Conceived in Liberty (43 page)

Massachusetts also took the lead in aggressive actions of the United Colonies
against other English colonies—for example, breaking off trade with Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados for daring to continue their support of the royalist cause.

Most of the friction between Massachusetts and the other colonies occurred over acts of imperial aggression by one or the other against their French neighbors to the north or the Dutch to the south. The first confrontation occurred with the French. After the Virginians had sacked the French Jesuit settlement at Port Royal in 1613, the French created the Company of New France, with Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, as president. Richelieu granted his own company feudal rule of the land and a monopoly of the fur trade. England conquered the Acadian and some other Canadian settlements from France in the war of 1627–29, but these areas were restored in 1632 in return for a large dowry from the French bride of the English king Charles I.

By 1643 a virtual war had broken out between two French claimants to the rich prize of Acadia—especially to the fur monopoly and the feudal tenure. The losing claimant, Claude de la Tour, appeared at Boston in 1643, and Governor Winthrop and a few of the ruling oligarchs decided to give de la Tour secret support for an expedition against the French governor. In defiance of legality this crucial matter was referred neither to the General Court nor to the commissioners of the new Confederation of the United Colonies. Winthrop and the others did not submit the issue because they knew that this rash interference in French affairs would have been rejected. The purpose of the affair was to have a clique of Boston merchants join in plunder, and gain a share in the fisheries and the tempting Acadian fur monopoly.

The ignominious failure of the expedition swelled the rising opposition to the scheme in Massachusetts—an opposition led by the competing merchants from Salem and other outlying towns—and Winthrop was temporarily deposed in the 1644 election. Leader of the opposition to the Acadian adventure was Richard Saltonstall, a merchant of Ipswich, north of Salem. Still, the raiders did manage to plunder the plantation of the French governor, Charles d’Aulnay, and to bring back the booty to be sold at auction in Boston. The proceeds of the auction were divided among the raiders. The new governor, John Endecott, however, proclaimed the neutrality of Massachusetts in the intra-French war and offered d’Aulnay satisfaction. The commissioners of the United Colonies met in the fall of 1644 and sternly forbade all such secret plundering expeditions in the future. Finally, Massachusetts signed the Treaty of Boston with d’Aulnay in the fall of 1644, providing that the English in Massachusetts and the French in Acadia have a right to trade freely with each other and with any other peoples, and also providing that any disputes between the two parties be settled by peaceful means.

In the conflicts with the Dutch, on the other hand, it was the southern New England colonies that yearned to plunder the Dutch, and it was Massachusetts
that held back from a war in which it was not economically concerned.

Connecticut and New Haven were early embroiled in problems with the Dutch. The original Dutch fort at Hartford was surrounded by English settlers, and the English pressed on to eastern Long Island. Such settlement was in itself highly legitimate, but this was not true of the accompanying
political
claims for governing these areas. New Haven also clashed with the Dutch and Swedes in the Delaware settlements, and was bitter not only at the Swedish and Dutch fur monopoly, but also at the Dutch for granting of asylum to runaway servants of the New Haven colonists.

The governor of Dutch New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, and the commissioners of the United Colonies, concluded the Treaty of Hartford in 1650, supposedly settling the large part of the disputes between them. The English were granted sovereignty over all land east of Greenwich, Connecticut, except for Fort Good Hope (Hartford), and over all of Long Island east of Oyster Bay. England, however, refused to ratify the treaty or to recognize any Dutch territory in America, and within a year, New Haven— backed by the United Colonies—attempted further expansion on the Delaware. What is more, the commissioners played a role in the passage of the anti-Dutch Navigation Act of 1651 in the English Parliament.

The following year, Cromwell launched his war of aggression against Holland, and New Haven and Connecticut whooped for war in earnest. They even stirred up false rumors of an alleged plot by Stuyvesant to incite the Indians to attack. Violating the treaty of 1650, Connecticut seized the Dutch fort at Hartford and forcibly incorporated the territory. And even Aquidneck, as we have seen, engaged in piracy against Dutch shipping. Furthermore, the English settlers in the New Netherland portion of Long Island—in the towns of Oyster Bay, Hempstead, Flushing, Jamaica, Newtown, and Gravesend—formed their own independent union.

