"Self-Government Before Theory" — A Hundred and Fifty Years of Practice
SELF-EVIDENT The Road to 1776 Article 18 of 22
There is a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. . . . The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.— John Winthrop, speech to the General Court of Massachusetts, 1645¹
Provincetown Harbor
The ship had been bound for the Hudson. Its passengers held a patent from the Virginia Company for land in what the company called the northern parts of Virginia, near the mouth of that river, and the patent was the only legal instrument any of them possessed. Contrary winds and the shoals off Cape Cod turned them back, and on November 11, 1620, by the calendar they kept, the Mayflower dropped anchor inside the hook of the Cape, in the harbor now called Provincetown, a long way outside any ground the patent described.²
About a hundred and two passengers were aboard. Some had come out of a separatist congregation that had spent a decade in exile in Holland; others had been recruited in England by the merchants financing the voyage, and the separatists called them strangers. William Bradford, who would govern the colony for most of the next thirty-five years, later wrote down what some of the strangers said once they understood where they were: that when they came ashore they would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them, the patent they had being for Virginia and not for New England.³
The reply was a paper of about two hundred words. Forty-one men signed it before anyone went ashore. The signers named themselves loyal subjects of King James, said they had undertaken a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, and then did the thing the paper existed to do:
[We] doe by these presents solemnly & mutualy in ye presence of God, and one of another, covenant & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation & furtherance of ye ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye generall good of ye Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.⁴
It is a story most of us first hear in grade school, typically at Thanksgiving. It is likely the first document of self-government American schoolchildren are taught, even before the Declaration or Constitution. The Mayflower Compact.
Bradford gave two reasons for it. The first was the mutinous speeches. The second was that an act done by the passengers themselves, in their condition, might be as firm as any patent, and in some respects more sure.⁵
It is easy to ask more of the document than it can give. It names no office, divides no power, and states no right. It binds the signers to obey laws they had not yet made, under officers they had not yet chosen. It was signed by forty-one men out of a company of a hundred or so; the women, the children, and most of the servants did not sign it. It was a stopgap for a legal problem, solved when the colony obtained a patent of its own from the Council for New England in June 1621.⁶ The original paper is lost. Its text survives in three seventeenth-century versions that differ slightly in wording and considerably in spelling, and the list of forty-one names survives only in a book published in 1669 by Bradford’s nephew, Nathaniel Morton, who appears to have copied it from Bradford and not from the signed original.⁷
And yet the thing it records did happen. A group of people who found themselves outside the reach of the only authority they had brought with them did not scatter, and did not wait for a new commission from England. They made one another a promise, in writing, and governed themselves on the strength of it. Plymouth never received a royal charter; for seventy years it was held together by its own consent and the patents its leaders obtained from the Council for New England.
The paper is the least of it. What matters is the habit it began.
Context
The subject here is New England, and only New England. There were thirteen colonies by the time of the Revolution, and they did not share a political history. Most of what follows — the town meeting, the church covenant, the freeman, the selectmen, the General Court — belongs to Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the New Hampshire towns, and it would be a mistake to write as though Virginia or Pennsylvania had lived the same life. The claim here is that one set of colonies spent a hundred and fifty years governing itself in small places before anyone there wrote a treatise explaining why. It is not a claim about America.
The two texts that most people now associate with Puritan New England are Bradford’s history of Plymouth and John Winthrop’s lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity. Neither was in print when the Revolution began. Bradford’s manuscript was consulted by a line of New England historians — Morton, William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, and Thomas Hutchinson all worked from it — and passages reached print through their books; the manuscript itself disappeared from Boston during the British evacuation of 1776, turned up in the library of the Bishop of London at Fulham in 1855, and was printed entire for the first time the following year.⁸ Winthrop’s sermon was not printed at all until 1838, more than two centuries after it was written; the manuscript stayed in the family until 1809.⁹
The Compact itself was another matter. Its text was printed in London in 1622 in Mourt’s Relation, a pamphlet usually attributed to Edward Winslow and Bradford; Samuel Purchas reprinted it in his collection of voyages in 1625, and Morton printed it again in 1669.¹⁰ A colonist of the 1760s could read the Compact. He could read Bradford’s history only in the passages other historians had quoted, and Winthrop’s sermon not at all.
Whatever New England handed forward to the Revolution, then, it did not hand forward mainly through its canonical texts. It handed forward a practice — a set of things people did so often that they stopped noticing they were doing political theory.
Jamestown, 1619
New England was not first. On July 30, 1619, sixteen months before the Mayflower reached the Cape, twenty-two burgesses chosen from the settlements along the James River sat down with the governor and his council in the choir of the new timber church at Jamestown. They had been summoned under instructions from the Virginia Company of London, which was replacing the colony’s military rule with a government that included elected men, and they sat until August 4, when sickness broke up the meeting. They set the price of tobacco, heard disputes, and passed laws. The governor could veto what they did, and the company in London kept final authority over the whole venture.¹¹
A few weeks after the burgesses adjourned, an English privateer put in at Point Comfort with some twenty Africans taken from a Spanish ship, and exchanged them for provisions. The governor who had convened the assembly bought several of them.¹² Virginia’s representative government and Virginia’s traffic in human beings arrived in the same season, and grew up together.
Virginia’s assembly did not come out of a covenant. It came out of a board meeting in London, and its members were chosen by the free white men of the settlements under a company’s rules. New England’s assemblies came mostly from congregations and towns that governed themselves first and were fitted into colony governments afterward. Maryland, whose Catholic proprietors intended it in part as a refuge for English Catholics, passed an Act Concerning Religion on April 21, 1649, that protected anyone professing belief in Jesus Christ from being troubled for his religion and prescribed death for anyone who denied the Trinity; a Protestant assembly repealed it five years later.¹³ William Penn’s Frame of Government for Pennsylvania, of 1682, came out of a Quaker proprietor’s convictions and a proprietor’s authority at once.
These were separate experiments, run under different charters by different people. The New England version’s habits of self-government ran deepest into ordinary life. It was one experiment among several.
The Practice
A Company Becomes a Commonwealth
The Massachusetts Bay Company was a trading corporation, chartered by the Crown in 1629. Its charter provided for a governor, a deputy governor, and eighteen assistants, chosen out of the freemen of the company, and gave the General Court of governor, assistants, and freemen the power to admit new freemen, elect officers, and make laws, so long as they were not contrary or repugnant to the laws of England.¹⁴ Nothing in the document said where the General Court had to meet. The company’s leaders read that silence as permission and brought the charter itself across the ocean with the Winthrop fleet in 1630, so that the corporation and the colony became the same body in the same place, with no board in London left to instruct them.¹⁵
John Winthrop, the Suffolk gentleman and lawyer whom the company chose as its governor before it sailed, was not a democrat and did not pretend to be. His lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity opens by explaining that God had made some rich and some poor as part of a design in which every man would have need of others.
The sermon’s best-remembered line, that the colony would be as a city upon a hill, has a history of its own. The tradition that Winthrop delivered it aboard the Arbella rests on a note added to the manuscript’s cover in the nineteenth century, and his biographer Francis Bremer concluded that he gave it at Southampton before the fleet sailed.¹⁶
Fifteen years later, after the deputies had impeached the magistrates over their handling of a disputed militia election at Hingham and Winthrop had been acquitted, he told the General Court what liberty the colony should expect — a civil liberty, maintained in a way of subjection to authority.¹⁷ The colony’s first governor held that its people were free to obey good government. The colony spent the next century finding out how far that was the same thing as governing themselves.
