USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. II > Part 15
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The new Governor landed in Boston from a war-ship Aug. 10, 1730. He also was received with parade and festivities, with warm expressions of grateful loyalty, and with a sermon. He seems to have stood faithful to his paternal religion. In his first speech to the Court the next month he planted himself on the prerogative which he was to represent here. He said he had positive instructions from the king to require a fixed salary of £1,000, and if it was refused he was to return immediately to England ; adding a downright threat from the monarch to lay the contumacy of the Province before Parliament, insisting that its undutiful and rebellious spirit should be checked. The House was cool and firm. It offered him £1,000 for his services and expenses, and another like sum " to enable him to manage the public affairs." The Council concurred, but proposed in an amendment "that the latter grant be fixed as annual, and then con- tinued for the present Governor." The House said "No!" to both prop- ositions. There was a conference between House and Council in presence of Belcher. He was calm and adroit, his aim being to get the whole Coun- cil on his side; and he alternated between threats and flatteries. Some few of the representatives would have yielded, but the Boston men were inflexible. Five hundred pounds more were granted him " for services," and a like sum was deposited in the Bank of England to be used in payment of agents. The Governor afterward regretted that he had approved of this deposit, when he found it turned to account in supporting complaints against himself.
A bill was prepared and offered in the House providing in a very quali- fied way a compensation of £1,000 for this Governor, as a native, knowing the country well, and so as presumably impartial while representing the
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wishes of the monarch; but it was not to be binding as to his successors. This bill it was understood the Governor would approve; but as it did not pass, he gave up the fight with an endeavor to secure a modification of his instructions from England. The Duke of Newcastle sent him, in August, 1735, an order, first, to accept the sum granted for the year, and afterward to take the most he could get. Thus effectually, on the side of the resolved popular purpose, closed a controversy of such continued and pertinacious a character. A point of honor was saved to the Crown by the condition that
GOVERNOR BELCHER.1
1 [This cut follows a portrait, painted in 1729, hanging in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is by Liopoldt. See Per-
kins's Copley, p. 25. His likeness was also taken by R. Phillips, and a mezzotint engraving of it was made in 1734 by I. Fabor, measuring 9/2 by
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
whatever grant was made to the Governor should be assigned at the open- ing of the session of the Court, so as to avoid any possible reference in it to approbation or displeasure as regarded his official course.
By Belcher's order Massachusetts sacrificed five hundred men in the war with Spain, in 1739, to help Admiral Vernon in his expedition against Cuba. For the rest, his administration was agitated by a continuous financial con- troversy. The pecuniary affairs of the Province were in a most distracted condition, and the treasury was long wholly empty, public creditors in vain demanding their pay. The point in contention concerned the issue of bills to be current longer than the date limited by the king, for 1641. But Bos- ton merchants got round the king's order by a scheme of their own. A Land Bank Company was organized, though opposed by the Governor, amid threats of popular disturbance.1 An Act of Parliament, which it was declared " does and shall extend to the Colonies and Plantations," dissolved this company. Another controversy, long pending, related to the boun- daries between Plymouth and Rhode Island, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire. This was settled under Belcher, to the loss to Massachusetts, both in the north and in the south, of much territory that had been claimed by her.
Belcher was removed on May 6, 1741, and, after four years, was made Governor of New Jersey. Retaining his affection for his native place, he enjoined that his remains should be brought to Cambridge for burial. He died, Aug. 31, 1757.
William Shirley, born in London in 1694, having resided in Boston eight years as an eminent lawyer, was commissioned May 16, 1741, as successor to Belcher, and held the chair till he embarked on his recall to England, Sept. 12, 1756. An interval of four years of his term -from Sept. 11, 1749, to Aug. 7, 1753 - he had passed in England and France, as commissioner on the boundaries of their possessions in America, -Spencer Phips, the Lieut .- Governor, acting in his absence. Shirley's agency and activity here were divided in much the larger measure to his military services in the critical conduct of the later struggles of our French and Indian wars, and for the rest to a troubled civil administration. His ability and spirit were of a high
121/2 inches. It represents him holding his com- mission, shows a glimpse of Boston in the dis- tance, and beneath are his arms with the motto: " Loyal au mort." There is a Belcher genealogy in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1873; see also, 1865. p. 207, for items. In the cabinet of the Hist. Society are eight volumes of the letter- books of Belcher, as follows : vol. i., September, 1731, to November, 1732; vol. ii., November, 1732, to January, 1734; vol. iii., January, 1734, to April, 1735; vol. iv., August, 1739, to Sep- tember, 1740; vol. v., September, 1740, to July, 1743, -"this volume was found at Milton, in the house of John Swift, the property of Hon.