Connecticut and New Haven, yearning for war, swung all but one of the commissioners to declare war against the Dutch, but Massachusetts coolly vetoed the scheme. Massachusetts asserted in its own curious but convenient interpretation of the Articles of Confederation, that the commissioners had no power to declare an
offensive
war. However, the Bay Colony was on completely sound legal ground in insisting on its right of nullification of the war decision as applied to itself. The Dutch model of the confederation, incidentally, had also stressed this right of nullification by each constituent province.

Why did Massachusetts balk at war? For one thing, it had no desire to put up two-thirds of the forces and the bulk of the finances for a war in which it could not gain. In fact, any Connecticut or New Haven accession to the lucrative Dutch fur trade with the Iroquois might well have been detrimental to Massachusetts’ trading interests.

Massachusetts was successful in blocking the war and the English war with the Dutch ended in 1654 without New England’s entering the fray.
Ironically, a British fleet, sent to America to act against the Dutch, arrived after the end of the war; thwarted, it decided not to waste its preparations and it promptly seized Acadia from the French. It is no coincidence that the leader of the Massachusetts force that helped conquer Acadia was Major Robert Sedgwick, a prominent Boston fish merchant, eager to obtain access to the Acadian fisheries.

After its persecution of the Hutchinsonians and the Gortonites, Massachusetts continued on its path of suppressing all deviations from the Puritan norm. The next important case was that of Dr. Robert Child. As early as 1644 a growing number of people subjected to oligarchic Puritan rule had found expression in an unsuccessful petition whose purpose was to widen the highly restricted civil privileges of nonmembers of the Puritan church. Two years later, in May 1646, Dr. Robert Child, a Presbyterian minister and graduate of the University of Padua, and Samuel Maverick, a very wealthy founder of the colony, headed a petition of seven important men of the colony protesting existing rule. The petition noted that there were many thousands of residents of Massachusetts who were disfranchised even though they were taxpayers and subject to all the levies and duties of the colony. The signers of the petition were leading merchants and property owners; they included Presbyterians, Anglicans, and men of diverse religious and political views, united only by their desire for a freer society.

The petitioners asked that Anglicans and Presbyterians either be admitted to church membership or be allowed to establish churches of their own. They also urged that “civil liberty and freedom” be speedily granted to all Englishmen, and that they no longer be compelled to attend Puritan service under penalty of a heavy fine. As Englishmen, they deserved to be treated “equal to the rest of their countrymen, and as all freeborn enjoy in our native country.” The petition also attacked the ruling “overgreedy spirit of arbitrary power” and the suppression of liberty in Massachusetts Bay—like “illegal commitments, unjust imprisonments, taxes... unjustifiable
presses, undue fines, immeasurable expenses... non-certainty of all things... whether lives, liberties, or estates.”

The Child petition was denounced from numerous Puritan pulpits as sedition, “full of malignancy, subversive both to church and commonwealth.” Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, and the General Court also angrily rejected the petition, and the signers were taken into court, heavily fined, and warned “to be quiet and to meddle with your own business”—an injunction which the Puritan oligarchy itself had never been conspicuous for heeding. When the petitioners had the audacity to appeal to Parliament to attain in Massachusetts the degree of freedom enjoyed in the home country, Winthrop had them fined and imprisoned for criticizing and opposing the government. When Child and some of the others attempted to leave, to present their case to England, they were seized, searched, and imprisoned.

Child managed to escape to England, but proved to be the unfortunate victim of poor timing. Having made his appeal originally to a predominantly Presbyterian—and therefore presumptively sympathetic—Parliament, Child’s case now came before a body dominated by Cromwell and his Independents, far more sympathetic to Massachusetts Bay. Furthermore, Child made the mistake of getting involved in an altercation with a Massachusetts Puritan then influential in England. Child was arrested by Parliament and was freed only on a written promise never to speak badly of New England again.

