CHAPTER II.

NEW ENGLAND, 1689-1763.

BY JUSTIN WINSOR,

_The Editor_.

ANDROS, with Joseph Dudley and other satellites, made safe in Castle

William, the revolution in New England was accomplished, and the

veteran Simon Bradstreet was at the head of the old government on its

sudden restoration (1689) to power.

The traditions of the charter-days were still strong among the country

people, and their deputies in the resuscitated assembly brought into

Boston the old spirit of independence to enliven the stifled atmosphere

which the royal governor had spread upon the town. The new government

was proposedly a provisional one to await the result of the revolution

which seemed impending in England. If the policy of unwavering

adherence to the old charter had been pursued with the constancy which

characterized the advocacy of Elisha Cooke, the popular tribune of the

day, the current of the New England history for the next few years

might possibly have been changed. The sturdy assumption of political

power did not follow the bold revolution which had prepared the way for

it, and, professing dependence upon the royal will, all thoughts were

now addressed to placate the new monarch, and regain by law what they

had failed to achieve by a dogged assertion of right. King William,

of whose accession they soon were notified, unhesitatingly, but for

temporary service, confirmed the existing rulers.[157]

A command came for Andros to be sent to England, with a presentation

of charges against him, and it was obeyed.[158] Increase Mather had

already gone there to join Ashurst, the resident agent of the colony,

and the people were not without hope that through the urgency of these

representatives the restitution of the old charter might be confirmed.

Subsequently Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oakes were despatched to reinforce

the others. Mather, either because he felt the project a vain one,

or because he hoped, under a new deal, to be better able to direct

affairs, was favoring a new charter.

[Illustration

This follows the map in the Amsterdam ed. (1688) of Richard Blome’s

_L’Amérique, traduit de l’Anglois_. This is a different map (on a

larger scale) from the one in the original English edition of Blome.

See reference to the map given in Mather’s _Magnalia_ (1702) in Vol.

III. p. 345. This map is reproduced in Cassell’s _United States_, i.

pp. 492, 516.

Douglass, with some excess, again speaks of Mather’s map (_Summary_,

etc., i. 362) “as composed from some old rough drafts of the first

discoverers, with obsolete names not known at this time, and has scarce

any resemblance of the country,” and he calls Cyprian Southack’s maps

and charts even worse. For Southack see _Mem. Hist. of Boston_.]

Plymouth, which had never had a royal charter, was endeavoring, through

the agency of Ichabod Wiswall,[159] the minister of Duxbury, who had

been sent over to protect their interests, to make the most of the

present opportunity and get a favorable recognition from the king.

Between a project of annexation to New York and Mather’s urging of an

alternative annexation to the Bay, the weaker colony fared hard, and

its ultimate fate was fashioned against its will. In the counsels of

the four agents Cooke was strenuous for the old charter at all hazards,

and Oakes sustained him. Mather’s course was professedly a politic

one. He argued finally that a chance for the old charter was gone,

and that it would be wiser to succumb in season to the inevitable,

in order better to direct progress. When it came to a petition for a

new charter, Oakes so far smothered his sentiments as to sign it with

Mather; but Cooke held out to the last.

[Illustration: ELISHA COOKE, THE ELDER.

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the gallery of the American

Antiquarian Society, which had belonged to the Rev. William Bentley, of

Salem, who was born in Boston in 1759, and died in Salem in 1819.]

Meanwhile, Massachusetts was governing itself, and had enough to do

in looking after its frontiers, particularly at the eastward, where

the withdrawal of the troops which Andros had placed there became the

signal for Indian outbreaks. New Hampshire, weak in her isolation,

petitioned to be taken under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and

was (March 19, 1690) for the time being annexed.[160] Connecticut,

destined to save her charter by delays and a less fiery spirit, entered

upon a career characterized in the main by dignified quiet. Though she

participated in some of the tumult of the recurrent Indian wars, and

let her bitterness against episcopacy sometimes lead to violent acts,

she had an existence of much more content than fell to the lot of the

other New England colonies.[161]

The first momentous event which the restored governments had to

encounter was the disastrous expedition which Phips led against

Quebec, in 1690. With confident hope, the fleet on the 8th of August

sailed from Boston harbor, and the whole community for three months

waited for news with great solicitude. Scarce three weeks had

passed when Sewall records (August 28) that they got from Albany

intelligence of the Mohawks’ defection, which, as he writes, “puts

a great damp here to think that our fleet should be disappointed of

their expected aid.”[162] Apprehension of some more imminent danger

grew throughout the colony. In September they placed watches at night

throughout Boston, and gave as watchwords “Schenectady” and “Salmon

Falls,”—fearful reminders.[163] One night at Charlestown there was an

alarm because Indians were seen in their back fields,—they proved to

be runaway servants. Again, the home guard, eight companies, trained

another day. At last tidings came from Plymouth of certain losses

which the contingent of that colony, among the forces acting at the

eastward, had suffered, news whereof had reached them. This and other

matters were made the grounds of an attempt to found a regular channel

of communicating the current reports, which in a little sheet called

_Publick Occurrences_ was issued at Boston, Thursday, September 25,

the precursor of the American newspaper. It told the people of various

incidents of their every-day life, and warned them of its purpose to

prevent false reports, and to correct the spirit of lying, “which

prevails among us.” It represented that “the chief discourse of this

month” was the ill-success of the expedition, which, under the command

of Gen. Winthrop, of Connecticut, had attempted to advance on Montreal

by way of Lake Champlain, to distract the enemy’s attention in that

direction while Phips ascended the St. Lawrence.[164]

About six weeks later, on Friday, November 7, word came to the governor

from Salem of the disastrous events in the St. Lawrence and the

discomfiture of Phips.[165]

The unfortunate expedition had cost Massachusetts £50,000, and while

the colony was devising an illusory scheme of paper money as a quick

way of gathering taxes, Phips slipped off to England, with the hope

that his personal explanations would assist in inducing the home

government to lend a helping hand in some future attempt.

When Phips reached England he found that Mather had done good

work in preventing the reinstalling of Andros, as at one time was

threatened.[166]

Memorials and counter-memorials, printed and manuscript, were pressed

upon Parliament, by which that body was now urged to restore, and now

implored to deny, the vacated charter. It was at this juncture that

Mather, with two other agents, petitioned the king for a new charter;

and the law officers reporting favorably, the plan had already been

committed to the Lords of Trade at the time when Phips appeared in

London. With the assent of the king, the framing of a new charter was

entrusted to Sir George Treby, the Attorney General, who was instructed

to fortify the royal prerogative, and to make the jurisdiction include

not only Massachusetts, but the territory of New Plymouth and all that

region, or the better part of it, lying east of the present State of

New Hampshire, and stretching from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.

It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now

came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to

enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in

the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the

Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The

chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important

one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to

wield, as the years which followed proved.

Mather professed to think the new charter—and it perhaps was—the best

result, under the circumstances, to be attained. He talked about the

colony still having a chance of assuming the old charter at some more

opportune moment. Cooke, the champion of the old conditions, was by no

means backed in his opposition by a unanimity of feeling in the colony

itself; for many of the later comers, generally rich, were become

advocates of prerogative, and lived in the hope of obtaining more

consequence under a changed order of society. Connecticut and Rhode

Island were content, meanwhile, with the preservation of their own

chartered autonomy, such as it was.

Thus affairs were taking a turn which made Phips forget the object of

his visit. Mather seems to have been prepared for the decision, and was

propitiated also by the promise of being allowed to nominate the new

governor and his subordinates. Phips had been Mather’s parishioner in

Boston, and was ambitious enough to become his creature, if by doing

so he could secure preferment. So Sir William Phips was commissioned

Governor; and as a sort of concession to the clerical party, of which

Mather himself was the leader in Boston, William Stoughton was made

Lieutenant-Governor. Isaac Addington became Secretary. Bradstreet was

appointed first assistant. Danforth, Oakes, and Cooke, the advocates of

the old charter, were forgotten in the distribution of offices.

On Tuesday, January 26, 1692, Robin Orchard came to Boston from Cape

Cod, bringing tidings that Capt. Dolberry’s London packet was at anchor

in the harbor now known as Provincetown, and that she had brought the

news of the appointment of Phips under a new charter.[167]

Boston was at this time the most considerable place in the New

World, and she probably had not far from 7,000 inhabitants; while

Massachusetts, as now constituted, included 75 towns, of which 17

belonged to Plymouth. Within this enlarged jurisdiction the population

ranged somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000,—for estimates widely

vary. Out of this number twenty-eight persons had been chosen to

make the governor’s council, but their places were to be made good

at subsequent elections by the assembly, though the governor could

negative any objectionable candidate; and the joint approval of the

governor and council was necessary to establish the members of the

judiciary. The acts of the legislature could for cause be rejected by

the Privy Council any time within three years, and to it they must

be regularly submitted for approval; and this proved to be no merely

formal action. It meant much.

These conditions created a new political atmosphere for Massachusetts.

Religion and politics had in the old days gone hand in hand, and the

little book which Joshua Scottow, one of the old patriarchs, now

printed, _Old Men’s Tears_, forcibly reminded them of the change.

The community was more and more engrossed with trade; and those that

concerned themselves with politics were not near so closely of one

mind as formerly; and there was lacking that invigorating motive of

saving their charter which had so unified the thoughts and banded the

energies of the community in former years.

On the 14th of May, 1692, the “Nonesuch” frigate cast anchor in

Boston harbor. When Phips and Mather disembarked, eight companies of

soldiers received and escorted them to their respective houses. “Made

no volleys, because ‘twas Satterday night,” says Sewall, recording the

event.[168] The ceremony of inauguration was no sooner over than all

parties began to take their bearings; and Mather, not long after,[169]

in an election sermon, took occasion to defend the policy of his recent

mission. It remained to be seen how much the province was to gain from

its closer connection with the home government. Was it to claim and

secure larger assistance in repressing Indian outbreaks and repelling

French encroachments?—for these things were brought home to them by

the arrival of every messenger from the frontiers, by the surveillance

under which they had put all Frenchmen who chanced to be in their

seaports, and by the loads of wine-casks which paraded the streets of

Boston when the “Swan” (September 20, 1692) brought in a French prize.

It was not till October 23d that Cooke and Oakes reached home, and the

old-charter party had once more its natural leaders; Cooke, at least,

bringing to it the influence of wealth.[170]

[Illustration: THE PROVINCE SEAL.

This is the form of the Great Seal of Massachusetts, used in the time

of George I. It was recut, and the name of the monarch changed under

George II. This last design will be found in the _Massachusetts House

Doc._, no. 345 (1885), being a report on the Arms and Great Seal of

Massachusetts. Here, as in the _Heraldic Journal_, vols. i. and ii.,

the private seals of the royal governors are given, which were used in

sealing military commissions.]

In the sermon to which reference has just been made, Mather showed

that, however he had carried many of his own points, he had failed

in some that much troubled him. The change in the qualification of

electors from church membership to the condition of freeholders

was alarming to those of the old theocratic sentiments. It meant a

diminution of their influence, and that the 120 churches in New England

(of which 80 were in Massachusetts) were to direct much less than

formerly the legislation of the people. The possible three years which

a law might live before the home-veto came must be made the most of.

Using his influence with Phips, Mather dictated the choice of the

first corporation of Harvard College, freshly chartered under the new

rule, and without waiting for the confirmation of the Privy Council,

who might well be thought to be opposed to a charter for the college

which did not provide some check in a board of visitors, he caused

himself, very likely in a passive way, to be made its first Doctor of

Divinity, but his admirers and creatures knew the reward he expected.

