WEBVTT NOTE 45. Further Decline in the Massachusetts Theocracy 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Volume 1, Chapter 45, Further Decline of the Massachusetts Theocracy 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:16.000 The late 1660s and early 1670s saw an intensification of the trends that had arisen in Massachusetts Bay, 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:21.000 a continuing decline in the power and vitality of the Puritan theocracy, 4 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:31.000 and a rise in the influence of the non-zealot and even non-Puritan merchants in Boston and the other large towns. 5 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:38.000 The rise of the merchants and the relative affluence in cosmopolitanism accompanying that rise 6 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:43.000 brought a growing awareness of doom to the older Puritan generation. 7 00:00:43.000 --> 00:01:00.000 The growing wealth and sophistication greatly weakened Puritan zeal among the younger generation. Mobility, enterprise and consumer enjoyments more and more replaced the old fanatical asceticism. 8 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:15.000 Many of the leading merchants were Anglicans who could not, with the advent of restoration, be any longer persecuted, and even the Puritan merchants grew less and less interested in becoming Church members. 9 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:26.000 The old guard puritans ranted and raved, of course, against the rising new order as they saw their power and ideals slipping from view. 10 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:37.000 Frantically, the theocrats denounced avarice, gain, pride, the spirit of trade, idolatry and the pursuit of wealth and the good things of life. 11 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:54.000 The Rev. John Higginson, whose own sons were to be merchants, thundered in 1663 that this is never to be forgotten, that New England was originally a plantation of religion, not a plantation of trade. 12 00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:58.000 At every hand came a lament for the good old days. 13 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:03.000 The Rev. Uriah Oakes declared sadly in 1673, 14 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:08.000 He that remembers the good old spirit of those who followed God into this wilderness 15 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:13.000 cannot but easily discern a sad alteration. 16 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:16.000 The following year, Rev. Samuel Tory bemoaned 17 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:21.000 the new spirit of profaneness, a spirit of pride, a spirit of worldliness, 18 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:25.000 a spirit of libertinism, a spirit of carnality. 19 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:32.000 Truly, the very heart of New England has changed and exceedingly corrupted with the sins of the times. 20 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:38.000 A few years later, Reverend Increase Mather, emerging as the spiritual leader of the colony, 21 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:45.000 again recalled that religion and not the world was what our fathers came hither for. 22 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:50.000 He railed against the new luxurious fashions being increasingly adopted, 23 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:56.500 against those monstrous and horrid periwigs, the new wigs for women, and such like 24 00:02:56.500 --> 00:03:02.000 horrish fashions whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled against the sinful land. 25 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:10.000 The colony was also increasingly infected with such sinful pastimes as mixed dancing. 26 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:17.000 The New England Synod of 1679 also complained of the growing inattention to the Lord's Day. 27 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:25.000 Many people were insisting on walking and traveling, talking in a worldly manner, and working on the Sabbath. 28 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:30.000 Here again, we see that rigorous persecution had proved to be a failure. 29 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:39.000 Profanity was on the increase too, and the synod worried that the glorious name of God was being commonly profaned. 30 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:49.000 Long hair among men, long denounced by Puritans, was deplored by the General Court in 1675 as a sign of evil pride, 31 00:03:49.000 --> 00:04:00.000 but here the long-haired had ample Puritan precedent, including Oliver Cromwell, and such magistrates as John Winthrop, John Endicott, and Simon Bradstreet. 