Conceived in Liberty (99 page)

Despite the myths of ideology and the threats of the whip, servants and slaves found many ways of protest and rebellion. Masters were continually denouncing servants for being disobedient, sullen, and lazy—little wonder, since they scarcely had reason to be cheerful or energetic. They did not live up to the ideal set for them by the obliging Cotton Mather in his
A Good Master Well-served
(1696): “Servants, you are the animate, separate active instruments of other men. Servants, your fingers, your hands, your feet are your masters’ and they should move according to the will of your masters.” One servant declared that he would much rather be in hell than serve his master; another, upon murdering his master, confessed that he had often told himself such words of reason as these: “I am flesh and blood, as well as my master, and therefore I know no reason why my master should not obey me, as well as I obey him.”

The Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, in
The Well-ordered Family
(1712, 1719), set forth the problem of the slaves’ and servants’ fondness for liberty and hence their rebelliousness, quite clearly: “Some servants are very high, proud.... They’ll scarce be commanded or restrained; they are much for liberty. They must have liberty for their tongues to speak almost what and when they please; liberty to give or receive visits of their own accord, and when they will;... liberty to... go and come almost when they will, without telling why or wherefore; such liberty they contend for; they won’t be ruled, governed, restrained....” Such servants, Wadsworth thundered, are very wicked “in their plain disobedience to God,... they trample God’s law, his authority under their feet.” Thus, God was adroitly linked to the rule of the masters.

Runaway servants and slaves were a problem from the beginning in Massachusetts
Bay. Mather, Willard, and Wadsworth took care to denounce running away as a grievous sin. And from the earliest days of the colony, Massachusetts law allowed the conscription of boats and horses in any chase after runaway labor.

It is not surprising that protest and rebelliousness took different forms among different classes of servants. The protest of contracted servants who had friends or relatives in the colony tended to take the form of unruly behavior or of taking their case to the courts. The more alienated and oppressed Negroes and foreign servants tended to run away. Thus, from 1629 through 1750 the latter class accounted for twenty-five percent of the cases of legal protest, but for sixty-nine percent of the runaways. Only a few servants bothered to go to court, and running away accounted for almost half of the recorded cases of protest, the latter growing with the shift in the type of forced labor during the eighteenth century.
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Here was a significant indication that the propaganda of the Puritan apologists was becoming increasingly ineffective. Increasingly, the unruliness of servants and slaves reduced the profitability of such labor for their masters. And Samuel Sewall pointed out that the Negro’s drive toward liberty made him a poor servant.

In the midst of this general miasma of opinion, some courageous voices were raised in behalf of liberty, even for Negroes. The eminent merchant Judge Samuel Sewall wrote, in
The Selling of Joseph
(1700), that “liberty is a real value next to life”; despite the Fall, all men, as the sons of Adam, “have equal rights into liberty.” To the excuse that the Negroes had already been enslaved through wars in Africa, Sewall trenchantly replied that “an unlawful war can’t make lawful captives. And by receiving we are in danger to promote and partake in their barbarous cruelties.” Indeed, the excuse of humanitarianism for purchasing Negro slaves rings thin; if true, the slave traders should have instantly released their charges instead of herding and dragging them at great cost in life to the New World.

The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 had ensured religious liberty for all Protestants and had eliminated the religious test for voting. An established church, however, was still permitted and the General Court quickly moved to establish a Puritan church in each town, to be supported by the taxpayers. The ministers, however, were to be selected locally by the voters of each town, including nonmembers of the church. This system was quickly shifted to confine the choice of a minister to the church’s members, subject to ratification by the town voters. Already, in 1694, opposition to the church by non-Puritans was blocking the ratification of ministers, and a new Massachusetts law provided for ratification by a Council of Elders of several churches, which council could then override a negative vote by the town.

