The New England Frontier

Abstract

NEW ENGLAND is a striking example of that corollary of the theory of the influence of the frontier according to which the characteristics of the new society may owe more to the cultural importations of the settlers than to the new environment. Pre-revolutionary New England stood out among the societies of the world for three characteristics: its relative democracy and political liberty; its relative toleration in religion; and its system of public education. The first two of these had not been a part of the original conception of the City upon a Hill, but they were inherent in the broader Puritanism of the majority of the settlers, and they became incorporated in the ideal for which the later generations struggled. It was this struggle to maintain the social ideals of the English Puritans, rendered easier by certain economic conditions not present on other frontiers, which made the states they set up in New England different from those created by the same type of people in Barbados and Virginia. The Puritans who went to the southern colonies (there was a process of selection) surrendered almost at once to the joys of the new world around them, but those who came out to New England for a full century remembered, they and their children, that they were a part of the great intellectual movement which included Cromwell's commonwealth, the Dutch republic, the Huguenots of France, and the Protestant universities of Germany. The first generation in New England felt themselves perched precariously on the edge of the unknown, and compared their sojourn here with the Israelites' forty years in the wilderness.1 King Philip's War showed the second generation that they could hold their bit of the