E. H. Robbins, by whom it was presented to J. McKean, and by him given to the Historical So- ciety to make their series more complete;" vol. vi., 1747-1748 (written principally from Burling- ton in New Jersey : the volume is marked, "Jo- seph Eckley, given to him by a relation in the family. Given to J. Stickney by David Eckley, Esq., the second son of the late Dr. Eckley, and by Stickney given to Nathaniel G Snelling, Esq., II Mar : 1815"); vol. vii., October, 1750, to August, 1752 (from Burlington and Ehzabeth- town) ; viii., July to December, 1755 (imperfect, from Elizabethtown). - ED.] .
1 [See Mr. Scudder's chapter in this vol .- ED.]
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order in military matters, and were perhaps exaggerated in his own ambi- tious estimate of his capacities. But he was brave and earnest in the work, and with a genius for planning campaigns. The disastrous expedition led by Braddock, in the death of that General, put Shirley in command of all the British forces in America, till General Abercrombie, and then the Earl of Loudoun, was sent over as General. The chief interest, therefore, of Shirley's administration centres in the campaigns which he helped to plan and to bring to triumphant results in extinguishing French dominion on this continent as the consequence of the last declaration of war with France, in 1744. Most conspicuous among these was that splendid achievement of the Provincial arms, the reduction of the fortress of Louisburg.1 The treaty of Aix-la-chapelle, in 1748, proved to be but a truce.
Shirley had his full share of sharp collisions and controversies with the intractable legislators of Massachusetts, as they were driven even beyond their wits' end by their financial perplexities. . He tried to maintain the au- thority of his royal instructions against all the banking schemes, and all issues of bills not redeemable in coin at the end of the term of their con- tract. But Boston merchants again circumvented the king. Relief and partial deliverance were found in the rich remittance of English coin sent here to remunerate the services of the Province against Louisburg. The historian of this period would have need - as is uncalled for here - to trace the workings and ferments of the intense religious excitement caused by the visit and preaching of Whitefield, which stirred the people with a new sensation, and led to a deluge of polemical pamphlets.2
During the absence of Governor Shirley, on his boundary commission, a little fishing settlement had been made at Pulling Point. Those interested in it asked of the Governor permission to call it by his name. Thus we have for a tongue of land in our harbor the name Point Shirley.3 He re- embarked on his recall to England, on Sept. 25, parting with the General Court in kindly terms.
On Aug. 11, 1749, Governor Shirley had with much ceremony laid the corner-stone of the present King's Chapel, succeeding to the former edifice of wood.4 This stone is at the northeast corner, and the services of the occasion took place in the church then standing. The beautiful marble monument and bust which commemorate the Governor's wife, Lady Frances Shirley, who died in Dorchester in 1746, mark a severe affliction sustained by him in the loss of one greatly beloved and esteemed, and whose decease called forth deep and wide sympathy. It was said that Shirley was much indebted to the high connections of this lady for his first advancement. While on his mission in France he secretly married a young Roman Catho-
1 [See Colonel Higginson's chapter in this volume. - ED.]
2 [See Dr. Mckenzie's chapter in this vol- ume. - ED.]
8 [See the account of a visit of Shirley to the Point, and of a dinner given him there at
the time, in Boston News-Letter, Sept. 13, 1753, copied in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1859, p. III .- ED.]
4 [See Mr. Bynner's chapter in this volume. - ED.]
