59. Aftermath in the 1690s: The Salem Witch-Hunt and Stoughton's Rise to Power

The Glorious Revolution imposed the last great settlement on the northern colonies. After the smoke of the tumult was over, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire were royal colonies similarly structured; the main forces of conflict were, as they had long been in Virginia, the royal governor and his oligarchic council on the one hand, and the more democratic assembly, representing the people of the colony, on the other. In New York, the royal and landed oligarchy had been particularly strong and rapacious for many years, and the institution of a representative assembly was just beginning. In Massachusetts, as we have seen, the electoral base made the always more democratic assembly an especially democratic and relatively liberal voice of the people; whereas the new royal post of governor bid fair to preserve the rewards of oligarchic and royal rule.

When Massachusetts heard the news of the new charter at the turn of 1692, a power vacuum opened in the colony. The new institution of royal governor offered a tempting prospect for oligarchic power and plunder—despite the prospect of conflict with the popular House of Representatives. But it was still not clear which group would take control. The old Puritan theocracy was in rather frantic retreat from external and internal blows, but still remained strong in the colony. The new coalition of Governor Phips and Increase Mather was an alliance of moderates. Mather rather halfheartedly was trying to lead the more fanatical Puritans to the new realities of a more pluralistic and liberal society. Phips, highly liberal for a royal official and as Massachusetts’ governor, was strongly sympathetic to the colony’s desires for freedom from the exactions and regulations of the Crown.

If the Mather-Phips coalition had been allowed to continue in control, Massachusetts might have found a tolerable and even welcome path into the eighteenth century: the steady easing of Puritan restrictions combined with a decided drift back to effective Massachusetts independence from royal depredations. In short, Massachusetts might have been able to advance toward a synthesis of the best of the two contending sides of the recent past: the self-government and freedom of trade of the Puritans (without the theocratic persecutions), and the religious freedom and mercantile cosmopolitanism of the pro-royal opportunists (without the royal despotism). But such a synthesis for liberal independence was not to be. For at the heart of the new regime was a sinister canker: Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. Stoughton was determined to overthrow this moderate liberalism in order that he and his friends—including the formerly discredited Joseph Dudley—might return to power, and that he might renew his plundering of Massachusetts.

Stoughton and Dudley were determined to regain power and to reimpose a royal absolutism that they would lead, at the head of a newly plundering oligarchy. To do this they would have to discredit and eliminate Governor Phips. With great luck, William Stoughton found his opportunity at hand; opportunity to split the ordinarily antiroyalist masses and to rally the body of Puritan theocrats behind him. In short, Stoughton found a way to rally the two extremes, to swing the Puritan masses behind his Tory opportunists in order to crush the moderate center. This opportunity was the notorious Salem witch-hunt of 1692.

Witchcraft had always been a capital crime in New England, but it had also been almost entirely a dead letter. The problem, after all, was obtaining evidence of guilt, and until now the sober judges and leaders of the community had not been willing to credit “spectral evidence”—the unsupported testimony of an hysterical “victim” of witchcraft that somebody’s spectral witch-shape had appeared to attack him. But now, Puritan zeal was in retreat on many fronts; notably was it retreating from the burgeoning rationalistic and skeptical temper. Perhaps, the Puritan leaders felt, a reemphasis on spectral evidence and the powers of witchcraft could vindicate the true faith and roll back the tide of rationalism and secularism. As early as 1681 a group of leading Puritan divines had decided to combat rationalism by gathering supposed evidence of the supernatural in earthly affairs. Among these “evidences” was witchcraft. One of the leaders of this project was Rev. Increase Mather. In 1684 he compiled a galaxy of superstitions, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, which is a record of the deeds of magicians and gremlins and which had considerable impact on the public temper. Careful attention was paid by the Puritan ministers to any cases of hysterical children that they could find; the ministers would quickly see in them evidences of witchcraft and demon possession. With the most eminent divines of the colony paying eager and almost loving attention to any signs of juvenile hysteria, these signs were accordingly encouraged and nurtured by the eager solemnity with which they were greeted. The Reverend Cotton Mather took one of these young girls into his home, the better to record the Memorable Providences (1689). The time was now ripe for the Puritan divines to lead a frenzied mob in a determined rearguard attempt to reinstall Puritan fanaticism in its old home; an attempt that would be abetted and used by Stoughton and the Tory opportunists.

