Conceived in Liberty (80 page)

Long without an agent in England to defend its interests, Plymouth—the old mother colony—met its demise, suffering the same fate at the hands of Massachusetts as New Haven had at the hands of Connecticut three decades before. Plymouth’s General Court met for the last time in July 1692. Before dissolving, it set aside a day “to be kept as a day of solemn fasting and humiliation.”

Apart from Massachusetts’ territorial expansion, the only remaining remnant of the Dominion concept was the charter’s grant to Massachusetts of command over the militia of all the New England colonies. But this attempt at centralized command proved to be ineffective, as the colonists refused to serve outside their own colonies.

Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oates, Massachusetts’ agents in England, were too embittered to agree to the new charter, but Rev. Increase Mather decided to swallow his chagrin (particularly at granting the vote to non-Puritans) and to lead the colony to acceptance of the new dispensation. He and his friends of the ruling clique could at least look forward to sharing power with the Crown.

Increase Mather was also able to take comfort in the fact that he was allowed by the Crown to name the first governor, lieutenant governor, and councillors (who, in contrast to all the succeeding concillors, were appointive). At Mather’s guidance, the lusty Sir William Phips, an old friend of Mather’s and the hero of Port Royal, was appointed governor. William Stoughton, always emerging on top, was selected as lieutenant governor. Committed to the new dispensation, Mather brought back into the Council Wait Winthrop and others of the old merchant opportunists and excluded several of the most hard-line advocates of the old charter. These included such determined men of principle as Cooke, Oates, and their leader, Thomas Danforth. Finally, Phips, with Mather, arrived in Boston to take charge in May 1692.

During its first session in that year, the new General Court completed
the framework that was to rule Massachusetts until the end of the eighteenth century. One law chartered town corporations, another established the framework of representation in elections for the new General Court.

A common myth about this framework, much propagated by later writers, asserts that the seaboard towns were overrepresented in the General Court and that this malapportionment was perpetuated during the following century, giving ever-greater overrepresentation to the “merchant aristocracy” of the seaboard towns, as against the newer and smaller agricultural towns. In the first place, we have noted that the forty-shilling or forty-pound property qualification was—again contrary to later myths—low enough to allow almost everyone to vote. Therefore, if the seaboard did dominate, it was a domination based upon the votes of the seaboard’s average man. But, second, this plausible contention—plausible because population in fact moved westward from the seaboard, and a democracy will almost inevitably overrepresent older sections—turns out to be the reverse of the truth. For the 1692 apportionment law laid down the following rules: A town with less than forty eligible voters
could
send one representative to the House if it desired, but this was not compulsory. A town of more than forty qualified voters was
compelled
to send a representative. A town of over one hundred twenty eligible voters could send two delegates, but was forced to send at least one. Furthermore, no town, regardless of size, could send more than two delegates except Boston, which could send four. Note that this basic law of 1692, which remained essentially in effect until 1775, far from privileging the large old towns, did precisely the
opposite. Any
new town was entitled to a representative, but
no
town could have more than two. This ensured substantial overrepresentation of the smaller agricultural towns as against the larger seaboard areas. And it also ensured that as new small towns were added over the years, this agricultural, small-town overrepresentation would be intensified.

It is intriguing that, far from complaining about discrimination, the larger towns were quite satisfied with this arrangement; whereas it was the
smaller
towns that were constantly trying to reduce their own representation, to evade the necessity of sending delegates. It must be concluded that in those days of small pay for legislators, the cost of sending a delegate to Boston was greater than the benefits resulting—a startling testimony to the low degree of state intervention in Massachusetts society during the eighteenth century. For the absence of privileges and benefits from sharing in state power indicates that the overall impact of that power on society and the economy must have been low indeed.

Another basic law passed in 1692 established the new framework for town government in Massachusetts. As developed in this and later acts, the town meeting had many highly democratic and liberal features: notably, annual elections to insure very frequent popular checks on municipal
officials; also the provision that any ten persons could place an item on the town-meeting agenda. By this period, the town proprietors had little political say-so, rule being exercised by the freemen of the town. It is, again, another heralded myth that town voting was more democratic than voting for representatives. Quite the contrary. Although relative quantities fluctuated because of changes in money value, in the basic law the property qualifications for town voting, while still low, averaged about twenty-five percent higher than for provincial voting. As a result, the best estimate is that under this basic law, the town franchise comprised seventy-five to eighty percent of the males as compared to well over ninety percent for provincial elections.
*

The brutal domination of the Puritan theocracy, having faded under compelling pressures during three decades, had now been eliminated. No longer could the Puritan theocrats hang Quakers or persecute heretics; no longer could they compel people to attend the Puritan church; no more could they preclude non-Puritans from voting in town or provincial elections. The watchful eye of the royal governor and the rising influence of the far more worldly, though nominally, Puritan merchants would be there to prevent a resurrection. What was the reaction of the Puritans to this new charter?

The basic reaction of the Puritans to their bitter defeat was to fall back on a second line of defense. If they could no longer persecute Anglicans or Quakers, they could at least
establish
the Puritan church and have the satisfaction of forcing the unbelievers to pay for Puritan church support. The Puritans lost no time in so doing. A law of 1692 forced each town to pay for or maintain one or more Puritan ministers. All taxpayers were forced to pay for their support. The first year, all the taxpayers of each town, being forced to finance their local Puritan ministers, were entitled to choose their own. But the following year, 1693, the choice of its minister was placed on each congregation, to be ratified by town taxpayers and attendees of the church. In 1694 the Puritan establishment tightened further; a group of ministers protested that non-Puritans were blocking ratification of ministers. The General Court obligingly provided that a council of local Puritan elders could keep a minister in office regardless of the vote of the town freemen. As a corollary to the establishment of the Puritan church, a law of 1692 also forced every town to hire a schoolmaster; here was an attempt to erect a network of public education in the colony.

