SOURCE: "Colonial America," in The American Historical Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, pp. 21-67.

[In the excerpt that follows, Leisy describes a number of historical novels written about the American colonies, maintaining that a majority of them focus on themes such as Puritanism, conflicts with Native Americans, and witchcraft.]

In the colonial South there was an abundance of incidents to invite romantic treatment by novelists. The arrival of the first white settlers in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Maryland; the Smith-Pocahontas romance; the Virginia Massacre of 1622; life in Jamestown under Governor Berkeley at the time of Bacon's Rebellion; events at the capital of Williamsburg; the Yemassee wars in Carolina—these, as well as the romantic careers of Virginia's Governor Spotswood and young Washington, were each the subject of historical fiction at one time or another.

The primacy of the Old Dominion made her a natural favorite among writers of the historical novel. The Virginia depicted in American fiction was a highly romantic land, a land of cavaliers, in contrast to the haven of criminals depicted by Defoe and the Elizabethan dramatists.…

The episode which appealed to novelists more than any other in the early history of Virginia was the rescue of Captain John Smith by the Indian maid Pocahontas. Whether fact or legend (Smith first recalled the story after Pocahontas appeared at the Court of St. James's), here was the essence of romance—the flower of chivalry saved from a cruel beheading by a radiant daughter of nature. John Davis, an English traveler, touched on the theme in The First Settlers of Virginia (1802); John Esten Cooke, under the pseudonym Anas Todkill, contributed a "memoir," My Lady Pokahontas (1885); and an Englishman, David Garnett, published the most detailed account as Pocahontas (1933).

Davis, after a sojourn of several years in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, briefly mentioned the episode in his Travels (1802). He refurbished it in The First Settlers of Virginia, an Historical Novel (1802), and expanded it in Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas (1805), with historical material copied almost verbatim from Robertson and Belknap. From the slightness of the plot it is clear that Davis little sensed the dramatic values inherent in his materials. The episode in which Pocahontas intervenes in the Captain's behalf is brief, comes too early, and is treated without suspense. After Smith's supposed death, Pocahontas is comforted by John Rolfe, whom she later marries. The couple leave with their little son for England, where Pocahontas attracts much attention, but soon succumbs to a fever. The book, though it bears the subtitle of "historical novel," is really a plotless chronicle of travel, embellished with romantic sidelights on the Indians and the boundless forests.

Cooke's account of Smith includes glimpses of Shakespeare's England prior to and after the founding of Jamestown. Couched in the semiarchaic style of the Puritan Anas Todkill, the memoir is mainly a love tragedy, a tribute to the devotion of a gentle maid to a courageous cavalier. But dark days are ahead. There are the machinations of three leaders, who, by disputing Smith's authority, force him to go back to England. Pocahontas, supposing Smith dead, assuages her sorrow by serving the infant colony as a protecting deity. But she is seized by the buccaneer Argall, who thus hopes to curb the power of her father, Powhatan. Eventually Rolfe wins her, and takes her with him to England. There she is admired by royalty. On a chance meeting with Smith at the Globe Theater she sees William Shakespeare, who confesses she served as inspiration for his Miranda! Fanciful as this memoir is, it carefully follows Smith's own account in The Generall Historie of Virginia, and it conveys the atmosphere of the period.…

The Virginia Massacre in 1622 was the next episode in Virginia history to appeal to writers of fiction. It might be observed in passing that "massacre" was a euphemism applied whenever the Indians got the upper hand in combat between the two races; if the reverse was true, it was dubbed a "bloody victory." The "massacre" of 1622, following the period of good will engendered by Smith and Powhatan, came at a time when the settlers around Jamestown had let their fortifications fall into disuse. After Powhatan's death in 1618, his brother Opechancanough felt that the whites should be expelled before it might be too late. Accordingly, he rallied the tribes and raided the outlying plantations, killing some four hundred persons and devastating much property.

This massacre furnished the background of two short romances, Ruth Emsley (1850), by William H. Carpenter, and The Head of a Hundred (1895), by Maud Wilder Goodwin. In Ruth Emsley, the betrothed of George Pierce is taken captive during the general uprising, but is rescued in the nick of time by a young chief—an intervention which enables George and Ruth to be happily united.

The Head of a Hundred resorts to the courtly style of Elizabethan romance in relating the fortunes of a young physician who comes to Jamestown after having been flouted in England by the spirited Elizabeth Romney. Shortly after, she too arrives with a shipload of maids as wives for the settlers. On the voyage she has had the misfortune to break her arm, which offers the physician an opportunity to help her. She spurns further advances, although at his insistence she accepts custodianship of his ancestral ring while he is away on a mission to King Accomac. On the way, his boat picks up John Rolfe and his motherless son. The story comes to its climax during the devastating massacre, when the love of the "head of a hundred" for Elizabeth finally triumphs. Despite conventional plots, both novels blend history and fiction fairly well.…

The next group of novels on colonial Virginia center about Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. This rebel attack on excessive taxation and arbitrary government came, significantly enough, just a century before the colonies united in revolt against royal authority. In the course of the long reign of Sir William Berkeley as the royal governor, the conflict between his will and that of the people was heading toward a crisis. The immediate provocation of the uprising was the dilatory policy of the Governor about Indian depredations. Some even accused him of trading with the Indians for personal profit. Whatever truth there may have been in the accusations, the young rebel Bacon, by rallying the people against the forces of despotism, became a symbol of warning for the future in colonial affairs.

