Part One, Developments in the Separate Colonies
Volume Two, Chapter One, Liberalism in Massachusetts
The first half of the 18th century was a relatively stable period for the colonies in many ways,
especially in internal political institutions.
As was true for most of the other colonies, Massachusetts politics became a tug of war
The Key to the Power of the Lower House was its control over the purse strings of government, and it steadfastly refused to vote a permanent salary for the governor.
Not only was the voted sum generally far smaller than the governor wished, but the salary was granted at the end of the year, after the legislature had had a chance to appraise his actions.
In short, the governor's salary was always based on good behavior.
By 1731, the British government had authorized the governor to accept annual grants of salary,
a final victory for the prerogative of the lower house.
The lower house was not as successful in the controversy over selection of its speaker.
The assembly contended, quite properly, that it had a right to choose its officers, but
But it was finally overruled in 1725 in favor of the governor's assertion of the right
of veto over the post of speaker.
Leadership of the House opposition to the executive was directed by Alicia Cook, who,
at his death in 1715, was succeeded by the equally popular Alicia Cook, Jr.
One highly significant development in Massachusetts was the disintegration of the attempt to
To Impose Comprehensive Wage and Price Controls Having lapsed by the mid-seventeenth century
after repeated failures, a bill for comprehensive maximum wage controls, attempting to compel
wage rates lower than the market, was introduced in 1670 and in 1672. The more oligarchic
Council of Magistrates twice approved the bill, but the more popular Lower House twice
defeated the plan.
The Committee of Nine of the Massachusetts General Court, representing the views of the
small-scale artists and employers, lamented the oppression of tanners, glovers and shoemakers
by their being obliged by the market to pay journeyman employees wages that they deemed
The Committee also attacked the gall of journeymen in daring to desire and wear expensive clothes and in asking for wages that would pay for them.
There seemed to be no understanding of how wages are set in an unhampered market.
Finally, in 1675, an extensive but less comprehensive piece of maximum wage control and sumptuary legislation was passed.
was passed. The legislation was clearly designed to keep the lower orders in their place. Significant
of the class bias of the regulations was the fact that only laborers were to be punished
and heavily fined for receiving wages above the legal maximum. No penalties were to be
levied on employers paying those wages. By 1690, however, enforcement of the legislation
had begun to break down, and from then on the laws proved to be increasingly ineffective
and obsolete. The collapse of the regulations and of their enforcement accelerated after
1720. It was not only in the South that the proportion
of negro slaves to white bond servants greatly increased after the turn of the 18th century.
Although forced labor played a less dominant role in the Northern economy, a similar shift
occurred in Massachusetts.
From a class of young English servants bonded to family masters, the coerced laborers became
largely an alienated, heterogeneous group of non-English whites and Negro slaves.
In the 1630s, 95 percent of forced labor in Massachusetts was white and 5 percent negro.
By the 1740s, however, 25 percent of forced labor was white and 75 percent negro.
The increasing alienation of the slaves and the servants led the Puritan members of the
The Oligarchy to try to win their allegiance by rationalizing their ordeal as somehow natural,
righteous and divine. So have tyrants always tried to dupe their subjects into approving
or at least remaining resigned to their fate. Hence the Rev. Samuel Willard in his A Complete
The body of divinity, 1726, slyly linked the supposed hierarchical order of heaven to the
existing order on earth, to the ranks and orders among mankind in this world, which
God rather than the oligarchy hath appointed. Especially, the subjection of servants to
Servitude Masters was divinely appointed, made necessary by man's fall. All servitude
began in curse. Servants, according to the emphatically non-servant Willard, were duty-bound
to revere and obey their masters, to serve them diligently and cheerfully, and to be
patient and submissive even to the cruelest master. A convenient ideology indeed for the
Unfortunately, the Reverend Mr. Willard lamented, some masters are indeed insufferably harsh,
and hence provoke their subjects, and some servants are disorderly enough to be uneasy
and not willing to bear the yoke or be under any command.