In February 1692, at the town of Salem Village (now Danvers), these reactionary forces found their chance. The stage had been set by the solemn findings of the Mathers. Now a group of young girls of Salem Village became “bewitched” and began the delightful game of accusing other people—at first mostly personal enemies—of witchcraft. The leaders of the bewitched girls were the two daughters of the Puritan divine, Rev. Samuel Parris, and so their accusations were taken all the more seriously. At first, neighbors who had annoyed the girls were accused of being witchtormentors. But like an infection, the accusations spread with great speed throughout the colony. Legal proceedings commenced. Since spectral evidence was now accepted by the courts, the supposed witches were quickly condemned, imprisoned, and hanged. After the classic pattern of intimidation and informing, reprieve came only if the witch would confess his or her guilt; and the confession was deemed sincere only if other people— accomplices—were named. Many of these confessions were extracted under torture. The circle of accusations thus became ever wider. The first hanging was that of a neighbor of the Parris family, Sarah Good, whose five-year-old daughter was even imprisoned as a witch.

Beginning with helpless old women, the circle of victims of the witchhunt soon expanded. The Reverend George Burroughs, a retired Puritan minister himself, had the bad fortune of incurring the dislike of the Parrises. Burroughs was duly accused of being a leading witch (witches are male as well as female), of “confederacy with the Devil,” etc. Reverend Mr. Burroughs was accused by several of the girls of witchcraft. The unfortunate minister became the most prominent victim of the witch-hunt. Although the more moderate Increase Mather was dubious of the spectral evidence, his son Cotton had no such doubts, and eagerly whipped up the witch-hunt generally, and specifically against Burroughs. Plagued by dishonest or deluded witnesses and biased judges, Burroughs was sentenced to be hanged.

It was no wonder that Burroughs, a good Puritan, was led by these proceedings to disbelieve in witchcraft altogether—a dose of rationalism imbibed by many who were falsely accused in their turn. On the day of Burroughs’ execution, he made a brief and moving statement of his innocence, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer. The crowd, convinced of his innocence, began to move to free the unfortunate Burroughs, but Cotton Mather—playing a role reminiscent of Reverend Mr. Wilson’s at the hanging of Mary Dyer a generation before—stepped to the fore and explained to the crowd that it was easy for an agent of the Devil to simulate innocence. Thanks to Cotton Mather, the hanging of the venerable wizard proceeded according to schedule.

The witch-hunt flourished. One unfortunate woman, Martha Carrier, denounced by Cotton Mather as a “rampant hag,” found that her four children had been induced to testify against her. In a Boston court, even a “bewitched” dog was solemnly tried, convicted, and executed.

When Sir William Phips arrived in Boston he found the colony under a full head of witch-hunt steam. He found over one hundred accused witches in prison and awaiting trial. In over his depth, he turned unfortunately to the Mathers for advice. The Mathers and the rest of the clergy called for continual efforts to detect and root out witchcraft in the colony. The crime must meet “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” The Mathers did warn that more than spectral evidence should be required for conviction, but this was a mere pro forma note of caution, unheeded by them or by the judges. Phips then centralized the witch trials. On advice of the Council, he turned over all witch trials to a special court of seven councillors. Naively, Phips wrote William Blathwayt that the seven judges were “persons of the best prudence.” Chief judge and strongman of the new court was Lieutenant Governor Stoughton. The other councillors constituted, in the words of Professor Dunn, a “perfect microcosm of the Massachusetts ruling coalition”—Puritans and Tory opportunists. Trustingly believing that all was safe and in sober hands, Phips left for Maine to fight Indians; Stoughton was left in charge of the court, which opened in Salem in early June.

Too many writers have treated the Salem witch-hunt in psychological terms: childish neuroses and mob hysteria. The vital point is not the hysteria of children, but the use made of it by the adult society. Neither can the witch-hunt be treated as a case study in mob psychology; for the witch-hunt was not a lynching bee, but a program carried out by the elite of the colony and directed by the lieutenant governor himself, the man whose major aim had long been the exercise of power.