We think, however, to-day less of the legislation which gave such a

title to their great man than we do of the smaller ambitions by which

the assembly of the province about the same time were originating our

public-school system.

The governor, in his communication to the General Court, reminded them

of the royal recommendation that they should fix by law a fitting

salary for the chief executive. It raised a point that Elisha Cooke

was in wait for. Under his instigation, the plan was devised of

substituting an annual grant, which might be raised or lowered, as

circumstances warranted, and as was necessary to vindicate one of the

few rights left to them by the charter. It was the beginning of a

conflict that recurred with each successive governor as he attempted to

force or cajole the representatives into some recognition of the royal

wish.

The baleful influence of the Mathers—for the son Cotton was now

conspicuous—conduced to commit the unwary Phips to instituting a

court, which disgraced itself by the judicial murders attending the

witchcraft frenzy; and in the midst of all, Sir Francis Wheeler’s

crippled fleet arrived from the West Indies (June 11, 1693), having

lost more than half its men by disease. The fear of infection almost

caused a panic among the inhabitants of Boston when, two days later,

Wheeler anchored his frigates off Noddle’s Island. Ten days afterwards

their commander was entertained at Cambridge by the governor, and by

Mather as president of the college.

Connecticut was in the mean while serving both Massachusetts on

the east and New York on the west. She sent troops to help defend

the eastern dependencies of the Bay. On the retreat of Winthrop’s

expedition, New York appealed to Connecticut for help, and she afforded

it; but when Governor Fletcher, of New York, came to Hartford and

claimed command of her militia, she resisted his pretensions, and, as

the story goes, drowned the reading of his proclamation by a vigorous

beating of drums.[171] Fitz-John Winthrop was sent to England to

compose matters, and it ended in Connecticut placing 120 men at the

disposal of the New York governor, while she retained command of her

home forces, and Winthrop became in turn her governor.

Phips too went to England, but on a mission not so successful. His

testy character had early imperilled his administration. He got into

a quarrel with Fletcher, of New York, and he yielded to passions

which brought undignified encounters even in the public streets.

Representations of such conduct did not fail to reach the king, and

Phips was commanded to appear in his own defence. His friends had

endeavored to force an address through the House of Representatives,

praying the king not to remove him; but it was defeated by the united

action of members from Boston, many of whom represented country towns.

The governor’s friends resorted to a specious device which appealed

to the local pride of the country; and, by the urgency of Mather and

others, a bill requiring the representatives to be residents of the

town they sat for was forced through the House.[172] With an assembly

constituted under the new rule, a bare majority was secured for the

address, and Phips took it with him.

Before much progress could be made in the investigation, after his

arrival in London, he died on February 18, 1694-5.[173] The news did

not reach Boston till early in May. “People are generally sad,” says

Sewall. “Cousin Hall says the talk is Mr. Dudley will be governor,” and

the next day mourning guns were fired at the Castle.[174]

Joseph Dudley’s hour of pride was not yet come, though he had

intrigued for appointment even before Phips’s death. The protests of

Ashurst and Constantine Phipps, the colony’s agents in London, were

effectual; and the king was by no means prepared as yet to alienate the

feelings of his New England subjects in order to gratify the avenging

spirit of Dudley. That recusant New Englander was put off with the

lieutenant-governorship of the Isle of Wight, a position which he held

for nine years.

The government in Boston upon Phips’s leaving had legally fallen

into the hands of that old puritan, the lieutenant-governor, William

Stoughton, and in his charge it was to remain for four years and more

(November, 1694, to May 26, 1699). It was a period which betokened

a future not significant of content. It was not long before Thomas

Maule could call the ministers and magistrates hard names, and with

his quick wit induce a jury to acquit him.[175] But the spirit of

Parliament could not be so easily thwarted. As colonists, they had

long known what restrictive acts the mother country could impose on

their trade in the interests of the stay-at-home merchants, who were

willing to see others break the soil of a new country, whose harvests

they had no objection to reap. The Parliament of the Commonwealth

had first (1651) taken compulsory steps, and the government of the

Restoration was not more sparing of the colonists. King William’s

Parliament increased the burden, and the better to enforce observance

of its laws they established a more efficient agency of espionage than

the Plantation Committee of the Privy Council had been, by instituting

a new commission in the Lords of Trade (1696), and had followed it

up by erecting a Court of Admiralty (1697) to adjudicate upon its

restrictive measures.[176] About the same time (1696) they set up Nova

Scotia, which had been originally included in the Massachusetts charter

of 1691, as a royal province. The war which was waging with France

served somewhat to divert attention from these proceedings. French

privateers were hovering round the coast, and Boston was repairing her

defences.[177] Not a packet came into the Bay from England, but there

was alarm, and alertness continued till the vessel’s peaceful character

was established. News was coming at one time of Frontenac’s invasion

of New York, and at another of Castin’s successes at the eastward. In

August, 1696, when Captain Paxton brought word to Boston of Chub’s

surrender of Pemaquid, five hundred men were mustered, but they reached

Penobscot only to see the French sailing away, and so returned to

Boston unrewarded. The enemy also fell on the Huguenot settlement at

Oxford, Mass., and the inhabitants abandoned it.[178] When the aged

Bradstreet was buried,[179] they had to forego the honor they would pay

his memory in mourning guns, because of the scarcity of powder; and

good people rejoiced and shivered as word came in June of the scalping

exploit of Hannah Dustin at Haverhill, in the preceding March. In

the autumn (November 4) there was nothing in all this to prevent the

substantial loyalty of the people showing itself in a celebration of

the king’s birthday. The Boston town house was illuminated, and the

governor and council went with trumpets to Cotton Hill[180] to see the

fireworks “let fly,” as they said. No word had yet come of the end of

the war, which had been settled by the peace of Ryswick in September.

A month later (December 9, 1697) Captain Gillam arrived at Marblehead

from London, and the next day, amid the beat of drum and the blare of

trumpet, between three and four in the afternoon, the proclamation

of the peace was made in Boston. The terms of that treaty were not

reassuring for New England. A restitution of captured lands and ports

on either side was made by it; but the bounds of Acadia were not

defined, and the Sagadahock country became at once disputed ground. The

French claimed that it had been confirmed to them by the treaties of

St. Germain (1632) and Breda (1668); but the Lords of Trade urged the

province to rebuild the forts at Pemaquid, and maintain an ascendency

on the spot.

[Illustration: BELLOMONT.

This follows a contemporary engraving preserved in Harvard College

library, which is inscribed: “His Excellencie Richard Coote. Earle of

Bellomont, Governour of New England, New York and New Hampshire, and

Vice Admirall of those seas.” Cf. the picture of doubtful authenticity

in the _Memorial History of Boston_, ii. p. 175.]

As early as August, 1695, word had come that Richard Coote, the Earl

of Bellomont, was to be the new governor of Massachusetts. Later

it was said that he would not arrive till spring; and when spring

came the choice had not even been determined upon. It was not till

November, 1697, that he was commissioned governor of New York, New

Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He landed in New York on the

2d of April, 1698, and on the 12th a sloop reached Boston, bringing

tidings of his arrival, and three days later the council received a

communication from him. For a year and more he stayed in New York,

sending his instructions to Stoughton, who as lieutenant-governor

directed the council’s action. On the 26th of May, 1699, the governor

reached Boston;[181] and it was not long before he manifested his

sympathy with the party of which Elisha Cooke was the leader. This

gentleman, who was so obnoxious to the Mather party, had been negatived

by Phips, when chosen to the council; but on Phips’s withdrawal, his

election had escaped a veto, and he now sat at the council board.

Mather had succeeded, in 1697, in forcing upon the legislature a

charter, in the main of his own drafting, which gave to Harvard College

the constitution that he liked, but he manœuvred in vain to secure his

own appointment from the General Court to proceed to England to solicit

the sanction of the Privy Council; and it was not long before he found

that the new governor had vetoed his charter, and in 1701 the assembly

legislated him out of office, as the president of the college.

This first blow to the dominance of the Mathers was reassuring, and

Bellomont was a leader for the new life to rally about.[182] He was a

man of complacent air. He liked, if we may believe him, to hear sermons

well enough to go to King’s Chapel on Sundays, and to the meeting-house

for the Thursday lectures. He could patronize the common people with

a sufficient suavity; and when the General Court, after their set

purpose, voted him a present instead of a salary, if he was not much

pleased, he took his £1,000 as the best substitute he could get for the

£1,200 which he preferred.

Boston, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was not so bad a seat of a

viceroyalty, after all, for a poor earl, who had a living to make, and

was debarred the more lucrative methods of trade. He reported back to

the Lords of Trade abundant figures of what he found to be the town’s

resources and those of his government; but the favor which he was

receiving from the good people might have been less had they known that

these same reports of his set forth his purpose to find Englishmen,

rather than New Englanders, for the offices in his gift.

We have also at this time the report which the scurrilous Ned Ward made

of the puritan town and its people;[183] but it is not well to believe

all of his talk about the innocence of doves and the subtile wiles of

serpents, though life in Boston was not without its contrasts, as we

look back upon it now. Samuel Sewall, her first abolitionist, was even

then pointing the finger of doom to the insidious evil in his _Selling

of Joseph_. Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the

political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day,

1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial

verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century

being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to

make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit

judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than

any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty

one. He had figured in one of the noblest spectacles ever seen in the

self-willed puritan capital, when on a fast day, January 14, 1697, he

had stood up in the meeting-house, and had listened with bowed head to

the reading of his penitential confession for the sin of his complicity

in the witchcraft trials. Stoughton, the lieutenant-governor, and

chief justice of those trials, was quite another type of the puritan

fatalist, from whom it was futile to expect a like contrition; and

when, at a later day (December 25, 1698), Stoughton invited to dinner

the council and omitted Sewall, who was one of them, one might fancy

the cause was in no pleasant associations with the remembrance of that

scene in Parson Willard’s meeting-house. It is characteristic of Sewall

that this social slight oppressed him for fear that Bellomont, who had

not yet come, might hear of it, and count him less! But poor Sewall was

a man whom many things disturbed, whether it was that to mock him some

one scattered a pack of playing-cards in his fore-yard, or that some of

the godly chose to wear a wig![184]

[Illustration: SAMUEL SEWALL.

This follows the steel engraving in _Sewall Papers_, vol. i. There

is another likeness in _N. E. H. & Gen. Reg._, i. 105. Cf. also

Higginson’s _Larger Hist. United States_, p. 208.]

The smiting of the Mathers, to which reference has been made, was a

business of serious moment to those theocrats. Whoever was not in

sympathy with their protests fared badly in their mouths. “Mr. Cotton

Mather,” records Sewall (October 20, 1701), “came to Mr. Wilke’s shop,

and there talked very sharply against me, as if I had used his father

worse than a neger; spoke so loud that people in the street might hear

him.” There is about as near an approach to conscious pleasantry as we

ever find in Sewall when, writing, some days later, that he had sent

Mr. Increase Mather a haunch of very good venison, he adds, “I hope in

that I did not treat him as a negro.”

The Mathers were praised highly and blamed sharply in their lifetime,

and have been since. There can be little dispute about what they did

and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives

and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for

their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is

scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of

those influences which place men in relation to other times than their

own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around

them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries.

Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination,

the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a

study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not

been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic

character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance,

canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social

impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious

epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for

which New England had reason to be grateful. Increase Mather had a

convenient astuteness, which was exerted not infrequently to her no

small gain. He had learning, which usually left his natural ability and

his education free from entanglements. It was too often quite otherwise

with his son Cotton, whose reading smothered his faculties, though he

had a native power that occasionally got the upper hand. Between them

they gathered a library, which, as John Dunton said, was the glory

of New England. The awe which Increase inspired knew little of that

lurking rebellion which the too pitiful arrogance of Cotton incited;

for the father was essentially a strong and politic man, and though his

domination was waning outwardly in 1700, he had the ability to compel

the Boston press into a refusal to print the _Gospel Order Revised_,

which his opponents had written in answer to his _Order of the Gospel_,

and to force his adversaries to flee to New York to find a printer.[185]

The old Mather theocracy was attacked on two sides. There was, in

the first place, the defection within the old New England orthodoxy,

by which an independent spirit had established a church. From the

published manifesto of its principles this came to be known as the

“Manifesto Church,” and it had invited Benjamin Colman home from

England to become its pastor,[186] who, to avoid difficulties, had been

ordained in England. He first preached in November, 1699. In the second

place, the organization of the Church of England, which had begun in

Andros’s time, was gathering strength, though Sewall got what comfort

he could from the fact that Mr. Maccarty’s shop and others were not

closed on Christmas Day. Attempts had been made to divert the funds

of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England from

their application to the needs of the Indians, to strengthen the new

Episcopal movement; and the failure to do this, as well as a spirit to

emulate the missionary enterprise of the French, had instigated the

formation of a new Society in England for Propagating the Gospel in

Foreign Parts; but it was not long before its resources were turned

into channels which nurtured the Episcopal movement and the royal

authority. Strong contrasts to the simplicity of the old order were

increasing; and it was not without misgivings that the old people had

seen Benjamin Wadsworth, the new associate pastor of the First Church,

inducted (1696) into office with an unusual formal parade. Thus the

humble manners of the past were becoming in large degree a memory; and

when, a little later (June 1, 1702), the new queen was proclaimed,

and the representatives were allowed to precede the ministers in the

procession, the wail in Sewall’s diary, as well as when he notices the

raising of colors at the Castle on the Lord’s Day, betokens in another

way the order of things which the new charter was making possible.

While in Massachusetts the defection grew, in Connecticut the old

order was entrenching itself in the founding of Yale College,

first at Saybrook, and later at New Haven, which was destined, as

Harvard declined in the estimation of the orthodox, to become the

rallying-point of the old school.[187]

In Rhode Island matters went on much as the heterogeneous composition

of that colony necessarily determined. Bellomont could find little good

to report of her people, and the burden of his complaint to the Lords

of Trade touched their propensity to piracy, their evasion of the laws

of trade, and the ignorance of the officials.

Bellomont had returned to his government in New York when, on the 5th

of March, 1701, he died. It took ten days for the news to reach Boston

(March 15), and four days later (March 19) word came by the roundabout

channel of Virginia of the declaration of war between England and

France. In the midst of the attendant apprehension, on April 7th,

mourning guns were fired for the dead governor at the Sconce and at the

Castle, and the artillery company gave three volleys in the middle of

the town, Col. Townshend, as Sewall in his antipathy does not fail to

record, wearing a wig!

When Bellomont had left for New York in May, 1700, the immediate charge

of the government had again fallen upon Stoughton. He did not long

survive his chief, and died July 7, 1701, in his seventieth year,[188]

and from this time to the coming of Dudley the council acted as

executive.

It was on Joseph Dudley, to a large party the most odious of all New

Englanders, the ally of Andros, that the thoughts of all were now

turned. It was known that he had used every opportunity to impress upon

the king his fitness to maintain the royal prerogative and protect the

revenue in New England. The people of Boston had not seen him for about

ten years. In 1691 he had landed there on his way to New York, where

he was to serve as a councillor; and during that and the following

year he had made some unobtrusive visits to his home in Roxbury, till,

in 1693, he was recalled to England to be made lieutenant-governor of

the Isle of Wight. With the death of Bellomont his hopes again rose.

Ashurst, as the senior of the Massachusetts agents, still opposed him,

though his associate, Constantine Phipps,[189] was led to believe that

the king might do worse than appoint the aspirant. Dudley was not

deficient in tact, and he got some New Englanders who chanced to be in

England to recommend him; and a letter, which he used to some purpose,

came not surprisingly, considering his lineage, from Cotton Mather,

saying quite enough in Dudley’s praise. Elisha Cooke and his friends

were not ignorant of such events, and secured the appointment of Wait

Winthrop as agent to organize a fresh opposition to Dudley’s purposes.

It was too late. The letters which Dudley offered in testimony were

powerful enough to remove the king’s hesitancy, and Dudley secured his

appointment, which, on the death of the king a few days later, was

promptly confirmed by Anne.[190]

The news of the king’s death and the accession of the queen reached

Boston, by way of Newfoundland, on the 28th of May, 1702.[191] The new

monarch was at once proclaimed from the town house, and volleys of

guns and the merriment of carouse marked a new reign. How New England

was to find the change was soon sharply intimated. Amid it all tidings

came of the capture of three Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians.

Later in the same day the eyes of Madam Bellingham, the relict of an

early governor, were closed in death, severing one of the last links

of other days. Her death was to most a suggestive accompaniment of the

mischance which now placed in the governor’s chair the recusant son of

Thomas Dudley, that other early governor.

A fortnight later (June 10, 1702), the ship “Centurion,” having Joseph

Dudley on board, put in at Marblehead, and the news quickly travelled

to Boston. The next day a committee of the council went in Captain

Croft’s pinnace to meet him, and they boarded the “Centurion” just

outside Point Alderton. Dudley received them on deck, arrayed in a

very large wig, as Sewall sorrowfully noted while making him a speech.

They saw another man whom they had not heard of, one Thomas Povey,

who was to be their lieutenant governor, and to have charge of their

Castle. They saw, too, among the passengers, George Keith, the whilom

quaker, who was come over on £200 salary, very likely paid by the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to convert

as many as he could to prelacy.[192] Sewall was not happy during that

day of compliments. The party landed at Scarlet’s Wharf amid salvos of

artillery, and under escort of the council and the town regiment they

proceeded to the town house, where the commissions were published and

all “had a large treat,” as Sewall says. Major Hobby’s coach, with six

horses, was at the door, a guard of horsemen wheeled into ranks, and so

Dudley went to that Roxbury home, whence, as many remembered, he had

been taken to be imprisoned.

Dudley was not deficient in confidence and forwardness; but he had no

easy task before him. He naturally inclined to the faction of which

Byfield and Leverett were leaders; but the insidious and envious Cotton

Mather, taking him into his confidence, warned him of these very

people. Dudley told them of the warning, and it was not long before the

sanctimonious Mather was calling his excellency a “wretch.”

When Dudley made his opening address to the General Court,[193]

he could not refrain from saying some things that were not very

conciliatory. There were two points on which he raised issues, which he

never succeeded in compassing. One of these was a demand for a stated

salary. The assembly answered it with a present of £500 against the

£1,000 which they had given to Bellomont. No urgency, no threats, no

picturing the displeasure of the Crown, could effect his purpose.[194]

The war which he waged with the representatives never, as long as the

province existed, ended in a peace, though there was an occasional

truce under pressure of external dangers.

Another of Dudley’s pleas was for the rebuilding of the fort at

Pemaquid, to secure possession of the disputable territory between the

Kennebec and Acadia.[195] The deputies were immovable. If the Crown

wished to secure that region, it must do it by other sacrifices than

those of New England.

Thus thwarted, Dudley could make them feel that the royal governor

had some prerogatives; and so he rejected the councillors which the

deputies accredited. All of this thrust and parry was of course

duly reported by Dudley to the home government. The situation was

perplexing in the extreme, quite as much so to the governor as to the

people, who reluctantly received him. It was for the interests of

both that the war against the French should not flag, and money was

necessary, but the governor claimed the direction of expenditures,

while the representatives stood aloof and firm on the “privilege and

right of English subjects to raise and dispose of money, according to

the present exigency of affairs.” With the clergy and the ministers,

Dudley was not less unhappily placed. His interests turned him to the

church people, but they could not find that his profession had any

constancy. His lineage placed him with the Congregationalists, and

he once had the ministry in view, but his sympathies went altogether

with the new school, of which Stoddard, of Northampton, was leader

in the west, while Colman, the Leveretts, and the Brattles were the

spokesmen in Boston. In the election of a president for Harvard,

Dudley favored Leverett, the successful candidate, and made a Latin

speech at his installation,[196] and Cotton Mather writhed at the

disappointment of his own hopes. The governor encountered (1708), for

his decisive opposition to the Mathers, a terrible but overwrought

letter from the father, and a livelier epistle from the son. He showed

in his reply a better temper, if nothing more.[197] In the opinion

of all honest patriots, of whatever party, Dudley was later found in

company which raised suspicions. The conflict with France begat, as

wars do, a band of miscreants ever ready to satisfy their avarice by

trading with the enemy and furnishing them with arms. Dudley did not

escape suspicion, and he experienced some of the bitterest abuse in

talk and pamphlet,[198] though the council and the House, the latter

after some hesitancy, pronounced the charges against him a “scandalous

accusation.” It can hardly be determined that he was implicated, and

Palfrey gives him the benefit of the doubt.[199]

[Illustration: JEAN BAPTISTE HERTEL, SEIGNEUR DE ROUVILLE.

This likeness of the leader of the assault on Deerfield follows one

given in Daniel’s _Nos Gloires Nationales_, i. p. 278, where is an

account of the Hertel family. He was thirty-four at the time of his

attack.]

The war was a fearful one. In 1703, month by month fresh tidings of

its horrors among the frontier towns reached Boston. In January it was

of Berwick, in Maine. In February came sad tidings from Haverhill. In

March there was the story of Deerfield, and how Hertel de Rouville had

dashed upon the village. With the early summer Dudley went to Canso

to confer with the Indians (June 20); and not long after (July 8),

Bombazeen, a noted Indian, appeared in Boston with rumors of the French

landing near Pemaquid. In August there were sad messages from Wells,

and Capt. Southack was sent off by sea with chaplain and surgeon. With

all this need of her troops at home, the colony also despatched two

companies of foot to help the British forces at Jamaica. Samuel Sewall

mourned as ever, when on Sunday (April 23, 1704) great guns at the

Castle signalized the Coronation-Day. “Down Sabbath! Up St. George!” he

says. The very next day the first number of the _Boston News-Letter_

(April 24)[200] brought to the minister’s study and to his neighbor’s

keeping-room the gossip and news of the town which was witnessing this

startling proof of progress. Ten days later Dudley signed Benjamin

Church’s instructions (May 4), and the old soldier, whose exploits

in Philip’s war were not forgotten, set off by land to Piscataqua,

where he was met by Cyprian Southack in his brigantine, who carried

him to the eastern garrisons. In the _News-Letter_, people read of the

tribulations at Lancaster; of the affairs at Port Royal; of the new

cannon which Dudley got from England for the Castle; of the French

captives, whose presence in Boston so disturbed the selectmen that they

petitioned the governor to restrain the strangers, and whose imagined

spiritual needs prompted Cotton Mather to print in his tentative French

his _Le vrai patron des saines paroles_.

News of this sort was varied by a rumor (December 18, 1705), which a

sloop from the English Plymouth had brought, that Sir Charles Hobby

was to be made governor,—which meant that the agents of the colony

in London were trying to oust Dudley with a new man; but in this they

failed.

