Conceived in Liberty (31 page)

A decisive conference of Puritans took place at the Puritans’ intellectual center, Cambridge University, at the end of August 1629. In the Cambridge Agreement, a group of Puritan leaders from East Anglia agreed to join the Massachusetts Bay Company and to immigrate to America if the officers were to be chosen solely from immigrants to New England, and if the company charter were to be carried with them to the New World. Moreover, the Puritan stockholders remaining in England agreed to sell all their shares in the company to the emigrants; the Massachusetts Bay Company could now be completely located in New England as a self-governing Puritan colony. This was a legal action, because the Puritans had cleverly persuaded the king not to specify the location of the company in the charter. John Winthrop, a leading East Anglian attorney was appointed governor of the company and John Humphrey, brother-in-law of the highly influential Earl of Lincoln, deputy governor. When Humphrey decided to remain in England, he was replaced by Thomas Dudley, the steward of the Earl of Lincoln. Although the Rev. John White did send some West Country Puritans to Salem during 1630, the vast bulk of the great Puritan exodus of the 1630s—the Great Migration—came from East Anglia.
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The Great Migration of Puritans began immediately, and seventeen ships sailed from England in 1630 alone. They settled not only in Salem, but all along the Massachusetts coast, founding such towns as Watertown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Medford, and Newtown (later Cambridge). During the 1630s, from 20,000 to 25,000 people immigrated to Massachusetts; by 1640, 9,000 remained (deducting emigration from Massachusetts back home or to other lands), while only 1,000 people lived in Plymouth.

Thus, by 1630 the two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts
Bay, had managed to win for themselves virtual self-governing status, independent of English control. Like Virginia, the New England colonies began as chartered companies. But the Virginia Company continued to rule the colony from England, being finally expropriated and superseded by the Crown in 1620. The New England settlements, in contrast, were strongly impelled by religious motives. Hence, the Plymouth Pilgrims and Separatists were only loosely controlled by the parent company, and soon bought out that company completely, while the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Company transferred itself to, and completely blended with, the colony in America.

According to the Massachusetts Bay charter, the governor, deputy governor, and Council of Assistants were to be elected by the whole body of stockholders or “freemen.” This sounds highly democratic on paper, but the stumblingblock was that only twelve stockholders migrated to America, and all were officers of the colony. Since any new freemen had to be selected by the existing freemen, the natural tendency was to perpetuate a closed oligarchy and to select few new members. Rumblings of popular resistance occurred as early as the fall of 1630, when 109 settlers petitioned to be made freemen of the company. The freemen gave in to this request, but completely vitiated its effect by mendaciously claiming that the charter had put all power into the hands of the Council of Assistants, who could choose the governor and deputy governor and make all the laws. Moreover, the assistants were to hold office permanently, on good behavior. The
only
function of the body of freemen, it was alleged, was filling vacancies in the council. By thus failing to show the freemen the text of the charter, a dozen Puritan oligarchs managed to keep absolute control of the colony’s affairs for great lengths of time. In addition, though in violation of the charter, only Puritans were admitted to the body of freemen, thus insuring domination of the churches and the broad body politic by the church elders.

From the beginning, the authorities had trouble from the newly burgeoning smaller towns. At the beginning of 1631, a tax of sixty pounds was levied upon each settlement, to pay for frontier forts at Newtown. The inhabitants of Watertown promptly refused to pay the tax, assessed by the Council of Assistants, on the great old English ground that no community may be taxed without its own consent. As the Watertown protesters eloquently declared: “It was not safe to pay moneys after that sort, for fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage.” Here was the first tax strike in America, long anticipating the episode in Surry, Virginia. In 1632 the government bowed to the strike—after an apology was extracted from the resisters and the freemen assumed the power to elect the governor and the assistants (though the governor had to be chosen from the ranks of the assistants), and also to make tax levies. Or rather, this power was assumed by the
representatives
of the freemen—direct democracy now being held impractical in the large colony—and two
deputies were elected from each town in Massachusetts. For over a decade, the deputies and the assistants sat in the same house of the legislature (the General Court), but then separated into two houses of that court.

