Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8) / The English and French in North America 1689-1763

by Unknown

CHAPTER II.

NEW ENGLAND, 1689-1763.

BY JUSTIN WINSOR,

The Editor.

ANDROS, with Joseph Dudley and other satellites, made safe in Castle William, the revolution in New England was accomplished, and the veteran Simon Bradstreet was at the head of the old government on its sudden restoration (1689) to power.

The traditions of the charter-days were still strong among the country people, and their deputies in the resuscitated assembly brought into Boston the old spirit of independence to enliven the stifled atmosphere which the royal governor had spread upon the town. The new government was proposedly a provisional one to await the result of the revolution which seemed impending in England. If the policy of unwavering adherence to the old charter had been pursued with the constancy which characterized the advocacy of Elisha Cooke, the popular tribune of the day, the current of the New England history for the next few years might possibly have been changed. The sturdy assumption of political power did not follow the bold revolution which had prepared the way for it, and, professing dependence upon the royal will, all thoughts were now addressed to placate the new monarch, and regain by law what they had failed to achieve by a dogged assertion of right. King William, of whose accession they soon were notified, unhesitatingly, but for temporary service, confirmed the existing rulers.[157]

A command came for Andros to be sent to England, with a presentation of charges against him, and it was obeyed.[158] Increase Mather had already gone there to join Ashurst, the resident agent of the colony, and the people were not without hope that through the urgency of these representatives the restitution of the old charter might be confirmed. Subsequently Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oakes were despatched to reinforce the others. Mather, either because he felt the project a vain one, or because he hoped, under a new deal, to be better able to direct affairs, was favoring a new charter.

This follows the map in the Amsterdam ed. (1688) of Richard Blome’s L’Amérique, traduit de l’Anglois. This is a different map (on a larger scale) from the one in the original English edition of Blome. See reference to the map given in Mather’s Magnalia (1702) in Vol. III. p. 345. This map is reproduced in Cassell’s United States, i. pp. 492, 516.

Douglass, with some excess, again speaks of Mather’s map (Summary, etc., i. 362) “as composed from some old rough drafts of the first discoverers, with obsolete names not known at this time, and has scarce any resemblance of the country,” and he calls Cyprian Southack’s maps and charts even worse. For Southack see Mem. Hist. of Boston.

Plymouth, which had never had a royal charter, was endeavoring, through the agency of Ichabod Wiswall,[159] the minister of Duxbury, who had been sent over to protect their interests, to make the most of the present opportunity and get a favorable recognition from the king. Between a project of annexation to New York and Mather’s urging of an alternative annexation to the Bay, the weaker colony fared hard, and its ultimate fate was fashioned against its will. In the counsels of the four agents Cooke was strenuous for the old charter at all hazards, and Oakes sustained him. Mather’s course was professedly a politic one. He argued finally that a chance for the old charter was gone, and that it would be wiser to succumb in season to the inevitable, in order better to direct progress. When it came to a petition for a new charter, Oakes so far smothered his sentiments as to sign it with Mather; but Cooke held out to the last.

ELISHA COOKE, THE ELDER.

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the gallery of the American Antiquarian Society, which had belonged to the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem, who was born in Boston in 1759, and died in Salem in 1819.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts was governing itself, and had enough to do in looking after its frontiers, particularly at the eastward, where the withdrawal of the troops which Andros had placed there became the signal for Indian outbreaks. New Hampshire, weak in her isolation, petitioned to be taken under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and was (March 19, 1690) for the time being annexed.[160] Connecticut, destined to save her charter by delays and a less fiery spirit, entered upon a career characterized in the main by dignified quiet. Though she participated in some of the tumult of the recurrent Indian wars, and let her bitterness against episcopacy sometimes lead to violent acts, she had an existence of much more content than fell to the lot of the other New England colonies.[161]

The first momentous event which the restored governments had to encounter was the disastrous expedition which Phips led against Quebec, in 1690. With confident hope, the fleet on the 8th of August sailed from Boston harbor, and the whole community for three months waited for news with great solicitude. Scarce three weeks had passed when Sewall records (August 28) that they got from Albany intelligence of the Mohawks’ defection, which, as he writes, “puts a great damp here to think that our fleet should be disappointed of their expected aid.”[162] Apprehension of some more imminent danger grew throughout the colony. In September they placed watches at night throughout Boston, and gave as watchwords “Schenectady” and “Salmon Falls,”—fearful reminders.[163] One night at Charlestown there was an alarm because Indians were seen in their back fields,—they proved to be runaway servants. Again, the home guard, eight companies, trained another day. At last tidings came from Plymouth of certain losses which the contingent of that colony, among the forces acting at the eastward, had suffered, news whereof had reached them. This and other matters were made the grounds of an attempt to found a regular channel of communicating the current reports, which in a little sheet called Publick Occurrences was issued at Boston, Thursday, September 25, the precursor of the American newspaper. It told the people of various incidents of their every-day life, and warned them of its purpose to prevent false reports, and to correct the spirit of lying, “which prevails among us.” It represented that “the chief discourse of this month” was the ill-success of the expedition, which, under the command of Gen. Winthrop, of Connecticut, had attempted to advance on Montreal by way of Lake Champlain, to distract the enemy’s attention in that direction while Phips ascended the St. Lawrence.[164]

About six weeks later, on Friday, November 7, word came to the governor from Salem of the disastrous events in the St. Lawrence and the discomfiture of Phips.[165]

The unfortunate expedition had cost Massachusetts £50,000, and while the colony was devising an illusory scheme of paper money as a quick way of gathering taxes, Phips slipped off to England, with the hope that his personal explanations would assist in inducing the home government to lend a helping hand in some future attempt.

When Phips reached England he found that Mather had done good work in preventing the reinstalling of Andros, as at one time was threatened.[166]

Memorials and counter-memorials, printed and manuscript, were pressed upon Parliament, by which that body was now urged to restore, and now implored to deny, the vacated charter. It was at this juncture that Mather, with two other agents, petitioned the king for a new charter; and the law officers reporting favorably, the plan had already been committed to the Lords of Trade at the time when Phips appeared in London. With the assent of the king, the framing of a new charter was entrusted to Sir George Treby, the Attorney General, who was instructed to fortify the royal prerogative, and to make the jurisdiction include not only Massachusetts, but the territory of New Plymouth and all that region, or the better part of it, lying east of the present State of New Hampshire, and stretching from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.

It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to wield, as the years which followed proved.

Mather professed to think the new charter—and it perhaps was—the best result, under the circumstances, to be attained. He talked about the colony still having a chance of assuming the old charter at some more opportune moment. Cooke, the champion of the old conditions, was by no means backed in his opposition by a unanimity of feeling in the colony itself; for many of the later comers, generally rich, were become advocates of prerogative, and lived in the hope of obtaining more consequence under a changed order of society. Connecticut and Rhode Island were content, meanwhile, with the preservation of their own chartered autonomy, such as it was.

Thus affairs were taking a turn which made Phips forget the object of his visit. Mather seems to have been prepared for the decision, and was propitiated also by the promise of being allowed to nominate the new governor and his subordinates. Phips had been Mather’s parishioner in Boston, and was ambitious enough to become his creature, if by doing so he could secure preferment. So Sir William Phips was commissioned Governor; and as a sort of concession to the clerical party, of which Mather himself was the leader in Boston, William Stoughton was made Lieutenant-Governor. Isaac Addington became Secretary. Bradstreet was appointed first assistant. Danforth, Oakes, and Cooke, the advocates of the old charter, were forgotten in the distribution of offices.

On Tuesday, January 26, 1692, Robin Orchard came to Boston from Cape Cod, bringing tidings that Capt. Dolberry’s London packet was at anchor in the harbor now known as Provincetown, and that she had brought the news of the appointment of Phips under a new charter.[167]

Boston was at this time the most considerable place in the New World, and she probably had not far from 7,000 inhabitants; while Massachusetts, as now constituted, included 75 towns, of which 17 belonged to Plymouth. Within this enlarged jurisdiction the population ranged somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000,—for estimates widely vary. Out of this number twenty-eight persons had been chosen to make the governor’s council, but their places were to be made good at subsequent elections by the assembly, though the governor could negative any objectionable candidate; and the joint approval of the governor and council was necessary to establish the members of the judiciary. The acts of the legislature could for cause be rejected by the Privy Council any time within three years, and to it they must be regularly submitted for approval; and this proved to be no merely formal action. It meant much.

These conditions created a new political atmosphere for Massachusetts. Religion and politics had in the old days gone hand in hand, and the little book which Joshua Scottow, one of the old patriarchs, now printed, Old Men’s Tears, forcibly reminded them of the change. The community was more and more engrossed with trade; and those that concerned themselves with politics were not near so closely of one mind as formerly; and there was lacking that invigorating motive of saving their charter which had so unified the thoughts and banded the energies of the community in former years.

On the 14th of May, 1692, the “Nonesuch” frigate cast anchor in Boston harbor. When Phips and Mather disembarked, eight companies of soldiers received and escorted them to their respective houses. “Made no volleys, because ‘twas Satterday night,” says Sewall, recording the event.[168] The ceremony of inauguration was no sooner over than all parties began to take their bearings; and Mather, not long after,[169] in an election sermon, took occasion to defend the policy of his recent mission. It remained to be seen how much the province was to gain from its closer connection with the home government. Was it to claim and secure larger assistance in repressing Indian outbreaks and repelling French encroachments?—for these things were brought home to them by the arrival of every messenger from the frontiers, by the surveillance under which they had put all Frenchmen who chanced to be in their seaports, and by the loads of wine-casks which paraded the streets of Boston when the “Swan” (September 20, 1692) brought in a French prize. It was not till October 23d that Cooke and Oakes reached home, and the old-charter party had once more its natural leaders; Cooke, at least, bringing to it the influence of wealth.[170]

THE PROVINCE SEAL.

This is the form of the Great Seal of Massachusetts, used in the time of George I. It was recut, and the name of the monarch changed under George II. This last design will be found in the Massachusetts House Doc., no. 345 (1885), being a report on the Arms and Great Seal of Massachusetts. Here, as in the Heraldic Journal, vols. i. and ii., the private seals of the royal governors are given, which were used in sealing military commissions.

In the sermon to which reference has just been made, Mather showed that, however he had carried many of his own points, he had failed in some that much troubled him. The change in the qualification of electors from church membership to the condition of freeholders was alarming to those of the old theocratic sentiments. It meant a diminution of their influence, and that the 120 churches in New England (of which 80 were in Massachusetts) were to direct much less than formerly the legislation of the people. The possible three years which a law might live before the home-veto came must be made the most of. Using his influence with Phips, Mather dictated the choice of the first corporation of Harvard College, freshly chartered under the new rule, and without waiting for the confirmation of the Privy Council, who might well be thought to be opposed to a charter for the college which did not provide some check in a board of visitors, he caused himself, very likely in a passive way, to be made its first Doctor of Divinity, but his admirers and creatures knew the reward he expected. We think, however, to-day less of the legislation which gave such a title to their great man than we do of the smaller ambitions by which the assembly of the province about the same time were originating our public-school system.

The governor, in his communication to the General Court, reminded them of the royal recommendation that they should fix by law a fitting salary for the chief executive. It raised a point that Elisha Cooke was in wait for. Under his instigation, the plan was devised of substituting an annual grant, which might be raised or lowered, as circumstances warranted, and as was necessary to vindicate one of the few rights left to them by the charter. It was the beginning of a conflict that recurred with each successive governor as he attempted to force or cajole the representatives into some recognition of the royal wish.

The baleful influence of the Mathers—for the son Cotton was now conspicuous—conduced to commit the unwary Phips to instituting a court, which disgraced itself by the judicial murders attending the witchcraft frenzy; and in the midst of all, Sir Francis Wheeler’s crippled fleet arrived from the West Indies (June 11, 1693), having lost more than half its men by disease. The fear of infection almost caused a panic among the inhabitants of Boston when, two days later, Wheeler anchored his frigates off Noddle’s Island. Ten days afterwards their commander was entertained at Cambridge by the governor, and by Mather as president of the college.

Connecticut was in the mean while serving both Massachusetts on the east and New York on the west. She sent troops to help defend the eastern dependencies of the Bay. On the retreat of Winthrop’s expedition, New York appealed to Connecticut for help, and she afforded it; but when Governor Fletcher, of New York, came to Hartford and claimed command of her militia, she resisted his pretensions, and, as the story goes, drowned the reading of his proclamation by a vigorous beating of drums.[171] Fitz-John Winthrop was sent to England to compose matters, and it ended in Connecticut placing 120 men at the disposal of the New York governor, while she retained command of her home forces, and Winthrop became in turn her governor.

Phips too went to England, but on a mission not so successful. His testy character had early imperilled his administration. He got into a quarrel with Fletcher, of New York, and he yielded to passions which brought undignified encounters even in the public streets. Representations of such conduct did not fail to reach the king, and Phips was commanded to appear in his own defence. His friends had endeavored to force an address through the House of Representatives, praying the king not to remove him; but it was defeated by the united action of members from Boston, many of whom represented country towns. The governor’s friends resorted to a specious device which appealed to the local pride of the country; and, by the urgency of Mather and others, a bill requiring the representatives to be residents of the town they sat for was forced through the House.[172] With an assembly constituted under the new rule, a bare majority was secured for the address, and Phips took it with him.

Before much progress could be made in the investigation, after his arrival in London, he died on February 18, 1694-5.[173] The news did not reach Boston till early in May. “People are generally sad,” says Sewall. “Cousin Hall says the talk is Mr. Dudley will be governor,” and the next day mourning guns were fired at the Castle.[174]

Joseph Dudley’s hour of pride was not yet come, though he had intrigued for appointment even before Phips’s death. The protests of Ashurst and Constantine Phipps, the colony’s agents in London, were effectual; and the king was by no means prepared as yet to alienate the feelings of his New England subjects in order to gratify the avenging spirit of Dudley. That recusant New Englander was put off with the lieutenant-governorship of the Isle of Wight, a position which he held for nine years.

The government in Boston upon Phips’s leaving had legally fallen into the hands of that old puritan, the lieutenant-governor, William Stoughton, and in his charge it was to remain for four years and more (November, 1694, to May 26, 1699). It was a period which betokened a future not significant of content. It was not long before Thomas Maule could call the ministers and magistrates hard names, and with his quick wit induce a jury to acquit him.[175] But the spirit of Parliament could not be so easily thwarted. As colonists, they had long known what restrictive acts the mother country could impose on their trade in the interests of the stay-at-home merchants, who were willing to see others break the soil of a new country, whose harvests they had no objection to reap. The Parliament of the Commonwealth had first (1651) taken compulsory steps, and the government of the Restoration was not more sparing of the colonists. King William’s Parliament increased the burden, and the better to enforce observance of its laws they established a more efficient agency of espionage than the Plantation Committee of the Privy Council had been, by instituting a new commission in the Lords of Trade (1696), and had followed it up by erecting a Court of Admiralty (1697) to adjudicate upon its restrictive measures.[176] About the same time (1696) they set up Nova Scotia, which had been originally included in the Massachusetts charter of 1691, as a royal province. The war which was waging with France served somewhat to divert attention from these proceedings. French privateers were hovering round the coast, and Boston was repairing her defences.[177] Not a packet came into the Bay from England, but there was alarm, and alertness continued till the vessel’s peaceful character was established. News was coming at one time of Frontenac’s invasion of New York, and at another of Castin’s successes at the eastward. In August, 1696, when Captain Paxton brought word to Boston of Chub’s surrender of Pemaquid, five hundred men were mustered, but they reached Penobscot only to see the French sailing away, and so returned to Boston unrewarded. The enemy also fell on the Huguenot settlement at Oxford, Mass., and the inhabitants abandoned it.[178] When the aged Bradstreet was buried,[179] they had to forego the honor they would pay his memory in mourning guns, because of the scarcity of powder; and good people rejoiced and shivered as word came in June of the scalping exploit of Hannah Dustin at Haverhill, in the preceding March. In the autumn (November 4) there was nothing in all this to prevent the substantial loyalty of the people showing itself in a celebration of the king’s birthday. The Boston town house was illuminated, and the governor and council went with trumpets to Cotton Hill[180] to see the fireworks “let fly,” as they said. No word had yet come of the end of the war, which had been settled by the peace of Ryswick in September. A month later (December 9, 1697) Captain Gillam arrived at Marblehead from London, and the next day, amid the beat of drum and the blare of trumpet, between three and four in the afternoon, the proclamation of the peace was made in Boston. The terms of that treaty were not reassuring for New England. A restitution of captured lands and ports on either side was made by it; but the bounds of Acadia were not defined, and the Sagadahock country became at once disputed ground. The French claimed that it had been confirmed to them by the treaties of St. Germain (1632) and Breda (1668); but the Lords of Trade urged the province to rebuild the forts at Pemaquid, and maintain an ascendency on the spot.

BELLOMONT.

This follows a contemporary engraving preserved in Harvard College library, which is inscribed: “His Excellencie Richard Coote. Earle of Bellomont, Governour of New England, New York and New Hampshire, and Vice Admirall of those seas.” Cf. the picture of doubtful authenticity in the Memorial History of Boston, ii. p. 175.

As early as August, 1695, word had come that Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, was to be the new governor of Massachusetts. Later it was said that he would not arrive till spring; and when spring came the choice had not even been determined upon. It was not till November, 1697, that he was commissioned governor of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He landed in New York on the 2d of April, 1698, and on the 12th a sloop reached Boston, bringing tidings of his arrival, and three days later the council received a communication from him. For a year and more he stayed in New York, sending his instructions to Stoughton, who as lieutenant-governor directed the council’s action. On the 26th of May, 1699, the governor reached Boston;[181] and it was not long before he manifested his sympathy with the party of which Elisha Cooke was the leader. This gentleman, who was so obnoxious to the Mather party, had been negatived by Phips, when chosen to the council; but on Phips’s withdrawal, his election had escaped a veto, and he now sat at the council board. Mather had succeeded, in 1697, in forcing upon the legislature a charter, in the main of his own drafting, which gave to Harvard College the constitution that he liked, but he manœuvred in vain to secure his own appointment from the General Court to proceed to England to solicit the sanction of the Privy Council; and it was not long before he found that the new governor had vetoed his charter, and in 1701 the assembly legislated him out of office, as the president of the college.

This first blow to the dominance of the Mathers was reassuring, and Bellomont was a leader for the new life to rally about.[182] He was a man of complacent air. He liked, if we may believe him, to hear sermons well enough to go to King’s Chapel on Sundays, and to the meeting-house for the Thursday lectures. He could patronize the common people with a sufficient suavity; and when the General Court, after their set purpose, voted him a present instead of a salary, if he was not much pleased, he took his £1,000 as the best substitute he could get for the £1,200 which he preferred.

Boston, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was not so bad a seat of a viceroyalty, after all, for a poor earl, who had a living to make, and was debarred the more lucrative methods of trade. He reported back to the Lords of Trade abundant figures of what he found to be the town’s resources and those of his government; but the favor which he was receiving from the good people might have been less had they known that these same reports of his set forth his purpose to find Englishmen, rather than New Englanders, for the offices in his gift.

We have also at this time the report which the scurrilous Ned Ward made of the puritan town and its people;[183] but it is not well to believe all of his talk about the innocence of doves and the subtile wiles of serpents, though life in Boston was not without its contrasts, as we look back upon it now. Samuel Sewall, her first abolitionist, was even then pointing the finger of doom to the insidious evil in his Selling of Joseph. Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day, 1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty one. He had figured in one of the noblest spectacles ever seen in the self-willed puritan capital, when on a fast day, January 14, 1697, he had stood up in the meeting-house, and had listened with bowed head to the reading of his penitential confession for the sin of his complicity in the witchcraft trials. Stoughton, the lieutenant-governor, and chief justice of those trials, was quite another type of the puritan fatalist, from whom it was futile to expect a like contrition; and when, at a later day (December 25, 1698), Stoughton invited to dinner the council and omitted Sewall, who was one of them, one might fancy the cause was in no pleasant associations with the remembrance of that scene in Parson Willard’s meeting-house. It is characteristic of Sewall that this social slight oppressed him for fear that Bellomont, who had not yet come, might hear of it, and count him less! But poor Sewall was a man whom many things disturbed, whether it was that to mock him some one scattered a pack of playing-cards in his fore-yard, or that some of the godly chose to wear a wig![184]

SAMUEL SEWALL.

This follows the steel engraving in Sewall Papers, vol. i. There is another likeness in N. E. H. & Gen. Reg., i. 105. Cf. also Higginson’s Larger Hist. United States, p. 208.

The smiting of the Mathers, to which reference has been made, was a business of serious moment to those theocrats. Whoever was not in sympathy with their protests fared badly in their mouths. “Mr. Cotton Mather,” records Sewall (October 20, 1701), “came to Mr. Wilke’s shop, and there talked very sharply against me, as if I had used his father worse than a neger; spoke so loud that people in the street might hear him.” There is about as near an approach to conscious pleasantry as we ever find in Sewall when, writing, some days later, that he had sent Mr. Increase Mather a haunch of very good venison, he adds, “I hope in that I did not treat him as a negro.”