In William A. Caruthers' story based on this event, The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown (1834), the Governor is anxious for a leading beauty, Virginia Fairfax, to marry his adopted son, Frank Beverly. This hope is challenged by the young cavalier Bacon, who is leading the people's cause against the royal governor. In the struggle which ensues, Bacon is thrown into prison to await death, but public opinion rallies to his defense, forces Berkeley into temporary retirement, and enables Bacon to win the celebrated beauty.

Although the author based his story on Burk's History of Virginia, he adapted his material considerably to meet the requirements of romance. According to the record, Bacon, instead of being awarded the lovely Miss Fairfax, died from a fever at the point of victory. The Gothic subplot of Caruthers' story transfers, on doubtful authority, the regicide Whalley from New England to a cave near Jamestown, where he may serve conveniently as an ally to the cavaliers. The allies of Bacon were really not cavaliers at all, but small farmers. In these respects, as well as in his verbose, rhetorical style, Caruthers was writing under the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott. He deserves credit for managing his double plot with no little dexterity, but it is obvious that he was more interested in his role as storyteller than as historian. His imaginary Virginia, with its absurd mysteries and melodramatic villains, had little basis in reality.

A more realistic version of the Bacon-Berkeley quarrel appeared in St. George Tucker's Hansford (1857). Tucker, the grandson of the Revolutionary jurist, tried to reconcile the diverse opinions concerning Sir William handed down by history, but relied mainly on Kercheval's History of the Valley of Virginia. He considered Berkeley a brave cavalier who was warped to bloody excesses by his insane loyalty to Charles II. When, after Bacon's death, Berkeley recovered power for a short time, he put to death so many leaders in the rebellion that even Charles, on replacing him, exclaimed, "That old fool has killed more people in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father."

According to the novel, Thomas Hansford, a rebel friend of Nathaniel Bacon, is betrothed to Virginia Temple, the charming daughter of a member of the House of Burgesses. The Temple family is opposed to the match and favors the courtly Alfred Bernard, a villainous rival. When the temporizing policy of the Governor results in open rebellion, Hansford is dismissed by the family, while Bernard shines at the birthnight ball. Then Bacon's men defeat the Indians; but the Governor rescinds the young man's commission. The attack on the government follows, with the rebels routing the cavaliers and forcing Berkeley to leave. Unable to hold the town for long, they set it afire. Three months later Bacon dies from dysentery, and Hansford's romance ends in tragedy. On a secret visit to Virginia, Hansford is trapped by Bernard, who turns out to be his illegitimate brother. Although Bernard expresses remorse for his brother's execution, he soon sails for England with Berkeley, and dies later in a popish plot. Virginia, another conventionally tragic heroine, accepts her fate.

In summing up his view of the rebellion, Tucker expresses the opinion that Bacon was impelled in his course by his intense desire for fame. In style as well as in point of view, Hansford reflects a growing sense of realism in the writing of historical fiction.

Half a century later, Mary Johnston based her romance, Prisoners of Hope (1898), on this same uprising of bondservants and slaves against Governor Berkeley. On the plantation of Colonel Verney, the tobacco king, Godfrey Landless, bondservant from Newgate, has fallen in love with the Colonel's daughter Patricia. She is also being formally courted by her cousin, Sir Charles Carew, who has come from England to replenish his fortune, though he is now engrossed by her beauty. After Patricia spurns Landless, he heads an insurrectionary organization. This action leads to his imprisonment and to Patricia's abduction by the Indians. On her recapture by Landless, she confesses her love for him; but her father bans the rebellious bondsman to the forest, while Patricia, in the key of sentimental romance, vows eternal celibacy. The atmosphere of the period is well conveyed, with its laced and brocaded ladies, its silk-stockinged men, its convicts and slaves, and its scenes in the House of Burgesses, at the Governor's ball, and in tobacco fields. Matters of topical interest are discussed, like the Act of Uniformity and the Navigation Laws, and a fresh point of view emerges in the commoner's asserting himself; but the work as a whole is in the romantic manner of an age before realism set in.…

The valley of the Shenandoah held the greatest romantic appeal for John Esten Cooke, a native of the region. In The Virginia Comedians (1854) he drew a mellow picture of its brocaded gentry in the days immediately preceding the Revolution. He depicted such diversions as the earliest theater in the colonies, fox hunts, cavalier balls, the Williamsburg fair and the Jamestown races. But the center of interest is the love story.

