During the winter recruiting was going on in Boston with success for the fleet wintering at Louisbourg.[316] In the campaign of the next year (1759), Massachusetts and Connecticut put at least a sixth of all their males able to bear arms into the field. They were in part in the army which Amherst led by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and among them were some of the veterans which Pepperrell had command in 1745 at Louisbourg,—Pepperrell who was to die during the progress of the campaign, on the 6th of July, at Kittery in his sixty-fourth year. Another portion went with Pownall to the Penobscot region, or followed him there, and assisted in the building of Fort Pownall, which was completed in July (1759).[317] The reader must turn to another chapter[318] for the brilliant success of Wolfe at Quebec, which virtually ended the war.
George the Second hardly heard of the victories which crowned his minister’s policy. He died October 25, 1760, but the news of his death did not reach Boston till December 27th. He had already effected a change in the government of Massachusetts. Pownall, who had made interest with the Board of Trade to be transferred to the executive chair of South Carolina, left Boston in June, taking with him the good wishes of a people whom he had governed more liberally and considerately than any other of the royal governors.[319] Two months later (August 2, 1760), Francis Bernard, who had been governor of New Jersey,[320] reached Boston as his successor. He showed some want of tact in his first speech, in emphasizing the advantages of subjection to the home government, and gave the House opportunity to rejoin that but for the sacrifice in blood and expense which these grateful colonies had experienced, Great Britain might now have had no colonies to defend. Notwithstanding so untoward a beginning, Bernard seems to have thought well of the people, and reported fair phrases of encomium to the Lords of Trade.[321]
A few weeks after Bernard’s arrival Stephen Sewall, the chief justice, died (September 11, 1760). Thomas Hutchinson was now the most conspicuous man in New England, and he had put all New England under obligations by his strenuous and successful efforts to better their monetary condition. A train of events followed, which might possibly have been averted, if, instead of appointing Hutchinson to the chief-justiceship, as he did, Bernard had raised one of the other justices, and filled the vacancy with Col. James Otis, then Speaker of the House, father of the better known patriot of that name, and whose appointment had been contemplated, it is said, by Shirley. Hutchinson was already lieutenant-governor, succeeding Spencer Phips, and was soon to be judge of probate also for Suffolk,—a commingling of official power that could but incite remark.
The younger Otis was soon to become conspicuous, in a way that might impress even Bernard. There were certain moneys forfeited to the king for the colony’s use, arising from convictions for smuggling under the Sugar Act; the province had never applied for them, and had neglected its opportunities in that respect. The House instructed Otis to sue the custom-house officers. The superior bench under the lead of Hutchinson decided against the province, and it did not pass without suspicion that Bernard had placed Hutchinson on that bench to secure this verdict.
An event still more powerful in inciting discontent was approaching. Charles Paxton, who had been surveyor of Boston since 1752, had, in his seeking for smuggled goods, used general search warrants,—unreturnable, known as “writs of assistance,” and of course liable to great abuse. It seems probable that this process had been so far sparingly used, and there had been no manifest discontent. Upon the king’s death, the existing writs had only a six months’ later continuance, when new applications must be made under the new reign. These new applications came at a time when the public mind was much exercised, and there was a determination to question the legality of such unrestrained power as the writs implied. The hearing was to be before the court of which Hutchinson was now the chief. Jeremy Gridley appeared for the king, and the younger Otis with Oxenbridge Thacher for the petitioners. The court deferred its decision, but in November, 1761, the case was again discussed. The court meanwhile had had advices from England, and the writs were sustained. In the discontent growing out of this proceeding, we may find the immediate beginning of the controversy between the provinces and the Crown, which resulted in the American Revolution. The subsidence of the war left men time to think deeply of these intestine griefs, and when the Peace of Paris in February, 1763, finally dissipated the danger of arms, events had gone far to shape themselves for bringing another renewal of battle, not with the French, but with the mother country.
[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]
NEW England in general.—Of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620 to 1698, mention has been made in another volume,[322] and, as the title shows, it touches only the few earlier years of the period now under consideration. The book was published in London in 1702, and a solitary forerunner of the edition reached Boston, as we know, October 29 of the same year. It was the most considerable work which had been produced in the British colonies, and was in large part an unshapely conglomerate of previous tracts and treatises. Neal, Mather’s successor in the field, while praising his diligence in amassing the material of history, expressed the opinion of all who would divest scholarship of meretriciousness when he criticised its “puns and jingles,”[323] and said, “Had the doctor put his materials a little closer together, and disposed them in another method, his work would have been more acceptable.”[324] But Mather without Matherism would lose in his peculiar literary flavor; we laugh and despise, while his books nevertheless find a chief place on the shelves of our New England library. Mather was still young when the Magnalia was printed, but he stood by his methods and manner a quarter of a century later, and in publishing (1726) his Manuductio ad Ministerium[325] he defended his labored and bedizened style against, as he says, the blades of the clubs and coffee-houses, who set up for critics. He also belabored Oldmixon in a similar fashion, when that compiler both borrowed the doctor’s labors and berated his reputation, and Mather called him, in his inveterate manner, Old Nick’s son.[326] Sibley not unfairly remarks that these peculiarities of Mather’s style were probably almost as absurd to his contemporaries as to ourselves;[327] and very likely it helped to create something of that curiosity respecting him, which Prince tells us he found in Europe at a later day.
In any estimate of Cotton Mather we may pass by the eulogy of his colleague Joshua Gee,[328] and the Life of Cotton Mather[329] by his son Samuel, as the efforts of a predisposing and uncritical friendliness. We are not quite sure how far removed from the fulsome flattery, if not insincerity, of funeral sermons in those days was the good word upon his contemporary which came from Benjamin Colman.
With the coming of the present century we might suppose the last personal resentment of those who knew Cotton Mather had gone, and as an historical character it might well be claimed that a dispassionate judgment was due to him. When James Savage edited Winthrop’s journal, the public were told how Cotton Mather should be contemned; and the tale was not untruthful, but it was one-sided. Quincy in his History of Harvard University could give no very laudatory estimate of the chronic and envious grumbler against the college.[330] When Dr. Chandler Robbins wrote the History of the Second Church of Boston, he said all he could, and in a kindly spirit, to qualify the derogatory estimate then prevalent respecting his predecessor; and W. B. O. Peabody in his Life of Cotton Mather[331] tempered his judgment by saying, “There is danger lest in our disgust at his fanaticism and occasional folly we should deny him the credit which he actually deserves.” His professed defenders, too, lighten their approval with pointing out his defects. Thus does Samuel G. Drake in a rather feeble memoir in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. (vol. vi.), and in the 1855 edition of the Magnalia. Dr. A. H. Quint in the Congregational Quarterly, 1859, and Dr. Henry M. Dexter in the Memorial Hist. of Boston, vol. ii., incline to the eulogistic side, but with some reservations. Mr. Samuel F. Haven in the Report of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., April, 1874, turned away the current of defamation which every revival of the Salem witchcraft question seems to guide against the young minister of that day. The estimates of Moses Coit Tyler in his Hist. of Amer. Literature (vol. ii.), and John Langdon Sibley in his Harvard Graduates (vol. iii.), show that the disgust, so sweeping fifty years ago, is still recognized amid all efforts to judge Mather lightly.[332] Mankind is tender in its judgment of the average man, when a difference of times exists. The historical sense, however, is rigid in its scrutiny of those who posture as index-fingers to their contemporaries; and it holds such men accountable to the judgments of all time. Great men separate the perennial and sweet in the traits of their epoch from the temporary and base,—a function Cotton Mather had no conception of.