USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 1 > Part 44
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54
In 1631, the franchise already limited to freemen was re- stricted to church members; and until the charter was cancelled by the Scire facias proceedings of 1684, that membership must be of what we call the Congregational Church. Unless the minister certified that the candidates for admission to the body of freemen were of orthodox principles and of good lives and conversations, they were shut out. Inasmuch as the recognized ministers and eld- ers were all of the strict Congregational hue, theocracy was thus entrenched, for the General Court, the organ of the movement, was based on election by the freemen.
480
CONTROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
Outside of this restriction on authority, the Assistants or Magistrates believed that it was their duty to take counsel with the clergy on a variety of legislation and legal technicalities. This fastened on Massachusetts a system of parson government that has always given the same results wherever it has been tried. The ministers and elders were treated with a deference far beyond their virtues to resist. Those virtues were great in many cases, nor did the clergy always have things their own way. Occasionally when they went beyond the proper limits of their calling, the lay good sense of the Assistants and soon of the Deputies objcted or was restive. The clergy held too much power and too firm a standing in matters in no wise touched by their Christian duties. Throughout the seventeenth century the clergy usually stood for the sever- est punishments, and the strictest restrictions on personal and religious liberty. When they found among the civil authorities such allies as the brutal Endecott, the stage was set for religious persecution and the curtain was soon raised upon a drama of intolerance and cruelty.
STATUS OF NON-MEMBERS (1650-1664)
There is no evidence that the action and stand of the Massachusetts General Court was a popular action. It was rather that of a body of men who had the immediate authority and the means for enforcing it. Palfrey seems to think otherwise, but to-day we have a rather more ac- curate knowledge of the extent of real popular govern- ment in the Massachusetts of the seventeenth century. By this time, Massachusetts was become provincial, that is, its population was now composed of those born in the new world; but that population, owing to the restriction of the franchise, lacked a normal or direct influence on the policies and the political actions of the colony. At the same time, Boston had become more "polite" in the eighteenth century meaning of the term, because com- merce had brought more acquaintance with the general world and also needs more like those of such a world.
Marked as were the traits of the politico-theocratic ring that engrossed the conduct of affairs, many as were their
481
TREATMENT OF HERETICS
activities that shock or irritate the man of the twentieth century nevertheless they had a distinct tradition of what kind of political state must be founded. Had not that tra- dition satisfied the growing popular element, it would not have survived as it did. Like the first settlers, they wished to govern and live free from English interference; and as the country grew in population and general material com- fort that tradition, though persisting, gradually from being a theological purpose became a political tenet. It is reck- oned that three-fourths of the adult male population in 1666 were not church members and were therefore vote- less. These and many of the freemen must have resented the constant meddling of the clergy. But we can be cer- tain that very few would have changed the General Court for the Restoration gang. In Massachusetts was their soil, their home and their economy, and though at large they may have been but dimly conscious of the nation- hood even then ingerminated, nevertheless it was to the government of Massachusetts that they looked first.
TREATMENT OF HERETICS (1650-1664)
In 1644 a law had been passed against the Baptist and in 1651 Clark was fined while Holmes was whipped and fined, both for their tenets, Endecott throwing in for good measure the opinion that they ought to be executed. That the great body of the people, even in 1651, approved such things, is hardly believable; for that body was composed of peaceable folk, hard working and most of them carefully disenfranchised, though taxed by those who engineered the fines and whippings in this and like cases. The political ring, however, was vociferous and the people were speech- less except when something peculiarly flagrant caused them to give voice.
The general attitude of the authorities a few years be- fore the Protectorate is shown by a law of 1646 to the effect that all heretics, "continuing obstinate therein, after due means of Conviction, shall be sentenced to Banish- ment." In 1658 the Declaration of Liberties was amended so that no person or member of any church "which shall be gathered without the approbation of the Magistrates
482
CONTROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
and the said churches, shall be admitted to the freedom of this Commonwealth." This of course included members of that church of England to which all the original settlers had belonged.