During the summer, the witch-hunt centering in Salem spread through the colony. Other young girls joined in the business of being bewitched and of leveling accusations, until their number rose to fifty. Favorite targets of accusations were any who dared to raise their voice to criticize the witchhunt, or even to assert that witches didn’t exist at all. Concentration on these targets served to intimidate critics of the veritable reign of terror. This same cause was served by executing, as evident proof of diabolism, any conscience-stricken informer who dared to recant his implication of other persons.

To make sure of verdicts against the accused, Lieutenant Governor Stoughton decided, remarkably, to operate under the old charter rules. As a result, the jurors were chosen only from the ranks of Puritan church members, and the hapless defendants were allowed no rights of counsel. And, crucially, the special high court decided to admit all spectral evidence, under the rather dubious assumption that the devil could not assume the spectral shape of nonwitches. All of the witch executions, including Burroughs’, were the handiwork of the Stoughton court. By the end of September, the high court had condemned twenty-seven for witchcraft and had executed twenty. Fifty witches had escaped punishment by confession, an additional hundred were in prison awaiting trial, and some two hundred more were accused but not yet imprisoned. This amounted to almost one percent of Massachusetts’ population being accused of witchcraft during a period of only a few months.

Here and there brave men literally took their lives in their hands by coming out openly against the monstrous proceedings. Young Joseph Putnam, a relative of one of the bewitched girls, offered his home as refuge to any accused witch, and announced with loaded guns that anyone who should come to arrest him for witchcraft would come at his own peril. More silently, Councillor Nathaniel Saltonstall, one of the judges on the special court, withdrew in disgust from the proceedings. The eminent young liberal Puritan of Ipswich, Rev. John Wise, who had led Massachusetts’ opposition to the Andros regime, now spoke up in defense of two accused parishioners, as did twenty neighbors of the accused couple. And the prominent liberal merchant of Boston, Thomas Brattle, widely distributed an open letter, “A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion Called Witchcraft Which Prevailed in New England.” Brattle denounced the “new Salem philosophy,” and attacked the suppression of personal liberty upon spectral evidence. Prophetically, Brattle warned: “What will be the issue of these troubles, God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”

As the bewitched girls and their adult supporters felt their newfound power, the social level of their accusations continued to rise. Beginning with poor crones, the accusers now began to strike at some of the most eminent men of the colony. The renowned Puritan minister of Boston, Rev. Samuel Willard, was accused of witchcraft (though this was understandable in view of Willard’s criticism of the witch trials). But soon the girls moved to strike at some of the leaders of the witch-hunt itself: the wife of Rev. John Hale of Beverly, one of the most ardent of the witch-hunters, was accused of being a witch; so too the mother-in-law of one of the most zealous of the judges in prosecuting the witches. It is not surprising that Hale soon came to see chat the witch-hunt was a double-edged sword, and he joined the outspoken critics of the witch trials. Perhaps the most interesting, and tactically the most mistaken, of the accusations was the one leveled against none other than Lady Phips, wife of the governor. The Phipses were liberally inclined, and during her husband’s absence, Lady Phips angered the hard-line witch-hunters by ordering that one of the accused witches be freed. And so, in the full heady exercise of its terrorizing power, the witch-hunt reached too far. It moved against the Phipses themselves; against, in short, the major obstacle to Stoughton’s assumption of power in Massachusetts.

The witch-hunters had made their fatal mistake. Phips, never enthusiastic about the witch-hunt, now turned flatly against it. At the end of September he suspended the special court and all its proceedings for a three-month period. As Phips explained to the Crown, “Some were accused of whose innocency I was well assured and many considerable persons of unblamable life and conversations were cried out upon as witches and wizards....” Increase Mather concurred in suspending the infamous court, but his son Cotton tried his best to have the witch trials continued. In fact, the witch-hunt was not yet over. Phips again journeyed to Maine, and a large number of colonists—including ministers and judges—seized this opportunity to press for a continuation of the trials, even though in defiance of Phips’ order. The Reverend Samuel Torrey was particularly eager to get on with the prosecutions.