During the following year, political conflicts intensifed in the colony as opinion polarized two camps: Thomas Dudley, backed by the elders, accused Governor Winthrop of “leniency,” and of being negligent in instituting the absolute and complete “tyranny of the Lord-Brethren.” Dudley called, characteristically, for “heavier fines, severer whippings, more frequent banishments.” On the other hand, many of the freemen continued to grow restive at the oligarchical rule, and the leading Puritan divine, Rev. Thomas Hooker, arrived in Massachusetts to stand aghast and protest at the tyranny of the colony’s magistrates.

The struggle came to a head in 1634. A paper by Israel Stoughton denounced the government oligarchy for monopolizing power: “They made the laws, disposed lands, raised monies, punished offenders, etc. at their discretion; neither did the people know the portent....” The magistrates responded by burning the paper, but the argument would not thus be stifled. Finally a committee from each of the eight towns in Massachusetts Bay sent representatives to insist on the opening of the hitherto secret charter for the colony. When they then discovered that the lawmaking power was fully and legally vested in the freemen rather than in the assistants, the General Court from then on assumed full jurisdiction for the making of laws. The magistrates made sure, however, that not the
total
body of freemen, but the more malleable deputies in the General Court were actually to make the laws.

For a while, the General Court—especially the deputies in the lower house—was furious at the lengthy betrayal, and, led by Israel Stoughton as speaker of the deputies, it deposed Winthrop as governor and levied fines on some of the assistants. But the number of freemen was still restricted to Puritan church members by an act of 1631, and a law five years later prohibited any new churches from existing in the colony without securing the consent of the authorities. The loosening of the oligarchic rule in Massachusetts was therefore not very great. Indeed, Dudley, who had replaced Winthrop as governor, quickly prohibited Stoughton from any public office for a three-year period. Soon the General Court was all too happy to return Winthrop to office and depose Dudley.

A threat of English overlordship vanished in 1635 upon the dissolution of the Council for New England. The Council had failed financially; its doom had been assured when its fishing monopoly off the English coast was disallowed by the Crown. Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his associates still tried to menace the colony by proposing that the territory of New England be parceled out to individual proprietors in the Council. Gorges also tried his best to have the Massachusetts charter revoked.

The Crown, indeed, was thinking along similar lines. England was getting very worried about the virtual independence of Massachusetts
Bay. In 1634 the lords commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General, as Privy Council committee under the chairmanship of the formidable Archbishop Laud, moved firmly against the colony. Authorized to control the colonies as well as emigration, the commission moved, in the spring of 1635, to revoke the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company in the courts. The English courts severely rebuked the officer of the Massachusetts colony for not appearing at the trial, and decided to revoke the colony’s charter in 1637. Massachusetts prepared to arm to repel an English attack, but it was saved from such a confrontation by the beginnings of the Puritan Revolution the following year, a revolution that hopelessly distracted the English government from Massachusetts affairs for fully a generation.

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It must be noted that by no means all of the great wave of Puritan emigrants from East Anglia in the 1630s chose to go to Massachusetts Bay. A greater number moved to Barbados, other West Indian islands, and Ireland.

The Puritans had no sooner landed in the New World than they began coercively to “purify” their surroundings. As early as John Endecott’s arrival in Salem, the Puritans had surprisingly shifted from their loyal opposition within the Anglican church and had severed themselves from the Anglican communion. In this way, they became to a large extent as Separatist as the Plymouth Pilgrims they had previously despised. This act of separation was accomplished in 1629, with Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton as the guiding ministers. Two Puritan members of the Council, John and Samuel Browne, balked at this radical departure from Puritan beliefs, and moved to form an Anglican church of their own. This prompted the government to move quickly, in the first act of “purifying” the colony’s spiritual atmosphere. Governor Endecott protested that the Brownes’ speeches and activities were “tending to mutiny and faction,” and promptly deported them to England—thus serving notice that any Anglican worship in Massachusetts would be speedily prosecuted.

