THE CHARTER POLITY.
“And then we’ll raise, on these wild shores,
A structure of wise government, and show
In our New World a glorious spectacle
Of social order.”
MRS. HALE’S _Ormond Grosvenor_.
The fundamental law of the colonies of Massachusetts Bay was the
charter, which bore the crown seal. The old parchment contained a
permit and a fiat. It gave the corporation the right to enlarge or
decrease its numbers at its option, and to establish the terms on
which new members should be admitted to its franchises. It decreed
that the governor and his assistants should be elected by the
suffrages of the Company at large. Every freeman, as the members of
the corporation were called, was entitled to vote.[713]
On the 3d of August, 1630, at Charlestown, Winthrop convened
his assistants, and held the first court under the transferred
charter.[714] It was the earliest baby-cry of the provincial
government. Administrative functions were at once assumed. Measures
were initiated which looked to the support of ministers; the question
of wages was adjusted; and an order was issued for the arrest of
Thomas Morton,[715] who, through the carelessness of Allerton, the
Plymouth agent, had returned to New England, and once more “hied to
his old nest” at Merry-mount, only to renew his godless pranks.[716]
“Such was the first colonial legislation, and such the first
legislative body. No heralds, no wigs, no cannon, no gilding, were
necessary to impose upon the senses or give majesty and authority to
law.”
Two months later,[717] a general assembly of the freemen of the
colony was convened at Boston.[718] In the Assembly the charter
vested the fundamental legislative authority.[719] It was the
colonial Parliament. At this session more than a hundred planters
were admitted to the franchises of the corporation;[720] and since
this accession increased the preëxisting inconvenience of gathering
the whole Company for purposes of legislation, the freemen ceded to
the governor and his assistants the whole political power, reserving
only the right to supply vacancies.[721] The tenure of office was
unlimited;[722] perhaps it was tacitly understood to be, as in the
old English law, “during good behavior”—_quamdiu se bene gesserint_.
For a season the government was an elective aristocracy. It was
oligarchical, like that of Venice.
This endured but little more than a twelvemonth. In May, 1631, the
freemen met again, “after corn was set,” and revoked a part of the
authority of which they had been too lavish. The government was
curbed by a reservation to the commons of the right to make such
annual changes as the majority should desire.[723]
“At this same time a law was established pregnant with evil, and with
good. ‘To the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of
honest and good men’—so runs the old text—‘it is ordered and agreed
that, for the time to come, no man shall be admitted to the freedom
of this body politic but such as are members of some of the churches
within the corporate limit.’ This rule stood unchanged until after
the Restoration. Thus was the elective franchise narrowed. The polity
was a sort of theocracy; God himself, speaking through the lips of
his elect, was to govern his people. An aristocracy was founded; but
not on wealth, or blood, or rank. The servant, the bondman, might
be a member of the church, and therefore a freeman of the Company.
Other states have limited the possession of political rights to
the opulent, to freeholders, to the first-born. The colonists of
Massachusetts, scrupulously refusing to the clergy the least shadow
of political power, established the reign of the visible church, a
commonwealth of the chosen people in covenant with God.”[724]
But we must not let the boldness and presumption of this act blind
us to its inconsistency and its evil tendency. If men might enjoy
the franchise only by uniting with the church, ambitious men, wicked
men, might become hypocrites, that they might get power. When
church-membership became the road to political authority, there was
danger that audacious and unchastened interlopers might usurp the
government, as they did in England under Whitgift, and Williams, and
Laud.
This law was an inconsistency, because it was a radical departure
from the primal principle of Massachusetts ecclesiasticism, the
separation of church and state, and the complete independence of the
individual churches.[725] Now it was affirmed that the state must
unfold within the church.[726] Indeed, a kind of state church was
developed.[727] This is evident from two facts. The clergy were to be
supported, not merely by the contributions of actual church-members,
but it was decreed that “all who are instructed in the word of
God must contribute for those by whom they are taught in all good
things.”[728] The government was empowered to curb ecclesiastical
errorists; and “if any church should grow schismatical, rending
itself from the communion of other churches, or should walk
incorrigibly and obstinately in any corrupt way, contrary to the word
of God, in such case the civil magistrate was directed to put forth
his coercive power.”[729]
Thus individual religious independence, child of the Protestant
principle, was strangled. Our fathers honestly erred. Purity of
religious worship was their goal; and in order to that, they desired
the unclogged enjoyment of what they esteemed the divinely-appointed
means of grace. Their model was the Mosaic code. They did not
remember that God had superseded it by a new dispensation.
The Pilgrims were wise and devout men, and in most respects they were
a century in advance of their generation; but as a body, they did not
understand the golden rule of toleration. Divorcing church and state
in theory, in practice they married them.
“It is folly,” remarks an English scholar who has himself rehearsed
the story of the Pilgrims, “for either British or American encomiasts
to seek to disguise this fact. It is on record. All may read it.
Impartial history is compelled to acknowledge that very few, even of
the foremost thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century, had
any just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the New
Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole Judge of human faith,
and interferes with opinions or creeds only when they run to seed
in riot, and develope consequences inimical to social virtue and
political order.”[730]
But notwithstanding the fact that the Pilgrims erected a theocracy,
and by conferring upon the civil arm jurisdiction in religion, opened
the way to unjust persecution, it is also true that they “builded
better than they knew;” for the principles they professed eventually
forced their children to a broader platform. They secured the future.
They were the acorn; let the nineteenth century be the oak.
“For we doubt not, through the ages
One increasing purpose runs;
And the thoughts of men are widened
With the process of the suns.”