England in America, 1580-1652

by Lyon Gardiner Tyler

(1624-1652)

During the civil war in England the sympathies of Massachusetts, of course, were with Parliament. New England ministers were invited to attend the Westminster assembly of divines held in September, 1642, and several of them returned to England. The most prominent was Rev. Hugh Peter, who was instrumental in procuring the decapitation of Charles I., and paid for the offence, on the restoration of Charles II., with his own life. In 1643 Parliament passed an act[1 ] freeing all commodities carried between England and New England from the payment of "any custom, subsidy, taxation, imposition, or other duty."

The transfer of the supreme authority to the Parliament, though hailed with enthusiasm in New England, increased, if anything, her confidence. In the summer of 1644 a ship bearing a commission from the Parliament attacked and captured in the harbor of Boston another ship friendly to the king; Massachusetts showed her displeasure by addressing a strong protest to Parliament. Not long after another vessel of Parliament attacked a ship belonging to persons from Dartmouth in sympathy with the king. This time Winthrop turned the guns of the battery upon the parliamentary captain and made him pay a barrel of powder for his insolence.[2 ]

The same summary action was adopted in regard to the growing demand for a freer suffrage. In May, 1646, an able and respectful petition was presented to the general court for the removal of the civil disabilities of all members of the churches of England and Scotland, signed by William Vassall, Samuel Maverick, Dr. Robert Child, and four other prominent Presbyterians. The petition was pronounced seditious and scandalous, and the petitioners were roundly fined. When Child set out for England with his grievances, he was arrested and his baggage searched. Then, to the horror of the rulers of Massachusetts, there was discovered a petition addressed to Parliament, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England and that a general governor should be sent over. The signers, brought before the court, were fined more heavily than before and imprisoned for six months. At length Vassall and his friends contrived to reach England, expecting to receive the aid of the Presbyterian party in Parliament; but misfortune overtook them there as in Massachusetts, for the Independents were now in control and no help could be obtained from them.[3 ]

The agitation in England in favor of Presbyterianism, and the petition of Vassall and his friends in Massachusetts, induced the general court in May, 1646, to invite the clergy to meet at Cambridge, "there to discuss, dispute, and clear up, by the word of God, such questions of church government and discipline as they should think needful and meet," until "one form of government and discipline" should be determined upon. The "synod" met September 1, 1646, and after remaining in session fourteen days they adjourned. In August, 1648, after the downfall of Presbyterianism in England, another meeting was held, and a plan of church government was agreed upon, by which order and unity were introduced among members theoretically independent.[4 ]

By a unanimous vote the synod adopted "a platform" approving the confession of faith of the Westminster divines, except as to those parts which favored the Presbyterian discipline. The bond of union was found in the right of excluding an offending church from fellowship and of calling in the civil power for the suppression of idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, etc. The platform recognized the prerogative of occasional synods to give advice and admonition to churches in their collective capacity, but general officers and permanent assemblies, like those of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, armed with coercive power to act upon individuals, were disclaimed.[5 ]

Nevertheless, by the organization thus effected, the benumbing influence of the Calvinistic faith upon the intellectual life of New England was fully established, and the deaths of John Winthrop and John Cotton, which happened not long after, were the forerunners of what Charles Francis Adams styles the "glacial period of Massachusetts."[6 ] Both Winthrop and Cotton were believers in aristocracy in state and church, but the bigotry of Winthrop was relieved by his splendid business capacity and that of Cotton by his comparative gentleness and tenderness of heart.

"Their places were taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever breathed"[7]—John Endicott, who was governor for thirteen out of fifteen years following Winthrop's death, and John Norton, an able and upright but narrow and intolerant clergyman. The persecuting spirit which had never been absent in Massachusetts reached, under these leaders, its climax in the wholesale hanging of Quakers and witches.

In the year of Cotton's death (1652), which was the year that Virginia surrendered to the Parliamentary commissioners and the authority of the English Parliament was recognized throughout English America, the population of New England could not have been far short of fifty thousand. For the settlements along the sea the usual mode of communication was by water, but there was a road along the whole coast of Massachusetts. In the interior of the colony, as Johnson boasted, "the wild and uncouth woods were filled with frequented ways, and the large rivers were overlaid with bridges, passable both for horse and foot."[8 ]

All the conditions of New England tended to compress population into small areas and to force the energies of the people into trade. Ship-building was an early industry, and New England ships vied with the ships of Holland and England in visiting distant countries for commerce.[9 ] Manufacturing found early encouragement, and in 1639 a number of clothiers from Yorkshire set up a fulling-mill at Rowley.[10 ] A glass factory was established at Salem in 1641,[11 ] and iron works at Lynn in 1643,[12 ] under the management of Joseph Jenks. The keenness of the New-Englander in bargains and business became famous.