This chapter has been published in the book American Revolution to 1800.
For ordering information please click here.
After New Haven became part of Connecticut in 1664,
the United
Colonies had only three members.
Plymouth wanted to dissolve the
confederation,
but they agreed to meet once every three years.
In the revised articles five of the six commissioners were required
for a decision,
and the right of declaring war was left to the
general courts of the colonies.
The death of John Endecott marked
the end of an era in Massachusetts,
and in May 1665 Richard Bellingham
was elected governor.
The General Court had been ignoring the
English Navigation Act of 1660,
which required them to sell their
goods only to the English for low prices,
and specified commodities
could only be exported to England or English colonies.
Massachusetts
in 1661 had declared their liberty to make their own laws as long
as
they did not contradict English law, and they denied the right
of appeal from their courts.
In August 1665 the General Court
of Massachusetts sent a petition to the King
complaining that
they were being threatened with ruin,
and they declared that they
saw no reason to submit.
The visiting royal commissioners did
not recognize the United Colonies.
In 1666 King Charles II sent
a circular letter to these colonies
expressing satisfaction with
all but Massachusetts.
In 1668 Massachusetts asserted its control
over the province of Maine by force of arms.
Many wanted to accept people who had been baptized and had
moral lives as members
of the church even if they were not qualified
for communion,
and in 1657 a council in Boston had approved what
was called the Halfway Covenant.
This decision was confirmed five
years later by a synod of all clergy from Massachusetts.
Boston's
minister John Wilson died in 1667,
and John Davenport of New Haven
was chosen as his successor.
He opposed the Halfway Covenant,
and 29 members seceded; but he died a year later.
Those who favored
the Halfway Covenant built the South Church in 1669,
and for many
years this church represented liberal ideas.
A serious land dispute was over Narragansett territory that
the royal charters had awarded to both Connecticut and Rhode Island.
In 1665 the royal commissioners decided that Rhode Island had
jurisdiction,
but they canceled two large purchases of 1659 and
the grants, deciding that
the Narragansetts should pay 300 fathoms
of wampum
for the purchases and 735 fathoms for the rest.
Connecticut
also disputed territory with New York
and kept some troops available
to deter them.
The Indians were being crowded into tongues of land
where they
could be controlled and watched.
The Wampanoag sachem Massasoit
had died in 1661.
The English referred to his sons Wamsutta as
Alexander and Metacom as Philip.
Alexander succeeded his father,
but after meeting with the Plymouth authorities
he died of a fever.
Metacom suspected his brother had been poisoned.
He became sachem
and was also summoned before the Court in August 1664.
Two years
later Metacom (King Philip) dictated a letter to officials on
Long Island
that Chief Ninigret was planning to exact tribute
from natives there.
Rumors that Metacom was going to cooperate
with the Dutch and the French
against the English in 1667 caused
the magistrates to collect his arms;
but no evidence was found,
and his arms were returned.
Yet they made him pay £40 for
their expedition.
In 1668 the people of Dedham began settling
on the land they had purchased
from Metacom
at Wollomonuppoag;
but they found that the Indians were still planting crops there.
Metacom claimed it was his but accepted £5 as a down payment
in August 1669.
That year Ninigret was summoned to Newport by
the government of Rhode Island,
and his answers to their questions
were satisfactory.
In March 1671 Hugh Cole of Swansea reported to Plymouth that
he saw
the
Narragansetts repairing guns and making weapons at
Mount Hope, where Metacom lived.
Plymouth forced
Metacom to make a treaty at Taunton in April, and after a trial
at Plymouth
in September he had to surrender his arms, pay £100
within three years,
and could only sell land with the colony’s approval.
The Wampanoags turned in seventy muskets and agreed
to pay an annual tribute
of five wolves’ heads and not to engage
in war without permission.
In 1671 the Plymouth colony summoned
the squaw-sachem Awashonks and ordered her
to put her lands under
the authority of the colony and pay the English £50 compensation.
The settlers’ horses and hogs did so much damage to the crops
of the Indians
that in 1671 Plymouth appointed committees in eleven
different towns.
That year Metacom was required to deposit the
guns of his people with the Court,
which decided they were forfeited
and distributed them to the colonists.
In Connecticut towns were
refusing to pay their taxes, and in 1671 a law was passed
penalizing
anyone who spoke out in a town meeting against paying assessments.
The next year they elected Quakers as magistrates, and free debate
was restored.
Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck was the first native to graduate from
Harvard College in 1665.
Many of the natives resented the efforts
by the missionaries to form villages
of praying Indians as disruptive
of their way of life,
and Indians often suffered adverse judgments
in the English courts.
In the spring of 1675 Connecticut passed
regulations requiring the Pequots
on their reservation to obey
the Sabbath restrictions, and any settler finding
a native drunk
could make him work for twelve days as a fine and keep half the
proceeds.
The natives in the New England region were Algonquins,
and they could not
easily
move west because of their enemies,
the Mohawks of the powerful Iroquois confederation.
John Sassamon was a native who was raised by Puritans as a
Christian at Natick.
He studied at Harvard and served as Metacom’s secretary
before going back to teach school at Natick.
In January
1675 he informed the Plymouth government that the Wampanoags
were
organizing a general uprising; a few days later he was found dead.
One Indian named Patuckson testified that he saw three natives
murder him;
but his testimony has been questioned because he owed
these men a gambling debt.
They claimed they were innocent but
were convicted and hanged.
However, one rope broke, and Wampapaquan
said he saw his father
Tobias and Mattashunnamo commit the murder
and
that Metacom was complicit; but he was hanged again.
Metacom
was brought to court again but was released for lack of evidence.
As the Wampanoags were mobilizing in June, Rhode Island deputy
governor John Easton
tried to mediate the conflict and met with
Metacom; but the conference broke up.
When the Wampanoags began
looting,
Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow ordered seventy men
raised.
He also sent a letter to Massachusetts governor John Leverett
because Narragansetts and Nipmucks were involved.
Roger Williams
gained some assurances from the Narragansett sachem Canonchet,
but he was skeptical of his fine words.
Easton reported that an
Indian looter was shot on June 23 by a boy.
Plymouth declared
the next day for fasting and public humiliation,
and that day
in Swansea the Wampanoags killed six settlers, including the boy.
On June 29 they burned eight Rehoboth farmhouses and killed fifteen
people at Taunton.
Plymouth required every man to serve in the militia or pay
a fine of £5 or run the gauntlet,
and boys under sixteen
were used for guard duty.
Connecticut offered its officers and
troops land and the opportunity
to plunder the goods and sell
the Indians themselves, and
no male resident between fourteen
and seventy was allowed to emigrate from the colony.
Massachusetts
threatened those who would not join the army with the death penalty,
and they prohibited Quaker meetings.
Many of the colonists still
used the old matchlock guns, which were not nearly as
efficient and reliable as the newer flintlocks used by most of the Indians
by 1675.
New York governor Edmund Andros tried to exploit the
crisis by moving troops
into the disputed territory at Fort Seabrook,
but on July 9
the Assembly at Hartford sent a unanimous declaration
of protest to Major Andros.
Connecticut governor Winthrop sent
forces there, and the New York soldiers withdrew.
Connecticut sent troops on the first of July.
Captain Edward
Hutchinson moved his Massachusetts army from Mount Hope
to the
Narragansett country where the Pocasset squaw-sachem Weetamoo,
Alexander’s widow, might join Metacom’s alliance.
The Narragansetts
had about two thousand warriors and 900 guns.
On July
6 Massachusetts sent more than fifty Christian Indians to help;
but native hostility spread, and in Massachusetts the Nipmucks
attacked Mendon on July 14.
Captain Ephraim Curtis tried to negotiate
with the Nipmucks for eight days,
and Captain Hutchinson attended
a conference on the 28th to no avail.
The United Colonies made
a treaty with six Narragansett elders on July 15,
but they had
little influence.
Benjamin Church led some Rhode Island militia
to attack the hostile Indians
in the Pocasset swamp on July 19;
but the bunched-up English
could not defeat the Indians when they
were spread out.
While the English were building a fort at the
end of July,
Metacom escaped from the Pocasset territory north
to the Nipmucks.
Weetamoo led her people south and found refuge
with the Narragansetts.
The Nipmucks attacked Brookfield in August,
and the town was abandoned.
Settlers evacuated Deerfield in September,
and Captain Samuel Moseley's men buried 64 English.
The Commissioners of the United Colonies had their regular
meeting on 9 September 1675,
and they called for a thousand men—527
from Massachusetts,
315 from Connecticut, and 158 from Plymouth.
Colony taxes for the year 1675 went way up to pay for the war.
On September 12 Captain Beers and 20 of his men were killed
in an ambush,
and six days later about 600 Indians killed
Captain Lothrop and nearly a hundred men.
Negotiations with the
Narragansetts at Wickford broke down on September 22.
John Pynchon
and the town of Springfield were shocked
when local Indians burned
32 homes in early October.
Samuel Appleton replaced Pynchon as
commander in western Massachusetts,
and towns throughout New England
prepared to defend themselves.
The skulking tactics of the natives
in the forest were difficult for the English to counter,
though
using friendly Indians as scouts helped.
The resentment many Indians
felt against the English was exploding.
The town of Hatfield put
up a strong defense in October.
The Mohegans led by Chief Uncas,
the remaining Pequots,
and Chief Ninigret and his Niantics were
still loyal to the English.
The Narragansett sachem Canonchet was Miantonomo’s youngest
son
and had made a treaty with Massachusetts and Connecticut,
but an Indian warned the Plymouth colony that Canonchet was preparing
for war.
So the Commissioners authorized another thousand men
in November
under the command of Josiah Winslow to enforce their
treaty obligations.
An Indian named Peter guided the army to the
Great Swamp
in the Narragansett country of Rhode Island in December.
The English launched a pre-emptive attack and lost 80 killed,
including 14 officers, and had 200 wounded.
The
chaplain Joseph Dudley reported that about 200 Narragansett
braves were killed,
and Captain James Oliver estimated that they captured 300 warriors
and even more women and children than that.
Winslow did not trust the remote position, and
against Benjamin Church's advice
they burned the wigwams and the
food supplies.
Many Indians probably died trying to survive the
winter.
Winslow’s army chased the Narragansetts toward the Nipmuck
country in January.
Meanwhile Metacom had gone west to ask for
help from the Mohawks;
but New York governor Andros encouraged
the Mohawks to support New England
by supplying them with guns
and ammunition, and they chased Metacom’s band away.
In February 1676 a reported 1,500 Indians raided Lancaster
and Medfield in Massachusetts.
The Commissioners of the United
Colonies ordered six hundred mounted men to gather
at Brookfield
under the command of Major Thomas Savage,
and they planned a palisade
around Boston.
Loyal Indians were protected from mobs by putting
them in a workhouse,
and the Christian Indians at Natick were
deported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor.
Metacom and his braves
attacked Northampton on March 14,
but it was defended by two companies
from Connecticut and one from Massachusetts.
However, Captain
Samuel Wadsworth and his fifty men
were all killed on their way
to relieve Sudbury.
Warwick in Rhode Island was burned to the
ground, and an appeal by Roger Williams
did not prevent the Narragansetts
from burning his house and others in Providence.