Some popular opposition showed itself very early when the Cambridge Platform was drafted by the clergy and magistrates, with its provision that "the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive power, as the matter shall require," in cases of church schism or discipline. The deputies were not at all unanimous in its support, and when it was finally passed in 1651, fourteen of them refused to concur. The towns they represented were Boston, Salem, Braintree, Watertown, Roxbury, Wenham, Reading, Sudbury, Wey- mouth, Hingham, and Hampton in New Hampshire.
Such occasional opposition of the tougher minded depu- ties was only a whisper then of that dissent which was later to become much louder; in the meanwhile the clergy were repeatedly called in to steer and control affairs. The treatment of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson in 1635 had shown what the theocracy could do when in good condition. This very likeable woman taught a kindlier creed than the theocracy approved and to this crime she had added that of making Winthrop appear ridiculous. She was banished by the Court, and later disposed of by the Indians.
THE QUAKER EPISODE (1656-1665)
An outstanding exhibition of intolerance was in the treatment of certain Friends, or Quakers, who ventured to America in 1656. In that year, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin came to Boston and were examined as to their opinions, Deputy Governor Bellingham being in charge of the proceedings. Their views and their boxes of books proving unsatisfactory, they were stripped, then impris- oned, then shipped back to Barbadoes, whence they had come. The general Court expressed sympathy with this official method of encouraging people to worship God ac- cording to the dictates of their own conscience, by a law fining any ship-master bringing over Quakers, ordaining prison and whipping for such passengers, and fine and banishment for any citizen defending their opinions.
483
QUAKER EPISODE
With this start, the Massachusetts authorities presently went further by tightening the legislation against Quakers culminating in the execution three years later of Mary Dyer, William Robertson, Marmaduke Stevenson and a little later of William Leddra. Thereafter there were no more executions of Quakers but these people were none the less treated with severity until 1665. It is hard to say what would have been the further action of the powers in Boston if Edward Burroughs, himself an English Friend, had not gone to Charles II and told him flatly that innocent blood was shedding in New England "which if it were not stopped, would overrun all."
The King sent over a letter by a banished Quaker, one Samuel Shattuck, ordering Massachusetts to give over all proceedings against Quakers. Endecott, then Governor glowered and obeyed. Governor Hutchinson, who is never on the side of intolerance, later made a mild excuse for the Massachusetts government, attributing its actions to "a false zeal and erroneous judgment;" but the answer is that no government or state can afford to have such zeal or make such mistakes. In the same part of his book, he says, "May the time never come again when the govern- ment shall think that by killing men for their religion they do God service."
The first Quakers in New England, as they were in Old England, were extremely obstinate and at the same time of blameless lives. If a creed, religious or political, must be judged by its fanatics, then religious and political perse- cution can plausibly be justified. The Quaker theory of non-resistence, their totally unmilitary position, their in- ferential questioning the civil authority, all made their irruption into what was then a frontier community like a red rag to a bull for such men as Endecott and many other leaders, lay and clerical.
Yet other colonies treated the newcomers with leniency and survived. The Government of Rhode Island in 1657 wrote the General Court that they had found the Quakers most quickly silenced by being left alone and that "they are like to gain more adherents by the conceit of their pa- tient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious say-
484
CONTROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
ings." The King's letter to Endecott was a proof of the practical fact that the Massachusetts Court must face a new condition of things. Moreover, the rulers knew that the execution of these four Quakers would not have been approved by Oliver any more than by Charles.
THE ROYAL COMMISSION OF 1664
When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the news was received with very little enthusiasm. The General Court after much heated discussion on the relationship of the colony to the mother country, dispatched Simon Brad- street and John Norton to England to negotiate. They performed their delicate and thankless task as well as could be expected, but the mild letter of the King which followed their visit, although confirming the charter, failed to define positively the position and obligations of the colony.
He gave instructions to allow liberty of conscience to all except Quakers and to grant the suffrage to proper- tied men of good reputation whether or not they were Congregationalists. This letter the colony calmly disre- garded as she did the new Navigation Acts. Not precon- ceived theory but practical necessity now made Massa- chusetts defy the mother country on a constitutional basis. She denied that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies, and that the King could supervise legisla- tion or hear appeals from her courts.