The matter now came before the General Court and debate was intense. The hard-liners were determined to continue the trials as before; the moderates called instead for a convocation of ministers to advise the government, with the trials to be suspended meanwhile. The resolution for a convocation passed the General Court by a very close 33-29 vote. The margin of victory included those who either had been themselves accused of witchcraft or had had relatives so accused. If not for their votes, the General Court would have continued the witch-hunt. When Phips returned, such councillors as the old Puritan Samuel Sewall and James Russell tried desperately to persuade him to change his mind and continue the prosecutions, but to no avail.

When the convocation of Puritan ministers assembled, the hard-line old guard, sensing its defeat, remained away, and so the proceedings were dominated by such relative liberals as William Hubbard, Samuel Willard, and John Wise. The ministers put the question to Increase Mather, who gave the expected moderate advice. The devil, Mather maintained, is capable of taking the shape of innocent persons. This could be seen, he shrewdly noted, by the fact that many ardent believers in the guilt of the witches were themselves soon accused or found a close relative in that position. And with the devil that able, spectral evidence was clearly worth little or nothing.

Using the moderate Mather formula, Phips ended the old special court, and after the General Court incorporated the Massachusetts judicial system into the charter, Phips created in January 1693 a new Superior Court, which heard the witch cases. The court, under Phips’ orders to prohibit the use of spectral evidence, found it difficult to indict or convict witches. Of over fifty suspect witches, twenty-six were tried and only three convicted and sentenced to death. William Stoughton, chief justice of the old court, now assumed that office in the new. A hard-liner to the end, he happily prepared to execute the three convicted women, along with five who had been condemned by the old court. But despite Stoughton’s indecent haste, the eight executions were barred at the end of January by a last-minute reprieve from Governor Phips. The reprieve was cheered by thousands in the colony, but it infuriated Stoughton. Rising in “passionate anger,” Stoughton thundered that the court, if left unhampered, would have cleared Massachusetts at last of witches. But now, justice was obstructed and the task unfulfilled, thus advancing the kingdom of Satan. Stoughton left the implied question unstated: Was Phips consciously doing the devil’s work?

With this diatribe, Stoughton tempestuously quit the court. The court proceedings dragged on for several months, but the heart was now out of it. The juries began to acquit everyone despite the anger of the judges. Finally, in April, a servant girl, May Watkins, was indicted for witchcraft and acquitted by the jury. The court forced the jury to reconsider, but the panel was adamant. About this time, the remaining prisoners were released. The Salem reign of terror was over.

The side of the coin opposite that of the myth of mob hysteria should be noted. For one thing, the witch-hunt was led and directed by the elite of the colony, the magistrates and the ministers. In addition, by no means were all the masses caught up in the witch frenzy. On the contrary, it was the revulsion of the people—as shown at the Burroughs execution and particularly by the jury acquittals—that was instrumental in bringing the witch trials to an end. In addition, popular petitions had flowed into the government, denouncing the informers and defending the accused.

The end of the witch-hunt left Phips in a very weak political position in the colony. Hated by the hard-liners for stopping the witch trials, Phips had equally disenchanted his natural supporters—the liberals—by condoning the trials in the first place. The whole prosecution, after all, had been conducted by officials of his administration and so Phips bore ultimate responsibility.

The fanatical Puritan old guard, meanwhile, was not so constituted as to give up without a fight. The people of Massachusetts had almost been won back to the old faith and zeal by the frenzy of the witch-hunt. Perhaps they could yet be won back with a further campaign against witchcraft. The indefatigable Cotton Mather now dug up the case of Margaret Rule, a bewitched girl of seventeen. Mather found the case, asked the girl numerous leading questions, gave her great publicity, tried in vain to get some accusations, and then wrote up the case in the monograph “Another Brand Plucked out of the Burning.” Mather distributed the essay widely as an open letter (Phips had banned any publication on witchcraft).

