1. Liberalism in Massachusetts

0:00Part 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.

0:57In 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.

1:50One 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.

2:58There 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.

4:09Although 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

5:45Servitude 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.

6:33The 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?

7:50Mather'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.

9:29Some 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.

10:18Runaway 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

10:47of 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.

11:37Here 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.

12:10The 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.

13:09The 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

14:29and 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.

15:32And 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.

16:21Massachusetts 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.

17:09In 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.

17:58In 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,

19:26In 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

20:47of 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.

21:33The 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.

23:07One 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.

23:53Puritanism 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.

24:51The 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.

26:05Weiss 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.