Williams had
tried to explain to the natives that 10,000 English could
carry muskets,
and that even if they killed them, the King of
England could send 10,000 more.
Plymouth was no longer sending troops, and Connecticut forces
withdrew;
so Savage led most of the Massachusetts army back toward
Boston.
Towns did not have enough troops to guard them, and men
were needed for spring planting.
Canonchet and about six hundred
warriors massacred Captain Michael Pierce's
Plymouth company of
50 men on March 26 while losing 140 men;
but ten days later
Canonchet was defeated and captured,
and the English let the Mohegans
execute him, as they had his father.
Connecticut governor John
Winthrop Jr. died on April 5 during an epidemic,
and William Leete
was elected the next month.
The Assembly voted for a standing
army of 350 men.
Connecticut and Massachusetts began separate
negotiations with the natives on May 1,
and by June more than
20 English prisoners had been released.
About 800 Indians attacked Sudbury on 21 April 1676,
and on May 13 they raided the Hatfield cattle.
Thomas Reed escaped
from captivity and warned that
Indians were gathering at the falls
above Deerfield.
Captain William Turner led 150 men, and in a
surprise attack they slaughtered
more than 100 Indians while
only one colonist was killed;
but on their retreat they were
attacked by hundreds of Metacom’s warriors
who killed Turner
and 40 men.
Massachusetts organized 500 men who raided
Mount Wachusett,
and Major John Talcott gathered 440 English and
allied Indians
for Connecticut who killed or captured 171.
The
English destroyed Indian crops in order to starve them into submission;
but as the captive Mary Rowlandson found out,
the Indians were
very resourceful at surviving on little.
On June 12 Metacom led
700 braves against Hadley in Massachusetts,
but Connecticut
had 500 English and Mohican allies defending the town.
On June 19 the Massachusetts government offered amnesty to all
who surrendered.
Church arranged to meet his friend, the Sogkonate
squaw-sachem Awashonks,
and she sent her son Peter to Plymouth
to ratify the terms.
She took 80 or 90 of her tribe to
Major William Bradford at Pocasset on June 30
which was a day
of public thanksgiving in Boston.
Talcott’s forces killed or captured 238 Narragansetts on July
2 and 3.
Potuck had been given safe conduct by some Providence
men,
but he was later executed as a war criminal.
On July 3 at
Dover, Maine the Pennacook sachem Wannalancet
signed a peace treaty
with Major Richard Waldron.
James the Printer, who had worked
on Eliot's Algonquian Bible, led the surrender
of 140 Christian
Indians, and he reported that more Indians had died of disease
than were killed by the English during the year of war.
As more
natives surrendered, English troops combed the country to capture
and sell Indians.
The Narragansett sachem Pomham was killed in
late July.
Uncas accepted surrendering Indians in order to increase
his tribe of Mohegans.
Sagamore John led 180 Nipmucks into Boston
on July 27,
and Matoonas was executed for his murders.
On August
6 Weetamoo drowned trying to escape from Talcott’s men.
Metacom’s wife and son were captured and sold into slavery,
and Church’s
men killed Metacom on August 12 in his territory of Mount
Hope.
The Wampanoag warrior Annawon was executed at Plymouth.
Most of the Indians who did not surrender fled to the west.
Most of the captives were made indentured servants to age 26
or were sold as slaves.
John Eliot warned that selling people
as slaves is a dangerous business.
Most were sent to the West
Indies; but they placed little value on Indians
who made poor
slaves, and some even were shipped
as far as the notorious slave
market at Tangiers in Morocco.
Even Roger Williams arranged the
sale of some Indians
in Providence for limited periods of service.
The General Court of Connecticut decided in October that all captives
who could not be convicted of murder were not to be sold abroad,
although in May 1677 they made an exception for runaways.
During
the summer a force of 60 English and 200 Indian allies
were sent to defend settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, but
they were routed.
That year Deerfield and Hatfield were raided
by hostile Indians on their way to Canada.
However, during the
summer of 1678 the Commissioners
made peace with the Tarrantine
(Micmac) chief.
Massachusetts required all Indians who were not family servants
to live in Natick, Punkapaug, Hassanemesit, or Wamesit.
Chief
Uncas agreed to let Connecticut divide his lands into farms and
plantations.
His Mohegans and the Eastern Niantics in Rhode Island
were the last of the tribal governments in southern New England.
Metacom’s War (aka King Philip’s War) was
devastating for the population of New England.
Half the region’s 80 towns were badly damaged, and 12
were destroyed.
At least 3,000 Indians and 600
English were killed in the war.
Expenses for the war cost Plymouth
£11,743, Connecticut £22,173,
and Massachusetts £46,292,
and their war debts were about equal to their remaining assets.
Reconstruction began immediately, and by 1680
Massachusetts had
rebuilt the destroyed towns.
Wounded veterans were given compensation,
tax exemptions,
and the right to operate a tavern.
Other veterans
organized and were given land grants.
Connecticut increased its
militia to 2,507 men in 1679.
Roger Williams wanted to meet George Fox for a discussion,
and for three days in 1671 he debated three of his followers at
Newport.
In Rhode Island the Gortonians, Quakers, and Baptists
allowed women to participate
in church affairs much more than
in other colonies,
but the Anglicans and Congregationalists did
not.
In 1672 the Quakers elected Nicholas Easton governor.
William
Coddington also became a Quaker and was elected Easton's deputy
the next year.
In 1674 and 1675 Coddington was elected governor
with Easton as his deputy,
and in 1676 Walter Clarke was the last
in this sequence of Quaker governors.
The Quakers gained exemption
from military service, and Rhode Island
did not participate much
in Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War except in self-defense;
but they
provided refuge for other colonists.
Benjamin Church persuaded
Governor Coddington
to provide boats to patrol the northern shores.
On 27 October 1675 the General Assembly decided
to leave the
colony’s defense to each town.
Warwick was abandoned, and many
fled to the island of Rhode Island.
Coddington wrote a letter
to the Massachusetts government in January 1676
contrasting their
persecution of Quakers, who had been made to run the gauntlet
in Boston, to Rhode Island’s offering of hospitality to refugees.
Williams served as a captain in the Providence militia.
When the
Indians set fires at Providence and Warwick in March,
his house
with his books and papers was burned.
In April the deputy governor
John Cranston was commissioned a major
for the colony and was
commanded to kill and expel all the enemies.
In August a court
at Newport with magistrates Williams, Arthur Fenner, Randall Holden
and William Harris convicted five Indians of murder and had them
executed.
Benedict Arnold was elected governor in 1677,
and the
law exempting Quakers from military service was repealed.
The newly named Lords of Trade and Plantations chose
Edward
Randolph as their agent to New England.
He was the cousin of Robert
Mason, who had claims in New Hampshire.
Randolph arrived at Boston
in June 1676; but Governor John Leverett told him
they did not
recognize the King's right to bind the colony
because they had
made their own plantation in the wilderness.
Randolph had ten
ships seized for illegal entry during his first year,
but juries
acquitted them all.
He sent reports exaggerating the population
and wealth of Massachusetts,
claiming the King was losing £100,000
a year in customs.
In 1677 Massachusetts sent Peter Bulkeley and
William Stoughton to England as their agents,
and Randolph accused
them of spending £4,000 on bribes;
but the committee of
the Privy Council denied
Massachusetts’ jurisdiction over Maine
and New Hampshire.
So Massachusetts purchased the claims of Gorges
in Maine for £1,250,
but in 1678 a quo warranto was issued
against their charter.
An oath of allegiance was required of every
male older than sixteen,
and treason was made a capital offense.
Also in 1678 a ship from Madagascar brought forty or fifty Africans
and sold them as slaves.
The Massachusetts General Court still
held that the acts of navigation invaded their rights.
Randolph
was commissioned as the collector of customs in New England
and
returned to Boston in 1679, but he lost his cases in court.
The
Treaty of Breda had given part of Maine to France.
In 1679 Simon Bradstreet became Governor of Massachusetts,
and in May 1680 the General Court assembled with all 18
assistants for the first time.
They replied to a letter from King
Charles II by asserting their autonomy.
The royal agent Edward
Randolph went back to England in 1681
and brought twelve charges
against Massachusetts.
Two naval officers made sure that the English
customs of the Navigation Act
were not strictly enforced in Boston
and Salem, the two lawful ports.
In February 1682 Massachusetts
chose Joseph Dudley
and John Richards as their agents to England.
In 1683 the moderate Bradstreet defeated the radical Thomas Danforth,
690 votes to 631.
Only ten percent of the freemen voted in this
election.
Only about one-fifth of the freemen had the franchise
because one had to be a male church member to vote.
Their charter
went before a tribunal in October 1683 while the deputies in Boston,
encouraged by Increase Mather, adhered to their own laws.
In 1684
Increase Mather published “An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing.”
Roger Williams warned the Puritans
against their depraved appetite
or great portions of land in
the wilderness.
From 1660 to 1678 William Harris made determined
efforts to gain control
of 300,000 acres in Pawtuxet that he claimed
he bought from the Indians in 1638.
The Rhode Island General Assembly
dismissed Harris in 1667,
but he went to England in 1675 and gained
a royal order.
A jury in Providence decided in his favor in November
1677,
and his case was heard in Plymouth the next July.
Harris
secretly sailed from Boston at the end of 1679;
but the ship was
captured by a Barbary corsair, and Harris was sold as a slave.
A ransom of £459 was paid, but Harris died three days after
he arrived in London in 1681.
Arthur Fenner married the daughter
of Harris in 1686,
and the case was finally settled in 1712.
The
territory of Rhode Island was also in dispute as to its eastern
and western borders,
and these were eventually settled very close
to the terms
of the charter obtained in 1663 by John Clarke.
Roger Williams sent a letter to Providence on 15 January 1681 in which he wrote,
Six things are written in the hearts of all mankind, yea, even in pagans:
1st that there is a Deity;
2d that some actions are naught;
3d that the Deity will punish;
4th that there is another life;
5th that marriage is honorable;
6th that mankind cannot keep together without some government.1
He noted that charters became increasingly expensive.
The first
charter he got for Rhode Island cost only £100;
but the second was about a thousand, and Connecticut paid about
£6,000.
He asked if wisdom is not keeping peace with God
and men.
Williams founded a community based on liberty of conscience
and the sharing of property;
he died in the winter of 1683.
On 24 July 1679 New Hampshire was recognized as a royal province,
and in 1680 their Assembly asserted their right to make their
own laws.
Robert Mason claimed he owned New Hampshire;
but when
he visited there in 1680, the Council prohibited his interference.
He appointed Edward Cranfield governor of New Hampshire in 1682.
Cranfield probably gained the appointment by bribing the
British
war secretary William Blathwayt and was intent on making money.
The legislators voted him £250; but when they would not
give up their liberties,
he dissolved the Assembly in January
1683.
The people protested so much that Cranfield had the leader
Edward Gove arrested,
confiscated his estate, and sent him to
England, where
he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for three
years.
Cranfield wrote to Randolph that he hoped to sell pardons
to men in Boston for £10,000,
or he could sell new leases
for £2,000.
