The Colonial Mood: Anxiety and Nostalgia in Massachusetts Bay

The main body of the Winthrop fleet reached New England in the month of June 1630. After the euphoria of arrival wore off, moods rapidly began to change. “Salem, where we landed, pleased us not,” Dudley wrote. Most of the new settlers moved south to Charlestown, where they made a camp of “cloth tents” and small huts near the water’s edge. Many were weak with scurvy after their long sea voyage. Fevers spread swiftly through the unhealthy camp, and people began to die. The Bay Colony knew nothing like the “starving time” of Jamestown or Plymouth, but every day there were several dead colonists to bury.

“The first beginning of this work seemed very dolorous,” Isaac Johnson remembered, “ … almost in every family, lamentation, mourning and woe was heard.” When the immigrant ships left for home, nearly one hundred settlers decided to return with them, and the remainder watched with sinking hearts as the topsails disappeared beyond the horizon. A melancholy spirit settled over the colony, as it did in every new settlement. Many colonists felt desperately homesick, and regretted what Isaac Johnson called their “voluntary banishment” from the “mother country.” Something of this colonial mood persisted for many years.¹

This aching sense of physical separation from the European homeland became a cultural factor of high importance in colonial settlements.² The effect of distance created feelings of nostalgia, anxiety and loss. The prevailing cultural mood became profoundly conservative—a spirit reinforced by emigration from England, by the rigors of the Atlantic passage, and by the sense of distance from the Old World. “For my own part,” wrote Lucy Winthrop Downing, “changes were ever irksome to me, and the sea much more.”³

In the early records of the Bay Colony, the adjectives “new” and “novel” were pejorative terms. In 1639, for example, a special “day of humiliation” was called in Massachusetts on account of “novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered.” In this catalogue of depravity, it is interesting to observe that “novelty” led the list.⁴ Dissenters were severely punished for “innovation.” Roger Williams was banished for opinions that were condemned not merely as dangerous, but “new and dangerous.” Thomas Makepeace was warned by the General Court that “because of his novile disposition … we were weary of him unless he reform.”⁵

As that statement implies, reform was regarded in Massachusetts mainly as a process of recovery and preservation. Reformation meant going backward rather than forward, on the assumption that error was novel and truth was ancient in the world. The Protestant Reformation meant a reversion to primitive Christianity. In politics, reform was a return to the ancient constitution. In society, it meant a revival of ancestral ways.

These ideas were deepened by feelings of nostalgia for the “mother country,” as the Puritans called England. The passengers who sailed in the Arbella wrote from shipboard “we … cannot part from our native country … without much sadness of heart, and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation, we have received in her bosom, and sucked it from her breasts.”⁶ For many years, the people of Massachusetts called themselves “the English.” Nearly two centuries would pass before they could think of themselves as American.⁷

These attitudes grew even stronger among the children and grandchildren of these migrants—reinforced by a mood of cultural anxiety which developed in most colonies, no matter whether English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese. In all of these settlements there was an abiding fear of what Cotton Mather called “Criolian degeneracy.” Change of any sort seemed to be cultural disintegration. In consequence, the founders of Massachusetts and their descendants for many generations tended to cling to the cultural baggage which they had carried out of England.⁸

This mood of cultural conservatism created a curious paradox in colonial history. New settlements tended to remain remarkably old-fashioned in their folkways. They missed the new fads and customs that appeared in the mother country after they were planted. They tended also to preserve cultural dynamics that existed in the hour of their birth. It was as if they were caught in a twist of time, and held in its coils while the rest of the world moved beyond them.

A case in point was the history of language in new colonies. Much recent scholarship has repeatedly rediscovered the same pattern of linguistic conservatism in colonial cultures. The language of Iceland is an archaic form of Norwegian. The patois of Quebec preserves much of old French. The speech called Afrikaans is in many ways an antique Dutch dialect. The Spanish of Mexico and Peru retain many old-fashioned Castilian expressions. None of these colonial languages have been static or frozen. All of them diverged from the homeland by complex processes of change in their new environments. But the continuities were also very strong. A classical example was the language of Massachusetts.⁹