Mather might have been successful in reviving the witch-hunting spirit had it not been for a courageous Boston cloth merchant, Robert Calef, who stopped him in his tracks. Bitter at the clergy’s whipping up of the Salem witch-hunt, Calef attended Margaret’s public examination by Mather and refuted it in 1694 in an open letter of his own. Infuriated, Mather denounced Calef as “one of the worst of liars” and had him arrested for slander. But Mather prudently decided not to press charges, and Calef kept peppering Mather with letters pointing to the unreliability of the evidence and the absurdity of the accusation of witchcraft. Ministers and magistrates joined in reviling Calef as an atheist, but he stood his ground. President Increase Mather and the fellows of Harvard College, all but one of them Puritan ministers, joined the fray in March 1694, trumpeting the “remarkables” of supernatural intervention in the natural world, and asking people to send to the Harvard fellows more such evidences. Calef, with cutting sarcasm, sent in his own list of “remarkables”: the deaths of one of the witch-hunting judges, of two sons of another judge, etc. Finally, in 1700 the intrepid Calef gathered the whole inflammable discussion into one book, More Wonders of the Invisible World, published in London, as no Boston printer would dare to publish it. Increase Mather had the book publicly burned in Harvard Yard, but this only served to spread the book more widely. Calef’s More Wonders, indeed, had served to crystallize the popular revulsion against the whole witch-hunt episode and its leadership. The instigator of the witch-hunt, Rev. Samuel Parris, was now driven out of his Salem parish by the aroused congregation, and one of the main “bewitched” girls of Salem confessed her dishonesty and begged forgiveness. The Massachusetts General Court itself admitted in 1696 that it had committed wrongs by participating in the witch-hunt. And in the same year, Councillor Samuel Sewall, one of the witch-hunt judges, confessed his errors publicly, and had the liberal Rev. Samuel Willard read the confession aloud in church. Willard read the noble words: “Samuel Sewall... being made sensible that as to the guilt... at Salem, he is... more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking of men and especially desiring prayers that God... would pardon that sin.” Perhaps the supreme irony of the entire affair was that Margaret Rule (who, like so many of the other “afflicted,” turned to promiscuity in later life), after prodding by Cotton Mather to tell the name of the witch who was afflicting her, named Mather himself as the guilty wizard. Unsurprisingly, Cotton Mather’s interest in witchcraft dwindled markedly after that.

But through it all remained Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton; as always, unrepentant; as always, ready to come out on top. Phips had lost prestige from the witch frenzy; the old Puritan theocrats had been thoroughly discredited; rationalism was now stronger than ever—but political events were bringing Stoughton to the brink of power.

Governor Phips now lost the confidence of the Crown for taking a vigorous part in defending Massachusetts liberties against the depredations of royal officials, and for his conflicts with other governors. In the summer of 1692 a Captain Short tried to impress Bostonians into the English navy. When two members of the Massachusetts General Court opposed these despotic acts, Short invaded their homes and assaulted them. Short then failed to obey orders by Phips to follow him eastward to Maine. Infuriated at these peccadilloes, Phips, on his return to Boston in early 1693, fought with Captain Short on the street, knocked him down, and beat his cane over Short’s head. Phips then imprisoned Short and had him shipped to England for trial. In connection with Short’s arrest, the Governor also got into a row with Short’s successor and with the government of New Hampshire. In addition, Phips, in his capacity as commander in chief of the king’s armed forces in the Northeast, came into conflict with Lieutenant Governor Usher of New Hampshire, who repulsed Phips’ attempt to inspect the fort at Portsmouth as well as his demand to search the New Hampshire towns for deserters from an English ship.

Governor Phips also defended Massachusetts’ liberties in opposing the depredations of Jahleel Brenton, whom Edward Randolph had contrived to have appointed as royal collector of customs for New England. Brenton, son of Rhode Island merchant William Brenton, enforced the duties rigorously, but Phips joined the Massachusetts merchants in arguing that jurisdiction over customs collecting belonged to his own, more pliable, naval officers. When Brenton, toward the end of 1693, seized a ship arriving in Boston from the West Indies, the irascible Phips threatened to break every bone in Brenton’s body and to cut off the ears of Brenton’s witnesses, if he did not release the vessel. Phips punctuated the threat by beating Brenton with his cane and fists. Even Edward Randolph, though surveyor general of the king’s customs in America, was flatly refused an accounting of the customs books by Governor Phips.

