It was this wooded, storm-battered littoral of the eastern seaboard of America, with its promise of religious freedom and personal salvation, that offered the greatest hope for England’s Puritans during the anxious Stuart years. In 1623 a ‘Council for New England’ had been established to promote the creation of further colonies, and, as one of the first histories of Boston recounts it,
On the 19th of March, 1627–8, Sir Henry Rosewell and Sir John Young [Puritan landowners and colonists], with their associates near Dorchester, in England, purchased of the Council for New England a patent for that part of the country situated between three miles to the northward of the Merrimac River and three miles to the southward of the Charles River, and in length from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea. Under this charter, ‘the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England’ commenced the settlement of the Massachusetts* colony.4
Like the Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, formed in 1629, was a joint-stock corporation which received its rights to settle and trade in America from the Crown. But the vital difference was that the Massachusetts Bay leaders moved the location of their patent from London to New England, allowing them to build a self-governing commonwealth, over the sea, free from day-to-day royal interference. For the Council for New England was composed of a well-connected network of Puritan merchants and divines, who were keen to exploit Atlantic fishing opportunities but also to promote colonialism as a safe haven for true religion. In time, it was hoped the exercise of pure Protestantism in America would inspire and rescue the English church from its present woes. God’s will had revealed itself: here was the perfect vehicle for Winthrop to escape Old England for New. He invested heavily in the Massachusetts Bay Company before, in October 1629, being elected its governor.
As his ship Arbella set sail out of Southampton for Cape Ann harbour in the spring of 1630, Winthrop took the opportunity to preach a lay sermon, ‘The model of Christian charity’, to his fellow passengers. He took as his text the Book of Matthew, 5:14–16:
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Aboard the ship’s deck, the governor set out his ambitions for the colony and its elect membership, ‘a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ’. Central to Winthrop’s vision of his prosperous, godly commonwealth was the seventeenth-century notion of a Covenant with God: ‘We are entered into a covenant with Him for this work.’ As a body of pilgrims dependent upon God’s grace for their survival, they had to agree to work together, live together and worship the same God together. The colony, as an exemplary Christian community, was the corpus through which God could be most perfectly served. If the Lord ‘shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then he hath ratified this Covenant … and will expect a strict performance of the articles’.5 If they achieved the purpose for which God had planned, ‘We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.’ Long before any notion of America’s manifest destiny, the city of Boston had been marked out for special purposes. ‘This Year [1630] it pleased God of his rich grace to Transport over into the Bay of the Massachusets divers honourable Personages, and many worthy Christians,’ recalled Nathaniel Morton, the secretary of the Colony of Plymouth, ‘whereby the Lord began in a manifest manner and way to make known the great thoughts which he had of Planting the Gospel in this remote and barbarous Wilderness.’6
Unfortunately, the Protestant Wind was not as benign as they had hoped, and it initially deposited the Arbella in Salem, which, according to the deputy governor Thomas Dudley, ‘pleased us not’. They found the colony there in a ‘sad and unexpected condition’, with its dwindling residents barely able to make it through the winter.7 So they moved from Salem to another settlement at Charles Town and then, searching for a decent water supply, crossed the Charles River to join the reclusive Puritan William Blaxton (or Blackstone) in the Indian settlement of Shawmutt on the land known as Trimontaine, because of its three peaks. In September 1630, this settlement upon three hills was renamed Boston in honour of their brother and fellow pilgrim Isaac Johnson of Boston, in the county of Lincolnshire, who had died in Salem.
The advantages of the place were immediately apparent. ‘His situation is very pleasant, being a Peninsula, hemmed in on the South-side with the Bay of Roxberry, on the north side with Charles-River, the Marshes on the back side being not half a quarter of a mile over; so that a little fencing will secure their cattle from the wolves,’ was how William Wood described it in an early brochure, New England’s Prospect.
