USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 22
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full rights of citizens a steadily inercasing number of excellent, upright, and conscientious persons, who, for reasons satisfactory to themselves, could not and would not come into covenant relations with a church by the prescribed methods. Either lack of belief, or self-distrust, or scruples of conscience, restrained them from subjecting themselves to the ordeal of standing before a mixed congregation and revealing their innermost religious exercises and experience, with a profession that they had reached a certain stage in their conviction, and would henecforward put themselves under the watch and ward of the men and women under covenant. But as a second ill-working of this condition, while it excluded from citizenship some of the best persons, it afforded no adequate security against the inclusion of the worst. A hypo- crite might easily pass the ordeal under the lure of the consideration and privilege of which it was made the condition. One of the earliest and one of the most vexatious causes of strife and complaint, and a whole series of perplexities and embarrassments relieved only by the positive demand of Charles II. for the free allowance of the franchise, came from the imposition of this covenant condition. Persons who challenged scrutiny for the recti- tude of their characters and lives in vain petitioned for the rights of citizen- ship, as they shared all the public burdens. As the rite of baptism was allowed only to the children of parents who were under covenant, there was soon a generation of those born on the soil who neither were baptized themselves nor could obtain baptism for their children. The question be- came to them a pertinent one, whether they were Christians or Heathen. Such then was the quandary in which the Puritan leaders found themselves. To yield the franchise to the " uncovenanted " and the " unregenerate " was to subvert their Theocracy. To enforce the covenant condition was to risk the sure ruin of their Commonwealth.
These preliminary suggestions, which present the aims and purposes of the responsible leaders in the enterprise that planted the town of Boston, - the germ of the State, - have been here advanced as setting forth that enter- prise, the spirit and the method of it, as it reveals itself to us in the retro- spect of history; with more of clearness and fulness than may have been enjoyed by those who planned and guided it. The writer of these pages, from as thorough a study of the original sources of information in our colonial history as was within his reach, has become convinced that a decp religious design in the purpose of the leaders is the key to the enterprise. We have to trace the process-one of arbitrary acts on the part of the leaders, and of obstructions and arrests on the side of opponents who stood for a more lawful authority - by which, through the temporary experi- ment of the Puritan Commonwealth, the corporation of the Massachusetts Bay Company became, by anticipation, the Commonwealth of Massachu- setts. Our starting point is from the obvious and undeniable fact that the charter was made to serve a use for which it was not designed or intended.1
1 [Cf. Jocl Parker's lecture on the charter the Lowell Lectures, Massachusetts and its Early and religious legislation in Massachusetts, in Ilistory. - ED.]
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Whatever, then, was found necessary, by forced construction, adaptation, or supplementary provisions, to fit it for the purposes to which it was turned, involved, of course, trespass, disloyalty, and a breach of law. The charter was in this way perverted as a basis and medium for all such acts and measures and stretch of authority as it was made to sanction. Notwith- standing this, and the fact that the astute leaders must have been perfectly well aware that they had, so to speak, stolen a march upon their monarch by the transfer of the charter, and by the setting up, under their way of constru- ing it, such a government as they instituted here, they still clung to that char- ter, and professed to find in it their sufficient warrant. They seem to have per- suaded themselves- indeed they boldly insisted - that there was a pledge and potency in a quality which it derived from its seal of royalty, its kingly grace and covenant, that neutralized, or at least was not invalidated by, any strain or stretch of use of which, as they pleaded, they had found it abso- lutely necessary to avail themselves. The Chancery process, which in 1684 vacated and revoked the charter, was a decisive judgment of the authori- ties at home that the charter had been unlawfully perverted. This, how- ever, was only a final and effectual disposal of a controversy which had been from the first continuously in agitation. As soon as the royal councillors had knowledge of what was going on here under the assumed authority of the charter, a commission was instituted for examining and recalling it. More and more inquisitive and stringent measures by royal mandate and by later commissioners followed up the same attempt to bring the recusant Massachusetts legislators to a reckoning. Yet they still insisted upon that transcendent royal quality in the pledge of their patent just referred to. And they might well heighten its value to them by the plea which they more and more cogently and even piteously urged, about the sincerity of their reliance upon the royal covenant in the stern enterprise of coming over as " a poor distressed flock " into a desolate wilderness, at their own charges, among brute men and wild beasts, to found a civil State, and " to extend the bounds of the Gospel." It is evident, also, that the more of added value they had with pains and toil put into the venture, the more cogent would be their plea that the original covenant of their enterprise should hold inviola- ble. Nothing but the all-engrossing troubles and convulsions of the mother country, and the sympathy of the temporary Puritan Parliament and Pro- tectorate of Cromwell, would have availed, however, to secure to the exiles in Massachusetts time and opportunity for the rooting of their enterprise under the first charter. Whoever chooses by curious study to inform him- self of all the particulars incident to this lively episode in our history, about the challenging of the charter and the struggle to keep it, will find the story at least an entertaining one. He will find much that he may appreciate in the resolute, sturdy pluck and defiant obstinacy of the Puritan magistracy ; and he must be left free to form his own judgment of the casuistry and the strat- egy, and -to use plain words - the artifice and adroit trickery by which the charter administration was maintained till the catastrophe of its fall; while