[Illustration]

The war made little progress. The expedition against Port Royal in

1707 was a failure, and the frontier towns were still harassed. The

news of Marlborough’s victories was inspiriting, and Boston could name

a part of its main thoroughfare after the great soldier; but while

she planted guns on her out-wharves and hoisted a tar-barrel to her

beacon’s top, and while Colonel Vetch marshalled her troops,[201] she

waited in vain for the English army to arrive, in concert with which

the New England forces were to make a renewed attack on Port Royal in

1709. Rhode Island sent her war-vessels and two hundred men, and they

too lay listlessly in Nantasket roads. Schuyler, of Albany, meanwhile

started to conduct four Mohawks or Maqua chiefs to England, where

he hoped to play upon the imagination of the queen; and in August,

while the weary New Englanders were waiting for the signal to embark,

Schuyler brought the savages to Boston, and Colonel Hobby’s regiment

was mustered for their diversion.[202] Very likely they were taken to

see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before

“brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,”

as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which

he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English

traders among that people. Distractions and waiting wore away the time;

but the English forces never came, and another Port Royal attempt

proved wretchedly futile.

That autumn (October, 1709) the New England governors met at Rehoboth,

and prepared an address to the queen urging another attempt. In the

face of these events the Massachusetts colony had to change its London

agent. Sir Henry Ashurst died, and the House would have chosen Sir

William Ashurst against Dudley’s protest, if Sir William would have

accepted. They now selected their own Jeremiah Dummer, but against his

desires.

The year 1710 opened with rumors from Albany about preparations in

Canada for an onset along the frontier, and it was not till July

(15) that flags and guns at the Castle and Sconce, with drum-beats

throughout the streets, told the expectant Bostonians that General

Nicholson, who was to head a new expedition, had arrived. It was

candle-light before he landed, and the letters and despatches at once

busied the government. A little later the council (July 24) entertained

that commander, with Vetch and Hobby, at the Green Dragon Tavern; and

four days afterwards Governor Saltonstall, from Connecticut, reached

Boston, and the contingent of that colony, three hundred men, was on

the spot in four weeks from the warning. In September the armament

sailed,—twelve ships-of-war and twenty-four transports, of which

fourteen carried Massachusetts troops, two New Hampshire, three Rhode

Island, and five those of Connecticut. On the 26th of October (1710),

Nicholson and his force were back in Boston, flushed with the triumph

which the capitulation of Port Royal had given them.[203] The town had

need of some such divertissement. There had been a scarcity of grain,

and when Captain Belcher attempted to despatch a ship laden with it

the mob cut her rudder, and the excitement had not passed without more

or less inflaming of the passions. The circle of Matherites had also

disturbed the equanimity of the liberals in theology by an anonymous

document, _Question and Proposals_, which aimed at ecclesiasticising

everybody and everything,—a stroke of a dying cause. There was an

antagonist equal to the occasion in John Wise, of Ipswich, and the

Mather dynasty had less chance of revival after Wise’s book _The

Churches’ Quarrel Espoused_ was launched upon the town.[204]

Nicholson, again in England, had urged the new tory government under

Bolingbroke to make a more determined assault on Canada, and Dummer had

united with him in a petition to the queen[205] for a royal armament to

be sent for the work. Their plea was recognized and what seemed a great

force was despatched. Nicholson, with the van of the fleet, arrived

on the 6th of June, 1711,[206] and a convention of the New England

governors was straightway called at New London to arrange for the

campaign. The plan was for Nicholson to lead four thousand men by way

of Albany, and the Connecticut contingent of three hundred and sixty

men was to make part of this force. The royal ships came straggling

into Boston harbor. On the 24th General Hill, who brought under his

command seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments, arrived, and the

next day Sewall and others of the council boarded the “Devonshire”

and exchanged courtesies with Hill and the admiral of the fleet, Sir

Hovenden Walker. The Boston regiments mustered and escorted them to

the town house, and the veterans were thrown into a camp on Noddle’s

Island. The next six weeks were busy ones, with preparations and

entertainments. Mr. Borland, a wealthy merchant, took Hill into his

house. The governor offered official courtesies. The transports as they

came up into the inner harbor presented a “goodly, charming prospect,”

as Sewall thought.[207]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Commencement at Cambridge came on July 4, and all the dignitaries were

there. One day some Connecticut Indians exhibited themselves before the

admiral, and on another some Mohawks danced on board the flag-ship. By

the end of the month, everything was as nearly ready as could be,[208]

and the fleet sailed (July 30). They went proudly away, hastened

somewhat by large desertions, which the patrolling of the roads

leading from Boston had not prevented.

[Illustration: BRITISH SOLDIERS, 1701-1714.

Fac-simile of a cut (pl. xxviii.) in Luard’s _Hist. of the Dress of the

British Soldier_, London, 1852, p. 94. It represents the soldiers of

Marlborough’s wars.]

Nicholson dallied in Boston for a week or two, eating good dinners, and

then started for New York, to take the conduct of the land expedition,

Saltonstall accompanying the Connecticut troops as far as Albany. Much

farther no one of the land forces went, for word reached them of the

sad disaster on the St. Lawrence and of the withdrawal of Walker’s

fleet. The New England part of it came straggling back to Boston in

October to find the town suffering under the loss of a great fire,

which had happened on the night of October 2-3; most unmistakably

the result, as Increase Mather told them in a sermon,—and perhaps

believed,—of the way in which, during the fitting of the fleet, they

had carried bundles on the Lord’s Day, and done other servile work! The

cause of the expedition’s failure can be more reasonably indicated:

delay in starting, an ill-organized method of supplies, bad pilotage,

and incompetent leaders. Walker and Hill sailed direct for England, and

in October, while the deputies of the province were bolstering their

courage in asking the monarch for another attempt, the English mind was

being filled with charges of want of proper coöperation on the part of

the New Englanders as the all-sufficient cause of the disaster. Dummer,

in London, vindicated his people as well as he could in a _Letter to a

Noble Lord concerning the late expedition to Canada_.[209]

In August of the following year (1712) Bolingbroke made a truce with

France, the news of which reached Boston from Newfoundland in October

(24th). It resulted in the following spring (March 31, 1713) in the

Treaty of Utrecht, by which England acquired Acadia with its “ancient

limits,” whatever they might be, for we shall see it was a question.

The news arrived amid another corn panic. Two hundred angry and

perhaps hungry men broke open Arthur Mason’s storehouse and seized the

stock of grain. Capt. Belcher sent off another shipload, despite the

remonstrance of the selectmen; but the mob stopped short of pulling

down Belcher’s house about his ears. “Hardest fend off,” was his word.

Peace secured, Dudley despatched from Boston, November 6, 1713, John

Stoddard and John Williams to proceed to Albany, thence by Lake

Champlain to Quebec, to negotiate with Vaudreuil for the restoration of

prisoners.[210]

* * * * *

The Mason claim[211] to the province of New Hampshire had been bought

by Samuel Allen, a London merchant, and he had become its governor;

but the active ruler was his son-in-law, John Usher, who had been the

treasurer of Andros’s government, and also, as lieutenant-governor,

lived in the province. Memories of old political affiliations had

not conduced to make his relations with Sir William Phips, of the

neighboring jurisdiction, very agreeable. When Bellomont came he was

commissioned to take New Hampshire within his government; and it

had fallen in the same way to Dudley’s care. This Boston governor

found himself popular in New Hampshire, whose people had opposed

the reinstatement of Usher, though this had been accomplished

in their spite. Dudley and Usher recriminated, and told their

respective grievances, and both made their counter-charges to the

home government.[212] Affairs went uncomfortably enough till George

Vaughan became the successor of Usher, who now withdrew to Medford, in

Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty, in 1726.

Upon Rhode Island, Dudley had looked longingly. She would have been

brought under his commission but for the exertion of William Penn,

then her agent in London. Still, under pretence of consolidating the

military strength of the colonies as occasion might require, there was

a clause in the commission of Dudley which he construed as giving him

command of the Rhode Island militia. Dudley early (September, 1702)

went to Newport, and ordered a parade of the militia. Gov. Cranston

cited their charter as being against any such assumption of power;

and the troops were not paraded.[213] Dudley told the Board of Trade

that the colony was “a receptacle of rogues and pirates;” and the

people of Rhode Island renewed their fortifications, and sent out their

solitary privateer to cruise against French and Spanish. At Dudley’s

instigation the Board of Trade (1705) prepared charges of evading

the revenue against the colony. Dudley gathered evidence to sustain

them, and struggled hard to push the wiry colony to the wall, hoping

to crush her charter, and pave the way for a general government for

New England, to be the head of which he had not a little ambition. In

this Dudley had a confederate in Lord Cornbury, now governor of New

York. To him had been similarly given by his commission the control

of the Connecticut militia, but a timely prudence saved that colony.

Fitz-John Winthrop was now governor,—a second dilution of his race, as

Palfrey rather hazardously calls him,—and blameless in purpose always.

Dudley’s concert with Cornbury, aimed to crush the charters of both

Rhode Island and Connecticut, that each conspirator might get something

from the wreck to add to his jurisdiction, utterly failed. In England

Sir Henry Ashurst labored to thwart the machinations of Dudley’s

friends. In Connecticut Dudley found malcontents who furnished him with

allegations respecting the colony’s appropriating unfairly the lands of

the Mohegans,[214] and getting a commission appointed to investigate

he was made its president. He then proceeded in his own fashion. He

omitted to warn Connecticut of the meeting of the court, judged the

case peremptorily, and ordered the restitution of the lands. The colony

exercised its right of appeal, and prolonging the investigation to

1743 got Dudley’s decision reversed.[215] Gov. Fitz-John Winthrop, of

Connecticut, died in Boston while on a visit, November 27, 1707, and

was commemorated by Cotton Mather in a funeral sermon, called in his

pedantic manner _Winthropi justa_. The vacant chair was now taken by

Gurdon Saltonstall, who did his generation great service and little

harm. The policy of Connecticut soon felt his active nature.[216] Her

frontier towns towards New York were guarded, and Massachusetts found

she had an efficient ally in her warfare at the eastward.

Connecticut, which was steadily rising above 20,000 in population in

Saltonstall’s time,—though estimates vary,—was growing more rigorous

in observance and creed in contrast to the strengthening of liberalism

in Massachusetts. Saltonstall favored the Saybrook platform, which put

the management of church affairs in a “consociation of ministers,”—a

sort of presbytery. Though a general accord in religious views linked

her people together, she harbored some strange sectaries, like the

Rogerenes of New London, who were allied in some respects with the

Seventh Day Baptists of Westerly, just over the Rhode Island line.

[Illustration: GURDON SALTONSTALL.

This follows the original picture at Yale College by an unknown artist.

There is a photograph of it in Kingsley’s _Yale College_, i. 33. There

is another engraving in Hollister’s _Connecticut_, ii. 584. There is an

engraving by Doolittle noted in the _Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p.

30.]

[Illustration

The annexed autograph is from a MS. in Harvard College library

[5325.23], entitled: _A Memorial offered to the General Assembly of

his Majesties Colony of Connecticut hold in Hartford, May y^e 10th,

1716, By Gurdon Saltonstall, Esq., one of the Trustees in Trust of the

Mohegan Fields in the Township of New London, for the use of Cesar,

Sachem of Mohegan & his Indians, upon the occasion of y^e sd Cesar’s

Complaint to y^e sd Assembly of wrong done him and his Indians in and

upon the sd Fields._]

It was during Dudley’s time that the emission of paper money had begun

to have a portentous aspect. These financial hazards and disputes, as

turning people’s thoughts from old issues, had the effect to soften

some of the asperities of Dudley’s closing years of service.[217] He

ceased to wrangle for a salary, and omitted to reject Elisha Cooke when

again returned by the House in 1715 as a member of the council.[218]

Massachusetts had grown much more slowly than her neighbors, and five

or six thousand of her youth had fallen in the wars. This all meant a

great burden upon the survivors, and in this struggle for existence

there was no comforting feeling for Dudley that he had helped them in

their trials. The puritan class was hardly more content. Sewall’s diary

shows the constant tribulation of his representative spirit: sorrowed

at one time by the rumor of a play in the council chamber; provoked

again on the queen’s birthday at the mocking of his efforts to check

the drinking of healths with which it was celebrated on Saturday night;

and thankful, as he confessed again, that he heard not the salutes on

the Lord’s Day, which were paid to Nicholson when he finally set sail

for England.

