In the second place, the rank and file of the Puritans came from a better class of men than the average immigrant to the southern colonies. The Puritans came from the middle classes of England. A large part of the immigrants to Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas were the riffraff of the large cities of the mother country.

Another factor in promoting the cause of education in New England was the favorable attitude taken by the Puritan clergy.

Finally, the compact New England township was far better suited to a public school system than the scattered plantations of the South.

It is significant that Massachusetts required every town having a certain population to maintain a free school, and enforced this requirement by heavy fines.38

38 Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts Bay, 2: 100.

CHAPTER II

LAND GRANTS FOR THE SUPPORT OF THE MINISTRY

During the period of American colonization, and for centuries before that time, the English clergy were in a large measure a beneficed clergy, dependent for their support upon the produce of estates of which they were the life tenants. With this nation-wide practice of the mother country before them the English colonists were asked to solve the problem, how to provide a maintenance for their ministry. It is no wonder that they turned to the one heritage with which they were munificently endowed, the land. It is rather a cause for surprise that the policy was not everywhere followed.

The foregoing study of land grants for the support of schools incidentally has served to show that in all the New England colonies, except Rhode Island, the use of land for this purpose generally went hand in hand with land grants for the support of the ministry. The towns, however, especially in Massachusetts, made a much more extensive use of public land for the latter purpose. Dedham in 1642 reserved a small tract for "the Towne the Churche & A fre Schoole." Lancaster in 1653, almost immediately after receiving its allotment from the general court, set aside "for the maintainance of the minestree of Gods holy word thirty acors of vppland and fortie acors of Entervale Land and twelue acors of meddowe." Plymouth made reservations for the use of the ministry in 1663, 1684, and 1709; Rowley in 1667 and 1669. In the latter year Kittery, a Maine town, assigned one hundred fifty acres in each division of the town "for ye use of ye Ministry for Ever." The same year the proprietors of Worcester reserved fifty acres for religious purposes. In 1682 Cambridge voted to lay out "500 acheres of the remote lands . for the vse & benefitt of the ministry of this Town for euer.' Dorchester made its allotment in 1706,8 Duxbury in 1710.9 Rochester devoted one "three-and-thirtyeth" part of its land to religious uses.10

The practice, however, was by no means universal. In many of the towns the servants of the church relied for their maintenance solely upon contributions in money or in produce.

1 Dedham Town Records, 3: 92.

2 Early Records of Lancaster, 27.

3 Records of the Town of Plymouth, 1: 53, 296; 2: 26.

4 Rowley Town Records, 189, 205.

5 Maine Historical Society, Collections, Documentary History, ser. 2, 12: 131.

6 Records of the Proprietors of Worcester, Massachusetts, 16.

Records of the Town and Selectmen of Cambridge, 1630-1703, p. 259.

8 Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts Bay, 5: 335.

9 Records of the Town of Duxbury, 210.

10 Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts Bay, 2: 308.

In the middle colonies very little use was made of public land grants for the support of the ministry. This was due in part to the attitude of William Penn toward the established church as revealed by his charter of privileges of 1680, which relieved all men from forced contributions for the support of religious worship." The Baltimores made no provision for a settled maintenance for the ministers of Maryland, an omission which became a matter of complaint in the council of trade and plantations as late as 1777.12 Many parishes, however, were provided with glebe lands by private parties.13 After the Declaration of Independence sites for churches and burying grounds were sometimes provided by the legislature.1 In 1703 Trinity Church in New York received its churchyard and cemetery grounds by grant from the city government.15

In New Jersey, on the other hand, the proprietors, Berkeley and Carteret, in 1664 granted to each parish two hundred acres for the use of the ministry. In 1702, when the colony had become a royal province, the instructions to the governor called for the maintenance of a glebe at common charge.16

In all of the southern colonies, where the majority of the settlers were Episcopalians, glebe lands were provided, in accordance with the practice of the Church of England. Such lands were provided with buildings for the use of the acting minister, but did not become his property.