Despite these props and privileges, however, the Puritan establishment
soon began to crumble. Once again it was the Quakers who took the lead in religious liberty. Despite attempts in 1702, 1706, and later to compel Quakers to pay for the Puritan establishment and to force Quaker towns to support a Puritan minister, Quaker resistance continued. The Quakers kept protesting to England over the compulsion to pay “the demands of the priest.” Finally, in 1728, the Massachusetts establishment was seriously weakened. A law of that year permitted Quakers and Baptists to refuse to pay taxes for support of Puritan ministers on the grounds of conscience. The provision was hedged about with numerous conditions, such as the necessity of the objectors to attend some church, and their taking an oath of allegiance to the colony. But in 1731, all Quakers were unconditionally exempted from religious taxes, and four years later Baptists were likewise exempted. Only in new towns without a minister were Baptists and Quakers still obliged to pay for the Puritan church. And even in new towns the regulation was often unenforced, as witness a law of 1759 allowing non-Quakers in any town with a Quaker majority to elect as many assessors for church taxes as the Quakers. Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Puritan establishment had, to some extent, broken down in Massachusetts.

Hand in hand with the Puritan establishment came, in 1692, a law compelling each town to provide for and impose compulsory schooling on its inhabitants. Many towns, however, did not abide by the provisions, or did not impose penalties for violations. Massachusetts then tightened the screws, imposing more stringent enforcement in 1701. Further linking government schooling with religion was the fact that the schoolmaster had to be approved by a board of Puritan ministers.

Inability to enforce compulsory schooling led to still further interventions, and to still more rigorous and brutal attempts at enforcement. Not only were fines increased on towns not furnishing compulsory schooling, but in 1735 parents not educating their children in ways thought fit by the state might see their children seized by the government and shipped to arbitrarily designated foster families.

In general, rule in Massachusetts by the Puritan oligarchy—once so rigorous and so fanatical—had been greatly weakened by blows from without and by crumbling from within by the end of the seventeenth century. With the advent of the eighteenth, the decline of Puritan control accelerated still further. For the first time, moreover, a determined liberal opposition developed
within
the church, and was able to retain a foothold.

Within the church there had emerged with the Salem witch-hunt liberal opposition led by the merchant Thomas Brattle and by the Reverend John Wise of Ipswich, who had gone to prison for protesting the Andros tyranny. In 1699, a group of influential liberals of Boston, headed by Thomas Brattle, his brother William, and John Leverett, founded the Brattle Street Church within the Puritan fold. The new church issued a manifesto, endorsing the
Half-Way Covenant, eliminating the requirement of a public examination for church membership, and allowing Half-Way Covenanters a vote in the church government. Conservative ministers were outraged, and such ministers as Increase Mather, John Higginson, and Nicholas Noyes fretted and fumed, but such men no longer had the coercive power of their forebears and the Brattle Street Church survived and flourished.

Perhaps even more vital a blow to the old diehards was the loss of old-guard control of Harvard College, which had been set up as the chief training ground of the Puritan theocracy. The theocrats had always been unlucky in their choice of presidents for the college, the first two being heretical (from the orthodox Puritan viewpoint) in regard to infant baptism. That is to say, they opposed it. Succeeding presidents were unwilling to give the post their full time; as a result, with President Increase Mather away in England obtaining the new Massachusetts charter in 1692, administration of the college fell into the hands of two outstanding liberal tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle. It was largely Leverett and Brattle who converted Harvard from an old-guard Puritan stronghold to a truly liberal arts college, reflecting new ideas of science and rationality. Mather, finally seeing what was happening by the late 1690s, tried to lead a counterrevolution to regain control of Harvard for the conservatives, but he was hampered by his unwillingness to give up his congregation and make Harvard his full-time activity. Mather persuaded the Massachusetts General Court in 1699 to exclude all but orthodox Puritans from the presidency or governing fellows of the college, but the royal governor, Lord Bellomont, vetoed the scheme. Finally, in the fall of 1701, with Mather relinquishing the post, the General Court elevated Vice President Willard to the presidency of Harvard. The Mathers were appalled, regarding the accession of the Reverend Mr. Willard, who was also inclined to heresy on infant baptism, as the first step down the slippery slope to liberal control of Harvard. When Brattle and Leverett, whom Mather had dismissed from the ruling “corporation” of the college, were reinstated to their membership by the General Court, the Mathers’ fears seemed confirmed. They were further aggravated by the General Court’s allowing Willard to reside in Boston most of the week, thus continuing to leave effective control in the hands of Leverett and Brattle.