A trading company’s constitution now had to govern a colony of several hundred families, and then of several thousand. Two words need glossing before going further, because they changed meaning in the process. A freeman was originally a member of the corporation, with a vote in its General Court, and became a voting citizen of the colony. The General Court was originally a shareholders’ meeting and became the colony’s legislature.
May 1631
At the second General Court held in the colony, in May 1631, a hundred and sixteen men were admitted as freemen at a stroke. That was far more than the number of shareholders who had come over. At the same meeting the court ordered that no one would be admitted a freeman in future unless he was a member of one of the colony’s churches.¹⁸
The two acts have to be read together, and they can be read in two ways, both correct.
Measured against the charter, the May court widened the franchise enormously. A document that gave the vote to a few dozen investors was turned, in one afternoon, into one that gave it to many more of the colony’s men, and it set no property qualification, such as English county elections required.¹⁹ Measured against the population the colony was about to have, the same court installed the mechanism that would narrow the vote year by year. Church membership was not church attendance. Attendance at worship was compulsory for everyone in Massachusetts. Membership required a candidate to satisfy the elders and then the congregation that he had experienced saving grace, usually by giving an account of his conversion in public, and many people who attended faithfully all their lives never sought it or never obtained it.²⁰ As immigration outran conversion, the share of the colony’s men who could vote for its governor fell.
Neither description cancels the other. One act widened the franchise from the top and narrowed it at the door, and a reader who wants the Puritans to have been democrats or tyrants has to discard one of the two facts to get there.
The franchise was also a thing that could be taken back. In 1637, at the height of a religious controversy, the court disfranchised men who had taken the side of the minister John Wheelwright and his supporters, among them the captain of the colony’s militia, John Underhill.²¹ A freeman’s vote was a standing in the community, conferred by it and revocable by it.
Plymouth took a different road. It set no church-membership test, but a man became a freeman only by the vote of the colony’s own General Court, and after 1660 Plymouth added a property qualification.²² Connecticut set its own terms; New Haven, a separate colony at the time, made church membership the qualification outright.²³
1634: Reading the Patent
By 1634 the freemen were uneasy that the assistants were making most decisions among themselves. That spring, delegates from the towns asked to see the charter, read it, and found that it gave the power of making laws to the General Court of freemen, not to the magistrates. The May court that followed reorganized itself: each town would send deputies to sit with the magistrates, and the freemen would no longer need to travel to Boston in a body to exercise their rights.²⁴ A colony of towns had become a representative government because a group of freemen had read the document that governed them and taken it at its word.
The next step took longer. The freemen wanted the law written down, so that magistrates could not decide cases at their own discretion, and the magistrates were in no hurry; committees appointed in 1635 and 1636 produced nothing usable. In March 1638 the court ordered the freemen of every town to meet and collect the heads of the laws they thought necessary. In December 1641, after drafts had been sent out to the towns and returned, the court adopted the code called the Body of Liberties, compiled by Nathaniel Ward, a minister at Ipswich who had trained as a lawyer in England.²⁵
The Body of Liberties opens by promising that no man’s life, honor, liberty, or goods would be touched except by virtue of some express law of the country, established by a General Court and sufficiently published. It forbade torture except in select cases, limited whipping to forty stripes, allowed a party to choose trial by bench or jury, protected married women from beatings by their husbands, and let servants who fled a cruel master take refuge in a neighbor’s house.²⁶ It also contained Liberty 91, which begins by declaring that there shall never be any bond slavery among the colonists and then makes its exceptions.
The Town
Most of what a New Englander experienced of government, he experienced in his town.
The colony did not create towns by imposing them. Groups of families obtained a grant of land from the General Court, laid out their lots, gathered a church, and began to meet. Dedham’s founders held their first meeting in August 1636. For a few years all the householders met to decide everything — who would be admitted, where the roads ran, how the meadow would be divided. By 1639 they had concluded that a general meeting of so many men wasted time, and elected a small board of selectmen to handle ordinary business between meetings, with the town meeting keeping the larger questions and the power to replace them.²⁷ Other towns elected selectmen on their own schedules.
The Body of Liberties then wrote down what the towns were already doing. The freemen of every township could make by-laws for the welfare of their town, so long as they were prudential and not criminal, and so long as the penalties did not exceed twenty shillings. They could choose each year a convenient number of fit men, not above nine, to order the planting and prudential affairs of the town. No town’s treasury could be spent except by the freemen of that township.²⁸
One provision reached further than the franchise. Liberty 12 declared that every man, whether inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free, had liberty to come to any public court, council, or town meeting and there move any lawful question or present any petition, complaint, or bill, provided he did it in convenient time, due order, and respectful manner.²⁹ Voting was restricted. Speaking was not.
Six years later the General Court went further. An act of May 26, 1647, allowed the freemen of each town to choose men who were not freemen — men who had taken the oath of fidelity and reached the age of twenty-four — as jurors and to certain town offices, and allowed those men to vote in town elections and to act with the freemen in ordering schools, herding cattle, laying out highways, and distributing land. A majority of every board of selectmen still had to be freemen, and a non-freeman convicted of misconduct against the government or the churches lost the privilege until the court that convicted him restored it.³⁰ The law created, in effect, two electorates in every town: a narrow one for the colony and a wider one for the business of the place where people lived.
How much wider varied from town to town. In Springfield, on the Connecticut River, only seven of the town’s forty-three adult men were freemen in 1647, and the local magnate who controlled admissions admitted very few more.³¹ Historians have long disputed what share of adult men could vote in the colony’s elections. What the statutes establish is firmer: from 1647 the law of Massachusetts recognized a right to vote in town affairs that did not depend on church membership, while the right to vote for governor still did.
The town meeting in this period was not a debating society. Lockridge’s study of Dedham describes a community that pursued agreement rather than contest and treated persistent dissent as a failure of the town.³² The New England town admitted inhabitants and warned out strangers it did not want. Ipswich’s records from 1639 show the town refusing to receive a man as an inhabitant because it considered itself full.³³ The meeting was the place where a community governed itself, and it was also the place where a community decided who belonged to it.
The Covenant and the Congregation
Behind the town stood the church, and behind the church stood a covenant.
A New England congregation came into existence when a group of believers bound themselves to one another and to God by a written agreement, chose their own minister and elders, and admitted and disciplined their own members. No bishop appointed the minister and no bishop or synod could overrule the congregation’s choice. The Body of Liberties put this into law as well: every church had free liberty to elect and ordain its officers, to admit and expel members, and to exercise discipline according to the rules of Scripture, and no injunction could be laid on any church in doctrine, worship, or discipline beyond what the Lord had instituted.³⁴
The same people met on Sunday as a congregation and on a weekday as a town, often in the same building, which is why a Puritan town called it a meetinghouse and not a church. A congregation chose its officers, admitted members after examination, and could expel them, and so could a town. The colonists themselves drew the connection between the two, most forcefully in the writings of John Wise.
A covenanted church was a voluntary body only in part, because the civil government required everyone to attend worship and taxed everyone to support the minister. And the congregation’s liberties were the liberties of the orthodox. The Body of Liberties allowed any of the people of God within the jurisdiction who were orthodox in judgment and not scandalous in life to gather themselves into a church.³⁵ The qualifying words did a great deal of work.