In 1684 he called the Assembly to get money
for defense.
Cranfield also invoked Anglican laws and ordered
the celebration of Christmas.
The Portsmouth minister Moody refused
to give free communion
and was prosecuted and imprisoned.
Cranfield
visited New York and tried to get taxes passed by making people
fear a war;
but associations formed for mutual support, and they
resisted collections.
Cranfield wrote to England and was allowed
to withdraw from New Hampshire.
In August 1684 he told the Lords
of Trade that citizens in Boston were aiding French pirates.
Cranfield
was removed as governor at the end of 1684.
The Commissioners of the United Colonies held their
last meeting
at Hartford in September 1684.
That year an intercolonial congress
was held at Albany, and the Iroquois Confederacy
agreed to an
alliance with Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia.
A letter
called “Phileroy Philopatris” noted that the colonists
had no representatives
in England and that the King could not
injure them by withdrawing protection,
which had not been granted.
In October the Massachusetts charter was judged forfeited,
but
the judgment did not reach Boston until July 1685.
By then James
II was king, and he appointed
Joseph Dudley president of the New
England Dominion.
He chose a Council of seventeen that included
Edward Randolph and George Mason;
the rest were New Englanders
who supported the Crown taking over the colony.
On 17 May 1686
Dudley told the General Court in Boston they had no legal existence.
He and his Council held the power, and he made provision
for appeals
to England in cases involving at least £300.
The Lords of Trade chose Edmund Andros as governor of all New
England except
Connecticut and Rhode Island with a salary of £1,200
per year,
and he arrived in Boston on December 20 with 100 professional soldiers.
When Andros was Governor of New
York, he had refuse
to aid New England during Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War
Increase Mather commented, “The foxes were now made
the administrators of justice to the poultry.”2
Andros selected moderate commissioners
who were influential.
Those who met regularly with him were called
his “tools” and
included Randolph, Dudley, William Stoughton,
John Usher, and Francis Nicholson.
Without the charter all Massachusetts
land legally belonged to the King.
Governor Andros offered to
confirm legal titles for less than a third of a penny per acre;
but the petty officers were so poorly paid that they added substantial
fees,
and a separate patent was needed for each county.
These
policies alienated the landowners.
Connecticut confirmed land
titles before its charter was revoked.
Rhode Island accepted the
jurisdiction of Andros, but Connecticut did not.
Both these colonies
became active in smuggling.
In October 1687 Andros went to Hartford
to seize the Connecticut charter.
Governor Robert Treat described
the blood and treasure
they had spent defending the charter.
When
the candles were blown out, Captain Joseph Wadsworth
took the
charter and hid it in a hollow oak tree.
Nevertheless Andros took
control of the colony.
Plymouth governor Thomas Hinckley sent
a
memorial to Blathwayt complaining about the taxes.
Dissenters were no longer required to attend the Congregational
Church,
and the ministers lost their support from taxes.
The public
school system and Harvard College also lost their state funding.
Anglicans were given permission to hold services in the South
Meeting House,
and this was resented by the Puritans, who often
had to wait to enter on Sunday.
Andros mandated the English form
of kissing the Bible as the oath in the courts,
and he
offended Puritans by allowing festivities
on Saturday night and
the celebration of Christmas.
The General Court had repealed all
their revenue acts, and so Andros imposed
public charges, imposts,
and excise and poll taxes.
Some towns protested that levying taxes
without an assembly violated the Magna Carta.
The minister
John Wise persuaded a meeting in Exeter not to choose a tax commissioner.
Andros had Wise and five others arrested and prosecuted.
Dudley
was chief justice, and they were all convicted
and fined a total
of £185, plus heavy court costs.
Wise also had his ministry
suspended.
In March 1688 Andros and his Council of more than forty
men
issued the Local Government Act that banned town meetings
except for annual elections.
They suspended habeas corpus,
and all printing had to be approved by Dudley.
Implementing the
Navigation Acts caused a business depression,
and Andros removed
reputable members of the Council without giving any reason.
No
one was allowed to leave the country without the Governor's permission.
Andros had forts built and garrisoned them with the professional
“redcoats.”
He petitioned to have New York expanded
by adding the Jerseys and Connecticut,
but instead the Lords of
Trade added New York and the Jerseys
to the Dominion of New England
in 1688.
Andros went to Maine in the spring to restore the fort
at Pemaquid.
He seized the movable property belonging to the Baron
Vincent de St. Castine
until he would recognize his authority.
Next Andros went to New York and the Jerseys, and he engaged
in
diplomacy at Albany with the Five Nations of the Iroquois.
He
attended a conference at Hartford and then returned to Boston.
Castine was married to an Abenaki princess and
roused the natives
to retaliate against the English.
After Indian attacks killed
26 Europeans during the summer,
Andros organized an expedition
to Penobscot, Maine in November with eight hundred men.
They destroyed
Indian settlements and captured their ammunition and supplies.
After this, according to Randolph, Boston merchants
sent a ship
with 42 tons of gunpowder, shot, and food.
The merchants as well as the Puritans came to resent their
lack of an assembly.
Increase Mather was acquitted by a jury and
escaped another prosecution
by Randolph by boarding a ship to
England in April 1688.
Richard Wharton and Elisha Hutchinson were
trying
to get permission for mining and other industries.
Mather
joined with them and William Phips and Samuel Sewall to petition
King James II
for a representative assembly based on freehold
suffrage.
When this was rejected, they asked if the Council could
have territorial representation
so that each county would have
at least one member;
but only the requests for freedom of
conscience and Harvard’s security were accepted.
After Prince
William of Orange came to England in November 1688, Increase Mather
and Phips asked the new King to recall Governor Andros.
Mather
persuaded the King to withhold the letters confirming the colonial
officers,
and he petitioned for a new charter, writing several
pamphlets on New England in 1689.
On 4 April 1689 John Winslow brought to Boston news
of the “Glorious Revolution of 1688.”
Governor Andros had him arrested.
Two weeks later Cotton Mather
was facing charges for incendiary writing,
and mutinous troops
arrived from the frontier.
Andros was besieged on Fort Hill, and
87-year-old Simon Bradstreet
and other magistrates went to the
Town House and read
a declaration from the balcony criticizing
the abuses of Andros.
Two days later they announced they were
the Council for Safety of the People
and Conservation of the Peace
until a more orderly settlement could be made.
They locked up
Randolph, judges, captains, the sheriff, the jailor,
and Dudley,
who was seized in Rhode Island.
Andros capitulated and was put
under house arrest;
but after he tried to escape twice, once in
woman’s clothing, he was imprisoned.
In 1691 a pamphlet called
“The Revolution in New England Justified,” which
was
probably written by Edward Rawson, argued that the colonists derived
their rights
from occupying and using the soil and from purchasing
the land from the Indians
rather than from any grant from the
king.
However, Andros was of the opinion that whoever did not
pay rent to those
who held the patents for lands should be treated
as rebels rather than subjects.
The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut had not yet been
annulled.
The freemen of Rhode Island made their declaration on
May 1, 1689.
On May 9 the assembly in Hartford reinstated the
magistrates they had elected in 1687,
and the General Court restored
the Connecticut charter.
Connecticut would continue to be governed
by its charter until 1818
and Rhode Island by its charter until
1842.
Plymouth went back to their old constitution and made Hinckley
governor again.
Representatives from 44 towns in Massachusetts
gathered on May 9,
and 75 delegates represented 51 towns on May
22.
Four days later news arrived in Boston that William and Mary
had been proclaimed king and queen of England.
On June 22 they
revived all the laws of Massachusetts
that were in force before
the Dominion.
After garrisons in Dover were attacked by Indians
in the early summer, a convention
of town delegates in Maine met
in February 1690 and petitioned Boston to be annexed.
A few weeks
later the Massachusetts government
appointed three magistrates
in the province.
In October 1690 Connecticut gave freemanship
to all peaceable adult males
with freehold estates with an annual
pay of forty shillings, and four months later
Massachusetts extended
the franchise to those certified by selectmen as
“not vicious in life” who paid four shillings or who owned freehold property
worth £6 a year.
By April 1692 the Massachusetts General
Court
had added more than seven hundred men to freemanship.
In 1689 in revenge for Major Richard Waldron's treacherous
capture of friendly Indians
13 years before, the Pennacooks
began raiding towns in New Hampshire,
and in June they killed
or captured 50 settlers at Cocheco.
Six weeks later the Fort
Charles garrison at Pemaquid surrendered.
Boston impressed militiamen
and offered volunteers a bounty of £8
for every enemy killed
or captured, but they could find few opponents
in the northern
territory by the Kennebec River.
Some questioned the government's
authority and refused to serve.
Meanwhile Connecticut sent Captain
Jonathan Bull and 87 militia men
to defend the Iroquois at Albany
against the French.
Massachusetts was spending £110 a day
on defense,
and in November 1689 they levied taxes, which some
refused to pay.
Because they believed that Increase Mather might
offer concessions,
the Massachusetts General Court chose Elisha
Cooke and Thomas Oakes
as their agents to England in December.
In May 1690 while William Phips led an expedition from Massachusetts
that
captured Port Royal in Acadia and destroyed the French fort,
the French led by Frontenac were capturing Falmouth in Maine,
killing most of the 70 men in the garrison and burning the
town.
Phips led the English campaign against Quebec and landed
1,300 militiamen in October.
After three days of suffering freezing
weather and hunger,
the troops embarked, leaving behind five cannons.
On the voyage home smallpox and dysentery took a toll,
and more
than three hundred men were lost on the venture.
At the same time
Fitz John Winthrop of Connecticut led the attack
on Montreal that
failed because of lack of men.
When they returned to Albany, Jacob
Leisler had Winthrop arrested for treason;
but he escaped and
was exonerated in Connecticut.
A peace was made with the Indians
in November; but the following spring
it broke down as the Abenaki
raided the eastern frontier.
The Massachusetts militia refused
to garrison Port Royal and left it to some merchants,
who were
soon pushed out by a French frigate.
Connecticut, Plymouth, and
Massachusetts raised their taxes to pay for the war.
Rhode Island
and several towns in Plymouth refused to pay the taxes.
Under
the aged Governor Thomas Hinckley the Plymouth government deteriorated,
and Increase Mather was able to get Plymouth merged into Massachusetts.
Increase Mather petitioned William III for a new Massachusetts
charter in October 1690,
but William was preoccupied with fighting
France
and did not sign the new charter until a year later.
Against
the advice of Increase Mather, he decided that the Crown
should
appoint
the governor of Massachusetts and have veto power over
the General Court.
He accepted Mather’s suggestion to appoint
William Phips as governor and let Mather
select the 28 members
of the governor’s Council, which was to serve as the upper house.
After that, the Council was chosen annually by the lower house
with the governor’s consent.
Massachusetts was still allowed to
establish the Congregational Church with public funds;
but the
new charter recognized freedom of conscience in religion
and no
longer required church membership as a qualification for the franchise.
William Blathwayt of the Board of Trade got several changes
put into the new charter.
Voting was by “freeholders” instead of “freemen,” and they were required to have
a 40-shilling freehold or property worth £40.