The Mathers were praised highly and blamed sharply in their lifetime, and have been since. There can be little dispute about what they did and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of those influences which place men in relation to other times than their own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries. Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination, the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance, canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for which New England had reason to be grateful. Increase Mather had a convenient astuteness, which was exerted not infrequently to her no small gain. He had learning, which usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements. It was too often quite otherwise with his son Cotton, whose reading smothered his faculties, though he had a native power that occasionally got the upper hand. Between them they gathered a library, which, as John Dunton said, was the glory of New England. The awe which Increase inspired knew little of that lurking rebellion which the too pitiful arrogance of Cotton incited; for the father was essentially a strong and politic man, and though his domination was waning outwardly in 1700, he had the ability to compel the Boston press into a refusal to print the Gospel Order Revised, which his opponents had written in answer to his Order of the Gospel, and to force his adversaries to flee to New York to find a printer.[185]

The old Mather theocracy was attacked on two sides. There was, in the first place, the defection within the old New England orthodoxy, by which an independent spirit had established a church. From the published manifesto of its principles this came to be known as the “Manifesto Church,” and it had invited Benjamin Colman home from England to become its pastor,[186] who, to avoid difficulties, had been ordained in England. He first preached in November, 1699. In the second place, the organization of the Church of England, which had begun in Andros’s time, was gathering strength, though Sewall got what comfort he could from the fact that Mr. Maccarty’s shop and others were not closed on Christmas Day. Attempts had been made to divert the funds of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England from their application to the needs of the Indians, to strengthen the new Episcopal movement; and the failure to do this, as well as a spirit to emulate the missionary enterprise of the French, had instigated the formation of a new Society in England for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts; but it was not long before its resources were turned into channels which nurtured the Episcopal movement and the royal authority. Strong contrasts to the simplicity of the old order were increasing; and it was not without misgivings that the old people had seen Benjamin Wadsworth, the new associate pastor of the First Church, inducted (1696) into office with an unusual formal parade. Thus the humble manners of the past were becoming in large degree a memory; and when, a little later (June 1, 1702), the new queen was proclaimed, and the representatives were allowed to precede the ministers in the procession, the wail in Sewall’s diary, as well as when he notices the raising of colors at the Castle on the Lord’s Day, betokens in another way the order of things which the new charter was making possible.

While in Massachusetts the defection grew, in Connecticut the old order was entrenching itself in the founding of Yale College, first at Saybrook, and later at New Haven, which was destined, as Harvard declined in the estimation of the orthodox, to become the rallying-point of the old school.[187]

In Rhode Island matters went on much as the heterogeneous composition of that colony necessarily determined. Bellomont could find little good to report of her people, and the burden of his complaint to the Lords of Trade touched their propensity to piracy, their evasion of the laws of trade, and the ignorance of the officials.

Bellomont had returned to his government in New York when, on the 5th of March, 1701, he died. It took ten days for the news to reach Boston (March 15), and four days later (March 19) word came by the roundabout channel of Virginia of the declaration of war between England and France. In the midst of the attendant apprehension, on April 7th, mourning guns were fired for the dead governor at the Sconce and at the Castle, and the artillery company gave three volleys in the middle of the town, Col. Townshend, as Sewall in his antipathy does not fail to record, wearing a wig!

When Bellomont had left for New York in May, 1700, the immediate charge of the government had again fallen upon Stoughton. He did not long survive his chief, and died July 7, 1701, in his seventieth year,[188] and from this time to the coming of Dudley the council acted as executive.

It was on Joseph Dudley, to a large party the most odious of all New Englanders, the ally of Andros, that the thoughts of all were now turned. It was known that he had used every opportunity to impress upon the king his fitness to maintain the royal prerogative and protect the revenue in New England. The people of Boston had not seen him for about ten years. In 1691 he had landed there on his way to New York, where he was to serve as a councillor; and during that and the following year he had made some unobtrusive visits to his home in Roxbury, till, in 1693, he was recalled to England to be made lieutenant-governor of the Isle of Wight. With the death of Bellomont his hopes again rose. Ashurst, as the senior of the Massachusetts agents, still opposed him, though his associate, Constantine Phipps,[189] was led to believe that the king might do worse than appoint the aspirant. Dudley was not deficient in tact, and he got some New Englanders who chanced to be in England to recommend him; and a letter, which he used to some purpose, came not surprisingly, considering his lineage, from Cotton Mather, saying quite enough in Dudley’s praise. Elisha Cooke and his friends were not ignorant of such events, and secured the appointment of Wait Winthrop as agent to organize a fresh opposition to Dudley’s purposes. It was too late. The letters which Dudley offered in testimony were powerful enough to remove the king’s hesitancy, and Dudley secured his appointment, which, on the death of the king a few days later, was promptly confirmed by Anne.[190]

The news of the king’s death and the accession of the queen reached Boston, by way of Newfoundland, on the 28th of May, 1702.[191] The new monarch was at once proclaimed from the town house, and volleys of guns and the merriment of carouse marked a new reign. How New England was to find the change was soon sharply intimated. Amid it all tidings came of the capture of three Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians. Later in the same day the eyes of Madam Bellingham, the relict of an early governor, were closed in death, severing one of the last links of other days. Her death was to most a suggestive accompaniment of the mischance which now placed in the governor’s chair the recusant son of Thomas Dudley, that other early governor.

A fortnight later (June 10, 1702), the ship “Centurion,” having Joseph Dudley on board, put in at Marblehead, and the news quickly travelled to Boston. The next day a committee of the council went in Captain Croft’s pinnace to meet him, and they boarded the “Centurion” just outside Point Alderton. Dudley received them on deck, arrayed in a very large wig, as Sewall sorrowfully noted while making him a speech. They saw another man whom they had not heard of, one Thomas Povey, who was to be their lieutenant governor, and to have charge of their Castle. They saw, too, among the passengers, George Keith, the whilom quaker, who was come over on £200 salary, very likely paid by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to convert as many as he could to prelacy.[192] Sewall was not happy during that day of compliments. The party landed at Scarlet’s Wharf amid salvos of artillery, and under escort of the council and the town regiment they proceeded to the town house, where the commissions were published and all “had a large treat,” as Sewall says. Major Hobby’s coach, with six horses, was at the door, a guard of horsemen wheeled into ranks, and so Dudley went to that Roxbury home, whence, as many remembered, he had been taken to be imprisoned.

Dudley was not deficient in confidence and forwardness; but he had no easy task before him. He naturally inclined to the faction of which Byfield and Leverett were leaders; but the insidious and envious Cotton Mather, taking him into his confidence, warned him of these very people. Dudley told them of the warning, and it was not long before the sanctimonious Mather was calling his excellency a “wretch.”

When Dudley made his opening address to the General Court,[193] he could not refrain from saying some things that were not very conciliatory. There were two points on which he raised issues, which he never succeeded in compassing. One of these was a demand for a stated salary. The assembly answered it with a present of £500 against the £1,000 which they had given to Bellomont. No urgency, no threats, no picturing the displeasure of the Crown, could effect his purpose.[194] The war which he waged with the representatives never, as long as the province existed, ended in a peace, though there was an occasional truce under pressure of external dangers.

Another of Dudley’s pleas was for the rebuilding of the fort at Pemaquid, to secure possession of the disputable territory between the Kennebec and Acadia.[195] The deputies were immovable. If the Crown wished to secure that region, it must do it by other sacrifices than those of New England.

Thus thwarted, Dudley could make them feel that the royal governor had some prerogatives; and so he rejected the councillors which the deputies accredited. All of this thrust and parry was of course duly reported by Dudley to the home government. The situation was perplexing in the extreme, quite as much so to the governor as to the people, who reluctantly received him. It was for the interests of both that the war against the French should not flag, and money was necessary, but the governor claimed the direction of expenditures, while the representatives stood aloof and firm on the “privilege and right of English subjects to raise and dispose of money, according to the present exigency of affairs.” With the clergy and the ministers, Dudley was not less unhappily placed. His interests turned him to the church people, but they could not find that his profession had any constancy. His lineage placed him with the Congregationalists, and he once had the ministry in view, but his sympathies went altogether with the new school, of which Stoddard, of Northampton, was leader in the west, while Colman, the Leveretts, and the Brattles were the spokesmen in Boston. In the election of a president for Harvard, Dudley favored Leverett, the successful candidate, and made a Latin speech at his installation,[196] and Cotton Mather writhed at the disappointment of his own hopes. The governor encountered (1708), for his decisive opposition to the Mathers, a terrible but overwrought letter from the father, and a livelier epistle from the son. He showed in his reply a better temper, if nothing more.[197] In the opinion of all honest patriots, of whatever party, Dudley was later found in company which raised suspicions. The conflict with France begat, as wars do, a band of miscreants ever ready to satisfy their avarice by trading with the enemy and furnishing them with arms. Dudley did not escape suspicion, and he experienced some of the bitterest abuse in talk and pamphlet,[198] though the council and the House, the latter after some hesitancy, pronounced the charges against him a “scandalous accusation.” It can hardly be determined that he was implicated, and Palfrey gives him the benefit of the doubt.[199]

JEAN BAPTISTE HERTEL, SEIGNEUR DE ROUVILLE.

This likeness of the leader of the assault on Deerfield follows one given in Daniel’s Nos Gloires Nationales, i. p. 278, where is an account of the Hertel family. He was thirty-four at the time of his attack.

The war was a fearful one. In 1703, month by month fresh tidings of its horrors among the frontier towns reached Boston. In January it was of Berwick, in Maine. In February came sad tidings from Haverhill. In March there was the story of Deerfield, and how Hertel de Rouville had dashed upon the village. With the early summer Dudley went to Canso to confer with the Indians (June 20); and not long after (July 8), Bombazeen, a noted Indian, appeared in Boston with rumors of the French landing near Pemaquid. In August there were sad messages from Wells, and Capt. Southack was sent off by sea with chaplain and surgeon. With all this need of her troops at home, the colony also despatched two companies of foot to help the British forces at Jamaica. Samuel Sewall mourned as ever, when on Sunday (April 23, 1704) great guns at the Castle signalized the Coronation-Day. “Down Sabbath! Up St. George!” he says. The very next day the first number of the Boston News-Letter (April 24)[200] brought to the minister’s study and to his neighbor’s keeping-room the gossip and news of the town which was witnessing this startling proof of progress. Ten days later Dudley signed Benjamin Church’s instructions (May 4), and the old soldier, whose exploits in Philip’s war were not forgotten, set off by land to Piscataqua, where he was met by Cyprian Southack in his brigantine, who carried him to the eastern garrisons. In the News-Letter, people read of the tribulations at Lancaster; of the affairs at Port Royal; of the new cannon which Dudley got from England for the Castle; of the French captives, whose presence in Boston so disturbed the selectmen that they petitioned the governor to restrain the strangers, and whose imagined spiritual needs prompted Cotton Mather to print in his tentative French his Le vrai patron des saines paroles.

News of this sort was varied by a rumor (December 18, 1705), which a sloop from the English Plymouth had brought, that Sir Charles Hobby was to be made governor,—which meant that the agents of the colony in London were trying to oust Dudley with a new man; but in this they failed.

The war made little progress. The expedition against Port Royal in 1707 was a failure, and the frontier towns were still harassed. The news of Marlborough’s victories was inspiriting, and Boston could name a part of its main thoroughfare after the great soldier; but while she planted guns on her out-wharves and hoisted a tar-barrel to her beacon’s top, and while Colonel Vetch marshalled her troops,[201] she waited in vain for the English army to arrive, in concert with which the New England forces were to make a renewed attack on Port Royal in 1709. Rhode Island sent her war-vessels and two hundred men, and they too lay listlessly in Nantasket roads. Schuyler, of Albany, meanwhile started to conduct four Mohawks or Maqua chiefs to England, where he hoped to play upon the imagination of the queen; and in August, while the weary New Englanders were waiting for the signal to embark, Schuyler brought the savages to Boston, and Colonel Hobby’s regiment was mustered for their diversion.[202] Very likely they were taken to see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before “brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,” as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English traders among that people. Distractions and waiting wore away the time; but the English forces never came, and another Port Royal attempt proved wretchedly futile.

That autumn (October, 1709) the New England governors met at Rehoboth, and prepared an address to the queen urging another attempt. In the face of these events the Massachusetts colony had to change its London agent. Sir Henry Ashurst died, and the House would have chosen Sir William Ashurst against Dudley’s protest, if Sir William would have accepted. They now selected their own Jeremiah Dummer, but against his desires.

The year 1710 opened with rumors from Albany about preparations in Canada for an onset along the frontier, and it was not till July (15) that flags and guns at the Castle and Sconce, with drum-beats throughout the streets, told the expectant Bostonians that General Nicholson, who was to head a new expedition, had arrived. It was candle-light before he landed, and the letters and despatches at once busied the government. A little later the council (July 24) entertained that commander, with Vetch and Hobby, at the Green Dragon Tavern; and four days afterwards Governor Saltonstall, from Connecticut, reached Boston, and the contingent of that colony, three hundred men, was on the spot in four weeks from the warning. In September the armament sailed,—twelve ships-of-war and twenty-four transports, of which fourteen carried Massachusetts troops, two New Hampshire, three Rhode Island, and five those of Connecticut. On the 26th of October (1710), Nicholson and his force were back in Boston, flushed with the triumph which the capitulation of Port Royal had given them.[203] The town had need of some such divertissement. There had been a scarcity of grain, and when Captain Belcher attempted to despatch a ship laden with it the mob cut her rudder, and the excitement had not passed without more or less inflaming of the passions. The circle of Matherites had also disturbed the equanimity of the liberals in theology by an anonymous document, Question and Proposals, which aimed at ecclesiasticising everybody and everything,—a stroke of a dying cause. There was an antagonist equal to the occasion in John Wise, of Ipswich, and the Mather dynasty had less chance of revival after Wise’s book The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused was launched upon the town.[204]

Nicholson, again in England, had urged the new tory government under Bolingbroke to make a more determined assault on Canada, and Dummer had united with him in a petition to the queen[205] for a royal armament to be sent for the work. Their plea was recognized and what seemed a great force was despatched. Nicholson, with the van of the fleet, arrived on the 6th of June, 1711,[206] and a convention of the New England governors was straightway called at New London to arrange for the campaign. The plan was for Nicholson to lead four thousand men by way of Albany, and the Connecticut contingent of three hundred and sixty men was to make part of this force. The royal ships came straggling into Boston harbor. On the 24th General Hill, who brought under his command seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments, arrived, and the next day Sewall and others of the council boarded the “Devonshire” and exchanged courtesies with Hill and the admiral of the fleet, Sir Hovenden Walker. The Boston regiments mustered and escorted them to the town house, and the veterans were thrown into a camp on Noddle’s Island. The next six weeks were busy ones, with preparations and entertainments. Mr. Borland, a wealthy merchant, took Hill into his house. The governor offered official courtesies. The transports as they came up into the inner harbor presented a “goodly, charming prospect,” as Sewall thought.[207]

Commencement at Cambridge came on July 4, and all the dignitaries were there. One day some Connecticut Indians exhibited themselves before the admiral, and on another some Mohawks danced on board the flag-ship. By the end of the month, everything was as nearly ready as could be,[208] and the fleet sailed (July 30). They went proudly away, hastened somewhat by large desertions, which the patrolling of the roads leading from Boston had not prevented.

BRITISH SOLDIERS, 1701-1714.

Fac-simile of a cut (pl. xxviii.) in Luard’s Hist. of the Dress of the British Soldier, London, 1852, p. 94. It represents the soldiers of Marlborough’s wars.

Nicholson dallied in Boston for a week or two, eating good dinners, and then started for New York, to take the conduct of the land expedition, Saltonstall accompanying the Connecticut troops as far as Albany. Much farther no one of the land forces went, for word reached them of the sad disaster on the St. Lawrence and of the withdrawal of Walker’s fleet. The New England part of it came straggling back to Boston in October to find the town suffering under the loss of a great fire, which had happened on the night of October 2-3; most unmistakably the result, as Increase Mather told them in a sermon,—and perhaps believed,—of the way in which, during the fitting of the fleet, they had carried bundles on the Lord’s Day, and done other servile work! The cause of the expedition’s failure can be more reasonably indicated: delay in starting, an ill-organized method of supplies, bad pilotage, and incompetent leaders. Walker and Hill sailed direct for England, and in October, while the deputies of the province were bolstering their courage in asking the monarch for another attempt, the English mind was being filled with charges of want of proper coöperation on the part of the New Englanders as the all-sufficient cause of the disaster. Dummer, in London, vindicated his people as well as he could in a Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late expedition to Canada.[209]

In August of the following year (1712) Bolingbroke made a truce with France, the news of which reached Boston from Newfoundland in October (24th). It resulted in the following spring (March 31, 1713) in the Treaty of Utrecht, by which England acquired Acadia with its “ancient limits,” whatever they might be, for we shall see it was a question. The news arrived amid another corn panic. Two hundred angry and perhaps hungry men broke open Arthur Mason’s storehouse and seized the stock of grain. Capt. Belcher sent off another shipload, despite the remonstrance of the selectmen; but the mob stopped short of pulling down Belcher’s house about his ears. “Hardest fend off,” was his word.

Peace secured, Dudley despatched from Boston, November 6, 1713, John Stoddard and John Williams to proceed to Albany, thence by Lake Champlain to Quebec, to negotiate with Vaudreuil for the restoration of prisoners.[210]

The Mason claim[211] to the province of New Hampshire had been bought by Samuel Allen, a London merchant, and he had become its governor; but the active ruler was his son-in-law, John Usher, who had been the treasurer of Andros’s government, and also, as lieutenant-governor, lived in the province. Memories of old political affiliations had not conduced to make his relations with Sir William Phips, of the neighboring jurisdiction, very agreeable. When Bellomont came he was commissioned to take New Hampshire within his government; and it had fallen in the same way to Dudley’s care. This Boston governor found himself popular in New Hampshire, whose people had opposed the reinstatement of Usher, though this had been accomplished in their spite. Dudley and Usher recriminated, and told their respective grievances, and both made their counter-charges to the home government.[212] Affairs went uncomfortably enough till George Vaughan became the successor of Usher, who now withdrew to Medford, in Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty, in 1726.

Upon Rhode Island, Dudley had looked longingly. She would have been brought under his commission but for the exertion of William Penn, then her agent in London. Still, under pretence of consolidating the military strength of the colonies as occasion might require, there was a clause in the commission of Dudley which he construed as giving him command of the Rhode Island militia. Dudley early (September, 1702) went to Newport, and ordered a parade of the militia. Gov. Cranston cited their charter as being against any such assumption of power; and the troops were not paraded.[213] Dudley told the Board of Trade that the colony was “a receptacle of rogues and pirates;” and the people of Rhode Island renewed their fortifications, and sent out their solitary privateer to cruise against French and Spanish. At Dudley’s instigation the Board of Trade (1705) prepared charges of evading the revenue against the colony. Dudley gathered evidence to sustain them, and struggled hard to push the wiry colony to the wall, hoping to crush her charter, and pave the way for a general government for New England, to be the head of which he had not a little ambition. In this Dudley had a confederate in Lord Cornbury, now governor of New York. To him had been similarly given by his commission the control of the Connecticut militia, but a timely prudence saved that colony. Fitz-John Winthrop was now governor,—a second dilution of his race, as Palfrey rather hazardously calls him,—and blameless in purpose always. Dudley’s concert with Cornbury, aimed to crush the charters of both Rhode Island and Connecticut, that each conspirator might get something from the wreck to add to his jurisdiction, utterly failed. In England Sir Henry Ashurst labored to thwart the machinations of Dudley’s friends. In Connecticut Dudley found malcontents who furnished him with allegations respecting the colony’s appropriating unfairly the lands of the Mohegans,[214] and getting a commission appointed to investigate he was made its president. He then proceeded in his own fashion. He omitted to warn Connecticut of the meeting of the court, judged the case peremptorily, and ordered the restitution of the lands. The colony exercised its right of appeal, and prolonging the investigation to 1743 got Dudley’s decision reversed.[215] Gov. Fitz-John Winthrop, of Connecticut, died in Boston while on a visit, November 27, 1707, and was commemorated by Cotton Mather in a funeral sermon, called in his pedantic manner Winthropi justa. The vacant chair was now taken by Gurdon Saltonstall, who did his generation great service and little harm. The policy of Connecticut soon felt his active nature.[216] Her frontier towns towards New York were guarded, and Massachusetts found she had an efficient ally in her warfare at the eastward.

Connecticut, which was steadily rising above 20,000 in population in Saltonstall’s time,—though estimates vary,—was growing more rigorous in observance and creed in contrast to the strengthening of liberalism in Massachusetts. Saltonstall favored the Saybrook platform, which put the management of church affairs in a “consociation of ministers,”—a sort of presbytery. Though a general accord in religious views linked her people together, she harbored some strange sectaries, like the Rogerenes of New London, who were allied in some respects with the Seventh Day Baptists of Westerly, just over the Rhode Island line.

GURDON SALTONSTALL.

This follows the original picture at Yale College by an unknown artist. There is a photograph of it in Kingsley’s Yale College, i. 33. There is another engraving in Hollister’s Connecticut, ii. 584. There is an engraving by Doolittle noted in the Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 30.

The annexed autograph is from a MS. in Harvard College library [5325.23], entitled: A Memorial offered to the General Assembly of his Majesties Colony of Connecticut hold in Hartford, May y^e 10th, 1716, By Gurdon Saltonstall, Esq., one of the Trustees in Trust of the Mohegan Fields in the Township of New London, for the use of Cesar, Sachem of Mohegan & his Indians, upon the occasion of y^e sd Cesar’s Complaint to y^e sd Assembly of wrong done him and his Indians in and upon the sd Fields.

It was during Dudley’s time that the emission of paper money had begun to have a portentous aspect. These financial hazards and disputes, as turning people’s thoughts from old issues, had the effect to soften some of the asperities of Dudley’s closing years of service.[217] He ceased to wrangle for a salary, and omitted to reject Elisha Cooke when again returned by the House in 1715 as a member of the council.[218] Massachusetts had grown much more slowly than her neighbors, and five or six thousand of her youth had fallen in the wars. This all meant a great burden upon the survivors, and in this struggle for existence there was no comforting feeling for Dudley that he had helped them in their trials. The puritan class was hardly more content. Sewall’s diary shows the constant tribulation of his representative spirit: sorrowed at one time by the rumor of a play in the council chamber; provoked again on the queen’s birthday at the mocking of his efforts to check the drinking of healths with which it was celebrated on Saturday night; and thankful, as he confessed again, that he heard not the salutes on the Lord’s Day, which were paid to Nicholson when he finally set sail for England.