Connecticut and Rhode Island
The founders of Connecticut came mostly out of Massachusetts, led by the minister Thomas Hooker, and in January 1638/9 the three river towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield adopted the Fundamental Orders. The Orders provided for two General Courts a year, one for elections and one for making laws; for a governor who could not serve two years running; for magistrates chosen annually; and for deputies from each town. The electors were the admitted freemen who had taken the oath of fidelity, themselves admitted first as inhabitants by a majority of their town; the governor had to be a member of some approved congregation, and the text set no such test for the men who chose him.³⁶ The towns made the colony, and the colony’s frame said so.
Rhode Island was made by the people Massachusetts expelled. Roger Williams, banished in 1635, bought land from the Narragansett the next year and founded Providence. Hutchinson and her circle, who left Massachusetts in 1638, settled on Aquidneck Island. The settlements quarreled with one another for a generation and governed themselves through town meetings and, from 1647, a loose assembly of the whole colony.³⁷ In 1663 the colony obtained a royal charter. Its petitioners had told the king that it was much on their hearts to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained with a full liberty in religious concernments, and the charter granted what they asked: that no person in the colony should be molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, so long as he did not actually disturb the civil peace.³⁸
The phrase the charter used for Rhode Island — a lively experiment — was the colonists’ own, recited back to them by the Crown.
The Theory Catches Up
Ipswich, 1687
In 1684 the Court of Chancery in London vacated the Massachusetts charter. Two years later James II folded Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut into a single royal province called the Dominion of New England, and extended it in 1688 to New York and the Jerseys. Its governor, Sir Edmund Andros, arrived in Boston in December 1686. The Dominion had no elected assembly. Andros and an appointed council made its laws, and among the first of them was a tax.³⁹
Ipswich refused it. In late August 1687 the minister of the town’s Chebacco parish, John Wise, met with the town’s leading men, among them the brothers John and Samuel Appleton, and the town meeting that followed voted that it was not willing to choose a commissioner to assess the tax, and did not consent that the selectmen proceed to lay any such rate until it be appointed by a General Assembly concurring with the governor and council.⁴⁰ It was a town meeting refusing to tax itself on the ground that the town’s consent had not been asked by any assembly it had chosen.
Warrants followed for men described as seditiously inclined and disaffected to his majesty’s government. Wise and five others were tried in Boston, fined, and bound over; Wise was suspended from his ministry. Samuel Appleton, sixty-two years old, refused to give bond or make any apology and spent the winter in the Boston jail.⁴¹ The Dominion restricted every town to a single meeting a year, for the choice of its officers.⁴²
Two sentences from the trial are often quoted: that the defendants must not think the laws of England followed them to the ends of the earth, and that Wise had no more privileges left him than not to be sold as a slave. They come from an account of the proceedings that Wise drew up afterward and sent to England with other charges against the Andros government — the testimony of a defendant, written to support a complaint against his judges, not a transcript. The sources divide on who said them: some give them to Joseph Dudley and others to one of the judges without a name.⁴³
The vocabulary of the Ipswich case is not in doubt. Its men argued from Magna Carta and the rights of Englishmen, not from the state of nature. When news of the revolution in England reached Boston in the spring of 1689, the town rose on April 18, jailed Andros, and restored the old magistrates; Samuel Appleton was given the task of handing the governor into the boat that carried him to prison on Castle Island, and Ipswich paid Wise’s fine and sent him to the convention that reorganized the government.⁴⁴ The charter that Massachusetts received in 1691 gave it a royal governor with a veto, a lower house elected by the towns, and a franchise defined by property rather than by church membership.⁴⁵
The Vindication, 1717
Thirty years after Ipswich, Wise wrote the theory.
The occasion was ecclesiastical. In 1705 a group of Boston-area ministers proposed bringing the congregations under associations of clergy with authority over them, and Wise answered in The Churches Quarrel Espoused in 1710 and then, at greater length, in A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches, printed in Boston in 1717.⁴⁶ The Vindication defends the independence of the covenanted congregation, and to do it, Wise went back to first principles and announced his source in his first paragraph: he would principally take Baron Pufendorf for his chief guide and spokesman. He began, he wrote, by considering man in a state of natural being, as a free-born subject under the crown of heaven, owing homage to none but God himself.⁴⁷
A man who had helped a town refuse a tax in 1687 explained, in 1717, why people are by nature free and equal and why government must rest on their consent — and he explained it in a borrowed vocabulary, from a German professor of natural law, in defense of the way his neighbors had been running their churches for eighty years.
The Vindication was reprinted in Boston in 1772, when the argument between the colonies and Parliament was well under way, and that reprint has carried a large claim ever since.⁴⁸ In 1864 the Reverend Benjamin Franklin Morris wrote that some of the most glittering sentences in the Declaration of Independence were almost literal quotations from Wise’s essay, which had been used as a political textbook; Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the Declaration’s hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1926, told his audience that Wise’s reprinted works had been declared nothing less than a textbook of liberty for the Revolutionary fathers, and the claim has circulated since.⁴⁹ The reprint is real. What the chain from 1772 to 1776 lacks is the link that would carry it: a participant who names the source as one he read.
January 30, 1749/50
Until 1752 the English calendar began the legal year on March 25, so that a day in January or February belonged to one year by the legal count and to the next by the reckoning that begins the year on January 1. Colonists wrote such dates with both years. On January 30, 1749/50 — the hundred and first anniversary of the execution of Charles I, which the Church of England kept as a day of penitence for the royal martyr — a twenty-nine-year-old minister named Jonathan Mayhew preached at the West Church in Boston a sermon he published that year as A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.⁵⁰
The text was Romans 13, the passage every defender of passive obedience reached for: let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. Mayhew read it as an argument that carried its own limit. The apostle commanded obedience to rulers because they were ministers of God for good. But how, Mayhew asked, is this an argument for obedience to such rulers as do not perform the pleasure of God, by doing good, but the pleasure of the devil, by doing evil, and such as are not, therefore, God’s ministers, but the devil’s?⁵¹ Rulers who ruined the public forfeited the claim to obedience that the passage supported. Bernard Bailyn, who edited the sermon among the pamphlets of the Revolution, found that for his full rationale of resistance Mayhew drew not on Locke but on a sermon of the English bishop Benjamin Hoadly, from whom he borrowed ideas and phrases.⁵²
In this case a participant names the source. Writing to the Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles on February 13, 1818, John Adams listed Mayhew among the men of great influence in the commencement of the Revolution and described the sermon of 1750 as seasoned with wit and satire superior to any in Swift or Franklin. It was, he wrote, read by every body, celebrated by friends, and abused by enemies. That autumn he sent Niles half a dozen of Mayhew’s sermons for publication, and he sent the Discourse to Jefferson.⁵³
Adams wrote sixty-eight years after the sermon and forty-two after the Declaration, in a run of letters in which he was deliberately assembling an account of where the Revolution came from and correcting accounts he thought gave too much to Virginia. The same letter dates Mayhew’s greatest influence to the years 1761 to 1766. The testimony is retrospective, and it is interested. It is also a participant naming a source by title, which is what the Wise claim lacks.
