58. The Glorious Revolution in the Northern Colonies, 1690-1692

While the northern colonies were routing the hated Dominion and at least temporarily restoring self-government, King William was inaugurating his reign by taking England into a general European alliance (the League of Augsburg) against France. William had already been at war with France as stadtholder of Holland, and he was now eager to continue in that tradition. The war with France, beginning in 1689, had important repercussions in the New World.

Historians of each nation, when treating their country’s foreign affairs and conflicts, almost always make it appear that their side was the righteous one and their state beset and threatened by lowering enemies. Any objective historian of New France and the English colonies, however, should certainly conclude that the menace was to New France, and not from New France. New France had a population of 12,000 compared with that of 100,000 in New England alone. Second, the English were solidly allied with the most feared, most aggressive, and most imperialistic Indians in the northeast—the Iroquois.

The basic struggle between the French on the one hand and the Iroquois, Dutch, and English on the other was economic—the beaver trade. In the seventeenth century the French had settled in Quebec and along the St. Lawrence and had developed a thriving fur trade with the Indian tribes farther west. But this trade interfered with the Iroquois, who tried by coercion to obtain a monopoly of the intermediate fur trade. The French in Canada could deal directly with the western tribes, but the Dutch and English in Albany could not. In Albany the Iroquois could find a market for resale of the furs purchased from the Indians farther west. In short, both the Iroquois and the English had a vested interest in aggressions against the French: the Iroquois to eliminate competition for the purchase of furs from the western Indians, and to obtain a monopoly of the middleman fur trade; the English to oust the French from the fur trade, and to grab French land for the glory and benefit of the Crown.

The Iroquois had plagued and ravaged the French settlers, as well as the more peaceful Indians in the northeast, for decades. During the 1640s the Iroquois plundered the French and drove out friendly tribes, but in the course of another war, were able to reestablish their position. We have observed that Governor Dongan urged the Iroquois to attack the French during the 1680’s. The Iroquois’ went unerringly to the heart of the matter: the fur trade. After the Iroquois had driven the peaceful fur-trading Hurons from the St. Lawrence, the latter settled in the Great Lakes areas as far west as Wisconsin, and a direct fur trade with the French was established from there. Now, in the mid-1680s, the Iroquois invaded Huron country and by 1686 were able by force of arms to break the vital chain between the Great Lakes fur trade and the French. After the French made a feeble attempt to oust the Iroquois and restore the fur trade, the Iroquois began mercilessly to ravage the French settlements on the St. Lawrence, even to the environs of Montreal itself. The raids reached a peak in the summer of 1689. When the venerable Comte de Frontenac resumed his old post as governor of New France that fall, his obvious task was to try to preserve the colony from the Iroquois menace.

Now that England had declared war on France, Frontenac did not have to respect the status of privileged sanctuary with which the English had cloaked the Iroquois. Seeing English military strength weakened by the overthrow of the Dominion, the French and allied Indians executed a daring raid on February 9, 1690, upon the upstate New York trading post of Schenectady. The raiders burned the town, massacred a large portion of the inhabitants, and captured the rest. Two other daring and successful raids with similar results were engineered by Frontenac against Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, and Falmouth, Maine, on Casco Bay.

Ever since the previous December (1689), Jacob Leisler had been in control as the temporarily recognized ruler of the New York colony. But Albany still proved recalcitrant. Now, with Albany frightened by the raid on Schenectady, Leisler made a determined move to assume control.

Leisler had lost no time in transforming the revolution in New York into a virtual duplication of the old power. The old Committee of Safety was now made Leisler’s Council. It quickly decreed the Revenue Act of 1683 to be still in force, and went so far as to order Delanoy to collect back taxes as well. Seeing the liberalism of the revolution vanish, a group of angry merchants issued a Declaration of the Freeholders of New York in protest. Leisler’s order was torn down and the declaration substituted. Leisler by decree prohibited defacing his orders. He also established a new Court of the Exchequer to try to collect revenue. Still, Leisler had enormous difficulty in collecting taxes. Like many another tyrant, Leisler then decided that this was the result of a subversive “hellish conspiracy” and he ordered a summary search of all suspect houses and the arrest of his opponents. By February there were numerous arrests of people caught speaking contemptuously of his government, and also of suspected “papists.”