It was the 15th of September (1714) when news came of the death of Queen Anne. A sloop sent from England with orders was wrecked on Cohasset rocks, and the government was left in ignorance for the time being of the course which had been marked out for it. Dudley’s commission legally expired six months after the sovereign’s demise, if nothing should be done to prolong it. As the time came near, a committee of the council approached him to provide for the entrance of the “Devolution government,” as Sewall termed the executive functions, which then under the charter devolved on the council. Dudley met the issue with characteristic unbending; and some of his appointees knew their places well enough to reject the council’s renewal of their commission, being still satisfied with Dudley’s, as they professed. His son Paul besought the ministers to pray for his father as still the chief executive, and intrigued to prevent the proclamation of the council for a fast being read in the pulpits. In March what purported to be a copy of an order for his reinstatement reached Dudley by way of New York. It was quite sufficient; and with an escort of four troops of horse clattering over Boston neck, he hurried (March 21, 1715) to the town house, where he displayed and proclaimed his new commission. His further lease of power, however, was not a long one.

WILLIAM DUMMER.

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston.

There were new times at the English court when the German George I. ruled England; when he gave his ugly Killmansegge and Schulenberg places among the English peeresses, and the new Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendall simpered in their uncouth English. The Whig lords must now bend their gouty knees, and set forth in poor German or convenient—perhaps inconvenient—Latin what the interests of distant New England required. We may well suspect that this German dullard knew little and cared less when it was explained to him that the opposing factions of the private and public bank in his American province of Massachusetts Bay were each manœuvring for a governor of their stripe. We may well wonder if he was foolish enough to read the address of the ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, or the address even of the General Court, which came to him a little later. His advisers might have rejoiced that Increase Mather, pleading his age, had been excused from becoming the bearer of these messages, or of that of the ministers, at least.[219]

JEREMIAH DUMMER.

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston. It was at one time in the Mass. Hist. Soc. gallery. (Cf. Proceedings, ii. 289, 296, 300, 302.) It has been ascribed to Sir Godfrey Kneller.

The friends of a private bank carried their point far enough to secure to Col. Elisha Burgess the coveted commission, who, however, was better satisfied with the thousand pounds which the friends of a public bank were willing to pay him, and so he declined the appointment. The same power that paid the money now got the commission issued to Col. Samuel Shute, and the news which reached Boston (April 21, 1715) of Burgess’ appointment was swiftly followed by the tidings of Shute’s ascendency, which meant, it was well known, that Jonathan Belcher, of Cambridge, and Jeremiah Dummer had been successful in their diplomacy in this, as well as in the displacing of Tailer as lieutenant-governor by William Dummer. The latter was Dudley’s son-in-law, and the appointment gilded the pill which the late governor was prepared to swallow.

The good people of Massachusetts had not long got over their thanksgiving for the suppression of the Scottish rebellion when, just about sunset, October 3, 1716, a gun in the harbor told of Shute’s arrival. Two days later, at the town house, he laid his hand on the Bible, “kissing it very industriously,” as Sewall records, and swore to do his duty. On the following Sunday he attended King’s Chapel, and on Thursday he was present at the usual lecture of the Congregationalists, when he heard Cotton Mather preach.[220] He seemed very docile, and doubtless smiled when Mather’s fulsome address to him was paraded in a broadside; very docile, too, when he yielded to Sewall’s entreaty one evening that he would not go to a dancing-master’s ball and scandalize his name. But on November 7 (1716), in his set speech to the legislature, there were signs of trouble. New England had peace on her frontiers, and that was not conducive to quiet in her domestic politics. The conflict came, and Shute was hardly equal to it. The legislature could look to a support nearly unanimous of almost a hundred thousand people in the province, being not much short of a quarter of the entire population of the English colonies; and a people like the New Englanders, who could annually export £300,000 worth of products, were not deficient at least in business courage.

Shute’s instructions as to the demands he should make were not novel. It was the old story of a fixed salary, a house to live in, the command of the Rhode Island militia, the rebuilding of Pemaquid, and the censorship of the press. The governor brought their financial plight to the attention of the House, and they voted more bills of credit. He told them of other things which he and the king expected of them, and they did nothing. So he prorogued them.

It was incumbent on the Crown governor to encourage the production of naval stores, as a means of diverting attention from manufactures, which might injure the market in the colonies for English products. One Bridger had already made himself obnoxious, and been suspected of malfeasance as “surveyor-general of woods,” in Dudley’s time, and it was far from conciliatory to a people who found the Crown’s right to mast-timber burdensome[221] that Bridger appeared in the train of Shute with a new commission. The surveyor was arraigned by the younger Elisha Cooke, who was now succeeding to his father’s leadership, and Shute defending him, a rather lively contention followed, which was not quieted till Dummer, in England, finally got Bridger removed.[222] To one of Shute’s speeches the House made a reply, and Shute threatened he would prevent their printing it.

ELISHA COOKE, THE YOUNGER.

This follows a red-chalk drawing once owned by the Rev. Wm. Bentley, of Salem, and now in the gallery of the American Antiquarian Society. Cooke was born in Boston in 1678, and died in 1737. His only publication appears to be the following: Mr. Cook’s just and seasonable vindication, respecting some affairs transacted in the late general assembly at Boston. [Boston, 1720.] The second impression, corrected. [Boston, 1720.] Sabin, iv. 16,305; Brinley, no. 1,474.

Its appearance, nevertheless, in the News-Letter established the freedom of the press in Massachusetts.[223] The governor informed the Board of Trade that the province was bound to wrest from him as much of his representative prerogative as it could, and its action certainly seemed sometimes to have no other purpose than to establish precedents which might in some turn of fortune become useful. The House chose the younger Cooke speaker in palpable defiance, and when he was disapproved the members refused to go into another ballot, and the governor prorogued them. When the new House assembled they contented themselves with publishing a protest, and chose another speaker; and then they diminished the “present” which they voted to the governor. It seems clear that the House, in a rather undignified way, revelled in their power, and often went beyond the limits of propriety. The charter required that all acts should be reviewed by the Crown for approval. The House dodged the necessity by passing resolves. Dummer in England knew that such conduct only helped the Board of Trade to push the plan of confederating all the provinces under a governor-general, and intimated as much. The House was in no temper to be criticised by its own agent, and voted to dismiss Dummer. The council in non-concurring saved him; but the House retaliated by dropping his allowance.

The council was not without its troubles. Shute refused to attend its meetings on Christmas. Sewall, ever alert at any chance of spurning the day, “because,” as he chose to think, “the dissenters had come a great way for their liberties,” broadly intimated that the council still could pass its bills on that day, and the governor might take whatever day he chose to sign them. It was certainly not a happy era in Massachusetts. The legislature was not altogether wise or benign, and Shute did nothing to make them so.[224]

The frontiers, for a space, had but a hazardous peace. In August, 1717, Shute had gone to Arrowsick (Georgetown, Me.) to hold a conference with the Indians, and had learned from a letter received there from Sebastian Rasle, the Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, that any attempt to occupy the lands beyond the Kennebec would lead to war, and as we shall see the war came.[225] Meanwhile, life in Boston was full of change and shadow. Pirates beset the people’s shipping, and when the notorious “Whidaw” was cast away on Cape Cod (1717) they heard with some satisfaction of the hundred dead bodies which were washed ashore from the wreck. There was consequently one less terror for their coasters and for the paltry sloops which were now beginning to venture out for whales from Cape Cod and Nantucket.[226] There was occasion, indeed, to foster and protect that and all industries, for the purchasing power of their paper money was sinking lower and lower, to the disturbance of all trade. When the province sought to make the English manufacturers afford some slight contribution to restoration of prosperity by imposing a duty of one per cent. on their manufactures sent over, the bill was negatived by the king, with threats of loss of their charter if any such device were repeated. In the same spirit Parliament tried to suppress all iron-working in the province;[227] but after much insistence the people were allowed the boon of making their own nails![228] Some Scotch Irish had come over in 1718, and though most of them went to New Hampshire and introduced the potato,[229] enough remained in Boston to teach the art of linen-making. Spinning under this prompting became a popular employment, and Boston appointed a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools.[230] Perhaps they could spin, if they could not forge; and Boston, with her 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants to be clothed and fed, needed to do something, if Parliament would permit. Her spirit was not always subdued. In 1721 she instructed her representatives not to be deterred by frown or threat from maintaining their charter privileges. “When you come to grant allowances,” she said, “do not forget the growing difficulties that we at this day labor under, and that poverty is coming upon us as an armed man.”[231] The General Court emphasized its call for frugality by forbidding the extravagant outlay for funerals, which was becoming the fashion.[232] There might have been some scandal at the haberdashery trade which the profuse habits of bestowing upon their parsons gloves and rings made a possible circumstance, to say the least, in more than one minister’s house. But a little innocent truck in the study was not the ministers’ most pressing diversion. Cotton, or rather Doctor Cotton Mather, as he had been called since Glasgow, in 1712, had given him a Doctorate of Divinity, bid for an ally against the liberals.[233] When he and his father assisted in the ordination of the new Baptist minister, Elisha Callender, in 1718; and when Dudley, two years before his death,[234] joined Sewall in open attacks on Leverett and the government of Harvard College, there is little doubt where the sympathy of the Mathers lay.[235] They had hopes, too, that the new Connecticut college would register their edicts, since they could no longer enforce them at Cambridge. Sewall found the Lord’s Supper unsuggestive of charity, when the deacon offered the cup to Madam Winthrop before it was served to him; and we, to-day, had much rather see him riding about the country on his circuit, distributing tracts and sermons to squires and hostlers, and astonishing the children, as he rode into the shire-towns under the escort of the sheriff and his men.

But Yale College, of which so much was hoped by the lingering puritanism, soon surprised them, when Timothy Cutler, its rector, with one of its tutors, and other Connecticut ministers, embraced Episcopacy in 1722. Governor Saltonstall was powerless to prevent it, when at Commencement the story of that defection was told. Cutler went to England, received Episcopal ordination, and came to Boston in 1724 to take charge of one of its English churches.[236]

But before this the care of the body as well as of souls had proved a source of dispute with the ministers. Cotton Mather had read in the Transactions of the Royal Society, to which he was sometimes a contributor himself, of the method which was employed in Turkey of disarming the small-pox of some of its terrors by the process of inoculation.[237] That disease was now raging. While the town was moving the governor to send the “Seahorse,” man-of-war, down to Spectacle Island, because she had the pest among her crew, Mather urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to make trial of the Turkish method. The selectmen of Boston and the town meeting opposed it. The House forbade it by bill; but the council hesitated. One of the most active of the physicians of Boston strenuously objected. This was William Douglass, who had been a student of medicine at Leyden and Paris, and who had come to Boston three years before. Other physicians were likewise in opposition. The passions were excited by the controversy; the press was divided; and Mather, who about this time was finding the people “bloody and barbarous,” the town “spiteful,” and the country “poisoned,”[238] had a grenado thrown through his window.[239]

What with the political, financial, theological, and sanitary disturbances of Shute’s time, and the freedom of the press, which the governor had been foolish enough to give them the opportunity of making the most of, the intellectual activity of the people had never before occasioned so great a fecundity of print. The Boston man of the early part of the eighteenth century resorted to the type-setter as readily as he gossiped, and that was easily enough. In 1719 there were five printing-presses running in Boston,[240] and the Exchange was surrounded with booksellers’ shops. The practice of sales of books at auctions had begun in 1717 with the disposing of the library of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, or at least its catalogue is thought to be the first of such a sale. Thomas Fleet was selling his doggerel ballads, and the boys and girls of New England first knew who Mother Goose was when her nursery tales were published by Fleet in 1719. The News-Letter had been published for fifteen years, but not three hundred were yet sold at an impression. Wm. Brooker, succeeding Campbell as postmaster, felt it necessary to divide the town and give the News-Letter a chance for an altercation, when in 1719 (Dec. 21) he began the Boston Gazette. James Franklin had printed this paper for Brooker, but the printing being taken from him he startled the town with the New England Courant, which first appeared on Aug. 17, 1721. The new sheet was bold and saucy,—a sort of free lance, to which people were not accustomed; and while it gave little news and had few advertisements, its columns swarmed with what the staid citizens called impertinences. It wildly attacked the new inoculation theory, and elicited a public rebuke for its scandalous conduct from Increase Mather, who was in turn attacked by it.[241]

The Mathers, Elisha Cooke, Sewall, and above all Jeremiah Dummer in his Defence of the New England Charters,[242] published not a little of a terse and combative strain, which the student to-day finds needful to read, if he would understand the tides and eddies of the life of the time. Boston was also nourishing some reputable chroniclers of her own story. Thomas Prince, who after his graduation had gone to England, had returned in 1717, yet to live forty years ministering to his people of the Old South, gathering the most considerable of the early collections of books and papers, illustrating in good part the history of New England,[243] and contributing less than we could wish to such stores from his own writing. Dr. William Douglass, as we have seen, had dipped into the controversies of the day, practised his pen in the public journals, not always temperately or with good taste, and thirty years later was to vent so much prejudice in his Summary of the British Settlements that, though the book is suggestive, it is an unsafe guide to the student. Thomas Hutchinson, much the best of our colonial historians, was now a boy of six or seven in the forms of Master Bernard’s grammar school.

THOMAS PRINCE.

This follows an oil painting in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. There is also of Prince a mezzotint engraving of a painting, of which there is a heliotype in the Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 221. A portrait after a painting by John Greenwood is noted in the Catal. Cabinet, Mass. Hist. Soc., no. 26. Cf. Proceedings, i. 448.

But war was again imminent. As early as 1709 it had been considered advisable to build a line of defences across Boston neck, and up to 1718 much money had been spent upon it. The peaceful aspect of the affairs at that moment had been an inducement to disband the watch which they had kept there; but in 1721 it had been again set. Gov. Phillips, of Nova Scotia, had been in Boston to talk over the situation at the eastward, for the warnings of Rasle rendered a continuance of quiet doubtful. The younger Castin had been seized and taken to Boston,[244] and bloodshed could hardly be averted; for though peace existed between England and France, there was little question but the encroachments and ravages of the Indians were instigated from Quebec. Sewall tried to arrest the progress of events, and published his Memorial relating to the Kennebec Indians,—an argument for persuasion rather than for force. On July 25, 1722, Gov. Shute and his council declared war against the eastern Indians, and a harrowing struggle began.[245] On the 1st of January, 1723, guns at the Castle before sunrise told the town that Shute had sailed for England, and when the people were astir Boston Light was sinking behind him. He went to arraign the colony in person before the Privy Council, and never returned to his government. The conduct of affairs, meanwhile, fell to Dummer, the lieutenant-governor, who made Cotton Mather inexpressibly happy by what the divine called his wise and good administration.

BOSTON LIGHT AND THE PROVINCE SLOOP.

Sketched from an old mezzotint, “W. Burgis del. and fecit,” and inscribed: “To the merchants of Boston this view of the Light House is most humbly presented By their Humble Serv^t, W^m. Burgis.” Its date is probably not far from 1712. See Boston Record Commissioners’ Reports, vii. 97.

New Hampshire had been included in Shute’s commission, but Vaughan, the lieutenant-governor, claimed that during Shute’s stay in Boston his direct authority lapsed, and his lieutenant was the resident executive. The strife and bickering which followed this assumption had been among Shute’s tribulations, which were somewhat mitigated when influence at London secured the displacement of Vaughan by John Wentworth.[246]

The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut did not order their enactments to be submitted to the royal supervision, a requirement which at one time there was danger would be made,[247] but which was in good part prevented by the ready reasoning of Dummer in his Defence of the New England Charters. One act of Rhode Island, published at this time, seemingly invalidates that colony’s claim for unfailing toleration. In the edition of her laws printed in 1715 there is one which disfranchises Romanists. No one is able to find beyond dispute when, in the chaotic mass of her enactments, it became a law. To relieve the pride of her people from any imputation so contrary to the professed purport of all her history, Arnold, the historian of Rhode Island, has labored to show that the wording of the statute was simply the interpretation of a committee; but it was an interpretation that successive editors kept up till after the close of the Revolutionary War.[248]

In Massachusetts matters were not much improved under the rule of Dummer. An issue soon arose. The House insisted that Walton and Moody, commanders at the eastward, should be suspended, and refused supplies till it was done. Dummer claimed that as commander-in-chief he had the responsibility of such a change. He was forced, however, to yield, and appointed Thomas Westbrooke in the place of Walton, who, having obeyed the governor rather than the House, found he must retire without the pay which he had earned.

In England Shute was presenting to the king his memorial against the province.[249] When the House heard of it they appropriated £100 to hire counsel for the defence; but the upper branch gave the resolve a negative. So the House sent an address to the king,[250] in which the council would not join. The House would then despatch a new agent; the council was content with Dummer; a compromise was reached, by which Elisha Cooke was sent to join Dummer. Shute and his opponents were in due time heard before the Privy Council. The aspect of affairs grew threatening. A Boston man, John Colman, wrote home that the charter was in danger.[251] It ended in the sealing of a new explanatory and supplemental charter,[252] in which Shute’s demands were fairly met, in that there was in it an undeniable expression of the right of the governor to reject a speaker, while the House itself was denied the right to adjourn beyond two days. With this new order Col. Samuel Vetch had hopes of succeeding Shute; but the old governor was not displaced. The General Court prudently accepted the new charter, January 15, 1725.

INCREASE MATHER.

This follows a corresponding likeness in Cotton Mather’s Parentator, Boston, 1724 (Harv. Col. lib., 10397.17). Cf. Edmund Calamy’s ed. of Memoirs of the life of the late Rev. Increase Mather, London, 1725 (Ibid., 10397.16). Engravings are noted in the Catal. Cab. MS. Hist. Soc., p. 35; and of the painted portraits in the same catalogue, no. 23 is of Mather. There is an original painting in the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which is engraved in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, i. 587.

While the provincial charter had been thus in jeopardy, the father of it died. The most conspicuous of New Englanders in his day, though his fame is somewhat overshadowed by his son’s, breathed his last, when Increase Mather died, on August 23, 1723, at the advanced age of eighty-four. When he was buried, a hundred and threescore scholars of Harvard College walked in such a procession as never before attended the burial of a New England divine. In most respects he was the greatest of a race which was born with traits of prowess. His learning was large, far better assimilated than that of the son, and his power over men far happier and more consistent. His industry was enormous; he sometimes worked in his study sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. What Cotton Mather called the “tonitruous cogency” of his pulpit discourse was often alarming to the timid, but not always effective for the mass. The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers. There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the Courant, were printing the hymns of Isaac Watts.

A year after the father died, there was a new election of president of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. Their first choice was Joseph Sewall, of the Old South, a son of the Judge; “chosen for his piety,” as the disappointed man sneeringly wrote in his diary. The “miserable” college, when Sewall declined, chose the minister of the Manifesto Church, a direct thrust at Matherism; but no choice was accepted till Benjamin Wadsworth was elected. The college had another conflict when Timothy Cutler, after receiving Episcopal ordination in England, came to Boston, and by virtue of his new position as a Church of England ministrant set up his claim to a seat in the Board of Overseers. He sought in vain. Mather meantime was contriving to fortify himself, and determined to have a synod to organize some resistance to this increasing antagonism. Dummer entertained a petition to that end, but John Checkley, one of Cutler’s friends, ferreted out the scheme, and there followed a sharp rebuke from the lords justices, who pronounced the calling of such a body the prerogative of the crown, and the movement came to naught. This same John Checkley, a polemical churchman, in Boston, who kept a toy shop, united with it the publishing of tracts, in which the prevailing theology was attacked. In 1719 he had reprinted Charles Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists, and later accompanied Cutler and his friends to England. While there he caused another edition of Leslie to be printed (1723), but added to it his own Boston imprint, and what was more important, he appended a Discourse concerning Episcopacy, which seems to have been a refashioning of another of Leslie’s treatises, by which Checkley had pointedly demonstrated the schism of all ordination except an Episcopal one. With a stock of this book he came back to Boston, and at the “Sign of the Crown and Blue gate, over against the west end of the town house,” he began to sell them. The magistrates found in some expressions “a false and scandalous libel” on themselves. A trial followed with an appeal, which dragged its slow length along; and in the midst of it Checkley delivered a memorable speech in his own defence. It ended in his being fined fifty pounds.

Checkley left Boston not long after for England; and came back again to settle in Providence, and administer the rites of the church as he believed they should be administered.

During all this wearisome contention in Boston, there is a glimpse of the humaner, and perhaps more godly, spirit in the gathering of men together under the lead of Joseph Marion to effect the insuring of neighbors’ worldly possessions from the chances of fire and the sea. It is not unlikely that this first trial of a system which to-day contributes so much to the sum of our happiness began then to indicate that mutual helpfulness might conduce as much to Christian comfort as keeping eyes alert for “scandalous libels.”

But there was no way yet, except by keeping other eyes alert along a musket barrel, to meet the dangers of the frontier. When the authorities erected (1724) Fort Dummer[253] near a spot where Brattleboro’ now stands, they made the first English settlement in what is to-day Vermont. On the 22d of August (1724), as Sewall records, “the ‘Sheerness’ comes up and Captain Harmon with his Neridgwack scalps, at which there is great shouting and triumph. The Lord help us to rejoice with trembling!” Another diary of the day makes these scalps twenty-eight, one of them Bombazeen’s, and another that of “fryer Railes,”—and this is the shape in which the tidings came to Boston of that quick onset at Norridgewock, when the Jesuit Sebastian Rasle fell among his Indian neophytes, ten days before this.[254]

In May of the next year, Lovewell the borderer made his last fight at Fryeburg in Maine, and the news reached Boston on the 13th of the same month. The ballad of Pigwacket, commemorating that bloody work, passed into the popular memory, and abided there for many a year.[255] In the following November four eastern sagamores came to Boston, and what is known as Dummer’s treaty was signed there on December 16, and the next summer (August 6) it was ratified at Falmouth (Portland). There was to be little disturbance of the peace thus consummated for a score of years to come. The war had borne heavily on Massachusetts. In such money as they had, it had during its four years’ continuance cost £240,000, and when the assembly voted an issue of another £50,000 of bills, Dummer, under royal instructions, withheld his approval. His fidelity cost him his salary for a while, which the House refused to vote until some compromise was reached.

While this quieting of the eastern frontier was in progress, the western settlements of Massachusetts were being pushed across the mountains beyond the Connecticut, and the peopling of Berkshire began at Sheffield in 1725. The leading agents in this movement were Col. Jacob Wendell, of Boston, and Col. Jonathan Stoddard, of Northampton. The occupation proved a barrier against the Dutch of New York, though it was sixteen years before the next settlement was made in the Housatonic valley at Pittsfield.[256]

MATHER BYLES.