Proof that English dominance was not at an end was offered by the sending of four commissioners to the colo- nies to settle matters in New Netherland and New Eng- land in 1664. The Commissioners were Richard Nicolls, Samuel Maverick, Robert Carr and George Cartwright. Nicolls was the first governor of New York under the English rule and an able man. Maverick was an original freeman of the Bay Company, and an Episcopalian who joined Child in his complaint against the theocracy. Carr and Cartwright were by no means men to impress a Cal- vinist public. On their arrival in Boston in July 1664 the Court passed a law ostensibly widening the franchise, but really the baldest subterfuge. It had the assurance to
GOVERNOR JOHN ENDECOTT Portrait painted in Boston in 1665, the year of his death, now in the possessionof William Crowninshield Endicott of Danvers, Massachusetts. 1
LONFROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
in The King's letter to Endecott was a proof of the practical fact that the Massachusetts Court must face a new condition of things. Moreover, the rulers Knew that the execution of these four Quakers would not have been approved by Oliver any more than liv Charles.
THE ROYAL COMMISSION OF 1664
When the monarchy was restored in 4660, the news pras received with very little ration dasm, The General Court alter much Heated discussion so the relationship of the colony to the minther country, dispatched Simon Brad- street att John Nozon io Bagiand to negotiate. They performed their delicate and thankiess task as well a. could be expected box the mill letter of the King which tel weil their vins, although confirming the charter, failed
H. .. bleideninword mailli W fonoleszogjedi ni wofi cience to In the suffrage to proper- tiel mex of good reputation whether or not they Were Comprenationalists. This letter the colony calmly disre- Marked à she did the new Navigabon Ari, Noy porecon- welted theory bul practical Bespar nog med Massa- Chovetti defy the mother country on a constitutional basis. Se Vienied that Partament had the right to legislate for Dre colonies, and that the King could supervise legisla- Hon or heart appeals from her coarts.
Proof That English dominance was not at an end was offered by the sending of four commissioners to the colo alig to settle matters in New Netherland and New Eng- Lod in 1664. The Commissioners were Richard Nicolls. Samu .I Maverick, Robert Card and George Cartwright. Nicoll was the first governor of New York ider the English rule and an able man Maverick was an original Wertke pi the Bay Company, and an Episcopalian who And Child in bis complaint ugo at the theocracy. Carr WAT Lownight were by no moshe meg to impress a Car Cjabac On their arrival in Boston in July 1664 the Con guard a law odensibly widening the franchise, but rally the latest subterfuge. Is bad the assurance to
A.W. Elson & Co.Belmont. Mass.
To: Endicott
485
ROYAL COMMISSION
write Clarendon asking the withdrawal of the commission; to which he answered that the colony's happiness and well being depended on the performance of its duties.
After much coming and going, the General Court in July 1664 met the royal instructions as follows : (1) They framed an oath of allegiance which was made ineffective by its reference to the colony's charter; (2) In ecclesiasti- cal matters, they avoided, but did not confess; they equi- vocated as to the state of religious freedom; (3) They were not much better in rebutting the charges that the Navigation Acts were being disobeyed; (4) The Court did raise a force against the Dutch which was not needed, in- asmuch as New Netherland succumbed without a fight.
The Commissioners had work to do in New Netherland and this took them away from Boston, the storm thereby being by so much postponed. With the Connecticut and Rhode Island colonies they had very little trouble. When they returned to Boston in the spring of 1665 the clouds gathered again. Endecott had died and Richard Belling- ham, the Deputy Governor, took his place. Bellingham, after service as Recorder of Boston in Lincolnshire, came over in 1634. He was successful and cunning. He was Governor in 1641, again in 1654, and was to serve from 1665 to 1672.
Two views of the commission have found their way into the histories of the time: One was that the King sent it to find out what he had a right to know, and to see how the imperial mechanism was working. The other was that the commission was a body sent out to bully, enslave and corrupt New England and in especial, Massachusetts. The truth lies between these views. So long as there was a sovereign power that could grant or annul a charter, so long as the headquarters of the empire were an active nation, the colony was under obligation to recognize those facts. Both sides were double faced; for years the Crown gave its commissioners private instructions ; but the Gen- eral Court did the same with its agents in London.