The Awakening and Its Name
Between Wise and Mayhew came the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s, in which the preaching of Jonathan Edwards in the Connecticut valley and the tours of the English itinerant George Whitefield drew crowds that New England had never seen, split congregations between those who welcomed the revival and those who distrusted it, and sent unlicensed lay exhorters into towns that had never admitted them. A strong historiographical tradition, set out most fully by Alan Heimert in 1966, connected the revivals to the Revolution: people who had learned to judge their own ministers learned to judge their rulers.⁵⁴
The connection is disputed at its root. In 1982 Jon Butler argued that the Great Awakening as a single intercolonial event was an interpretive fiction — that what happened was a short-lived Calvinist revival in New England in the 1740s, dying there by 1745 before revivalism in Virginia had begun, and that the unified event of the textbooks was assembled afterward. Frank Lambert answered that the revivalists themselves had constructed the idea of a single, connected revival while it was happening, through their own promotion and publishing, so that the coherence was invented but not by historians. Thomas Kidd’s general history of 2007 treats the revivals as a real and connected movement over a longer span.⁵⁵ The familiar label came later still: Joseph Tracy made The Great Awakening the title of his history of 1842, and Joseph Conforti has traced how the event was built into a usable past in the half-century before that book.⁵⁶
Two things hold whichever side is right. The revivals intensified a habit New England already had — that a congregation judges its own minister. And the familiar name under which they are remembered took shape over the following century, among people who wanted the event to mean something.
Distance
On March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons to move resolutions for conciliation with the American colonies, and in the course of a speech that took most of the afternoon, he gave a name to the conditions under which the colonies had grown. They owed little or nothing to any care of Parliament’s, he said; they were not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature had been suffered to take her own way to perfection.⁵⁷
The phrase salutary neglect comes from that sentence. It was coined, that is, in 1775, in a speech pleading for the restoration of an arrangement that had already ended, by a member of the opposition arguing against the king’s ministers. James Henretta’s standard study of colonial administration under the Duke of Newcastle describes what the phrase referred to: a neglect of colonial problems by those in London, and the absence of any concerted attempt to administer colonial political life.⁵⁸ Adams, in the letter of 1818, described the same thing from the other side of the ocean. The Acts of Trade, he wrote, had lain a dead letter, unexecuted for half a century, until the ministry decided after the conquest of Canada to enforce them.⁵⁹ Neither man was describing a policy anyone had announced. They were describing a condition, and naming it after it was over.
Burke also named its cause. Among the sources he gave for what he called the fierce spirit of liberty in the colonies, the last was geography. Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them, he told the House, and no contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government.⁶⁰
Distance did not create the town meeting, the covenant, or the elected General Court; the colonists made those out of the corporate and congregational forms they brought with them. What distance did was leave the towns and the General Court in possession of the field. When London closed the distance, in 1686, it took away the elected assembly and restricted the town meeting, and the Dominion lasted less than three years.
The same distance had another effect, and Burke named it in the same speech. Among his causes of the colonial spirit of liberty was slavery. In Virginia and the Carolinas, he said, the colonists had a vast multitude of slaves, and where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom; freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.⁶¹ Earlier in the same speech, counting the population of the colonies, Burke had put the inhabitants of European blood and colour at no fewer than two million, besides at least five hundred thousand others, who formed no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole.⁶² He did not name the others there. The speech that gave the colonial period its most admired name counted half a million people among the sources of colonial wealth, and gave slavery credit for part of the pride Virginia’s gentry took in their freedom.
The Honest Reckoning
The Meetinghouse Door
The New England town meeting was open, by the standard of its century, to a great many people. It helps to count who stood how far from its door.
Inside the building, without a vote, stood most of the people who lived in the town. Women were not freemen and could not vote in the town or the colony. Men who were not church members could speak in the Massachusetts town meeting under the Body of Liberties; from 1647 they could vote in town affairs, and never for the colony’s governor.
One step out stood the disfranchised. In 1637 the General Court took the vote from men who had sided with Wheelwright and Hutchinson in the controversy over their teaching. Among them was John Underhill, who within the year would be banished.⁶³
Further out stood the banished. The General Court sentenced Roger Williams to banishment in October 1635, for spreading what it called new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates, and gave him six weeks to leave.⁶⁴ In November 1637, after a trial before the General Court, Anne Hutchinson was sentenced to banishment and held under house arrest through the winter; her Boston church excommunicated her the following March, and she left Massachusetts with her family and a small circle of followers, the Dyers among them. She went to Rhode Island and later to New Netherland, where in 1643 she and most of her household were killed.⁶⁵
Further out still stood the hanged. Quaker missionaries began arriving in Massachusetts in 1656. The General Court answered with whippings, imprisonment, and a law cutting off an ear for a first return and the other ear for a second, and in October 1658 it made banishment on pain of death the penalty for Quakers who came back. William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson came back, and were hanged in Boston on October 27, 1659. Mary Dyer, who had left Massachusetts with Hutchinson’s circle two decades earlier and had become a Quaker, was condemned with them and reprieved at the gallows; she came back, and was hanged on June 1, 1660. William Leddra was hanged on March 14, 1660/1.⁶⁶
Beyond the reach of the meeting altogether stood people the colony’s own law permitted it to hold as property. Liberty 91 of the Body of Liberties reads in full:
There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be Judged thereto by Authoritie.⁶⁷
The first clause forbids slavery in general. The exceptions then permit bondage for lawful captives taken in just wars and for strangers sold to the colonists — categories under which Native captives and enslaved Africans could fall, and did. When the code was adopted, both were already there. Pequot captives had been shipped out of the colony after the war of 1637, some to the West Indies, and in 1638 the Desire, a Massachusetts vessel, brought enslaved Africans into Boston.⁶⁸
And furthest from the door stood the people whose land the meetinghouse was built on. In the spring of 1637 a force from Connecticut and Massachusetts under John Mason and John Underhill, with several hundred Narragansett and Mohegan allies, surrounded the fortified Pequot town near the Mystic River before dawn on May 26 and set it on fire. Underhill published his account in London the next year. The Pequots themselves, he wrote, reported about four hundred souls in the fort, and not above five of them escaped; later accounts put the dead at six to seven hundred, counting on a different basis.⁶⁹ He described those who fled the flames being received with the point of the sword, and answered the question he expected readers to ask:
It may bee demanded, Why should you be so furious (as some have said) should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would referre you to Davids warre. . . . sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; some-time the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.⁷⁰
The colonists’ own allies had seen it differently. When the fight was over, Underhill recorded, the Narragansett and Mohegan warriors cried mach it, mach it — it is naught, it is naught — because the English way of war was too furious, and slew too many men.⁷¹ Surviving Pequots were killed, enslaved, or parceled out among the Mohegan and Narragansett, and the Treaty of Hartford of September 21, 1638, divided the Pequot country and gave the best of it to the English.⁷²
London
The second movement of the reckoning is shorter, because it rests on what did not happen.
Every one of these acts took place under a charter that required the colony’s laws to be not repugnant to the laws of England, in a colony that in theory answered to the Crown. None of it was prevented from England. The same distance that let Massachusetts elect its own governor let it banish, disfranchise, hang, and enslave by its own authority, and fight its own wars for land. The absence of imperial supervision did not protect liberty in general. It protected the liberty of the people inside the meetinghouse to govern themselves, including their liberty to govern everyone else.
The great war of the next generation was fought on the same terms. In 1675 the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, went to war against the colonies that had been pressing on his people’s land for half a century. In southern New England the war ended in 1676 with his death; in the northern settlements fighting went on until the Treaty of Casco Bay in April 1678, which is why the war is dated both ways.⁷³ On December 19, 1675, colonial forces attacked the Narragansett in their winter fort in the Great Swamp, in what is now South Kingstown, Rhode Island, and burned it; the Narragansett dead, many of them women, children, and old people, are estimated anywhere from several hundred to a thousand.⁷⁴
The Massachusetts troops at the Great Swamp were commanded by Major Samuel Appleton of Ipswich.⁷⁵ He is the same Samuel Appleton who, twelve years later, sat in the Boston jail through the winter rather than give bond for his town’s refusal to be taxed without an assembly it had chosen, and who handed Andros into the boat in 1689.
