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New England character, in which the Puritan elements greatly predominate; the second is the southern character, which is the old English character of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, changed and modified by climate and the institution of slavery ; the third is a mixed character, and the only one much mixed that has approximated to a national type.

The mixed type of character has been produced in south-eastern, southern, and central New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and all the north-western states excepting the Connecticut › Western Reserve, which comprises the north-eastern part of Ohio, bounded east by Pennsylvania, north by Lake Erie, and south by the 41st degree of latitude. This mixed type of character is formed by the amalgamation of opinions, habits, manners, and customs of the descendants of emigrants from England, New England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, France and Germany-the amalgamation being nearly complete in many of the counties of New York, New Jersey, and Michigan, but much less so in the other states. The same causes however continue in operation, and the process will go on, until the assimilation is as complete as it is in any country of Europe. The inhabitants of New York living north of the tier of counties lying on the Mohawk river, and also those west of Cayuga lake, are mostly of New England descent; and are as completely assimilated to the New England type of character as those of Maine or New Hampshire are. It will require perhaps a couple of generations more to assimilate the inhabitants of many districts of Louisiana, of French descent, to the general type of southern character; but such a result is not very far distant. The differences of climate are so great, that the people of the United States can never be reduced to one type of national character.

SEC. 4. PURITANS AND PURITANISM.

The Puritans arose in an age of religious schisms, dissentions, and fanaticisms, in the sixteenth century, when Protestantism was in an unsettled condition. They were a class of dissenters in England, who grew up and increased during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and her successors, James I, and Charles I, and gradually separated from the church of England. They were rigid Cal

vinists, and pretended to stricter discipline and greater holiness of life than any other people. They condemned some of the customs and ceremonies of the English church as heretical and idolatrous; but one of the principal causes of their separation was the strong tendency of the church of England to depart from the tenets of rigid Calvinism, and to occupy a middle ground between Calvinism and Arminianism. Their peculiar views were first reduced to form and system in New England.

Puritanism contained the leaven of fanaticism in many particulars, some of which it still retains-fanaticism on the subject of dress and manners, customs and amusements, the importance that should be attached in modern times to the principles of the Old Testament dispensation, and a strong tendency to blend religious with political principles, and to infuse their peculiar dogmas into the legislation and government of the country. All these tendencies were exhibited in the tyrannical and intolerant legislation of Connecticut, and the theocratic system of government and the persecuting laws and edicts of the General Court of Massachusetts Bay. The same spirit, in a milder form, is still exhibited in the Maine liquor laws, and in the action of the abolitionists.

Puritanism is not pure religion; but religious principles and usages blended with various isms and fanaticisms-upon the subject of manners, customs, morals, and government.

The Puritans were industrious, frugal, austere, and ascetic in their manners and customs, proscribed all amusements, attached an extraordinary degree of importance to education, and were rigidly devoted to their own peculiar views. Their asceticism and full belief that they were the elect of God, inclined them to superstition, fanaticism, and intolerance, of what they honestly deemed error, heresy, and idolatry. They have ever been wonderfully ambitious to spread their good principles and doctrines; and to reform, educate, and mould mankind in accordance with their views and dogmas; and hence they have been very ambitious for political as well as ecclesiastical dominion-to enable them to evangelize the world, and crush out vice and error. Their great ambition has rendered them none the less selfish and tyrannical, whenever they succeed in getting the staff of power into their own hands. They have manifested some of the same characterestics in England and in

America; which were fully exhibited by the first Governor Winthrop, of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, and afterwards by Oliver Cromwell.

The distinguished historian, Thomas B. Macauly, in his history of England, gives descriptions of the Puritans of England, from which the following are extracts:

"While a section of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one direction, the position which they had originally occupied, a section of the Puritan body departed, in a direction diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe enough to destroy. They had not been tamed into submission, but baited into savageness and stubbornness. After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety; encouraged in themselves, by reading and meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs; and when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined they were only hating the enemies of Heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted, by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans, therefore, began to feel for the Old Testament a preference which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to themselvs, but which showed itself in all their sentiments and habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors."

