Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century demographic events such as the
“clearances” in Scotland, the potato famine in Ireland and the pogroms in Eastern Europe all had a significant impact on the national composition of the immigrant population of North America. However, the significance of these events tends to overshadow the fact that individual intellectuals, too, left their mark on the profile of its people, long before the influx of the 1848ers after the failed German revolution. Indeed, the very first generation of settlers, in both centers of immigration, Virginia and New England, is remarkable among colonial populations for its considerable component of university men. Whether scholars or gentlemen or both, they were determined to leave an intellectual legacy. As early as 1619, ten thousand acres were set aside for a college in Henrico, Virginia, designed to teach the Indians “true religion and civil course of life”;2 and the college in the “other” Cambridge bears the
1 A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness was the title of the election sermon preached on 11 May 1670 by the Rev. Samuel Danforth (Cambridge, MA, 1671), https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/35/. It was given wide currency by Perry Miller’s book Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1956). I am grateful to Nicholas Rogers for helping me on my errand into the past.
2 Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960), I, 60.
© Karl S. Guthke, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126.02
name of the Cantabrigian who bequeathed his more than 300 books to it in the 1630s.3 “These university-trained emigrants were the people who founded the intellectual traditions and scholastic standards […].
They created that public opinion which insisted on sound schooling, at whatever cost; and through their own characters and lives they inculcated, among a pioneer people, a respect for learning.”4 The earliest settlers of Virginia, from 1607 on, were cultured if nothing else, and the
“Great Migration” of some 13,000 by-and-large reasonably prosperous Puritans to New England during the 1630s included 118 university men, an estimated 85 percent of them clergy. About three quarters of them were Cambridge graduates. Sidney Sussex College, which is featured in this essay as a representative sample, with four graduates coming to America in the 1630s, contributed its fair share, comparable to other Cambridge colleges, say, Pembroke, Clare and King’s, though not to Emmanuel, which sent no fewer than thirty-five alumni to New England by 1645, virtually all of them during the 1630s. (Far fewer university men had emigrated to New England before 1630.)5
Typically, all four Sidney men were clergymen. Yet while three of them, George Burdett, George Moxon, and John Wheelwright, left Old England for the New to escape various forms of alienation and oppression commonly inflicted on Puritans in the pre-Commonwealth era, the fourth, Thomas Harrison, came to Virginia as a High Church man, but moved from Anglican Virginia to nonconformist Boston as a newly reborn Puritan, having become persona non grata in the colony of Cavaliers. But he was by no means the only one of the four reverends who ran afoul of religious orthodoxy. In fact, each of the other three had his difficulties with the Puritan orthodoxies that emerged rapidly
3 For the broader context, see Frank Thistlethwaite, “Cambridge: The Nursery of New England,” Cam, Spring 1992, 8–12.
4 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 4l.
5 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991), 15;
Morison, 359, 360, 362; Harry S. Stout, “University Men in New England 1620–1660:
A Demographic Analysis,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IV (1974), 377, 378.
David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), speaks of seventy-six ministers emigrating in the period in question (87). Also based on seventy-six clergymen, mostly Cambridge graduates, is Richard Waterhouse, “Reluctant Emigrants: The English Background of the First Generation of the New England Puritan Clergy,”
Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XLIV (1975), 473–488.
in the colony designed to be the Almighty’s kingdom on transatlantic Earth. Oddly enough — or perhaps not — both Virginia and New England, each in her denominationally separate way, created the same climate of religious intolerance, oppression, and harassment that many of the university men had found unbearable at home, when Archbishop Laud reigned supreme, imposing Arminian “popery” on recalcitrant Calvinists.6 No wonder all four Sidney graduates were among those — nearly half of the intellectuals, ministers, and university men who had embarked on the “errand into the wilderness” of New England out of a sense of mission — who returned to England from 1640 on, until 1660 when the tide turned with respect to opportunities for both political action and clerical employment.7 While around 1630, according to Captain Roger Clap, “How shall we go to Heaven” was a more popular topic of discourse than “How shall we go to England,”8 the reverse seems to have been true a decade later. By that time, Heaven had all but been established in the Boston area, but Old England was widely considered “the more tolerant country,” as one remigrant put it.9
In the metaphoric language of the Statutes of Sidney Sussex College, the four men I shall examine more closely were no doubt the bees that swarmed the farthest from their hive in their search for new habitats (“ita ut tandem ex Collegio, quasi alveari evolantes, novas in quibus se exonerent sedes appetant”).10 Was it a worthwhile trip? And what manner of bees were they? Not the drones (“fuci”), surely, which the Statutes providentially included in their extended simile, but a very
6 On the religious motives for emigration see T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” William and Mary Quarterly, XXX (1973), 189–222; Perry Miller, “Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia,” in Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1956); Cressy, ch. 3; Anderson, ch. 1. On Arminianism and the general political and religious background, see Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660 (Oxford, 1971), esp. 210–217.
7 William L. Sachse, “The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640–1660,”
American Historical Review, LIII (1948), 251–278; Harry S. Stout, “The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–
1660,” Journal of American Studies, X (1976), 151–172; Stout (n. 5), 382, 394–397.
8 Cited from Sachse, 252.
9 Sachse, 253.
10 G. M. Edwards, Sidney Sussex College (London, 1899), 25, https://archive.org/stream/
sidneysussexcoll00edwarich/sidneysussexcoll00edwarich_djvu.txt; paraphrased in C. W. Scott-Giles, Sidney Sussex College (Cambridge, 1975), 25.
mixed lot, nonetheless. That is the short answer. The slightly longer one offers some curious glimpses of American frontier life, Cambridge-style.