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the cabinet of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which came to it with other portraits by the bequest of the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem (b. Boston, June 22, 1759; d. Salem, December 29, 1819). There is another likeness in the Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 227. Cf. Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 37.

During the night of the 29th of October, 1727, New England experienced one of the severest earthquakes which she had known. The next morning Cotton Mather made a speech in Boston, and this, with an account of the earthquake’s effects, was published at once as The Terror of the Lord, followed shortly by his Boanerges, intended to strengthen the impressions of the awful hour in the minds of the people. Haven’s bibliography shows the affluence of the ministerial mind in the face of this event.[257] Sermon after sermon was published, and the press had not ceased issuing the renewed editions of some of them when Cotton Mather died on the 13th of February, 1728, and gave the preachers another fruitful theme. Here was a man whose views of a fitting mundane life were as repulsive as those of Sebastian Rasle, and whose scalp would have aroused Quebec as Rasle’s did Boston. We have grown to judge each by a higher standard than the prejudices and doctrines of their time.[258]

After the departure of Shute, Wentworth continued as lieutenant-governor in the executive chair of New Hampshire. The assembly tried to insist upon a speaker whom he disapproved, but the explanatory charter of Massachusetts came to Wentworth’s support, and he prevailed; and under his lead the province experienced its share of the Indian warfare. Rhode Island remained all the time under Gov. Cranston, who had held the office by election thirty successive years when he died in 1727. Her chief point of contact with her neighbors was her bills of credit, which had sunk so low that they had become little better than a pest to herself and to the neighboring colonies. Connecticut kept her activity and quiet ways within herself. She took no part in the war beyond putting her border towns in a state of defence.

Shute was pursuing his aim in England. He had succeeded in getting from the king an explicit threat, under whose pressure it was thought the Massachusetts assembly would see the advisability of establishing a fixed salary for the royal governor, when George I. died (June 11, 1727), and Shute’s commission was vacated. He slipped into a pension of £600 a year, and died an old man. The news of the king’s death reached Boston in August, and on the 14th George II. was proclaimed with military parade. The ministers beguiled themselves, as usual, preaching many sermons on the death of a good king, and Mather Byles published a poem.

Since 1720 William Burnet, a son of Bishop Burnet, had been governor of New York and New Jersey, whither he had gone to retrieve a fortune lost in stock speculations; and with a numerous family to support, he felt the necessity of it. The new king relieved him of some embarrassment, occasioned by a growing unpopularity in his government, by directing his transfer to the vacant chair of Massachusetts, signing his commission in March. He reached Boston July 13, and as he was escorted to the Bunch of Grapes tavern[259] the people marked his noticeable presence and his suave manners, and might have predicted a calmer sway from him than proved to be in store. He was flattered by his reception, and even ordered the publication of some eulogistic verses, which Mather Byles, the clerical wit of the time, addressed to him.[260]

GEORGE II.

From a print in Entick’s Gen. Hist. of the late War (2d ed. 1765) vol. ii., frontispiece.

His instructions were of the sort that the province had got used to, though perhaps they hinted more pointedly of the danger which awaited the charter, if the salary question was not agreeably settled. Burnet’s speech opened the legislative war. The assembly answered it by voting him a larger allowance than was usual,—but still an allowance. The town of Boston had the speech read to it in town meeting, and voted nemine contradicente, as we read in the records,[261] in the assembly’s spirit. The House now asked to be prorogued. The governor refused, thinking the £1,000 a month which the sitting cost might bring them to terms. This failing, he resorted to manœuvres which even Chalmers censures. He removed the General Court to Salem, when, in a sort of grim irony, it recorded a resolve to legalize proceedings passed in an unaccustomed place, and consequently unconstitutional, as they claimed. The House now addressed a memorial to the king and refused the governor a copy of it, and, helped by Boston merchants to pay the cost, the representatives despatched Jonathan Belcher to coöperate with Francis Wilks, now the resident agent in London, in obtaining the king’s favorable attention to their plea. This appeal gave the governor a pretext for releasing the legislature for three months,—and perhaps the device of the House had that purpose.

The Board of Trade heard both sides, sustained the governor, and advised the king to lay the facts before Parliament. The House in turn ordered a historical summary of all the proceedings relating to the salary question from the time of Phips to be edited and printed.[262] The governor dissolved the assembly, and took his revenge in withholding his signature to the bill for their own pay. A new election sent to Boston an assembly which was of the same temper. Burnet told them of the danger from the Board of Trade’s advice to the Crown; their own agents wrote to them there was no danger; and so the House continued as bold as ever. The governor directed their reassembling at Cambridge. Here they voted afresh the allowance, which was scorned as before. Meanwhile the governor got some literary recreation, for which his acquirements well fitted him, by printing moral and entertaining papers in the New England Journal; and if this did not bring him an income, he managed to eke one out by increasing the rate of clearance fees at the custom house, which all went into his own pockets.

Returning one day from Cambridge to Boston, in August, 1729, he was thrown into the water by the overturning of his carriage. A fever ensued, and he died September 7. The legislature gave him an impressive funeral, and voted £2,000 to his children; and his “character,” by Parson Colman, was circulated in a folio half-sheet.[263]

Dummer, as lieutenant-governor, again took the executive’s chair, and fought over the salary question once more; and the council, as before, steadily refused to join in the payment of the agents of the House.

Jonathan Belcher, lately the agent of the province, was now commissioned governor. He came of a New England stock, and his father had gained a fortune in trade, and had secured some political consideration as a member of the council. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Danforth, one of the ablest of the leading politicians under the old charter. The new governor had graduated at Harvard College; and foreign travel had added ease and attraction, with some of the wiles of the world, to a presentable person. He had been accustomed to dispense his fortune in ways to draw attention and give him consequence. He had thrown out intimations in high quarters in England that the view he once held on the prerogative had undergone a change, and that he knew the turbulent spirits of his native province well enough to manage them. Wilks and Shute had seconded his professions, and his appointment followed. With instructions pitched to a higher demand than ever before, he was sent off to try his skill with an intractable people. Meanwhile Dummer had been superseded by Tailer, a former incumbent of the lieutenant-governorship, chiefly because the naval office he was occupying was wanted for another. Tailer was at the time in New England, and received his commission before Belcher arrived, which was not till August 10, 1730. So amid the terror, from a new invasion of small-pox which had withdrawn the town from the observance of its centenary,[264] and with signs of a new life, as well as a new era, in the relief which the law was giving to the baptists and the quakers from the burden of the parish taxes, and with the stranger element of their population developing a new Irish Presbyterian church under John Moorhead,[265] the people of Boston received their recusant townsman as governor. He made his speech in due time to the General Court. Cato, he told them, went beyond reason in letting his obstinacy lure him to destruction. This reference to the salary contention did not intimidate them; for the House had information from its own agents that the jealousies of the party leaders in England were not likely to let any issue affecting the continuance of the charter be forced upon Parliament. In any event there was a disposition rather to accept parliamentary domination, whatever it might be, than surrender one jot of their principles. With such a disposition the House became stubborn,—politely so. It even voted the governor liberal grants for the services which he had rendered as agent, and he took the gratuities though he had abandoned the grantors. The allowances for his services as governor he could not well accept under such instructions as bound him; and as he needed the pay, his son solicited permission from the home government for the father to receive the usual grants. The request was allowed, and the salary contention came virtually to an end. When Belcher approved a grant of £500 to be placed in the Bank of England to the credit of the province’s agent, he little suspected he was furnishing the means to bring about his own overthrow. His conduct of his office rendered such an overthrow likely. The times, with all failings, had not seen before such flagrant attempts to serve party friends with the spoils of office. The public was so sensitive that even the younger Cooke, accepting a judgeship with some traits of sycophancy, fell in their good opinion.

The House set up a claim to audit all bills for which they granted money, and attaching such a proviso to their grants, such votes successively received the governor’s veto. This denied the public officers their salaries, and occasioned distress that the home government was besought to alleviate. The governor’s position was confirmed, and when the news of it came the House somewhat ludicrously asked him to appoint a day of fasting and prayer, since they were under such a “divine displeasure.” The governor thought the matter more mundane than divine, and refused. So in the autumn of 1733 the House saved its pride one forenoon by passing a bill with the proviso, and in the afternoon satisfied its sense of expediency by reversing the vote. Thus the delegates in their ungraceful way succumbed, as the governor did two years later, respecting the salary question. Each side was humbled, and affairs went smoothly for a while, though the depreciation of the paper in which the governor was paid did not quite fill the measure of his content.[266]

Commercial distress always conduces to emotional disturbance in a community, and the history of the “Great Awakening,” as it was called, is no exception to the rule. This religious revival began to make itself felt in 1734, under an impulse from Jonathan Edwards,[267] and later, under the ministrations of George Whitefield, the wild passion—for it became scarce else—spread through the churches and communities of New England.[268]

Mather Byles, Judge Danforth, and Thomas Prince supported the movement in the New England Weekly Journal. Thomas Foxcroft and others, reinforced by a large part of the country ministers, fought the battle in sermon and pamphlet. Benjamin Colman gave the movement a qualified commendation. It found various classes of opponents. Charles Chauncy condemned it for its hot-bed sustenance, its “commotion in the passions,” and its precarious growth.[269] Thomas Fleet, the publisher of children’s books, turned the wit which enlivened his evening vendu at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, into the columns of the Boston Evening Post, which he had just started. Here he held up Whitefield to ridicule, just as Joseph Green and other wits held up in the same place the pomp of Belcher to public derision. Dr. Douglass[270] reckoned up the thousand pounds sterling that were lost to the families of working people by what he called a misuse of time in attending the midday mass-meetings, to which Whitefield ministered. The passion and fervor swelled, lapsed, returned, dwindled, and died; some counted the wrecks it left, some wondered at its transient impressiveness, and a few occasionally struggled to revive it.[271] Amid all the consternation attending what William Cooper in the election sermon of 1740 called “an empty treasury, a defenceless country and embarrassed trade,” New England managed to raise 1,000 men to send off to join the fleet of Admiral Vernon in the West India waters. Scarce a hundred of them ever returned.[272]

AN ENGLISH FLEET OF THIS PERIOD.

From Popple’s great map, The British Empire in North America, 1732. Admiral Preble says in his “Vessels of war built at Portsmouth” (N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., 1868, p. 393) that the “Falkland” was built in 1690, and carried 54 guns; but in some MS. emendations in the copy of his paper in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soc., he says she was probably built between 1694 and 1696. She is considered to be the earliest man-of-war built in the colonies. Within a short time after 1743, three vessels were built in New England for the royal navy,—the “America,” “Boston,” and “Essex.” The same writer, in The United Service, January, 1884, p. 98, etc., describing the changes in armament of vessels during the 18th century, defines ships-of-the-line as carrying 50 guns or more on three decks; frigates, 20 to 50 guns on two decks. Sloops-of-war with guns on one deck, and corvettes with guns on the poop and forecastle only, came in later.

The social life of the chief town of New England passed on, meanwhile, in the shadow of these ominous uncertainties. Jeremy Gridley had as early as 1731 started The Weekly Rehearsal, and had given the more scholarly classes this to ponder upon, and that to be entertained with, in columns more purely literary than they had ever known before. If such people welcomed the poems of Isaac Watts,—and one which Watts addressed to Belcher was just now printed in Boston,—they caused Richard Fry, an English printer, freshly come to Boston, to hold a high opinion of their literary taste, because they relieved his shelves of twelve hundred copies of the poems of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire bard. In 1731 they listened at a Thursday lecture to Colman’s eulogy of Thomas Hollis as a patron of learning; and the neighboring college mourned in him the principal benefactor of this time. Lemercier, the minister of the Huguenots in Boston, published a Church History of Geneva (1732), which was a passing talk. Cox, a bookseller near the town house, got out (1734) a Bibliotheca Curiosa, describing his stock,—enormous for the times. Thomas Prince, the minister of the Old South, let his antiquarian zeal bring back the early struggles of the first settlers, when he printed (1731) the homely Memoirs of Roger Clap, of Dorchester, while the century sermons of Foxcroft in Boston (1730), and of Callender in Rhode Island (1739), made the pews slumbrous then, and command big prices to-day. Thomas Prince, moreover, was in travail with his Chronological History of New England. He published it in 1736, and the General Court paused to take note of it, and forgot for a moment money schemes and revivals to learn how in the “year 1, first month, 6th day” Adam appeared, to lead the long chronology which Prince felt bound to run down before he got to his proper theme. He had already wearied everybody so much, when he had gone far enough to embrace two or three years only of the New England story, that no one longer encouraged him, and “the leading work of history published in America up to that time” remains a fragment for the antiquaries to regret.[273]

It was in the year 1741 that the Boston Cadets came into existence as the governor’s body-guard. It was earlier, that Thomas Hancock, who had married the daughter of Henchman, the bookseller, by whom he was indoctrinated with the principles of successful trade, built the stone mansion on Beacon Hill which John Hancock, his nephew, later made more famous.[274] It was in this time of commercial distress that, according to Bennett, an observer, the reputation of the ladies of Boston suffered if they went to a dancing-assembly lately set up; but they could drive about with their negro footmen, and “neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.” And when the finest lady in Boston, his Excellency’s wife, was buried in 1736, we read of the horses of the hearse covered with broadcloth and escutcheons, and of other parade and adornment, which gave tradespeople something to do and money to earn. Artisans needed then more than now such adventitious help.

BENJAMIN POLLARD.

This likeness of one of the first captains of the Boston Cadets follows an original by Blackburn in the gallery of the Mass. Hist Society. It was Pollard who received Shirley on his return from Louisbourg. Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 119. He died in 1756. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. 498, xvi. 390; Catal. of the Cabinet, no. 76.

Not a hatter might make as many hats as he would, because he injured by so much the trade of the English hatter, and Parliament interdicted (1732) any such rivalry. The poor man paid dear for his molasses, because Parliament compelled the merchant to buy it of the English sugar islands, instead of the French colonies in the West Indies.[275] He paid more for his rum, because Parliament protected the English distillers. The merchant smuggled and had no pangs of conscience; and what smuggling could do was very likely shown in the stately mansion that Thomas Hancock built.[276] Can we wonder that the new country did not attract as many settlers as it might; that town rates in Boston increased from £8,600 in 1738 to £11,000 in 1741, and the polls fell off from 3,395 to 2,972; and that Sam. Adams, graduating at Harvard in 1740, took for his Commencement part the inquiry, “Whether it be lawful to resist the superior magistrates, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?”

Belcher played the potentate with the Indians, and made his treaties with them as his predecessors had done. He met them at Falmouth (Portland) in 1732, and at Deerfield in 1735. Perhaps he was fairer in his dealings with them than he was with his fellows of the whiter skin, for he has passed into history as the least entitled to esteem of all the line of royal governors in Massachusetts,—a depreciation perhaps helped by his being born on the soil. His political paths were too devious. Hutchinson tells us that when Tailer, the lieutenant-governor, died in 1732, it was Adam Winthrop that Belcher openly favored in New England as the successor, while he intrigued with the Board of Trade to secure the appointment of Paul Mascarene; yet to no avail, for Spencer Phips, the adopted son of Sir William, succeeded to the place.

New Hampshire had been reunited with Massachusetts under Burnet, and she had proved much more tractable than the larger colony in yielding the point of the fixed salary to the governor. She had hopes of being in some way rewarded for it. Under Belcher matters grew worse. He quarrelled with the lieutenant-governor, and David Dunbar, the surveyor-general of the king’s lands, came into the place, but without healing dissensions. Dunbar had the support of influential persons like Benning Wentworth and Theodore Atkinson; and Belcher made what he could out of the friendship of Richard Waldron, the secretary.[277] Massachusetts, as well as her governor, had grievances against her neighbor; and she prohibited by legislation the circulation within her bounds of the promissory notes of New Hampshire whose redemption was not well secured. New Hampshire and Massachusetts were never again under a single executive. Wentworth chanced to be in London when Belcher’s downfall came, and he readily slipped into the executive seat of his province.[278]

After the picture (in the Mass. Hist. Society’s gallery) painted on the voyage over by Smybert, who accompanied him. Cf. Catal. Cabinet Mass. Hist. Soc., no. 41. A photograph of the picture of Berkeley and his family by Smybert, now at Yale College, is given in Noah Porter’s Two Hundredth Birthday of Bishop George Berkeley, N. Y. 1885; and in Kingsley’s Yale College, i. 59. Smybert later painted many portraits in Boston. Cf. Mem. Hist. Boston, iv. 384, with references. His pictures, together with those of Blackburn, Pelham, and Copley, richly preserve to us the look and costume of the better classes of New England during the provincial time. Cf. Wm. H. Whitmore’s Notes on Peter Pelham, Boston, 1867; Arthur Dexter’s paper on the “Fine Arts in Boston” in Mem. Hist. Boston, vol. iv., with references in the notes; A. T. Perkins on the portraits of Smybert and Blackburn in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Dec. 1878, p. 385, and May, 1879, p. 93. For historic costume see Dr. Edward Eggleston’s “Colonists at Home” in The Century, xxix. 882. It was when Copley was most in vogue that the habits of the upper classes reached in their dress that profusion of silk and satin, brocaded damask and ruffles, ermine and laces, velvet and gilt braid, which makes up the descriptions in Mr. Perkins’ enumeration of Copley’s portraits. (A. T. Perkins’ Life and Works of J. S. Copley, Boston, 1873. Cf. also Martha B. Amory’s “John Singleton Copley” in Scribner’s Monthly, March, 1881, and her Domestic and Artistic life of Copley, Boston, 1882.)

The Rhode Islanders ejected (1732) Jenckes, their governor, because he tried to stay their wild course in the emission of paper money. The lieutenant-governor, John Wanton, led the opponents of Jenckes, and secured the election of his brother, William Wanton, and two years later succeeded to the chair himself.

George Berkeley, in England, had been pronouncing the age barren of every glorious theme. Perhaps to transcend this level he conceived a project of establishing a college in Bermuda for Indians and missionaries.[279] So he came over to Newport (1729) to buy American lands, and await or perhaps force a rise on them. The death of George I. had crossed his pious scheme by drying up his fountains. Newport was now a thriving town of 5,000 souls, the chief town in a colony of perhaps 18,000 inhabitants. It had an Episcopal church in which Berkeley sometimes preached, and to which he gave an organ. He had brought over with him a Scotch artist, John Smybert, and so the patron and his family, happy on the whole, though his glorious project had not fructified, came out of the canvas under Smybert’s pencil; and the picture went to Yale College, where we may see it now,[280] and afterwards so did his books, and the deed conveying his Newport farm,[281] when after two or three years he had gone back to England, a disappointed man.[282]

Not long afterwards another man with a mission ventured on a different project in the little colony. James Franklin, who had found it prudent to leave Massachusetts, when he told the august assembly that they did not do all they might to catch pirates, came to this nest of free-booters, and started a newspaper, the Rhode Island Gazette, the first in the colony, and saw it fail within a year.

When the Spanish war was coming on, in 1739, the plucky little colony put herself on a war footing. She built the “Tartar,” a war-sloop of 115 tons;[283] her merchants, the Wantons, the Malbones, and others, ran five privateers out to sea; and even her quakers found ways to help. Seven watch-towers were built along the coast, Fort George was garrisoned, and a battery frowned on Block Island.[284]

WILLIAM SHIRLEY.

This follows an engraving, “T. Hudson, pinxt.; J. McArdell, fecit,” reproduced in J. C. Smith’s Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, p. 896. Cf. Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc., p. 26; Mem. Hist. Boston, ii., frontispiece.

In Connecticut, on Saltonstall’s death in 1724, Joseph Talcott succeeded and held office during the rest of Belcher’s time.

BOSTON HARBOR, 1732.

From Popple’s British Empire in America (1732).

The rule by which good ends sanctified base means came to its limit. Belcher, who had not been without high support,[285] was removed on the 6th of May, 1741; when he had sufficiently indoctrinated his opponents in his own wily ways, and they had not hesitated to use them.

William Shirley, the governor who succeeded on the same day, was an English barrister, who had come to Boston some time before (about 1733-35) to seek his fortune. He looked about for offices in the gift of the home government, and began soliciting them one after another. When the Spanish war came on, he busied himself in prompting enlistment, and took care that the authorities in England should know it; and Mrs. Shirley, then in that country, had, to her husband’s advantage as it turned out, the ear of the Duke of Newcastle. Shirley was in Rhode Island acting upon the boundary question, which was then raised between Massachusetts and her neighbor, when his commission arrived, and he hastened to Boston to take the oath.

Shirley had some excellent qualities for political station. He was courtly and tactful, and when at a later day he entertained Washington he captivated the young Virginian. He was diligent in his duties, and knew how to retreat when he had advanced unadvisedly. He governed his temper, and was commonly wise, though he did not possess surpassing talents.[286] In his speech to the legislature he urged the strengthening of the defences of Boston, for the Spanish war still raged; and he touched without greatly clarifying the financial problem. He tried in a more civil way than his predecessor had followed to get his salary fixed; but he could not force a vote, and a tacit understanding arising that he should be sure annually of £1,000, he desisted from any further attempts to solve that vexed question. A month later, he went to Commencement at Cambridge, and delivered a Latin speech at the proper moment, which was doubtless talked over round the punch in the chambers, as it added one scholarly feature to a festival then somewhat riotously kept. There was more dignity at the Boston lecture, when Benjamin Colman preached, and when his sermon was printed it had in an appendix the address of the Boston ministers to the new governor, and his Excellency’s reply. Spencer Phips was retained in the chair of the lieutenant-governor, but a new collector of Boston came in with Sir Henry Frankland, the story of whose passion for the maid of a Marblehead inn is one of the romances of the provincial history of New England.[287]

Boston was now a vigorous town, and held probably for the next forty years a larger space in the view which Europe took of the New World than has belonged to her since. Forty topsail vessels were at this time building in her ship-yards. She was despatching to sea twice as many sail as New York, and Newport was far behind her. Fortunes were relatively large, and that of John Erving, the father of Shirley’s son-in-law, was perhaps the largest of its day. He earned a few dollars in ferrying passengers across to Cambridge on a Commencement Day; put them into fish for Lisbon, there into fruit for London, and the receipts into other commodities for the return voyages, until the round of barter, abundantly repeated, made him the rich man that he became, and one who could give tea to his guests. The privateers of the merchants brought royal interest on their outlay, as they captured goods from the French and Spanish traders. Yankee wit turned sometimes unpromising plunder to a gain. One vessel brought in “a bale of papal indulgencies,” taken from a Spanish prize. Fleet, the printer, bought them, and printed his ballads on their backs. Another Boston merchant, of Huguenot stock, had given the town a public hall. This benevolent but keen gentleman, of a limping gait, did not live long to add to the fortune which he inherited. The first use that Faneuil Hall was put to was when James Lovell, the schoolmaster and a writer in the local magazines, delivered a eulogy there on this same Peter Faneuil,[288] while the loyal Bostonians glanced from the speaker to the likeness of George II., which had already been hung on its walls.

