government took advantage of the time to overthrow it. There were men
enough who had watched for such a chance. Though discontent with the
proprietor’s government had met very sharp frustration and rebuke twelve
years ago, when Davis and Pate went to the gallows for the treason of
emulating the example of Mr. Bacon in Virginia, as many wanted a change
now as had wanted it then, and this new opportunity seemed made for any
who chose to act upon its invitation. The mere fact of being governed
like a private estate and mediæval county palatine was very irksome
to the more ambitious spirits of the colony; and the more closely and
sedulously the proprietor attended to his government the more irksome did
it become. He dealt very harshly with opposition; he openly interfered
with elections to the assembly; he disallowed and set aside such
legislation as he did not like; he gave the offices of government to
men of his own kin or personal following; and the taxes were not always
spent for the public benefit. It was like the government of Virginia
with a petty king in residence. And that petty king, every one knew, was
of the popish party, whose part the great King at home had played to
his own undoing. Men fancied they saw new popish plots in every trivial
incident or shifting of affairs. If the panic had touched New York and
turned her government upside down, it was little to be wondered at that
it touched Maryland also. Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, the officer
who reduced Ireland “from a place of briskest trade and best paid rents
in Christendom to ruin and desolation,” and who had dared hold it for
James Stuart, despite the Parliament in London and the authority of
the Prince of Orange, was of Lord Baltimore’s kin and his very close
friend; and Maryland teemed as no other colony did with Roman Catholic
partisans. Lord Baltimore was, in fact, no laggard in his loyalty. He
promptly despatched instructions out of England commanding the immediate
proclamation of King William and Queen Mary to the province; but his
messenger died on the way, and Maryland seemed to lag behind the other
colonies in her loyalty. Upon which one John Coode, and some others,
pretending, perhaps believing, that the proprietor’s officers in the
colony meant to defy the crown and establish papacy, got together an
“Association in Arms for the Defence of the Protestant religion, and
for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province
of Maryland and all the English dominions,” officers of the militia and
the very Speaker of the colonial House acting with them; seized the
government of the colony (1689); convinced the King of their sincerity
and good faith in what had been done, though many of the best people in
the colony protested; ruled as their party pleased for two years; and
then welcomed a royal governor (1692). They had made Maryland a royal
province out of hand. Lord Baltimore was henceforth to receive only his
quit-rents and the proceeds of the export duties.
[Illustration: MAP OF NEW YORK IN 1695]
It was a Protestant revolution with a vengeance. Taxes were ordered
levied for the support of the Church of England. The immigration of
Roman Catholics was prohibited and the public celebration of the mass
forbidden by law. The seat of government was removed from St. Mary’s,
where the Catholic families held sway to whom the colony had owed
its establishment, and set up at Providence, presently to be known
as Annapolis, where the Protestant influence centred. Maryland was
transformed.
Everywhere in the colonies there was doubt for a little while what
government to obey, until things should be settled in England, and his
Majesty King William should have time to turn his attention to affairs in
America. Nowhere was the doubt more embarrassing than in East and West
Jersey, which seemed left without any general government at all. Formal
negotiations had been afoot in 1688, the very year of the revolution, for
the surrender of the rights of the East Jersey proprietors to the crown;
repeated transfers of proprietorship and redivisions of jurisdiction,
both by private sale and public grant, had from the first sadly confused
authority in the province; and when news came of what had happened in
England, some doubted whether there were either royal authority or
private right for the government of the growing hamlets of either colony.
Affairs presently settled even there, however, to their normal frame
again. For quite fourteen years longer the proprietors kept their right
to appoint governors and exercise superintendence there. The settlers in
the two provinces, moreover, were for the most part hard-headed English
and Scottish people, who were not to be disconcerted in the management
of their own affairs by trouble in England or the mere lack of a settled
general government. For quite three years (1689-1692) they waited,
without disturbance or excitement or any unusual interruption of their
quiet life, under the direction of their town and county officers; until
at last they learned what their government as a province was to be. There
were already five organized counties in East Jersey, and had been these
twenty years, since before the second coming of the Dutch (1674); and ten
thousand people crowded their little towns and the cleared spaces of the
forest about them. West Jersey, on the other side of the forests, by the
Delaware, had grown almost as fast. Both provinces had the means and the
men to take care of themselves.