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the instrument itself was never wrenched away to cross the ocean on its return, but still hangs with its royal seal attached in the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. The King himself had no power, nor could he by prerogative have usurped or exercised it, to confer by charter on any sect or party of his subjects such an independency and such legislative functions as were actually assumed by the corporation of Massachusetts Bay when transferred here. Having transported themselves with their charter, the leaders of the enterprise seem to have taken for granted that they might extend and supplement their rightful authority under it so as to adjust it to the change of place and circumstances.1
It is, however, a curious fact, having a significance which each reader is at liberty to assign to it, that whatever may have been, consciously or unconsciously, the intent of the leaders of the Boston colony as to the setting up in Church and State an original and arbitrary pattern of their own, what they actually wrought out of this sort had been suspected of them and charged upon them as their real but covert design before their feet rested on the new territory for their experiment. Some persons in England whose attention had been drawn to the project before it was effected, and who were more or less informed of its preliminary measures, had expressed jealous misgivings lest the prime movers had secretly in view the actual scheme of separation and faction which was soon realized here. The anonymous Planter's Plea, written by that stanch friend and pro- moter of the enterprise, the patriarch and vicar of Dorchester, John White, was published in London in 1630, after Endicott had been heard from at Salem, and while Winthrop's company was on the ocean. One of the "objections" to the enterprise, which Mr. White trics to set aside, is thus expressed : "That religion indeede and ye colour thereof is ye cloake of this work, but under it is secretly harboured faction and separation from ye Church. Men of ill affected mindes (some conceive), unwilling to join any longer with our assemblies, meane to draw themselves apart, and to unite into a body of their owne, and to make that place a nursery of faction and rebellion, disclaiming and renouncing our Church as a limbe of Antichrist." This objection Mr. White meets by referring to the affectionate and tender parting address of the governor and his associates, to "their dear mother, ye Church of England," and to the known "carriage of these persons in their owne country in former times, as not men of turbulent or factious dis- positions, impatient of ye present government, who have separated from our Assemblies, refused our Ministery, &c. . . . And yet, if some one or two, or ten of them should be factiously inclined, it were hard measure to condemn a whole Society, &c. ... I persuade myself there is no one Separatist knowne unto ye Governours, or if there be any, that it is as far from their purpose as it is from their safety to continue him among them." Yet the candid pleader, doubtless well knowing more than he cared to communicate, adds,
1 [ The struggle to maintain the charter is more particularly explained by Mr. Deane in another chapter. - ED.]
VOL. I .- 20.
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" I conceive we doe and ought to put a great difference between Separa- tion and Non-Conformity. There is great oddes between peaceable men, who out of tendernesse of heart forbcare ye use of some ceremonies of ye Church, and men of fiery and turbulent spirits that walke in a crosse way out of distemper of minde. I should be very unwilling to hide anything I think might be fit to discover ye uttermost of ye intentions of our Planters, and therefore shall make bold to manifest not only what I know, but what 1 guesse concerning their purpose." Necessity, novelty, love of gain may draw some, "but that ye most and most sincere and godly part have Je advancement of ye Gospel for their main scope I am confident. That of them some may entertain hope and expectation of enjoying greater libertie there than here in ye use of some orders and Ceremonies of our Church, it seemes very probable. Nay, I see not how we can expect from them a correspondence in all things to our State, civill or Ecclesiasticall. Wants and necessities cannot but cause many changes. But ye men are far enough from projecting the erecting of this Colony for a Nursery of Schis- matickes." Mr. White concludes " that ye suspicious and scandalous reports raysed upon these gentlemen and their friends (as if under ye colour of planting a Colony they intended to rayse and erect a seminary of faction and separation ) are nothing else but ye fruits of jealousie of some distempered minde, &c." It is admitted that the wise and good of the company would naturally be followed "by a mixed multitude, as were ye children of Israel out of Egypt ;" and Mr. White forcbodes that such " would prove refractory to Government, expecting all libertie in an unsettled body," and that the restraint of authority would cross their discontented humors, so that they would revenge themselves by being " ready to blemish ye Government with such scandalous reports as their malicious spirits can devise and utter." He anticipates that such will return or be sent back to England, revengeful and malignant with ill reports; and he asks that they be not listened to till the authorities in New England shall send home truc information.