It was the 15th of September (1714) when news came of the death of

Queen Anne. A sloop sent from England with orders was wrecked on

Cohasset rocks, and the government was left in ignorance for the

time being of the course which had been marked out for it. Dudley’s

commission legally expired six months after the sovereign’s demise,

if nothing should be done to prolong it. As the time came near, a

committee of the council approached him to provide for the entrance of

the “Devolution government,” as Sewall termed the executive functions,

which then under the charter devolved on the council. Dudley met the

issue with characteristic unbending; and some of his appointees knew

their places well enough to reject the council’s renewal of their

commission, being still satisfied with Dudley’s, as they professed.

His son Paul besought the ministers to pray for his father as still

the chief executive, and intrigued to prevent the proclamation of the

council for a fast being read in the pulpits. In March what purported

to be a copy of an order for his reinstatement reached Dudley by way of

New York. It was quite sufficient; and with an escort of four troops of

horse clattering over Boston neck, he hurried (March 21, 1715) to the

town house, where he displayed and proclaimed his new commission. His

further lease of power, however, was not a long one.

[Illustration: WILLIAM DUMMER.

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston.]

There were new times at the English court when the German George I.

ruled England; when he gave his ugly Killmansegge and Schulenberg

places among the English peeresses, and the new Countess of Darlington

and Duchess of Kendall simpered in their uncouth English. The Whig

lords must now bend their gouty knees, and set forth in poor German or

convenient—perhaps inconvenient—Latin what the interests of distant

New England required. We may well suspect that this German dullard knew

little and cared less when it was explained to him that the opposing

factions of the private and public bank in his American province of

Massachusetts Bay were each manœuvring for a governor of their stripe.

We may well wonder if he was foolish enough to read the address of

the ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, or the address even

of the General Court, which came to him a little later. His advisers

might have rejoiced that Increase Mather, pleading his age, had been

excused from becoming the bearer of these messages, or of that of the

ministers, at least.[219]

[Illustration: JEREMIAH DUMMER.

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston. It was at one

time in the Mass. Hist. Soc. gallery. (Cf. _Proceedings_, ii. 289, 296,

300, 302.) It has been ascribed to Sir Godfrey Kneller.]

The friends of a private bank carried their point far enough to secure

to Col. Elisha Burgess the coveted commission, who, however, was better

satisfied with the thousand pounds which the friends of a public bank

were willing to pay him, and so he declined the appointment. The same

power that paid the money now got the commission issued to Col. Samuel

Shute, and the news which reached Boston (April 21, 1715) of Burgess’

appointment was swiftly followed by the tidings of Shute’s ascendency,

which meant, it was well known, that Jonathan Belcher, of Cambridge,

and Jeremiah Dummer had been successful in their diplomacy in this, as

well as in the displacing of Tailer as lieutenant-governor by William

Dummer. The latter was Dudley’s son-in-law, and the appointment gilded

the pill which the late governor was prepared to swallow.

The good people of Massachusetts had not long got over their

thanksgiving for the suppression of the Scottish rebellion when, just

about sunset, October 3, 1716, a gun in the harbor told of Shute’s

arrival. Two days later, at the town house, he laid his hand on the

Bible, “kissing it very industriously,” as Sewall records, and swore to

do his duty. On the following Sunday he attended King’s Chapel, and on

Thursday he was present at the usual lecture of the Congregationalists,

when he heard Cotton Mather preach.[220] He seemed very docile, and

doubtless smiled when Mather’s fulsome address to him was paraded in

a broadside; very docile, too, when he yielded to Sewall’s entreaty

one evening that he would not go to a dancing-master’s ball and

scandalize his name. But on November 7 (1716), in his set speech to

the legislature, there were signs of trouble. New England had peace

on her frontiers, and that was not conducive to quiet in her domestic

politics. The conflict came, and Shute was hardly equal to it. The

legislature could look to a support nearly unanimous of almost a

hundred thousand people in the province, being not much short of a

quarter of the entire population of the English colonies; and a people

like the New Englanders, who could annually export £300,000 worth of

products, were not deficient at least in business courage.

Shute’s instructions as to the demands he should make were not novel.

It was the old story of a fixed salary, a house to live in, the command

of the Rhode Island militia, the rebuilding of Pemaquid, and the

censorship of the press. The governor brought their financial plight

to the attention of the House, and they voted more bills of credit. He

told them of other things which he and the king expected of them, and

they did nothing. So he prorogued them.

It was incumbent on the Crown governor to encourage the production of

naval stores, as a means of diverting attention from manufactures,

which might injure the market in the colonies for English products.

One Bridger had already made himself obnoxious, and been suspected

of malfeasance as “surveyor-general of woods,” in Dudley’s time, and

it was far from conciliatory to a people who found the Crown’s right

to mast-timber burdensome[221] that Bridger appeared in the train of

Shute with a new commission. The surveyor was arraigned by the younger

Elisha Cooke, who was now succeeding to his father’s leadership, and

Shute defending him, a rather lively contention followed, which was not

quieted till Dummer, in England, finally got Bridger removed.[222] To

one of Shute’s speeches the House made a reply, and Shute threatened he

would prevent their printing it.

[Illustration: ELISHA COOKE, THE YOUNGER.

This follows a red-chalk drawing once owned by the Rev. Wm. Bentley,

of Salem, and now in the gallery of the American Antiquarian

Society. Cooke was born in Boston in 1678, and died in 1737. His

only publication appears to be the following: _Mr. Cook’s just and

seasonable vindication, respecting some affairs transacted in the late

general assembly at Boston_. [Boston, 1720.] The second impression,

corrected. [Boston, 1720.] Sabin, iv. 16,305; Brinley, no. 1,474.]

Its appearance, nevertheless, in the _News-Letter_ established the

freedom of the press in Massachusetts.[223] The governor informed

the Board of Trade that the province was bound to wrest from him as

much of his representative prerogative as it could, and its action

certainly seemed sometimes to have no other purpose than to establish

precedents which might in some turn of fortune become useful. The House

chose the younger Cooke speaker in palpable defiance, and when he was

disapproved the members refused to go into another ballot, and the

governor prorogued them. When the new House assembled they contented

themselves with publishing a protest, and chose another speaker; and

then they diminished the “present” which they voted to the governor. It

seems clear that the House, in a rather undignified way, revelled in

their power, and often went beyond the limits of propriety. The charter

required that all acts should be reviewed by the Crown for approval.

The House dodged the necessity by passing resolves. Dummer in England

knew that such conduct only helped the Board of Trade to push the

plan of confederating all the provinces under a governor-general, and

intimated as much. The House was in no temper to be criticised by its

own agent, and voted to dismiss Dummer. The council in non-concurring

saved him; but the House retaliated by dropping his allowance.

The council was not without its troubles. Shute refused to attend its

meetings on Christmas. Sewall, ever alert at any chance of spurning

the day, “because,” as he chose to think, “the dissenters had come a

great way for their liberties,” broadly intimated that the council

still could pass its bills on that day, and the governor might take

whatever day he chose to sign them. It was certainly not a happy era in

Massachusetts. The legislature was not altogether wise or benign, and

Shute did nothing to make them so.[224]

The frontiers, for a space, had but a hazardous peace. In August, 1717,

Shute had gone to Arrowsick (Georgetown, Me.) to hold a conference

with the Indians, and had learned from a letter received there from

Sebastian Rasle, the Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, that any

attempt to occupy the lands beyond the Kennebec would lead to war,

and as we shall see the war came.[225] Meanwhile, life in Boston was

full of change and shadow. Pirates beset the people’s shipping, and

when the notorious “Whidaw” was cast away on Cape Cod (1717) they

heard with some satisfaction of the hundred dead bodies which were

washed ashore from the wreck. There was consequently one less terror

for their coasters and for the paltry sloops which were now beginning

to venture out for whales from Cape Cod and Nantucket.[226] There was

occasion, indeed, to foster and protect that and all industries, for

the purchasing power of their paper money was sinking lower and lower,

to the disturbance of all trade. When the province sought to make the

English manufacturers afford some slight contribution to restoration of

prosperity by imposing a duty of one per cent. on their manufactures

sent over, the bill was negatived by the king, with threats of loss

of their charter if any such device were repeated. In the same spirit

Parliament tried to suppress all iron-working in the province;[227] but

after much insistence the people were allowed the boon of making their

own nails![228] Some Scotch Irish had come over in 1718, and though

most of them went to New Hampshire and introduced the potato,[229]

enough remained in Boston to teach the art of linen-making. Spinning

under this prompting became a popular employment, and Boston appointed

a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools.[230]

Perhaps they could spin, if they could not forge; and Boston, with

her 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants to be clothed and fed, needed to

do something, if Parliament would permit. Her spirit was not always

subdued. In 1721 she instructed her representatives not to be deterred

by frown or threat from maintaining their charter privileges. “When

you come to grant allowances,” she said, “do not forget the growing

difficulties that we at this day labor under, and that poverty is

coming upon us as an armed man.”[231] The General Court emphasized its

call for frugality by forbidding the extravagant outlay for funerals,

which was becoming the fashion.[232] There might have been some scandal

at the haberdashery trade which the profuse habits of bestowing upon

their parsons gloves and rings made a possible circumstance, to say the

least, in more than one minister’s house. But a little innocent truck

in the study was not the ministers’ most pressing diversion. Cotton, or

rather Doctor Cotton Mather, as he had been called since Glasgow, in

1712, had given him a Doctorate of Divinity, bid for an ally against

the liberals.[233] When he and his father assisted in the ordination of

the new Baptist minister, Elisha Callender, in 1718; and when Dudley,

two years before his death,[234] joined Sewall in open attacks on

Leverett and the government of Harvard College, there is little doubt

where the sympathy of the Mathers lay.[235] They had hopes, too, that

the new Connecticut college would register their edicts, since they

could no longer enforce them at Cambridge. Sewall found the Lord’s

Supper unsuggestive of charity, when the deacon offered the cup to

Madam Winthrop before it was served to him; and we, to-day, had much

rather see him riding about the country on his circuit, distributing

tracts and sermons to squires and hostlers, and astonishing the

children, as he rode into the shire-towns under the escort of the

sheriff and his men.

