His instructions were of the sort that the province had got used to, though perhaps they hinted more pointedly of the danger which awaited the charter, if the salary question was not agreeably settled. Burnet’s speech opened the legislative war. The assembly answered it by voting him a larger allowance than was usual,—but still an allowance. The town of Boston had the speech read to it in town meeting, and voted nemine contradicente, as we read in the records,[261] in the assembly’s spirit. The House now asked to be prorogued. The governor refused, thinking the £1,000 a month which the sitting cost might bring them to terms. This failing, he resorted to manœuvres which even Chalmers censures. He removed the General Court to Salem, when, in a sort of grim irony, it recorded a resolve to legalize proceedings passed in an unaccustomed place, and consequently unconstitutional, as they claimed. The House now addressed a memorial to the king and refused the governor a copy of it, and, helped by Boston merchants to pay the cost, the representatives despatched Jonathan Belcher to coöperate with Francis Wilks, now the resident agent in London, in obtaining the king’s favorable attention to their plea. This appeal gave the governor a pretext for releasing the legislature for three months,—and perhaps the device of the House had that purpose.
The Board of Trade heard both sides, sustained the governor, and advised the king to lay the facts before Parliament. The House in turn ordered a historical summary of all the proceedings relating to the salary question from the time of Phips to be edited and printed.[262] The governor dissolved the assembly, and took his revenge in withholding his signature to the bill for their own pay. A new election sent to Boston an assembly which was of the same temper. Burnet told them of the danger from the Board of Trade’s advice to the Crown; their own agents wrote to them there was no danger; and so the House continued as bold as ever. The governor directed their reassembling at Cambridge. Here they voted afresh the allowance, which was scorned as before. Meanwhile the governor got some literary recreation, for which his acquirements well fitted him, by printing moral and entertaining papers in the New England Journal; and if this did not bring him an income, he managed to eke one out by increasing the rate of clearance fees at the custom house, which all went into his own pockets.
Returning one day from Cambridge to Boston, in August, 1729, he was thrown into the water by the overturning of his carriage. A fever ensued, and he died September 7. The legislature gave him an impressive funeral, and voted £2,000 to his children; and his “character,” by Parson Colman, was circulated in a folio half-sheet.[263]
Dummer, as lieutenant-governor, again took the executive’s chair, and fought over the salary question once more; and the council, as before, steadily refused to join in the payment of the agents of the House.
Jonathan Belcher, lately the agent of the province, was now commissioned governor. He came of a New England stock, and his father had gained a fortune in trade, and had secured some political consideration as a member of the council. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Danforth, one of the ablest of the leading politicians under the old charter. The new governor had graduated at Harvard College; and foreign travel had added ease and attraction, with some of the wiles of the world, to a presentable person. He had been accustomed to dispense his fortune in ways to draw attention and give him consequence. He had thrown out intimations in high quarters in England that the view he once held on the prerogative had undergone a change, and that he knew the turbulent spirits of his native province well enough to manage them. Wilks and Shute had seconded his professions, and his appointment followed. With instructions pitched to a higher demand than ever before, he was sent off to try his skill with an intractable people. Meanwhile Dummer had been superseded by Tailer, a former incumbent of the lieutenant-governorship, chiefly because the naval office he was occupying was wanted for another. Tailer was at the time in New England, and received his commission before Belcher arrived, which was not till August 10, 1730. So amid the terror, from a new invasion of small-pox which had withdrawn the town from the observance of its centenary,[264] and with signs of a new life, as well as a new era, in the relief which the law was giving to the baptists and the quakers from the burden of the parish taxes, and with the stranger element of their population developing a new Irish Presbyterian church under John Moorhead,[265] the people of Boston received their recusant townsman as governor. He made his speech in due time to the General Court. Cato, he told them, went beyond reason in letting his obstinacy lure him to destruction. This reference to the salary contention did not intimidate them; for the House had information from its own agents that the jealousies of the party leaders in England were not likely to let any issue affecting the continuance of the charter be forced upon Parliament. In any event there was a disposition rather to accept parliamentary domination, whatever it might be, than surrender one jot of their principles. With such a disposition the House became stubborn,—politely so. It even voted the governor liberal grants for the services which he had rendered as agent, and he took the gratuities though he had abandoned the grantors. The allowances for his services as governor he could not well accept under such instructions as bound him; and as he needed the pay, his son solicited permission from the home government for the father to receive the usual grants. The request was allowed, and the salary contention came virtually to an end. When Belcher approved a grant of £500 to be placed in the Bank of England to the credit of the province’s agent, he little suspected he was furnishing the means to bring about his own overthrow. His conduct of his office rendered such an overthrow likely. The times, with all failings, had not seen before such flagrant attempts to serve party friends with the spoils of office. The public was so sensitive that even the younger Cooke, accepting a judgeship with some traits of sycophancy, fell in their good opinion.
The House set up a claim to audit all bills for which they granted money, and attaching such a proviso to their grants, such votes successively received the governor’s veto. This denied the public officers their salaries, and occasioned distress that the home government was besought to alleviate. The governor’s position was confirmed, and when the news of it came the House somewhat ludicrously asked him to appoint a day of fasting and prayer, since they were under such a “divine displeasure.” The governor thought the matter more mundane than divine, and refused. So in the autumn of 1733 the House saved its pride one forenoon by passing a bill with the proviso, and in the afternoon satisfied its sense of expediency by reversing the vote. Thus the delegates in their ungraceful way succumbed, as the governor did two years later, respecting the salary question. Each side was humbled, and affairs went smoothly for a while, though the depreciation of the paper in which the governor was paid did not quite fill the measure of his content.[266]
Commercial distress always conduces to emotional disturbance in a community, and the history of the “Great Awakening,” as it was called, is no exception to the rule. This religious revival began to make itself felt in 1734, under an impulse from Jonathan Edwards,[267] and later, under the ministrations of George Whitefield, the wild passion—for it became scarce else—spread through the churches and communities of New England.[268]