Moreover, Phips sponsored a proposal to exempt Massachusetts from the exactions and requirements of the Navigation Acts. And when the Speaker of the Massachusetts House, Nathaniel Byfield, had the temerity to call for greater royal control over Massachusetts, with the notorious Joseph Dudley as governor, Phips had him expelled from the House.

In addition, Phips, a man of decided pro-Leislerian sympathies, came into sharp conflict with Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York, a partisan of the royalist oligarchy of that colony. Both men claimed jurisdiction over the Connecticut militia, and Fletcher threatened to take under New York jurisdiction the island of Martha’s Vineyard, by this time a part of Massachusetts. Fletcher also demanded the surrender of young Abraham Gouverneur, one of the convicted (but released) Leislerians, who had moved to Boston. Gouverneur had written a letter, seized by Fletcher, highly critical of the New York chief executive. Phips angrily refused Fletcher’s importunate demand, and also informed Fletcher’s agent that New York’s former governor Henry Sloughter should have been brought to trial because of his murder of Leisler and Milborne.

With the accumulation of cases concerning Phips’ opposition to royal power over Massachusetts, the king finally yielded to the charges (especially Brenton’s) and to the anti-Phips machinations of men like Joseph Dudley, and recalled Phips to England in February 1694 to answer charges of misconduct. Fighting for his political life, Phips tried to obtain a vote of support for his continuance by the General Court. Bolstered by the support of Increase Mather, Phips won a bare majority of the democratic House of Representatives but the relatively oligarchic Council, headed by the implacable Stoughton, was determined to dispose of Phips. Phips finally sailed for England at the end of 1694 and died soon after arriving in England.

Phips’ recall and death left the executive power in the hands of none other than Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, who now achieved his longterm objective of assuming power in Massachusetts. Stoughton was to remain as acting governor for the remainder of the decade.

With Phips gone, the days of a liberal governor were over. No more any quixotic defense of Massachusetts liberties. Instead, Stoughton swiftly molded a proroyalist ruling clique of spoilsmen and plunderers in the best Dudley tradition. Stoughton’s major allies were the selfsame Dudley, still trying to win the permanent spot of governor, and Speaker Byfield, whose daughter was married to Stoughton’s nephew. Opposition to Stoughton centered in the more democratic lower house. Thus, in 1696 the House of Representatives voted to send an agent to England to work for restoration of the old Massachusetts charter, but the Council oligarchy naturally vetoed the plan.

With the Glorious Revolution over, a royal government fixed on Massachusetts, and the inconclusive war with France dragging to a close (and in 1697 with the status quo ante restored in the colonies), King William now had time to turn his attention to enforcing the imperial system upon America. The great trading center of Massachusetts especially needed attention, for there the navigation laws were still virtually unenforced. The London merchants, in particular, were pressing the Crown more than ever to crack down on their colonial rivals.

As a result, three significant steps were taken to tighten imperial control of the colonies and to compel enforcement of the navigation laws. For one thing, Parliament in 1696 passed another Navigation Act, which (1) confined all colonial trade to English-built ships; (2) required all colonial governors—including the elected governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island—to take an oath to enforce the navigation laws; (3) gave the royal customs official in the colonies the right of forcible search and seizure; (4) stipulated that colonial governors appointed by proprietors must be approved by the king; (5) forced merchants reexporting enumerated articles bought from another colony (for example, tobacco from the South) to post a bond to insure that the goods not be sold to another European country; and (6) authorized the Crown to establish special vice admiralty courts to enforce the navigation laws.

Second, also in 1696, the administration of colonial affairs was taken from the Lords of Trade, a committee of the Privy Council dominated by the court aristocracy, and shifted to a new and independent Board of Trade. Although the new board contained seven privy councillors, the active working members were eight paid officials generally representing the London merchants. Among its many functions, the board was empowered to recommend the disallowing of laws conflicting with English law or policy.