But Yale College, of which so much was hoped by the lingering

puritanism, soon surprised them, when Timothy Cutler, its rector, with

one of its tutors, and other Connecticut ministers, embraced Episcopacy

in 1722. Governor Saltonstall was powerless to prevent it, when at

Commencement the story of that defection was told. Cutler went to

England, received Episcopal ordination, and came to Boston in 1724 to

take charge of one of its English churches.[236]

But before this the care of the body as well as of souls had proved

a source of dispute with the ministers. Cotton Mather had read in

the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society, to which he was sometimes

a contributor himself, of the method which was employed in Turkey

of disarming the small-pox of some of its terrors by the process

of inoculation.[237] That disease was now raging. While the town

was moving the governor to send the “Seahorse,” man-of-war, down to

Spectacle Island, because she had the pest among her crew, Mather

urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to make trial of the Turkish method. The

selectmen of Boston and the town meeting opposed it. The House forbade

it by bill; but the council hesitated. One of the most active of the

physicians of Boston strenuously objected. This was William Douglass,

who had been a student of medicine at Leyden and Paris, and who had

come to Boston three years before. Other physicians were likewise in

opposition. The passions were excited by the controversy; the press was

divided; and Mather, who about this time was finding the people “bloody

and barbarous,” the town “spiteful,” and the country “poisoned,”[238]

had a grenado thrown through his window.[239]

What with the political, financial, theological, and sanitary

disturbances of Shute’s time, and the freedom of the press, which

the governor had been foolish enough to give them the opportunity of

making the most of, the intellectual activity of the people had never

before occasioned so great a fecundity of print. The Boston man of

the early part of the eighteenth century resorted to the type-setter

as readily as he gossiped, and that was easily enough. In 1719 there

were five printing-presses running in Boston,[240] and the Exchange

was surrounded with booksellers’ shops. The practice of sales of books

at auctions had begun in 1717 with the disposing of the library of

the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, or at least its catalogue is thought to

be the first of such a sale. Thomas Fleet was selling his doggerel

ballads, and the boys and girls of New England first knew who Mother

Goose was when her nursery tales were published by Fleet in 1719. The

_News-Letter_ had been published for fifteen years, but not three

hundred were yet sold at an impression. Wm. Brooker, succeeding

Campbell as postmaster, felt it necessary to divide the town and give

the _News-Letter_ a chance for an altercation, when in 1719 (Dec. 21)

he began the _Boston Gazette_. James Franklin had printed this paper

for Brooker, but the printing being taken from him he startled the

town with the _New England Courant_, which first appeared on Aug. 17,

1721. The new sheet was bold and saucy,—a sort of free lance, to which

people were not accustomed; and while it gave little news and had

few advertisements, its columns swarmed with what the staid citizens

called impertinences. It wildly attacked the new inoculation theory,

and elicited a public rebuke for its scandalous conduct from Increase

Mather, who was in turn attacked by it.[241]

The Mathers, Elisha Cooke, Sewall, and above all Jeremiah Dummer in his

_Defence of the New England Charters_,[242] published not a little of

a terse and combative strain, which the student to-day finds needful

to read, if he would understand the tides and eddies of the life of

the time. Boston was also nourishing some reputable chroniclers of

her own story. Thomas Prince, who after his graduation had gone to

England, had returned in 1717, yet to live forty years ministering to

his people of the Old South, gathering the most considerable of the

early collections of books and papers, illustrating in good part the

history of New England,[243] and contributing less than we could wish

to such stores from his own writing. Dr. William Douglass, as we have

seen, had dipped into the controversies of the day, practised his pen

in the public journals, not always temperately or with good taste, and

thirty years later was to vent so much prejudice in his _Summary of

the British Settlements_ that, though the book is suggestive, it is

an unsafe guide to the student. Thomas Hutchinson, much the best of

our colonial historians, was now a boy of six or seven in the forms of

Master Bernard’s grammar school.

* * * * *

[Illustration: THOMAS PRINCE.

This follows an oil painting in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian

Society at Worcester. There is also of Prince a mezzotint engraving of

a painting, of which there is a heliotype in the _Mem. Hist. Boston_,

ii. 221. A portrait after a painting by John Greenwood is noted in the

_Catal. Cabinet, Mass. Hist._ Soc., no. 26. Cf. _Proceedings_, i. 448.]

But war was again imminent. As early as 1709 it had been considered

advisable to build a line of defences across Boston neck, and up to

1718 much money had been spent upon it. The peaceful aspect of the

affairs at that moment had been an inducement to disband the watch

which they had kept there; but in 1721 it had been again set. Gov.

Phillips, of Nova Scotia, had been in Boston to talk over the situation

at the eastward, for the warnings of Rasle rendered a continuance

of quiet doubtful. The younger Castin had been seized and taken to

Boston,[244] and bloodshed could hardly be averted; for though peace

existed between England and France, there was little question but

the encroachments and ravages of the Indians were instigated from

Quebec. Sewall tried to arrest the progress of events, and published

his _Memorial relating to the Kennebec Indians_,—an argument for

persuasion rather than for force. On July 25, 1722, Gov. Shute and his

council declared war against the eastern Indians, and a harrowing

struggle began.[245] On the 1st of January, 1723, guns at the Castle

before sunrise told the town that Shute had sailed for England, and

when the people were astir Boston Light was sinking behind him. He went

to arraign the colony in person before the Privy Council, and never

returned to his government. The conduct of affairs, meanwhile, fell to

Dummer, the lieutenant-governor, who made Cotton Mather inexpressibly

happy by what the divine called his wise and good administration.

* * * * *

[Illustration: BOSTON LIGHT AND THE PROVINCE SLOOP.

Sketched from an old mezzotint, “W. Burgis del. and fecit,” and

inscribed: “To the merchants of Boston this view of the Light House is

most humbly presented By their Humble Serv^t, W^m. Burgis.” Its date is

probably not far from 1712. See _Boston Record Commissioners’ Reports_,

vii. 97.]

New Hampshire had been included in Shute’s commission, but Vaughan, the

lieutenant-governor, claimed that during Shute’s stay in Boston his

direct authority lapsed, and his lieutenant was the resident executive.

The strife and bickering which followed this assumption had been among

Shute’s tribulations, which were somewhat mitigated when influence at

London secured the displacement of Vaughan by John Wentworth.[246]

The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut did not order their

enactments to be submitted to the royal supervision, a requirement

which at one time there was danger would be made,[247] but which was in

good part prevented by the ready reasoning of Dummer in his _Defence

of the New England Charters_. One act of Rhode Island, published at

this time, seemingly invalidates that colony’s claim for unfailing

toleration. In the edition of her laws printed in 1715 there is one

which disfranchises Romanists. No one is able to find beyond dispute

when, in the chaotic mass of her enactments, it became a law. To

relieve the pride of her people from any imputation so contrary to the

professed purport of all her history, Arnold, the historian of Rhode

Island, has labored to show that the wording of the statute was simply

the interpretation of a committee; but it was an interpretation that

successive editors kept up till after the close of the Revolutionary

War.[248]

* * * * *

In Massachusetts matters were not much improved under the rule of

Dummer. An issue soon arose. The House insisted that Walton and Moody,

commanders at the eastward, should be suspended, and refused supplies

till it was done. Dummer claimed that as commander-in-chief he had the

responsibility of such a change. He was forced, however, to yield, and

appointed Thomas Westbrooke in the place of Walton, who, having obeyed

the governor rather than the House, found he must retire without the

pay which he had earned.

In England Shute was presenting to the king his memorial against the

province.[249] When the House heard of it they appropriated £100 to

hire counsel for the defence; but the upper branch gave the resolve a

negative. So the House sent an address to the king,[250] in which the

council would not join. The House would then despatch a new agent; the

council was content with Dummer; a compromise was reached, by which

Elisha Cooke was sent to join Dummer. Shute and his opponents were in

due time heard before the Privy Council. The aspect of affairs grew

threatening. A Boston man, John Colman, wrote home that the charter

was in danger.[251] It ended in the sealing of a new explanatory and

supplemental charter,[252] in which Shute’s demands were fairly met,

in that there was in it an undeniable expression of the right of the

governor to reject a speaker, while the House itself was denied the

right to adjourn beyond two days. With this new order Col. Samuel Vetch

had hopes of succeeding Shute; but the old governor was not displaced.

The General Court prudently accepted the new charter, January 15, 1725.

[Illustration: INCREASE MATHER.

This follows a corresponding likeness in Cotton Mather’s _Parentator_,

Boston, 1724 (Harv. Col. lib., 10397.17). Cf. Edmund Calamy’s ed. of

_Memoirs of the life of the late Rev. Increase Mather_, London, 1725

(Ibid., 10397.16). Engravings are noted in the _Catal. Cab. MS. Hist.

Soc._, p. 35; and of the painted portraits in the same catalogue,

no. 23 is of Mather. There is an original painting in the American

Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which is engraved in the _Mem. Hist.

of Boston_, i. 587.]

While the provincial charter had been thus in jeopardy, the father of

it died. The most conspicuous of New Englanders in his day, though

his fame is somewhat overshadowed by his son’s, breathed his last,

when Increase Mather died, on August 23, 1723, at the advanced age of

eighty-four. When he was buried, a hundred and threescore scholars of

Harvard College walked in such a procession as never before attended

the burial of a New England divine. In most respects he was the

greatest of a race which was born with traits of prowess. His learning

was large, far better assimilated than that of the son, and his power

over men far happier and more consistent. His industry was enormous; he

sometimes worked in his study sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.

What Cotton Mather called the “tonitruous cogency” of his pulpit

discourse was often alarming to the timid, but not always effective

for the mass. The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers.

There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a

gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the

nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the

Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the _Courant_, were printing the

hymns of Isaac Watts.

A year after the father died, there was a new election of president

of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The

governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and

never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. Their first choice was

Joseph Sewall, of the Old South, a son of the Judge; “chosen for his

piety,” as the disappointed man sneeringly wrote in his diary. The

“miserable” college, when Sewall declined, chose the minister of the

Manifesto Church, a direct thrust at Matherism; but no choice was

accepted till Benjamin Wadsworth was elected. The college had another

conflict when Timothy Cutler, after receiving Episcopal ordination

in England, came to Boston, and by virtue of his new position as a

Church of England ministrant set up his claim to a seat in the Board of

Overseers. He sought in vain. Mather meantime was contriving to fortify

himself, and determined to have a synod to organize some resistance

to this increasing antagonism. Dummer entertained a petition to that

end, but John Checkley, one of Cutler’s friends, ferreted out the

scheme, and there followed a sharp rebuke from the lords justices,

who pronounced the calling of such a body the prerogative of the

crown, and the movement came to naught. This same John Checkley, a

polemical churchman, in Boston, who kept a toy shop, united with it the

publishing of tracts, in which the prevailing theology was attacked.

In 1719 he had reprinted Charles Leslie’s _Short and Easy Method with

the Deists_, and later accompanied Cutler and his friends to England.

While there he caused another edition of Leslie to be printed (1723),

but added to it his own Boston imprint, and what was more important,

he appended a _Discourse concerning Episcopacy_, which seems to have

been a refashioning of another of Leslie’s treatises, by which Checkley

had pointedly demonstrated the schism of all ordination except an

Episcopal one. With a stock of this book he came back to Boston, and

at the “Sign of the Crown and Blue gate, over against the west end

of the town house,” he began to sell them. The magistrates found in

some expressions “a false and scandalous libel” on themselves. A trial

followed with an appeal, which dragged its slow length along; and

in the midst of it Checkley delivered a memorable speech in his own

defence. It ended in his being fined fifty pounds.

Checkley left Boston not long after for England; and came back again

to settle in Providence, and administer the rites of the church as he

believed they should be administered.

During all this wearisome contention in Boston, there is a glimpse of

the humaner, and perhaps more godly, spirit in the gathering of men

together under the lead of Joseph Marion to effect the insuring of

neighbors’ worldly possessions from the chances of fire and the sea.

It is not unlikely that this first trial of a system which to-day

contributes so much to the sum of our happiness began then to indicate

that mutual helpfulness might conduce as much to Christian comfort as

keeping eyes alert for “scandalous libels.”

