Conceived in Liberty (82 page)

But through it all remained Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton; as always, unrepentant; as always, ready to come out on top. Phips had lost prestige from the witch frenzy; the old Puritan theocrats had been thoroughly discredited; rationalism was now stronger than ever—but political events were bringing Stoughton to the brink of power.

Governor Phips now lost the confidence of the Crown for taking a vigorous
part in defending Massachusetts liberties against the depredations of royal officials, and for his conflicts with other governors. In the summer of 1692 a Captain Short tried to impress Bostonians into the English navy. When two members of the Massachusetts General Court opposed these despotic acts, Short invaded their homes and assaulted them. Short then failed to obey orders by Phips to follow him eastward to Maine. Infuriated at these peccadilloes, Phips, on his return to Boston in early 1693, fought with Captain Short on the street, knocked him down, and beat his cane over Short’s head. Phips then imprisoned Short and had him shipped to England for trial. In connection with Short’s arrest, the Governor also got into a row with Short’s successor and with the government of New Hampshire. In addition, Phips, in his capacity as commander in chief of the king’s armed forces in the Northeast, came into conflict with Lieutenant Governor Usher of New Hampshire, who repulsed Phips’ attempt to inspect the fort at Portsmouth as well as his demand to search the New Hampshire towns for deserters from an English ship.

Governor Phips also defended Massachusetts’ liberties in opposing the depredations of Jahleel Brenton, whom Edward Randolph had contrived to have appointed as royal collector of customs for New England. Brenton, son of Rhode Island merchant William Brenton, enforced the duties rigorously, but Phips joined the Massachusetts merchants in arguing that jurisdiction over customs collecting belonged to his own, more pliable, naval officers. When Brenton, toward the end of 1693, seized a ship arriving in Boston from the West Indies, the irascible Phips threatened to break every bone in Brenton’s body and to cut off the ears of Brenton’s witnesses, if he did not release the vessel. Phips punctuated the threat by beating Brenton with his cane and fists. Even Edward Randolph, though surveyor general of the king’s customs in America, was flatly refused an accounting of the customs books by Governor Phips.

Moreover, Phips sponsored a proposal to exempt Massachusetts from the exactions and requirements of the Navigation Acts. And when the Speaker of the Massachusetts House, Nathaniel Byfield, had the temerity to call for greater royal control over Massachusetts, with the notorious Joseph Dudley as governor, Phips had him expelled from the House.

In addition, Phips, a man of decided pro-Leislerian sympathies, came into sharp conflict with Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York, a partisan of the royalist oligarchy of that colony. Both men claimed jurisdiction over the Connecticut militia, and Fletcher threatened to take under New York jurisdiction the island of Martha’s Vineyard, by this time a part of Massachusetts. Fletcher also demanded the surrender of young Abraham Gouverneur, one of the convicted (but released) Leislerians, who had moved to Boston. Gouverneur had written a letter, seized by Fletcher, highly critical of the New York chief executive. Phips angrily refused Fletcher’s importunate demand, and also informed Fletcher’s agent that New York’s
former governor Henry Sloughter should have been brought to trial because of his murder of Leisler and Milborne.

With the accumulation of cases concerning Phips’ opposition to royal power over Massachusetts, the king finally yielded to the charges (especially Brenton’s) and to the anti-Phips machinations of men like Joseph Dudley, and recalled Phips to England in February 1694 to answer charges of misconduct. Fighting for his political life, Phips tried to obtain a vote of support for his continuance by the General Court. Bolstered by the support of Increase Mather, Phips won a bare majority of the democratic House of Representatives but the relatively oligarchic Council, headed by the implacable Stoughton, was determined to dispose of Phips. Phips finally sailed for England at the end of 1694 and died soon after arriving in England.

Phips’ recall and death left the executive power in the hands of none other than Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, who now achieved his longterm objective of assuming power in Massachusetts. Stoughton was to remain as acting governor for the remainder of the decade.