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lic, the daughter of his landlord, a connection which proved to him the source of much mortification and regret. He was, after he left here, com- missioned Governor of one of the Bahama Islands, in which office being suc- ceeded by a son he came back to his seat between Dorchester and Roxbury, where he died, March 24, 1771, and was entombed under King's Chapel.1
Lieut .- Governor Phips, who had taken the chair when Shirley embarked for England, felt incompetent to act in the military capacity required of him in the meeting of the Council for the conduct of the war, held in Boston in January, 1757, and the Province was therefore represented by a commission. Phips died on April 4 following, and, under the Presidency of Sir William Pepperrell, the Council, according to the charter, became the Executive. News was soon received that Thomas Pownall had been appointed Gover- nor on March 12, 1757, and might be expected soon to arrive, as he did on August 3. He had been twice before in Boston, in the employment of and in confidential relations with Shirley. He had conceived a mistrust of that Governor, doubting his military capacity, and suspecting him of purposes and schemes which looked rather to his own advancement than to the service of the king. Passing twice, as in the interest of the exigencies of the military measures, between England and America in the darkest and most critical period of the war with France, just preceding its triumphant close, he is supposed to have made such representations as secured his own com- mission. He was generally regarded as able, honest, and wise. He seems to have more shrewdly and intelligently than any of his predecessors under- stood the real temper of the people whom he had come to govern, and to have divined the tendencies that were here working towards the coming struggle which resulted in the independence of the colonies. He stood calmly and firmly for the prerogative of the king, but as far as possible endeavored to study and adapt himself to the humors and sensitiveness of the people. So he received many evidences of popular favor, as well as especial esteem and respect from his associates in office. When he was re- called after a short term, at his own request, unusual compliments were paid to him. Still, he did not find his position and situation pleasant to him; and, though he might have remained, he sought relief, and was in 1760
1 [A daughter of Shirley married John Erv- ing, of Boston; and the late Samuel G. Drake had engraved for his Five Years' French and Indian War a portrait of Shirley, painted in 1750 by Hudson, and belonging to a descendant of Erving, - Shirley Erving, Esq. The like- ness in the frontispiece of this volume follows this engraving. Pelham, in 1747, issued " a curious print of his Excellency, done in mezzo- tinto, to be sold by him, at his school in Queen Street." (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., 1866, p. 201.) For an account of the Shirley House, later known as the Eustis house, given also in the cut, see Mr. Drake's chapter in this volume. It is shown
also in one of the views of Boston taken in the Revolutionary period, and reproduced in Vol. III. See also Drake's Town of Roxbury, p. 120. The Shirley arms, which still may be seen within King's Chapel, are figured also in the Heraldic Journal, ii. 12. Shirley was buried in the Chapel, March 24, 1771. The panel with the royal arms represents the one, now in the Historical Society's Rooms, which was originally displayed above the door of the Province House. The Cross, now standing above the entrance of Harvard College Library, was brought from Louisburg by the Mas- sachusetts troops, and is also shown in the cut. -ED.]
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transferred successively to New Jersey as Lieut .- Governor, and to South Carolina as Governor. He was a member of Parliament from 1768 to 1780, and, using his experience gained in America as to the tendency of the British measures in the colonies, he uttered in our behalf advice and warn-
GOVERNOR POWNALL.1
1 [This cut follows a likeness owned by the Historical Society. It is stated in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Nov. 1875, that the original portrait of Pownall is at Earl Orford's, in Norfolk, and that the Historical Society's picture, presented by the late Lucius Manlius Sargent, is said to have been painted from an engraving, perhaps
the one which bears this inscription : "Cotes, pinxit : Earlom fecit. Thomas Pownall, Esq., member of Parliament, late Governor, Captain- General, and Commander-in-Chief and Vice- Admiral of His Majesty's Provinces, Massachu- setts Bay and South Carolina, and Lieut .- Gov- ernor of New Jersey, June 5, 1777."- ED.]
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ings and protests which were not regarded. He was a man of fine culture, and a voluminous author. Living to the age of eighty-three, and dying in 1805, he saw this country, in fulfilment of his own prophecies, take its place among the nations.
