"Nor ought we to submit without the consent of the body of the people. But the freemen and church members throughout New England will never consent hereunto. Therefore, the government may not do it.
"The civil liberties of New England are part of the inheritance of their fathers; and shall we give that inheritance away? Is it objected that we shall be exposed to great sufferings? Better suffer than sin. It is better to trust the God of our fathers than to put confidence in princes. If we suffer because we dare not comply with the wills of men against the will of God, we suffer in a good cause, and shall be accounted martyrs in the next generation, and at the Great Day."
The promulgation of this paper was the prelude to much calamity in New England for many years; but how well it has justified itself! Such words are a living power, surviving the lapse of many generations, and flaming up fresh and vigorous above the decay of centuries. The patriotism which they express is of more avail than the victories of armies and of navies, for these may be won in an ill cause; but the dauntless utterances of men who would rather perish than fail to keep faith with God and with their forefathers is a victory for mankind, and is everlasting. How poor and vain in comparison with this stern and sincere eloquence seem the supple time-service and euphemism of vulgar politicians of whose cunning and fruitless spiderwebs the latter years have been so prolific. It is worth while to do right from high motives, and to care for no gain that is not gained worthily. The men of Massachusetts who lived a hundred years before Jefferson were Americans of a type as lofty as any that have lived since; the work that was given them to do was so done that time can take away nothing from it, nor add anything. The soul of liberty is in it. It is easy to "believe in" our country now, when it extends from ocean to ocean, and is the home of seventy-five million human beings who lead the world in intelligence, wealth, and the sources of power. But our country two hundred years ago was a strip of sea-coast with Indians on one side and tyrants on the other, inhabited by a handful of exiles, who owned little but their faith in God and their love for the freedom of man. No lesser men than they could have believed in their country then; and they vindicated their belief by resisting to the last the mighty and despotic power of England.
On November 30, 1683, the decision was made known: "The deputies consent not, but adhere to their former bills." A year afterward the English court, obstinate in the face of all remonstrances, adjudged the royal charter of Massachusetts to be forfeited. It had been in existence all but half a century. It was no more; but it had done its work. It had made Massachusetts. The people were there—the men, the women and the children—who would hand on the tradition of faith and honor through the hundred years of darkness and tribulation till the evil spell was broken by the guns of Bunker Hill. Royal governors might come and go; but the people were growing day by day, and though governors and governments are things of an hour, the people are immortal, and the time of their emancipation will come. By means of the charter, the seed of liberty was sown in favorable soil; it must lie hid awhile; but it would gather in obscurity and seeming death the elements of new and more ample life, and the genius of endless expansion, Great men and nations come to their strength through great trials, so that they may remember, and not lightly surrender what was so hardly won.
The king's privy council, now that Massachusetts lay naked and helpless before them, debated whether she should be ruled by English laws, or whether the king should appoint governors and councils over her, who should have license to work their wills upon her irresponsibly, except in so far as the king's private instructions might direct them. A minority, represented by Lord Halifax, who carried a wise head on young shoulders, advised the former plan; but the majority preferred to flatter Charles's manifest predilection, and said—not to seem embarrassingly explicit—that in their opinion the best way to govern a colony on the other side of an ocean three thousand miles broad, was to govern it—as the king thought best!
So now, after so prolonged and annoying a delay, the royal libertine had his Puritan victim gagged and bound, and could proceed to enjoy her at his leisure. But it so fell out that the judgment against the charter was received in Boston on the second of July, 1685, whereas Charles II. died in London on February 6th of the same year; so that he did not get his reward after all: not, at least, the kind of reward he was looking for. But, so far as Massachusetts was concerned, it made little difference; since James II. was as much the foe of liberty as was his predecessor, and had none of his animal amiability. The last act of the Massachusetts assembly under the old order was the appointing of a day of fasting and prayer, to beseech the Lord to have mercy upon his people.