With Phips gone, the days of a liberal governor were over. No more any quixotic defense of Massachusetts liberties. Instead, Stoughton swiftly molded a proroyalist ruling clique of spoilsmen and plunderers in the best Dudley tradition. Stoughton’s major allies were the selfsame Dudley, still trying to win the permanent spot of governor, and Speaker Byfield, whose daughter was married to Stoughton’s nephew. Opposition to Stoughton centered in the more democratic lower house. Thus, in 1696 the House of Representatives voted to send an agent to England to work for restoration of the old Massachusetts charter, but the Council oligarchy naturally vetoed the plan.

With the Glorious Revolution over, a royal government fixed on Massachusetts, and the inconclusive war with France dragging to a close (and in 1697 with the
status quo ante
restored in the colonies), King William now had time to turn his attention to enforcing the imperial system upon America. The great trading center of Massachusetts especially needed attention, for there the navigation laws were still virtually unenforced. The London merchants, in particular, were pressing the Crown more than ever to crack down on their colonial rivals.

As a result, three significant steps were taken to tighten imperial control of the colonies and to compel enforcement of the navigation laws. For one thing, Parliament in 1696 passed another Navigation Act, which (1) confined all colonial trade to English-built ships; (2) required all colonial governors—including the elected governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island—to take an oath to enforce the navigation laws; (3) gave the royal customs official in the colonies the right of forcible search and seizure; (4) stipulated that colonial governors appointed by proprietors must be approved by the king; (5) forced merchants reexporting enumerated articles bought from another colony (for example, tobacco from the South) to post a bond to insure that
the goods not be sold to another European country; and (6) authorized the Crown to establish special vice admiralty courts to enforce the navigation laws.

Second, also in 1696, the administration of colonial affairs was taken from the Lords of Trade, a committee of the Privy Council dominated by the court aristocracy, and shifted to a new and independent Board of Trade. Although the new board contained seven privy councillors, the active working members were eight paid officials generally representing the London merchants. Among its many functions, the board was empowered to recommend the disallowing of laws conflicting with English law or policy.

The third step, the following year, was the creation by the Privy Council of the network of vice admiralty courts for the colonies, authorized in the Navigation Act. These courts were specially created for the trial and punishment of violators of the Navigation Acts. Prior to 1697, accused violators were tried at the regular common-law colonial courts. This meant that the judges were colonists who probably disapproved of the restrictive laws, and that the trials were by juries almost invariably sympathetic to the violators. To surmount this problem, the Privy Council now commissioned the royal colonial governors as vice admirals, each empowered to create a vice admiralty court under his jurisdiction. The vice admiralty court could now convict violators without the inconvenience of putting the case to a jury of the defendant’s peers, for here trial was conducted by the judge only. The judges, of course, were to be royal officials, in effect appointed by the governors, as were all of the vice admiralty court officials. In practice, the judges had the full management of the vice admiralty courts; and to ensure diligence in convicting offenders, the judges were paid a percentage of the value of the violator’s goods that they condemned. Enhancing the power of each judge was the fact that each court had one judge only, although in some cases the judge appointed a deputy to try cases; for instance, the judge of the Massachusetts court, the jurisdiction of which covered New Hampshire, appointed a deputy for the latter colony.

Since the vice admiralty posts were only assigned to royal governors, the Massachusetts court was assigned jurisdiction over Rhode Island, and the New York court over Connecticut and the Jerseys.

In 1699 the English also moved against the growth of manufacturing in America. The colonists were accustomed to rural household manufacture of textiles for their own use, but now New England and Long Island were beginning to manufacture woolens for commercial markets and beginning to outcompete the powerful English woolen industry. Not only were the English manufacturers alarmed, but so also were the English merchants, who stood to lose control of the trade of the Southern colonies should the latter purchase their manufactured goods from Boston instead of from England. Therefore, Parliament passed the Woolen Act of 1699, prohibiting the export of wool or woolens from any American colony, even to another colony.

Instrumental in drafting and implementing these measures was none other than the old enemy of the American colonies, Edward Randolph. Randolph had had a great deal of experience with recalcitrant juries in the early 1680s and renewed that experience when surveyor general of the customs in America in the early 1690s. His later enforcement difficulties occurred particularly in Maryland and by the spring of 1694 Randolph was reporting to England on trade-act enforcement: “I find that by the partiality of juries and others, that I can obtain no cause for His Majesty upon the most apparent evidences.”

