Eliot was imbued with the enthusiasm of the time. As John Cotton had deduced a body of laws from the Scriptures, which he offered to the General Court for the colony, so in like manner Eliot drew from the Scriptures a frame of government for a commonwealth. It was entitled The Christian Commonwealth; or, the Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which he sent to England during the interregnum, and commended to the people there. He had drawn up a similar form for his Indian community, and had put it in practice. His manuscript, after slumbering for some years, was printed in London in 1659, and some copies came over to the colony. The Restoration soon followed. Eliot had in his treatise reflected on kingly government, and in May, 1661, the General Court ordered the book to be totally suppressed; and all persons having copies of it were commanded either to cancel or deface the same, or deliver them to the next magistrate. Eliot acknowledged his fault under his own hand, saying he sent the manuscript to England some nine or ten years before. Hutchinson, commenting on this whole proceeding, says, “When the times change, men generally suffer their opinions to change with them, so far at least as is necessary to avoid danger.” How many copies of the book were destroyed by this order of the court, we cannot tell. A few years ago the only copy known was owned by Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, then residing in London; and from this copy a transcript was made, and it was printed in 1846 in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., ix. 129.[602]
Eliot was not the only distinguished citizen whose book came under the ban of the Massachusetts authorities. William Pynchon, of Springfield, wrote a book which was published in London in 1650, entitled The Meritorious price of our Redemption, etc., copies of which arrived in Boston during the session of the General Court in October of that year. The Court immediately condemned it, and ordered it to be burned the next day in the market-place, which was done; and Mr. Norton was asked to answer it. Norton obeyed, and the book he wrote was ordered to be sent to London to be published. It was A Discussion of that Great Point in Divinity, the Sufferings of Christ, etc., 1653. Pynchon in the mean time was brought before the Court, and was plied by several orthodox divines. He admitted that some points in his book were overstated, and his sentence was postponed. Not liking his treatment here he went back to England in 1652, and published a reply to Norton in a work with a title similar to that which gave the original offence, London, 1655. Pynchon held that Christ did not suffer the torments of hell for mankind, and that he bore not our sins by imputation. A more full answer to Norton’s book was published by him in 1662, called the Covenant of Nature.[603]
John Winthrop died March 26, 1649. No man in the colony was so well qualified as he, either from opportunity or character, to write its history. Yet he left no history. But he left what was more precious,—a journal of events, recorded in chronological order, from the time of his departure from England in the “Arbella,” to within two months of his death. This Journal may be called the materials of history of the most valuable character. The author himself calls it a “History of New England.” From this, for the period which it covers, and from the records of the General Court for the same period, a history of the colony for the first twenty years could be written. For over one hundred years from Winthrop’s death no mention is made of his Journal. Although it was largely drawn upon by Hubbard in his History (1680), and was used by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia, it was cited by neither, and was first mentioned by Thomas Prince on the cover of the first number of the second volume of his Annals, in 1755. Among his list of authorities there given, he mentions “having lately received” this Journal of Governor Winthrop. Prince made but little use of this manuscript, as the three numbers only which he issued of his second volume ended with Aug. 5, 1633. Prince probably procured the Journal from the Winthrop family in Connecticut. It was in three volumes. The first and second volumes were restored to the family, and were published in Hartford in 1790, in one volume, edited by Noah Webster.[604] The third volume was found in the Prince Library, in the tower of the Old South Church, in 1816, and was given to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It was published, together with volumes one and two, in 1825 and 1826, in two volumes, edited by James Savage.[605] Volume two of the manuscript was destroyed by a fire which, Nov. 10, 1825, consumed the building in Court Street, Boston, in which Mr. Savage had his office.[606]
The earliest published narrative—we can hardly call it a history—relating generally to Massachusetts, is Edward Johnson’s “Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England,”—the running title to the book, which on the titlepage is called a History of New England, etc., London, 1654. The book does not profess to give an orderly account of the settlement of New England, or even of Massachusetts, to which it wholly relates, but describes what took place in the colony under his own observation largely, and what would illustrate “the goodness of God in the settlement of these colonies.” The book is supposed to have been written two or three years only before it was sent to England to be published. It is conjectured that the titlepage was added by the publisher.[607] The book has a value, for it contains many facts, but its composition and arrangement are bad.[608]
The Quaker episode produced an abundant literature. Several Rhode Island Baptists had previously received rough usage here; and Dr. John Clarke, one of the founders of Rhode Island, who had a personal experience to relate, published in London, in 1652,—whither he had gone with Roger Williams the year before,—a book against the colony, called Ill-Newes from New-England, or a Narrative of New-England’s Persecution, etc.[609]
In 1654, two years before the Quakers made their appearance, the colony passed a law against any one having in his possession the books of Reeve and Muggleton, “the two Last Witnesses and True Prophets of Jesus Christ,” as they called themselves. Some of the books of these fanatics had been printed in London in 1653, and had made their way to the colony, and the executioner was ordered to burn all such books in the market-place on the next Lecture day. In 1656 the Quakers came and brought their books, which were at once seized and reserved for the fire; while sentence of banishment was passed against those who brought them. The Quakers continued to flock to the colony in violation of the law now passed against them. They were imprisoned, whipped, and two were hanged in Boston in October, 1659, one in June, 1660, and one in March, 1661. Some of the more important books which the Quaker controversy brought forth must now be named. An account of the reception which the Quakers met with here soon found its way to London, and to the hands of Francis Howgill, who published it with the title, The Popish Inquisition Newly Erected in New England, etc., London, 1659. Another tract appeared there the same year as The Secret Works of a Cruel People Made Manifest. In the following year appeared A Call from Death to Life, letters written “from the common goal of Boston” by Stephenson and Robinson (who were shortly after executed); and one “written in Plymouth Prison” by Peter Pearson, a few weeks later, giving an account of the execution of the two former. In October, 1658, John Norton had been appointed by the Court to write a treatise on the doctrines of the Quakers, which he did, and the tract was printed in Cambridge in 1659, and in London in 1660, with the title, The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation. After three Quakers had been hanged, the colony, under date of Dec. 19, 1660, sent an “Humble Petition and Address of the General Court ... unto the High and Mighty Prince Charles the Second,” defending their conduct. This was presented February 11, and printed, and was replied to by Edward Burroughs in an elaborate volume, which contains a full account of the first three martyrs. This was followed this year, 1661, by a yet more important volume, by George Bishope, called New England Judged, in which the story of the Quaker persecution from the beginning is told. Bishope lived in England, and published in a first volume the accounts and letters of the sufferers sent over to him. A second volume was published in 1667, continuing the narrative of the sufferings and of the hanging of William Leddra, in March, 1661. A general History of the Quakers was written by William Sewel, a Dutch Quaker of Amsterdam, published there in his native tongue, in 1717, folio. Sewel’s grandfather was an English Brownist, who emigrated to Holland. The book was translated by the author himself into English, and published in London in 1722.[610] Joseph Besse’s book,—A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, for the Testimony of a Good Conscience, 1753,—contains a mass of most valuable statistics about the Quakers. Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay has an excellent summarized account, as do the histories of Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Barry.[611]
The records of the colony, as I have frequently had occasion to observe, afford the richest materials for the colony’s history, and never more so than in regard to the trials which the colony experienced from the period following the Restoration to the time of Dudley and Andros. The story of the visit of the royal commissioners here in 1665 is no where so fully told as there. Indeed, the principal source of the history of Maine and of New Hampshire while they were for many years a component part of the colony of Massachusetts is told in the records of the old Bay State.