But there was no way yet, except by keeping other eyes alert along

a musket barrel, to meet the dangers of the frontier. When the

authorities erected (1724) Fort Dummer[253] near a spot where

Brattleboro’ now stands, they made the first English settlement in what

is to-day Vermont. On the 22d of August (1724), as Sewall records, “the

‘Sheerness’ comes up and Captain Harmon with his Neridgwack scalps,

at which there is great shouting and triumph. The Lord help us to

rejoice with trembling!” Another diary of the day makes these scalps

twenty-eight, one of them Bombazeen’s, and another that of “fryer

Railes,”—and this is the shape in which the tidings came to Boston of

that quick onset at Norridgewock, when the Jesuit Sebastian Rasle fell

among his Indian neophytes, ten days before this.[254]

In May of the next year, Lovewell the borderer made his last fight

at Fryeburg in Maine, and the news reached Boston on the 13th of the

same month. The ballad of Pigwacket, commemorating that bloody work,

passed into the popular memory, and abided there for many a year.[255]

In the following November four eastern sagamores came to Boston, and

what is known as Dummer’s treaty was signed there on December 16, and

the next summer (August 6) it was ratified at Falmouth (Portland).

There was to be little disturbance of the peace thus consummated for

a score of years to come. The war had borne heavily on Massachusetts.

In such money as they had, it had during its four years’ continuance

cost £240,000, and when the assembly voted an issue of another £50,000

of bills, Dummer, under royal instructions, withheld his approval. His

fidelity cost him his salary for a while, which the House refused to

vote until some compromise was reached.

While this quieting of the eastern frontier was in progress, the

western settlements of Massachusetts were being pushed across the

mountains beyond the Connecticut, and the peopling of Berkshire began

at Sheffield in 1725. The leading agents in this movement were Col.

Jacob Wendell, of Boston, and Col. Jonathan Stoddard, of Northampton.

The occupation proved a barrier against the Dutch of New York, though

it was sixteen years before the next settlement was made in the

Housatonic valley at Pittsfield.[256]

[Illustration: MATHER BYLES.

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the cabinet of the Antiquarian

Society at Worcester, which came to it with other portraits by the

bequest of the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem (b. Boston, June 22,

1759; d. Salem, December 29, 1819). There is another likeness in the

_Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 227. Cf. Catal. _Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p.

37.]

During the night of the 29th of October, 1727, New England experienced

one of the severest earthquakes which she had known. The next morning

Cotton Mather made a speech in Boston, and this, with an account of

the earthquake’s effects, was published at once as _The Terror of the

Lord_, followed shortly by his _Boanerges_, intended to strengthen

the impressions of the awful hour in the minds of the people. Haven’s

bibliography shows the affluence of the ministerial mind in the face

of this event.[257] Sermon after sermon was published, and the press

had not ceased issuing the renewed editions of some of them when Cotton

Mather died on the 13th of February, 1728, and gave the preachers

another fruitful theme. Here was a man whose views of a fitting mundane

life were as repulsive as those of Sebastian Rasle, and whose scalp

would have aroused Quebec as Rasle’s did Boston. We have grown to judge

each by a higher standard than the prejudices and doctrines of their

time.[258]

* * * * *

After the departure of Shute, Wentworth continued as

lieutenant-governor in the executive chair of New Hampshire. The

assembly tried to insist upon a speaker whom he disapproved, but the

explanatory charter of Massachusetts came to Wentworth’s support, and

he prevailed; and under his lead the province experienced its share

of the Indian warfare. Rhode Island remained all the time under Gov.

Cranston, who had held the office by election thirty successive years

when he died in 1727. Her chief point of contact with her neighbors

was her bills of credit, which had sunk so low that they had become

little better than a pest to herself and to the neighboring colonies.

Connecticut kept her activity and quiet ways within herself. She took

no part in the war beyond putting her border towns in a state of

defence.

* * * * *

Shute was pursuing his aim in England. He had succeeded in getting

from the king an explicit threat, under whose pressure it was thought

the Massachusetts assembly would see the advisability of establishing

a fixed salary for the royal governor, when George I. died (June 11,

1727), and Shute’s commission was vacated. He slipped into a pension of

£600 a year, and died an old man. The news of the king’s death reached

Boston in August, and on the 14th George II. was proclaimed with

military parade. The ministers beguiled themselves, as usual, preaching

many sermons on the death of a good king, and Mather Byles published a

poem.

Since 1720 William Burnet, a son of Bishop Burnet, had been governor of

New York and New Jersey, whither he had gone to retrieve a fortune lost

in stock speculations; and with a numerous family to support, he felt

the necessity of it. The new king relieved him of some embarrassment,

occasioned by a growing unpopularity in his government, by directing

his transfer to the vacant chair of Massachusetts, signing his

commission in March. He reached Boston July 13, and as he was escorted

to the Bunch of Grapes tavern[259] the people marked his noticeable

presence and his suave manners, and might have predicted a calmer sway

from him than proved to be in store. He was flattered by his reception,

and even ordered the publication of some eulogistic verses, which

Mather Byles, the clerical wit of the time, addressed to him.[260]

[Illustration: GEORGE II.

From a print in Entick’s _Gen. Hist. of the late War_ (2d ed. 1765)

vol. ii., frontispiece.]

His instructions were of the sort that the province had got used to,

though perhaps they hinted more pointedly of the danger which awaited

the charter, if the salary question was not agreeably settled. Burnet’s

speech opened the legislative war. The assembly answered it by voting

him a larger allowance than was usual,—but still an allowance.

The town of Boston had the speech read to it in town meeting, and

voted _nemine contradicente_, as we read in the records,[261] in the

assembly’s spirit. The House now asked to be prorogued. The governor

refused, thinking the £1,000 a month which the sitting cost might

bring them to terms. This failing, he resorted to manœuvres which even

Chalmers censures. He removed the General Court to Salem, when, in

a sort of grim irony, it recorded a resolve to legalize proceedings

passed in an unaccustomed place, and consequently unconstitutional,

as they claimed. The House now addressed a memorial to the king and

refused the governor a copy of it, and, helped by Boston merchants

to pay the cost, the representatives despatched Jonathan Belcher to

coöperate with Francis Wilks, now the resident agent in London, in

obtaining the king’s favorable attention to their plea. This appeal

gave the governor a pretext for releasing the legislature for three

months,—and perhaps the device of the House had that purpose.

The Board of Trade heard both sides, sustained the governor, and

advised the king to lay the facts before Parliament. The House in turn

ordered a historical summary of all the proceedings relating to the

salary question from the time of Phips to be edited and printed.[262]

The governor dissolved the assembly, and took his revenge in

withholding his signature to the bill for their own pay. A new election

sent to Boston an assembly which was of the same temper. Burnet told

them of the danger from the Board of Trade’s advice to the Crown;

their own agents wrote to them there was no danger; and so the House

continued as bold as ever. The governor directed their reassembling at

Cambridge. Here they voted afresh the allowance, which was scorned as

before. Meanwhile the governor got some literary recreation, for which

his acquirements well fitted him, by printing moral and entertaining

papers in the _New England Journal_; and if this did not bring him an

income, he managed to eke one out by increasing the rate of clearance

fees at the custom house, which all went into his own pockets.

Returning one day from Cambridge to Boston, in August, 1729, he was

thrown into the water by the overturning of his carriage. A fever

ensued, and he died September 7. The legislature gave him an impressive

funeral, and voted £2,000 to his children; and his “character,” by

Parson Colman, was circulated in a folio half-sheet.[263]

Dummer, as lieutenant-governor, again took the executive’s chair, and

fought over the salary question once more; and the council, as before,

steadily refused to join in the payment of the agents of the House.

Jonathan Belcher, lately the agent of the province, was now

commissioned governor. He came of a New England stock, and his

father had gained a fortune in trade, and had secured some political

consideration as a member of the council. His mother was a daughter of

Thomas Danforth, one of the ablest of the leading politicians under the

old charter. The new governor had graduated at Harvard College; and

foreign travel had added ease and attraction, with some of the wiles of

the world, to a presentable person. He had been accustomed to dispense

his fortune in ways to draw attention and give him consequence. He

had thrown out intimations in high quarters in England that the view

he once held on the prerogative had undergone a change, and that he

knew the turbulent spirits of his native province well enough to manage

them. Wilks and Shute had seconded his professions, and his appointment

followed. With instructions pitched to a higher demand than ever

before, he was sent off to try his skill with an intractable people.

Meanwhile Dummer had been superseded by Tailer, a former incumbent

of the lieutenant-governorship, chiefly because the naval office he

was occupying was wanted for another. Tailer was at the time in New

England, and received his commission before Belcher arrived, which

was not till August 10, 1730. So amid the terror, from a new invasion

of small-pox which had withdrawn the town from the observance of its

centenary,[264] and with signs of a new life, as well as a new era, in

the relief which the law was giving to the baptists and the quakers

from the burden of the parish taxes, and with the stranger element of

their population developing a new Irish Presbyterian church under John

Moorhead,[265] the people of Boston received their recusant townsman

as governor. He made his speech in due time to the General Court.

Cato, he told them, went beyond reason in letting his obstinacy lure

him to destruction. This reference to the salary contention did not

intimidate them; for the House had information from its own agents

that the jealousies of the party leaders in England were not likely

to let any issue affecting the continuance of the charter be forced

upon Parliament. In any event there was a disposition rather to accept

parliamentary domination, whatever it might be, than surrender one

jot of their principles. With such a disposition the House became

stubborn,—politely so. It even voted the governor liberal grants for

the services which he had rendered as agent, and he took the gratuities

though he had abandoned the grantors. The allowances for his services

as governor he could not well accept under such instructions as bound

him; and as he needed the pay, his son solicited permission from the

home government for the father to receive the usual grants. The request

was allowed, and the salary contention came virtually to an end. When

Belcher approved a grant of £500 to be placed in the Bank of England

to the credit of the province’s agent, he little suspected he was

furnishing the means to bring about his own overthrow. His conduct

of his office rendered such an overthrow likely. The times, with all

failings, had not seen before such flagrant attempts to serve party

friends with the spoils of office. The public was so sensitive that

even the younger Cooke, accepting a judgeship with some traits of

sycophancy, fell in their good opinion.

The House set up a claim to audit all bills for which they granted

money, and attaching such a proviso to their grants, such votes

successively received the governor’s veto. This denied the public

officers their salaries, and occasioned distress that the home

government was besought to alleviate. The governor’s position was

confirmed, and when the news of it came the House somewhat ludicrously

asked him to appoint a day of fasting and prayer, since they were under

such a “divine displeasure.” The governor thought the matter more

mundane than divine, and refused. So in the autumn of 1733 the House

saved its pride one forenoon by passing a bill with the proviso, and in

the afternoon satisfied its sense of expediency by reversing the vote.

Thus the delegates in their ungraceful way succumbed, as the governor

did two years later, respecting the salary question. Each side was

humbled, and affairs went smoothly for a while, though the depreciation

of the paper in which the governor was paid did not quite fill the

measure of his content.[266]

* * * * *

Commercial distress always conduces to emotional disturbance in a

community, and the history of the “Great Awakening,” as it was called,

is no exception to the rule. This religious revival began to make

itself felt in 1734, under an impulse from Jonathan Edwards,[267]

and later, under the ministrations of George Whitefield, the wild

passion—for it became scarce else—spread through the churches and

communities of New England.[268]

[Illustration]

Mather Byles, Judge Danforth, and Thomas Prince supported the movement

in the _New England Weekly Journal_. Thomas Foxcroft and others,

reinforced by a large part of the country ministers, fought the

battle in sermon and pamphlet. Benjamin Colman gave the movement a

qualified commendation. It found various classes of opponents. Charles

Chauncy condemned it for its hot-bed sustenance, its “commotion in the

passions,” and its precarious growth.[269] Thomas Fleet, the publisher

of children’s books, turned the wit which enlivened his evening _vendu_

at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, into the columns of the _Boston

Evening Post_, which he had just started. Here he held up Whitefield to

ridicule, just as Joseph Green and other wits held up in the same place

the pomp of Belcher to public derision. Dr. Douglass[270] reckoned up

the thousand pounds sterling that were lost to the families of working

people by what he called a misuse of time in attending the midday

mass-meetings, to which Whitefield ministered. The passion and fervor

swelled, lapsed, returned, dwindled, and died; some counted the wrecks

it left, some wondered at its transient impressiveness, and a few

occasionally struggled to revive it.[271] Amid all the consternation

attending what William Cooper in the election sermon of 1740 called

“an empty treasury, a defenceless country and embarrassed trade,” New

England managed to raise 1,000 men to send off to join the fleet of

Admiral Vernon in the West India waters. Scarce a hundred of them ever

returned.[272]

[Illustration: AN ENGLISH FLEET OF THIS PERIOD.

