Respecting the French and Indian wars, nine volumes of the so-called Massachusetts Archives cover muster-rolls from 1710 to 1774, including the regiments of Sir Chas. Hobby and others (1710), the frontier garrisons, those of Annapolis Royal (1710-11), the expedition to the West Indies (1740), the campaigns of Crown Point, Fort William Henry, and Louisbourg (1758), beside various eastern expeditions and the service by sea. Of the first Louisbourg (1745) expedition, there are no rolls, except as made up in copies from the Pepperrell and Belknap papers in the library of the Mass. Historical Society. In addition to these bound papers there are many others in packages, laid aside by Mr. Felt in his labor, in some cases for reasons, and in other cases by oversight or a varying sense of choice.[366]
The Colonial Records of Connecticut for the present period have come under the supervision of Mr. C. J. Hoadly, and are carefully edited. In 1849 about 50,000 documents in the state archives had been bound in 138 volumes, when an index was made to them.[367] The correspondence of the Connecticut authorities with the home government (1755-58) has been printed in the Connecticut Historical Collections (vol. i. p. 257).
For Rhode Island, the continuation of the Colonial Records, beginning with vol. iii., covers the period now under consideration. The sessional papers of 1691-95, however, are wanting, and were probably sent to England by Bellomont, whence copies of those for May and June, 1691, were procured for the Carter-Brown library. Newport at this time was a leading community in maritime affairs, and the papers of these years touch many matters respecting pirates and privateers. The fifth volume (1741-56) indicates how Rhode Island at that time kept at sea more ships than any other colony, how she took part in the Spanish war, and how reckless her assembly was in the authorizing of paper money. The sixth volume (1757-69) closes the provincial period.
The series of publications of New Hampshire ordinarily referred to as Provincial Papers, from the leading series of documents in what is more properly called Documents and records relating to New Hampshire, is more helpful in the present period than in the earlier one.[368] They may be supplemented by the Shute and Wentworth correspondence (1742-53), and Wentworth’s correspondence with the ministry (1750-60); and letters of Joseph Dudley and others, contained in the Belknap MSS. in the cabinet of the Mass. Historical Society.[369] The Granite Monthly (vol. v. 391) has published a list of the issues of the press in New Hampshire from 1756 to 1773; and B. H. Hall’s History of Eastern Vermont, from its earliest settlement to the close of the eighteenth century, with a biographical chapter and appendixes (2 vols., Albany, N. Y., 1858, and on large paper in 1865), supplements the story as regards the claim of New Hampshire to the so-called New Hampshire grants.
The legislative and judicial methods of the several governments are of the first importance to the understanding of New England history, for it was a slow process by which it came to pass that professional lawyers held any shaping hand in the making or the administering of laws. The first Superior Court of Massachusetts under the provincial charter had not a single trained lawyer on the bench, and its assembly was equipped more with persistency and shrewdness in working out its struggle with the crown officer who tried to rule them than with legal acquirements. E. G. Scott, in his Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies (N. Y., 1882, pp. 31-58), examines the forms of the colonial governments and the political relations of the colonies. No one has better traced their relations to European politics than Bancroft.
The legislation of the several governments has had special treatment in Emory Washburn’s Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts, 1630-1775 (Boston, 1840); in T. Day’s Historical Account of the Judiciary of Connecticut (Hartford, 1817); in John M. Shirley’s “Early Jurisprudence of New Hampshire,” in the New Hampshire Historical Society’s Proceedings, June 13, 1883. Cf. also H. C. Lodge, Short Hist. of the English Colonies, pp. 412-419.
Of the legislation of Massachusetts, Dr. Moore says[370] that it is “a record which, notwithstanding all its defects, has no parallel in any other American State.” The first edition of the Province Laws, under the new charter, was printed in 1699, and it was annually supplemented by those of the succeeding sessions till 1714, when a second edition was printed, to which an index was added in 1722, and various later editions were issued.[371] In 1869 the first volume of a new edition, of historical importance, was published by the State, with the title Acts and Resolves, public and private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, with historical and explanatory notes, edited by Ellis Ames and Abner C. Goodell. Mr. Ames has since died (1884), and the editing is still going on under Mr. Goodell; five volumes, coming down to 1780, having been so far published.[372]
B. Men and Manners.—Dr. George E. Ellis, in an address[373] which he delivered in October, 1884, on the occasion of erecting a tablet to Samuel Sewall’s memory in the new edifice of the Old South church, in Boston, of which that last of the puritans had been a member, said:—
“Judge Sewall is better known to us in both his outer and inner being than any other individual in our local history of two hundred and fifty years; and this is true not only of himself, but through his pen, curiously active, faithful, candid, kind, impartial, and ever just, his own times stand revealed and described to us. His surroundings and companions, his home and public life, the habits, usages, customs, and events, and even the food which we can almost smell and taste, the clothes, and furnishings, the modes of hospitality, of travel, the style of things,—all in infinite detail; the military service, the formal ceremonials and courtesies, the excitements, panics, disasters,—all these have come down to us through Sewall’s pen, with a fullness and old-time flavor and charm, which we might in vain seek to gather from many hundred volumes. And all this comes from Sewall having kept a daily journal from 1674 to 1729, fifty-five years,”—and forty of these years come within the scope of the present chapter.
These journals had long been known to exist in a branch of Sewall’s family, but as, Dr. Ellis says, they “had been kept with much reserve, sparingly yielding to earnest inquirers the information they were known to contain.” President Quincy had drawn from them in his History of Harvard University, and had called them “curious and graphic,” as his extracts show. They had also been used by Holmes in his American Annals, by Washburn in his Judicial History of Mass., and by others. In 1868, some friends of the Mass. Historical Society purchased the diaries and other Sewall papers of the holders, and gave them to the society.[374] The diaries have since been published, and make part of the Collections of that society.[375] Despite a good deal of a somewhat ridiculous conservatism, linked with a surprising pettiness in some ways, the character of Sewall is impressed upon the present generation in a way to do him honor. His was a struggle to uphold declining puritanism, and the contrasts presented by the viceroyalty of New England at that time to one who was bred under the first charter must have been trying to Christian virtues, even were they such as Sewall possessed.[376] Dr. Ellis has pointed out[377] how universally kindly Sewall was in what he recorded of those with whom he came in contact. “There are no grudges, no animosities, no malice, no bitter musings, no aggravating reproaches of those—some very near him—who caused him loss and grief, but ever efforts to reconcile, by forbearance, remonstrance, and forgiveness.” All this may be truly said, and afford a contrast to what the private diaries of his contemporaries, the two Mathers, would prompt us to say of their daily records. Those who are more considerate of the good names of those divines than they were themselves have thus far prevented the publication of these diaries. Dr. Ellis[378] says of them:—