Leisler’s imposition of a despotism in order to levy taxes was a fateful step. Before then the Leisler movement had been truly a people’s revolution; its only opponents had been members of the discredited ruling oligarchy. But now the liberals, who had been his staunchest supporters, began to leave the Leisler cause in droves. In mid-May 1690, merchants and other leading citizens of New York drew up a Humble Address to the King protesting Leisler’s “slavery,” “arbitrary power,” and “ruling us by the sword.” The authors included such prominent merchants and great leaders of the revolution as Leisler’s former fellow militia captains: DePeyster, Lodwyck, and Stuyvesant. The petition also complained of Leisler’s confiscation of goods—even as far as Elizabethtown, New Jersey—plundering of homes, and searching of mails.

Jacob Leisler’s frenzy to collect taxes was largely because of his determination to seize Albany and then to mount a giant intercolonial invasion to conquer New France. He had always been a hard-liner on “papist” New France, and now the war and the massacre at Schenectady gave him his long-awaited opportunity. The higher taxes and the rigorous enforcement were to pay for Leisler’s cherished invasion plans.

By the end of February, Leisler decided to call a representative assembly in New York to make the raising of taxes more palatable to the increasingly restive populace. The Assembly finally met at the end of April. Suffolk County (except for Hempstead) refused to send any delegates. Suffolk still hoped to join Connecticut and also balked at the high-tax program. Leisler barred from voting all those who had not taken what was, in effect, an oath of allegiance to himself. Therefore, the election, especially in the upstate anti-Leisler county of Ulster, was not truly free. The Assembly dutifully imposed a new property tax of three pence per pound, but tried to win the support of the farmers and the New York masses by ending the hated New York City flour monopoly, the New York port monopoly, and the Albany fur monopoly. Abolition of the three hated monopolies was highly welcome to the people. Leisler, though, was angered by the growing popular movement for release of his political prisoners. He brusquely dissolved the Assembly for even daring to receive the petitions of the people urging him to free the prisoners.

The popularity that Leisler could have earned by ending the monopolies never materialized because of his taxes and confiscations to finance his unrealistic dream of the conquest of French Canada. To confiscate supplies for an expedition against the French, Leisler imposed on grain exports an embargo, which allowed him to seize the grain for military purposes. Ending the flour monopoly did little good when farmers and merchants could not export the grain at all. Moreover, by decree Leisler embargoed all exports of pork and confiscated all private stores of pork meat. He also searched all suspected places without bothering about a warrant. Stocks of cloth in the city were also confiscated.

Other foci of resistance to Leisler were New Rochelle, where the newly settled Huguenots objected to a tax burden for his needless expedition, and traditionally antitax Suffolk County, which Leisler had to force to “submit to him.” An East Hampton meeting in May, for example, was evenly split between accepting Leisler’s authority on condition of some redress of grievances, or not submitting at all without further word from England. No one at the meeting advocated unconditional submission to Leisler’s authority.

Despite an increasingly restless home base behind him, Leisler proceeded on his course of seizing Albany and then mounting an invasion of Canada. As soon as Leisler acquired legitimacy in December, he ordered Albany to submit and to hold new municipal elections. But the Albany convention refused, and was backed by the Connecticut militia, sent there to aid against the French. The Schenectady massacre, however, changed the situation. Leisler was now able to blame Albany’s recalcitrance for the poor preparation against the attack. Furthermore, the Albany oligarchy was now beginning to face numerous internal and external troubles. First, Leisler conscripted a militia and ordered it to seize Albany and Ulster counties. Second, the people of Albany, fearful of a French attack, began to ship their goods downriver to New York City; the Albany convention ordered all such shipments stopped. And finally, Connecticut withdrew its troops and advised Albany to submit to Leisler, while Massachusetts, as fellow revolutionaries against the Dominion, inclined toward Leisler and joined in this plea.