While horseback riding near his ancestral home, Effingham Hall, a short distance from Williamsburg, young Champ Effingham, a blase Oxonian, meets Beatrice Hallam of Hallam's theatrical troupe, recently arrived from London. He calls on her at the Raleigh Tavern, falls madly in love with her, and even joins the cast. His father naturally is incensed, for Champ might easily marry Clare Lee, a gentleman's daughter. Worse, Beatrice has the hardihood to reject the Byronic young gentleman in favor of the proletarian Charles Waters, who has chanced to save her life when her boat capsizes. Later, in desperation, Champ tries to abduct her, stabs Charles, and is obliged to leave the country. Waters recovers, however, and Beatrice eventually marries him, while Champ, after a sojourn in Europe, returns to marry Clare. In the second volume the interest shifts from Beatrice, who goes into a fatal decline, to the middle-class Waters family. The story closes on the aroused opposition to the Stamp Act, led by "the man in the red cloak," Patrick Henry.

A sequel, Henry St. John (1856), notes the strong under-current of colonial revolt, in which Virginians were the leaders. "Charles Waters was the brain, Henry the tongue, Jefferson the pen, and Washington the sword of the Revolution." St. John, a great-grandson of Pocahontas, expresses the general opposition to Lord Dunmore after the haughty governor dissolves the House of Burgesses. Following a duel over the beautiful Bonnybel Vane, and following Dunmore's refusal to give him a commission, St. John in final desperation leaves for the frontier. The novel, based on Campbell's Virginia and on early files of the Virginia Gazette, blends history and romance better than its predecessor, but it is too attenuated for the modern reader. As romancer and historian, Cooke did "more than any other to popularize the legendary view of Revolutionary Virginia. His intimate knowledge of historical details did not correct his view of colonial life, but only served to make his picture of it seem more real to those who read him. Not only has he impressed his conception of colonial life upon untrained historians like Page and novelists like Mary Johnston and Hallie Ermine Rives; he has even influenced so well trained a historian as John Fiske, who in his Old Virginia and Her Neighbors betrays the influence of Cooke's Virginia: A History of the People (1883).…

The beginnings of another colony, Maryland, are the theme of Sir Christopher (1901), by Maud Wilder Goodwin. This romance of a Maryland manor in 1644 pictures the life of the immediate descendants of the people in her earlier book, The Head of a Hundred. Sir Christopher Neville, a Roundhead, after being refused by the young widow Elinor Calvert because of religious differences, comes to Maryland as overseer of a seven-thousand-acre estate given by Lord Baltimore to Mrs. Calvert and her young son. Neville further incurs the dislike of the Calverts, who are fairly hospitable to persons of other faiths, when he is thought to have killed Father Mohl. Then the pirate Ingle on his deathbed confesses the murder, and the way is open for Elinor and Sir Christopher to wed. Among the historical characters introduced are Giles Brent, deputy governor, Councilor Claiborne, and Sir William Berkeley. The work is one of few on the Papist-Protestant conflict along the border between Maryland and Virginia, but it has barely survived the generation that produced it.

An earlier and much livelier novel of colonial Maryland, Rob of the Bowl (1838), by John P. Kennedy, pictures the conflict between Protestants and Catholics at a slightly later date (1681) than in Sir Christopher. When King Charles orders all Catholic officers in the province to be replaced by Protestants, there is a flare-up. Blanche Warden, however, has troubles of her own, for she is loved by Albert Verheyden, Lord Baltimore's secretary, as well as by Cocklecroft, member of a smuggling ring. A duel fails to materialize, but one rainy night Albert loses his way and arrives at a deserted house on the seashore, known as the Wizard's Chapel. At this smugglers' rendezvous he is taken captive, but the mysterious cripple Rob, who transports himself on a bowl, recognizes Albert as his own long-lost son and helps him to escape. Later, when Rob publicly confesses his paternity and repents his smuggling activities, the council forgives him and jails Cocklescroft. As the story closes, Blanche and Albert are to be married.

Clearly the importance of this book does not lie in originality of plot or characters. The introduction of the smugglers, and the author's manner of alternating history with fiction and then blending the two, mark Kennedy as a devoted follower of Scott, although his style is more brisk. There are overtones, also, of Elizabethan drama. Garret Weasel and his wife, keepers of the Crow and Archer, are well realized, and the scenes at the fisherman's hut are excellent. Albert appears too saintly, but the proprietary, Lord Calvert, is well portrayed. He is tolerant toward Protestants, even though their active antagonism is shown to underlie much of the trouble in the colony. The things, then, that make Rob of the Bowl a satisfying work for the reader of historical romance are a beautiful heroine, a hero with clouded ancestry, smugglers plying their trade, picturesque tavern scenes, an abduction and a rescue, excitement, and a happy ending. All this is presented in a style that knows no lassitude, and the story is readily enjoyable today.