Shirley with the rest saw that war with France could not be far off. There was preparation for it in the treaty with the Six Nations, which was made at Philadelphia in July, 1742. In August Shirley himself had treated with the eastern Indians at Fort St. George’s. The next year (1743) the line of western settlements in Massachusetts was strengthened by the occupation, under William Williams, of Poontoosuck, now Pittsfield, and Williams was later instructed to establish Fort Shirley (at Heath), Fort Pelham (at Rowe), and Fort Massachusetts (in Adams, near the Williamstown line).

In 1744 the war came.[289] The French, getting advices from Europe earlier, attacked Canseau before the English were aware of the hostile decision. Though France had published her declaration in March, the news did not reach Boston till the 2d of June. Men’s thoughts passed from the “Great Awakening” to the stern duties of a war. “The heavenly shower was over,” said Thomas Prince, who saw with regret what he thought a warfare with the devil pass by; and Fleet, the wit of the newspapers, pointed to an opportune comet, and called it “the most profitable itinerant preacher and friendly New Light that has yet appeared among us,” while all the pulpit orators viewed it after other and their own fashions. Perhaps the lingering puritanism saw an omen or a warning in the chimes just then set in the tower of Christ Church. A lottery in full success was not heinous enough in those days, it would seem, to be credited with all the divine rebukes that it might be now.[290]

There was danger on the coasts. The armed sloops of Rhode Island and Connecticut were cruising between Martha’s Vineyard and New Jersey, and the brigantines of Massachusetts watched the coast north of Cape Cod.[291] But the retaliatory stroke was soon to come in the expedition against Louisbourg.

Dr. Douglass, who had grown into prominence in Boston, prophesied the failure of a scheme which had the barest majority in the assembly, and the chances were certainly on his side: but a desire to show what could be done without the military aid of England aroused the country, and not a little unworthy hatred of Romanism helped on the cause. One parson at least was ready to take along with him a hatchet to hew down the altars of the papist churches. A company from Plymouth, under Sylvanus Cobb, was the earliest to reach Boston. Massachusetts mustered 3,250 men, and the transports which sailed out of Boston harbor with this force made a fleet of a hundred sail, under convoy of nine or ten armed vessels, the whole carrying not far from 200 cannon.

The reader must turn to another chapter for the progress of the siege.[292] Good fortune favored this time the bold as well as the brave. Word coming back to Boston for reinforcements, an express was sent to Captain Williams, at Fort Shirley, and in six days he reported in Boston with 74 men, and sailed on the 23d of June. Louisbourg, however, had already surrendered (June 16), two days after the Rhode Island sloop “Tartar”[293] and two other war-sloops had dispersed the flotilla which was speeding from Annapolis to its assistance. This was the only active force of Rhode Islanders in the campaign; her contingent of foot, which was intended to join the Connecticut regiment, did not reach the ground till after the surrender; but her privateers did good service elsewhere, meanwhile, having sent into Newport during the year a full score of prizes.

It was on a fast day, July 2d, that the news of the success reached Boston, and spread throughout the colonies, occasioning[294] exuberant rejoicing, which the ministers tempered as best they could with ascribing the conquest to the finger of God, shown “more clearly, perhaps,” as Charles Chauncy said, “than since the days of Joshua and the Judges.” Modern historians think that Douglass was right, and that extraordinary good luck was a chief reason of the success.

The colonies beyond the Hudson were now anxious to be partakers in the cost and in the burden of the future defence of the captured fortress, if they had not shared the danger and exhaustion of the victory.[295] Pennsylvania offered £4,000, New Jersey £2,000, and New York £3,000.

The victorious Pepperrell returned to Boston in June, 1746. Cannon from the batteries saluted the frigate which brought him. The governor welcomed him at the Castle and escorted him to the landing of the town, where the Cadets received him and led the way to the council chamber. Here addresses and congratulations were exchanged, and the successful general started for his home in Maine, meeting demonstrations of honor at every town on his way.

Shirley now resolved on further conquest, and plans were being arranged for an armament sufficient for the conquest of all New France, with the help this time of veterans from England, when news came of the speedy arrival of a large French fleet on the coast, with a mission of reprisals and devastation.[296] In August a thanksgiving for the victory at Culloden was held, and Thomas Prince spoke in the Old South in Boston. In September there was little giving of thanks, and there was much fear of the French admiral, D’Anville. Troops were pouring into Boston from the country. Douglass says he saw six or seven thousand of them on Boston Common. The defences of the harbor were being rapidly strengthened. All the coast lookouts were reëstablished, and shore batteries were manned. Rhode Island pushed work on her forts. Connecticut sent promises of large reinforcements, if the attack should fall on Boston. Every Frenchman was put under surveillance, and the times inciting to strong language, the General Court issued orders for greater publicity to be given to the act against profaneness. There was a fast to supplicate for mercy. Thomas Prince in his pulpit heard the windows of the meeting-house rattle with a rising storm. He prayed that it might destroy the French fleet. It did. Divided counsels, disappointments in plans, the sudden death of D’Anville, its commander, the suicide of his lieutenant, disorganized the purpose of the enemy; the waves and the rocks did the rest, and only a fragment of the great armament went staggering back to France. Boston breathed easily, and the hasty soldiers marched home to their harvests; and when news came of the compact which George Clinton had made with the Six Nations at Albany, in August and September, hope and courage prevailed, though the tidings from Fort Massachusetts were distressing. Then came other massacres, and Indians were reported prowling through northern Hampshire. It had been intended to make a demonstration against Crown Point in the autumn. Provisions and munitions were hurried from Boston; Massachusetts men gathered at Albany. Winter came, disconcerting plans, and discouragement ensued.[297]

The next year Boston had a taste of the old-world despotism to which it had not been accustomed. Commodore Knowles, commanding a part of the fleet which had assisted in the capture of Louisbourg, came to Boston. Some of Knowles’ men deserted, and as enlistments did not bring what recruits the fleet needed, the commodore sent a press-gang to town (November 17, 1747), which seized whomever they found about the wharves. Boston was enraged. A mob gathered, and demanded that some of the officers of the fleet, who were in town, should be detained as hostages. The air grew murkier, and Shirley became frightened and fled to the Castle. The legislature tried to settle the difficulty, and Knowles threatened to bombard the town, unless his officers were released. The General Court denounced the riot, but signified to the commodore the necessity of redress. Under its order, the officers returned to the fleet, and Knowles, finding the business had become dangerous, let most if not all of his recruits go, and set sail, but not till the governor, gathering courage from the control over the mob which a town meeting had seemed to acquire, had come back to town, when he was escorted to his house by the same militia that had refused his summons before.

It was a violent reaction for Shirley from the enthusiasm of the Louisbourg victory, thus to experience the fickleness of what he called the “mobbishness” of the people; and his trust in the town meeting and the assembly was not strengthened when the representatives reduced his allowance, on pretence of the burdens which the war had brought. Shirley intimated that the 200,000 population of the province and a capital with 20,000 inhabitants did not mark a people incompetent to pay their rulers equably; but his intimations went for little. The colony was not in very good humor. England, in making the treaty of Aix la Chapelle (October 7, 1748), had agreed to restore Louisbourg to the French, and leave the bounds as before the war. There were discordant opinions among the advisers of the government touching the real value of Louisbourg as a military post; but it was unfortunate that to redress the balance in Europe England had to relinquish the conquests of her colonists. It may not have been wholly without regard to the quelling of the New England pride, which might become dangerous,—since Sam. Adams was pluming his political rhetoric in the Independent Advertiser at this time,—that it was thought best by that treaty to give to the province an intimation of the superior authority of the Crown.[298] The province was not without its own power of warning, for Hugh Orr, a young Scotchman, manufactured about this time at Bridgewater 500 stands of arms for the province of Massachusetts Bay; which are said to have been carried off by the British from Castle William when they evacuated Boston in March, 1776. They are supposed to have been the first made in America.[299]

Meanwhile, Horatio Walpole, the auditor-general, with an eye to his own personal advantage, had brought forward a project of the Board of Trade for overruling the charters of the colonies; but the strenuous opposition of William Bollan and Eliakim Palmer for Massachusetts and Connecticut made the advocates of the measure waver, and the movement failed. Shirley was devising a plan of his own, which looked to such an extension of the parliamentary prerogative as had not yet been attempted. His scheme was to build and maintain a line of posts at the eastward, the expense of which all the colonies should share under a tax laid by Parliament.[300] In the pursuit of this plan, Shirley obtained leave of absence, and went to England (1749), while the conduct of affairs was left in the hands of Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor, a man of experience and good intentions, but not of signal ability. Thomas Hutchinson, James Otis, and two others meanwhile went to Falmouth to engage the eastern Indians, who were far from quiet, in a treaty, which was finally brought to a conclusion on October 16, 1749. In the following winter (1749-50), Sylvanus Cobb was in Boston fitting out his sloop for a hostile raid through the Bay of Fundy; but Cornwallis at Halifax thought the preparations for it had become known to the French, and the raid was not accomplished.

The next year (1750), Parliament touched the provinces roughly. The English tanners wished for bark, and they could get it cheap if the English land-owners could sell their wood to the furnaces, and the furnaces would buy it if they could find a sufficient market for their iron and steel, as they could do if they had no rivals in America. It was a chain of possibilities that Parliament undertook to make realities, and so passed an act forbidding the running of slitting and rolling mills in the colonies, and Charles Townshend, who introduced the bill, found no opposer in Shirley. The bold utterances that Jonathan Mayhew was making in indignant Boston carried a meaning that did not warn, as it might, the Board of Trade in England.

Shirley, after four years’ absence, during which he had been employed in an unsuccessful mission to Paris about the Acadian boundaries, came back to Boston in 1753, to be kindly received, but to feel in bringing with him a young Catholic wife, whom he had married in Paris, the daughter of his landlord, that he gave her the position of the first lady in the province not without environing himself and her with great embarrassment, in a community which, though it had departed widely from the puritanism of the fathers, was still intolerant of much that makes man urbane and merry. While Shirley had been gone, the good town had been much exercised over an attempt to introduce the drama, and the performance of Otway’s Orphan at a coffee-house in King Street had stirred the legislature to pass a law against stage plays. The journals of Goelet[301] and others give us some glimpses of life, however, far from prudish, and show that human nature was not altogether suppressed, nor all of the good people quite as stiff as Blackburn was now painting them.

Notwithstanding his hymeneal entanglement, Shirley was unquestionably the most powerful Englishman at this time in America. The fortuitous success of his Louisbourg expedition had given him a factitious military reputation.[302] A test of it seemed imminent. For the sixth time in eighty years the frontiers were now ravaged by the savages. Pepperrell was sent to pacify the eastern Indians. The French were stretching a cordon of posts from the Atlantic to the gulf which alarmed Shirley, and he doubted if anything was safe to the eastward beyond the Merrimac, unless the French could be pushed back from Nova Scotia. He feared New Hampshire would be lost, and with it the supply of masts for the royal navy. A road had been cut along the Westfield River through Poontoosuck (Pittsfield) to Albany, and Shirley planned defences among the Berkshire Hills.

At this juncture a conference of the colonies was called at Albany in 1754, which had been commanded through the governor of New York by the Board of Trade. The reader will find its history traced on a later page. Hutchinson in July brought back to Boston a draft of the plan of action. In the autumn the legislature was considering the question, while Franklin was in Boston (October-December) conferring with Shirley and discussing plans. Boston held a town meeting and denounced the Albany plan, and in December (14th) the legislature definitely rejected it, as all the other colonies in due time did. Rhode Island, particularly, was very vigilant, lest an attempt might be made to abridge her charter-privileges. Connecticut established its first press in this very year, which with the press of the other colonies, was lukewarm or hostile to the plan.[303]

Shirley had not attended the congress. He had left Boston in June (1754) on the province frigate “Massachusetts,” with the forces under John Winslow to build a fort on the Kennebec, which was completed on the 3d of September and called Fort Halifax. On his way he stopped at Falmouth, and on the 28th of June he had a conference with the Norridgewock Indians, and on July 5th another with the Penobscots. Accompanied by some young Indians who were entrusted to the English for education, the governor was once more in Boston on the 9th of September, where he was received with due honor.

This expedition and the congress were but the prelude to eventful years. When Henry Pelham died, on the 6th of March of this year, his king, in remembrance of the wise and peaceful policy of his minister, exclaimed, “Now I shall have no more peace!” For the struggle which was impending, New England had grown in strength and preparation, and had had much inuring to the trials of predatory warfare. She had increased about sixfold in population, while New York and Virginia had increased fivefold. The newer colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland had fairly outstripped these older ones, and numbered now nine times as large a population as they had sixty-five years earlier. The Carolinas and Georgia had increased in a ratio far more rapid. Massachusetts at this time probably had 45,000 on its alarm list, and in train-bands over 30,000 stood ready for the call.[304] John Adams, when teaching a school in Worcester the next year, ventured to write to a friend, “If we can remove the turbulent Gallicks, our people will in another century become more numerous than England itself.”

In the spring of 1755 Shirley went to Alexandria, in Virginia, being on the way from March 30 till April 12, to meet the other governors, and to confer with General Braddock upon the organization of that general’s disastrous campaign. When the news of its fatal ending reached New England it gave new fervor to the attempts, in which she was participating, of attacking the French on the Canada side,[305] and the war seemed brought nearer home to her people when, by the death of Braddock, the supreme command devolved on the Massachusetts governor.[306] On the 6th of November, at Thomas Hutchinson’s instigation and in expression of their good-will at Shirley’s promotion, the General Court passed a vote of congratulation.

The autumn had been one of excitement in Boston.[307] The forces of nature were conspiring to add to the wonderment of the hour. A part of the same series of convulsions which overturned Lisbon on November 1st and buried Sir Henry Frankland in the ruins, to be extricated by that Agnes Surriage whose romantic story has already been referred to, had been experienced in New England at four o’clock in the morning of the 18th of the same month, with a foreboding of a greater danger; but the commotion failed in the end to do great damage to its principal town, then esteemed, if we may believe the Gentleman’s Magazine, finer than any town in England excepting London. People looked to the leading man of science in New England of that time for some exposition of this mighty power, and Prof. John Winthrop gave at Cambridge his famous lecture on earthquakes, which was shortly printed.[308] The electrical forces of nature had not long before revealed themselves to Franklin with his kite, and it was in November or December that the news was exciting comment in Boston, turning men’s thoughts from the weariness of the war.

That war had not prospered under Shirley, and with a suspicion that he had been pushed beyond his military capacity he was recalled to England, ostensibly to give advice on its further conduct. He had found that Massachusetts could not be led to tax herself directly for the money which he needed, and only pledged herself to reimburse, if required, the king’s military chest for £35,000, which Shirley drew from it. A scale of bounties had failed to induce much activity in enlistments, and the forces necessary for the coming campaign were gathering but slowly.[309] This was the condition of affairs when Shirley left for England, carrying with him the consoling commendations of the General Court.

Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor, succeeded to the executive chair in Massachusetts at a time when even Boston was not felt to be secure, so fortunate or skilful were the weaker French in a purpose that was not imperilled by the jealousies which misguided the stronger English. It was now problematical if Loudon, the new commander-in-chief, was to bring better auguries. In January of the next year (1757), he came to Boston to confer with the New England governors. The New England colonies now agreed to raise 4,000 new troops. Meanwhile Phips had died in April (4th) in the midst of the war preparations, and Pepperrell, as president of the council, next directed affairs till Thomas Pownall,[310] who had been commissioned governor, and who had reached Halifax on the fleet which brought Lord Howe’s troops, arrived in Boston, August 3d, on the very day when Montcalm on Lake George was laying siege to Fort William Henry, which in a few days surrendered. The news did not reach Pownall till he had pushed forward troops to Springfield on their way to relieve the fort. He put Pepperrell at once in command of the militia,[311] and a large body of armed men gathered under him on the line of the Connecticut;[312] for there was ignorance at the time of Montcalm’s inability to advance because of desertions, and of the weakening of his force by reason of the details he had made to guard and transport the captured stores. Messengers were hurried to the other colonies to arouse them. John Adams, then a young man teaching in Worcester, kept from the pulpit by reason of his disbelief in Calvinism, stirred by the times, with the hope some day of commanding a troop of horse or a company of foot, was one of these messengers sent to Rhode Island, and he tells us how struck he was with the gayety and social aspect of Sunday in that colony, compared with the staid routine which characterized the day in Massachusetts.[313]

Massachusetts had enrolled 7,000 men for the campaign. Connecticut had put 5,000 in the field, and Rhode Island and New Hampshire a regiment each. Massachusetts had further maintained a guard of 600 men along her frontiers. The cost of all these preparations necessitated a tax of half the income of personal and landed property.

In a commercial sense almost crushed,[314] in a political sense the people were as buoyant as ever. When Loudon sent orders to quarter a regiment of the British troops on the people, the legislature forbade it, and grew defiant, and nothing could pacify them but the withdrawal of the order. The commander-in-chief, however he stormed in New York, found it expedient to yield when he learned of the fury his order was exciting in a colony upon whose vigor the home government was largely depending for the successful prosecution of the war. This had now fallen into the hands of Pitt, and he at once recalled Loudon, who chanced to be in Boston, parleying with the legislature about raising troops, when an express brought him his recall. Abercrombie, who succeeded, was even a worse failure; but there was a burst of light at the eastward. Amherst had captured Louisbourg in July (1758),[315] and bringing his troops by water to Boston had landed them on September 13. Never was there so brilliant array of war seen in the harbor as the war-ships presented, or on Boston Common where the troops were encamped. Amherst delayed but three days for rest, when on the 16th of September he began his march westward to join the humbled Abercrombie. At Worcester the troops halted, and John Adams tells us of the “excellent order and discipline” which they presented, and of the picturesqueness of the Scotch in their plaids, as this army of four thousand men filled his ardent gaze.

During the winter recruiting was going on in Boston with success for the fleet wintering at Louisbourg.[316] In the campaign of the next year (1759), Massachusetts and Connecticut put at least a sixth of all their males able to bear arms into the field. They were in part in the army which Amherst led by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and among them were some of the veterans which Pepperrell had command in 1745 at Louisbourg,—Pepperrell who was to die during the progress of the campaign, on the 6th of July, at Kittery in his sixty-fourth year. Another portion went with Pownall to the Penobscot region, or followed him there, and assisted in the building of Fort Pownall, which was completed in July (1759).[317] The reader must turn to another chapter[318] for the brilliant success of Wolfe at Quebec, which virtually ended the war.

George the Second hardly heard of the victories which crowned his minister’s policy. He died October 25, 1760, but the news of his death did not reach Boston till December 27th. He had already effected a change in the government of Massachusetts. Pownall, who had made interest with the Board of Trade to be transferred to the executive chair of South Carolina, left Boston in June, taking with him the good wishes of a people whom he had governed more liberally and considerately than any other of the royal governors.[319] Two months later (August 2, 1760), Francis Bernard, who had been governor of New Jersey,[320] reached Boston as his successor. He showed some want of tact in his first speech, in emphasizing the advantages of subjection to the home government, and gave the House opportunity to rejoin that but for the sacrifice in blood and expense which these grateful colonies had experienced, Great Britain might now have had no colonies to defend. Notwithstanding so untoward a beginning, Bernard seems to have thought well of the people, and reported fair phrases of encomium to the Lords of Trade.[321]

A few weeks after Bernard’s arrival Stephen Sewall, the chief justice, died (September 11, 1760). Thomas Hutchinson was now the most conspicuous man in New England, and he had put all New England under obligations by his strenuous and successful efforts to better their monetary condition. A train of events followed, which might possibly have been averted, if, instead of appointing Hutchinson to the chief-justiceship, as he did, Bernard had raised one of the other justices, and filled the vacancy with Col. James Otis, then Speaker of the House, father of the better known patriot of that name, and whose appointment had been contemplated, it is said, by Shirley. Hutchinson was already lieutenant-governor, succeeding Spencer Phips, and was soon to be judge of probate also for Suffolk,—a commingling of official power that could but incite remark.

The younger Otis was soon to become conspicuous, in a way that might impress even Bernard. There were certain moneys forfeited to the king for the colony’s use, arising from convictions for smuggling under the Sugar Act; the province had never applied for them, and had neglected its opportunities in that respect. The House instructed Otis to sue the custom-house officers. The superior bench under the lead of Hutchinson decided against the province, and it did not pass without suspicion that Bernard had placed Hutchinson on that bench to secure this verdict.

An event still more powerful in inciting discontent was approaching. Charles Paxton, who had been surveyor of Boston since 1752, had, in his seeking for smuggled goods, used general search warrants,—unreturnable, known as “writs of assistance,” and of course liable to great abuse. It seems probable that this process had been so far sparingly used, and there had been no manifest discontent. Upon the king’s death, the existing writs had only a six months’ later continuance, when new applications must be made under the new reign. These new applications came at a time when the public mind was much exercised, and there was a determination to question the legality of such unrestrained power as the writs implied. The hearing was to be before the court of which Hutchinson was now the chief. Jeremy Gridley appeared for the king, and the younger Otis with Oxenbridge Thacher for the petitioners. The court deferred its decision, but in November, 1761, the case was again discussed. The court meanwhile had had advices from England, and the writs were sustained. In the discontent growing out of this proceeding, we may find the immediate beginning of the controversy between the provinces and the Crown, which resulted in the American Revolution. The subsidence of the war left men time to think deeply of these intestine griefs, and when the Peace of Paris in February, 1763, finally dissipated the danger of arms, events had gone far to shape themselves for bringing another renewal of battle, not with the French, but with the mother country.

