Its appearance, nevertheless, in the News-Letter established the freedom of the press in Massachusetts.[223] The governor informed the Board of Trade that the province was bound to wrest from him as much of his representative prerogative as it could, and its action certainly seemed sometimes to have no other purpose than to establish precedents which might in some turn of fortune become useful. The House chose the younger Cooke speaker in palpable defiance, and when he was disapproved the members refused to go into another ballot, and the governor prorogued them. When the new House assembled they contented themselves with publishing a protest, and chose another speaker; and then they diminished the “present” which they voted to the governor. It seems clear that the House, in a rather undignified way, revelled in their power, and often went beyond the limits of propriety. The charter required that all acts should be reviewed by the Crown for approval. The House dodged the necessity by passing resolves. Dummer in England knew that such conduct only helped the Board of Trade to push the plan of confederating all the provinces under a governor-general, and intimated as much. The House was in no temper to be criticised by its own agent, and voted to dismiss Dummer. The council in non-concurring saved him; but the House retaliated by dropping his allowance.
The council was not without its troubles. Shute refused to attend its meetings on Christmas. Sewall, ever alert at any chance of spurning the day, “because,” as he chose to think, “the dissenters had come a great way for their liberties,” broadly intimated that the council still could pass its bills on that day, and the governor might take whatever day he chose to sign them. It was certainly not a happy era in Massachusetts. The legislature was not altogether wise or benign, and Shute did nothing to make them so.[224]
The frontiers, for a space, had but a hazardous peace. In August, 1717, Shute had gone to Arrowsick (Georgetown, Me.) to hold a conference with the Indians, and had learned from a letter received there from Sebastian Rasle, the Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, that any attempt to occupy the lands beyond the Kennebec would lead to war, and as we shall see the war came.[225] Meanwhile, life in Boston was full of change and shadow. Pirates beset the people’s shipping, and when the notorious “Whidaw” was cast away on Cape Cod (1717) they heard with some satisfaction of the hundred dead bodies which were washed ashore from the wreck. There was consequently one less terror for their coasters and for the paltry sloops which were now beginning to venture out for whales from Cape Cod and Nantucket.[226] There was occasion, indeed, to foster and protect that and all industries, for the purchasing power of their paper money was sinking lower and lower, to the disturbance of all trade. When the province sought to make the English manufacturers afford some slight contribution to restoration of prosperity by imposing a duty of one per cent. on their manufactures sent over, the bill was negatived by the king, with threats of loss of their charter if any such device were repeated. In the same spirit Parliament tried to suppress all iron-working in the province;[227] but after much insistence the people were allowed the boon of making their own nails![228] Some Scotch Irish had come over in 1718, and though most of them went to New Hampshire and introduced the potato,[229] enough remained in Boston to teach the art of linen-making. Spinning under this prompting became a popular employment, and Boston appointed a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools.[230] Perhaps they could spin, if they could not forge; and Boston, with her 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants to be clothed and fed, needed to do something, if Parliament would permit. Her spirit was not always subdued. In 1721 she instructed her representatives not to be deterred by frown or threat from maintaining their charter privileges. “When you come to grant allowances,” she said, “do not forget the growing difficulties that we at this day labor under, and that poverty is coming upon us as an armed man.”[231] The General Court emphasized its call for frugality by forbidding the extravagant outlay for funerals, which was becoming the fashion.[232] There might have been some scandal at the haberdashery trade which the profuse habits of bestowing upon their parsons gloves and rings made a possible circumstance, to say the least, in more than one minister’s house. But a little innocent truck in the study was not the ministers’ most pressing diversion. Cotton, or rather Doctor Cotton Mather, as he had been called since Glasgow, in 1712, had given him a Doctorate of Divinity, bid for an ally against the liberals.[233] When he and his father assisted in the ordination of the new Baptist minister, Elisha Callender, in 1718; and when Dudley, two years before his death,[234] joined Sewall in open attacks on Leverett and the government of Harvard College, there is little doubt where the sympathy of the Mathers lay.[235] They had hopes, too, that the new Connecticut college would register their edicts, since they could no longer enforce them at Cambridge. Sewall found the Lord’s Supper unsuggestive of charity, when the deacon offered the cup to Madam Winthrop before it was served to him; and we, to-day, had much rather see him riding about the country on his circuit, distributing tracts and sermons to squires and hostlers, and astonishing the children, as he rode into the shire-towns under the escort of the sheriff and his men.