Connecticut and Massachusetts were entreated by Albany and Ulster to support them and to send more troops. Leisler demanded that Connecticut put its troops under his command. Albany’s chief agent to Connecticut and Massachusetts in the spring of 1690 was Robert Livingston, perhaps Leisler’s most determined enemy among the Albany oligarchy. Leisler sent agents to urge Connecticut to arrest “this rebel Livingston.” Connecticut did finally decide to remove its troops from Albany, but refused to arrest Livingston. New York’s comrade in revolution, Massachusetts, almost did arrest Livingston, but he was able to save himself by citing the friendship of the Iroquois to the Albany oligarchs.

Under pressure from all sides, Albany could only give in; it submitted to Leisler on March 20. Leisler appointed three commissioners to govern Albany, including Jacob Milborne. Esopus (Kingston) also submitted, and Milborne imposed Leisler’s authority there. As opponents of Leisler began to flee Albany, the commissioners issued an order prohibiting any male from leaving the city. They also forced into submission several burghers who had previously refused to obey the militia. Generally, though, Leisler conciliated the oligarchy by reappointing existing officials. The exception was Livingston, who was still in Connecticut and whom Leisler attempted to try for “treason.”

With Albany secured, Jacob Leisler proceeded to the second stage of his grand design: the united colonial conquest of Canada. Leisler called a great intercolonial conference at Albany for May 1, 1690. He assured the various governments that New York would contribute 400 men to such an expedition (260 of whom were already in arms) and the Iroquois had promised 1,000. Virginia refused the invitation and Quaker Pennsylvania, again in a state of anarchism, simply ignored it. The Jerseys, unfriendly to New York anyway, and a haven for many of Leisler’s enemies, also ignored the invitation. Maryland was sympathetic but was now in the midst of Coode’s rebellion, and had little time or men to spare. This left the New England colonies, which appeared at the conference and pledged a total of 355 men for the expedition, to be conducted under a supreme commander named by Leisler. Sixty men were pledged by Plymouth, Massachusetts promised 160, and Connecticut 135. Rhode Island sent no delegates and would conscript no men, but it agreed to contribute 300 pounds to help finance the campaign. Massachusetts had itself proposed an intercolonial conference concerning an invasion of Canada, and had in fact scheduled a New England conference at Newport before the New York meeting was called.

It was the attempt to finance and supply this mammoth campaign that led to the despotic exactions and confiscations, and to the rising opposition to Leisler in New York. The raising of the militia aggravated resentments still further. One Westchester realist pointed out that “they was fools if any of them did go and said who would give them a leg or arm if they lost them.” Kings and Queens counties were restive and desertions from the conscript militia began to mount.

In accordance with the decision of the Albany conference, Leisler named his righthand man Jacob Milborne to be supreme commander. It was decided that a naval attack on Quebec would be coordinated with a land assault on Montreal. But the other colonies had never really been enthusiastic about the Leisler expedition and had only joined under pressure of popular enthusiasm in New England for Leisler’s promised conquest of New France. Plymouth now withdrew its commitment, pleading poverty and lack of resources. And Massachusetts threw its resources instead into the naval expedition headed by Sir William Phips to capture Quebec. Moreover, Massachusetts found that its citizens refused en masse to be drafted into the militia, much less to volunteer. Only Connecticut now remained a direct ally of Leisler; and Connecticut —guided by such enemies of Leisler as Secretary John Allyn (whom Leisler had wanted arrested as a Jacobite) and Robert Livingston—took advantage of the situation to take over the expedition. Connecticut now insisted that Milborne be replaced as supreme commander by Fitz-John Winthrop of Connecticut, a close friend of Livingston’s. Finally, at the end of June, Leisler was forced to yield, and appointed Winthrop head of the expedition.

While Leisler’s military plans were beginning to crumble, the mounting opposition to his rule at home culminated in an armed revolt on June 6. Sparked by an attempt of the relatives of Nicholas Bayard to release him from a Leisler jail, the rebels assaulted Leisler. But the governor was saved by the people and thirteen of the rebels were arrested. When the tumult died down the prisoners were released upon paying a fine.