The beginnings of South Carolina have been ably described by her leading novelist, William Gilmore Simms. In The Yemassee (1835) the theme is the conflict between the early settlers and the powerful Yemassee Indians, abetted by designing Spaniards in Florida. The setting of the romance is Pocota-ligo, ancient seat of the tribe, headed in 1715 by Sanutee and his wife Matiwan. Their son, Occonestoga, has been bribed into betraying the tribe to the encroaching whites, after which his mother in a moving scene kills him rather than have him publicly dishonored. The love story centers about Gabriel Harrison, who is really Governor Craven, and Bess Matthews, daughter of a Puritan preacher. This use of an "unknown" character Simms borrows from Scott, while the exciting attack upon the blockhouse comes from Cooper. His Indians, like Cooper's, lament their unhappy fate in metaphorical language, but they are more realistic, more ferocious, and shrewder than Cooper's. Some of the incidents come from legends told Simms by his grandmother, but the vividness of the setting is the result of the author's alert personal observation. The Yemassee is a thrilling story, as is natural where men surrounded by danger battle for survival. Simms, in telling it, displays unusual gifts of narrative.

Some twenty years later, Simms wrote another colonial romance of South Carolina, The Cassique ofKiawah (1859). The narrative skips lightly over an Indian insurrection to describe pioneer life and smuggling activities in and about infant Charleston in 1684. The scene shifts from the deck of a privateer to the low drinking houses on the Ashley and then to the fashionable masquerades of the town. The cassique, Sir Edward Berkeley, brother of the Virginia governor, has built a spacious house at Kiawah for his family, consisting of his wife Olive, his infant son, and his domineering mother-in-law. Olive has been in love with his younger brother, Harry, a buccaneer of the Drake and Cavendish school, and has married Edward only after being assured that Harry has been lost at sea. Tortured by the realization that she cannot love her husband and nagged by her mother, she becomes a melancholiac with visions of her lover at night. When Harry returns as the Captain Calvert who supplied the colony with Spanish booty, he brings with him his Spanish wife, Zulieme, who before long becomes the belle of Charleston society. One night Sir Edward and Olive meet Harry, but before the old love is revived, Olive dies in an Indian attack, and Harry Zulieme have an heir.

Although the history is of subsidiary interest and the action drags in places, there is a skillful contrast of personalities in the fun-loving Zulieme and her matter-of-fact husband, as well as in the idealistic cassique and his pensive wife. The Indians are not so well individualized as in The Yemassee, but the corrupt governor in his relation with smugglers is well characterized, and the early life of Charleston is ably depicted. Simms, despite his fondness for the melodramatic, was a true raconteur.

Life in colonial New England presented a bleak contrast to the gay, sophisticated round of activities in the southern colonies. The northern colonists were interested in the salvation of men's souls, rather than in social frivolities or business, although they seem not to have been averse to driving a shrewd bargain with the Indians or with one of their countrymen. Themes which have stirred the imagination of novelists are: Puritanism, with its religious conflicts; Indian life and insurrections; the trouble with the regicides; the loss of the Connecticut charter; and the witchcraft frenzy. Besides these subjects from the seventeenth century, there were others, such as smuggling, the land-grant controversy between New York and New Hampshire, and the French and Indian Wars, which led up to exciting events in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

Puritan life is glimpsed in an early novel entitled A Peep at the Pilgrims in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-Six (1824), by Mrs. Harriet V. Cheney. Her two-volume "peep" is fairly comprehensive, extending from Plymouth to Boston, New Amsterdam, and Hartford, as it follows the romance of a newly arrived Anglican and a Puritan maid. It enables the reader to meet the affable Miles Standish and the waggish Peregrine White, as well as to hear Governor Winslow and Governor Winthrop discuss political and religious dissensions; and, for good measure, it lets him attend Governor Kieft's ball with the hero, before assisting Captain Mason in a hairbreadth rescue of the heroine from the Pequods. Obviously, Mrs. Cheney was trying to incorporate in her plot too much history, gleaned from Morton, Neal, and Irving, and it impeded the progress of her narrative. A plethora of historical matter was a problem that was to plague novelists for many a year.

A thorn in the side of the Plymouth colony was the roisterer Thomas Morton. When he was not annoying them with selling rum and firearms to the Indians, he appears to have been in league with Sir Philip Gardiner in some of his dark schemes. John Lothrop Motley, before becoming a famous historian, wrote a fantasy about these men of mischief and their conflict with the colonists, which he called Merry-Mount (1849). According to this account, the cavalier Morton had been obliged to leave England because of indiscretions involving love and money, and, dissatisfied on reaching Virginia, had come up to Plymouth, where with a set of lawless resolutes he lords it over the Pilgrims at Merry-Mount near by. The merrymaking this spouter of Horace and his greenwood crew indulge in is at such variance with the austere code of his neighbors that Morton soon finds himself in the hands of Captain Standish. But the good-humored man frees himself and once more commands his roisterers in a greenwood fortress before he is finally deported. Meanwhile, Sir Philip saves the heroine from a wolf, but is prevented from winning her hand, even though he fights a duel in her behalf. Clearly, the grim Puritans were winning the day, and the most intolerant of all was Governor Endicott at Naumkeak.