He cannot be divided into two men. The town meeting whose rights he defended in 1687 stood on land taken in the Pequot War and held in King Philip’s War, and he had helped to hold it. Both are the history of self-government in New England, and a history that kept only the second would misrepresent the first.
The Skeptic’s Case
That Colonial Liberty Was a Byproduct of Neglect
The strongest objection turns this article’s own evidence against it. On this account New England’s self-government was not an achievement but a leftover. The colonies governed themselves because London was far away, preoccupied, and incapable of doing otherwise, and Burke said so in as many words: the colonies owed their happy form not to watchful government but to neglect. When London did pay attention, in 1686, the elected General Court was abolished in months and the town meetings restricted to one a year, by one governor and an appointed council. Liberty that exists only until the empire looks up is permission, not self-government, and the lesson commonly drawn from this period — that liberty flourishes where government is distant — has the causation backward. What the record shows is that the General Court and the town meetings flourished where London was absent.
Most of this is correct. London’s inattention, not its principle, supplied the space in which the towns operated. The reply concerns what filled the space. Neglect explains why the colonists were left alone. It does not explain why, left alone, they built elected courts, written codes, town meetings, and covenanted churches rather than something else, and it does not explain what happened when the space closed. In 1687 a town meeting refused a tax, men went to jail rather than concede, and within two years the colony had overthrown the governor and recovered most of what it had lost. A practice that survives its suppression was not simply lent.
The objection is right about one thing more. The lesson that liberty flourishes where government is distant cannot be drawn from this record, because London was not the only authority present. The near one was the General Court, and it banished, hanged, and enslaved. What distance protected was self-rule by the people inside the meetinghouse. Whether that is the same thing as liberty depends on where the reader is standing.
That Practice Before Theory Proves Too Much
Every society practices before it theorizes. People hold meetings before anyone writes about deliberation and pay taxes before anyone writes about consent. On this objection the title says nothing that is not true of any society at all, and the interesting question — why this practice produced this revolution — is left untouched.
The reply is that the claim here is more specific, and it can be checked. It is not that practice precedes theory in general, but that in this place, the documents show the sequence in particular lives. John Wise helped his town refuse a tax in 1687 and wrote its justification from Pufendorf in 1717. The Ipswich men argued in 1687 from Magna Carta, not from nature. The freemen of 1634 read their charter and then reorganized the government on its terms, and only afterward did the colony write its liberties down. The general truth does not make the particular sequence less informative. It makes it a case that can be examined, as this one has been.
That New England Is Not America
The Revolution was made by thirteen colonies, and its principal document was drafted by a Virginian who owned slaves and who had grown up under a House of Burgesses, not a town meeting. An account that follows only New England has chosen the colonies that suit it. Virginia’s assembly was older than Plymouth, and its gentry, as Burke said, held freedom as a kind of rank among a vast multitude of the enslaved. The political habits of the Chesapeake had as much to do with 1776 as the town meeting did.
This objection is correct and the article concedes it. The account here is bounded to New England from its first pages, and Virginia’s assembly appears in it as a rival experiment and not as a footnote. What the objection establishes is that New England’s town meetings and General Courts were one road among several to an elected assembly. It does not establish that the New England road led nowhere. How thirteen colonies’ separate habits were argued into a single cause belongs to the article that follows this one.
That New England Is Judged by a Standard It Never Held
The inverse objection is owed equally. A society of the seventeenth century that restricted the vote to church members, banished dissenters, and made war on its neighbors was doing what nearly every society of the seventeenth century did. Measured against England, where the franchise rested on property, and against Europe, where the Thirty Years’ War was still devastating the German lands while Massachusetts was drafting its code, New England was unusually open. Judging it by a modern franchise and a modern law of war mistakes the date.
The reply is that the reckoning above did not need a modern standard. The objections were made at the time, by people inside or beside the colony. Roger Williams argued against the magistrates’ power over conscience in the 1630s, and was charged among other things with holding that the Native people, not the king, were the true owners of the land. Rhode Island’s petitioners asked the Crown for a full liberty in religious concernments in 1663, and got it. The Narragansett and Mohegan warriors at Mystic called the English way of war naught because it slew too many. The Body of Liberties itself began its ninety-first article with the word never. The standards were available, and some of the colonists held them.
The First Plantations
On February 13, 1818, John Adams sat at Quincy and wrote to a newspaper editor about where the Revolution had come from. The principles and feelings that produced it, he wrote, ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first plantations in America.⁷⁶
He was eighty-two, and he wanted the credit to go to Massachusetts and to the men he had known — Otis, Thacher, Samuel Adams, Mayhew — and not to Patrick Henry, whose admirers were claiming it. That does not make him wrong about the two hundred years. The practice came first. The names came afterward, from people with an argument to make: salutary neglect from Burke in 1775, pleading for its return; the Great Awakening from a history of 1842; the Mayflower Compact’s standing as a founding charter from later readers of a paper whose signers used it to get through a winter. Adams’s two hundred years were a name of the same kind, given by a participant who was building the story he had lived.
What the names describe was real. For a century and a half, in small places, several generations of New Englanders elected their officers, voted their own taxes, wrote down their laws, gathered and governed their own churches, and argued in town meeting over the placement of roads and fences. They did it under a franchise they narrowed and widened for their own reasons, on land they had taken by war, with a code that forbade slavery in its first clause and permitted it in its second, and under an empire that let them alone because it had other things to do.
In 1763 the empire stopped having other things to do. The war with France had ended, and the ministry in London set out to enforce its trade laws and to raise a revenue from colonies that had spent a century and a half governing themselves.⁷⁷ What the colonists said in reply — first as Englishmen, then as something else — is the next part of the road.
This is the road to 1776.
Self-Reflection Prompts
In May 1631 the Massachusetts General Court gave the vote to far more of the colony’s men than its charter required and, in the same session, tied all future votes to church membership. When a single act both widens and narrows who governs, which effect should decide how it is judged — the one felt at once, or the one that grows over time?
From 1647, a Massachusetts man who was not a church member could vote in his town’s affairs but not for the colony’s governor. Is a broad voice in the government nearest to you worth more or less than a narrow voice in the government above it?
John Wise helped his town refuse a tax in 1687 and wrote the theory that justified it thirty years later, borrowing it from a German jurist. Can a people understand its own practice better than the theory later written to explain it — and if so, what is the theory for?
Samuel Appleton commanded at the Great Swamp in 1675 and went to jail for his town’s right of consent in 1687. When the same person defends his own town’s self-government and helps take other people’s land, how should a later reader weigh the two, and can either be told without the other?
The Liberty Test. For most of a century and a half, the government in London left New England largely to govern itself, and New England used the space both to build elected institutions and to banish, hang, and enslave by its own authority. Did the absence of a distant government leave the people of New England more free or more governed — and does the answer change depending on which side of the meetinghouse door a person stood?
Endnotes
John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), 2:280–81, under 1645; the text is quoted in the modernized form given by Teaching American History (”On Liberty”). The pinpoint is that of Howard Gillman, Mark A. Graber, and Keith E. Whittington, American Constitutionalism, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2013), supplementary materials, and falls within the range 2:277, 279–83 given for Winthrop’s account of the 1645 proceedings in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 1, ch. 13, doc. 1. The Savage volume itself has not been inspected. The speech was given after Winthrop’s acquittal on charges brought by the deputies over the Hingham militia dispute; on the occasion, see the editorial note in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, which cites Robert Emmet Wall Jr., Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 93–120.