Although his support was crumbling on all sides, Leisler stubbornly determined to press on with the invasion. The expedition, begun on August 1, was a study in absurdity. The enmity between Winthrop and Livingston on the one hand and Leisler on the other could not have been more intense. To cap the picture, of 1,000 warriors promised by the Iroquois, only seventy Indians appeared, and they accomplished virtually nothing. And yet, despite the evident folly of the attempt, Winthrop set forth with 500 men—less than half the number (1,200) Frontenac rapidly raised to defend Montreal. After wandering around in the woods of New York for two weeks, short of canoes and supplies, Winthrop ignominiously returned home. Phips’ naval attack on Quebec in October was bungled so disastrously that he did well to get most of his men back to Boston. The grandiose attempt to conquer French Canada had proved a fiasco. Massachusetts characteristically met its failure by clamping a tight censorship on any criticism of the regime.

Phips had succeeded, however, in capturing Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia) on an expedition the previous spring. The motivations for Phips’ expedition were incisively set forth in a diary of the conquest: “May 11—the fort surrendered; May 12—went ashore to search for hidden goods. We cut down the cross, rifled the church, pulled down the high altar, and broke their images. May 13—kept gathering plunder all day; May 14—the inhabitants swore allegiance to King William and Queen Mary.”

Having pursued his goal of invasion with single-minded fanaticism, Leisler now looked around paranoiacally for a scapegoat for the debacle. He fastened, naturally enough, upon Fitz-John Winthrop. Leisler promptly put Winthrop and some of Winthrop’s officers under arrest, along with the leading burghers of Albany. Leisler intended to court-martial Winthrop for failure—or rather, for plotting to ruin the invasion. Finally, Leisler was forced to release Winthrop under pressure of Connecticut and especially of the Iroquois. But he continued to snarl to the last, accusing Allyn of being part of the so-called sabotage plot and charging Winthrop with being a “tool” of Livingston. Connecticut’s refusal to grant further military aid was greeted by the irascible Leisler with the charge that the men of Connecticut were responsible for the failure of the invasion, and he termed them “fiends” and “hypocrites.”

Leisler’s dream of conquering Canada was a shambles; following the classic course of tyrants, the now desperate Leisler redoubled his tyranny to maintain himself in power. The New York Assembly met again in September 1690 and levied a tax of three pence per pound sterling on all property for military purposes. It also demanded the return, in three weeks, of all who had fled the colony—on the rather absurd enticement of a promised fair trial. A seventy-five-pound penalty was placed on anyone refusing a military or civilian appointment by Leisler. A 100-pound penalty was levied on everyone leaving Albany or Ulster without Leisler’s consent, and all emigres were ordered to return.

Again, resistance arose in New York to Leisler’s depradations. The town of New Rochelle continued evading Leisler’s order to all towns to name justices of the peace and tax collectors. In Queens County an armed revolt flared in October. The courts were suspended and Leisler directed the prohibition of anyone aiding or encouraging the rebels. Thomas Willett, who had participated in the previous personal assault on Leisler, now gathered 150 men for a march on New York. But Milborne’s armed group of 300 easily routed the rebel forces. The Kings County militia also showed signs of rebellion, but Milborne’s ample use of court-martials soon quelled that disturbance. Finally, Leisler tried desperately to collect the property tax, but the towns failed to name assessors and tax collectors and few of them paid. Petitions against Leisler were sent to London, old women taunted him on the street, and crowds stoned him, denouncing his tyranny and calling him such names as “dog driver,” “deacon jailer,” and “little Cromwell.”

Cracking in all directions, Jacob Leisler’s reign in New York was swiftly coming to an end in more ways than one. On March 19, 1691, Governor Henry Sloughter, appointed by the king almost two years before, finally made his long-delayed arrival in New York. Sloughter was thoroughly opposed to Leisler and his supposed “rabble” and thoroughly partial to the old oligarchy, as seen by his defense before the Lords of Trade of the alleged necessity of New York City’s port monopoly.

But before Sloughter could arrive, Leisler had more troubles. At the beginning of 1691, Major Richard Ingoldesby arrived at New York with a troop of English regulars. Ingoldesby demanded that Leisler surrender the fort, but Leisler stubbornly maintained that Ingoldesby had no written authority from Sloughter or the king. Both sides now began to recruit forces. Large numbers of militiamen joined Leisler in response to the menace of the royal troop. Meanwhile, Thomas Clark, veteran opponent of Leisler, was raising troops for Ingoldesby on Long Island and arresting some Leislerians. Flatbush and Kings County were also centers of recruitment by Ingoldesby, and Westchester arrested several Leislerians. Civil war was now in the offing, although an uneasy truce permitted Ingoldesby to quarter his troops at the city hall. Both sides continued to threaten and to raise forces; Leisler darkly warned that all this was a papist plot against William and Mary and himself.