It was generally the case that the personal and official variances and alter- cations between the royal Governors and the legislature and people of Massa- chusetts were held in abeyance at intervals when disturbing or threatening perils of a comprehensive character, and arising chiefly from the long ex- tended struggle of the English colonies in French and Indian warfare, en- grossed the popular interests and made the colonists feel their dependence upon British arms and subsidies. Pownall came into office at the very darkest period of the war, when the colonists, burdened with debt, deci- mated by slaughter, disheartened by many military disasters, by dissensions in the counsels of officers of proved incompetence, and by despair for the future, had well-nigh given over hope. But before Pownall left the country the prospect had brightened, and great successes had been achieved. Pitt's return to office had invigorated British resolve and the whole administra- tion of affairs. He lifted our own Provincial officers, up to the colonelcies, to an equality with those of the regulars. Sept. 9, 1760, witnessed the extinguishment of French dominion on this continent; and peace was formally ratified in 1763. England had spent in the war seventy-three millions sterling. 'Was it in her own aggrandizement, or for our protec- tion? To compel us to share in the burden - beyond our own enormous sacrifices of money and life- was the motive of those schemes for taxing us which led to our revolt. It was under Pownall's administration here that the General the Earl of Loudoun, just before he was superseded in his command, was worsted in his fierce struggle with our Legislature, in his requisition for quartering British troops in Boston. He had to content himself with the Castle.
Pownall embarked for his return to England, June 3, 1760. Thomas Hutch- inson, who had been commissioned Jan. 31, 1758, as Lieut .- Governor, and who took his place as such June 1, 1758, had an opportunity to try his hand at the helm for two months after the departure of Pownall. Hutchinson might early in this part of his career have taken warning of the risks to which he was subjecting himself by holding at one time more high offices than had any one before him, and such as have never since been allowed to the same person. He was Lieut .- Governor, Councillor, Chief-Justice of the Superior Court, and Suffolk Judge of Probate. This plurality of office- holding led to the contest in the Legislature of 1762 against the Justices of the Superior Court having a place in either branch of it, and against the Lieut .- Governor being at the same time a Councillor.
Sir Francis Bernard, born in England in 1714, and who had been Governor of New Jersey, was commissioned Governor of Massachusetts Jan. 14, 1760,
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and arrived in Boston on the 2d of August following. He came to find affairs on an apparently peaceful and prosperous footing. He stayed till all was in a turmoil, and left only just before the storm broke. It seemed to be the aim of this prerogative Governor, who came in with the young King George III., to make it appear that the grand design of this monarch was to be to secure the liberties and privileges of his colonists, while the people would take great satisfaction in recognizing all the demands of their sov- ereign and his parliament. The " Molasses Duty," imposed as a source of revenue to the Crown, and bearing so onerously as to provoke a general evasion of it, first engaged the Governor's zeal against the traders. The officers of Customs were rigorous in collecting exorbitant claims and forfeitures of the merchants engaged in foreign trade, and enriched them- selves at the expense of the treasury; and there was a contest between the Governor and the Legislature as to the rights of the attorney-general in bringing suits against the pilfering officials. Then came the sturdy struggle, with the pleadings of the ablest men for the people and for the Crown as advocates or opponents,- James Otis earning his laurels on the writs of assistance, empowering the officers of the Customs to enlist the help of anybody at hand to enter and search any place at pleasure for dutiable goods. These, however, were grievances of a local character, chiefly felt in Boston. The Representatives for a while preserved an amicable relation with Bernard; and in a fit of good humor the Court made him a present of Mount Desert. The measures which stirred the popular spirit, and rapidly trained the Province to determined resistance to ministerial encroachments on its liberties, were those connected with the imposition of the Stamp Act and other duties, with the purpose of raising a revenue from the Province for the British exchequer. From first to last, resolutely, defiantly, and successfully, these impositions were rejected. As, from time to time in the development of the conflict, the people. by their stern opposition - sometimes marked by a dignified, logical, and argumentative pleading; sometimes by a turbulent outburst of lawless violence and mob-rule - compelled a removal of the tax in one or another form, the British legisla- ture coupled with the special relief the unqualified assertion of the absolute right to obtain from us a revenue in some shape. This general claim car- ried the controversy down to fundamental principles. As to the demand that we should help in some way to bear the burden of the debt incurred by Great Britain in the continuous warfare with the French and Indians on this continent, the reply was that Britain had come in to our aid only after we had exhausted our own resources single-handed in the contest; that we had already suffered in the loss of valuable lives, in debts incurred, and in our wretched condition from a paper currency more than our full share of the burden; and that Britain had an eye rather to her own stretch of em- pire than to our protection. But, as to the fundamental principle reached in the contest, the sole power of the purse was claimed as resting in our legislative body in all matters concerning ourselves, as fully and as rigidly
VOL. II .- 9.
