The disputes of the colonies, however, were by no means limited to those with foreigners and savages. The union, which had been so seriously threatened by the Dutch war, had earlier suffered another severe strain in a controversy between Connecticut and Massachusetts over questions of taxation. When the fort at Saybrook was bought from Fenwick by the former colony, for the purpose of protecting and controlling the mouth of the river, the contract provided that he should receive, in part payment, certain tolls to be levied upon merchandise exported by all the River Towns.[[593]] A few months later, the General Court passed a law regulating the amounts of these duties and providing for their collection.[[594]] The boundary line between Connecticut and Massachusetts was still undetermined; but as the latter colony claimed Springfield, which was under its jurisdiction, that town objected to being taxed by Connecticut, and refused to pay the duties demanded.[[595]] The question was referred to the Commissioners of the United Colonies by Connecticut in 1647, though the fort had then been destroyed by fire. The objections of Massachusetts, presented in writing, were not well taken, and one was an absolutely false statement, Connecticut having no difficulty in showing that the Bay Colony's contention that the question of a river-toll had delayed the formation of the Confederacy by ten years was palpably absurd and impossible.[[596]] Another contention, that the toll was not levied upon the Dutch at Good Hope, was also of no import, for the commerce of that tiny post was slight, and by taxing it, international questions would have been raised, to no advantage. Moreover, as the main value of the fort at Saybrook was to protect the river from the Dutch, its upkeep could hardly be considered as a charge of which that nation shared the advantages. The duties required were not discriminatory, and Connecticut was merely asking that the other permanent settlers up the river should share the same burden which she imposed upon herself.
Although the justice of her claim was upheld by the Commissioners of New Haven and Plymouth, Massachusetts refused to accept the decision as binding, and threatened retaliation, which, in 1649, took the form of an import duty on all goods from the three colonies entering at Boston Harbor, which was then the main channel through which all business was conducted with Europe.[[597]] The wording of the act made it obvious that it was to punish the three smaller colonies for not having agreed with herself; and the Confederacy's delegates resolved that “how fare the premisses agree with the lawe of love and with the tenure and import of the articles of Confederation, the Commissioners tender and recomend to the serius Concideration of the Generall Court of the Massachusits.” Wearied with her continuous rejection of their valid rulings for five years, they also added that they “desire to bee spared in all further agitations Concerning sprinkfield.”[[598]] Apparently, however, the pertinacity of Massachusetts won the struggle, to which bitterness was added by her persistent refusal, for seventy years, to acknowledge the real location of her southern boundary line, which she had extended slightly into Connecticut territory.[[599]] That “line” she had had surveyed, in 1642, by the somewhat odd method of having two “skillful artists,” as she called them, locate a point three miles south of the Charles River, and then, in order to avoid the long walk across country, sail around by the Sound, and ascend the Connecticut River to a point which they agreed was in the same latitude as that from which they had started. A map, a pen, and a ruler completed this arduous bit of surveying work in the wilderness.[[600]] Unfortunately, it did not satisfy Connecticut.
There was always a certain latitude, not astronomical, in the Bay Colony's treatment of boundaries, however; and, in spite of the reasonably strict definition of her own by her charter, the colony slowly expanded, like a balloon filling with gas. We have already seen how she had annexed New Hampshire, and, by her new interpretation of the charter, laid claim to Maine. The state of affairs in England, during the Civil War and Commonwealth, offered her the opportunity to make that claim a reality; and by 1658, the entire province had been annexed, bit by bit. In the midst of the civil commotions in the home country, the royalist Gorges had died, and his heirs had had no chance to answer their colonists' letters or to look after their affairs in America. Godfrey was elected governor of the settlements about York, the inhabitants there, “with one free and universanimous consent,” binding themselves into a body politic,[[601]] while farther east, the feud between Cleeve and Winter, the latter representing Trelawney's interests, had been continued. Trelawney, a royalist like Gorges, was imprisoned in England by the Parliament, and soon after died. Cleeve went to England, procured the assistance of Alexander Rigby, who had bought the questionable Lygonia patent, and secured from him a confirmation and extension of his own holdings. This was three years before the election of Godfrey at York in 1649, and Josselyn, who was then representing the Gorges interests, disputed Cleeve's claims, and both parties agreed to arbitration by Massachusetts. The jury failed to find a verdict, and the dispute continued.[[602]] The following year, the Commissioners of Plantations confirmed Rigby's patent, even enlarging its interpretation, and so confined the Gorges territory to that south of Saco.[[603]] Cleeve established a government within the now legal, if not equitable, Lygonia grant, and the quarrel between him and Godfrey seems to have been settled. Affairs promised to assume a more ordered aspect, and in 1651 Godfrey sent a petition to Parliament, asking that the inhabitants of Maine be declared “Members of the Common Wealth of England,” and confirmed in their rights.[[604]]
Massachusetts saw her opportunity slipping, and decided to act. In May of the following year, the General Court voted that the northern boundary of the colony was a line running from sea to sea and passing through a point three miles north of the most northerly section of the Merrimack, sending out more “skilfull artists” to find the exact latitude.[[605]] Godfrey vigorously objected, recalling to Massachusetts the services he had rendered her in England when her charter had been questioned, and denying the validity of her new claim.[[606]] His protest, of course, was of no avail, and in May, 1653, Massachusetts sent a commission, headed by Bradstreet, forcibly to require the submission of the inhabitants at Kittery. After much debate among the settlers, they agreed to submit, provided their conditions were accepted. This, however, was “wholy denied by the comissioners, who told them they must first submitt to the government, and then they should be ready to affoord such liberties and imunities as they should think meete to graunt.”[[607]] To this demand, as illegal as it was arrogant, the settlers were forced to yield an unconditional assent; and Godfrey returned to England, to add another, in the day of reckoning, to the enemies of Massachusetts. The country was organized as the County of York, and the towns incorporated with the same privileges as Dover.[[608]] Later in the same year, the commission continued its journey, and Wells, Cape Porpus, and Saco were likewise forced to submit.[[609]] Five years later, in spite of repeated protests from Cleeve, the whole of Maine and Lygonia were absorbed as far as Casco Bay, and the process of annexation was complete.[[610]] Of the principalities that Mason and Gorges had spent their fortunes to acquire, not a foot was left to their heirs.
