QUAKER AUTOGRAPHS.
[This group gives the names of some of the victims of the judicial extremities practised in Boston. See Bowden’s Friends in America, and the Memorial History of Boston. Cf. the note on the treatment of the early Quakers in New England, in chapter xii.—Ed.]
The ecclesiastical polity of the churches, embodied in the “Cambridge Platform,” was drawn up in 1648, and printed in the following year, and was finally approved by the General Court in 1651.
The community was obliged to feel its way, and adapt its legislation rather to its exigencies than to its charter. The aristocratical element in the society early cropped out in the institution of a Council for life, which may have had its origin in suggestions from England; but it met with little favor.
The confederation of the United Colonies, first proposed by Connecticut, was an act of great wisdom, foreshadowing the more celebrated political unions of the English race on this continent, for they all have recognized the common maxim, that “Union is strength.” The colonists were surrounded by “people of several nations and strange language,” and the existence of the Indian tribes within the boundaries of the New England settlements was the source of ceaseless anxiety and alarm. The Pequot War had but recently ended, and it had left its warning. It would have been an act of grace to admit the Maine and Narragansett settlements to this union, but it was probably impracticable.
DR. JOHN CLARK.
[This portrait of a leading physician of the colony hangs in the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and is inscribed “Ætatis suæ 66 ann. suo,” and purports to be a Dr. John Clark, and is probably the physician of that name of Newbury and Boston, who died in 1664. His son John, likewise a physician, was also a prominent public man in Boston, and died in 1690. That it is the former is believed by Dr. Thacher in his American Medical Biography, and by Coffin in his History of Newbury, both of whom give lithographs of the picture. Dr. Appleton, who printed an account of the Society’s portrait in its Proceedings, September, 1867, also took this view; while the Rev. Dr. Harris, in the Society’s Collections, third series, vii. 287, finds the year 1675 in the inscription, which is not there, and identifies the subject of the picture with another Dr. John Clark, who was prominent in Rhode Island history. There was still a third Dr. John Clark, son of John, and of Boston, who died in 1728. It is not probably determinable beyond doubt which of the earlier two this is; and Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary, gives twenty-five John Clarks as belonging to New England before the end of the first century; but of these only four are physicians, as above named. Cf. Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings, July, 1844, p. 287.—Ed.]
The conversion of the Indian tribes to Christianity was a subject which the colony had much at heart, and a number of its ministers had fitted themselves for the work: the special labors of the Apostle Eliot need only be mentioned. Through the instrumentality of Edward Winslow, a society for propagating the gospel among the Indians was incorporated in England in 1649, and the Commissioners of the United Colonies were made the agents of its corporation as long as the union of the colonies lasted.