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

NEW England in general.—Of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620 to 1698, mention has been made in another volume,[322] and, as the title shows, it touches only the few earlier years of the period now under consideration. The book was published in London in 1702, and a solitary forerunner of the edition reached Boston, as we know, October 29 of the same year. It was the most considerable work which had been produced in the British colonies, and was in large part an unshapely conglomerate of previous tracts and treatises. Neal, Mather’s successor in the field, while praising his diligence in amassing the material of history, expressed the opinion of all who would divest scholarship of meretriciousness when he criticised its “puns and jingles,”[323] and said, “Had the doctor put his materials a little closer together, and disposed them in another method, his work would have been more acceptable.”[324] But Mather without Matherism would lose in his peculiar literary flavor; we laugh and despise, while his books nevertheless find a chief place on the shelves of our New England library. Mather was still young when the Magnalia was printed, but he stood by his methods and manner a quarter of a century later, and in publishing (1726) his Manuductio ad Ministerium[325] he defended his labored and bedizened style against, as he says, the blades of the clubs and coffee-houses, who set up for critics. He also belabored Oldmixon in a similar fashion, when that compiler both borrowed the doctor’s labors and berated his reputation, and Mather called him, in his inveterate manner, Old Nick’s son.[326] Sibley not unfairly remarks that these peculiarities of Mather’s style were probably almost as absurd to his contemporaries as to ourselves;[327] and very likely it helped to create something of that curiosity respecting him, which Prince tells us he found in Europe at a later day.

In any estimate of Cotton Mather we may pass by the eulogy of his colleague Joshua Gee,[328] and the Life of Cotton Mather[329] by his son Samuel, as the efforts of a predisposing and uncritical friendliness. We are not quite sure how far removed from the fulsome flattery, if not insincerity, of funeral sermons in those days was the good word upon his contemporary which came from Benjamin Colman.

With the coming of the present century we might suppose the last personal resentment of those who knew Cotton Mather had gone, and as an historical character it might well be claimed that a dispassionate judgment was due to him. When James Savage edited Winthrop’s journal, the public were told how Cotton Mather should be contemned; and the tale was not untruthful, but it was one-sided. Quincy in his History of Harvard University could give no very laudatory estimate of the chronic and envious grumbler against the college.[330] When Dr. Chandler Robbins wrote the History of the Second Church of Boston, he said all he could, and in a kindly spirit, to qualify the derogatory estimate then prevalent respecting his predecessor; and W. B. O. Peabody in his Life of Cotton Mather[331] tempered his judgment by saying, “There is danger lest in our disgust at his fanaticism and occasional folly we should deny him the credit which he actually deserves.” His professed defenders, too, lighten their approval with pointing out his defects. Thus does Samuel G. Drake in a rather feeble memoir in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (vol. vi.), and in the 1855 edition of the Magnalia. Dr. A. H. Quint in the Congregational Quarterly, 1859, and Dr. Henry M. Dexter in the Memorial Hist. of Boston, vol. ii., incline to the eulogistic side, but with some reservations. Mr. Samuel F. Haven in the Report of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., April, 1874, turned away the current of defamation which every revival of the Salem witchcraft question seems to guide against the young minister of that day. The estimates of Moses Coit Tyler in his Hist. of Amer. Literature (vol. ii.), and John Langdon Sibley in his Harvard Graduates (vol. iii.), show that the disgust, so sweeping fifty years ago, is still recognized amid all efforts to judge Mather lightly.[332] Mankind is tender in its judgment of the average man, when a difference of times exists. The historical sense, however, is rigid in its scrutiny of those who posture as index-fingers to their contemporaries; and it holds such men accountable to the judgments of all time. Great men separate the perennial and sweet in the traits of their epoch from the temporary and base,—a function Cotton Mather had no conception of.

The next general account of the New England colonies after the Magnalia, and covering the first thirty years of the present period, was Daniel Neal’s History of New-England containing an account of the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the country to 1700. With a map, and an appendix containing their present charter, their ecclesiastical discipline, and their municipal-laws. In 2 vols. (London. 1720.)[333]

Dr. Watts, writing to Cotton Mather, Feb., 1719-20, of Neal’s history, said that he had hoped to find it “an abstract of the lives and spiritual experiences of those great and good souls that planted and promoted the gospel among you, and those most remarkable providences, deliverances, and answers to prayers that are recorded in your Magnalia Christi, but I am disappointed of my expectations; for he has written with a different view, and has taken merely the task of an historian upon him.” Watts took Neal to task personally for his freedom about the early persecution; but Neal only answered that the fidelity of an historian required it of him.[334] Neal himself in his preface (p. iv.) acknowledges his freedom in treating of the mistakes into which the government fell.

Prince in the preface to his Chronological History of New England says: “In 1720 came out Mr. Neal’s History of New England.... He has fallen into many mistakes of facts which are commonly known among us, some of which he seems to derive from Mr. Oldmixon’s account of New England in his British Empire in America, and which mistakes[335] are no doubt the reason why Mr. Neal’s history is not more generally read among us; yet, considering the materials this worthy writer was confined to, and that he was never here, it seems to me scarce possible that any under his disadvantages should form a better. In comparing him with the authors from whence he draws, I am surprised to see the pains he has taken to put the materials into such a regular order; and to me it seems as if many parts of his work cannot be mended.”

Rogers and Fowle, printers in Boston, who were publishing a new magazine, begun in 1743, called The American Magazine, announced that they would print in it by instalment a new history of the English colonies. They changed the plan subsequently so as to issue the book in larger type, in quarterly numbers, and in this form there appeared in January, 1747, the first number, with a temporary title, which read: A summary, historical and political, of the first planting, progressive improvements and present state of the British settlements in North America; with some transient accounts of the bordering French and Spanish settlements. By W. D., M. D., No. 1. To be continued. Boston, 1747.[336] The author soon became known as Dr. William Douglass, the Scotch physician living in Boston,—“honest and downright Dr. Douglass,” as Adam Smith later chose to call him. He had drawn (pp. 235-38), in contrast to Admiral Warren, a severe character of Admiral Knowles, whose conduct, which occasioned the impressment riot then recent, was fresh in memory. Knowles seems to have instituted a suit for libel, which led to a rather strained amend by Douglass in the preface to the first volume, when the numbers were collected in 1749, and were issued with a title much the same as before, A Summary, historical and political, of the first planting, etc., containing—here follow five heads.[337] The character which he had given of Knowles, he says, was written out of passionate warmth and indiscretion, merely “in affection to Boston and the country of New England, his altera patria,” and then adds that he has suppressed it in the completed volume.[338] The second volume is dated 1751, and Douglass died in 1752.[339]

To his second volume (1751) he adds what he calls “a supplement to the first volume and introduction to the second volume,” in which he hints at the offence he had given Shirley and Knowles—the latter’s suit for libel forcing him to recant, as we have seen—by saying, “If facts related in truth offend any governor, commodore, or other great officer,” the author “will not renounce impartiality and become sycophant.” He further charges upon “the great man of the province for the time being,” as he calls Shirley, the “impeding, or rather defeating, this public-spirited, laborious undertaking,” as he characterizes his own book.

A large part of the work is given to New England, which he knew best; but his knowledge was at all times subservient to his prejudices, which were rarely weak. He is often amusing in his self-sufficiency, and not unentertaining; but he who consults the book is puzzled with his digressions and with his disorderly arrangement, and there is no index to relieve him.[340] Hutchinson struck the estimate which has not since been disputed: it was his “foible to speak well or ill of men very much as he had a personal friendship for them, or had a personal difference with them.”[341] Prof. Tyler in his Hist. of American Literature[342] has drawn his character more elaborately than others.[343] His book, while containing much that is useful to the student, remains a source of uncertainty in respect to all statements not elsewhere confirmed, and yet of his predecessors on New England history Douglass has the boldness to say that they are “beyond all excuse intolerably erroneous.”[344]

A wider interest than that of ecclesiastical record attaches to a book which all students of New England history have united in thinking valuable. This is the work of Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Middleborough, Mass., who published at Boston in 1777 a first volume, which was called A History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination of Christians called Baptists.[345] This volume brought the story down to 1690 only, but an appendix summarized subsequent history down to the date of the book. In the second volume, which appeared at Providence in 1784, the title was changed to A Church History of New England, vol. ii., extending from 1690 to 1784. The same title was preserved in the third volume, which was published in Boston in 1796, bringing the narrative down to that date. In the preface to this volume the author complained of the many typographical errors in the first volume, and professed that though there had been private dislikes of the work by some “because their own schemes of power and gain were exposed thereby,” he knew not of any public dispute about “its truth of facts.” The whole work has been reprinted under the title of the original first volume, with notes by David Weston, and published in two volumes by the Backus Historical Society at Newton, Mass., in 1871.[346]

Miss Hannah Adams published at Dedham, Mass., in 1799, a single volume, Summary History of New England. She does not profess to have done more than abridge the usual printed sources, as they were then understood, and to have made some use of MS. material, particularly respecting the history of Rhode Island.

HANNAH ADAMS.

This follows an oil portrait by Alexander in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. Hannah Adams was born at Medfield, in 1755, and died at Brookline, Mass., Nov. 15, 1831; and she was the first person interred at Mount Auburn.

It is the fourth and last published volume of Dr. Palfrey’s History of New England (Boston, 1875) which comes within the period of the present chapter, bringing the story, however, down only to 1741, but a continuation is promised from a MS. left by the author, and edited by General F. W. Palfrey, his son, which will complete the historian’s plan by continuing the narrative to the opening of the war of independence. This fourth volume is amply fortified with references and notes, in excess of the limitations which governed the earlier ones. The author says in his preface that he may be thought in this respect “to have gone excessively into details, and I cannot dispute [he adds] the justness of the criticism; such at present is the uncontrollable tendency of my mind.”

JOHN GORHAM PALFREY.

The editor is indebted to Gen. F. W. Palfrey for the excellent photograph after which this engraving is made.

In 1866 Dr. Palfrey published a popular abridgment of his first three volumes in two smaller ones. These were reissued in August, 1872, with a third, and in 1873 with a fourth, which completed the abridgment of his larger work, and carried the story from the accession of Shirley to power down to the opening of the military history of the American Revolution. In this admirably concise form, reissued in 1884, with a thorough index, the work of the chief historian of New England is known as A compendious History of New England from the Discovery by Europeans to the first general Congress of the Anglo-American Colonies,—the last summarized chapter in the work not being recognized in the title.[347]

Massachusetts.—For this as well as for the period embraced in the third volume of the present history,[348] Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay is of the highest importance. Hutchinson says that he was impelled to write the history of the colony from observing the repeated destruction of ancient records in Boston by fire, and he complains that the descendants of some of the first settlers will neither use themselves nor let others use the papers which have descended to them. He seems, however, to have had the use of the papers of the elder Elisha Cooke. He acknowledges the service which the Mather library, begun by Increase Mather, and in Hutchinson’s time owned by Samuel Mather, who had married Hutchinson’s sister, was to him.

While Hutchinson’s continuation of the story beyond 1749 was as yet unknown, George Richards Minot planned to take up the narrative and carry it on. Minot’s Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1748 shows that he made use of the files in the state house as well as their condition then permitted, but he was conscious of the assistance which he might have had, and did not possess, from the papers in the English archives. His first volume was printed in 1798; and he died before his second volume was published, in 1803, which had brought the record down to 1765, but stopped abruptly.[349] Grahame (iii. 446) calls the work “creditable to the sense and talent of its author,” but considers “his style frequently careless, and even slovenly and ungrammatical.” His contemporaries viewed his literary manner much more favorably, and were inclined to give him a considerable share in placing our native historical literature upon a scholarly basis. More painstaking research, with a careful recording of authorities, characterizes the only other History of Massachusetts of importance, that by John S. Barry, whose second volume is given to the period now under consideration,—a work, however, destitute of commensurate literary skill, or its abundant learning would give it greater reputation. Haliburton, in chapters 2 and 3 of book iii. of The Rule and Misrule of the English in America, traces in a summary way the turbulent politics of the province of Massachusetts during its long struggle against the royal prerogative. Emory Washburn’s Sketches of the judicial history of Massachusetts from 1630 to the revolution in 1775, Boston, 1840, contains biographical notices of the judges of Massachusetts, and traces the relations of the study of the law to the progress of political events. William Henry Whitmore’s Massachusetts civil list for the colonial and provincial records, 1630-1774, Albany, 1870, is a list of the names and dates of appointment of all the civil officers constituted by authority of the charters or the local government. The general histories of Maine (during this period a part of Massachusetts) have been sufficiently characterized in another place.[350]

Connecticut.—The History of Connecticut, by Benjamin Trumbull, becomes not of less value as it approaches his own time. Grahame (ii. 165) says of him that he is “always distinguished by the accuracy of his statements, but not less distinguished by his partiality for his own people,” and Palfrey (iv. 226) avers that with all “his gravity Trumbull had a tendency for sensational traditions,” and both are right. He had not brought the story down later than 1713, in the volume published at Hartford in 1797. He says that he availed himself of the material which the ancient ministers and other principal gentlemen of Connecticut had communicated to Thomas Prince, when that writer was engaged upon his Chronological Hist. of New England; and in this collection, he adds, “important information was found, which could have been obtained from no other source.” Trumbull’s first volume was reprinted at New Haven in 1818, with a portrait of the author, together with a second volume, bringing the story down to 1764.

Rhode Island.—Of Rhode Island in the present period, Arnold’s History is the foremost modern authority.[351] Mr. William E. Foster has recently prepared, as no. 9 of the Rhode Island Historical Tracts (1884), a careful and well-annotated study of the political history of the eighteenth century, in a Memoir of Stephen Hopkins.

New Hampshire.—Dr. Belknap, as the principal historian of New Hampshire, has been characterized in another place.[352] The bibliography of his history may find record here. The first volume, The History of New Hampshire, vol. i., comprehending ... one complete century from the discovery of the Pascataqua, was read through the press in Philadelphia (1784) by Ebenezer Hazard.[353] This volume was reprinted at Boston in 1792, where meanwhile vol. ii. (1715-1790) had appeared in 1781, and vol. iii., embracing a geographical description, was issued in 1792. The imprints of these volumes vary somewhat.[354] There was printed at Dover, N. H., in 1812 (some copies have “Boston, 1813”) a second edition in three volumes, “with large additions and improvements published from the author’s last manuscript;” but this assertion is not borne out by the book itself.[355] A copy of his original edition having such amendments by Belknap had been used in 1810, at Dover, in printing an edition which was never completed, as the copy and what had been done in type were burned. Before parting with this corrected copy, the representatives of Dr. Belknap had transferred his memoranda to another copy, and this last copy is the one referred to in the edition which was printed by John Farmer at Dover in 1831, called The History of New Hampshire by Jeremy Belknap, from a copy of the original edition having the author’s last corrections, to which are added notes containing various corrections and illustrations. By John Farmer.[356] This is called vol. i., and contains the historical narrative, but does not include the geographical portion (vol. iii. of the original ed.), which Farmer never added to the publication.[357] Belknap says that he had been educated under the influence of Thomas Prince, and that he had used Prince’s library before it had been despoiled during the Revolution. Of Hutchinson—and Belknap was in early manhood before Hutchinson left New England—he says that while that historian writes many things regarding New Hampshire which Neal and Douglass have omitted, he himself omits others, which he did not think it proper to relate. He refers to Mr. Fitch, of Portsmouth, as having begun to collect notes on New Hampshire history as early as 1728, and says that he had found in Fitch’s papers some things not elsewhere obtainable. He also animadverts on errors into which Chalmers had fallen in his Political Annals of the American Colonies.

[EDITORIAL NOTES.]

A. The Documentary History of New England.—After the lapsing of the New England Confederacy consequent upon the charter of William and Mary, the governments which made up that group of colonies had no collective archives. It is only as we search the archives of the English Public Record Office, and those of Paris and Canada, including Nova Scotia, that we find those governments treated collectively. The Reports of the English Historical Manuscripts Commission have of late years not only thrown additional light on our colonial history, as papers touching it preserved in the muniment rooms of leading families have been calendared, but the commission’s labors have also been the incentive by which the public depositary of records has been enriched by the transfer of many papers, which the commission has examined. Nine of their voluminous reports (up to 1885) have been printed, and by their indexes clues have been provided to the documents about New England history. The Shelburne Papers, belonging to the Marquis of Lansdowne, which make a large part of the Fifth Report, while of most interest in connection with the American Revolution, reveal not a little concerning the colonial history of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. The volumes enumerated in this Report, which are marked xlv. (1705-1724) and xlvi. (1686-1766), are of particular interest, referring entirely to the American colonies. We find here various papers of the Board of Trade and Plantations (or copies of them), embracing the replies from the provincial governors to their inquiries. In the volume numbered lxi., there are sundry reports of the attorney and solicitor-general, to whom had been referred the appeals of Massachusetts in 1699, and of Connecticut in 1701; his report of 1705 respecting Jesuits and papists in the plantations; that of 1707 on the acts of Massachusetts fining those trading with the French; that of 1710 on the reservation of trees in Massachusetts for masts of the royal navy; that of 1716 on the claim of the governor of Massachusetts to command the militia of Rhode Island; that of 1720 on the negative of the governor reserved in the charter of Massachusetts; that of 1722 on the question of the time when the three years that a province law is open to disapproval properly begins; that of 1725 on the encroachments of the House of Representatives on the prerogative of the Crown; that of 1732 relating to the validity of acts in Rhode Island, notwithstanding the governor’s dissent,—not to name many others.

Another source of documentary help is the manuscripts of the British Museum, of which there are printed catalogues; and the enumeration of the documents in the possession of the Canadian government,—of which the quality can be judged, as they existed in 1858,—in the Catalogue of the Library of Parliament, Toronto, 1858, pp. 1541-1655.

The archives of Massachusetts are probably not surpassed in richness by those of any other of the English colonies. The solicitude which the colonial and provincial government always felt for their preservation is set forth by Dr. George H. Moore in appendix v. of his Final notes on Witchcraft (New York, 1885). In 1821, Alden Bradford, then secretary of the commonwealth, made a printed statement of “the public records and documents belonging to the commonwealth” (pp. 19), but the fullest enumeration of them was included in a Report to the Legislature of Massachusetts, made by the Commissioners ... upon the condition of the records, files, papers, and documents in the Secretary’s department, Jan., 1885 (pp. 42), drawn up by the present writer. An indication of such of them as concern the period of the present volume may be desirable.[358] The series of bound volumes, arranged in 1836-46, by the Rev. Joseph B. Felt, according to a classification which was neither judicious nor uniform, but, as Dr. Palfrey says, betrays “ingenious disorder,”[359] includes not all, but the chief part of the papers illustrative of legislation in the secretary’s office which concern us in the present chapter and make part of one hundred and thirty-one volumes. These come in sequence through vol. 136,—the omitted volumes being no. 107 (the revolution of 1689) and nos. 126 to 129 (the usurpation of the Andros period). The other volumes as a rule begin in the colonial period and come down to about the beginning of the Revolutionary War. They are enumerated with their topical characteristics in the Report already referred to (pp. 8, 9). Four volumes of ancient plans, grants, etc. (1643-1783), accompany the series.

Of the so-called French Archives—documents copied in France—mention has been elsewhere made, and a considerable portion of them cover the period now under examination.[360]

The destruction of the town and court house in 1747 carried with it the loss of many of the original records of the colony and province. The government had already undertaken a transcript of the records of the General Court, which had been completed down to 1737; and this copy, being at the house of Secretary Josiah Willard, was saved. A third copy was made from this, and it is this duplicate character which attaches to the records as we now have them. Transcripts of these records under the charter of William and Mary had by its provisions been sent to the Lords of Trade, session by session, and orders were at once given to secure these from 1737 to 1746, or a copy of them, for the province archives. For some reason this was not accomplished till 1845, when a commissioner was sent to England for that purpose; and these years (1737-1746) are thus preserved. None of these records for the provincial period have been printed.[361] The records of the upper branch or the council were also burned,[362] and were in a similar way restored from England. Of the House of Representatives, or lower branch, we have no legislative records before 1714, nor of the legislative action of either branch have we any complete record before 1714, since neither the journals of the House nor the legislative part of the records of the council were sent over to England, but only the executive part of the latter, which was apparently made up in view of such transmission, as Moore represents. The preservation of the journals of the House is due to the jealousy which that body felt of Dudley when he prorogued them in 1715. Because of their inaction on the paper-money question, the House, in a moment of indignation, and to show that they had done something, if not what the governor liked, voted to have their daily records printed. The set of these printed journals in the possession of the State is defective.[363] There is not known to be a perfect set of them in any collection, perhaps not in all the collections in the state, says Judge Chamberlain,[364] who adds: “Of their value for historical purposes I have formed a very high opinion. In many respects they are of more value than the journals of the General Court, which show results; while the journals of the House disclose the temper of the popular branch, and give the history of many abortive projects which never reached the journals of the General Court.”[365] Of a series of copies called charters, commissions, and proclamations, the second volume (1677-1774) concerns the present inquiry. There is a file of bound letters beginning in 1701, and it would seem they are copies in some, perhaps many, cases of originals in the archives as arranged by Mr. Felt.

Respecting the French and Indian wars, nine volumes of the so-called Massachusetts Archives cover muster-rolls from 1710 to 1774, including the regiments of Sir Chas. Hobby and others (1710), the frontier garrisons, those of Annapolis Royal (1710-11), the expedition to the West Indies (1740), the campaigns of Crown Point, Fort William Henry, and Louisbourg (1758), beside various eastern expeditions and the service by sea. Of the first Louisbourg (1745) expedition, there are no rolls, except as made up in copies from the Pepperrell and Belknap papers in the library of the Mass. Historical Society. In addition to these bound papers there are many others in packages, laid aside by Mr. Felt in his labor, in some cases for reasons, and in other cases by oversight or a varying sense of choice.[366]

The Colonial Records of Connecticut for the present period have come under the supervision of Mr. C. J. Hoadly, and are carefully edited. In 1849 about 50,000 documents in the state archives had been bound in 138 volumes, when an index was made to them.[367] The correspondence of the Connecticut authorities with the home government (1755-58) has been printed in the Connecticut Historical Collections (vol. i. p. 257).