If the Puritans could no longer force everyone to attend their churches, they could at least impose Sunday blue laws on all. A law of 1692 prohibited all work, games, travel, and entertainment on the Sabbath. Violations were punishable by fine, stocks, whipping, or jail. But enforcement of these edicts became an increasingly aggravating problem.

*
Professor Robert E. Brown investigated the effect of the property qualification on voting eligibility. He found that in the eighteenth century, with over ninety percent of the people of Massachusetts being farmers and artisans owning their own farms, and with the average farm ranging from eighty to 180 acres, even an unusually tiny farm of twelve acres was worth over twice the minimum needed for voting. Even the two percent of the farmers who were tenants were generally worth considerably more than the requirement. And the great bulk of the small number of town laborers were, even in the late eighteenth century, let alone the late seventeenth, artisan-entrepreneurs rather than wage workers in the modern sense. Generally, the estates of even the humblest artisans were far above the voting minimum. Robert E. Brown,
Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 21–31 and passim.

*
On the problems of geographical representation and of town
vis-a-vis
provincial voting, see Robert E. Brown,
Middle-Class Democracy,
chaps. 4, 5.

The Glorious Revolution imposed the last great settlement on the northern colonies. After the smoke of the tumult was over, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire were royal colonies similarly structured; the main forces of conflict were, as they had long been in Virginia, the royal governor and his oligarchic council on the one hand, and the more democratic assembly, representing the people of the colony, on the other. In New York, the royal and landed oligarchy had been particularly strong and rapacious for many years, and the institution of a representative assembly was just beginning. In Massachusetts, as we have seen, the electoral base made the always more democratic assembly an especially democratic and relatively liberal voice of the people; whereas the new royal post of governor bid fair to preserve the rewards of oligarchic and royal rule.

When Massachusetts heard the news of the new charter at the turn of 1692, a power vacuum opened in the colony. The new institution of royal governor offered a tempting prospect for oligarchic power and plunder—despite the prospect of conflict with the popular House of Representatives. But it was still not clear which group would take control. The old Puritan theocracy was in rather frantic retreat from external and internal blows, but still remained strong in the colony. The new coalition of Governor Phips and Increase Mather was an alliance of moderates. Mather rather halfheartedly was trying to lead the more fanatical Puritans to the new realities of a more pluralistic and liberal society. Phips, highly liberal for a royal official and as Massachusetts’ governor, was strongly sympathetic to the colony’s desires for freedom from the exactions and regulations of the Crown.

If the Mather-Phips coalition had been allowed to continue in control, Massachusetts might have found a tolerable and even welcome path into the eighteenth century: the steady easing of Puritan restrictions combined with a decided drift back to effective Massachusetts independence from royal depredations. In short, Massachusetts might have been able to advance toward a synthesis of the best of the two contending sides of the recent past: the self-government and freedom of trade of the Puritans (without the theocratic persecutions), and the religious freedom and mercantile cosmopolitanism of the pro-royal opportunists (without the royal despotism). But such a synthesis for liberal independence was not to be. For at the heart of the new regime was a sinister canker: Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. Stoughton was determined to overthrow this moderate liberalism in order that he and his friends—including the formerly discredited Joseph Dudley—might return to power, and that he might renew his plundering of Massachusetts.

Stoughton and Dudley were determined to regain power and to reimpose a royal absolutism that they would lead, at the head of a newly plundering oligarchy. To do this they would have to discredit and eliminate Governor Phips. With great luck, William Stoughton found his opportunity at hand; opportunity to split the ordinarily antiroyalist masses and to rally the body of Puritan theocrats behind him. In short, Stoughton found a way to rally the two extremes, to swing the Puritan masses behind his Tory opportunists in order to crush the moderate center. This opportunity was the notorious Salem witch-hunt of 1692.

Witchcraft had always been a capital crime in New England, but it had also been almost entirely a dead letter. The problem, after all, was obtaining evidence of guilt, and until now the sober judges and leaders of the community had not been willing to credit “spectral evidence”—the unsupported testimony of an hysterical “victim” of witchcraft that somebody’s spectral witch-shape had appeared to attack him. But now, Puritan zeal was in retreat on many fronts; notably was it retreating from the burgeoning rationalistic and skeptical temper. Perhaps, the Puritan leaders felt, a reemphasis on spectral evidence and the powers of witchcraft could vindicate the true faith and roll back the tide of rationalism and secularism. As early as 1681 a group of leading Puritan divines had decided to combat rationalism by gathering supposed evidence of the supernatural in earthly affairs. Among these “evidences” was witchcraft. One of the leaders of this project was Rev. Increase Mather. In 1684 he compiled a galaxy of superstitions,
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences,
which is a record of the deeds of magicians and gremlins and which had considerable impact on the public temper. Careful attention was paid by the Puritan ministers to any cases of hysterical children that they could find; the ministers would quickly see in them evidences of witchcraft and demon possession. With the most eminent divines of the colony paying eager and almost loving attention to any signs of juvenile hysteria, these
signs were accordingly encouraged and nurtured by the eager solemnity with which they were greeted. The Reverend Cotton Mather took one of these young girls into his home, the better to record the
Memorable Providences
(1689). The time was now ripe for the Puritan divines to lead a frenzied mob in a determined rearguard attempt to reinstall Puritan fanaticism in its old home; an attempt that would be abetted and used by Stoughton and the Tory opportunists.