These frank pleadings, disclosures, and anticipations, made public while the adventuring company with whose motives, plans, and fortunes they were concerned were on their ocean passage, are certainly very noteworthy. Had Mr. White deferred writing till the experiment had been on practical trial for ten or twenty years, he could not better have described its real working as to the separation effected, the " novelties" reduced to practice, and the complaints carried back to England, which he endeavored to deal with by anticipation. It is needless to ask by what prescience or " jealousie " some in England found occasion to advance the objections, which proved to be so well grounded, to the schemes of the planters. Doubtless it was in part from some shrewd observation of the spirits and inclinations of the prime movers in the enterprise, and in part from inferences drawn from the characteristics of the previous similar experiments at Plymouth.
The zealous pleading of the good patriarch White in his anticipatory defence of the colonists then on their passage to the Bay, taken in connec-
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tion with the fact that on their arrival they immediately pursued the course the suspicion and intent of which he so boldly repudiated, present to read- ers of this generation a curious theme on which they are at liberty to exer- cise their own judgment as to the integrity or crookedness of the leaders of the enterprise. Sharp censures have been pronounced upon them, in- volving the imputation of gross hypocrisy in their tender and yearning ad- dress from the deck of their vessel as they left the shores of their native land. In this they said : "We esteem it our honor to call the Church of Eng- land, from whence we rise, our dear mother, and cannot part from our native country where she specially resideth, without much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in ye common salvation, we have received in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts." They ask the prayers of their brethren, and promise their own for them, -" wishing our heads and hearts may be as fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness, &c." What then, it is asked, is to be said of the high-minded sincerity of men who, after uttering this pathetic strain, proceeded at once to lay the foundations in separation and schism of the Puritan Commonwealth? Something, doubtless, might be urged on their side by any one who should assume their defence or championship. What was to them the Church of England? It represented to them a lineage and communion of discipleship, in an organized institution, then in process of ref- ormation and purification from its late corruption under Popery. They had had part in zeal and suffering in advancing that needful reforming work to the stage which it had reached. For themselves, they hoped and expected that the purifying work would go on, as they believed there was need of it. They had a common interest in its membership. They had no idea that they were about to heathenize themselves by passing the ocean to another shore. They ever after maintained that they were seeking to advance an arrested process of reformation. They soon found that this involved for them sep- aration, which none the less they regarded as an enforced exclusion. When on the first year after the planting of their church in Boston they invited Roger Williams to be their teacher, the demand which he made on them as a condition of his acceptance, that they should renounce communion with the Church of England, met their decided refusal. And, further, any one who assumes their defence might proceed to urge that they de- parted only from the discipline of the Church of England, not at all from its doctrine; that changes in the mode of institution and discipline were inevitable, to meet the circumstances and exigences of their wilderness con- dition; that they had the example of the mother country to justify the connection of Church and State, and that they simply followed the leadings of Providence and the teaching of the Bible in adjusting their policy.
We proceed now to trace the development of that policy in the organi- zation of the Puritan Commonwealth. The written charter was made its basis, but the limitations and deficiencies which at once showed that it was
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to be put to uses not intended or provided for were recognized only to be neutralized by such devices as seemed necessary or available. By that charter a governor, deputy-governor, and eighteen assistants were anni- ally to be chosen out of their own number by all who, as " freemen," had the franchise in the Company. Any seven of the Assistants, with either the Governor or the Deputy, meeting once a month, made a quorum, as an executive, for the transaction of business. Four Great or General Courts were to be held annually, to clect and commission the officers and to vote upon the admission of new members, or " freemen." As soon as the com- pany was established here, the Assistants obtained a unanimous vote allow- ing them to choose the Governor and Deputy out of their own body; but when the Assistants were to be chosen, all the freemen were clectors. In- stead of the full number of eighteen, only eleven or twelve of the Assistants came over, and the number was never afterwards filled up. The Assistants soon assumed the name of " Magistrates," with all the requisite and im- plied functions. They quietly kept their office, without re-election, for two years, and made the first laws for the colony. In the first year one hundred new freemen, many of them not members of a church, took the prescribed oath. But in 1631 church membership was made a condition of the franchise. It may be noted herc, that as late as 1676 five-sixths of the men in the colony were non-voters, because not church members. In 1632 the freemen insisted on and secured their right to choose the Governor and Deputy ; and the " Magistrates " so graciously, though grimly, yielded the point that they were re-chosen.
The wide scattering of the colonists into different settlements helped for a while the centralization of power. As it became inconvenient for all the freemen to assemble at the courts, each local settlement, the nucleus of a town, delegated two persons to represent it. Meeting in Boston in 1634, these Deputies, carly watchful against arbitrary power, demanded " a sight of the patent," and then, seeming for the first time to come to a full knowl- edge of their rights, they " confronted " the Governor. After parrying their complaints, he told them that so large a number of freemen in the com- pany had not been anticipated ; that their numbers and lack of qualifications unfitted them for making laws; but that at the next Court some of them, summoned by the Governor, might come and judge of the taxes and revise the laws, though they could make no new ones, but might submit their grievances to the magistrates.