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as it was asserted by the House of Commons for Britain. Bernard kept all the elements of discontent and passion in a constant ferment by hectoring and proroguing the Legislature, and the people were forced to try the virtue of conventions, town-meetings, and committees of correspondence with the towns and with the other colonies. The Stamp Act closed the courts and instigated outrages and riots. Its enforced repeal quickened out- bursts of popular joy, which made a special triumph significant of the conviction that the whole stake would be sure, if resolve and pluck stood by the fundamental principle. Then came the acrimonies and the turbulences connected with the attempts to quarter foreign troops on the citizens of Boston, in response to the repeated suggestions of more than one of the royal Governors that a present military force could alone subdue the rebellious spirit of the town, inflamed by a few demagogues. To claim the whole of right and reason on our side in these embittered controversies, or to justify or even palliate the acts of personal violence and mob out- rage then perpetrated,-such as insults to sworn officials, tarring, feathering, and burning in effigy; the sacking and destruction of private houses, with pillage, and the turning of Boston harbor into a tea-pot, - is what the his- torian of our calm and judicial times may assume or decline according to his own temper. There will henceforward be two ways of telling parts of this story. It will always be incumbent on the historian to relate that our rights and cause had supporters in the British Parliament, to whom our early successes were as much to be attributed as to the abilities and arguments of our own patriots.
Bernard was recalled in the summer of 1769, and sailed homeward on the 3Ist of July to make report of the state of affairs here, and of his own administration, as the basis for future efforts either to conciliate or to subdue. He left us, mistrusted and detested, with the state of public affairs as unsettled and ominous as it well could be.1
It has often been asserted that if at this juncture Britain had furnished us with a chief magistrate who was gifted and guided by certain ideal qualities and virtues for his office, adapted to the sort of people whom he was to govern and the work he was to do peacefully, the Revolution would have been long deferred, and would have come about, if ever, in quite dif- ferent ways. This is more than doubtful. It may be questioned whether, even if we had been allowed at this juncture to have chosen our own governor, and had put Sam Adams himself into the office, swearing fealty to the King and fidelity to the Parliament, on any conceivable terms of . recognition of the assumed royal prerogative, there would have been a peaceful settlement of the contentions, and a harmony of future relations. Just before Doctor Franklin left his agency in London to return home, con-
1 [The papers of Governor Bernard, thir- books, 1758-72; ix .- xii., correspondence, 1758- teen volumes, are in the Sparks MSS. in Har- vard College Library. Vols. i .- viii. are letter-
79 ; xiii., orders and instructions, 1758-61. Sparks bought them in London in 1846 .- ED.]
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fidential interviews with him were sought and held by the Earl of Chatham, to see if they could moderate the strife and secure an adjustment of all the difficulties in the case. Here was the wisest American, - patriotic, calm in his moderation, keen in his sagacity, far-sighted and conciliatory in tem- per; and he gave positive assurance that the colonists were not aiming for independence. Here, too, was the Earl of Chatham, -more honored by us as Mr. Pitt, - who had proved himself-in Parliament to be the most earnest and eloquent champion of the colonists in his rebukes of the measures of the Ministry, and his prophetic warnings of the result. The patriot peer wished the advice of the patriot philosopher and statesman as to the terms of the propositions which he might offer to Parliament for conciliation. Neither could accord with the other's views. There was an irreconcilable variance, an insurmountable difficulty in the case. No scheme consistent with the asserted prerogative, claims, and functions of the . parent State could harmoniously adjust itself to what Massachusetts held to be her reserved rights.
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