Motley had Morton's own account, The New English Canaan (1637), as source. Evidently, too, he had read the Stratford playwright, not only for the hawking scene and the scene in the fortress, but for such low comedy types in the ribald crew as the sprawling Rednape, the clumsy Bootefish, Canary Bird, and Peter Cakebread. The Elizabethan period was not remote, and these characters and scenes might be transferred with slight change of atmosphere. Rich as the story was in local color and vivid factional strife, it never attained the compact force of Hawthorne's contemporary tale, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount." …

The outstanding romance about colonial New England is of course Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). This distinction belongs to it by virtue of a thorough assimilation of historical fact, together with the unfolding of a perennially interesting human story, one motivated at every point by the conditions and circumstances of the times. Minister Dimmesdale's sin of concealing an adulterous relation with Hester Prynne is set against the reverence of the populace for the man of God. Adultery is conceived of not as an affair of the civil order, but as a problem that concerns the immortal soul. The minister can find peace only through expiation; Hester, because of the public ignominy she has endured, is prepared for a larger view.

The Scarlet Letter, as a tale of human responsibility in terms of Calvinistic preoccupation with the problem of evil, possesses the very stuff of Greek tragedy. Three scenes of communal coloring outline the drama. The opening tableau shows the condemned adulteress led to the scaffold to receive the magistrates' sentence. Then, at the Governor's Hall the magistrates seek to take Hester's child from her while she is confronted by both the minister and her fiendish husband. Finally, after seven years of penance, climaxed by the holiday scene and the election sermon, it is clear that conformity is better than nature's lawless law. The story owes its somber understanding to the author's latent Puritanism—an insight modified by the critical perspective of a fourth-or fifth-generation descendant. To Hawthorne passion was of a higher order than intellect; even the church, disregarding the very nature of man, had relied too much on laws and on learning. As a work of art, this gaunt, powerful romance demonstrates that it is not necessary for a historical novel to be cluttered up with historical names and events in order to be effective. If it is true to the spirit of the times, that is sufficient; if, in addition, the action delineated is universal and timeless, the work is a masterpiece.

Before Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he had made a number of short excursions into the New England of the seventeenth century. In one of these, "The Gentle Boy," he introduced the theme of sectarian conflict by depicting the fate of a winsome Quaker child left helpless among the Puritans. A number of minor novels dealt with sectarian strife. Eliza Buckminster Lee's Naomi (1848), although evincing no conspicuous creative ability, is a fair and accurate story of Quaker persecution. Margaret Smith's Journal (1849), by John Greenleaf Whittier, is in the form of a pretended diary of an English girl visiting her relatives in the Bay Colony during 1678—79. The main thread of the narrative tells of Rebecca Rawson's jilting a noble youth in favor of a baronet's son. The baronetcy proves spurious, however, and the husband a bigamist who deserts her in England. Interpolated in the diary are various historical references: to the persecution of Quakers and witches, to Sir Christopher Gardiner, John Eliot, Cotton Mather, and Michael Wigglesworth. In general, historical and fictitious elements are interwoven in much the style of Hawthorne's "The Gentle Boy."

Joseph Banvard's Priscilla, or the Trials for the Truth (1854) tells of a girl who escapes to America in order to avoid proselyting by Anglicans, only to discover Puritans equally in tolerant. With her family, she finally takes refuge among the Baptists of Rhode Island. The Knight of the Golden Melice (1856), by John Turvill Adams, connects the mysterious Sir Christopher Gardiner with plans to establish Catholicism in 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Governor Winthrop, though he differs from Gardiner in creed, respects him highly, and trusts his relations with the Pequots. In other versions, as for example, Miss Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Sir Christopher is regarded with suspicion. In Motley's Merry-Mount he appears a Puritan saint in Plymouth and a worldly plotter at Merry-Mount.

Yet another novel to bring out Puritan intolerance was J. G. Holland's The Bay-Path (1857). At Agawam (Springfield), about 1650, Magistrate Pynchon is banished by Cotton and Norton for writing an unorthodox book about Puritanism, and a young woman whom he has befriended is accused of witchcraft and executed. Holland, editor of the Springfield Republican, and later the first editor of Scribner's Monthly, knew local legend thoroughly but chafed under the restrictions imposed upon him by history, and he wrote rather verbosely.