New Hampshire
was excluded from Massachusetts, but Maine, Plymouth,
and the
islands off Cape Cod were included in the Bay colony.
The new
charter also gave the king the authority to appoint customs officials,
admiralty court judges, and surveyors,
but all his appointments
had to be approved by the Council.
The governor could veto bills
passed by the General Court,
and the king could disallow any law
within three years.
The governor could not use funds without the
deputies' consent,
but no money could be spent without his permission.
Early in 1691 the London merchant Samuel Allen bought the title
to New Hampshire from Mason’s two sons.
Navy commissioners gave
him a contract to supply
masts and spars from the forest for seven
years.
Allen appointed John Usher as lieutenant governor
and did
not go to New England until 1698.
The people of New Hampshire
wanted a separate government,
and Increase Mather was unable to
bring it into Massachusetts.
In January 1692 in the home of the Salem parson Samuel Parris,
his slave Tituba taught
his daughter Betty and her friends Abigail
Williams, 12-year-old Ann Putnam,
and Elizabeth Hubbard some tricks
and spells from the voodoo she had learned in Barbados.
Betty
became ill, followed by Abigail, Ann, and other friends.
In February
the physician William Griggs suggested that
the cause of their
maladies might be witchcraft.
The girls said they were being afflicted
and accused
Tituba, Sarah Osborne, and Sarah Good of being witches.
The Putnams’ maid Mercy Lewis, their neighbor Mary Walcott,
and
John Proctor's servant Mary Warren were also afflicted.
Thomas
Putnam signed legal complaints, and warrants were issued on February
29.
Putnam or his relatives would eventually sign 71 of the 74
complaints.
Justices of the peace John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin
held the first examination the next day.
Tituba and her husband
John Indian testified to being involved in witchcraft,
and she
implied that seven witches had yet to be named;
but later she
said that Parris had beat her until she confessed.
Sarah Good
was also accused by her daughter Dorcas,
and her husband William
testified she might have a witch's mark.
While Sarah Good was
testifying,
the four girls complained that the women were torturing
them.
Sarah Good was pregnant and poor while
Sarah Osborne owned
property but was involved in land disputes.
A trial was set, and
Tituba and the two Sarahs were sent to a Boston jail.
On March 11 Ann Putnam accused Martha Corey of hurting her.
The next week Ann Putnam’s mother also named Ann and complained that
Corey’s specter was tormenting her, and she said that the specters
of
Martha and Rebecca Nurse tried to get her to sign a book to join
the forces of evil.
Some people believed that the devil could
not use a person’s
specter or ghost without having that person’s permission.
Young Ann Putnam and 17-year-old Mary Walcott also
accused the four-year-old child
Dorcas Good of afflicting them,
and she was taken to jail with the elderly Rebecca Nurse,
who
was a respected Christian.
On March 27 Samuel Parris gave a sermon
on witchcraft and warned
that even some in their church might
be devils.
Rebecca’s younger sister Sarah Cloyce walked out during
the sermon
and was accused eight days later along with Elizabeth
Proctor.
Some people urged the bewitched girls to go from house
to house
to find the witches who afflicted them.
Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth and four magistrates
attended
the hearing in Salem on April 11.
Danforth suggested that the
accused recite the Lord’s prayer as a test,
and any error was
considered a sign of evil.
On May 29 Cotton Mather wrote a letter
to Judge John Richards
complaining about the use of spectral evidence.
Seventy people had been charged by June 2;
half of them were from
Salem, and eighteen were men.
Governor William Phips named a special
commission of Oyer and Terminer
judges with Thomas Newton as the
special prosecutor.
Chief Justice William Stoughton instructed
the first jury that the victims
did not have to suffer actual
afflictions from the accused
but only what “tended to their being pined and consumed, wasted, etc.”
Bridget Bishop already
had a reputation as a witch.
She claimed she was innocent, but
she was convicted on June 4.
Four days later the new Massachusetts
government, which was called the General Court,
reinstated the
death penalty for witchcraft.
Stoughton then signed a death warrant,
and Bishop was hanged on June 10.
Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall
resigned from the court in protest
and was replaced by Jonathan
Corwin.
Prisoners were kept in chains for months and had to pay
for their stay in jail
while their family and friends had to provide
food, clothing, and blankets.
In 1689 Cotton Mather had described several cases of witchcraft
in his
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions.
On behalf of more than a dozen leading ministers he wrote
“The Return of Several Ministers Consulted” and gave it to Governor
Phips on 15 June 1692.
They expressed sympathy for the suffering of
their neighbors but criticized the judges
for using spectral evidence,
warning against
“too much credulity for things received only upon the Devil’s authority.”
Yet Cotton Mather concluded by recommending “speedy and vigorous prosecution of such
as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God,
and the wholesome statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.”3
Yet they advised caution in regard to those with an “unblemished reputation.”
In July 1692 Abigail Williams and the other accusers were invited
to Andover,
where they accused more people than they had in the
Salem area.
The Boston minister Samuel Willard warned in his sermons
that innocent people were being condemned.
The jury at first acquitted Rebecca Nurse; but the afflicted
cried out,
and Chief Justice Stoughton asked additional questions,
after which she was convicted.
Nurse was also excommunicated from
her church, and the outcries against her
persuaded Governor Phips
to rescind the reprieve he had granted her.
She asked, “What sin hath God found out in me unrepented of
that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?”4
On July 19 Sarah
Good, a defiant Rebecca Nurse, and three other women were hanged.
Sarah Good's hanging had been postponed until
after she gave birth
to a baby, who died in prison.
On July 27 the Massachusetts attorney
general
Anthony Checkley replaced Newton as the prosecutor.
Reverend George Burroughs was accused of murdering his two
previous wives
and mistreating the current one, and the afflicted
identified him as the leader of the conspiracy.
John Proctor wrote
to Increase Mather, Samuel Willard, and three other ministers,
and many of his friends and neighbors signed petitions on his
behalf.
On August 19 Burroughs, Proctor, John Willard, George
Jacobs,
and Martha Carrier were hanged.
These were the first men
to be hanged for witchcraft in Massachusetts.
The statements made
by Burroughs and Proctor prior to their being hanged
moved many
spectators, and Cotton Mather had to keep back the crowd with
his horse.
The elderly Giles Corey was the only one who
denied the authority
of the court and refused to be tried.
Sheriff George Corwin placed
heavy weights on his chest on September 17,
and he died two days
later.
His wife Martha Corey did not believe in witches
and thought
the afflicted girls were “distracted persons.”
Mary
Easty wrote a poignant letter to the judges asking them
to spare
those coming after her whom she believed to be innocent.
Dorcas
Hoar confessed on September 21, and she escaped execution.
The
next day Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Samuel Wardwell,
and five other
women were hanged.
Wardwell had retracted his confession on September
13.
As people discovered that the judges spared those who confessed,
eventually more than fifty confessed; but most took back their
confessions later.
Philip English had been in Salem for more than
a quarter century,
and he had made a fortune from illicit trade
with France.
He and his wife Mary escaped to New York,
where Governor
Benjamin Fletcher gave them sanctuary.
The shipbuilder Nathaniel
Cary also helped his wife Elizabeth escape to New York.
John Alden
broke out and went to relatives in Duxbury, and four other people
escaped.
Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Faulkner were spared
because
they were pregnant, and a few people died in jail.
After the September hangings, the judges loaned the trial records
to Cotton Mather
so that he could write a justification of their
work,
which he published as The Wonders of the Invisible World
at the end of the year.
Samuel Willard defied a gag order by Governor
Phips and
published his condemnation of the trials at the end
of September.
Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather, wrote Cases
of Conscience Concerning
Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts,
Infallible Proofs of Guilt in Such as
Are Accused with That Crime.
He read it to clergymen on October 3, and fourteen ministers endorsed
his conclusions.
He noted that occult methods were used to present
evidence and warned
that they should not practice witchcraft to
discover witches.
He warned that they should not take the testimony
of a distracted person in a capital case.
Increase Mather wrote
that it would be better for ten suspected witches to escape
than
to let one innocent person be condemned.
He visited the Salem
jail on October 19 and
reported that most were renouncing their
confessions.
More than 250 people had signed petitions
on behalf
of the accused, forty for Rebecca Nurse.
The Boston merchant Thomas Brattle noted that
the rich usually
escaped prosecution while the poor suffered.
Rebecca Nurse's younger
sisters Mary Easty and Sarah Cloyce
petitioned the judges, complaining
that they had no counsel.
No evidence exists that any of the defendants
were represented by a lawyer.
The afflicted accusers were present
to display their suffering in court.
When the accused looked at
them, they would go into fits;
but if the accused was made to
go over and touch them, they would become calm again.
Willard,
Brattle, and Robert Pike objected to consulting the afflicted
for evidence,
and they noted that the victims described distant
events, predicted the future,
explained things that happened before
they were born, named people they had never met,
and communicated
with the dead.
Ironically, they themselves displayed much of the
sorcery they claimed they suffered.
Influential opinions changed when the accusations implicated
the Reverend John Hale’s wife,
a member of the Mather family,
the Old South Church minister Samuel Willard,
and even the wife
of Phips himself.
Thus Governor Phips was persuaded to close the
special court on October 29.
He released some on bail and appointed
four of the same judges
plus Danforth to sit on a Superior Court.
Of the 52 indictments in January 1693 all but three who had confessed
were acquitted.
Stoughton signed death warrants for them and five
others previously condemned,
but Phips reprieved all eight.
Stoughton
resigned in protest and vowed to have Phips replaced.
In his second
report Governor Phips blamed Stoughton for excessive zeal.
In
May 1693 he pardoned those who had escaped and
released about
150 of the prisoners who had paid their fees.
Judge Samuel Sewall and twelve of the jurors publicly asked
for forgiveness.
Yet all five judges were appointed to the Governor’s Council in 1693.
Only Nathaniel Saltonstall, who had quit in protest,
suffered by turning to excessive drinking.
Robert Calef challenged
Cotton Mather’s account of the case against Margaret Rule in 1693,
and he effectively answered Mather’s justification of the 1692
trials
by writing More Wonders of the Invisible World.
Cotton and Increase Mather suppressed its publication in New England,
but it was published in 1700 in London.
The next year Increase
Mather lost his position as president of Harvard College
and was
replaced by Samuel Willard, whose nephew had been hanged.
In 1703
the Massachusetts General Court ruled that no specter evidence
would be valid.
Young Ann Putnam had named 21 people as witches,
but in 1706 she admitted in church that she had been deluded by
Satan.
Almost all of the condemned eventually had their names
cleared,
and in 1710 a total of £578 was paid in compensation
for the property that was confiscated.
William Phips inaugurated the new government of Massachusetts
on May 14, 1692.
In the war against French Canada, Governor Phips
was also made the commander
of the militia in Connecticut, Rhode
Island, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey.
The legislature
(General Court) passed a bill that no taxes could be imposed
without
their consent, but it was disallowed by the English Parliament.
By March 1693 the Assembly had enacted 52 laws,
and fifteen of
these were nullified by the Privy Council.
Towns with 50 householders
were required to provide a schoolmaster
to teach reading and writing,
and those with 100 families had to have a grammar school.