The climax of the struggle over Harvard came in 1707, with the death of the Reverend Mr. Willard. The conservatives made a desperate effort to elect one of the Mathers to the presidency, but the fellows of Harvard corporation selected none other than John Leverett. The conservatives were extremely bitter; not only was Leverett the leader of the liberals, but he being a mere layman, his appointment ended ecclesiastical control of the college. With the help of Governor Joseph Dudley, who had long left the fold of the orthodox, and a petition of thirty-nine liberal Puritan ministers, Leverett’s selection and salary were confirmed by the General Court. The victory of liberalism at Harvard
was sealed at long last. The victory was further confirmed when, a few years later, the liberals won unshakable control of the Board of Fellows of the corporation.

The Mathers, bitter to the last, each wrote a letter of denunciation to Dudley, giving up Harvard as a lost cause. For his part, Leverett went on to put the stamp of liberalism and freedom of inquiry upon Harvard, and to help make it a vital intellectual center in the colonies. Control of Harvard— the main center for training young ministers and laymen—meant control of the future of the Puritan church. As Thomas Wertenbaker writes: “In short, the control of Harvard by the liberal group meant that the future was theirs... with the triumph of Leverett and the Brattles and the group they represented, one of the chief props of the old order, the Bible Commonwealth of Winthrop and Cotton, was... knocked away.”
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One of the first products of the new, Leverett-trained generation of Massachusetts intellectuals was the Reverend Benjamin Colman, one of Leverett’s favorite pupils, who graduated from Harvard in the 1690s. Colman was selected the first minister of the new Brattle Street Church, and was largely responsible for the church’s defiant liberal manifesto. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, The Reverend Mr. Colman had become one of Harvard’s fellows and one of its most influential members.

Defeated at every hand, the Mathers and the other Puritan reactionaries decided to counterattack by transforming Puritan church polity into virtual Presbyterianism. Puritanism had always been an uneasy halfway house between Congregational and Presbyterian rule; now, seeing that individual congregations could be captured by the liberal forces, the old guard decided to impose collective synodal control on the individual churches. A ministerial convention of the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts had already begun to meet by the turn of the century. In 1705, the convention adopted the Massachusetts Proposals, which had been adopted by the principal Boston divines under the lead of the Mathers. The convention made the sweeping proposal that ministerial associations, each headed by a standing council, should have the power to examine and license ministers and assign ministers to the various churches. The proposals were eventually adopted, with the exception of the rule of each association by a council. The result of the change was a shift of Massachusetts Puritanism in the direction, though not a complete adoption, of Presbyterian ecclesiology.

Sturdy liberal resistance to this shift was headed by the redoubtable Reverend John Wise. Defending Congregational polity, Wise published two famous and widely read works:
The Church’s Quarrel Exposed
(1710; 2nd ed., 1715) and
A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches
(1717). Impelled by his interest in the forms of church government, Wise
widened his focus to society and government as a whole. Steeping himself in the works of the great late-seventeenth century liberal German jurist Samuel Pufendorf, Wise concluded that “by natural right all men are born free,” thus extending the implications of his individualist argument far beyond church affairs. Wise also concluded that “power is originally in the people,” and that government should limit the natural freedom of the individual as little as consistent with social peace. Wise leveled a trenchant attack on rule by oligarchy: “For what is it that cunning and learned men can’t make the world swallow as an article of their creed if they are once invested with an uncontrollable power, and are to be the standing orators to mankind in matters of faith and obedience?” The natural equality of all men in liberty meant that “government was never established by God or nature, to give one man a prerogative to insult over another....”