By her policy of annexation, Massachusetts had added over forty thousand square miles to her territory; while by that of nullification, she had patently shown that the bonds uniting the New England Confederacy were but ropes of sand. Confederation was a failure and imperial control as yet impossible. The unification of New England was progressing rapidly, but it was a mere process of absorption by Massachusetts. Had there been no hindrance offered by England to the movement, the fate of the other colonies was amply foreshadowed. A single state, with its capital at Boston, guided by the reactionary ideas of its leaders, would probably have arisen, and much of the work already accomplished for the enfranchisement of the individual by Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as the progress so far made by Massachusetts herself, might have been lost.
Although her policy had met with so little real resistance in the north, it received an unexpected check in the south, from the despised Rhode Islanders, while the restoration of the monarchy in England was permanently to save the independence of that colony and of Connecticut. In view of the circumstances, that event, and the assertion of imperial control which followed it, cannot be considered as so inimical to the interests of liberty and the colonies as writers whose attention and sympathy have been wholly devoted to Massachusetts have usually pictured it. In spite of the many fine qualities of the Bay Colony, and the services which she rendered in the settlement of New England, it was fortunate that her career of aggrandizement was halted, for the United States could ill afford to have lost the independent contributions made to her intellectual and political life by the smaller colonies. Indeed, it may even be questioned, if a single powerful, unscrupulous, and aggressive state had come to occupy the whole of New England, and possibly the Hudson Valley, whether the United States, as a federal nation in its present form, would have come into existence at all. When one considers the possibilities involved in a wholly different balance of power among the colonies in the following century, the early career of Massachusetts and the checks it encountered take on a larger interest.
The four settlements about Narragansett Bay, whose extreme individualism and disinclination to submit to any superior government have already been noted, would probably have been exceedingly slow to form a combination, had it not been for the danger to their existence, threatened by their neighbors. Massachusetts had already set up claims to a portion of the territory, and assumed jurisdiction over some of the natives at the time of the Gorton affair in 1643; and contemplated more aggressive action by attempting to secure a charter from the Commissioners of Plantations, in the same year. While never legally granted, this pretended patent was at first used by the colony to bolster its claims.[[611]] At the same time at which Massachusetts was trying to obtain that document, Williams, then in England for the purpose, was also endeavoring to secure a patent which would enable the settlements legally to resist encroachment. In this he was successful, and, after that, “the country about us was more friendly,” he wrote, “and treated us as an authorized colony, only the difference of our consciences much obstructed.”[[612]] The charter named the towns of Providence, Newport, and Portsmouth, and incorporated a vague territory bounded in part by Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Pequot River, as “the Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay in New England.”[[613]] The settlers were given the right to erect any form of government which they might choose.
The Narragansett Indians, after the death of Miantanomo, had agreed to place themselves directly under the protection of the English crown; and Gorton, who, after his release from Massachusetts, had gone back to Warwick, was chosen by them to go to England and carry their submission to the King.[[614]] In 1644, Plymouth had renewed her claim to Warwick; but in the following year, twenty families from Braintree having petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for permission to settle on Gorton's lands, the Court had granted them ten thousand acres there, and arranged for the organization of a town.[[615]] A Plymouth settler objected, however, when the party arrived, and the new planters dispersed to other places. At the same meeting of the court at which the Braintree men were granted their land, a letter was ordered sent to Williams, stating that Massachusetts had received a charter for Narragansett Bay, and ordering him to desist from exercising any authority.[[616]]
Nothing had been done by the Narragansett towns to combine under their patent, until May, 1647, when a meeting attended by freemen from all four, was held at Portsmouth, at which it was voted to give Warwick the same privileges as Providence.[[617]] The new government derived directly from the people, and not from the towns, those present also agreeing that it should be “democraticall, that is to say, a Government held by the free and voluntarie consent of all, or the greater parte of the free Inhabitants.”[[618]] Legislation was, in the main, to be initiated by the people in town meeting, and not by the Assembly, which latter was to be a representative body, consisting of six delegates from each township. Such bills as might be initiated in the Assembly, or General Court, were required to be submitted to the four towns at their meetings, the whole legislative system thus being “a crude combination of initiative and referendum.”[[619]]
Meanwhile, Gorton had obtained a letter from the Commissioners for Plantations, granting him safe conduct through Massachusetts, and allowing him to resettle upon his lands without molestation, until the disputed title should be decided.[[620]] To this, Massachusetts returned an answer defending her actions in the case and her refusal to allow of appeals to England; but Gorton was permitted to pass through her territory on his way to Warwick.[[621]] The settlers there, however, were much troubled by the Indians, whom Massachusetts claimed as under her jurisdiction; and after receiving two complaints from the Warwick people, the Commissioners of the United Colonies finally returned answer that they were ready to undertake the settlement of the question as to “under what Colonie youer Plantation doth fall.”[[622]] The following year, 1650, Massachusetts, by agreement with Plymouth, acquired all rights which that colony might possess about Warwick, but the Commissioners of the United Colonies refused to sanction the transfer.[[623]]