Boston public schools did not admit females, but some other towns
did.
Robert Ratcliff began regular Anglican services in Boston
in 1693,
but Harvard managed to keep from becoming an Episcopal
college.
In 1696 the Privy Council disallowed Harvard's 1692 charter
because the Crown had not been given the privilege of visitation.
The General Assembly did not want a Visitor to supervise Harvard,
and so they refused to incorporate the college.
Harvard president
Increase Mather opposed a Visitor because
he did not want to be
required to reside at the college.
Flogging of students was banned
in the early 18th century.
In 1704 the weekly Boston News-Letter
became North America's first successful newspaper.
Phips offended the House by spending money for purposes that
had not been authorized,
and his temper over distributing profits
from captured ships
caused two brawls on the Boston docks.
He
was accused of using his position to gain from privateering,
naval
stores, trade with the Indians, and land speculation.
The quarrelsome
Phips was recalled in 1694 to face charges in London,
where he
died in February 1695.
Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton replaced
Phips and governed
until the Earl of Bellomont arrived in May
1699.
In 1694 the General Court passed a law requiring its members
to be residents of the towns they represented.
Town meetings became
important again;
but as they grew, majority voting replaced consensus
decisions.
By 1695 Massachusetts had 83 towns.
In 1696 Pascho
Chubb surrendered the fort at Pemaquid in Maine
to Le Moyne d'Iberville
and his two French ships.
The fort was destroyed, and on his return
Chubb was imprisoned for cowardice.
The Treaty of Ryswick was
signed in 1697 and restored Acadia to the French.
In March of
that year some Abenakis captured Hannah Dustin.
After six weeks
she persuaded another captive woman and a boy to seize hatchets.
They scalped two men, two women, and six children while escaping
and collected
bounties from Massachusetts at the rate of £50
for each adult scalp and £10 for each child scalp.
The merchants of Massachusetts had evaded the Navigation Acts
more than
any other
colony, and they exported ships to gain credit
to finance the importation of English goods.
Based on the reports
of Edward Randolph, in April 1696 England passed a new
Navigation
Act to prevent fraud and abuse,
and the next month a new Board
of Trade and Plantations was established.
Two years later they
set up a vice-admiralty court to enforce the acts.
The Woolen
Act of 1699 was designed to prevent
that industry from developing
in the colonies.
The English mercantile policy aimed to increase
trade
while protecting the industries in England.
A Superior Court
of Judicature was established in 1699
as the legislature reorganized
the judicial system.
Each county had a general sessions court
for criminal cases
and a common pleas court for civil suits.
Guaranteeing
the right to jury trials caused some of these acts
to be disallowed,
temporarily disrupting the judicial system.
An act to suppress
piracy was passed in 1700.
That year a law ordered all Jesuits
and Catholic priests to leave the province
by September, and the
fine for harboring a Jesuit or priest was £200.
Boston with
about six thousand inhabitants was the most populated city in
English America.
Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, was appointed governor
of Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, and New York in June 1697 and
arrived at New York a year later.
He also commanded the militias
of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the Jerseys.
The Massachusetts
Assembly maintained control of the purse
by only appropriating
funds for the Governor's salary annually.
Bellomont sent William
Kidd out to suppress illegal trade, but the captain turned to
piracy.
The Governor was accused of doing business with him,
and
Lady Bellomont accepted a gift of jewels from Kidd.
Bellomont
sent Captain Kidd to England for trial in 1699, and he was hanged.
A plant disease wiped out the marketable wheat in Massachusetts
by 1700,
and wheat and flour had to be imported from New York
and Pennsylvania.
New England corn was a staple, and families
could grow rye.
With Indian troubles on the western frontier,
farmland for the growing population
was not increasing much, and
many sons became artisans.
Boston slave traders were importing most of the Africans into
New England and Virginia
In 1700 there were 5,206 slaves in the
northern colonies and 22,611 in the southern ones.
That year Samuel
Sewall criticized slavery in the pamphlet The Selling of Joseph.
He condemned slavery as being against the natural law of God
and
for causing economic and political dangers and social problems.
Even if the slaves had been prisoners of war,
he asked if the
trade would not encourage such cruel wars.
The buyer of slaves
is responsible for breaking up families and for
causing the misery
of captivity and transportation.
Sewall believed that Christians
should consider all mankind God's chosen people.
To those who
claimed that it was good to make Africans Christians,
he argued
that evil must not be done for a good purpose.
In a 1698 act the
children of slaves were declared slaves.
In 1703 the Assembly
enacted a law prohibiting any slave
from being out at night except
on some errand.
Two years later they banned mixed marriages and
illicit relations with Africans.
A minister performing such a
wedding could be fined £50.
Both those having intercourse
were to be flogged;
an African man was also banished, and an African
woman was sold as a slave.
Free Africans could be impressed to
work on the roads.
In 1705 the duty on imported Africans was raised
to £4 to discourage slavery.
In 1712 the Assembly banned
the importation of Indian slaves because they found
that those
coming from South Carolina had been "malicious, surly, and
revengeful."
After Bellomont's death in March 1701 Lt. Governor Stoughton
served again
until Joseph Dudley arrived with an armed convoy
in June 1702.
Dudley was governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire
and commanded
the militia of Rhode Island and Connecticut during
Queen Anne's War.
He rejected some of those elected to the House.
In June 1703 he met at Casco in Maine with Chief Bomazeen and
the feared Hope Hood.
Settlers on the frontier had suffered guerrilla
attacks,
and some wanted to hunt the Abenakis like wolves.
On
August 10 they plundered the house belonging to the son of the
Baron de Saint Castin.
His mother was an Abenaki princess, and
this provoked the Abenakis to raid the frontier.
The Abenakis
attacked Wells and captured about 130 settlers.
Dudley mustered
360 men but was unable to engage the guerrilla fighters.
On the night of 29 February 1704 about 50 French and 200 Abenakis and Mohawks
suddenly attacked Deerfield, killing
about 50 villagers and taking 111 captives.
William and Elizabeth
Fleming described their experience in
Narrative of Suffering
and Deliverance,
and the minister John Williams published Redeemed Captive in 1707.
After the long march to Canada
in which those who could not keep up were killed,
Governor Vaudreuil
purchased Williams and treated him well.
In May 1704 the veteran
Benjamin Church landed at Piscataqua with 550 troops
and went
up the Penobscot River, devastating the French as well as the
Indians.
Church invaded French Acadia in July and terrorized Minas
and Beaubassin;
but discipline failed after they captured stores
of wine and liquor.
Church decided not to attack Port Royal and
returned to Boston,
where the Assembly only refrained from censuring
him because of his past service.
In August the French and Indians
invaded Newfoundland and destroyed Bonavista.
In 1705 Dudley and Governor Vaudreuil of Canada negotiated
a decrease in hostility
and the restoration of prisoners, but
the General Assembly rejected the agreement
because of the ban
on English fishing in French waters.
Governor Dudley tried to
stop Thomas Oakes from serving as speaker,
but he took Sewall’s advice and withdrew his veto.
In 1706 Col. John March led a thousand
men in an attempt to take back
Port Royal in Acadia; but a reported
five hundred French were defending the fort,
and the officers
called a retreat to Casco Bay.
Dudley sent limited reinforcements
with three commissioners;
but the soldiers were suffering from
diarrhea and quinsy, and they returned to Boston.
Massachusetts
was spending £30,000 a year on the war, 90% of its budget.
Dudley was unable to get funds to rebuild the fort at Pemaquid,
and the Assembly suggested that the settlers or the English government
could protect their timber trade at Piscataqua.
The legislature
refused to fix his salary so that they could control the annual
appropriations.
The agent William Rouse made two journeys to Canada
in 1706
but brought back only 24 prisoners.
Rouse and five others
were fined by the Assembly for trading ammunition with the enemy,
but in September 1707 the Queen and her Council ruled that
the
Assembly did not have the authority of a law court.
Another expedition against Quebec in 1709 raised 1,500 men
from New England
while 1,200 from other colonies marched on Montreal.
When these troops became sick, Col. Francis Nicholson ordered
a retreat.
British troops had been expected in Boston in May 1709,
but Governor Dudley
received a letter five months later that they
had been sent to Portugal instead.
Nicholson and Peter Schuyler
sailed to London with four Mohawk chiefs,
and Nicholson was put
in command of a new expedition.
In September 1710 Nicholson led
five regiments and 36 ships that captured Port Royal
in Acadia
(Nova Scotia) with 400 British marines and about 1,500
colonials.
They allowed the garrison to withdraw and the
remaining
inhabitants to accept English rule after two years.
Port Royal
was renamed Annapolis Royal.
Captain Samuel Vetch remained with
a garrison of 450 men as the new governor.
In 1711 a massive expedition with 7,000 British soldiers
was organized in Boston,
putting a strain on food prices after
supplies were commandeered.
While Nicholson advanced again on
Montreal, General John Hill
and Admiral Hovenden Walker led the
attack on Quebec.
The British navy lacked pilots knowing that
area, and several transports
were wrecked at the mouth of the
St. Lawrence, drowning 740 soldiers.
Hill retreated, and Nicholson
was notified to pull back just in time.
The Treaty of Utrecht
ended the war in 1713 and recognized
the British occupation of
Newfoundland, Acadia, and Hudson Bay.
Dudley met at Portsmouth
with eight chiefs who realized
they would no longer be supported
by the French.
A general post office had been established in the colonies
in 1692
and it was consolidated by an imperial statue in 1711.
That year the debt of Massachusetts passed £120,000,
and
the General Assembly set up a public land bank in 1714.
After
the war many Scotch-Irish immigrants arrived, a thousand in 1718.
Dudley was recalled in 1715.
His successor, Col. Samuel Shute,
met with Indian chiefs and opposed the land bank.
When he rejected
Elisha Cooke Jr. as speaker in 1719,
the House retaliated by cutting
his salary by £200.
Harvard graduate Jeremiah Dummer served as the agent for Massachusetts
from 1710 and for Connecticut from 1712.
He published Defence
of the New England Charters,
but in 1721 Massachusetts dismissed
him for not backing their radical demands.
That year Boston suffered
a smallpox epidemic.
Cotton Mather recommended the experimental
inoculation he had read was successful
in Turkey and about which
one of his slaves had informed him.
Dr. Zabdiel Boylston inoculated
his son and two slaves.
When people learned of the experiment,
angry mobs stoned the homes of Mather and Boylston.
By the end
of September the disease had infected 2,757 people, and 203 had
died.
Boylston had inoculated 31 people and inoculated 121 more
in the next two months, and none of them died.
Another 135 people
were inoculated outside of Boston, mostly by Boylston.
In a battle
of pamphlets Cotton Mather was opposed by Dr. William Douglass
and others,
and someone tried to kill Mather with a grenade.
In 1721 Governor Shute and his Council declared war on the
Eastern Indians,
but the House refused to fund the war and brought
charges against Col. Walton.
On the first day of 1723 Shute left
for England to plead his case.
Lt. Governor William Dummer, the
agent’s brother,
filled in until William Burnet arrived in 1728.
The Abenakis had attacked Brunswick by Casco Bay in 1722,
and
what was called Governor Dummer’s War went on for three years.