For Rhode Island, the continuation of the Colonial Records, beginning with vol. iii., covers the period now under consideration. The sessional papers of 1691-95, however, are wanting, and were probably sent to England by Bellomont, whence copies of those for May and June, 1691, were procured for the Carter-Brown library. Newport at this time was a leading community in maritime affairs, and the papers of these years touch many matters respecting pirates and privateers. The fifth volume (1741-56) indicates how Rhode Island at that time kept at sea more ships than any other colony, how she took part in the Spanish war, and how reckless her assembly was in the authorizing of paper money. The sixth volume (1757-69) closes the provincial period.

The series of publications of New Hampshire ordinarily referred to as Provincial Papers, from the leading series of documents in what is more properly called Documents and records relating to New Hampshire, is more helpful in the present period than in the earlier one.[368] They may be supplemented by the Shute and Wentworth correspondence (1742-53), and Wentworth’s correspondence with the ministry (1750-60); and letters of Joseph Dudley and others, contained in the Belknap MSS. in the cabinet of the Mass. Historical Society.[369] The Granite Monthly (vol. v. 391) has published a list of the issues of the press in New Hampshire from 1756 to 1773; and B. H. Hall’s History of Eastern Vermont, from its earliest settlement to the close of the eighteenth century, with a biographical chapter and appendixes (2 vols., Albany, N. Y., 1858, and on large paper in 1865), supplements the story as regards the claim of New Hampshire to the so-called New Hampshire grants.

The legislative and judicial methods of the several governments are of the first importance to the understanding of New England history, for it was a slow process by which it came to pass that professional lawyers held any shaping hand in the making or the administering of laws. The first Superior Court of Massachusetts under the provincial charter had not a single trained lawyer on the bench, and its assembly was equipped more with persistency and shrewdness in working out its struggle with the crown officer who tried to rule them than with legal acquirements. E. G. Scott, in his Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies (N. Y., 1882, pp. 31-58), examines the forms of the colonial governments and the political relations of the colonies. No one has better traced their relations to European politics than Bancroft.

The legislation of the several governments has had special treatment in Emory Washburn’s Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts, 1630-1775 (Boston, 1840); in T. Day’s Historical Account of the Judiciary of Connecticut (Hartford, 1817); in John M. Shirley’s “Early Jurisprudence of New Hampshire,” in the New Hampshire Historical Society’s Proceedings, June 13, 1883. Cf. also H. C. Lodge, Short Hist. of the English Colonies, pp. 412-419.

Of the legislation of Massachusetts, Dr. Moore says[370] that it is “a record which, notwithstanding all its defects, has no parallel in any other American State.” The first edition of the Province Laws, under the new charter, was printed in 1699, and it was annually supplemented by those of the succeeding sessions till 1714, when a second edition was printed, to which an index was added in 1722, and various later editions were issued.[371] In 1869 the first volume of a new edition, of historical importance, was published by the State, with the title Acts and Resolves, public and private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, with historical and explanatory notes, edited by Ellis Ames and Abner C. Goodell. Mr. Ames has since died (1884), and the editing is still going on under Mr. Goodell; five volumes, coming down to 1780, having been so far published.[372]

B. Men and Manners.—Dr. George E. Ellis, in an address[373] which he delivered in October, 1884, on the occasion of erecting a tablet to Samuel Sewall’s memory in the new edifice of the Old South church, in Boston, of which that last of the puritans had been a member, said:—

“Judge Sewall is better known to us in both his outer and inner being than any other individual in our local history of two hundred and fifty years; and this is true not only of himself, but through his pen, curiously active, faithful, candid, kind, impartial, and ever just, his own times stand revealed and described to us. His surroundings and companions, his home and public life, the habits, usages, customs, and events, and even the food which we can almost smell and taste, the clothes, and furnishings, the modes of hospitality, of travel, the style of things,—all in infinite detail; the military service, the formal ceremonials and courtesies, the excitements, panics, disasters,—all these have come down to us through Sewall’s pen, with a fullness and old-time flavor and charm, which we might in vain seek to gather from many hundred volumes. And all this comes from Sewall having kept a daily journal from 1674 to 1729, fifty-five years,”—and forty of these years come within the scope of the present chapter.

These journals had long been known to exist in a branch of Sewall’s family, but as, Dr. Ellis says, they “had been kept with much reserve, sparingly yielding to earnest inquirers the information they were known to contain.” President Quincy had drawn from them in his History of Harvard University, and had called them “curious and graphic,” as his extracts show. They had also been used by Holmes in his American Annals, by Washburn in his Judicial History of Mass., and by others. In 1868, some friends of the Mass. Historical Society purchased the diaries and other Sewall papers of the holders, and gave them to the society.[374] The diaries have since been published, and make part of the Collections of that society.[375] Despite a good deal of a somewhat ridiculous conservatism, linked with a surprising pettiness in some ways, the character of Sewall is impressed upon the present generation in a way to do him honor. His was a struggle to uphold declining puritanism, and the contrasts presented by the viceroyalty of New England at that time to one who was bred under the first charter must have been trying to Christian virtues, even were they such as Sewall possessed.[376] Dr. Ellis has pointed out[377] how universally kindly Sewall was in what he recorded of those with whom he came in contact. “There are no grudges, no animosities, no malice, no bitter musings, no aggravating reproaches of those—some very near him—who caused him loss and grief, but ever efforts to reconcile, by forbearance, remonstrance, and forgiveness.” All this may be truly said, and afford a contrast to what the private diaries of his contemporaries, the two Mathers, would prompt us to say of their daily records. Those who are more considerate of the good names of those divines than they were themselves have thus far prevented the publication of these diaries. Dr. Ellis[378] says of them:—

“The diaries of Increase and Cotton Mather are extant, but only extracts of them have been printed. Much in them is wisely suppressed. Increase, though a most faithful, devoted, and eminently serviceable man, was morbid, censorious sometimes, and suffered as if unappreciated. The younger Mather was often jealous, spiteful, rancorous, and revengeful in his daily records, and thus the estimate of his general worth is so far reduced through materials furnished by himself.”[379]

There is among the Sparks manuscripts in Harvard College library a bound quarto volume which is superscribed as follows: “To Mr. Samuel Savile, of Currier’s Hall, London, attorney-at-law: Dear friend,—I here present you with an abstracted Historical Account of that part of America called New England; to which I have added the History of our voiage thereto, Anno Domini, 1740.” This account presents one of the best pictures of New England life, particularly of that in Boston, from a contemporary pen.[380] There are various other diaries of lookers-on, which are helpful in this study of New England provincial life, like the journals of Whitefield, the diary of Francis Goelet,[381] the journal of Madam Knight’s journey, 1704,[382]—not to name others. Among published personal records, there are George Keith’s Journal of Travels from New Hampshire to Caratuck (London, 1706); Capt. Nathaniel Uring’s Voyages and Travels, published at London in 1727;[383] and Andrew Burnaby’s Travels through the middle settlements in North America in the years 1759 and 1760, London, 1775.[384] Burnaby passed on his way, from Bristol through Providence to Boston. The early part of the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is of exceptional value as a reflex of the life of New England as it impressed a young man.[385]

Among the modern treatises on the social condition of New England, a chief place must be given to Henry Cabot Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, the chapters in which on the characteristics of the colonies and their life are the essential feature of a book whose title is made good by a somewhat unnecessary abridgment of the colonies’ anterior history. Lodge groups his facts by colonies. Dr. Edward Eggleston in some valuable papers, which are still appearing in the Century Magazine, groups similar, but often much minuter, facts by their topical rather than by their colonial relations. Mr. Horace E. Scudder prepared an eclectic presentation of the subject in a little volume, Men and Manners a hundred years ago (N. Y., 1876), which surveys all the colonies. The Rev. Jos. B. Felt’s Customs of New England (1853) has a topical arrangement.[386]

For Massachusetts in particular, most of the local histories[387] contribute something to the subject; and in the Memorial History of Boston there are various chapters which are useful,[388] and a survey is also given in Barry’s Massachusetts (vol. ii. ch. I).

“He that will understand,” says Bancroft,[389] “the political character of New England in the eighteenth century must study the constitution of its towns, its congregations, its schools, and its militia.”[390]

C. Finance and Revenue.—Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull in a pamphlet, First Essays at Banking and the first paper money in New England (Worcester, 1884,—from the Council Report of the American Antiquarian Society, Oct., 1884), traces more fully than has been done by Jos. B. Felt, in his Historical account of Massachusetts Currency (Boston, 1839), and by Paine in the Council Report of the same society, April, 1866,[391] the efforts at private banking previous to the province issue of bills in 1690, and with particular reference to a tract, which he ascribes to the Rev. John Woodbridge, of Newbury, called Severals relating to the fund, printed for divers reasons as may appear (Boston, probably 1681-82).[392] Dr. Trumbull attributes to Cotton Mather a paper sustaining the policy of issuing paper bills in 1690, which was published as Some considerations on the Bills of Credit now passing in New England (Boston, 1691),[393] to which was appended Some additional considerations, which the same writer thinks may have been the work of John Blackwell, who had been the projector of a private bank authorized in 1689. Similar views as there expressed are adopted by Mather in his Life of Phips, as printed separately in 1697, and as later included in the Magnalia.

In Dec., 1690, the bills of the £7,000 which were first authorized began to be put forth. Felt (p. 50) gives the style of them, and though an engraved form was adopted some of the earliest of the issues were written with a pen, as shown by the fac-simile of one in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc. (1863, p. 428). Up to 1702 there had been emissions and repetitions of emissions of about £110,000, when another £10,000 was put out. A fac-simile of one of these notes is given in Smith’s Hist. and Literary Curiosities, p. xlv. The issues for the next few years were as follows: 1706, £10,000; 1707, £22,000; 1708, £10,000; 1709, £60,000; 1710, £40,000; 1711, £65,000,—a total of £207,000.

In the following year (1712), the province bills of Massachusetts were made legal tender,[394] but the break had come. The public confidence was shaken, and their decline in value rapidly increased under the apprehension, which the repeated putting off of the term of redemption engendered.

In Connecticut the management was more prudent. She issued in the end £33,500, but all her bills were redeemed with scarce any depreciation. A fac-simile of one of her three-shilling bills (1709) is given in the Connecticut Colony Records, 1706-1716, p. 111.[395]

Rhode Island managed her issues wildly. The history of her financial recklessness, by E. R. Potter, was published in 1837, and reprinted by Henry Phillips, Jr., in his Historical Sketches, etc. This paper as enlarged by S. S. Rider in 1880, constitutes no. viii. of the Rhode Island Historical Tracts, under the title of Bills of Credit and Paper Money of Rhode Island, 1710-1786, with twenty fac-similes of early bills. In 1741 Gov. Ward made an official report to the Lords Commissioners of Trade, rehearsing the history of the Rhode Island issues from 1710 to 1740, and this report, with other documents relating to the paper money of that colony, is in the Rhode Island Col. Records, vol. v. (1741-56).

Towards the end of Dudley’s time in Massachusetts, the party lines became sharply drawn on questions of financial policy. The downfall of credit alarmed the rich and conservative. The active business men, not many in numbers, but strong in influence, found a flow of paper money helpful in making the capital of the rich and the labor of the poor subserve their interests, as Hildreth says. There were those who supposed some amelioration would come from banks, private and public, and the press teemed with pamphlets.[396] The aggressive policy was formulated in A Projection for erecting a Bank of Credit in Boston, New England, founded on Land Security, in 1714.[397] Its abettors endeavored to promote subscriptions by appealing to the friends of education, in a promise to devote £200 per annum to the advantage of Harvard College.[398]

The small minority of hard-money men cast in their lot with the advocates of a public bank as the lesser evil of the two.

Gov. Dudley was no favorer of the Land-bank scheme[399] and his son, Paul Dudley, attacked it in a pamphlet, Objections to the Bank of Credit lately projected at Boston[400] (Oct., 1714), to which an answer came in Dec., from Samuel Lynde and other upholders, called A Vindication of the Bank of Credit.[401] “Of nearly thirty pamphlets and tracts, printed from 1714 to 1721,[402] for or against a private bank or a public bank,” says Dr. Trumbull,[403] “that of Dudley was the first, and is in some respects the ablest;” but he places foremost among the advocates of the scheme the author of A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country (Boston, 1721), purporting to be by “Amicus Patriæ,” or, as Trumbull thinks (p. 40) there is little doubt, by the famous Rev. John Wise, of Chebacco. (Cf. Brinley Catal., i. nos. 1,442-45.)

To forestall the action of the private bank, the province, by a law, issued £50,000 to be let out on mortgages of real estate, and these bills were in circulation for over thirty years, and the assembly took other action to prevent the Land-bank scheme being operative. The subsequent emissions of paper money can be traced in Felt, who also cites the contemporary tracts, ranged upon opposite sides, and supporting on the one hand the conservative views of the Council, and on the other the heedless precipitancy of the House. One of these, The Distressed state of the town of Boston considered ... in a letter from a gentleman to his friend in the country (1720), excited the attention of the council as embodying reflections on the acts of the government.[404]

In 1722 bills of as small a denomination as one, two, and three pennies[405] were ordered, to provide small change, which had become scarce.

The financial situation was rapidly growing worse. In 1710 an ounce of silver was worth eight shillings in paper, and in 1727 it had risen to seventeen shillings; and at this time, or near it (1728), there was afloat about £314,000 of this paper of Massachusetts indebtedness, to say nothing of a similar circulation issued by the other colonies, that of Rhode Island showing a much greater depreciation.[406] The fall in value was still increasing when in 1731 there were plans of bringing gold and silver into the country for a medium of trade;[407] but naturally the needy mercantile class opposed it. Thomas Hutchinson early (1737-38) distinguished himself in the assembly as a consistent opposer of paper money, and in 1740 he tried to push a scheme to hire in England 220,000 ounces of gold to meet the province bills, but he had little success. Another[408] scheme, however, flourished for a while; and this was one reviving the old name of the Land-bank, though sometimes called “Manufactory bank,” a bill for which was set afoot by Mr. John Colman, a needy Boston merchant, as Hutchinson calls him. Its principal feature consisted in securing the issues of the bank by a mortgage on the real estate of each associate to the extent of his subscription. It found its support in the small traders and the people of the rural districts, and was sustained in general by the House of Representatives. The leading and well-to-do merchants opposed it, and set up what was called a “Silver Scheme,”—an issue of notes to be redeemed in silver after the lapse of ten years.[409] “Mr. Hutchinson,” as this gentleman himself records, “favored neither, but considered the silver plan as without fraudulent purpose, which he did not think could be the case with the Land-bank.”[410]

RHODE ISLAND PAPER,—TWELVE PENCE.

From an original bill in an illustrated copy of Historical Sketches of the Paper Currency of the American Colonies, by Henry Phillips, Jr., Roxbury, 1865,—in Harvard College library.

In 1733, Boston instructed its treasurer to refuse the bills of the new emission of Rhode Island. (Records, 1729-42, p. 53.)

The favoring and the opposing of the popular measure of the Land-bank drew lines sharply in the current political contests. The governor was suspected of double dealing, and while he was believed to be personally interested in it, he carried out openly the opposition which the Board of Trade instructed him to pursue: rejected the speaker and committees of the House, who were urging its progress, and displaced justices and militia officers of that way of thinking. All the while rumors of riot began to prevail, but they were not sufficient to coerce the government in a relaxation of their opposition; and the governor on his side carried espionage to a degree which was novel. It is said that something over £50,000 of the bank’s bills actually got out; but some one discovered that an old act of Parliament, which came of the explosion of the South Sea company, held each partner responsible, and nothing else was needed to push the adventure out of existence.[411]

Felt gives the main points in the development of this financial scheme, but here as elsewhere his book is a mere conglomerate of ill-digested items, referring largely to the five volumes (c.-civ.) of the Mass. Archives, marked “Pecuniary,” which cover the monetary movements in Massachusetts between 1629 and 1775. Among the Shelburne Papers, vol. 61,[412] there appears a report of the attorney general to the Lords of Trade on this scheme of erecting a Land-bank in Boston, dated Nov. 10, 1735.

RHODE ISLAND THREE-SHILLINGS BILL, 1738.

From an original bill in the Harvard College copy of Phillips’ Hist. Sketches.

A leading combatant in the wordy conflict which followed was the Scotch physician, William Douglass, then living in Boston. His first publication was Some observations on the scheme projected for emitting £60,000 in bills of a new tenor to be redeemed with silver and gold, Boston, 1738.[413] In the same year he published without date, An Essay concerning silver and paper currencies, more especially with regard to the British colonies in New England, Boston.[414] He next printed in London in 1739 a Discourse concerning the currencies of the British plantations in America, especially with regard to their paper money, more particularly in relation to Massachusetts.[415]

NEW HAMPSHIRE FIVE-SHILLINGS BILL, 1737.

From an original bill in the Harvard College copy of Phillips’ Hist. Sketches of Paper Currency. Fac-similes of bills of 1727 and 1742 are given in Smith’s Lit. and Hist. Curiosities, p. liii. Cf. also Potter’s Manchester.

NEW HAMPSHIRE THREE-POUNDS BILL, 1740.

From an original bill in the Harvard College copy of Phillips’ Hist. Sketches. There is a fac-simile of a N. H. bill of forty shillings in Gay’s Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. p. 133; and one of a bill of 1742-43 in Cassell’s Hist. United States, i. p. 486.

A fortunate plan for withdrawing the debased paper currency of Massachusetts Bay was finally matured.[416] Though the taking of Louisbourg had severely taxed the colony with a financial burden, the loss of it by treaty now made the way clear to throw off the same burden. William Bollan, the son-in-law of Shirley, had gone over after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle to represent how the sacrifices of New England deserved more recognition than was seemingly paid them in the surrender of her conquest. This and other reasons prevailed, and the government agreed to reimburse the province for the cost of the siege. This was reckoned on the new basis of paper money. Shirley in 1743 had been allowed to give his assent to an issue called “new tenor,” in which the value to silver was about ten times as great as the enormous flood of issues then in circulation bore, and these last were now known as “old tenor.” On this new basis Louisbourg had cost £261,700, which was held to be equivalent to £183,600 in London, the pound sterling equalling now about 30 shillings of the new tenor, and £11 of the old.[417] This agreement had been reached in 1749,[418] and the specie was shipped to Boston. Two hundred and seventeen chests of Spanish dollars and a hundred casks of copper coin were carted up King Street, in September, the harbinger of new prosperity. It was due most to Thomas Hutchinson’s skilful urgency that the assembly, of which he was now speaker, was induced to devote this specie to the redeeming of the paper bills of the “old tenor,” of which £2,000,000 were in circulation.[419] It was agreed to pay about one pound in specie for ten in paper, and the commissioners closed their labors in 1751, the silver and copper already mentioned paying nine tenths of it, while a tax was laid to pay the remaining tenth. About £1,800,000 in current bills were presented; the rest had been destroyed or hid away and forgotten.[420] Rhode Island had received £6,322 as her share of the whole; but as she was not wise enough to apply it to the bettering of her currency, she suffered the evils of a depreciated paper longer than her neighbors.[421] The same lack of wisdom governed New Hampshire. Connecticut had always been conservative in her monetary practices.

When the Massachusetts Assembly, in 1754, sought to raise money for the expenses of the war then impending, its debate upon an inquisitorial excise bill levying a tax on wines and liquors incited violent opposition. Samuel Cooper launched at the plan a pamphlet called The Crisis.[422] Another brief attack appeared with nothing on the title but The Eclipse, MDCCLIV.[423] Daniel Fowle, however, was accused of printing another satirical account of the Representatives’ proceedings, which was published in 1754 as The Monster of Monsters, and the “Thomas Thumb, Esq.,” of the title is supposed to have shielded Samuel Waterhouse. Fowle was arrested, and the common hangman was directed to burn the pamphlet in King Street.[424] Sabin says that not more than three or four copies of the tract escaped, but the Brinley Catalogue shows two.[425] After his release Fowle printed in Boston the next year (1755) A total Eclipse of Liberty. Being a true and faithful account of the arraignment and examination of Daniel Fowle before the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay, Oct. 24, 1754, barely on suspicion of being concerned in printing and publishing a pamphlet, entitled The Monster of Monsters. Written by himself. An Appendix to the late Total Eclipse, etc., appeared in 1756.[426]

In May, 1755, a stamp act went into operation in the province, by which the Representatives had established duties upon vellum, parchment, and paper for two years. It yielded towards defraying the charges of the government about £1,350 for the years in question.[427] Shirley issued a proclamation of its conditions, one of which is in the Boston Public Library, and has been reprinted in its Bulletin, 1884, p. 163.

D. The Bounds of the New England Colonies.—During the provincial period, the external limits and internal divisions of New England were the subject of disagreement. The question as to what constituted the frontier line towards Acadia was constantly in dispute, as is explained elsewhere.[428]

On the western side New York had begun by claiming jurisdiction as far as the Connecticut River. She relinquished this claim in the main, as to her bounds on Connecticut, when that colony pressed her pretensions to a line which ran a score of miles from the Hudson, and when she occupied the territory with her settlers, the final adjustment being reached in 1731.[429]

On the line of Massachusetts the controversy with New York lasted longer. The claim of that province was set forth in a Report made in 1753, which is printed in Smith’s New York (1814 ed., p. 283), and Smith adds that the government of Massachusetts never exhibited the reasons of its claim in answer to this report, but in the spring of 1755 sold lands within the disputed territory.[430] In 1764 the matter was again in controversy. Thomas Hutchinson is thought to have been the author of the Massachusetts argument called The Case of the Provinces of Massachusetts Bay and New York, respecting boundary line between the two provinces (Boston, 1764).[431] Three years later (1767) a meeting of the agents of the two provinces was held at New Haven, by which the disagreement was brought to a conclusion.[432]

For the region north of Massachusetts New York contended more vigorously, and the dispute over the New Hampshire grants in the territory of the present Vermont, which began in 1749, was continued into the Revolutionary period. When, in 1740, the king in council had established the northern line of Massachusetts, the commission of Gov. Benning Wentworth, of New Hampshire, the next year (1741), extended his jurisdiction westward until it met other grants, which he interpreted to mean till it reached a line stretched northerly in prolongation of the westerly boundary of Massachusetts, twenty miles east of the Hudson, and reaching to the southern extremity of Lake Champlain. On the 3d of Jan., 1749, Wentworth made a grant of the town of Bennington, adjacent to such western frontier line. These and other grants of townships which Wentworth made became known as the New Hampshire Grants.[433] The wars prevented much progress in the settlement of these grants, but some of the settlers who were there when the French war closed assembled, it is said, with the Rev. Samuel Peters in 1763 on Mount Pisgah, and broke a bottle of spirits with him, and named the country Verd Mont.