The Child opposition had thus been quickly and efficiently suppressed by Massachusetts, even though it had the support of a large part of the population of the colony. But Massachusetts was soon to reach the turning point in its previously unchecked highroad of persecution; despite a frenzy of zeal, it was never able to suppress the determined and courageous Quakers—the individualist champions of the inner light and the next great wave of heretics in the colony.

The first Quakers to arrive in America came to Boston in July 1656. They were two Englishwomen, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher. Although no law had yet been passed in Massachusetts prohibiting the arrival of Quakers, the two women were immediately imprisoned and searched carefully for “witch-marks.” Deputy Governor Richard Bellingham sent officers to the ship, searched the ladies’ baggage, seized their stock of Quaker literature, and had it summarily burned. The women were imprisoned for five weeks, during which time no one was allowed to visit or speak to them. No light or writing material was allowed in their cell, and the prisoners were almost starved to death. At the end of this ordeal, they were shipped back to Barbados.

Bellingham denounced the two Quakers as heretics, transgressors with “very dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions” and “corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines.” Bellingham’s litmus test for deciding if the ladies were Quakers was brusque indeed; one of them happened to
say “thee,” whereupon Bellingham declared that “he needed no more; now he knew they were Quakers.”

Governor Endecott’s only criticism of Bellingham’s treatment of the two Quaker ladies was to say that if
he
had been present, the prisoners also would have been “well whipped.”

A few days after the Austin-Fisher “threat” had been disposed of, nine more Quakers arrived in Boston. They were summarily arrested, imprisoned for eight weeks, and then shipped back; the master of the ship that brought them was also jailed, no doubt as an instructive moral lesson to future ship captains. If the existence of the two ladies had driven the Massachusetts authorities to fury, this was nothing compared to the effects of the new goad. Governor Endecott, repeatedly haranguing the hapless prisoners, kept threatening to hang them; for example: “Take heed ye break not our ecclesiastical laws for then ye are sure to stretch by a halter.” Since it was very difficult for a Puritan in good standing, let alone a Quaker,
not
to break some ecclesiastical law, the halter was close indeed. It is no wonder that Mary Prince, one of the prisoners, was impelled to denounce Endecott as a “vile oppressor” and “tyrant,” and the Massachusetts ministers as “hirelings” and “Baal’s priests.” At their trial the Quakers had the impudence to ask for a copy of the laws against them, which request Endecott angrily refused—causing a murmur of sympathy in the audience for the prisoners. For, it was openly asked, “How shall they know when they transgress?”

From this point on, the persecution of Quakers was savage and fanatical, but the determination of the Quakers to keep coming and spreading their Gospel remained remarkably steadfast. In October the General Court passed a law providing for the fining of any shipmaster bringing a known Quaker to Massachusetts; the Quaker was to be imprisoned, severely whipped, “kept consistently to work” and not permitted to speak to anyone. Any existing resident of Massachusetts who dared defend any Quaker opinion was to be fined and banished on the third offense; any criticism of a magistrate or minister was to be met with a whipping and a heavy fine. Thus, not only the Quakers but anyone presuming to defend their rights or to criticize the brutally repressive acts of the authorities was to be dealt with as a criminal. An early example was Nicholas Upshall, a weak old man who had bribed the jailer to give Ann Austin and Mary Fisher some food while they were starving in prison. Upshall protested against the oppressive anti-Quaker law, and for this offense he was fined, imprisoned, and banished from the colony. From Plymouth, old Upshall was forced to walk to Rhode Island in the winter snows. The old man was given shelter by an Indian who exclaimed: “What a God have the English who deal so with one another about the worship of their God!” Upshall finally found sanctuary in Warwick.

In succeeding years, Quakers were repeatedly stripped (to be searched for witch marks) and whipped, the ears of the men were cut off, and mere
attendance at a Quaker meeting was deemed by the authorities as automatic proof of Quaker belief. In 1661 the Cart and Whip Act decreed that all Quakers, men and especially women, were to be stripped, tied to a cart’s tail, branded on the left shoulder, and then whipped through every town until they had reached the borders of the colony.