The Munsons of Texas — an American Saga
Inset 4
ABOUT THE EARLY IMMIGRANTS TO NEW ENGLAND [1]
“Writing from Massachusetts Bay in September, 1629, Higginson said: ‘Many families are expected here the next spring out of Lincolnshire.’ The principal town of the English county of Lincoln was Boston. According to the Memorial History of Boston, Mass., ‘When the Boston (Eng.) men joined the Massachusetts Company. . .their superior wealth and standing gave them the ascendancy in its councils,’ and thus a name precious with Lincolnshire [i.e. Boston]. . .was applied to the Tri-Mountain settlement.”
“Increase Mather (l639-l723), President of Harvard College, wrote of the Rev. John Cotton, who for twenty years was minister in Boston, England, and for nineteen years minister in Boston, Massachusetts: ‘Both Bostons have reason to honor his memory; and New-England Boston most of all, which oweth its name and being to him, more than to any one person in the world.’ In the same ship with Cotton came Hooker, celebrated as a minister and as the founder of Hartford; and through Cotton’s influence. . . Davenport, celebrated as a minister and as associate-founder of New Haven, became a non-conformist, and so an exile to the New World. . .‘However,’ says Mather, ‘the number of those who did actually arrive at New-England before the year 1640, have been computed about 4000. . .
“The silenced, non-conformist ministers were at the head of this . . .migration. They had been ‘deprived not only of their livings, but also of their liberty to exercise their ministry, which was dearer to them than their livings.’. . .Most, if not all, of the ministers who then visited these regions, were either attended or followed, with a number of pious people, who had lived within the reach of their ministry in England. . .”
“Does one inquire for a definite answer to the question - What banished scores of the ablest, most devoted, most spiritual ministers, with 4,000 of their fellow-Christians, into a wilderness peopled with savages?. . .A conscientious refusal to practice certain ceremonies of human invention which had been added to the worship of God - unscriptural, unwarrantable, profane, as they believed; they could not conform to the requirements of the bishops and their courts in respect to these human inventions. That the silenced ministers might preach the Gospel, and that they and their fellow-Christians might have liberty to worship according to conscience. . .such were their primary motives in crossing the Atlantic.”
“Our Thomas Munson - the supposition is credible and unavoidable
- was among those Four Thousand exiled servants of God. He may have
voyaged hither with Higginson in 1629, with Cotton and Hooker in
1633, or with other brave and spirited colonists, loyal to God and
to conscience. Whence he came, when he came, with whom he came, may
some day appear.”
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[1] Myron A. Munson, The Munson Record, Vol. I:xxv-xxvii.