Gov. Colden, of New York, on Dec. 28, 1763, issued a proclamation claiming the land thus held under the grants of Wentworth, basing his rights on the grants in 1664 and 1674 to the Duke of York of “all lands from the west side of the Connecticut River to the east side of the Delaware Bay.” On the 20th July, 1764, the king in council confirmed Colden’s view, and made the Connecticut River the boundary as far as 45° north latitude. When this decision reached Wentworth he had already granted 128 townships. New York began to make counter-grants of the same land, and though the king ordered the authorities of New York to desist, when word reached London of the rising conflict, it was the angry people of the grants rather than the royal will which induced the agents of New York to leave the territory. Gov. John Wentworth continued to make grants till the Revolution, on the New Hampshire side; but though Gov. Moore, of New York, had been restrained (1767), his successors had not the same fear of the royal displeasure. As the war approached, the dispute between New York and the grants grew warmer.[434] In 1773 James Duane, it is thought, was the champion of the New York cause in two pamphlets: A State of the rights of the Colony of New York with respect to its eastern boundary on Connecticut River so far as concerns the late encroachments under the Government of New Hampshire, published by the assembly (New York, 1773); and A Narrative of the proceedings subsequent to the Royal Adjudication concerning the lands to the westward of Connecticut river, lately usurped by New Hampshire (New York, 1773).[435] The next year (1774) Ethan Allen answered the first of these tracts in his Brief narrative of the proceedings of the government of New York. Allen dated at Bennington, Sept. 23, 1774, and his book was published at Hartford.[436]

The war of independence soon gave opportunity for the British authorities on the Canada side to seek to detach the Vermonters from their relations to the revolting colonies.[437] The last of the royal governors of New Hampshire had fled in Sept., 1775, and a congress at Exeter had assumed executive control in Jan., 1776. The next year (1777) a convention framed a constitution, and by a stretch of power, as is told in Ira Allen’s Hist. of Vermont, it was adopted without recurrence to the people’s vote. In March, 1778, the state government was fully organized. The dispute with New York went on. Gov. Clinton issued a proclamation. Ethan Allen answered in an Animadversary Address (Hartford, 1778),[438] and in Dec., 1778, a convention of the people of the grants was held, and their resolution was appended to a document prepared by a committee of the assembly, called A public defence of the right of the New Hampshire grants (so called) on both sides Connecticut river, to associate together, and form themselves into an independent state. Containing remarks on sundry paragraphs of letters from the president of the Council of New Hampshire to his Excellency Governor Chittenden, and the New Hampshire delegates at Congress.[439]

The same year the legislature of New York directed the preparation of a Collection of evidence in vindication of the territorial rights and jurisdiction of the state of New York, against the claims of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the people of the grants who are commonly called Vermonters. It was prepared by James Duane, James Morrin Scott, and Egbert Benson, and is printed in the Fund Publications of the New York Historical Society, 1870 (pp. 277-528). On the other side, Ethan Allen published A vindication of the opposition of the inhabitants of Vermont to the government of New York, and of their right to form an independent state;[440] and in 1780, in connection with Jonas Fay, and by order of the governor and council, he published A concise refutation of the claims of New Hampshire and Massachusetts Bay, to the territory of Vermont; with occasional remarks on the long disputed claim of New York to the same.[441]

In 1782, Ethan Allen again brought out at Hartford his The present state of the controversy between the states of New York and New Hampshire on the one part, and the state of Vermont on the other.[442]

The arguments and proofs were rehearsed in 1784, when the question was to be presented to court, in a brief by James Duane, called State of the evidence and argument in support of the territorial rights of jurisdiction of New York against the government of New Hampshire and the claimants under it, and against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. An amicable adjustment prevented the publication of this document, and it was first printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll. for 1871.[443]

Connecticut claimed certain lands in Northern Pennsylvania, which came within her jurisdiction by the extension of her lines, as expressed in her charter of 1662, westward to the South Sea. New York, being then in the possession of a Christian power, was excepted, but the claim was preserved farther west. In 1753 a company was formed to colonize these Connecticut lands in the Susquehanna valley, and lands were bought of the Indians at Wyoming. The government of Pennsylvania objected, and claimed the lands to be within the bounds of William Penn’s charter. (Cf. Penna. Archives, ii. 120, etc.) The defeat of Braddock checked the dispute, but in 1761 it was renewed. In 1763 the home government required the Connecticut people to desist, on the ground that they had not satisfied the Indian owners. New bargains were then made, and in 1769 settlements again took place. General Gage, as commander-in-chief of the British troops on the continent, refused to interfere. In 1774, William Smith prepared an Examination of the Connecticut claim to lands in Pennsylvania, with an appendix and map (Philadelphia, 1774); and Benjamin Trumbull issued A Plea in vindication of the Connecticut title to the contested lands west of the Province of New York (New Haven, 1774). See entries in the Brinley Catalogue, Nos. 2121, etc. The dispute was later referred to the Continental Congress, which in 1781 decided in favor of Pennsylvania, and Aug. 8, 1782, commissioners were appointed. (Journals of Congress, iv. 59, 64.) Connecticut still claimed west of Pennsylvania, and though she retained for a while the “Western Reserve,” she finally ceded (1796-1800) to the United States all her claims as far as the Mississippi.[444] The claims of Massachusetts, on similar grounds, to land in Michigan and Wisconsin were surrendered to the general government in 1785.

The original patent for the Massachusetts Company made its northern line three miles north of the Merrimac River. New Hampshire claimed that it should be run westerly from a point on the coast three miles north of the mouth of that river. When the Board of Trade, in 1737, selected a commission to adjudicate upon this claim, Massachusetts was not in favor, and New Hampshire got more than she asked, the line being run north of the river three miles, and parallel to it, till it reached the most southerly point of the river’s course, when it was continued due west.[445]

Respecting the boundaries on the side of Maine, there is a journal of Walter Bryent, who in 1741 ran the line between New Hampshire and York County in Maine.[446]

Massachusetts also lost territory in the south. The country of King Philip on the easterly side of Narragansett Bay had been claimed by Plymouth, and Massachusetts, by the union under the province charter, succeeded to the older colony’s claim. An arbitration in 1741 did not give all she claimed to Rhode Island, but it added the eastern towns along the bay.[447] On the frontiers of Connecticut, the towns of Enfield, Suffield, Somers, and Woodstock had been settled by Massachusetts, and by an agreement in 1713 she had included them in her jurisdiction.[448] In 1747, finding the taxes in Massachusetts burdensome from the expenses of the war, these towns applied to be received by Connecticut, and their wish was acceded to, while Massachusetts did not dare risk an appeal to the king in council.[449]

The disputes of Connecticut and Rhode Island respecting the Narragansett country resulted on that side in a loss to Connecticut.[450]

In an interesting paper on the “Origin of the names of towns in Massachusetts,” by William H. Whitmore, in the Proceedings (xii. 393-419) of the Mass. Hist. Society, we can trace the loss of towns to Massachusetts, which she had incorporated, and find some reflection of political changes. Up to 1732 the names of towns were supplied by the petitioners, but after that date the incorporation was made in blank, the governor filling in the name, which may account for the large number of names of English peers and statesmen which were attached to Massachusetts towns during the provincial period. The largest class of the early names seems due to the names of the places in England whence their early settlers came. Prof. F. B. Dexter presented to the American Antiquarian Society, in April, 1885, a paper of similar character respecting the towns of Connecticut.

E. Forts and Frontier Towns of New England.—The large increase during recent years in the study of local history has greatly broadened the field of detail. As scarcely one of the older settlements to the west, north, and east escaped the horrors of the French and Indian wars, the student following out the minor phases must look into the histories of the towns of New England. Convenient finding-lists for these towns are the Check-list of Amer. local history, by F. B. Perkins; Colburn’s Bibliog. of Massachusetts; Bartlett’s Bibliog. of Rhode Island; and A. P. C. Griffin’s “Articles on American local history in Historical Collections, etc.,” now publishing in the Boston Public Library Bulletin.

For the Maine towns particular reference may be made to Cyrus Eaton’s Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston (1863), vol. i.; E. E. Bourne’s Wells and Kennebunk; Cushman’s Ancient Sheepscot and Newcastle; Willis’s Portland (2d ed.); Folsom’s Saco and Biddeford; Eaton’s Warren (2d ed.), which gives a map, marking the sites of the forts about the Georges River; Johnston’s Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid, which gives a map of the Damariscotta River and the Pemaquid region, with the settlements of 1751; R. K. Sewall’s Ancient Dominions of Maine; James W. North’s Augusta; G. A. and H. W. Wheeler’s Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, including the ancient territory known as Pejepscot, Boston, 1878 (ch. iv. and xxiii.).

See the present History (Vol. III. p. 365) for notes on the local history of Maine, and (Ibid., p. 364) for references to the general historians,—Sullivan, whose want of perspicuousness Grahame (i. 253) complains of, and Williamson.

At the present Brunswick (Maine), Fort Andros had been built in 1688, and had been demolished in 1694. Capt. John Gyles erected there in August, 1715, a post which was called Fort George. Ruins of it were noticeable at the beginning of this century. There is a sketch of it in Wheeler’s Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, pp. 624, 629.

The fort at St. Georges (Thomaston, Me.) had been built originally in 1719-20, to protect the Waldo patent; it was improved in 1740, and again in 1752 was considerably strengthened. (Williamson, i. 287.)

At Pemaquid, on the spot where Andros had established a post, Phips had built Fort William Henry in 1692, which had been surrendered by Chubb in 1696. It is described in Dummer’s Defence of the New England Charters, p. 31; Mather’s Magnalia, book viii. p. 81. In 1729 Col. David Dunbar erected a stone fort, perhaps on the same foundations, which was called Fort Frederick. There is a plan of the latter post in Johnston’s Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid, pp. 216, 264. Cf. Eaton’s Warren, 2d ed.

Further down the Kennebec River and opposite the upper end of Swan Island stood Fort Richmond, which had been built by the Massachusetts people about 1723. Near the present Augusta the Plymouth Company founded Forts Shirley and Western in 1754. There are plans and views of them in J. W. North’s Augusta, pp. 47-49. Cf. Nathan Weston’s Oration at the Centennial Celebration of the Erection of Fort Western, July 4, 1854, Augusta, 1854.

Col. John Winslow planned, in 1754, on a point half a mile below Teconick Falls, the structure known as Fort Halifax, according to the extent shown by the dotted line in the annexed cut.[451] Winslow’s letter to Shirley, with the plan, is in the Mass. Archives, and both are given in North’s Augusta, pp. 59, 60. The fort was completed the next year by William Lithgow, as shown by the black part of the cut, the rear flanker, forming the centre of the original plan, having been built, however, by Winslow. This block-house measured 20 × 20 feet below, and on the overhang 27 × 27 feet. The narrower of the large structures was the barracks, also raised by Winslow, but removed by Lithgow, who built the other portions.

FORT HALIFAX.

The cut follows a reconstruction-draft, made by Mr. T. O. Paine, which is given by North (p. 62). The flanker nearest the river is still standing, and the upright planks on the side, as shown in the annexed cut, mark the efforts which have been made of late to secure the timbers. In the Maine Historical Society’s Collections, vol. viii. p. 198, is a history of the fort by William Goold, as well as the annexed cut of a restoration of the entire fort, drawn by that gentleman from descriptions, from the tracings of the foundations, and from the remaining flanker. The preceding volume (vii.) of the same Collections had contained “materials for a history” of the fort, edited by Joseph Williamson,—mainly documents from the Mass. Archives. A journal of the march of Capt. Eleazer Melvin’s company in Gov. Shirley’s expedition to the Norridgewock country, when Fort Halifax was erected in 1754, kept by John Barber (May 30, 1754-Aug. 17, 1754), is in N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., 1873, pp. 281-85. Cf. further in Williamson’s Maine, i. 300; Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, iii. 26. A plan (1754) of the Kennebec River forts, by John Indicott (measuring 3⁸/₁₂ × 1⁵/₁₂), is noted in the Catalogue of the King’s Maps (i. 580), in the British Museum. The forts on the Kennebec, and the chief localities of that river, are described by Col. William Lithgow in 1767, in a deposition printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1870, p. 21. Lithgow was then fifty-two years old, and had known the river from childhood.

In 1752, when there was some prospect of quieting the country, and truck houses were built at Fort Richmond and St. Georges, William Lithgow and Jabez Bradbury were put in charge of them.

A paper by Richard Pike, on the building and occupancy of Fort Pownall, on the Penobscot, is in the N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., 1860, p. 4. In Williamson’s Belfast, p. 56, is a conjectural view of the fort, drawn from the descriptions and from a survey of the site in 1828. A Survey of the river and bay of Penobscot, by order of Gov. Pownall, 1759, is among the king’s maps (Catal., ii. 167) in the British Museum. A journal of Pownall’s expedition to begin this fort was printed, with notes, by Joseph Williamson in the Maine Hist. Coll., v. 363. Cf. Williamson’s Maine, i. 337. This fort was completed in July, 1759, at a cost of £5,000, and stood till 1775. Cf. N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1859, p. 167, with an extract from the Boston News-Letter, May 31, 1759.

This enumeration covers the principal fortified posts in the disputed territory at the eastward; but numerous other garrison posts, block-houses, and stockades were scattered over the country.[452] A view of one of these, known as Larrabee’s garrison stockade, is given in Bourne’s Wells and Kennebunk, ch. xxi. The view of a block-house built in 1714, near the junction of the Kennebec and Sebasticook rivers, as sketched in 1852, is annexed.

West of Maine the frontier stretched from the Piscataqua to the valley of the Housatonic.

For the New Hampshire part of this line, Belknap’s Hist. of New Hampshire must be supplemented for a general survey by B. H. Hall’s Eastern Vermont. So far as the muster-rolls of frontier service show the activity in New Hampshire, it can be gathered from the second volume of the Report of the Adjutant-General of New Hampshire, 1866, supplemented by others given in the N. H. Revolutionary Rolls, vol. i. (1886). The volumes of the series of Provincial Papers published by that State (vols. ix., xi., xii., xiii.), and called “Town Papers, 1638-1784,” give the local records. The principal town histories detailing the events of the wars are Potter’s Manchester; Bouton’s Concord; Runnel’s Sanbornton; Little’s Warren; C. C. Coffin’s Boscawen; H. H. Saunderson’s Charlestown; B. Chase’s Old Chester; C. J. Fox’s Dunstable; Aldrich’s Walpole; and Morrison’s Windham.

FLANKER, FORT HALIFAX.

In 1704 the assembly of New Hampshire ordered that every householder should provide himself with snow-shoes, for the use of winter scouting parties. (N. H. Prov. Papers, iii. 290.) In 1724 Fort Dummer was built near the modern Brattleboro, in territory then claimed by Massachusetts. (Hist. Mag., x. 109, 141, 178; N. H. Hist. Soc. Coll., i. 143; N. H. Adj.-Gen. Rept., 1866, ii. p. 122.) In 1746, after the alarm over the D’Anville fleet had subsided, Atkinson’s New Hampshire regiment was sent north to meet any invasion from Canada. (N. H. Adj.-Gen. Rept., 1866, ii. 83.) The next year (1747), Walter Bryent advanced with his regiment as far as Lake Winnepesaukee. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1878, p. 297; N. H. Prov. Papers, v. 431, 471; Belknap, ii. 228.)

In 1747 the fort at “no. 4,” or Charlestown, the outpost towards Canada, was attacked. (Saunderson’s Charlestown; Stone’s Sir William Johnson, i. 260.)

In 1752-54 there is record of the hostilities on the New Hampshire borders in the N. H. Prov. Papers, vi. 301, 310-319.

The St. Francis Indians confronted the settlements of the upper Connecticut, and in 1752 Shirley sent Capt. Phineas Stevens to treat with them in the presence of the governor of Canada. (N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 252.) For the massacre at Hinsdale in 1755, and attacks in the Connecticut valley, see N. H. Prov. Papers, vi. 412, and Adj.-Gen. Report, 1866, vol. ii. 153.

FORT HALIFAX, 1755.
(Restoration.)

In 1694-95, the frontier line of Massachusetts was established by law as including the towns of Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, and Deerfield. Five years later this list was increased by Brookfield, Mendon, and Woodstock, with a kind of inner line, running through Salisbury, Andover, Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley, Westfield, and Northampton.

For the border troubles of Massachusetts, beside Penhallow and Niles, Neal and Douglass, and the Magnalia, we turn to Hutchinson with confidence in the facilities which he enjoyed; but John Adams says (Works, x. 361), “When Mr. Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay first appeared, one of the most common criticisms upon it was the slight, cold, and unfeeling manner in which he passed over the Indian wars.”

The most exposed towns fronting the New Hampshire line were Haverhill, Andover, and Dunstable. The History of Haverhill, by G. W. Chase (1861), gives the story of the Indian troubles with much detail.[453] For Andover they may be found in S. L. Bailey’s Historical Sketches of Andover (Boston, 1880); and for Dunstable in Elias Nason’s History of Dunstable (1877). Just below Dunstable lay Groton, and Dr. Samuel A. Green’s Groton during the Indian Wars supplies the want here,—a good supplement to Butler’s Groton. The frontiers for a while were marked nearly along the same meridian by Lancaster, Marlborough, Brookfield, and Oxford. The Early records of Lancaster, 1643-1725, edited by H. S. Nourse (Lancaster, 1884), furnishes us with a full reflection of border experiences during King William’s, Queen Anne’s, and Lovewell’s wars, and it may be supplemented by A. P. Marvin’s History of Lancaster. The sixth chapter of Charles Hudson’s Marlborough (Boston, 1862), and Nathan Fiske’s Historical Discourse on Brookfield and its distresses during the Indian Wars (Boston, 1776), illustrate the period. The struggle of the Huguenots to maintain themselves at Oxford against the Indians is told in Geo. F. Daniels’ Huguenots in the Nipmuck Country (1880), and in C. W. Baird’s Hist. of the Huguenot Emigration to America (1885).

There is in the cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Soc. (Misc. Papers, 41.41) an early plan of the Connecticut and Housatonic valleys, showing the former from the sea as far north as Fort Massachusetts, and the latter up to Fort Dummer, and bearing annotations by Thomas Prince.

BLOCK HOUSE, BUILT 1714.

In the valley of the Connecticut, Northfield held the northernmost post within the Massachusetts bounds as finally settled. One of the best of our local histories for the details of this barbaric warfare is Temple and Sheldon’s History of Northfield. Deerfield was just south, and it is a centre of interest. The attack which makes it famous came Feb. 29, 1704-5, and the narrative of the Rev. John Williams, who was taken captive to Canada, is the chief contemporary account. Gov. Dudley sent William Dudley to Quebec to effect the release of the prisoners, and among those who returned to Boston (Oct. 25, 1706) was Williams, who soon put to press his Redeemed Captive,[454] which was published in 1707,[455] and has been ever since a leading specimen of a class of books which is known among collectors as “Captivities.”

Further down the Connecticut than Deerfield lies Hadley, which has been more fortunate than most towns in its historian. Sylvester Judd’s History of Hadley, including the early history of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Mass., With family genealogies, by L. M. Boltwood, Northampton, 1863, follows down the successive wars with much detail.[456] A systematic treatment of the whole subject was made by Epaphras Hoyt in his Antiquarian Researches, comprising a history of the Indian Wars in the Country bordering on the Connecticut River, etc., to 1760, published at Greenfield in 1824. There had been published seventy-five years before, A short narrative of mischief done by the French and Indian enemy on the western frontiers of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Mar. 15, 1743-44, to Aug. 2, 1748, drawn up by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle of Northfield, and found among his manuscripts after his death. Boston, 1750.[457]

By the time of Shirley’s war (1744-48), the frontier line had been pushed westerly to the line of the Housatonic,[458] and at Poontoosuck we find the exposed garrison life repeated, and its gloom and perils narrated in J. E. A. Smith’s History of Pittsfield, 1734-1800 (Boston, 1869). William Williams, long a distinguished resident of this latter town, had been detailed from the Hampshire[459] militia in 1743 to connect the Connecticut and the Hudson with a line of posts, and he constructed forts at the present Heath, Rowe, and Williamstown, known respectively as forts Shirley,[460] Pelham, and Massachusetts. In August, 1746, the latter post, whose garrison was depleted to render assistance during the eastward war, was attacked by the French and Indians, and destroyed.[461]

Fort Massachusetts was rebuilt, and its charge, in June, 1747, committed to Major Ephraim Williams.[462] It became the headquarters of the forts and block-houses scattered throughout the region now the county of Berkshire, maintaining garrisons drawn from the neighboring settlers, and at times from the province forces in part. The plans of one of these fortified posts are preserved in the state archives, and from the drawings given in Smith’s Pittsfield (p. 106) the annexed cuts are made.[463]

In 1754 the charge of the western frontier was given to Col. Israel Williams.[464]

These Berkshire garrisons were in some measure assisted by recruits from Connecticut, as that colony could best protect in this way its own frontiers to the northward. Beside the general histories of Connecticut, this part of her history is treated in local monographs like Bronson’s Waterbury, H. R. Stiles’ Ancient Windsor, Cothren’s Ancient Woodbury, Larned’s Windham County, and Orcutt and Beardsley’s Derby.[465]

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