The second generation of Puritans, according to Esther Forbes's Paradise (1937), were not altogether pious and gloomy, but were earthy men and women, contriving, eating, lusting, and, on occasion, warring with the Indians. In the novel, Jude Parre, gentleman, in 1639 acquires from the Indians a large tract of land some twenty miles inland from Boston. Here he founds the town of Canaan, builds his estate, Paradise, rears his family of five children, and is looked up to by the community. But troubles are ahead, both in the family and with the Indians. Fenton, Jude's lusty son, brings home a siren, Bathsheba, causing the gawky Salome, who admires him, to commit adultery with his brother Christopher. The public branding of the couple hurts Jude, who serves as justice for Canaan, and he dies. Bathsheba develops into a mad schizophrenic, while Fenton goes on to martial and amatory exploits as a squire extraordinary. His fine-grained, passionate sister, Jazan, has a frustrated marriage with a fanatical preacher, Forethought Fearing, who dares, however, to defend Bathsheba in public. The Indian troubles, culminating in King Philip's War, hurl the community into a maelstrom of death, from which the group at Paradise emerge, though not without scars. In this fast-moving story, history and romance are deftly interwoven, with due regard for social, political, and religious tensions, and without a trace of sentimentalism. But the characters are typed, and considering their apparent sophistication, undermotivated. A story pivoted on adultery and branding unfortunately courts comparison with The Scarlet Letter, a classic that not merely interprets the past, but illuminates human nature regardless of fashions in psychology.

Most of the novels about early New England revolve about the relations of the whites with the Indians. By the eighteen twenties, when the first of these novels appeared, red men in that region were no longer a menace. As a result, there developed a sentimental attitude toward them. Young women novelists speculated on what kind of husband an Indian would make. That is the question in Lydia M. Child's Hobomok (1824) and in Catherine M. Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). Young Hobomok, living at Naumkeak (Salem), is so "unwarped by the artifices of civilized life" that he gives up his white wife and infant upon the unexpected return of her betrothed, long mourned as dead. This is probably as well, for the author's picturing of domestic life is better than her handling of her noble red man.

Miss Sedgwick, a preceptress and distinguished literary lady of western Massachusetts, conceived of her task in Hope Leslie as illustrating for juvenile readers domestic manners in the seventeenth century. Hope is an orphan, the ward of her uncle Fletcher, with whose son Everell she falls in love. Magawisca, an Indian maiden of high lineage, and also a member of the Fletcher household, becomes so attached to Everell that, during an Indian raid, when he is about to be executed by her tribe, she outdoes Pocahontas by catching a blow which lops off her arm.

Seven years later the scene shifts to Governor Winthrop's household in Boston, where the villain, Sir Philip Gardiner, abetted by Thomas Morton of Merry-Mount, has designs on Hope; but when he attempts to abduct her, his "page" warns her of her danger from the Papist and notorious bigamist. In the further development of this overinvolved plot, Hope almost loses the man she really loves, but the end comes out all right. Aside from presenting the trials of the young people, this highly moral tale depicts the persecution of the Indians by the Puritan oligarchy. The author consulted the leading authorities, Hubbard, Trumbull, and Heckewelder, with a view to illustrating, as she says, "not the history, but the character of the times." She has succeeded in doing this without impeding her narrative. Hope Leslie, though diffuse and sentimental, is plausible; it rightly enjoyed wide popularity in its day.

The strained relations between the Indians and the whites in New England culminated in King Philip's War, 1675—76. This conflict marked the final desperate effort of the Indians to preserve their hunting grounds and to keep the whites from imposing their form of civilization upon them. James Fenimore Cooper, in The Last of the Mohicans, had dealt with the red man's final stand in New York, and he now undertook to picture the tragic fate of this race in New England. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish(1829), based in the main on Trumbull's History of Connecticut, was laid in the infant settlement of Hartford. The outpost of the stalwart Puritan, Mark Heathcote, is attacked and his daughter Ruth taken captive by the Indians. She is long wept for, but when, years later, hope for her return has been abandoned, she is discovered to be the wife of Conanchet, sachem of the Narragansets, to whom she has borne a child. Her life ends in tragedy, for after disowning her family, she loses her husband at the hands of Uncas, the Mohican chieftain. Cooper was quite in his element in this novel in depicting the Indian raids on the defenseless villages and farms, in particular the attack on the blockhouse. The leader of the villagers against the Indian attack is Goffe, the regicide, who figures in several romantic novels thereafter. Unfortunately, the author had a deep-seated antipathy for the Puritan character, and in this novel harps on their absurdities, especially the hypocrisies of one Rev. Meek Wolfe. So constantly is this worthy made to reprimand his followers that some readers have thought him intended as a caricature of Cotton Mather, but Mather is referred to in another connection. The Wept of Wish-tonWish is not one of Cooper's best efforts.