32 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:08.000 We have seen that even the good old Massachusetts tradition of religious persecution was fading away during this period. 33 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:21.360 In the latter 1670s, the persecution of Quakers and Baptists ceased, and a Quaker meeting-house and Baptist church were allowed, at last, to continue unmolested. 34 00:04:21.360 --> 00:04:26.660 As the theocracy dwindled in importance, the merchants arose. 35 00:04:26.660 --> 00:04:32.900 For private merchants, trade connections often depended on family connections, and intermarriage 36 00:04:32.900 --> 00:04:39.820 among merchants began to breed new names of stature in the colony. The Tings and Brad 37 00:04:39.820 --> 00:04:46.540 Streets, the Whartons and Dudleys, Breedans and Hutchinsons. In the New Hampshire towns, 38 00:04:46.540 --> 00:04:53.400 the Vaughns, Waldrins and Cots were becoming prominent, and in the main towns, the Frost 39 00:04:53.400 --> 00:05:00.280 and Pepperells. The Navigation Acts, as we have noted, had so far not been a hindrance 40 00:05:00.280 --> 00:05:07.280 to New England trade. They had not yet been enforced, and they remained unenforced after 41 00:05:07.280 --> 00:05:15.160 Massachusetts sent the Royal Commission packing. But in 1673, Parliament passed another Navigation 42 00:05:15.160 --> 00:05:22.160 Act that was to have a fateful impact on the American colonies. In the Navigation Act of 43 00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:51.160 The New England merchants evaded this act by the torturous interpretation that if Boston ships carrying tobacco from Virginia and North Carolina stopped first in Boston, then Boston was free to re-export the tobacco to France and other European countries. 44 00:05:51.160 --> 00:06:07.160 Seeing their expected monopoly dissolved by this practice, the London merchants clamored for, and obtained, the Navigation Act of 1673, which cracked down on this newly emergent trade. 45 00:06:07.160 --> 00:06:22.160 According to this act, one, a heavy tax on the enumerated products was levied at the port of clearance, for example, Boston, a tax that was equal to the import tax on those goods in England. 46 00:06:22.160 --> 00:06:32.160 Two, ship masters had to be bonded in order to ensure that their exported goods arrived in England or an English colony. 47 00:06:32.160 --> 00:06:36.160 and, perhaps most important, three. 48 00:06:36.160 --> 00:06:44.160 English customs commissioners were to appoint agents in the colonies to enforce these and other regulations. 49 00:06:44.160 --> 00:06:51.160 These provisions not only outlawed the export of sugar and tobacco to any country but England, 50 00:06:51.160 --> 00:06:57.160 they also meant a double tax on such goods if exported to England in New England ships, 51 00:06:57.160 --> 00:07:27.160 We have observed the terrible impact of the 1673 act on the North Carolina economy, and for that matter on the whole structure of the acts on the Virginia economy and on the price of tobacco, and we have remarked the impossibility of the enforcement of this act 52 00:07:27.160 --> 00:07:34.600 on the thinly populated North Carolina coast. The Culpeper Rebellion of 1677 was occasioned 53 00:07:34.600 --> 00:07:41.320 by the enforcement of the Act and was supported by the New England merchants. The London merchants 54 00:07:41.320 --> 00:07:47.320 also wanted enforcement of all the Navigation Acts because their New England rivals had been 55 00:07:47.320 --> 00:07:53.800 extensively smuggling cheap imports from European countries. The Massachusetts government strongly 56 00:07:53.800 --> 00:08:02.740 protested the Navigation Act of 1673, but to no avail. In fact, by the mid-1670s, England, 57 00:08:02.740 --> 00:08:10.440 the Dutch Wars over, was prepared to strike the decisive blow against Massachusetts' independence, 58 00:08:10.440 --> 00:08:16.520 self-government and free and flourishing trade. England's resumption of its previously abortive 59 00:08:16.520 --> 00:08:22.920 policy of cracking down on Massachusetts, stemmed largely from the breaking up of the 60 00:08:22.920 --> 00:08:30.000 of the Cabal Government and the fall from power of the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673. 61 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:35.820 Before that fall, Shaftesbury's powerful Plantation Council had urged the King to send 62 00:08:35.820 --> 00:08:42.580 over to New England a new, far more moderate commission, one not too much contrary to the 63 00:08:42.580 --> 00:08:44.580 and the present humor of the people.