The House dismissed Col. Walton and Major Moody,
and without war
supplies Dummer had to yield.
Col. Westbrook led 230 men up the
Penobscot River in February 1723
and burned a village and a chapel.
The Micmacs captured sixteen fishing boats at Canso in July.
In
1724 Captain Harmon led an attack on Norridgewock with 208 men
that killed the Jesuit Rale and 26 Indians.
After Pequawkets ambushed
and killed Captain John Lovewell and most
of his 34 men
in the
spring of 1725, the English made a peace agreement by the end
of the year.
Having learned from hard experience, the Massachusetts
legislature now provided
responsible trading houses in the Indian
country with fair prices.
The physician Nathaniel Ames started publishing an almanac,
and its popularity reached 60,000 copies a year.
He included astronomical
tables, weather predictions, essays, and poetry, such as
“All men are by Nature equal, but differ greatly in the sequel.”6
Boston’s New England Primer was a popular schoolbook,
as
Franklin issued 37,000 copies. “The Dutiful Child’s Promises” were listed as
I Will fear GOD, and honour the KING.
I will honour my Father & Mother.
I will Obey my Superiours.
I will Submit to my Elders.
I will Love my Friends.
I will hate no man.
I will forgive my Enemies, and pray to God for them.7
In 1726 a book suggested that hoop petticoats are contrary
to Nature and the law of God.
In 1727 Dummer objected to loaning
money to towns,
and the Assembly retaliated by refusing to pass
his tax bill.
Salaries could not be paid until Dummer gave in.
After Burnet’s death, Jonathan Belcher served as governor from
1730 to 1741.
The colony’s debt was up to £311,000,
but
his efforts helped bring it down in ten years to £205,000.
In 1732 the Massachusetts General Assembly blocked
an attempt
to disestablish the Congregational Church.
In 1733 the Molasses
Act with duties of six pence per gallon on molasses and
nine pence
per gallon on rum from the West Indies stimulated New England
merchants
to evade the prohibitive levies, and there were
not
enough Customs House Officers to stop the illegal trade.
In 1734
the pay for soldiers and judges was nearly three years in arrears,
and Belcher complained that his salary did not cover his expenses.
In 1735 the General Court authorized the building of a workhouse
in Boston for the poor,
and eight years later the workhouse system
was extended to other towns.
In 1739 the public bills were £250,000,
and Whitehall ordered Governor Belcher
to retire them within two
years and limit future issues to £30,000.
Privately in 1740
the Land Bank of Manufactory Company issued £150,000 to
landowners
while more conservative merchants established a silver
bank with bills up to £120,000.
Belcher opposed the land
bank scheme,
and it collapsed despite success in the 1740 elections.
In 1741 Massachusetts sent five hundred men on the disastrous
Cartagena expedition,
and only fifty came back.
Belcher’s successor William Shirley accepted the annual salary
appropriations.
More than £320,000 in taxes were not collected,
and £105,525 in bills had not yet been supported by authorizing
taxes.
In 1743 he tried to enforce the Navigation Acts,
but the
merchants persuaded him to relax his efforts.
Shirley predicted
that the smuggling would weaken
the dependence of the northern
colonies on their mother country.
Cotton Mather was born on 12 February 1663 and lived in Boston
until his death in 1728.
He was the youngest to graduate from
Harvard in 1678,
and three years later he was awarded a master’s degree by his father, Increase Mather.
Cotton was ordained in
1685, joining his father at the Second Church.
He devoted six
hours a day to prayer and meditation
and seven hours a day near
the end of his life.
Twice each month he kept a sleepless vigil
of self-examination, and he fasted often.
He struggled against
his own pride and what he believed were demonic forces.
In 1701
he published “A Christian at His Calling” in which he
preached that a
Christian
should follow an occupation with industry,
discretion, honesty, contentment, and piety.
In 1702 Cotton Mather's
ecclesiastical history of New England called
Magnalia Christi
Americana was published in London and included seven parts
on New England history, biographies of governors and sixty ministers,
history of Harvard College and its graduates, New England religion,
and problems related to their churches, such as heretics, witches,
and Indians.
He worked as an unpaid commissioner to help convert
Indians.
In 1710 Cotton Mather published anonymously his Bonifacius,
which is also called Essays to Do Good.
Benjamin Franklin
later admitted its influence on him.
In the preface Mather wrote,
“None but a good man, is really a living man;
and the more good any man does, the more he really lives.”5
He noted that in the Qur'an three times it is written that
God loves those that are inclined to do good.
In regard to neighbors,
Mather recommended first, pitying them;
second, visiting and comforting
them; and third, assisting them with their needs by finding
them
employment, educating them, and lovingly admonishing them for
their bad ways.
He objected to houses of prostitution and alehouses.
He aimed to follow the teachings of Jesus by doing good
even to
those who hurt him and speak badly of him.
He advised ministers
to make regular pastoral visits and in subsequent chapters
preached
to schoolmasters, churches, magistrates, physicians, rich men,
officials,
lawyers, and reforming societies how they can do good.
In the appendix he discussed how to Christianize the Indians.
His procedures for discussion groups were later used by Franklin’s Junto in Philadelphia.
Cotton Mather was influenced by what he learned about the
philanthropic
and
educational community in Halle, Germany by
corresponding with
August Hermann Francke, starting in 1711.
Over the next dozen
years Mather contributed his Curiosa Americana
to the British
Royal Society, and in 1713 he was elected to that prestigious
scientific club.
In 1717 he started evening classes for Indians
and Africans.
In 1721 Mather attempted to blend science with religion
in his Christian Philosopher, foreshadowing Deism.
He wrote Manuductio ad Ministerium in 1726 to advise those preparing
for the ministry.
John Wise (1652-1725) was the son of an indentured servant,
but he graduated from Harvard College in 1673,
and he became the
ordained minister for the Ipswich church in 1682.
He led the resistance
to “taxation without representation”
when Governor Andros
imposed a poll tax in 1687.
Wise was prosecuted and fined for
doing so.
Two years later he sued the former governor Dudley
for
having denied him a writ of habeas corpus.
He served as a military
chaplain on Governor Phips' failed expedition against Quebec.
He signed Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience against
the use of spectral evidence
in the witchcraft trials, and in
1703 he signed a petition to reverse the convictions.
In 1705
the Mathers tried to suppress innovation in the churches with
their Proposals
to the associated ministers of Boston and
Cambridge, and five years later
Wise opposed their views with
acerbic wit by writing The Churches Quarrel Espouse.
n
1721 he supported inoculation for smallpox.
Wise developed his ideas on the principles of democracy by
publishing A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches
in 1717.
He was influenced by the natural law philosophy of Samuel
von Pufendorf,
whose 1672 De Jure Naturae et Gentium had
been translated into English
as On the Law of Nature and Nations
in 1703.
Wise considered humans naturally free under God.
Civil
government results from providence and benefits mankind.
The image
of God is a law of nature in humans as reason
and a guide to justice
and other moral virtues.
Predominant in human nature is the principle
of self-love and self-preservation,
but a sociable disposition
and a love for mankind in general
are also higher principles for
human beings.
The internal liberty in humans implies they have
a faculty
to act or not act according to judgment.
Thus every
individual has the power to act on one’s own
without being controlled
by outer authority.
This makes every human equal to every other
human.
Whoever intrudes upon human liberty violates the law of
nature.
The purpose of a civil state is to preserve the human
rights of personal liberty and equality.
Removing the barriers
and admitting equality help
to maintain peace and friendship among
people.
The principle of equality may be transgressed because
of pride
when a person without sufficient reason prefers oneself
to others.
Servitude and subjection cannot exist without inequality
and depend upon
using force against others, or people may resign
their freedom by voluntary compliance.
Yet in a natural state
every person must be allowed to be free,
and the origin of civil
power comes from the people.
Wise wrote that a community expresses its will by building
a
commonwealth and by entering into a covenant as a political
body.
They may establish safety and make decisions by public voting.
Wise compared the civil state to a moral person in which the sovereign
power
is the soul,
laws the reason, councilors memory, officers
joints, concord health, and sedition disease.
The legislative
power prescribes rules of action,
and the judicial power decides
the controversies of the subjects.
The power of peace and war
forbids hostility or arms the subjects against foreigners.
In
a democracy free persons unite in an assembly and determine issues
by majority vote.
In an aristocracy selected members form a council,
and
in a monarchy the sovereign power is conferred upon one person.
Wise considered democracy the highest value as being agreeable
to the just and natural prerogatives of human beings.
A civil
state is based on the will of all and may use the riches of
private
persons to maintain the peace, security, and well being of all.
Wise believed that the English government was a good combination
of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy.
Yet he concluded that
both states and churches have
the best civil government when they
are democratic.
In 1692 Governor Phips of Massachusetts proclaimed
his authority
over the militia of Rhode Island.
The Quaker governor Walter Clarke
and council protested,
and some officers refused to obey.
The
General Assembly sent Christopher Almy as their agent to London,
and in December 1693 the English attorney general Edward Ward
decided that
Rhode Island could only be required to provide a
reasonable
quota of men outside the borders in time of war.
Governor
Clarke refused to sign the commissions for privateers during the
war with France,
but Deputy Governor John Greene did so.
Officials
were accused of commissioning pirates as privateers.
Rhode Island
claimed to have admiralty jurisdiction to rule
on the legality
of captures, but royal officials disagreed.
In 1696 conflict over
taxation resulted in the
General Assembly becoming a bicameral
legislature.
Governor Clarke refused to administer an oath to
the royal Vice Admiralty
judge Peleg Sanford, and Clarke resigned
in 1698.
The General Assembly chose his nephew Samuel Cranston,
and he was re-elected annually and governed Rhode Island until
his death in 1727,
longer than any other governor in North American
history.
During the Cranston era Newport developed as a commercial port.
Governor Cranston also served as chief justice, president of the
Newport
town meeting and council, and the main person in several
landowner organizations.
He quelled a tax revolt in the Narragansett
country in 1699
and worked to settle the town boundaries.
Governor
Bellomont visited Rhode Island in September 1699, demanded a copy
of Rhode Island's laws and records, and charged them with misadministration
for
failing to convert Indians, having biased judges, and protecting
pirates.
He challenged the charter's authority to let them impose
taxes, establish
an admiralty court, impose the death penalty,
or let the militia elect their own officers.
Governor Dudley of Massachusetts came to Newport in September
1702
to assert his command over the militia.
Captain Isaac Martindale,
the highest officer, refused to acknowledge his orders,
but some
of the regiment turned out at Kingston.
Governor Cranston and
his Council reprimanded them,
and the Assembly denounced Dudley.
Cranston called the Assembly to appropriate military expenditures
for the war against France and Spain,
and their agent William
Wharton represented the colony in London.
William Wanton and Martindale
sent out a privateer.
Dudley tried to take over Cranston's jurisdiction
over the prizes,
and Cranston yielded to an English court in 1704.
The Assembly sent some men and then a ship to help Dudley with
the war.
Cranston had agreed to a compromise on land disputes
with Connecticut in 1703.
The first official census in 1708 found
7,781 people in Rhode Island.
That year the Assembly put an impost
of £3 on each African imported.
