The representative system established.
For a time the freemen resumed the right of election of governor and deputy-governor, but soon handed this duty over to the representatives. Voting by ballot was introduced in 1634, and the freemen, who had become annoyed at threats from England of interference with their charter, asserted their independence of the official class by rebuking the assistants, turning Winthrop out of office, electing Dudley as governor, making new rules for the election of deputies, providing for an oath of allegiance to the colony, and placing their representative system on an enduring foundation. Ten years later (1644), as the result of a quarrel between the assistants and the deputies, growing out of a petty civil suit over a lost pig, the colonial parliament became bicameral, the assistants forming one house, and the deputies the other.
The representative system established.
There had been a healthy renewal of immigration to Massachusetts in 1633 because of increased harshness towards Puritans in England, and a number of strong men,—such as Sir Henry Vane and Hugh Peter,—destined to play no inconsiderable part in the history of America and England, were among the new arrivals. There were other Puritans higher in the social scale who would have liked to come,—such as Lord Say and Sele, and Lord Brook; but their proposition (1636) that an hereditary order of nobility be established in the province, did not meet with popular favor; a desire to be free from such distinctions was one of the causes which had impelled thousands to flee to America. A little later (1638) the freemen put down another attempt at aristocratic rule,—a movement looking to the establishment of a permanent council, whose members were to hold for life or until removed for cause.
53. Internal Dissensions in Massachusetts (1634-1637).
Condition of the colony (1634).
In 1634 the colony, now firmly planted with free English institutions in full force, contained about four thousand inhabitants, resident in sixteen towns. The old log-houses of the first settlers were gradually giving way to commodious frame structures with gambrel roofs and generous gables. The fields were being fenced, roads laid out between the towns, and watercourses bridged; and the farms were beginning to take on an air of prosperity. Goats, cattle, and swine abounded. Adventurous trading skippers, often in home-made boats, had cautiously worked their way through Long Island Sound as far as the Dutch settlements at New York, and up the coast to the Piscataqua, doing a small business by barter. Salt fish, furs, and lumber were exported to England, the vessels bringing back manufactured articles; for as yet the industries of New England were few and crude.
Harvard College founded.
The Massachusetts colonists were for the most part middle-class Englishmen, and education was general among them. Many were graduates of Cambridge, and the clergymen had, as conscientious Reformers seeing no hope of improvement in the English Church, abandoned comfortable livings at home to take charge of rude Independent meeting-houses in America. In 1636, an appropriation of £400—a very large sum, considering the means of the province—was made by the General Court to found a college at Cambridge, that "the light of learning might not go out, nor the study of God's Word perish." Two years later (1638) the Rev. John Harvard, a graduate of Emmanuel College, who had come out in 1637, dying, left his library and a legacy of £800 to the new institution of learning, "towards the erecting of a college;" and the Court decreed that it should bear his name. For two centuries the college continued to receive grants from the commonwealth.
Malcontents make trouble.