It was not very long, after all, before government became a settled
and ordered power again under the new King. William of Orange was a
businesslike master, a real governor, not likely to do less, likely,
rather, to do more, than either James or Charles in the government of
the colonies; and the colonies felt the power of his systematic way of
rule very soon. The old charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island were
presently recognized again and confirmed; but Massachusetts, instead of
her old, got a new charter. Plymouth lost her separate rights altogether
and was merged with Massachusetts; and many things were changed. It must
have seemed to the older men in the towns of the Plymouth grant as if the
old freedom and dignity of their life had been done away with forever.
Plymouth was the oldest of the northern colonies, and had kept through
all the long seventy years of her separate life not a little of the fine
temper, the sober resoluteness, steadfastness, moderation, and nobility
given to her at the first by her pilgrim founders. Surely the King’s
advisers had forgotten her story when they thus summarily and without
compunction handed her government and territory over to Massachusetts, to
be, as it were, obliterated and robbed of their identity! But such, it
seemed, was their way of bringing system into the administration of the
northern colonies.
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM PHIPS]
The new charter was granted in 1691. It not only joined Plymouth to
Massachusetts, but Maine also, carrying the northern borders of the
province to the very banks of the St. Lawrence. But, though it extended
her boundaries, it curtailed her liberties, and it was this that the
men of the Bay principally noted. Their governor was thenceforth to be
appointed by the crown. There were to be courts of admiralty, customs
officers, and a post-office service directly dependent upon the ministers
in London. There was to be a representative General Court, almost
as before, consisting of the governor, his council, and a house of
deputies, and the governor’s council of twenty-eight was to be every
year, after the first, elected by the General Court itself, in which the
people’s representatives predominated. Only the General Court could lay
taxes and make general laws. But the King’s governor was to have the
right to veto any law of which he did not approve, and the crown behind
him might set the Court’s enactments aside, as disallowed, at any time
within three years after they were passed. All the old rules as to who
should vote for deputies, too, were changed. The right to vote was no
longer to be confined to members of the Puritan churches; it was to be
exercised by every man who had forty pounds’ worth of personal property,
or a freehold estate in land worth two pounds a year. Judges were to be
appointed by the governor and council; all other officials of the colony
by the governor alone.
It was something to have one of their own fellow colonists, a familiar
figure among them, at least, for their first governor under the new
arrangement, though that did not alter his powers, and he was hardly
the man they would themselves have chosen. Sir William Phips was only a
rough, pushing, self-made sailor, one of the youngest of the twenty-one
sons of an humble gunsmith in a little settlement close by the mouth of
the far-away Kennebec. He had been a ship’s carpenter, a common seaman, a
ship’s captain,—always sanguine, always adventurous, always on the make,
risking everything to win his way, and as cheerful and hearty and full
of confident plans when he had lost as when he had won. At last he had
actually made the fortune he was in quest of, by finding and recovering
the treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon in the southern seas. He had
been much in England, and had won favor in the court and out of it by his
bluff and honest energy and unfailing good-will, and his breezy manners,
brought fresh from the salt seas. King James had knighted him Sir William
for the Spanish treasure he brought into England, and had made him high
sheriff of New England when Sir Edmund Andros was governor there. In the
year 1690, the year before the new charter was signed, he had led an
expedition into the north and taken Acadia from the French, with much
excellent private plunder, and then had failed in an expedition against
Quebec. He was no statesman, and it was not pleasant for any man to be
the first governor under the new charter; but bluff Sir William, known to
every man in Boston, was better than a stranger might have been.
[Illustration: PHIPS RECOVERING THE SUNKEN TREASURE]
The new King’s coming to the throne in England had brought war in
its train, a long war with the French, as every one had foreseen it
must.—“King William’s War,” they called it in the colonies; and war with
the French meant fear and massacre on the northern borders, where the
French were but too apt at stirring the Indians to their fierce attacks
even in times of peace. It was this war Jacob Leisler had heard would
surely bring French ships into New York and a Roman Catholic government.
It gave Sir William Phips leave to make his expeditions against the
north, for adventure and profit, instead.