The Reverend Cotton Mather, always an eloquent and leading spokesman for despotism, warned
Mathur advised the slaves and servants in a sermon that there is a fondness for freedom
in many of you. Mathur advised the slaves that they were living better materially than
they would be under freedom. Furthermore slavery had been appointed for them by God. Singing
for others the siren song of supposedly contented and blissful security, Mathur purred, Your
Your servitude is gentle. You are treated with more than mere humanity, and fed and
clothed and lodged as well as you can wish for, and you have no cares upon you, but only
to come when you are called and do what you are bidden. All the subjects must do, in short,
was to surrender their natural-born gift of freedom and independence, to subject themselves
matters completely to the whims and commands of others, who could then be blindly trusted
to take care of them permanently. How justify such unreasoning trust?
Mather's role, of course, was not to engage in disinterested inquiry into the well-being
of the slaves. Despite the myths of ideology and the threats of the whip, servants and
The slaves found many ways of protest and rebellion. Masters were continually denouncing
servants for being disobedient, sullen, and lazy. Little wonder, since they scarcely had
reason to be cheerful or energetic. They did not live up to the ideal set for them by the
obliging cotton-mather in his A Good Master Well-Served, 1696.
Servants, you are the animate, separate, active instruments of other men. Servants, your fingers,
your hands, your feet, are your masters, and they should move according to the will of
your masters. One servant declared that he would much rather be in hell than serve his
master. Another, upon murdering his master, confessed that he had often told himself such
The Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, in The Well-Ordered Family, 1712-1719, set forth the problem of
The slaves and servants fondness for liberty and hence their rebelliousness quite clearly.
Some servants are very high, proud. They'll scarce be commanded or restrained. They are
much for liberty. They must have liberty for their tongues to speak almost what and when
they please, liberty to give or receive visits of their own accord and when they will, liberty
to go and come almost when they will, without telling why or wherefore, such liberty they
contend for, they won't be ruled, governed, restrained. Such servants, Wadsworth thundered,
are very wicked in their plain disobedience to God. They trample God's law, His authority
under their feet. Thus, God was adroitly linked to the rule of the masters.
Runaway servants and slaves were a problem from the beginning in Massachusetts Bay. Mathered,
Willard and Wadsworth took care to denounce running away as a grievous sin, and from the
earliest days of the colony, Massachusetts law allowed the conscription of boats and
It is not surprising that protest and rebelliousness took different forms among different classes
of servants. The protest of contracted servants who had friends or relatives in the colony
tended to take the form of unruly behavior or of taking their case to the courts. The
The more alienated and oppressed Negroes and foreign servants tended to run away.
Thus, from 1629 through 1750, the latter class accounted for 25 percent of the cases of legal protest,
but for 69 percent of the runaways.
Only a few servants bothered to go to court,
and running away accounted for almost half of the recorded cases of protest,
the latter growing with the shift in the type of forced labor during the 18th century.
Here was a significant indication that the propaganda of the Puritan apologist was becoming increasingly ineffective.
Increasingly, the unruliness of servants and slaves reduced the profitability of such labor for their masters.
In the midst of this general miasma of opinion, some courageous voices were raised in behalf of liberty, even for Negroes.
The eminent merchant, Judge Samuel Sewell, wrote in The Selling of Joseph, 1700, that liberty is a real value next to life.
Despite the fall, all men as the sons of Adam have equal rights into liberty.
To the excuse that the Negroes had already been enslaved through wars in Africa, Sewell trenchantly replied that an unlawful war can't make lawful captives,
and by receiving we are in danger to promote and partake in their barbarous cruelties.
Indeed, the excuse of humanitarianism for purchasing Negro slaves rings thin. If true,
the slave traders should have instantly released their charges instead of herding and dragging
them at great cost in life to the New World.