Most eager for war against Leisler were Ingoldesby’s theoreticians—the men appointed to Sloughter’s Council. This group, largely representing the old oligarchy, consisted of the still imprisoned Nicholas Bayard, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Frederick Philipse, William Nicolls (who had been imprisoned along with Bayard), Gabriel Minvielle (the lone militia captain who had always been against the revolution), William Smith (an anti-Leislerian), Thomas Willett (who had led Long Island revolts against Leisler and had plotted the June 6 assault upon him), William Pinhorne (an English merchant who had fled Leisler tyranny to East New Jersey), Chidley Brooke (a relative of Sloughter), and the notorious Joseph Dudley (governor of the Dominion of New England before Andros). This group of advisers called on Ingoldesby to overthrow the Leisler rule.

On March 16 Leisler issued a proclamation ordering Ingoldesby to cease his preparations for war and demanded an answer in two hours. Civil war then ensued within the city with Ingoldesby capturing a blockhouse. Several hundred men on each side now skirmished with each other.

When Governor Sloughter finally arrived on the 19th, he stepped into a developing civil war. Leisler continued to delay surrendering the fort, but finally did so. It is possible that pressure by Leisler’s own men helped end his purposeless stubbornness. Since Leisler never proposed to mount a direct revolt against King William’s authority, his continued balkiness made little sense.

The old oligarchy now moved back in, thirsting for vengeance. Leisler and all his leading supporters were arrested and imprisoned. On the advice of his Council, Sloughter quickly created a special court with ten supposedly “unconcerned” judges: four bitter anti-Leislerians and six veteran royal officials and partisans of Andros and Sloughter. Three of Leisler’s most implacable enemies were assigned to prepare the evidence against the Leislerians, and the three prosecuting attorneys were also bitter enemies of the prisoners.

Charges against Leisler and his nine fellow-defendants were the maximum: treason and murder, including “traitorously levying war” upon the king. Instead of following the usual practice of sending the defendants to England for a sober trial, the enemies of Leisler determined on speedy “justice.” To say that the charges, let alone the procedure, were excessively harsh would be an understatement; after all, Leisler, as lieutenant governor and commander in chief, had been acting upon a plausible commission from the king. The conflict with Ingoldesby, on which the charges rested, was a jurisdictional dispute, with legal lines hardly clear-cut.

Yet, by March 31 the ten defendants had been indicted for treason and murder by a grand jury. The trial proceeded rapidly. Finally, Leisler, Milborne, and six others (Gerardus Beekman, Abraham Gouverneur, Johannes Vermilge, Thomas Williams, Myndert Coerteus, and Abraham Brasher) were convicted and sentenced to death, and their property was confiscated by a bill of attainder. Numerous other Leislerians, such as Joost Stol, were indicted for riot. The Leisler jury, incidentally, was as packed as the special court of ten judges: three of them had been leaders in the attempted June 6 assassination of Leisler! Two of the defendants, however—Peter Delanoy and Samuel Edsall—were acquitted by the jury; this shocked people like Bayard, and later historians have hinted at bribery.

Governor Sloughter, at this point, began to lose his nerve about carrying out these mass executions on his own responsibility. He therefore reprieved the six lesser Leislerians and even asked for a royal pardon for them. The question now was what to do with Leisler and Milborne. Sloughter’s close friend, Nicholas Bayard, now led the pack calling for Leisler’s blood, as a warning against all future rebellion against the royal government. Three Dutch ministers close to the old oligarchy, led by Reverend Mr. Selyus, also called for death. The only minister pleading for reprieve was the Reverend Peter Daille, a Huguenot, who was fined by the new anti-Leisler Assembly for these activities. Opposing the oligarchs was the voice of the people, who once again rallied around their former champion. Petitions, with over 1,800 signatures, were circulated calling for Leisler’s reprieve. The sheriffs of Staten Island and other counties were ordered to arrest anyone circulating petitions for reprieve.