The next month, May, 1634, twenty-four principal inhabitants appeared in Boston as representatives of the people, and disrupted the arbitrary exercise of power, and by exercising their deputed authority through the rights recognized in the Charter, they chose, as a new Governor, Thomas Dudley. They gained the point that the whole body of freemen should attend at the General Election, while being represented by their deputies at the three other Courts. The vigorous struggle in the next year was be- tween those who stood respectively for " strict discipline " or for lenity in
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the management of "infant plantations." The decision was in favor of the rigid party. The Assistants or magistrates, in their tenacity of pur- pose to maintain an almost exclusive authority in disposing each successive measure which the expanding interests and the needful protection of their enterprise seemed to make essential, acted on the assumption that they had
3
Job Reality in the ford of Cotton1
the same governing power over all their associates and subordinates on the spot as they would have had if they had been exercising their administrative rights in England over the employés which they had sent here. Up to 1644 the magistrates and the deputies of the people, meeting together, had
1 [The death of Cotton, near the end of 1652, was, after the death of Winthrop, the loss that most closely affected the town. The superstition of the day found alarming portents in the hea- vens while his body lay ready for burial. Nor- ton, Life and Death of Cotton, reissued with notes by Enoch Pond in 1834; Samuel Clarke, Lives of Ten Eminent Divines, London, 1662; Ma-
ther, Magnalia ; Emerson, First Church ; Snow, Boston, p. 133. Cotton's house stood not far from the southerly corner of Tremont Street and the entrance to Pemberton Square. The estate ran back up the hill. Vane lived on it two years, and, at a later day, Judge Sewall. A portrait, said to be of Cotton, from which our cut is taken, belonged to the late John Eliot
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acted jointly. In that year, as the result of another severe struggle as to the people's right to a negative voice, it was decided that cach branch should meet by itself, and that a concurrent vote should be requisite in legis- lation. This was another stage in the process by which the business man- agement of a mercantile corporation was transformed into an administration leading on to the constitutional provisions of our existing Commonwealth. It was obvious from the first that the reduction of the paramount authority of the magistrates, or even the participation in it to any great extent by the people at large, would imperil the rigid principles of Puritanism, so far as they were relied upon for bringing civil affairs under the absolute sway of the Church. It is observable that in all their pleas on their own behalf the magistrates emphasize their religious motives.
Incidental to, or we should rather say as a most needful and vital ele- ment of, the fundamentals of the Puritan theocratic Commonwealth, was the habit of appealing to and of relying upon the ministers of the churches for advice and guidance, outside of their own special functions. The clergy constituted, so to speak, a body of spiritual peers in the Puritan parliament, only they had relatively a far more exalted and stringent professional influ- ence than has been yielded to the bishops of the English realm since the era of the Reformation. "The reverend elders " - " our brethren the elders" - constituted a body which, cither in consultation by themselves or as called into the meetings of the Court, was appealed to for counsel and advice on all perplexed or critical matters. As pastors of the churches, whose mem- bers alone exercised the franchise, they would have had their full share of influence in preaching from their pulpits, and in their disciplinary visits from house to house. That they should have been recognized as jointly com- posing a fellowship qualified and entitled to have referred to them, impliedly for ultimate disposal, matters upon which the civil rulers were divided in judgment, is certainly the most significant token of the identity between the Puritan Church and State. It would have been consistently within the range of their clerical functions if questions of casuistry in religion, or of the inter- pretation and explication of Bible texts by whose guidance the people were generally disposed to be directed, were referred to them. But such ques- tions as the interpretation of the Charter, and how the continual attempts of the authorities at home to subvert and reclaim the administration set up under it were to be parried and thwarted, could be regarded as of fit refer- ence to a clerical body only under a theocracy. But these and like questions,
Thayer, Esq., and now hangs in the residence of the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop at Brookline. Mr. Thayer, who was a descendant of Cotton, bought it more than twenty years ago, but I have not been able to learn its previous history. It was first engraved, on steel, in Drake's Boston. The Cotton genealogy is given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. i. 164; also an account of his ancestry in the Heraldic Journal, iv. 49, and a tabular pedigree in Drake's Boston. By the care of Edward Everett and others, a chapel
of the old St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lin- colnshire, where Cotton preached before his coming to America, was restored some years since, and a memorial tablet was erected in it to Cotton's memory, with a Latin inscription by Mr. Everett. The list of subscribers is given in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 1874, p. 15. A paper on Boston, England, and Cot- ton's career there, by the Rev. G. B. Blenkin, Vicar of Boston, is in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1874 .- En.]
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