In Massachusetts the town was the unit of representation and taxation, and in local matters it governed itself. The first town government appears to have been that of Dorchester, where the inhabitants agreed, October 8, 1633, to hold a weekly meeting "to settle and sett down such orders as may tend to the general good."[13 ] Not long after a similar meeting was held in Watertown, and the system speedily spread to the other towns. The plan of appointing a body of "townsmen," or selectmen, to sit between meetings of the towns began in February, 1635, in Charlestown.[14 ]
The town-meeting had a great variety of business. It elected the town officers and the deputies to the general court and made ordinances regarding the common fields and pastures, the management of the village herds, roadways, boundary-lines, fences, and many other things. Qualified to share in the deliberations were all freemen and "admitted inhabitants of honest and good conversation" rated at £20 (equivalent to about $500 to-day).[15 ]
In the prevalence of the town system popular education was rendered possible, and a great epoch in the history of social progress was reached when Massachusetts recognized the support of education as a proper function of government. Boston had a school with some sort of public encouragement in 1635,[16 ] and in 1642, before schools were required by law, it was enjoined upon the selectmen to "take account from time to time of parents and masters of the ability of the children to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital lawes of the country."[17 ] In November, 1647, a general educational law required every town having fifty householders or more to appoint some one to teach children how to read and write, and every town having one hundred householders or more to establish a "grammar (Latin) school" to instruct youth "so far as may be fitted for the university."[18 ]
In 1636 the Massachusetts assembly agreed to give £400 towards "a schoole or Colledge,"[19 ] to be built at Newtown (Cambridge). In 1638 John Harvard died within a year after his arrival, and left his library and "one-half his estate, it being in all about £700, for the erecting of the College." In recognition of this kindly act the general court fitly gave his name to the institution,[20 ] the first founded in the United States.
In 1650 Connecticut copied the Massachusetts law of 1647, and a clause declared that the grammar-schools were to prepare boys for college. The results, however, in practice did not come up to the excellence of the laws, and while in some towns in both Massachusetts and Connecticut a public rate was levied for education, more generally the parents had to pay the teachers, and they were hard to secure. When obtained they taught but two or three months during the year.[21 ] Bad spelling and wretched writing were features of the age from which New England was not exempt. Real learning was confined, after all, to the ministers and the richer classes in the New England colonies, pretty much as in the mother-country. In Plymouth and Rhode Island, where the hard conditions of life rendered any legal system of education impracticable, illiteracy was frequent. The class of ignorant people most often met with in New England were fishermen and the small farmers of the inland townships.
Scarcity of money was felt in New England as in Virginia, and resort was had to the use of wampum as a substitute,[22 ] and corn, cattle, and other commodities were made legal tenders in payment of debts.[23 ] In 1652 a mint was established at Boston, and a law was passed providing for the coinage of all bullion, plate, and Spanish coin into "twelve-penny, sixpenny, and threepenny pieces." The master of the mint was John Hull, and the shillings coined by him were called "Pine-Tree Shillings," because they bore on one side the legend "Massachusetts" encircling a tree.[24 ]
Marriage was a mere civil contract, and the burials took place without funeral service or sermon. Stern laws were made against card-playing, long hair, drinking healths, and wearing certain articles, such as gold and silver girdles, hat-bands, belts, ruffs, and beaver hats. There were no Christmas festivals and no saints' days nor recognized saints, though special feasts and thanksgiving days were frequent.[25 ] The penal legislation of New England was harsh and severe, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut there were fifteen crimes punishable with death, while the law took hold also of innumerable petty offences. In addition the magistrates had a discretionary authority, and they often punished persons on mere suspicion.
There can be no doubt that the ideal of the educated Puritan was lofty and high, and that society in New England was remarkably free from the ordinary frivolities and immoralities of mankind; but it would seem that human nature exacted a severe retaliation for the undue suppression of its weaknesses. There are in the works of Bradford and Winthrop, as well as in the records of the colonies, evidence which shows that the streams of wickedness in New England were "dammed" and not dried up. At intervals the impure waters broke over the obstacles in their way, till the record of crime caused the good Bradford "to fear and tremble at the consideration of our corrupt natures."[26 ]
The conveniences of town life gave opportunities for literature not enjoyed by the Virginians, and, though his religion cut the Puritan almost entirely off from the finer fields of poetry and arts, New England in the period of which we have been considering was strong in history and theology. Thus the works of Bradford and Winthrop and of Hooker and Cotton compare favorably with the best productions of their contemporaries in England, and contrast with the later writers of Cotton Mather's "glacial period," when, under the influence of the theocracy, "a lawless and merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent, strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantics, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, and monstrosities of phrase" were the traits of New England literature.[27 ]