In 1692 a distemper showed itself at Salem, in Massachusetts, which
seemed for a little blacker than war itself,—an ominous distemper of
the mind. It was the year of frenzy against what men fancied to be
witchcraft, and Salem, where the chief madness was, saw nineteen persons
swing upon her gallows hill for commerce with the devil. Some really
believed them witches; some schemed to send their personal enemies to
the gallows with a false charge. Governor Phips was induced to appoint
special courts for the trial of the witches; and a long year went by
before men’s better thoughts, natural pity, and awakened consciences
called a halt upon the murderous frenzy, and Salem, with all the
province, tried to forget what had been done to the innocent.
[Illustration: WILLIAM PENN’S RESIDENCE IN 1699]
[Illustration: AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN SIR EDMUND ANDROS AND JAMES BLAIR]
In that year, 1692, the King appointed Benjamin Fletcher to be governor
of New York, and of Pennsylvania as well, which he was instructed to
bring within his jurisdiction, for the consolidation of government; and
Sir Lionel Copley, appointed in 1691, became royal governor of Maryland.
Sir Edmund Andros, too, was that year once more commissioned governor,
this time of Virginia, and stayed there full five years, a quieter if not
a wiser man than in the days of King James. The Virginians did not wholly
dislike him, taking him for what he was, a rough soldier, more efficient
than patient, who meant to do his duty according to his instructions,
but did not know how to do it in the wise way for his own interests and
the general peace. He honestly devoted himself to the welfare of the
colony, encouraged the growth of cotton in order that cloth might be
made, improved the methods of administration, and sought in more than one
way to better the sources of wealth. But the Virginians liked as little
as the other colonists did his zeal in the enforcement of the acts of
trade; and his arbitrary temper ruined him at last by bringing him into
collision with James Blair.
Andros’s predecessor in the governorship of Virginia had been Francis
Nicholson, a man who had been hardly more than a tool of James’s tyranny
a little while before in New York, but who was at heart something
better than a mere placeman. He was intemperate, and in private often
showed himself gross and licentious; but he had some of the gifts of a
statesman, and in quiet Virginia devoted himself very steadily to the
welfare of the people he governed, no less than to the advancement of
the general interests of the crown. James Blair had found in him an
intelligent friend, and not an opponent, when he sought to set up a
college in the colony. A great deal of Virginian politics centred in Mr.
Blair. He was a Scotsman bred to orders in the English Church, and was
but thirty-six when Sir Edmund Andros was made governor of Virginia. He
had come to the colony in 1685, at twenty-nine; and in 1690, the year
Mr. Nicholson became governor, he had been appointed commissary for
Virginia by the Bishop of London. Virginia was supposed to lie within the
see of London, and as the bishop’s commissary there it was Mr. Blair’s
duty to inspect, report upon, and administer discipline in the church
of the colony. He made it his first task to establish a college,—the
assembly, the governor, and every true friend of Virginia at his back
in the enterprise,—in order that education might sustain order and
enlightenment. The King granted a charter and revenues to the college
in 1692; the merchants of London subscribed right handsomely; Governor
Nicholson handed over to it three hundred and fifty pounds voted to him
by the assembly; and Virginia at last had the college she had wished and
planned for ever since the days of Sir George Yeardley. It was agreed
that it should be called the College of William and Mary.
[Illustration: THE FIRST CHURCH IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY]
But when Sir Edmund Andros came, Mr. Nicholson being sent to administer
the affairs of Maryland, it was found, after a few years’ trial, that
he and Mr. Blair could not live in the same colony. Mr. Blair was as
hot-tempered as Sir Edmund, and spoke his mind in as choleric and
unstinted a way. But Mr. Blair, though he was often boisterous, generally
managed, after the canny Scots manner, to be right as well, and generally
had both the law and the interests of the colony on his side when it came
to a contest, while Sir Edmund had a great talent for putting himself in
the wrong. When at last it came to a breach between the two, therefore,
as it did, Sir Edmund lost and Mr. Blair won. Sir Edmund was recalled to
England, and Mr. Nicholson was named governor once more. It was a long
time before Mr. Blair ceased to reign in Virginia. Mr. Nicholson became
instrumental in removing the capital from Jamestown, which Mr. Bacon had
burned, to Williamsburg, more wholesomely placed, ten miles back from
the river. The college also had been placed there; and there Mr. Blair
continued to preside as governors came and went.
For the _authorities_ and _sources_ for this period, see
the references under Sections I. to V. and VII. to IX. of
this chapter, so far as they cover the later years of the
seventeenth century.
END OF VOL. I.