The third step, the following year, was the creation by the Privy Council of the network of vice admiralty courts for the colonies, authorized in the Navigation Act. These courts were specially created for the trial and punishment of violators of the Navigation Acts. Prior to 1697, accused violators were tried at the regular common-law colonial courts. This meant that the judges were colonists who probably disapproved of the restrictive laws, and that the trials were by juries almost invariably sympathetic to the violators. To surmount this problem, the Privy Council now commissioned the royal colonial governors as vice admirals, each empowered to create a vice admiralty court under his jurisdiction. The vice admiralty court could now convict violators without the inconvenience of putting the case to a jury of the defendant’s peers, for here trial was conducted by the judge only. The judges, of course, were to be royal officials, in effect appointed by the governors, as were all of the vice admiralty court officials. In practice, the judges had the full management of the vice admiralty courts; and to ensure diligence in convicting offenders, the judges were paid a percentage of the value of the violator’s goods that they condemned. Enhancing the power of each judge was the fact that each court had one judge only, although in some cases the judge appointed a deputy to try cases; for instance, the judge of the Massachusetts court, the jurisdiction of which covered New Hampshire, appointed a deputy for the latter colony.

Since the vice admiralty posts were only assigned to royal governors, the Massachusetts court was assigned jurisdiction over Rhode Island, and the New York court over Connecticut and the Jerseys.

In 1699 the English also moved against the growth of manufacturing in America. The colonists were accustomed to rural household manufacture of textiles for their own use, but now New England and Long Island were beginning to manufacture woolens for commercial markets and beginning to outcompete the powerful English woolen industry. Not only were the English manufacturers alarmed, but so also were the English merchants, who stood to lose control of the trade of the Southern colonies should the latter purchase their manufactured goods from Boston instead of from England. Therefore, Parliament passed the Woolen Act of 1699, prohibiting the export of wool or woolens from any American colony, even to another colony.

Instrumental in drafting and implementing these measures was none other than the old enemy of the American colonies, Edward Randolph. Randolph had had a great deal of experience with recalcitrant juries in the early 1680s and renewed that experience when surveyor general of the customs in America in the early 1690s. His later enforcement difficulties occurred particularly in Maryland and by the spring of 1694 Randolph was reporting to England on trade-act enforcement: “I find that by the partiality of juries and others, that I can obtain no cause for His Majesty upon the most apparent evidences.”

Returning home in the fall of 1695, Randolph submitted a lengthy memorandum on his findings. Randolph was now brought in to advise on the new Navigation Act, and he was one of the two coauthors of the original draft of the act. Randolph then went to work for the new Board of Trade, of which his old friend the Earl of Bridgewater was president. And when the officers of the vice admiralty courts were selected, Randolph’s suggestions were adopted, as were, roughly, the boundaries of the court districts.

One of the major disputes in framing the Navigation Act stemmed from Randolph’s attempt to impose a royally appointed attorney general in every colony. To transfer full power over their trade from the colonies to the Crown, it was necessary for the prosecuting attorneys to be under Crown control. Randolph wanted the Crown to appoint all the attorneys general of the colonies directly. But the colonies themselves and their proprietors bitterly protested such a change and the Crown finally decided to appoint “advocates general” to prosecute admiralty cases, but to allow the colonies to continue to choose their own attorneys general. This meant that Crown agents would be limited to admiralty cases and, further, that jurisdictional disputes over the courts of trial might loom large in the future. The upshot was a diversity of pattern in the several colonies. But, generally, the colonial attorneys general were used also as Crown advocates general; only in Massachusetts and Virginia was a separate Crown official appointed. Because of Randolph’s good offices, Nathaniel Byfield was selected as the judge of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire Admiralty Court. But Wait Winthrop, the old weak-willed moderate and member of the Council, could not possibly accept this crowning of the nefarious Stoughton-Byfield alliance. These were the men whom Winthrop privately referred to as the Jacobite clique (the high Tory followers of the pretender James II), “who have in a little time got more by the government than all that have been before... [who] eat up the poor as bread and squeeze them to death by virtue of an office....” With the Massachusetts Council overriding Stoughton and refusing to assent to Byfield’s appointment, Winthrop, pulling strings in England, was able to get himself appointed as judge instead. Randolph bitterly concluded that the Massachusetts smugglers had “turned out Mr. Byfield, a man zealous for having the Acts of Trade duly executed.”