On the patent from the Virginia Company for the “northern parts of Virginia,” the forced anchorage at Cape Cod, and the date of November 11, 1620, Old Style (November 21, New Style), see the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. The Compact’s own text gives the place as Cape Cod and the day as the eleventh of November.
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, “The remainder of Anno 1620,” in the manuscript spelling as transcribed in the open edition at pressbooks.pub and in modernized form in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 1, ch. 17, doc. 1, which cites Bradford, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 75–76. The passenger count of about 102 is conventional.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, “The remainder of Anno 1620,” manuscript spelling. The article quotes Bradford’s text of the Compact. The version printed in Mourt’s Relation (1622) differs slightly in wording and considerably in spelling and punctuation; the modernized Mourt’s text printed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica (”Mayflower Compact”) carries the same operative clause.
Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, “The remainder of Anno 1620.”
On the patent from the Council for New England of June 1621, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Mayflower Compact.” Plymouth received further patents from the Council, including the grant of 1630 to Bradford and his associates noted in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., “Bradford, William”; it never received a royal charter and was absorbed into Massachusetts under the charter of 1691.
On the loss of the original, the three seventeenth-century versions, and the survival of the signers’ list only in Nathaniel Morton, New-Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), see the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the scholarship it summarizes. The statement that Morton appears to have copied from Bradford rather than from the signed document is that summary’s, and the article reproduces its tentativeness.
William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Charles Deane (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), published for the Massachusetts Historical Society and a reissue of most of vol. 3 of its Collections, 4th series; the Library of Congress catalogue record for that edition states that the manuscript, used by Hutchinson, Prince, and other early historians, disappeared at the British evacuation of Boston in 1776 and was discovered in 1855 in the Fulham library of the Bishop of London. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., “Bradford, William,” adds that it was freely used in manuscript by Morton, Hubbard, Mather, Prince, and Hutchinson and was returned to Massachusetts in 1897. The claim in the body is confined to the publication of the text: Bradford’s history was not printed entire before 1856, and what eighteenth-century readers had of it they had through those historians’ books.
John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” first printed in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 7 (1838): 31–48. The manuscript was given to the New-York Historical Society by Francis Bayard Winthrop in 1809. The body states publication facts only and makes no claim about what any individual read.
A Relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (London, 1622), commonly called Mourt’s Relation; Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1625); Morton, New-Englands Memoriall. On the attribution to Edward Winslow and Bradford, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Mayflower Compact,” and the 11th edition’s “Bradford, William.” The attribution is conventional; the pamphlet’s preface is signed “G. Mourt.”
James Horn, “A Fateful Experiment at Jamestown,” American Heritage, drawn from his 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Jamestown Rediscovery, “The First General Assembly.” Both give the dates July 30 to August 4, 1619, the choir of the church, and the twenty-two burgesses. On the setting of the price of tobacco and the governor’s veto, see the same sources and the Virginia Company’s instructions summarized there.
Jamestown Rediscovery, “Sir George Yeardley,” which states that Yeardley purchased several of the Africans and that eight were living on his property in 1625. The phrase “20. and odd” is John Rolfe’s, as widely quoted; Rolfe’s letter has not been consulted here.
“An Act Concerning Religion” (Maryland, April 21, 1649), text as printed by the American Battlefield Trust from the Library of Congress; on the repeal of 1654, see “1649: Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago,” American Heritage.
The Charter of Massachusetts Bay (March 4, 1628/9), as printed by Teaching American History and the Avalon Project, Yale Law School: “one Governor, one Deputy Governor, and eighteene Assistants,” chosen “out of the Freemen of the saide Company,” with the General Court’s power to admit freemen and elect officers. On the repugnancy clause, see the charter’s grant of lawmaking power, as summarized in the General Court’s own declaration of June 10, 1661, in Donald S. Lutz, ed., Colonial Origins of the American Constitution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), doc. 31.
The charter did not specify where the company’s officers were to reside. On the decision to carry the charter to New England, see Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). No pinpoint is asserted.
On the nineteenth-century note on the manuscript’s cover that places the sermon’s delivery aboard the Arbella, and Bremer’s conclusion that it was delivered at Southampton to the migration as a whole, see Bremer, John Winthrop. No pinpoint is asserted. The sermon’s authorship has also been questioned; the body does not rely on the attribution beyond the conventional one.
On the Hingham dispute and the impeachment of the magistrates, see the editorial note cited under Winthrop, History, in the note to the epigraph. The phrase “in a way of subjection to authority” is Winthrop’s.
The order of May 18, 1631, restricting future admission to church members, is in Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston, 1853), 1:87, as quoted in A. Hastings Ross, “Church and State in New England,” Bibliotheca Sacra (April 1892): 213–14. On the admission of 116 freemen at the same court, see the freemen’s lists compiled by Lucius R. Paige in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (1849). An earlier draft said that the 116 approached the whole adult male population of the colony; no source consulted supports that, and the body now claims only that the number far exceeded the shareholders who had come over. The Records have not been inspected here.
On the absence of a property qualification in the Massachusetts franchise, see the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, “Massachusetts Elections, Circa 1647,” Commonwealth Museum online exhibit. On the forty-shilling freehold in English county elections, the comparison is general and not tied to a single source.
On church membership as distinct from compulsory attendance, and on the examination required for admission, see Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963). No pinpoint is asserted.
On Underhill’s removal from office and disfranchisement in 1637, see Paul Royster’s introduction to Underhill, Newes from America (cited in full below).
Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History and People, 1620–1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986), 146–47. The pinpoint entered on the predecessor research thread’s reading.
“Fundamental Orders of Connecticut” (1638/9), in F. N. Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 1:519–26, as reprinted by Teaching American History; Connecticut Secretary of the State, Register and Manual, “Historical Antecedents,” which dates the vote January 14, 1638, Old Style. On New Haven’s Fundamental Agreement of 1639, which made church members only free burgesses, see the same sources’ secondary summaries.
Winthrop, History of New England, under 1634, on the freemen’s request to see the patent and the reorganization of the General Court with deputies from the towns. No pinpoint is asserted.
On the committees of 1635 and 1636, the order of March 12, 1638, and the adoption of the Body of Liberties in December 1641, see the editorial note to “The Body of Liberties” in Old South Leaflets 7:278–80, reproducing John Gorham Palfrey’s account and citing the Massachusetts Records and Winthrop’s History; on Nathaniel Ward, the leaflet’s note on the history of the manuscript.
“The Body of Liberties” (1641), in Old South Leaflets (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, n.d. [c. 1900]), 7:261–80, as digitized by the Hanover Historical Texts Project, Liberties 1, 29, 43, 45, 80, and 85.
On Dedham’s first meeting in August 1636 and the election of selectmen in 1639, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York: Norton, 1970). Dedham’s reason, that a general meeting of so many men wasted time, is recorded in the town’s records for 1639 and is paraphrased here from the quotation given in a student study of Lockridge’s account published in Historia (Eastern Illinois University, 2009); the town records have not been consulted directly.
“The Body of Liberties,” Liberties 66, 74, and 78.
“The Body of Liberties,” Liberty 12.