Two other early novels which concentrated on King Philip's War were Mount Hope (1851) by G. H. Hollister, a Connecticut lawyer and diplomat, and The Doomed Chief (1860) by Daniel P. Thompson, a Vermont novelist of the mid-century. Hollister focused attention on King Philip rather than on the regicides, but lacked imaginative power to bring out the dramatic aspects of his tale. Thompson was hardly more successful. In The Doomed Chief, Deacon Mudridge of Plymouth orders some Indians hanged for a crime they did not commit—an act which so incenses Metacom (King Philip) that he threatens bloody warfare. Meanwhile, the zealous Deacon attempts to have his nephew Sniffkin marry Madian, a girl beloved by Vane Willis. In the warfare which follows, Vane, because he is stigmatized as a Quaker, is unable to obtain a commission. Mudridge even accuses him of having made away with Madian. Finally, Vane helps inflict a severe defeat upon the Indians, pushing them as far as Mount Hope and confusing them to the extent that King Philip is slain and Queen Wetamoo drowns herself. Madian is found at last, and the Deacon punished. Thompson appears to have regarded the war an infliction from God for decadent manners. Despite his use of Mather's Magnalia, Sparks's Life of Eliot, Thatcher's Indian Biography, Carver's Travels, and possibly Mason's History of the Pequot War and Hubbard's Narratives, he could not draw a fair picture of the Puritans. His portraits of King Philip, John Eliot, and Roger Williams are acceptable, but in general he lacked imagination to transmute the events of history.

The fate of the regicides in New England was the subject of several works of fiction. Cooper's The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish … [has] already been mentioned. Upon the restoration of Charles II after the Commonwealth period, three men who had signed the death warrant of Charles I—Goffe, Whalley, and Dixwell—fled England and spent the remainder of their lives hiding in Puritan havens in the New World. The first novelist to use the regicide theme was Sir Walter Scott in The Peveril of the Peak (1822). Doubtless the popularity of this work inspired one of his ardent disciples, James McHenry, but lately come from Ireland to Baltimore, to use the theme in The Spectre of the Forest (1823). His pictures of Goffe's activities in Connecticut were spectral, however, rather than historical, and were designed to heighten the Gothic effects of his narrative. The few historical events—Sir Edmund Andros's attack upon Frontenac and the witchcraft episode (which McHenry asserted had been suppressed by Connecticut historians), as well as the escapades of Goffe—were employed merely to vary and complicate the machinery of horror in a rather slight novel. Writers in other media did comparatively better. Delia Bacon's "The Regicides," Hawthorne's short story "The Grey Champion," and J. N. Barker's play Superstition (1826) certainly were in no way inferior to the novels on the theme of the regicides.

The loss of the Connecticut charter in 1687 was the subject of one novel, The Romance of the Charter Oak (1871). Its author was William Seton, a military officer and scholar. After creating interest in Lydia Goffe, the author turned aside to show how the Connecticut colony sought a union with Massachusetts rather than with New York. At the request of James II, Governor Andros demanded that the people of Connecticut return the liberal charter which Charles II had given them in 1662. He was unable to obtain the document, however, since the people had hidden it in the hollow trunk of an old tree. The story, based on colonial records, Palfrey's History of New England, and Bulkeley's Will and Doom, combines with an account of political events, interesting observations on the costumes, furniture, and architecture of the period. The narrative lacks animation, however, and is mentioned here only because it memorializes an episode which other novelists overlooked.

A more popular subject for writers of fiction was the witchcraft delusion. Superstition had long been a scourge in Europe, and the mania found its way into Massachusetts and Connecticut toward the end of the seventeenth century. Salem was the principal seat of the delusion. In 1693, after nineteen victims of the craze had been hanged, a revulsion of feeling led to the liberation of all accused persons. The first novel to treat witchcraft in New England was Rachel Dyer (1828), by John Neal. This "North American Story," written for English readers, was not a narrative so much as a series of violent, incoherent accusations, and refutations made by Mather, Phips, and Sewall during the trials of Martha Cory, Samuel Parres, Sarah Good, Elizabeth and Rachel Dyer, and the hero-victim, George Burroughs. The author conceded the sincerity of the Puritans, but charged their gloomy state of mind with facilitating belief in witchcraft; once hallucinations sprang up, they quickly multiplied.

Neal declared that "the time was at hand for a Declaration of Independence in the great Republic of Letters," and that knowing that in the view of Englishmen, Irving was only "the American Addison" and Cooper had "just enough reputation not to hazard it by stepping aside into a new path," he, who had too little respect for authorship to risk anything, thought he might call the attention of American "novel writers to what is undoubtedly native and peculiar." Instead of gaining American followers, however, the egregious Neal, who had recently "exposed" American writers in Blackwood's Magazine, attracted the attention of those English critics who were only too ready to accept his assertion that roughness and turgidity were distinctive characteristics of American writers and his grotesque characters truly representative of American life. The most distinct impression left by Rachel Dyer is of a too liberal peppering of dashes and exclamation points.