From Popple’s great map, _The British Empire in North America_, 1732.

Admiral Preble says in his “Vessels of war built at Portsmouth” (_N.

E. Hist. and Gen. Reg._, 1868, p. 393) that the “Falkland” was built

in 1690, and carried 54 guns; but in some MS. emendations in the copy

of his paper in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soc., he says she

was probably built between 1694 and 1696. She is considered to be

the earliest man-of-war built in the colonies. Within a short time

after 1743, three vessels were built in New England for the royal

navy,—the “America,” “Boston,” and “Essex.” The same writer, in _The

United Service_, January, 1884, p. 98, etc., describing the changes in

armament of vessels during the 18th century, defines ships-of-the-line

as carrying 50 guns or more on three decks; frigates, 20 to 50 guns on

two decks. Sloops-of-war with guns on one deck, and corvettes with guns

on the poop and forecastle only, came in later.]

The social life of the chief town of New England passed on, meanwhile,

in the shadow of these ominous uncertainties. Jeremy Gridley had as

early as 1731 started _The Weekly Rehearsal_, and had given the more

scholarly classes this to ponder upon, and that to be entertained with,

in columns more purely literary than they had ever known before. If

such people welcomed the poems of Isaac Watts,—and one which Watts

addressed to Belcher was just now printed in Boston,—they caused

Richard Fry, an English printer, freshly come to Boston, to hold a high

opinion of their literary taste, because they relieved his shelves

of twelve hundred copies of the poems of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire

bard. In 1731 they listened at a Thursday lecture to Colman’s eulogy

of Thomas Hollis as a patron of learning; and the neighboring college

mourned in him the principal benefactor of this time. Lemercier, the

minister of the Huguenots in Boston, published a Church History of

Geneva (1732), which was a passing talk. Cox, a bookseller near the

town house, got out (1734) a _Bibliotheca Curiosa_, describing his

stock,—enormous for the times. Thomas Prince, the minister of the

Old South, let his antiquarian zeal bring back the early struggles of

the first settlers, when he printed (1731) the homely _Memoirs_ of

Roger Clap, of Dorchester, while the century sermons of Foxcroft in

Boston (1730), and of Callender in Rhode Island (1739), made the pews

slumbrous then, and command big prices to-day. Thomas Prince, moreover,

was in travail with his _Chronological History of New England_. He

published it in 1736, and the General Court paused to take note of

it, and forgot for a moment money schemes and revivals to learn how

in the “year 1, first month, 6th day” Adam appeared, to lead the long

chronology which Prince felt bound to run down before he got to his

proper theme. He had already wearied everybody so much, when he had

gone far enough to embrace two or three years only of the New England

story, that no one longer encouraged him, and “the leading work of

history published in America up to that time” remains a fragment for

the antiquaries to regret.[273]

It was in the year 1741 that the Boston Cadets came into existence

as the governor’s body-guard. It was earlier, that Thomas Hancock,

who had married the daughter of Henchman, the bookseller, by whom he

was indoctrinated with the principles of successful trade, built the

stone mansion on Beacon Hill which John Hancock, his nephew, later

made more famous.[274] It was in this time of commercial distress

that, according to Bennett, an observer, the reputation of the ladies

of Boston suffered if they went to a dancing-assembly lately set up;

but they could drive about with their negro footmen, and “neglect the

affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in

London.” And when the finest lady in Boston, his Excellency’s wife,

was buried in 1736, we read of the horses of the hearse covered with

broadcloth and escutcheons, and of other parade and adornment, which

gave tradespeople something to do and money to earn. Artisans needed

then more than now such adventitious help.

[Illustration: BENJAMIN POLLARD.

This likeness of one of the first captains of the Boston Cadets follows

an original by Blackburn in the gallery of the Mass. Hist Society. It

was Pollard who received Shirley on his return from Louisbourg. _Mem.

Hist. Boston_, ii. 119. He died in 1756. Cf. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._,

i. 498, xvi. 390; _Catal. of the Cabinet_, no. 76.]

Not a hatter might make as many hats as he would, because he injured

by so much the trade of the English hatter, and Parliament interdicted

(1732) any such rivalry. The poor man paid dear for his molasses,

because Parliament compelled the merchant to buy it of the English

sugar islands, instead of the French colonies in the West Indies.[275]

He paid more for his rum, because Parliament protected the English

distillers. The merchant smuggled and had no pangs of conscience; and

what smuggling could do was very likely shown in the stately mansion

that Thomas Hancock built.[276] Can we wonder that the new country did

not attract as many settlers as it might; that town rates in Boston

increased from £8,600 in 1738 to £11,000 in 1741, and the polls fell

off from 3,395 to 2,972; and that Sam. Adams, graduating at Harvard

in 1740, took for his Commencement part the inquiry, “Whether it be

lawful to resist the superior magistrates, if the Commonwealth cannot

be otherwise preserved?”

Belcher played the potentate with the Indians, and made his treaties

with them as his predecessors had done. He met them at Falmouth

(Portland) in 1732, and at Deerfield in 1735. Perhaps he was fairer in

his dealings with them than he was with his fellows of the whiter skin,

for he has passed into history as the least entitled to esteem of all

the line of royal governors in Massachusetts,—a depreciation perhaps

helped by his being born on the soil. His political paths were too

devious. Hutchinson tells us that when Tailer, the lieutenant-governor,

died in 1732, it was Adam Winthrop that Belcher openly favored in New

England as the successor, while he intrigued with the Board of Trade to

secure the appointment of Paul Mascarene; yet to no avail, for Spencer

Phips, the adopted son of Sir William, succeeded to the place.

[Illustration]

New Hampshire had been reunited with Massachusetts under Burnet, and

she had proved much more tractable than the larger colony in yielding

the point of the fixed salary to the governor. She had hopes of

being in some way rewarded for it. Under Belcher matters grew worse.

He quarrelled with the lieutenant-governor, and David Dunbar, the

surveyor-general of the king’s lands, came into the place, but without

healing dissensions. Dunbar had the support of influential persons

like Benning Wentworth and Theodore Atkinson; and Belcher made what he

could out of the friendship of Richard Waldron, the secretary.[277]

Massachusetts, as well as her governor, had grievances against her

neighbor; and she prohibited by legislation the circulation within

her bounds of the promissory notes of New Hampshire whose redemption

was not well secured. New Hampshire and Massachusetts were never

again under a single executive. Wentworth chanced to be in London when

Belcher’s downfall came, and he readily slipped into the executive seat

of his province.[278]

[Illustration: Script

After the picture (in the Mass. Hist. Society’s gallery) painted on

the voyage over by Smybert, who accompanied him. Cf. _Catal. Cabinet

Mass. Hist. Soc._, no. 41. A photograph of the picture of Berkeley and

his family by Smybert, now at Yale College, is given in Noah Porter’s

_Two Hundredth Birthday of Bishop George Berkeley_, N. Y. 1885; and

in Kingsley’s _Yale College_, i. 59. Smybert later painted many

portraits in Boston. Cf. _Mem. Hist. Boston_, iv. 384, with references.

His pictures, together with those of Blackburn, Pelham, and Copley,

richly preserve to us the look and costume of the better classes of

New England during the provincial time. Cf. Wm. H. Whitmore’s _Notes

on Peter Pelham_, Boston, 1867; Arthur Dexter’s paper on the “Fine

Arts in Boston” in _Mem. Hist. Boston_, vol. iv., with references in

the notes; A. T. Perkins on the portraits of Smybert and Blackburn in

_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, Dec. 1878, p. 385, and May, 1879, p. 93. For

historic costume see Dr. Edward Eggleston’s “Colonists at Home” in

_The Century_, xxix. 882. It was when Copley was most in vogue that

the habits of the upper classes reached in their dress that profusion

of silk and satin, brocaded damask and ruffles, ermine and laces,

velvet and gilt braid, which makes up the descriptions in Mr. Perkins’

enumeration of Copley’s portraits. (A. T. Perkins’ _Life and Works of

J. S. Copley_, Boston, 1873. Cf. also Martha B. Amory’s “John Singleton

Copley” in _Scribner’s Monthly_, March, 1881, and her _Domestic and

Artistic life of Copley_, Boston, 1882.)]

The Rhode Islanders ejected (1732) Jenckes, their governor, because he

tried to stay their wild course in the emission of paper money. The

lieutenant-governor, John Wanton, led the opponents of Jenckes, and

secured the election of his brother, William Wanton, and two years

later succeeded to the chair himself.

George Berkeley, in England, had been pronouncing the age barren of

every glorious theme. Perhaps to transcend this level he conceived

a project of establishing a college in Bermuda for Indians and

missionaries.[279] So he came over to Newport (1729) to buy American

lands, and await or perhaps force a rise on them. The death of George

I. had crossed his pious scheme by drying up his fountains. Newport

was now a thriving town of 5,000 souls, the chief town in a colony

of perhaps 18,000 inhabitants. It had an Episcopal church in which

Berkeley sometimes preached, and to which he gave an organ. He had

brought over with him a Scotch artist, John Smybert, and so the patron

and his family, happy on the whole, though his glorious project had

not fructified, came out of the canvas under Smybert’s pencil; and

the picture went to Yale College, where we may see it now,[280] and

afterwards so did his books, and the deed conveying his Newport

farm,[281] when after two or three years he had gone back to England, a

disappointed man.[282]

Not long afterwards another man with a mission ventured on a different

project in the little colony. James Franklin, who had found it prudent

to leave Massachusetts, when he told the august assembly that they

did not do all they might to catch pirates, came to this nest of

free-booters, and started a newspaper, the _Rhode Island Gazette_, the

first in the colony, and saw it fail within a year.

When the Spanish war was coming on, in 1739, the plucky little colony

put herself on a war footing. She built the “Tartar,” a war-sloop of

115 tons;[283] her merchants, the Wantons, the Malbones, and others,

ran five privateers out to sea; and even her quakers found ways to

help. Seven watch-towers were built along the coast, Fort George was

garrisoned, and a battery frowned on Block Island.[284]

[Illustration: WILLIAM SHIRLEY.

This follows an engraving, “T. Hudson, pinxt.; J. McArdell, fecit,”

reproduced in J. C. Smith’s _Brit. Mezzotint Portraits_, p. 896. Cf.

_Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p. 26; _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii.,

frontispiece.]

In Connecticut, on Saltonstall’s death in 1724, Joseph Talcott

succeeded and held office during the rest of Belcher’s time.

[Illustration: BOSTON HARBOR, 1732.

From Popple’s _British Empire in America_ (1732).]

The rule by which good ends sanctified base means came to its limit.

Belcher, who had not been without high support,[285] was removed on the

6th of May, 1741; when he had sufficiently indoctrinated his opponents

in his own wily ways, and they had not hesitated to use them.