In 1710 Rhode Island issued
£5,000 in bills of credit and sent more ships
and men for
the invasion of Acadia and then to Canada the next year.
Rhode Island printed and lent people £40,000 in paper
notes
in 1714 using mortgages on land as collateral.
Rural people
were reluctant to borrow, and the new money was often rejected;
so the legal tender provision was repealed in 1716.
The purchasing
power of notes went down to 45% of face value by 1723.
Towns developed
local governments, and in 1718 the General Assembly prohibited
towns from refusing to accept people with £50 worth of real
estate within their boundaries.
That year the law of primogeniture
was repealed,
and the equal system of inheritance eventually brought
social changes.
In 1724 they established a uniform property qualification
for admitting freemen.
Indians and those of African descent were
often compelled
to be servants until the age of 21 or 24.
Rhode
Island had many Quakers and pacifist Baptists,
and conscientious
objectors were exempted from military service.
Joseph Jenckes succeeded Cranston as governor in 1727.
He tried to rescind the paper money act and did not run for reelection.
The great idealist philosopher George Berkeley wanted to found
a college on Bermuda, and he came to Newport in 1728.
He wrote “America, or the Muse’s Refuge, a Prophecy,” which included
the famous line “Westward the course of Empire makes its Way.”
During his 32 months in Rhode Island he wrote Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher.
Berkeley did not receive the expected grant for the Bermuda College
and donated his farm and books to Yale, sending Latin classics
to Harvard and an organ to Trinity Church in Newport.
In 1729 the Assembly established county courts.
In 1731 an official census counted 17,935 people in Rhode Island,
including 1,648 Africans and 985 Indians.
The Wanton brothers
were elected governor and deputy governor,
and in 1733 they authorized
the fifth land bank at £104,000.
The Board of Trade objected,
but the sixth old tenor bank issued £100,000 in 1738.
During
this decade Rhode Island provided more than half the paper money
in
New England because Massachusetts under Belcher was retiring
their bills.
Rhode Island prospered, and in 1741 Governor Richard
Ward
reported to the Board of Trade that their inhabitants had
more than
120 sailing vessels constantly involved in trade with
neighboring colonies,
in the West Indies, in Europe, and on the
coast of Africa.
Two months before England declared its War of Jenkins’ Ear
against Spain in October 1739,
the Rhode Island Assembly authorized
the Governor to grant commissions for privateers,
and one ship
even took prizes before the war officially began.
Richard Ward
became governor when John Wanton died in 1740.
During numerous
squabbles he alternated with William Greene as voters changed
their minds.
By the time the war against France began in 1744
Newport owners had one-sixth of their ships privateering.
The
first public lottery began that year to raise £15,000.
In
September a munitions warehouse exploded,
killing four prominent
men and costing £1,500.
Three months later two ships sank
in a blizzard with about four hundred men.
During these wars profits
rose from trade with the West Indies.
Connecticut maintained its charter after the Glorious Revolution
and continued
to elect their own governors, magistrates, and delegates
to the Assembly.
When Governor Phips and then Governor Fletcher
of New York were given command
of their militia in 1692, the Connecticut
legislature refused to submit.
The next year they sent Major-general
Fitz John Winthrop
to King William with a petition and £500
for expenses.
Governor Robert Treat declined a commission from
Col. Fletcher.
When Fletcher tried to read his commission to the
Hartford militia,
Captain Wadsworth ordered drumming.
Fletcher
went back to New York.
King William wrote asking for support in
fortifying Albany,
and in February 1694 the Assembly sent £600
to Fletcher.
Connecticut’s quota was set at 120 men under Col.
Fletcher’s command
with the rest of the militia under the Connecticut
governor.
Fitz John Winthrop was elected governor in 1698, and the magistrates
with the governor became the upper house of a bicameral legislature.
The General Assembly acted as both legislature and judiciary,
and they received hundreds of petitions from widows and other
administrators
of estates requesting permission to sell land;
others asked for exemption
from poll taxes or militia duty or
to solve various problems.
In Connecticut the ballot made it easy
for most officials
to be reelected annually, and changes were
few.
In 1699 the General Assembly began contributing half the
£20 salary for each
schoolmaster, and the next year they
required each county to have a grammar school.
In 1701 the Assembly
authorized £120 a year for a college.
Some gentlemen donated
books, and they met in the Saybrook home of Abraham Pierson.
In
1702 the property qualification for voting was
set at a forty-shilling
freehold or a £40 personal estate.
Connecticut had suspended
its law against Quakers holding services in 1675,
but the law
was printed with the Connecticut code in 1702.
English Quakers
appealed to the Board of Trade, and in 1705 Queen Anne
disallowed
the law, which Connecticut repealed the next year.
Governor Dudley of Massachusetts had been involved in the Dominion
of New England.
In 1704 he and Governor Cornbury of New York tried
to vacate
the charters in America in order to reunite the colonies
under the Crown.
Henry Ashurst effectively advocated for Connecticut
against this bill in Parliament.
Dudley and Cornwall brought numerous
complaints against Connecticut
for violating the acts of navigation,
supporting pirates, and harboring
criminals from New York and
Massachusetts.
Queen Anne ordered Dudley and Cornwall to submit
evidence,
and Ashurst managed to get their commission's judgment
blocked.
The Queen ordered a new commission to review land disputes.
The heirs of John Mason claimed that the Mohegan sachem Uncas
had granted him land,
but finally in 1743 a third commission decided
in favor of Connecticut.
Fitz John Winthrop died in December 1707, and Gurdon Saltonstall
became the only ordained minister to be elected governor of an
American colony, serving until his death in 1724.
He approved
the results of the meeting of ministers at Saybrook
in 1708 that
organized consociations of pastors to regulate church affairs.
That year Connecticut passed a law allowing dissenters recognized
by English law
to worship, but they still had to pay taxes to
support the established Congregational ministers.
In 1709 Connecticut
raised 350 men and authorized £8,000 in bills of credit
for the campaigns against the French in New Foundland, Acadia,
and Canada,
and by 1713 the credit had increased to £33,500.
That year Connecticut made progress in settling its
boundary disputes
with Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
After the war the General
Assembly passed resolutions to
suppress vice in an act entitled
“Children to be educated.”
In 1715 Connecticut prohibited
the importation of Indian
slaves to keep out those from the Carolinas.
Despite protests in Saybrook in 1717 the college was transferred
to New Haven.
Cotton Mather persuaded Elihu Yale to donate three
bales of goods and 417 books,
and the college was named Yale the
next year.
In the early 1700s the Connecticut government operated on a
budget of about £800 a year,
and even in 1756 it was only
£4,000, of which £490 was for schools.
Salaries were
low, and all able-bodied men were expected to help build the roads.
Officials, ministers, teachers, and students were exempt from
poll taxes.
Each town was responsible for taking care of its own
poor,
and the Assembly ordered the first workhouse to be built
at Hartford in 1727.
Laws against counterfeiting bills of credit
began in 1710,
and punishments escalated to branding a C, cropping
an ear,
and even life imprisonment in a workhouse; yet counterfeiting
continued.
Widows and divorcees had the right to claim their dowers,
and the Assembly confirmed this in 1736.
Divorces were rare, but
couples could divorce because of adultery,
a fraudulent contract,
desertion, or a long absence.
After the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded in 1701,
Anglican missionaries
came to the colony to convert
those of other denominations as
well as Indians.
In 1721 an early revival by Samuel Whiting converted
eighty people in Windham.
In 1727 the Assembly granted members
of the Church of England tax exemption,
and two years later it
was extended to Quakers and Baptists.
They had to show certificates
to prove that they were part of a religious group.
Proselytizers
were sometimes resented, and in 1738 a missionary,
who tried to
build a church on purchased land at New Haven Green near Yale,
was driven off by students threatening death.
In 1739 the Connecticut
militia was organized into thirteen regiments;
every male
between
the ages of sixteen and sixty, who was not exempt, was expected
to serve.
In the fall of 1740 George Whitefield preached in several towns
that sinners
should realize that they can only be saved by the
mercy of God.
He encouraged them to test the spiritual condition
of their ministers and warned
that those who were not truly converted
could not help others.
The certainty that hundreds of new converts
claimed went against the
Puritan tradition of life-long questioning,
prayer, and self-examination.
In 1741 James Davenport claimed
to know who
was converted and called ministers Pharisees.
He was
tried by the General Assembly and expelled as insane.
Ministers
met at Guilford in November and affirmed that
only licensed ministers
could preach in Connecticut.
Davenport had called Yale president
Thomas Clap an unconverted hypocrite,
and in 1742 he expelled
students and closed the college.
Clap persuaded the Assembly to
pass a severe law against itinerant preachers.
Also in 1742 private
schools were required to obtain a license from the General Assembly.
Davenport confessed his errors in 1744, but he could not persuade
many of the newly converted that they were deluded.
The legislature
granted Yale a charter in 1745
giving its president and the fellows
much control.
The New Lights, as they were called, gained political
support.
Concerned that students were leaving to go to the new
College of New Jersey at Princeton,
Clap became more tolerant,
and the law against itinerant preachers was repealed in 1750.
Richard Mather as early as 1645 had suggested that children
of parents
in the Covenant should be baptized, and this idea was
accepted by ministers
and the Connecticut General Court in 1657
and by the Massachusetts Court
in 1662 and came to be known as
the Half-Way Covenant.
Although these "halfway" members
were baptized,
they did not receive the communion of the last
supper.
Solomon Stoddard and others in the Connecticut Valley
ended this division
by letting everyone in the congregation take
communion.
In 1709 he wrote An Appeal to the Learned in
which he included
in the visible church all those who professed
faith in Christianity.
Between 1680 and 1719 Stoddard observed
five seasons
of religious revival which he called “harvests.”
Jonathan Edwards was born on 5 October 1703 at East Windsor,
Connecticut.
He graduated from Yale in 1720.
At first he objected
to the Calvinist doctrine that God has predestined some souls
to everlasting hell, but in 1721 he was converted and accepted
God's sovereignty.
He earned a master's degree and tutored at
Yale.
In 1727 he married Sarah Pierrepont and became an assistant
to his
grandfather Solomon Stoddard, a pastor in Northampton,
Massachusetts.
When Stoddard died two years later, Jonathan gained
the most
prominent pulpit in the province outside of Boston.
Edwards
fathered eleven children and owned slaves.
He was strongly influenced
by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
and
he adopted Newton's concept of space as the divine sensorium.
Edwards accepted Puritan Platonism, which believes that only the
spiritual world is real.
He held views similar to the idealist
philosophy of George Berkeley
that the spirit of God is the awareness
in all things,
though the writings of Edwards do not mention that
philosopher's name.
During the next twenty years Edwards wrote
copious notes about his studies
called “Miscellanies” which he hoped to work into a comprehensive Calvinist theology,
but his History of the Work of Redemption was not completed before his death.
In 1731 he preached a sermon in Boston on “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence.”
He was concerned that people were becoming insensible to religion and more licentious,
especially the youths who frequented taverns and were corrupted by lewd behavior.
Following the conversion of a young woman of doubtful morality
in 1734,
the town of Northampton began to become more religious.