The first land grants in the United States for the support of the ministry were made by the Virginia Company. In 1618 it directed Governor Yeardley to set apart one hundred acres of land in each city or borough toward the maintenance of the ministers.17 This proved to be insufficient to attract the rectors of the Church of England to this frontier community. As a further inducement the company undertook to provide tenants for each glebe, at the joint expense of the company and the parish.18 In 1642, after Virginia had become a royal colony, Governor Berkeley was instructed by the king to increase the reservation for glebe lands to two hundred acres.19

In 1661 the colonial assembly required every parish which had not already done so to provide a glebe,20 a requirement which was now more rigidly enforced. This policy was followed until after the Revolution.21

11 Charters and Acts of the Assembly of the Province of Pennsylvania, p. x.

12 Colonial Records of North Carolina, 1: 234.

13 Bacon's Laws of Maryland at Large, ch. 38, sec. 1, 2; 1722, ch. 4, sec. 1.

14 Laws of Maryland made since 1763, 1781, ch. 8.

15 Black, Municipal Ownership of Land on Manhattan Island, 21.

16 Grants and Concessions of New Jersey, 25, 638.

17 "Instructions to Governor Yeardley," in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2: 158. 18 Records of the Virginia Company, 1: 314, 352.

19 "Instructions to Governor Berkeley," in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2: 281. 20 Hening's Statutes at Large, 2: 30.

21 Ibid., 1: 400, 479; 2: 29, 31; 3: 152; 4: 440; 6: 89; 8: 14, 24, 204, 435; 9: 319, 440; 11: 404; 13: 190.

In 1668 the proprietors granted one hundred acres of land to each parish in North Carolina for the support of the ministry.22 Individual parishes also provided glebe lands.23 In 1762 each of these local communities was required by the colonial government to set apart not less than two hundred acres of good arable land for this purpose.24

A similar policy was pursued in the neighboring colony on the south. In 1704 the six parishes of Berkeley County were required by the central government to provide glebe lands, sites for churches, and burial grounds. The parish of Charlestown had made such a provision for its rector a few years earlier. 25

In the very first year of the colonizing of Georgia provision was made for a permanent maintenance for the ministry. But here, instead of requiring the local communities to set aside the lands, as was the practice of the other southern colonies, the colonial government made the reservations. Provision was also made for the cultivation of the lands. In this connection, in the record of the meeting of the proprietors of the colony for January 31, 1738, we read an entry the humor of which was perhaps lost on the men of that generation. It was provided "that fifteen Tons of strong Beer be bought and sent over to Genl Oglethorpe, And the Produce thereof be applied for the cloathing and maintaining the Trustees Servants to be employ'd in cultivating Lands for Religious Uses."26 Grants of land were also made for the support of missionaries.27

In concluding the consideration of land grants for the support of the ministry it may be said that by the close of the Revolutionary War the practice of using public land for this purpose had been adopted and consistently followed by all of the New England colonies, except Rhode Island, and by all of the southern colonies. In the middle colonies, on the other hand, it had been resorted to only in New Jersey. That is to say, eight of the thirteen colonies had adopted this policy, to which should be added Vermont, when that community asserted its right to be an independent

state.

What about the other five? With the same precedents before them, why did they not adopt the same policy? The well-known attitude of Roger Williams, the founder of the colony, toward an established church is sufficient to explain the absence of public land grants for the support of the ministry in Rhode Island. The same might be said of Pennsylvania. But here there was an even more fundamental reason. The colony was a Quaker colony and for more than half a century the Quaker element was

the predominating one. But the Quakers had no regularly ordained ministers and their religious speakers held that to accept pecuniary reward for their services would be contrary to the injunction of Christ: "Freely ye have received, freely give."28 Delaware was governed by Pennsylvania from 1683 to 1703 and remained a dependency until the Revolution. The Quaker element was also important in New Jersey after 1680, and, in connection with the mixed character of the population in nationality and religion, prevented the extension of the policy which the English proprietors adopted in 1664. In Maryland the presence in approximately equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants was a factor in preventing the adoption of the policy.

28 Encyclopedia Americana.