The act of May 26, 1647, as summarized in Joseph Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire, ch. 2, “The Suffrage Extended,” consulted in the Lane Memorial Library’s online edition. The act is printed in the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, under that date; the Records have not been consulted here, and the summary is Dow’s.
David M. Powers, “Voter Suppression in 17th-Century Springfield,” Pioneer Valley History Network, April 16, 2020. The figure of seven freemen among forty-three men, and the statement that Springfield had the lowest proportion of freemen in the colony, are Powers’s.
Lockridge, A New England Town. The characterization is of Lockridge’s argument; no pinpoint is asserted.
Historic Ipswich, “Warned Out,” which quotes the Ipswich town record of 1639 and gives the town’s other provisions for admitting and excluding inhabitants, drawing on Thomas Franklin Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Ipswich: Ipswich Historical Society, 1905).
“The Body of Liberties,” Liberty 95, articles 3–5.
“The Body of Liberties,” Liberty 95, article 1.
“Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” articles 1, 4, and 5, in Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 1:519–26.
On Williams’s purchase and the founding of Providence in 1636, and on the Aquidneck settlements, see the National Park Service, Roger Williams National Memorial. On the colony-wide assembly of May 1647 at Portsmouth, see “Acts and Orders of 1647,” as printed by Teaching American History.
“Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” (1663), text as given by the National Park Service, Roger Williams National Memorial, “Royal Charter,” and in the State Bar of Arizona’s reprint. The charter is dated July 8, 1663, in most accounts and July 15, 1663, in one printing; the body gives the month.
On the vacating of the charter in 1684, the Dominion of New England, and Andros’s arrival in December 1686, see Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), cited for orientation; no pinpoint is asserted.
The Ipswich vote as quoted from the town record in Historic Ipswich, “The ‘Birthplace of American Independence.’” Accounts of the date differ: Historic Ipswich gives the evening of August 23, 1687, for Wise’s meeting with the town’s leaders and the next day for the town meeting, while other accounts give August 22 and 23. The body gives the month.
Historic Ipswich, “The Defiant Samuel Appleton,” and “The ‘Birthplace of American Independence,’” drawing on Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The same sources give the fines; they are not repeated in the body because the accounts of Wise’s fine differ.
Dow, History of the Town of Hampton, ch. 5, which states that Andros forbade town meetings except once a year for the choice of town officers. Secondary accounts differ on whether the restriction preceded or followed the Ipswich protest, and the body asserts no sequence. The Skeptic’s Case describes the Dominion as abolishing the elected General Court and restricting the town meetings; an earlier version said both were dissolved, which overstated the fate of the town meetings.
Historic Ipswich, “The ‘Birthplace of American Independence,’” which states that the account containing these words was drawn up by Wise afterward and sent to England with other charges against Andros. Historic Ipswich attributes the first sentence to one of the judges; other accounts attribute it to Joseph Dudley. The body reports both attributions.
Historic Ipswich, “The Defiant Samuel Appleton,” on Appleton’s role on April 18, 1689; Historic Ipswich, “Vindication of the Government of New England Churches,” on Ipswich’s choice of Wise for the convention that reorganized the government.
The Charter of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (October 7, 1691). On the Crown-appointed governor with an absolute veto, the House of Representatives elected by the towns, and the property franchise, see the introduction to Massachusetts in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Center for the Study of the American Constitution, University of Wisconsin–Madison. The documentary copies of the charter disagree on the alternative estate qualification. Ellis Ames, Qualification for Voting in the Provincial Charter of Massachusetts (Boston, n.d.), 1–5, reports that the duplicate original brought over by Governor Phips in 1692 reads forty pounds sterling, while the first printing of 1692, the entry in the Colonial Entry Book, and the charter enrolled on the Patent Rolls read fifty; that the King in Council annulled a Massachusetts act of 1692 in 1695 because it used forty; and that on the Privy Seal warrant “forty” was first written and altered to “fifty.” The last point Ames gives on the report of W. N. Sainsbury of the Public Record Office to Abner C. Goodell, and it is Sainsbury’s opinion that the alteration was made before William and Mary signed. Ames offers two explanations for the Massachusetts copy, a clerk’s error or, as he thought more probable, a copy made before the correction and sent over uncorrected; both are his inferences. The pamphlet is undated; the Library of Congress catalogues it as [Boston, 1869], a record that could not be reached here. An earlier version of this note dated it 1886. The body requires only the change from a religious to a property qualification and gives no figure.
John Wise, The Churches Quarrel Espoused (Boston, 1710); John Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (Boston: Printed by J. Allen, for N. Boone, 1717). On the proposals of 1705 to which Wise was responding, see Historic Ipswich, “Vindication of the Government of New England Churches.” Historic Ipswich associates the proposals with Increase Mather; they were issued by an association of ministers, and the body describes them accordingly.
Wise, Vindication (1717), opening of the first chapter, as transcribed at constitution.org. Spelling of the original: “Baron Puffendorff.”
John Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (Boston, 1772), reprinted with The Churches Quarrel Espoused. The printer’s name is spelled differently in the sources consulted and is not given here.
Benjamin Franklin Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (Philadelphia, 1864). Morris’s sentence is paraphrased from reproductions of it; his book has not been consulted directly, and no pinpoint is asserted. Calvin Coolidge, “Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” July 5, 1926, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. Coolidge said that Wise’s works “were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.” He reported the claim; he did not repeat Morris’s assertion about the Declaration’s sentences, and an earlier draft that said he repeated it has been corrected.
Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: D. Fowle and D. Gookin, 1750). The sermon was preached on January 30, 1749/50; the dual year reflects the legal year beginning March 25 under the calendar in force until 1752.
Mayhew, Discourse, as printed by Teaching American History and by the Claremont Institute’s founding.com; the two transcriptions agree in the passage quoted.
Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), introduction. The page is 36, as given in David Hall, “Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers,” Place for Truth (March 3, 2016), which quotes the passage; the volume itself has not been inspected here.
John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, Founders Online, National Archives (Adams Papers, Early Access), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854, quoted in its original spelling (”Seasoned with Witt and Satyre, Superior to any in Swift or Franklin. It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies”); Adams to Niles, September 29, 1818 (99-02-02-6998), sending “half a dozen Sermons of Dr Mayhew”; Niles to Adams, October 10, 1818 (99-02-02-7013). On the copy of the Discourse in Jefferson’s library, see the Jefferson Papers at Founders Online and E. Millicent Sowerby’s catalogue as cited there; the Jefferson item has not been consulted directly. The Founders Online transcription dates Mayhew’s volume of seven sermons to 1748; other printings of the letter give 1749. The phrase often attached to the Discourse, “the morning gun of the Revolution,” is not in this letter; it is used in J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 366, as reported, and its origin has not been traced here. The body does not use it.
Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (September 1982): 305–25; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), and Lambert, “The First Great Awakening: Whose Interpretive Fiction?” New England Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 1995): 650–59; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Butler’s name is sometimes given as “Jonathan”; the Journal of American History gives Jon.
Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1842); Joseph A. Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842,” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 99–118.
The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775 (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), consulted in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online text at the University of Michigan Digital Collections.
James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). The summary of what the phrase referred to is Henretta’s; no pinpoint is asserted.
Adams to Niles, February 13, 1818.
Burke, Speech on Conciliation; the passage appears in The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 1, doc. 2, from Burke’s Works 1:464–71.
Burke, Speech on Conciliation, as in The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 1, doc. 2.
Burke, Speech on Conciliation, the population passage near the opening of his account of the colonies’ condition.