Edwards preached that humans are completely dependent on God for
redemption,
and he gave a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone” in November.
This stimulated a great revival of spiritual joy and love which spread
to other towns in the Connecticut Valley as 300 people professed their faith.
In 1737 he described the stages of the conversion process in
A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God.
Although it describes how some people became suicidal, this book helped promote
what was called the Great Awakening.
In 1738 Edwards gave a series of sermons on “Charity and its Fruits.”
He believed that love is the sum of all virtue and
better than
the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit.
In the third sermon he
suggested that nothing can make up for lacking
sincerity in the
heart, and in the fourth he recommended patience and kindness.
In the next sermons he warned that envy, pride, anger, and criticism
are contrary to charity.
Then he preached that grace brings holy
practices
and can never be overcome because only divine love is
eternal.
On 15 September 1740 George Whitefield preached his first sermon
in New England at Newport, Rhode Island in an Anglican church.
People of all denominations attended, and many were deeply affected.
Whitefield had known John and Charles Wesley at Oxford;
but he found resistance to “methodism” in England, and in 1739 Whitefield
was ordained an Anglican priest and took to itinerant preaching to crowds outdoors.
After preaching three times at Newport he went on to Bristol and Boston
where he spoke in churches and to 5,000 people on the Common and 8,000 in the Field.
At Checkley’s church a turbulent mob caused
five people to fall from the gallery to their deaths.
He went as far north as York in Maine and came to Northampton on October 17.
He stayed with Edwards and preached from his pulpit four times,
reminding them of their 1735 experience.
Whitefield wrote in his Seventh Journal, “Dear Mr. Edwards
wept during almost the whole time of the exercise.”8
The traveling evangelist was also impressed by the religious understanding of Mrs. Edwards.
He went on to other towns and preached five times in New Haven.
Whitefield provoked problems when he wrote that many of the ministers
did not know Christ “experimentally” and that they had “lost the old spirit of preaching.”
He also offended the universities by writing in the Seventh Journal
that their light had become darkness.
Charles Chauncey was one of the ministers doubted, and he wrote to a friend
that Whitefield moved the passions, especially of the young and female
and that people were neglecting business to listen to sermons.
Whitefield urged Gilbert Tennent to tour New England to continue the “glorious work.”
Tennent arrived at Boston in December 1740 and spent
three cold months preaching to crowds in New England.
Evening lectures were held, and many private religious societies formed.
After he left, thousands of people went to their ministers for spiritual counseling.
Tennent’s most infamous sermon “On the Danger of an Unconverted Ministry”
was circulated and reprinted in Boston in 1742.
In the summer of 1741 James Davenport
toured
Connecticut preaching with even more fervor.
When he condemned
the minister Joseph Noyes of the First Church
in New Haven, Yale’s rector Thomas Clap became angry.
Davenport claimed that he could
distinguish the elect from the damned,
and in May 1742 two laymen
charged him with disturbing the peace.
After a three-day trial
the Connecticut Court found him
mentally disturbed and deported
him to Long Island.
Three weeks later Davenport went to Boston,
and the ministers
meeting there agreed not to invite him to preach.
Davenport called the signers unconverted and unworthy
In August
he was arrested in Suffolk County and was declared non compos
mentis.
In October he was put on trial for neglecting his
own parish on Long Island.
Davenport repented, and in the summer
of 1744
he published his Confessions and Retractions.
Most of the ministers welcomed the Great Awakening at first. Eleazar Wheelock
went outside his parish to preach in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Benjamin Church in Boston was another senior pastor who supported the revival,
but about a quarter of the ministers were skeptical.
Cotton Mather’s son Samuel was dismissed from his church
in December 1741 for not supporting the Awakening.
Jonathan Edwards did not approve of attacking or removing “unconverted” ministers,
and he objected to lay preachers; but he welcomed the religious enthusiasm
and did not think it was unreasonable to try to frighten people away from hell.
He preached on the terrors of hell in his famous Enfield sermon
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” on 8 July 1741.
Edwards preached at skeptical Yale on September 10,
and his defense of the emotional revivals was published as
The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God.
He suggested that a true revival will cause greater esteem for Jesus,
operate against Satan, cause more regard for scripture,
lead people to truth, and be a spirit of love.
On the same day Charles Chauncey lectured in Boston’s First Church on
“An Unbridled Tongue a sure Evidence that our Religion is Hypocritical and Vain.”
He proposed the criterion of a “real and effectual renovation of heart and life,”
and he advised people to govern their zeal carefully with sound judgment.
In 1742 Edwards published Some Thoughts Concerning
the Present
Revival of Religion in New England.
In this treatise he aimed
to show that the recent revival was a glorious work of God,
that
everyone was obligated to promote this work and that
it was very
dangerous not to do so, that its promoters had been
injured by
those
blaming them, and he explained what ought to be done
and
avoided in order to promote the work.
Yet he criticized the spiritual
pride of the New Lights
as a cause of vilification and abusive
judgments.
He was also concerned about doctrinal errors such as
accepting immediate revelation
which is contrary to scripture,
believing that specific prayers are always answered,
acting immediately
while neglecting future consequences, believing that God’s approval
of persons can be known with certainty, and devaluing education
for the ministry.
Also in 1742 Edwards initiated a covenant of
ethical behavior for business relations.
In 1743 Thomas Prince
began reporting on the Great Awakening in Christian History,
the first religious magazine in the colonies.
Charles Chauncey, the pastor at the First Church in Boston,
criticized preaching terror and the powerful passions it provoked.
In 1743 his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in
New England
warned that the new movement was a dangerous explosion
of emotions,
and he argued that people should be guided by reason.
He castigated Whitefield, Tennent, and other itinerant preachers,
whom he blamed for awakening passions while neglecting reason
and judgment.
By 1744 Edwards had realized that most of the converts
did not persist
in their new convictions, and he declared the
awakenings “dead.”
That year he disciplined some youths
who had used a book on midwifery
for prurient purposes and taunted
young women, but apparently some
who were innocent were condemned
along with the guilty.
Edwards believed that love and the emotions of the heart are
much more important
than reason, and in 1746 he wrote A Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections.
He accepted Locke's division
of the mind into understanding and will.
Edwards also agreed that
understanding comes from sensation.
In his psychology of will
Edwards argued that will is an inclination of the heart
based
on love and hate, or liking and disliking, and he derived the
emotions of
desire,
hope, joy, gratitude, complacence, fear, anger,
grief and others from these two impulses.
He believed that love
is most important and is the essence of all true religion,
and
he suggested that the gracious affections have a supernatural
or divine origin.
However, like Chauncey, he was also critical
of enthusiastic delusions
that come from the imagination rather
than supernatural revelations.
Yet Edwards believed that the passions
aroused by the Great Awakening were
bestowed by God’s grace and
were a proper religious expression.
He explained that the purpose
of prayer is not to move God
but to prepare our own hearts to
receive the blessings.
In 1747 Edwards wrote a book in support of international prayer to revive religion.
He had gone along with his grandfather’s acceptance of the Halfway Covenant
that gave communion to baptized children of believers “owning the covenant”
without their having to describe their conversion experience.
However, in 1747 Edwards wrote An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word
of God, Concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and
Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church.
He wanted to purify the Church from those who had separated themselves.
In addition to the outward duties of morality and worship he believed
that the inward duties of loving God and accepting Christ were
necessary to be admitted into the communion of saints.
Edwards’ rejecting the “promiscuous admission” of all as visible saints le
to a controversy that resulted in a council of ministers and delegates
from nine churches recommending his dismissal in 1750.
He wrote two books to defend his position which Congregationalists later accepted.
Jonathan Mayhew was a missionary to the Indians and opposed
the Great Revival.
He criticized the Anglican missionaries of
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
for spending most
of their time in New England towns trying to convert other colonists
rather than reaching out to help Indians and Africans.
On January
30, 1750, the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I,
Mayhew delivered the famous sermon,
“A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission” in which he argued that people
who
are oppressed have a right to resist and dethrone a tyrant
in
order to vindicate their liberties and just rights.
He urged people
to be free and loyal as long as the prince ruled according to
law.
Mayhew believed in Arminian free will and opposed
Calvinist
dogma and Anglican authoritarianism.
In 1751 Edwards became a pastor on the frontier at Stockbridge,
Massachusetts
and worked to convert Indians while writing books.
His most famous book on the Freedom of Will was published
in 1754 and attacked the Arminian doctrine of free will that
had
been made popular by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609).
Edwards argued
that every action has a cause and that what seems to be free will
comes from previous causes and ultimately from God, the creator
of all.
His view of human will is passive as people are moved
by what is agreeable.
Will is a preference or desire, and these
affections have causes.
Edwards believed that the will is always
drawn to the apparent good
and that the mind has no power to resist
this.
Edwards completed The Great Christian Doctrine of Original
Sin Defended
on behalf of Calvinism in 1757.
He became the
president of the College of New Jersey in January 1758,
but he
died on March 22 of that year in Princeton from a smallpox vaccination.
He had written The Nature of True Virtue in 1755, and it
was published posthumously
ten years later in Two Dissertations
with
Concerning the End for Which God Created the World.
Edwards believed that virtue is a beauty of the heart.
Benevolence or love of God is spiritual beauty while harmony, justice,
and love of one’s neighbor are inferior virtue or natural beauty.
He wrote, “All sin has its source from selfishness, or from self-love
not subordinate to a regard to being in general.”9
He argued that the only thing that lifts humans above their natural
self-love
is spiritual virtue, which is the disinterested benevolence
that comes from the grace of God.
Thus the good passions may overcome
the evil ones.
This disinterested benevolence makes the humans
who
are enslaved by self-love seem even more completely depraved.
For Edwards the atonement of Christ provides the supernatural
and
irresistible grace that lifts humans out of the depravity
of their original sin of selfishness.
For him being virtuous is
letting God do all, and he did not believe
that virtue can be
cultivated by making good choices.
Only by letting the divine
power outside oneself direct one may one be saved,
because all
moral good comes from God.
Yet because of his belief in hell,
Edwards divided God's sovereignty
into common grace over the wicked
and special grace for the elect.
In my view the Calvinist theology of Edwards is deficient because
it apparently believes that
God loves some souls and not others.
I believe that all souls are part of God, and in that divinity
we exercise the free will that comes from the Creator.
We do have
choices and are responsible for the consequences of our actions.
Thus by consciously working on making better moral choices
we
can improve ourselves with the help of the divine.
1. Rhode Island: Its Making and Its Meaning
by Irving Berdine Richman, p. 541.
2. The Colonial Experience by David Hawke, p.
261.
3. Salem-Village Witchcraft ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
p. 118.
4. Salem Witchcraft by Charles W. Upham, Vol.
2, p. 159.
5. Bonifacius by Cotton Mather, p. 7.
6. Colonial Massachusetts by Benjamin W. Labaree,
p. 191.
7. Peaceable Kingdoms by Michael Zuckerman, p.
81.
8. The Great Awakening in New England by Edwin
Scott Gaustad, p. 28.
9. The Nature of True Virtue by Jonathan Edwards, p. 92.
This chapter has been published in the book American Revolution to 1800. For ordering information please click here.