The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 had ensured religious liberty for all Protestants and
and had eliminated the religious test for voting. An established church, however, was still
permitted and the general court quickly moved to establish a Puritan church in each town
to be supported by the taxpayers. The ministers, however, were to be selected locally by the
voters of each town, including non-members of the church. This system was quickly shifted
to confine the choice of a minister to the church's members, subject to ratification
by the town voters. Already in 1694, opposition to the church by non-Puritans was blocking
the ratification of ministers, and a new Massachusetts law provided for ratification by a council
of elders of several churches, which council could then override a negative vote by the
of Town. Despite these props and privileges, however, the Puritan establishment soon began
to crumble. Once again it was the Quakers who took the lead in religious liberty. Despite
attempts in 1702, 1706, and later to compel Quakers to pay for the Puritan establishment
and to force Quaker towns to support a Puritan minister, Quaker resistance continued. The
The Quakers kept protesting to England over the compulsion to pay the demands of the priest.
Finally in 1728, the Massachusetts establishment was seriously weakened. A law of that year
permitted Quakers and Baptists to refuse to pay taxes for support of Puritan ministers
on the grounds of conscience. The provision was hedged about with numerous conditions
such as the necessity of the objectors to attend some church and their taking an oath
of allegiance to the colony. But in 1731 all Quakers were unconditionally exempted from
religious taxes and, four years later, Baptists were likewise exempted. Only in new towns
without a minister were Baptists and Quakers still obliged to pay for the Puritan Church.
And even in new towns the regulation was often unenforced, as witnessed a law of 1759 allowing
non-Quakers in any town with a Quaker majority to elect as many assessors for church taxes
as the Quakers. Thus, by the middle of the 18th century, the Puritan establishment had,
broken down in Massachusetts. Hand in hand with the Puritan establishment came, in 1692, a law compelling each town to provide for and impose compulsory schooling on its inhabitants.
Many towns, however, did not abide by the provisions or did not impose penalties for violations.
Massachusetts then tightened the screws, imposing more stringent enforcement in 1701. Further linking government schooling with religion was the fact that the schoolmaster had to be approved by a board of Puritan ministers.
Inability to enforce compulsory schooling led to still further interventions and to still more rigorous and brutal attempts at enforcement.
Not only were fines increased on towns not furnishing compulsory schooling, but in 1735,
parents not educating their children in ways thought fit by the state might see their children seized by the government
and shipped to arbitrarily designated foster families.
In general, rule in Massachusetts by the Puritan oligarchy,
once so rigorous and so fanatical, had been greatly weakened by blows from without
and by crumbling from within by the end of the 17th century.
With the advent of the 18th, the decline of Puritan control accelerated still further.
For the first time, moreover, a determined liberal opposition developed within the Church and was able to retain a foothold.
Within the Church there had emerged with the Salem Witch Hunt liberal opposition led by the merchant Thomas Brattle
and by the Reverend John Wise of Ipswich, who had gone to prison for protesting the Andros Tyranny.
In 1699, a group of influential liberals of Boston, headed by Thomas Brattle, his brother
William and John Leverett, founded the Brattle Street Church within the Puritan fold.
The new church issued a manifesto endorsing the halfway covenant, eliminating the requirement
of a public examination for church membership and allowing halfway covenanters a vote in
and the Church Government. Conservative ministers were outraged, and such ministers as Increase
Mather, John Higginson, and Nicholas Noyes fretted and fumed, but such men no longer
had the coercive power of their forebears and the Brattle Street Church survived and
flourished. Perhaps even more vital a blow to the old
diehards was the loss of old guard control of Harvard College, which had been set up
The Theocrats had always been unlucky in their choice of presidents for the college, the first two being heretical, from the Orthodox Puritan viewpoint, in regard to infant baptism. That is to say, they opposed it. Succeeding presidents were unwilling to give the post their full time. As a result, with President Increase Mather away in England, obtaining the new Massachusetts Charter,
In 1692, administration of the college fell into the hands of two outstanding liberal tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle.
It was largely Leverett and Brattle who converted Harvard from an old guard Puritan stronghold to a truly liberal arts college, reflecting new ideas of science and rationality.
Mathur, finally seeing what was happening by the late 1690s, tried to lead a counterrevolution
to regain control of Harvard for the conservatives, but he was hampered by his unwillingness to
give up his congregation and make Harvard his full-time activity.