Returning home in the fall of 1695, Randolph submitted a lengthy memorandum on his findings. Randolph was now brought in to advise on the new Navigation Act, and he was one of the two coauthors of the original draft of the act. Randolph then went to work for the new Board of Trade, of which his old friend the Earl of Bridgewater was president. And when the officers of the vice admiralty courts were selected, Randolph’s suggestions were adopted, as were, roughly, the boundaries of the court districts.

One of the major disputes in framing the Navigation Act stemmed from Randolph’s attempt to impose a royally appointed attorney general in every colony. To transfer full power over their trade from the colonies to the Crown, it was necessary for the prosecuting attorneys to be under Crown control. Randolph wanted the Crown to appoint all the attorneys general of the colonies directly. But the colonies themselves and their proprietors bitterly protested such a change and the Crown finally decided to appoint “advocates general” to prosecute admiralty cases, but to allow the colonies to continue to choose their own attorneys general. This meant that Crown agents would be limited to admiralty cases and, further, that jurisdictional disputes over the courts of trial might loom large in the future. The upshot was a diversity of pattern in the several colonies. But, generally, the colonial attorneys general were used also as Crown advocates general; only in Massachusetts and Virginia was a separate Crown official appointed. Because of Randolph’s good offices, Nathaniel Byfield was selected as the judge of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire Admiralty Court. But Wait Winthrop, the old weak-willed moderate and member of the Council, could not possibly accept this crowning of the nefarious Stoughton-Byfield alliance. These were the men whom Winthrop privately referred to as the Jacobite clique (the high Tory followers of the pretender James II), “who have in a little time got more by the government than all that have been before... [who] eat up the poor as bread and squeeze them to death by virtue of an office....” With the Massachusetts Council overriding Stoughton and refusing to assent to Byfield’s appointment, Winthrop, pulling strings in England, was able to get himself appointed as judge instead. Randolph bitterly concluded that the Massachusetts smugglers had “turned out Mr. Byfield, a man zealous for having the Acts of Trade duly executed.”

The settlement after the Glorious Revolution had made New Hampshire a royal colony; Samuel Allen, claimant to the proprietorship, was named royal governor. Allen’s son-in-law, the wealthy John Usher, served as lieutenant governor and resident executive of the colony. Usher struggled with the Assembly throughout the 1690s; he continually asked it for tax money, which the assemblymen claimed the colony was too poor to afford, and tried to conscript troops, which they failed to supply. The Assembly was thus the spokesman for the liberties of the people against the exactions of the royal and proprietary executive. Usher’s attempts to collect quitrents were largely futile, as no quitrents could be collected from a New Hampshire jury. When Usher urged the Assembly to raise more taxes, it replied that it would do so only if Usher would join them in petitioning for a return of the province to Massachusetts.

Finally, mass pressure from the citizens of New Hampshire persuaded Allen to discharge his generally hated son-in-law and to fill his post, in 1697, with the treasurer of New Hampshire, William Partridge. Partridge, powerful at court as a heavy supplier of masts and timber to the Royal Navy, now fought it out with Usher before the legislature for the office of lieutenant governor. The Council and Assembly insisted on Partridge in what the rattled Usher described as the “Piscataqua Rebellion”; the Assembly sent its profound thanks to the king for the new appointment. In regard to the tyrannical Usher, the Assembly assured the Crown that “there had been no disturbances but what he himself had made.”

We already noted that Benjamin Fletcher became royal governor of New York in 1692, and that though the convicted Leislerians were allowed
their rehabilitation, Fletcher was a staunch partisan of the old oligarchy. After the Leislerians received full royal pardon, Fletcher had to let Delanoy and others take their seats as assemblymen; he later blamed their obstructions for the allegedly inadequate defenses of the colony. In addition, Fletcher kept the conflicts alive by threatening to shoot anyone who in the May 1695 election would dare to vote for Delanoy. In the New York City elections that year, the despotic Fletcher sent roving bands of soldiers and sailors through the streets threatening to draft anyone who happened to vote “incorrectly.” These troops were also made freemen of the city arbitrarily in order to gain their votes against the popular Leislerian party. Such methods of intimidation were successful in confining public offices to the hands of the minority oligarchy.