Weston's Colony and its Career

Not long after this, the first war between the English and savages broke out. Weston, a wealthy and dissatisfied member of the Plymouth Company, sent over a colony of sixty unmarried men to plant a settlement on his own account, somewhere on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. He boasted of the superior strength of such a settlement by bachelors to that of Plymouth, which was "weakened by women and children." They were mostly idle and disorderly young men like those who went early to Virginia. Many of them were very dissolute. After living several weeks upon the scanty means of the Plymouth families, they went to the site of Weymouth, where they began a settlement. Idle and wasteful, they were soon compelled to confront gaunt Famine; and beggary and starvation were the alternatives presented to them. They exasperated the Indians by plundering their cornfields and other sources of supplies. The savages, failing to discriminate between the righteous and the unrighteous, or fearing the vengeance of the other white people if they should destroy the young men at Weymouth, formed a plot for the extermination of all the English in their land. The peril was great, and was discovered only a few days before the fatal blow was to be struck. Massasoit, who had been nursed into health after a deadly sickness, by the brave hands of Edward Winslow, revealed the plot to his benefactor. The Plymouth people immediately sent Captain Standish, with a few soldiers, to protect the offending Englishmen, and in a contest that ensued an Indian chief and several of his followers were killed. The victor carried the chief's head upon a pole, in triumph, into Plymouth, and placed it on the palisades of the fort. When the good Robinson, at Leyden, heard of this, he wrote: "O, how happy a thing it would have been, had you converted some, before you killed any." If they were not "converted," the savages were very much frightened, and sued for peace. So the settlement of strong unmarried men was saved by the Plymouth people, who were "weakened by many women and children." The childless Lord Bacon, in one of his essays, says: "Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men." Weston's experience was the reverse. His colony, too weak to endure, was broken up within a year after it was planted, and the most worthless of its members, happily for the Plymouth people, returned to England.

We have observed (Chapter III, Book II) that the Pilgrims and London merchants and others, formed a partnership in making the settlement of the Plymouth colony. The speculation, as such, was a failure. Ill-feeling arose between the two classes of proprietors. The merchants and others wished to dissolve the league, whose prescribed term of existence was seven years. It continued to the end of that time, when the colonists purchased the interest of their partners in England. Then the community system, or the common sharing of labor and its products, was abandoned, and the whole property was divided among the inhabitants. New incentives to industry were thereby created; and very soon the blessings of plenty drawn from the unfruitful soil of New England, rewarded labor there. The cultivators of the soil became free-holders, and general prosperity was soon manifested.

The restless enterprise of the children of the Pilgrims of our day marked the "Fathers." While their number was few and their strength feeble, they stretched forth their hands to grasp other landed possessions. At an early day they acquired rights of domain on Cape Anne and on the borders of the Kennebec. Nothing but the interfering spasms of the dying Plymouth Company, of whom the veteran Gorges was the latest survivor, prevented their extending the jurisdiction of Plymouth over all New England. His efforts to sustain the claims and existence of the Company, and his ambitious aspirations in his old age as governor-general of New England and lord proprietor of Maine, have been already considered in the Fifth Chapter of the Second Book.

The colony had been spared the affliction of a governor sent by Gorges, and from the beginning had enjoyed self-government without the royal sanction. That government was simple. At first the only officers were a governor and one assistant magistrate. In 1624, five assistants were chosen, and in 1630, when the colony numbered about five hundred souls, seven assistants were chosen by the whole people. This pure democracy existed at Plymouth until 1639, a period of nineteen years, when a representative government was established and a pastor was chosen as a spiritual guide.