Sloughter’s Council, led by Bayard, was bent on death, and overrode the opposition of the relatively disinterested Dudley. The Assembly agreed, and Leisler and Milborne were executed on May 16, 1691. Sloughter was perhaps helped to decide for execution by a special gift of money from the anti-Leislerian Assembly. One interesting story about the hanging is that no carpenter could be found to supply a ladder, which had to be provided by the Reverend Mr. Selyus. If not strictly accurate, the story is indicative of the depth of popular feeling against the killing of Leisler. The revolutionary government in Massachusetts was, of course, none too pleased at this potential precedent; Rev. Increase Mather declared that the two men were “barbarously murdered.” But Massachusetts did not, like New York, have to face a strong and vindictive royal oligarchy.

The upshot of the Glorious Revolution for New York was that, by the spring of 1691, the self-governing regime of Leisler was ended and New York was again a royal colony, headed by a royal governor, with the old oligarchy back in power. But the retrogression was only partial; Sloughter came bearing instructions for New York to have a regularly elected Assembly, an institution which that colony had never really had before. To this extent, considerable progress had been made since Dongan’s pre-Dominion government.

The first regular Assembly met at the end of March 1691. While it was anti-Leislerian, its actions of most lasting significance were those repealing the Carting Act—the provision for permanent financial support of the government—and the other acts of Dongan’s short-lived Assembly of 1683. The Assembly thus placed the governor on notice that though he could call and dissolve it at will, he was continually dependent on the Assembly for the raising of revenue. The new Assembly also greatly extended the definitions of rebellion and treason to include such vague offenses as disturbing “the peace... and quiet” of the government. All land grants were reconfirmed. The New York City Council passed tighter regulations for carters and made requirements for freemanship more restrictive.

The oligarchy was in power, but the Leislerians remained active and embittered. The quarrel was intensified by the numerous damage suits put through by the oligarchy against the former Leislerian leaders. And Delanoy, freed on the treason charge, was imprisoned by Sloughter for being Leisler’s collector of customs.

Governor Sloughter died in the summer of 1691 but his policy of vengeance was continued in full force by his acting successor, Major Ingoldesby, who was selected by the Council. The new governor, arriving in late summer 1692, was Benjamin Fletcher. Fletcher, who ruled during the 1690s, sided with the oligarchy but was not the zealot that Ingoldesby was. He finally agreed to release the six Leislerian prisoners as well as the minor convicts, and to restore their confiscated estates. But first he forced the Leislerians to admit their guilt, and he arbitrarily voided the election of several of them to the Assembly. Fletcher, moreover, continued to mutter threats of execution against them until they finally secured a full pardon from the Crown in 1694. Finally, Leisler was fully though posthumously vindicated when Parliament, in 1695, retroactively absolved Leisler and Milborne of guilt and annulled their convictions.

The end of turmoil in New York in 1691 still left the status of post-Glorious Revolution Massachusetts unresolved. By the spring of 1690, the Crown had dismissed the Massachusetts charges against Andros and his aides, but argument over the permanent settlement continued to rage. Finally, in October 1691, after almost two years of struggle over the type of new charter to be issued, the Crown promulgated the new Massachusetts charter.

The new charter, which fixed the course of Massachusetts government for three-quarters of a century, was part-way between the old charter and the royal absolutism of the Dominion. On the one hand, the self-government of the old charter was completely buried; Massachusetts was now a royal colony, with a governor and lieutenant governor appointed by the Crown rather than elected by the people. Furthermore, the governor was the dominant ruler of the colony; all military and judicial officers were to be appointed by him, with one exception—admiralty courts, which enforced customs duties, would still depend on the Crown for their makeup. Moreover, the governor could veto any legislation. In addition, the General Court was to be called into being and dissolved at the governor’s command. On the other hand, in contrast to the totally dictatorial Dominion, there was an elected assembly—the House of Representatives, which was to levy taxes and pay the salary of the government officials, including the governor. This power over government salaries was a mighty weapon for the House to wield. The Council—the upper house of the General Court—was to be elected indirectly by the whole General Court rather than by the people (old charter) or royally appointed (the Dominion). Its membership, however, was subject to the governor’s veto, giving him substantial control over its affairs. Furthermore, the new Council was not nearly as powerful as the old Council of Assistants; the latter’s judicial powers were transferred to a new, appointed Supreme Court and its executive powers shifted to the new governor. Royal control was further provided by giving the king a veto of legislation and the power of appeal of major judicial decisions in the colony. In short, as a royal colony, Massachusetts’ formal political structure was quite close to that of Virginia or even of New York—especially after its newly formed Assembly exerted itself against the executive.