"In defiance of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the church had, from the primitive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mo aic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their thoughts and discourses ran much on acts which were not recorded as examples for our imita ion. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king; the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs; the matron who in defiance of plighted faith, and the laws of Eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates."

"Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of the syuagogue, when the synagogue was in its worst state. The dress, the deportment, the language, the studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles resembling those of the Pharisees, who, proud of their washed hands and broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a Sabbathbreaker and wine-bibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a May-pole, to drink a friend's health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals, to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these rules which would have appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and contemptible to the serene and philosophical intelleet of Zuingle, threw over all life a more than monastic gloom."

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"The learning and eloquence by which the great reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar, because the name of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occured in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben Johnson's was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent. The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and, above all, by his peculiar dialect. He emploved, on every occasion, the imagery and style of Scripture." "The Puritans, in the day of their power, had undoubtedly given cruel provocation. * They proved as intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been. They interdicted, under heavy penalties, the use of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses. It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent, one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected from their benifices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble Churches and sepulchers, fine works of art, and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the Virgin Mother shouid be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chissels, were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent. Against the lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered by humanity or by common sense. Sharp laws were passed against betting. It was enacted that adultery should be punished with death. That illicit intercourse of the sexes, even where neither violence nor seduction was imputed, where no public scandal was given, where no conjugal right was violated, was made a misdemeanor. Public amusements, from the masques which were exhibited at the mansions of the great, down to the wrestling matches and griuning matches on village greens, were vigororously attacked. One ordinance directed that all May-poles in England shonld forth with be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical diversions. The play-houses were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, the actors whipped at the cart's tail. Rope-dancing, uppet-shows, bowls, horseracing, were regarded with no friendly eye; but bear-baiting, then a favorite divers on of high and low, was the abomination which most strongly stirred the wrath of the austere sectarians."

The Puritans of New England have the virtues in great activity and vigor, improved by education, which are common in cold climates; many of which cannot be produced in a hot climate, and cannot long exist there, when transplanted from a cold one. Neither Puritans nor Puritanism can exist very long in a hot or warm country. The climate soon changes their character. Many have emigrated from New England to Georgia and New Orleans, but their children are never Puritans.

Common Schools and Education.

Having the good sense to adopt the opinions and the practice of the Presbyterians of Scotland upon the subject of education, the

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legislatures of the Puritan colonies of New England passed laws in the years 1647 and 1648, for the establishment of a school in every town. They soon made a common school education universal, and established colleges for the higher grades of education. The Puritans of New England were not only superior in acquirements and intelligence to the inhabitants of the central and southern colonies; but during the last half of the 17th, the whole of the 18th, and the first half of the 19th century, they were beyond all comparison, the best educated people in the world. Their system of common schools for the education of the people was put in operation nearly a century and a half in advance of that in New York, and more than a century and a half earlier than the general establishment of similar institutions in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or any one of the southern states, except Maryland. From this cause, and this ouly, has arisen the extraordinary power and influence of the Puritans during the last hundred years. They were nearly all educated, while more than three-fourths of the inhabitants of the other states were uneducated. Their superiority and success has arisen from their education, intelligence, and industry, and not from the peculiarities and austerities of Puritanism.

SEC. 5. THE PURITANS NOT FRIENDLY TO RELIGIOUS, CIVIL, OR PO

LITICAL LIBERTY.

The claim has been often made that the Puritans fled from tyranny in England, to establish and enjoy religious liberty, in America. But it was an idle boast, totally destitute of truth. That they left England to escape the tyranny of the government under the influence of the Episcopal hierarchy, is very true. They came here to establish their own independence of that government and hierarchy, and to enjoy their own opinions and forms of religious worship, and to establish a tyranny of their own. They were the most inveterate and determined enemies of religious liberty, of any of the settlers of the thirteen colonies.

Massachusetts was the birthplace and the cradle of colonial independence; but not of either religious or civil liberty-as has been erroneously claimed. Liberty is often confounded with independence-though it is in reality a very different thing. The word

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