The reign of James II. was a black season for the northern American colonies; we can say no better of it than that it did not equal the bloody horrors which were perpetrated in Scotland between 1680 and 1687. Massacres did not take place in Massachusetts; but otherwise, tyranny did its perfect work. The most conspicuous and infamous figures of the time are Sir Edmund Andros and Edward Randolph.
Andros, born in 1637, was thirty-seven years of age when he came to the colonies as governor of New York on behalf of the Duke of York. He was a lawyer, and a man of energy and ability; and his career was on the whole successful, from the point of view of his employers and himself; his tenure of office in New York was eight years; he was governor of New England from 1686 to 1689, when he was seized and thrown in jail by the people, on the outbreak of the Revolution in England; and he afterward governed Virginia for seven years (1692-1698), which finished his colonial career. But from 1704 to 1706 the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, was intrusted to his rule; and he died in London, where he was born, in 1714, being then seventy-seven years old, not one day of which long life, so far as records inform us, was marked by any act or thought on his part which was reconcilable with generosity, humanity or honor. He was a tyrant and the instrument of tyranny, hating human freedom for its own sake, greedy to handle unrighteous spoils, mocking the sufferings he wrought, triumphing in the injustice he perpetrated; foul in his private life as he was wicked in his public career. A far more intelligent man than Berkeley, of Virginia, he can, therefore, plead less excuse than he for the evil and misery of which he was the immediate cause. But no earthly punishment overtook him; for kings find such men useful, and God gives power to kings in this world, that mankind may learn the evil which is in itself, and gain courage and nobility at last to cast it out, and trample it under foot.
James II. was that most dangerous kind of despot—a stupid, cold man; even his libertinism, as it was without shame, so was it without passion. In his public acts he plodded sluggishly from detail to detail, with eyes turned downward, never comprehending the larger scope and relations of things. He was incapable of perceiving the vileness, cruelty, or folly of what he did; the almost incredible murders in Scotland never for a moment disturbed his clammy self-complacency. Perhaps no baser or more squalid soul ever wore a crown; yet no doubt ever crept into his mind that he was God's chosen and anointed. His pale eyes, staring dully from his pale face, saw in the royal prerogative the only visible witness of God's will in the domain of England; the atmosphere of him was corruption and death. But from 1685 to 1688 this man was absolute master of England and her colonies; and the disease which he bred in English vitals was hardly cured even by the sharp medicine of the Boyne.
By the time Andros came to New England, he had learned his business. The year after his appointment to New York, he attempted to assert his sovereignty up to the Connecticut River; but he was opposed by deputy governor Leet, a chip of the old roundhead block, who disowned the patent of Andros and practically kicked him out of the colony. Connecticut paid for her temerity when the owner of Andros became king. In the meanwhile he returned to New York, where he was not wanted, but was tolerated; the settlers there were a comfortable people, and prosperous in the homely and simple style natural to them: they demanded civil rights in good, clear terms, and cannot be said to have been unduly oppressed at this time. New York for awhile included the Delaware settlements, and Andros claimed both east and west Jersey. The claim was contested by Carteret and by the Quakers. When the Jersey commerce began to be valuable, Andros demanded tribute from the ships, and shook the Duke's patent in the people's faces. They replied, rather feebly, with talk of Magna Charta. In 1682, the western part came by purchase into Quaker ownership, and, three years afterward, the eastern part followed by patent from the Duke. To trace the vicissitudes of this region to their end, it was surrendered to England in 1702, and united to New York; and in 1788, in compliance with the desire of the inhabitants, it became its own master. The settlers were of composite stock: Quakers, Puritans, and others; and at the time of the Scotch persecutions, large numbers of fugitive Covenanters established themselves on the eastern slopes. The principle on which land was distributed, in comparatively small parcels, made the Jerseys a favorite colony for honest and industrious persons of small means; and, upon the whole, life went well and pleasantly with them.