One of the most momentous features of the Massachusetts charter of 1691 was its change in the requirement for voting; its sole test was now either a modest freehold property yielding forty shillings in annual rent, or any property, personal or landed, with a total value of forty pounds sterling. No longer did Puritan church members have exclusive or even discriminatory rights to vote. Now everyone could vote who met the property qualifications, pitched so low as to make suffrage almost universal in the colony. * A lethal blow had at long last been delivered to the Puritan theocracy.

Liberty of conscience was granted by the charter to all Christians except Catholics. The vital land question was amicably settled by automatically reconfirming New England land titles, and by not requiring quitrents on any land to be granted in the future. All mineral rights were, happily, granted to the colony, but the king reserved to himself all trees with a diameter larger than two feet, for the use of the Royal Navy.

As a sweetener to Massachusetts for the deprivation of its old self-government, the new charter granted to Massachusetts the Maine towns, Pemaquid (eastern Maine, transferred from New York), Nova Scotia (newly captured from the French), and Plymouth. The Mason claims, as we have seen, kept New Hampshire as an independent royal colony, with the people struggling against the gubernatorial rule of the proprietary claimant.

Long without an agent in England to defend its interests, Plymouth—the old mother colony—met its demise, suffering the same fate at the hands of Massachusetts as New Haven had at the hands of Connecticut three decades before. Plymouth’s General Court met for the last time in July 1692. Before dissolving, it set aside a day “to be kept as a day of solemn fasting and humiliation.”

Apart from Massachusetts’ territorial expansion, the only remaining remnant of the Dominion concept was the charter’s grant to Massachusetts of command over the militia of all the New England colonies. But this attempt at centralized command proved to be ineffective, as the colonists refused to serve outside their own colonies.

Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oates, Massachusetts’ agents in England, were too embittered to agree to the new charter, but Rev. Increase Mather decided to swallow his chagrin (particularly at granting the vote to non-Puritans) and to lead the colony to acceptance of the new dispensation. He and his friends of the ruling clique could at least look forward to sharing power with the Crown.

Increase Mather was also able to take comfort in the fact that he was allowed by the Crown to name the first governor, lieutenant governor, and councillors (who, in contrast to all the succeeding concillors, were appointive). At Mather’s guidance, the lusty Sir William Phips, an old friend of Mather’s and the hero of Port Royal, was appointed governor. William Stoughton, always emerging on top, was selected as lieutenant governor. Committed to the new dispensation, Mather brought back into the Council Wait Winthrop and others of the old merchant opportunists and excluded several of the most hard-line advocates of the old charter. These included such determined men of principle as Cooke, Oates, and their leader, Thomas Danforth. Finally, Phips, with Mather, arrived in Boston to take charge in May 1692.

During its first session in that year, the new General Court completed the framework that was to rule Massachusetts until the end of the eighteenth century. One law chartered town corporations, another established the framework of representation in elections for the new General Court.

A common myth about this framework, much propagated by later writers, asserts that the seaboard towns were overrepresented in the General Court and that this malapportionment was perpetuated during the following century, giving ever-greater overrepresentation to the “merchant aristocracy” of the seaboard towns, as against the newer and smaller agricultural towns. In the first place, we have noted that the forty-shilling or forty-pound property qualification was—again contrary to later myths—low enough to allow almost everyone to vote. Therefore, if the seaboard did dominate, it was a domination based upon the votes of the seaboard’s average man. But, second, this plausible contention—plausible because population in fact moved westward from the seaboard, and a democracy will almost inevitably overrepresent older sections—turns out to be the reverse of the truth. For the 1692 apportionment law laid down the following rules: A town with less than forty eligible voters could send one representative to the House if it desired, but this was not compulsory. A town of more than forty qualified voters was compelled to send a representative. A town of over one hundred twenty eligible voters could send two delegates, but was forced to send at least one. Furthermore, no town, regardless of size, could send more than two delegates except Boston, which could send four. Note that this basic law of 1692, which remained essentially in effect until 1775, far from privileging the large old towns, did precisely the opposite. Any new town was entitled to a representative, but no town could have more than two. This ensured substantial overrepresentation of the smaller agricultural towns as against the larger seaboard areas. And it also ensured that as new small towns were added over the years, this agricultural, small-town overrepresentation would be intensified.