On Underhill’s disfranchisement in 1637 and banishment in 1638, see Paul Royster’s introduction to John Underhill, Newes from America (London, 1638), Electronic Texts in American Studies 37 (University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2007).
The court’s sentence, as printed by the National Park Service, Roger Williams National Memorial, “Roger Williams: Rejecting the Middle Way”: Williams “hath broached & divulged diverse new & dangerous opinions, against the authority of magistrates,” and “shall depart out of this jurisdiction within six weeks now next ensuing.” The same page gives the charges against him, the first of which was that “the Natives are the true owners” of the land. The day of the sentence is commonly given as October 9, 1635; the body gives the month.
National Park Service, “Anne Hutchinson’s Brief Residence near St. Paul’s Church,” on the civil trial before the General Court in November 1637, the sentence of banishment, the house arrest, and the excommunication in March 1638; accounts give March 15 and March 22 for the church trial, and the body gives the month. On the Dyer family’s departure from Massachusetts with Hutchinson’s circle, see the Library of Congress, “America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2.” An earlier draft dated her banishment January 1637/8 and placed it after the church trial; that chronology was wrong. The date of her death in 1643 is conventional.
On the laws of 1656–58, including the ear-cropping statute and the act of October 1658 imposing banishment on pain of death, see Douglas O. Linder, “The General Court’s Anti-Quaker Laws (1656–1661, Boston),” Famous Trials, University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, which reprints them. On the executions, see Paul Royster’s abstract to Electronic Texts in American Studies 23 (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), which gives October 1659 for Robinson and Stevenson, June 1660 for Dyer, and March 1661 for Leddra; the days for Robinson and Stevenson (October 27, 1659) and for Dyer (June 1, 1660), and Dyer’s reprieve at the gallows in 1659, follow Cheney J. Schopieray, “’This I Will Seale with My Blood’: The Execution of William Leddra,” The Quarto, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan (2022), which also describes the Clements Library’s copy, made about 1716, of the Court of Assistants record of Leddra’s trial and sentence of March 5, 1660/1. Leddra’s execution on March 14, 1660/1 is dated on the title page of George Bishope, New England Judged, The Second Part (London, 1667), which describes him as hung “at Boston, the 14th of the first month, 1660/1,” the first month being March in the reckoning the Quakers used; the same day appears in the index to the published Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1692, vol. 3, as held by the University at Albany. One archival finding aid gives January 14, 1661; the body follows the contemporary title page. The day falls before March 25 and so in 1660/1 by the colony’s reckoning. The court’s printed justification is A Declaration of the General Court of the Massachusets Holden at Boston in New-England, October 18, 1659, Concerning the Execution of Two Quakers (reprinted London, 1659), Library of Congress. Sources place the gallows variously on Boston Common and on Boston Neck; the body says Boston. See also Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England (London, 1661).
“The Body of Liberties,” Liberty 91, in the spelling of the Old South Leaflets text.
National Park Service, “Slavery and Law in Early Massachusetts,” on the Desire and the arrival of enslaved people at Boston in 1638; Paul Royster’s introduction to Underhill, Newes from America, which states that most Pequot survivors were sold in the West Indies or given to the colonists’ Native allies as slaves. The body asserts no numbers.
John Underhill, Newes from America (London: J.D. for Peter Cole, 1638), 35, in Paul Royster’s edition from the Huntington Library copy, which preserves the original’s spelling and pagination. Underhill’s figure of about four hundred is, in his words, the number the Pequots themselves reported. The figure of six to seven hundred dead is given by modern accountings, including the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut; Royster’s introduction gives 600 to 800 inhabitants and fourteen survivors. The two figures do not count the same thing, and both are given.
Underhill, Newes from America, 35–36, in the original spelling. The widely circulated form of this passage, which renders “with their parents” as “with the parents” and omits “some-time the case alters: but we will not dispute it now,” does not match the 1638 text and is not used.
Underhill, Newes from America, 38–39.
On the fate of the surviving Pequots and the Treaty of Hartford of September 21, 1638, see the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut and Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). Vaughan’s broader interpretation of Puritan Indian policy has been sharply contested since its publication, and the book is cited here only for the terms of the settlement.
Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 1999). On the two datings, the southern war ended with Metacom’s death in 1676, and fighting in northern New England continued until the Treaty of Casco Bay of April 12, 1678; the two ranges measure different theaters.
Schultz and Tougias, King Philip’s War. Estimates of Narragansett dead at the Great Swamp vary widely, and the body gives the range rather than a figure.
On Appleton’s command at the Great Swamp and at Hatfield, see Schultz and Tougias, King Philip’s War; on the identity of the commander with the Ipswich resister of 1687, see Abraham Hammatt, The Hammatt Papers: Early Inhabitants of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1633–1700, entry for Samuel Appleton, which records his command of a regiment in King Philip’s War, his service as an assistant from 1681 to 1686, and his death on May 15, 1696, and Historic Ipswich, “The Defiant Samuel Appleton,” which gives his age as sixty-two in 1687. The two accounts describe one career.
Adams to Niles, February 13, 1818.
Adams to Niles, February 13, 1818, which dates the first formal plan for raising a revenue from America by parliamentary taxation to the years after the conquest of French America, and names as its first manifestation the order to enforce the Acts of Trade. On the revenue measures that followed, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953). No pinpoint is asserted.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Sources
Adams, John. Letters to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, and September 29, 1818. Founders Online, National Archives.
Bishope, George. New England Judged, The Second Part. London, 1667.
“The Body of Liberties.” 1641. In Old South Leaflets, 7:261–80. Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, n.d. [c. 1900].
Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation. Edited by Charles Deane. Boston: Little, Brown, 1856.
Burke, Edmund. The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775. London: J. Dodsley, 1775.
“Charter of Massachusetts Bay.” 1628/9.
“Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” 1663.
Coolidge, Calvin. “Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” July 5, 1926. The American Presidency Project.
“Fundamental Orders of Connecticut.” 1638/9. In The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, edited by F. N. Thorpe, 1:519–26. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909.
Mayhew, Jonathan. A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. Boston: D. Fowle and D. Gookin, 1750.
Morton, Nathaniel. New-Englands Memoriall. Cambridge, Mass., 1669.
Mourt’s Relation [A Relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England]. London, 1622.
Underhill, John. Newes from America. London: J.D. for Peter Cole, 1638. Edited by Paul Royster. Electronic Texts in American Studies 37. University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2007.
Winthrop, John. The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. Edited by James Savage. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1853.
Winthrop, John. “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 7 (1838): 31–48.
Wise, John. A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches. Boston: J. Allen, for N. Boone, 1717.
Secondary Works
Ames, Ellis. Qualification for Voting in the Provincial Charter of Massachusetts. Boston, n.d. [catalogued as 1869].
Bailyn, Bernard, ed. Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Barnes, Viola Florence. The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923.
Bremer, Francis J. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Butler, Jon. “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction.” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 305–25.
Conforti, Joseph A. “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842.” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 99–118.
Dow, Joseph. History of the Town of Hampton, New Hampshire. Online edition, Lane Memorial Library.
Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Henretta, James A. “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Horn, James. 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2018.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736. New York: Norton, 1970.
Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1963.
Schultz, Eric B., and Michael J. Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 1999.
Stratton, Eugene Aubrey. Plymouth Colony: Its History and People, 1620–1691. Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986.
Waters, Thomas Franklin. Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ipswich: Ipswich Historical Society, 1905.
Next: Article 18 — “The Revolutionary Argument”
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