The Massachusetts charter of 1629 was technically that of a commercial company ; and the theory that it gave every kind of right not expressly reserved to the Crown,
486
CONTROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
was hardly likely to be accepted by the Crown's represen- tatives. Instead the King's commissioners had private instructions to attempt a general assembly, to which they could appeal over the heads of the governor and council; to insist on Crown nomination "or approbation" of the governor; to demand that the militia should be com- manded by a Crown appointee. They were also to hint that Nichols would make a good governor and Cartwright an excellent major general. The commission were to note all doubtful clauses in the charter and perhaps make the way ready for its alteration.
The Commission itself gave its members the doubtful and dangerous power to hear and determine complaints and appeals in civil, criminal and military cases. In 1632, Thomas Knower had been put in the bilboes for threat- ening the Court, "if hee should be punisht, hee would have it tryed in England, whither he was lawfully punished or not." Since that day the Court had set its face against such appeals. Yet its judgments were never those of a really judicial body, acting juridically, and in many cases the judgments were those of a knot of laymen subject to overruling by a knot of clergymen. To have those judgments reviewed was the last thing the Massachusetts theocracy could stomach.
QUESTION OF JUDICIAL APPEAL (1660-1664)
The Charter was a very loosely worded instrument on this point. It was not an act of oppression for the Crown and its commissioners to insist that appeal did lie in some form and in some contingencies. The defect of the King's instructions and of the commissioners' attempted action was that they sought to create a sort of itinerant court of appeal with undefined powers.
For example, one Porter, a good for nothing and ap- parently a real danger to his parents and the town, had been convicted of blasphemy in public, disobedience to parents and denying the authority of the magistrates. These not desperate crimes earned him commitment to the house of correction, a severe whipping and exposure un- der the gallows with a halter about his neck. He escaped
487
JUDICIAL APPEAL
to Rhode Island, where he obtained from three of the royal commissioners a warrant of interlocutory protection and notice of appeal before them in Boston. This must have irritated the magistrates for every reason, but the records state that, had not his mother been tender hearted and had she joined her husband in the complaint, the court must necessarily have punished Porter capitally, "according to our law, being grounded and expressed in the word of God, in Deut. 22: 20, 21. See Capital Lawes, p. 9, sec. 14." However brutal the penal laws of England, they derived from Parliament, not Deuteronomy. How- ever the commissioners found they could do nothing against the protest of the General Court in the direction of an intelligent system of review of judicial proceedings by the General Court and magistrates who were not pri- marily a judicial body. The case of Thomas Deane in 1665 raised a much clearer issue, especially in the matter of jurisdiction, as it involved the Navigation Acts. Deane informed the commission that the Massachusetts court had not proceeded with trial of a case under the Act. The General Court's answer was in the first place to station in front of the house where the commission purposed to hear the appeal a messenger to read a proclamation warn- ing all persons not to attend the hearing. In the second place, it pleaded that the defect was not their fault. Lastly came the entry in the Court's record, (May, 1665) that in regard to the commissioners' complaint that the court had not recognized them as a court of appeals, "we doe freely oune a noncurrance on our part in such wise and on the grounds mentioned in the foregoing narrative."
In the Deane case, the commissioners' warrant called for the appearance of the Governor and Assistants, that is, it attempted to try the judges in their own jurisdiction. These were the last tactics to try with men as stubborn and self-opinionate as the Massachusetts rulers. The court added that it knew no better rule for deciding this con- troversy than the terms of the charter and Charles's letter of June 28th, 1662.
The Massachusetts had definitely shown that, short of physical force, it would do as it chose, and the com-
488
CONTROVERSIES WITH ENGLAND
missioners understood this perfectly. They knew when they were beaten, but to beat them and to defeat the Crown were quite different things. The commissioners' report to the Council spoke well of Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut. As for Massachusetts, going over the facts, the commissioners held that the King had best take away the charter. As a counterblast the General Court prepared and sent over a "Narrative" in which they answered the commission's charges and defended their own course. The commission was soon after recalled, less in token of de- feat of the royal power than of preoccupation with the Dutch war and of the decline of Clarendon's influence. Those whom Nicolls called "the grandees of Boston" treated the recall as their victory.