John W. DeForest, a well-known novelist of the midnineteenth century, dealt with the Salem delusion in a novelette, Witching Times, which appeared in Putnam's Magazine, 1856-57. Henry More, after fighting the superstition of the period, is executed for his zeal. His daughter Rachel is also condemned, but is rescued by her husband in a realistic scene. Among the historical figures introduced are Elder Noyse, with his passion for Rachel, the "tyrant" Elder Parris, Judge Hathorne, ancestor of the novelist, and Cotton Mather, who seizes his opportunity for advancement among the clerical oligarchy then in power. DeForest's sense of the historical is not sufficiently imaginative to keep the narrative from dragging. The scene in which Giles Corey is executed by being pressed to death is the only vivid episode in the book.…

The eighteenth century found New England either in conflict over boundary disputes, as in the quarrel between Vermont and the York gentry over the Hampshire Grants, or engaged in the French and Indian Wars of the pre-Revolutionary struggle. One novel, Agnes Surriage (1886), by Edwin L. Bynner, may serve as a transition between those novels already discussed and those about to follow. It touches on witchcraft, but has more to do with smuggling. In the main, however, it is a love romance, based on the legend of Sir Harry Frankland, previously used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his ballad "Agnes." According to the story, the young collector of the port of Boston in 1745 falls in love with a beautiful servant at an inn in Marblehead. Agnes, this daughter of a poor fisherman, apparently lives with him for a while in sin, but after they go to Europe and she helps him escape from the wreckage of the earthquake at Lisbon, he marries her in gratitude. John Fiske praised the book as "one of the greatest of American historical novels."

For generations Yankees and Yorkers contested with each other for control of the borderlands between the Connecticut and the Hudson, Yankees contending that Yorkers were solvenly, uneducated, godless folk, and Yorkers convinced that Yankees were pushing, miserly hypocrites. As a matter of fact, Yankees did penetrate into the lands of the Yorkers, and honeycombed upstate New York with their ideas and institutions. By the time of the Revolution the boundary dispute had turned into a class war between landlords and tenants engaged in an agrarian struggle. This controversy over the land was joined with the Revolutionary campaigns of Ethan Allen and Seth Warner in a very popular novel, The Green Mountain Boys (1839), by Daniel Pierce Thompson.

Judge Thompson, Vermonter born and bred, considered these episodes in the early history of his state in themselves romantic "with the use of little more fiction than was deemed sufficient to weave them together and impart to the tissue a connected interest." According to his racy account, the Vermonters drove the York state men from the Grants, but the tool of the land-jobbers vowed he would take revenge on the greenwood hero's sweetheart. While her lover was away helping heroic Ethan Allen take Fort Ticonderoga, the villain won over the girl's neutral father, and by calumny secured the defection of the daughter. After Allen was captured, the hero, Seth Warner, joined St. Clair against Burgoyne, who was then descending from the north. During this expedition the young man vindicated himself by rescuing the girl and her father.

Thompson was able to relate his story with something of the animation and suspense which actually characterized the strife because he had the story directly from aged participants. Ethan Allen, St. Clair, Seth Warner, Schuyler, Benedict Arnold, and others move through these scenes freely and humanly—an important advance in historical fiction over such stiff and shadowy portraitures as Cooper's Washington and John Paul Jones. Perhaps the greatest charm of the narrative lies in the piquancy of its provincialism, which triumphs over occasional lapses in idiom. These mountaineer kinsmen of Thompson were fighting, not for adventure merely, but for defense of home. It is only natural that such a stirring appeal to patriotism should have caused the book to run through many editions.

The French and Indian Wars, 1754-63, were fought largely outside the borders of New England. But in Haverhill, or the Memoirs of an Officer in the Army of Wolfe (1831), James A. Jones linked mid-eighteenth century Yankee manners with the conflict when he told of the rise of a humble youth from Cape Cod. When Lynn Haverhill's love for Mary Danvers is thwarted by the girl's aristocratic father, who wants her to marry her wealthy cousin Charles, the unhappy youth seeks to prove his worth by going to sea. After rescue in a storm and a period of imprisonment in an Indian camp, he joins Wolfe's army at Quebec. Following the victory on the Plains of Abraham, he comes home to find his mother and his brother dead and his wayward sister gone—reportedly to the West Indies. During his fruitless search for her, he becomes infatuated with a Creole, Margaretta, only to find that his former rival Charles has prior claims, which leaves him free to marry his first love. In spite of its use of the long arm of coincidence, the book is still worth reading. The fact that the narrative is in the first person gives the reader a sense of actual participation in the events. General Wolfe is shown as unpretentious as a clerk in banter, but unsurpassed when energy and decision are required, and noble in the hour of death. No previous author has related with such detail the manners of a New England community—its shooting matches, husking bees, quilting frolics, sleighing parties, wrestling matches, horse races, favorite dishes, courtships, gossip, and superstitions. The style is fluent and seasoned with homely wit, and for once the characters are not impeccable.

Wolfe's defeat of Montcalm at Quebec was only one of the three objectives for which the French and Indian Wars were waged. The others were Louisburg and Ticonderoga. In the Champlain region there fought a romantic American hero, Major Robert Rogers, whose exploits have been recorded by the historian Francis Parkman, and in fiction by Sir Gilbert Parker in The Seats of the Mighty (1896).