It is intriguing that, far from complaining about discrimination, the larger towns were quite satisfied with this arrangement; whereas it was the smaller towns that were constantly trying to reduce their own representation, to evade the necessity of sending delegates. It must be concluded that in those days of small pay for legislators, the cost of sending a delegate to Boston was greater than the benefits resulting—a startling testimony to the low degree of state intervention in Massachusetts society during the eighteenth century. For the absence of privileges and benefits from sharing in state power indicates that the overall impact of that power on society and the economy must have been low indeed.

Another basic law passed in 1692 established the new framework for town government in Massachusetts. As developed in this and later acts, the town meeting had many highly democratic and liberal features: notably, annual elections to insure very frequent popular checks on municipal officials; also the provision that any ten persons could place an item on the town-meeting agenda. By this period, the town proprietors had little political say-so, rule being exercised by the freemen of the town. It is, again, another heralded myth that town voting was more democratic than voting for representatives. Quite the contrary. Although relative quantities fluctuated because of changes in money value, in the basic law the property qualifications for town voting, while still low, averaged about twenty-five percent higher than for provincial voting. As a result, the best estimate is that under this basic law, the town franchise comprised seventy-five to eighty percent of the males as compared to well over ninety percent for provincial elections. *

The brutal domination of the Puritan theocracy, having faded under compelling pressures during three decades, had now been eliminated. No longer could the Puritan theocrats hang Quakers or persecute heretics; no longer could they compel people to attend the Puritan church; no more could they preclude non-Puritans from voting in town or provincial elections. The watchful eye of the royal governor and the rising influence of the far more worldly, though nominally, Puritan merchants would be there to prevent a resurrection. What was the reaction of the Puritans to this new charter?

The basic reaction of the Puritans to their bitter defeat was to fall back on a second line of defense. If they could no longer persecute Anglicans or Quakers, they could at least establish the Puritan church and have the satisfaction of forcing the unbelievers to pay for Puritan church support. The Puritans lost no time in so doing. A law of 1692 forced each town to pay for or maintain one or more Puritan ministers. All taxpayers were forced to pay for their support. The first year, all the taxpayers of each town, being forced to finance their local Puritan ministers, were entitled to choose their own. But the following year, 1693, the choice of its minister was placed on each congregation, to be ratified by town taxpayers and attendees of the church. In 1694 the Puritan establishment tightened further; a group of ministers protested that non-Puritans were blocking ratification of ministers. The General Court obligingly provided that a council of local Puritan elders could keep a minister in office regardless of the vote of the town freemen. As a corollary to the establishment of the Puritan church, a law of 1692 also forced every town to hire a schoolmaster; here was an attempt to erect a network of public education in the colony.

If the Puritans could no longer force everyone to attend their churches, they could at least impose Sunday blue laws on all. A law of 1692 prohibited all work, games, travel, and entertainment on the Sabbath. Violations were punishable by fine, stocks, whipping, or jail. But enforcement of these edicts became an increasingly aggravating problem.

*Professor Robert E. Brown investigated the effect of the property qualification on voting eligibility. He found that in the eighteenth century, with over ninety percent of the people of Massachusetts being farmers and artisans owning their own farms, and with the average farm ranging from eighty to 180 acres, even an unusually tiny farm of twelve acres was worth over twice the minimum needed for voting. Even the two percent of the farmers who were tenants were generally worth considerably more than the requirement. And the great bulk of the small number of town laborers were, even in the late eighteenth century, let alone the late seventeenth, artisan-entrepreneurs rather than wage workers in the modern sense. Generally, the estates of even the humblest artisans were far above the voting minimum. Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 21–31 and passim.

*On the problems of geographical representation and of town vis-a-vis provincial voting, see Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy, chaps. 4, 5.