The Puritans also proceeded to the final destruction of Thomas Morton’s ill-starred Merrymount colony. For Morton, in 1629, had indeed reestablished his colony of the interracial frolic, the Anglican maypole, and brisk and efficient trade in Indian furs that competed with Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts offered to share the Bay Company’s fur trading monopoly with Morton, but the highly efficient Morton refused to do so, judging that he could easily outcompete the Massachusetts monopoly. This he did, far outstripping Massachusetts in the fur trade by over six to one. This the colony could not tolerate, and Captain Littleworth was sent to Merrymount with an armed troop. Littleworth cut down the maypole, burned
Morton’s house and confiscated his property, and proceeded to destroy the settlement. Morton was charged by the authorities with “alienating” the Indians—the reverse of the fact—and was again deported to England.

Back in England, the embittered Morton protested his persecution and worked for Gorges in trying to void the Plymouth and Massachusetts patents, but to no avail. Years later, returning to Massachusetts, the poverty-stricken Morton was heavily fined, was imprisoned for a year by the authorities, and died in Maine shortly after his release.

The Massachusetts colony was organized in towns. The church congregation of each town selected its minister. Unlike the thinly populated, extensive settlement of Virginia, the clustering in towns was ideal for having the minister and his aides keep watch on all the inhabitants. Although the congregation selected the minister, the town government paid his salary; in contrast to the poorly paid clergy of the Southern colonies, the salary was handsome indeed. Out of it the minister could maintain several slaves or indentured servants and amass a valuable library. The minister—himself a government official—exerted enormous political influence in the community, and only someone whom he certified as “godly” was likely to gain elected office. The congregation was ruled, not democratically by the members, but rather by its council of elders. Also highly important was the minister who functioned as “church teacher,” specializing in doctrinal matters.

Since only church members could vote in political elections, the requirements for admission became a matter of concern for every inhabitant. These requirements were rigorous. For one thing, the candidate had to satisfy the minister and elders of his complete adherence to pure doctrine and of his satisfactory personal conduct. And, once admitted, he was always subject to expulsion for deviations in either area.

As the years wore on, the rule of the oligarchy tended to tighten and polarize further, so that a lower proportion of the colony was admitted to church membership. The Puritan leaders made strenuous efforts to exclude the “unsanctified” from the colony. Thus, in 1636 the town of Boston outlawed any person’s entertaining strangers for more than two weeks, without obtaining permission from the town government. Salem went one better by hiring an inspector “to go from house to house... once a month to inquire what strangers... have thrust themselves into the town.” To quicken his incentive for snooping, he was rewarded with the fines levied against those whose crime in entertaining “strangers” he had uncovered. In 1637 the Massachusetts government imposed this outlawing of hospitality on all towns, and it was now illegal for any town to permit a stranger to move there without the consent of high government officials. As the years went on, however, and the colony grew, the authorities were forced by the need for labor to admit servants, apprentices, sailors, and artisans, who did not necessarily belong to the body of Puritan “saints.”

To the saints and their leaders, any idea of separation of church and state was anathema. As the Puritan synod put it in their
Platform of Church Discipline
(1648): “It is the duty of the magistrate to take care of matters of religion.... The end of the magistrate’s office is... godliness.” It is the duty of the magistrate to punish and repress “idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, venting corrupt and pernicious opinions... open contempt of the word preached, profanation of the Lord’s Day....” Should any congregation dare to “grow schismatical” or “walk incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own,” the magistrate was to “put forth his coercive power.” And if the state was to be the strong coercive arm of the church, so the church, in turn, was to foster in the public the duty of obedience to the state rulers: “Church government furthereth the people in yielding more hearty... obedience unto the civil government.” From this attitude, it followed for the Puritan that any rebel against the civil government was a “rebel and traitor” to God, and of course any criticism of, let alone rebellion against, Puritan rule was also a sin against God, the author of the plan for Puritan hegemony. So insistent indeed were the Puritans on the duty of obedience to civil government that the
content
of its decrees became almost irrelevant. As Rev. John Davenport, a leading Puritan divine, put it: “You must submit to the rulers’ authority, and perform all duties to them whom you have chosen... whether they be good or bad, by virtue of their relation between them and you.” Naturally, John Winthrop, who helped govern Massachusetts for twenty years after its inception, agreed with this sentiment. To Winthrop, natural liberty was a “wild beast,” while correct civil liberty meant being properly subjected to authority and restrained by “God’s ordinances.”