The colonists who sought to establish permanent communities—as distinct from those who erected only trading posts—were not a little like those whom the cities of Greece used to plant about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders of the “Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned themselves to erect an altar, or rather, to lay the foundations for an edifice which denied the religious value of altars. In the crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” an early observer notes, the Puritans remember to “sing psalms, pray, and praise their God”; and although we of today may regard their religion as harsh and nay-saying, we cannot forget that it was a central point of their existence and not an afterthought piled as it were on material prosperity for the sake of a good appearance. Material goods formed the basis, but not the end, of their life.
The meetinghouse determined the character and limits of the community. As Weeden says in his excellent Economic and Social History of New England, the settlers “laid out the village in the best order to attain two objects: first, the tillage and culture of the soil; second, the maintenance of a ‘civil and religious society.’ ” Around the meetinghouse the rest of the community crystallized in a definite pattern, tight and homogeneous.
The early provincial village bears another resemblance to the early Greek city: it does not continue to grow at such a pace that it either becomes overcrowded within or spills beyond its limits into dejected suburbs; still less does it seek what we ironically call greatness by increasing the number of its inhabitants. When the corporation has a sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers, and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. So Charlestown threw off Woburn; so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded Nahant.
The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago pointed out in The Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing. Economically, this method of community-development kept land values at a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land for the sake of a speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method of settlement comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader’s paradise of Manhattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all the land on Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small part of it was cultivated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a housing-shortage.
One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants of an early New England village were copartners in a corporation; they admitted into the community only as many members as they could assimilate. This copartnership was based upon a common sense as to the purpose of the community, and upon a roughly equal division of the land into individual plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common fields, of which there might be half a dozen or more.
There are various local differences in the apportionment of the land. In many cases, the minister and deacons have a larger share than the rest of the community; but in Charlestown, for example, the poorest had six or seven acres of meadow and twenty-five or thereabouts of upland; and this would hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not merely is membership in the community guarded: the right of occupying and transferring the land is also restricted, and again and again, in the face of the General Assembly, the little villages make provisions to keep the land from changing hands without the consent of the corporation; “it being our real intent,” as the burghers of Watertown put it, to “sitt down there close togither.”
These regulations have a positive side as well; for in some cases the towns helped the poorer members of the corporation to build houses, and as a new member was voted into the community, lots were assigned immediately, without further ado. A friend of mine has called this system “Yankee communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution to the attention of those who do not realize upon what subversive principles Americanism, historically, rests.
What is true of the seventeenth century in New England holds good for the eighteenth century in the Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania; and it is doubtless true for many another obscure colony; for the same spirit lingered, with a parallel result in architecture and industry, in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century. It is pretty plain that this type of pioneering, this definite search for the good life, was conducted on an altogether different level from the ruthless exploitation of the individual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail west of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier European culture as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem give us a notion of the cultural values which