But Yale College, of which so much was hoped by the lingering puritanism, soon surprised them, when Timothy Cutler, its rector, with one of its tutors, and other Connecticut ministers, embraced Episcopacy in 1722. Governor Saltonstall was powerless to prevent it, when at Commencement the story of that defection was told. Cutler went to England, received Episcopal ordination, and came to Boston in 1724 to take charge of one of its English churches.[236]
But before this the care of the body as well as of souls had proved a source of dispute with the ministers. Cotton Mather had read in the Transactions of the Royal Society, to which he was sometimes a contributor himself, of the method which was employed in Turkey of disarming the small-pox of some of its terrors by the process of inoculation.[237] That disease was now raging. While the town was moving the governor to send the “Seahorse,” man-of-war, down to Spectacle Island, because she had the pest among her crew, Mather urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to make trial of the Turkish method. The selectmen of Boston and the town meeting opposed it. The House forbade it by bill; but the council hesitated. One of the most active of the physicians of Boston strenuously objected. This was William Douglass, who had been a student of medicine at Leyden and Paris, and who had come to Boston three years before. Other physicians were likewise in opposition. The passions were excited by the controversy; the press was divided; and Mather, who about this time was finding the people “bloody and barbarous,” the town “spiteful,” and the country “poisoned,”[238] had a grenado thrown through his window.[239]
What with the political, financial, theological, and sanitary disturbances of Shute’s time, and the freedom of the press, which the governor had been foolish enough to give them the opportunity of making the most of, the intellectual activity of the people had never before occasioned so great a fecundity of print. The Boston man of the early part of the eighteenth century resorted to the type-setter as readily as he gossiped, and that was easily enough. In 1719 there were five printing-presses running in Boston,[240] and the Exchange was surrounded with booksellers’ shops. The practice of sales of books at auctions had begun in 1717 with the disposing of the library of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, or at least its catalogue is thought to be the first of such a sale. Thomas Fleet was selling his doggerel ballads, and the boys and girls of New England first knew who Mother Goose was when her nursery tales were published by Fleet in 1719. The News-Letter had been published for fifteen years, but not three hundred were yet sold at an impression. Wm. Brooker, succeeding Campbell as postmaster, felt it necessary to divide the town and give the News-Letter a chance for an altercation, when in 1719 (Dec. 21) he began the Boston Gazette. James Franklin had printed this paper for Brooker, but the printing being taken from him he startled the town with the New England Courant, which first appeared on Aug. 17, 1721. The new sheet was bold and saucy,—a sort of free lance, to which people were not accustomed; and while it gave little news and had few advertisements, its columns swarmed with what the staid citizens called impertinences. It wildly attacked the new inoculation theory, and elicited a public rebuke for its scandalous conduct from Increase Mather, who was in turn attacked by it.[241]
The Mathers, Elisha Cooke, Sewall, and above all Jeremiah Dummer in his Defence of the New England Charters,[242] published not a little of a terse and combative strain, which the student to-day finds needful to read, if he would understand the tides and eddies of the life of the time. Boston was also nourishing some reputable chroniclers of her own story. Thomas Prince, who after his graduation had gone to England, had returned in 1717, yet to live forty years ministering to his people of the Old South, gathering the most considerable of the early collections of books and papers, illustrating in good part the history of New England,[243] and contributing less than we could wish to such stores from his own writing. Dr. William Douglass, as we have seen, had dipped into the controversies of the day, practised his pen in the public journals, not always temperately or with good taste, and thirty years later was to vent so much prejudice in his Summary of the British Settlements that, though the book is suggestive, it is an unsafe guide to the student. Thomas Hutchinson, much the best of our colonial historians, was now a boy of six or seven in the forms of Master Bernard’s grammar school.
THOMAS PRINCE.
This follows an oil painting in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. There is also of Prince a mezzotint engraving of a painting, of which there is a heliotype in the Mem. Hist. Boston, ii. 221. A portrait after a painting by John Greenwood is noted in the Catal. Cabinet, Mass. Hist. Soc., no. 26. Cf. Proceedings, i. 448.