EFFECTS OF THE INVESTIGATION
This tendency, fostered by the political leaders and by the much greater forces of situation, distance and training, had one more breathing time a decade long. Charles II and his Council were to be busy after 1665 with European affairs and though the victory over the commission had in reality destroyed the underpinning of the charter of 1628- 29, Massachusetts was not much disturbed until the King sent over Edward Randolph. After the four commission- ers gave in their report to England, commerce was good and so continued. No customhouse was established; the colony governed New Hampshire and Maine without hin- drance; the French peril was removed for a time; the Swedes and Dutch could make no more trouble to the south. Nominally the Navigation Acts, especially those of the 12th and 15th Charles II (1660, 1663) were in force, but as Hutchinson expresses it, Governor Bellingham "whose business it was to carry them into execution, was annually elected by the people, whose interest it was that they should not be enforced." Some of the "grandees" were become wealthy. John Josselyn said about this time, "the grose goddons, or great masters, and some of their Merchants, are damnable rich," but in scrutinizing the constitutional and material growth of the colony, one must
489
EFFECTS OF THE INVESTIGATION
remember that there was a frontier class, as contrasted with an urban and farm class. There had always been settlers who would push outward, and their migrations farther and farther away from centers of settlement were to be a continuous feature of New England history. The frontier disliked authority and was radical; the settled urban and farming element was more conservative, though it disliked authority quite as much when it was exercised by the English.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
[See also the bibliographies following Chapters v (Charter and Colony) ; vii (Winthrop) ; xiv (Religious Freedom) ; and the General Bibliography at the end of Volume V.]
ADAMS, James Truslow .- The Founding of New England (Boston, At- lantic Monthly Press, 1921, 1926).
ANDREWS, Charles M .- British Committees, Commissions and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622-1675 (Balto., Johns Hopkins Press, 1908).
ANDREWS, Charles M .- The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (New Haven, Yale Press, 1924).
ANDREWS, Charles M .- "Materials in British Archives for American Colonial History" (Am. Historical Review, X, No. 2, 1905).
BACKUS, Isaac .- Church History of New England (Newton, Backus Hist. Society, 1871).
BARRY, J. S .- History of Massachusetts (3 vols. Boston, Philips Lamp- son, 1855) .- Vol. I.
BEER, George Louis .- "Cromwell's Economic Policy" (Political Science Quarterly, Columbia University) .- Vol. XVI.
BODGE, G. M .- Soldiers in King Philip's War (Boston, Clapp, 1891; Leominster,, 1896).
BOLTON, Charles Knowles .- The Founders (3 vols. Boston, Boston Athenaeum, 1919-1926).
CALENDER OF STATE PAPERS, COLONIAL .- Vol. V. 1661-1668; Vol. VII. 1669-1674; Vol. IX. 1675-1676; Vol. X. 1677-1680.
CHANNING, Edward .- A History of the United States (6 vols. N. Y., Macmillan, 1908-1926) .- Vol. II.
CHANNING, Edward, HART, A. B., and TURNER, F. J .- Guide to the Study of American History (Boston, Ginn, 1912) .- See §§ 135,142. O'CALLAGHAN, E. B .- Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1853) .- Vol. III.
DUMMER, Jeremiah .- A Defense of the New England Charters (London, Wilkins, 1721; Boston, Fleet, 1765).
HART, Albert Bushnell, editor .- American History Told by Contempor- aries (4 vols. N. Y., Macmillan, 1897-1904) .- See Vol. I.
HOWE, D. W .- The Puritan Republic (Indianapolis, Bowers, Merrill, 1899).
HUTCHINSON, Thomas .- History of Massachusetts (3 vols. Boston, Fleet (1764-1828).
HUTCHINSON, Thomas .- The Hutchinson Papers (Albany, Prince So- ciety, 1865).
JONES, P. M .- The Quakers in the American Colonies (London, Mac- millan, 1911).
KAYE, F. L .- The Colonial Executive Prior to the Restoration (Balto., Johns Hopkins Univ. 1900).
KAYE, F. L .- English Colonial Administration under Lord Clarendon, 1660-1667 (Balto., Johns Hopkins Press, 1905).
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.