Mathur persuaded the Massachusetts General Court in 1699 to exclude all the orthodox Puritans
from the Presidency or Governing Fellows of the College, but the Royal Governor Lord Bellomont
vetoed the scheme. Finally, in the fall of 1701, with Mather relinquishing the post,
the General Court elevated Vice President Willard to the Presidency of Harvard. The
Mathers were appalled regarding the accession of Reverend Mr. Willard, who was also inclined
to Heresy on Infant Baptism as the first step down the slippery slope to liberal control
of Harvard. When Brattle and Leverett, who Mather had dismissed from the ruling corporation
of the college, were reinstated to their membership by the general court, the Mathers' fears seemed
confirmed. They were further aggravated by the general courts allowing Willard to reside
in Boston most of the week, thus continuing to leave effective control in the hands of
Leverett and Brattle.
The climax of the struggle over Harvard came in 1707 with the death of the Reverend Mr.
Willard.
The conservatives made a desperate effort to elect one of the mathers to the presidency,
but the fellows of Harvard Corporation selected none other than John Leverett.
The conservatives were extremely bitter. Not only was Leverett the leader of the liberals,
but he, being a mere layman, his appointment ended ecclesiastical control of the college.
With the help of Governor Joseph Dudley, who had long left the fold of the Orthodox and
a petition of 39 liberal Puritan ministers, Leverett's selection and salary were confirmed
by the General Court. The victory of liberalism at Harvard was sealed at long last. The victory
was further confirmed when, a few years later, the liberals won unshakable control of the
Board of Fellows of the Corporation. The Mathers, bitter to the last, each wrote a letter
of denunciation to Dudley, giving up Harvard as a lost cause. For his part, Leverett went
In short, the control of Harvard by the liberal group meant that the future was theirs, with
With the triumph of Leverett and the Braddles and the group they represented, one of the
chief props of the old order, the Bible Commonwealth of Winthrop Ben Cotton, was knocked away.
One of the first products of the new Leverett-trained generation of Massachusetts intellectuals
was the Reverend Benjamin Coleman, one of Leverett's favorite pupils, who graduated
from Harvard in the 1690s.
Coleman was selected the first minister of the New Brattle Street Church and was largely
responsible for the Church's defiant liberal manifesto. By the second decade of the 18th
century, the Reverend Mr. Coleman had become one of Harvard's fellows and one of its most
influential members. Defeated at every hand, the Mathers and the other Puritan reactionaries
has decided to counter-attack by transforming Puritan Church polity into virtual Presbyterianism.
Puritanism had always been an uneasy halfway house between congregational and Presbyterian rule.
Now, seeing that individual congregations could be captured by the liberal forces,
The Old Guard decided to impose collective synodal control on the individual churches.
A ministerial convention of the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts had already begun to meet by the turn of the century.
In 1705, the convention adopted the Massachusetts proposals,
which had been adopted by the principal Boston divines under the lead of the Mathers.
The convention made the sweeping proposal that ministerial associations, each headed
by a standing council, should have the power to examine and license ministers, and assign
ministers to the various churches.
The proposals were eventually adopted, with the exception of the rule of each association
by a council.
The result of the change was a shift of Massachusetts Puritanism in the direction, though not a
complete adoption, of Presbyterian ecclesiology. Sturdy liberal resistance to this shift was
headed by the redoubtable Reverend John Wise. Defending congregational polity, Wise published
two famous and widely read works, The Church's Quarrel Exposed, 1710, 2nd edition, 1715,
and A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, 1717.
Impaled by his interest in the forms of church government, Wise widened his focus to society
and government as a whole, steeping himself in the works of the great late 17th century
The German jurist Samuel Pufendorf, Weiss concluded that, by natural right, all men are born free, thus extending the implications of his individualist argument far beyond church affairs.
Weiss also concluded that power is originally in the people, and that government should limit the natural freedom of the individual as little as consistent with social peace.
Wise leveled attention attack on rule by oligarchy. For what is it that cunning and learned men can't make the world swallow, as an article of their creed, if they are once invested with an uncontrollable power, and are to be the standing orators to mankind in matters of faith and obedience?
The natural equality of all men in liberty meant that government was never established
by God or nature to give one man a prerogative to insult over another.