This neck of land is not above four miles in compass; in form almost square, having on the south-side, at one corner, a great broad hill, whereon is planted a fort, which can command any ship as she sails into any harbour within the still Bay. On the north side is another hill, equal in bigness, whereon stands a Windmill. To the north-west is a high mountain with three little rising hills on the top of it, wherefore it is called the Tramount.8
Winthrop set to work on his Garden of Eden, keen to find God’s favour in the enterprise. ‘Plantations in their beginnings have work enough…’ he wrote in a letter, ‘there being buildings, fencings, clearing and breaking up of ground, lands to be attended, orchards to be planted, highways and bridges and fortifications to be made, and all things to do, as in the beginning of the world.’9 The Genesis analogy seemed apposite since, by the time Winthrop began tilling the soil, Massachusetts must have felt like a virgin landscape thanks to the decimation of the native Indian population. Indeed, he predicted as much in his 1629 Plantation pamphlet: ‘God hath consumed the natives with a great plague in those parts, so as there be few inhabitants left.’ The arrival of European settlers had indeed sparked an epidemic of smallpox, measles and influenza among the coastal Algonquian societies against which they lacked any immunity. By 1633 settlers already outnumbered Indians in the Massachusetts Bay area, and by 1700 the native population was reduced to about 10 per cent of what it had been before European contact.10 ‘So if we leave them sufficient for their own use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and for us,’ concluded Winthrop.11
With minimal Native American resistance to Winthrop’s initial plans, the first identifiable outlines of Boston came into being. The lands and islands of the outer and inner harbours became populated with grazing cattle and sheep, with farmlands and orchards. It was hard, dangerous work. In December 1638 there was ‘so great a tempest of wind and snow all the night and the next day, as had not been since our time’. As a result,
Five men and youths perished between Mattapan and Dorchester … Anthony Dick, in a bark of thirty tons, cast away upon the head of Cape Cod. Three were starved to death with the cold; the other two got some fire and so lived there, by such food as they saved, seven weeks, till an Indian found them, etc.12
The Boston magistrate and keen diarist Samuel Sewall similarly noted the ‘extream cold’ of January 1686, ‘so that the Harbour frozen up, and to the Castle. This day so cold that the Sacramental Bread is frozen pretty hard, and rattles sadly as broken into the Plates.’13
In the Boston promontory, the narrow ‘neck’ of which was regularly flooded by tidal surges, cutting the growing town off from the mainland, a windmill soon appeared atop the north hill (Copp’s Hill or Mill Hill), ‘grinding out the rich yellow corn of Indian origin, raised on nearly every garden lot on the peninsula’. A fire-pot suspended on a beacon was planted on Treamount or Tramount hill, to warn of impending dangers, and on the third hill, a wooden fort. These were the sites that greeted the growing number of Puritan migrants, fleeing the persecution of King Charles I’s Archbishop Laud for the promised land of New England. In 1634, some seventeen emigrant ships arrived in
Boston; thirty-two in 1635; and another twenty in 1638, landing a total of nearly 21,000 new settlers across the colony. They set to work constructing the first forms of a conurbation: market squares, a public park (the origin of today’s Boston Common), roads, docks, meeting-houses and churches. Education and literacy were so elemental to the Puritan ethos that quite quickly the Boston Grammar School was established, and, in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Company allocated £400 (more than half of the entire colony tax levy for 1635) to the establishment of Harvard College, named after the Puritan minister John Harvard, who on his deathbed donated £780 and his own library to the new institution. The college was located nearby at Newtown (later renamed Cambridge) on a ‘spacious plain’ at the edge of salt marshes and designed to be as close a copy of a Cambridge University college as possible.14 Harvard’s purpose was to supply Massachusetts with a home-grown crop of Christian ministers and make it unnecessary to call upon unreliable Anglicans from England. In ensuing decades, Boston would add to its infrastructure with a bridge across the Charles River, a 670-metre defensive barricade in the harbour, town houses, pebbled streets, wharfs and more meeting-houses. For Winthrop’s companions, such progress was all a sign of divine grace: nature was being tamed and a godly citadel erected. As Captain Edward Johnson put it in his celebrated tract of 1654, Wonder-Working Providence of Zion’s Saviour in New England,
The chiefe Edifice of this City-like Towne is crowded on the Sea-bankes, and wharfed out with great industry and cost, the buildings beautifull and large, some fairly set forth with Brick, Tile, Stone and Slate, and orderly placed with comly streets, whose continuall inlargement presages some sumptuous City. The wonder of this moderne Age, that a few yeares should bring forth such great matters by so meane a handfull … But now behold the admirable Acts of Christ; at this his peoples landing, the hideous Thickets in this place were such that Wolfes and Beares nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders, in those very places where the streets are full of Girles and Boys sporting up and downe, with a continued concourse of people.15
Such earthly success was a reflection of true Christian sentiment, but it had to be worked at continuously. Around every corner, Winthrop saw the Devil’s hand at work, as one of his journal entries from July 1632 describes:
At waterton there was … a great combate betweene a mouse & a snake, & after a longe fight, the mouse prevayled & killed the snake; the Paster of Boston mr willson a verye sincere holy man hearinge of it, gave this Interpretation, that, the snake was the devill, the mouse was a poore contemptible people which God had brought hether, which should overcome Sathan heere & disposesse him of his kingdome.16
To assist salvation, Massachusetts’s early government was almost theocratic. The franchise for the colony’s assembly was not property holding, as in England, but church membership, and to join one of the many churches an individual had to evince positive signs of grace. It was compulsory for everyone to attend their parish church, and the power of ministers seamlessly extended from the ecclesiastical to the civil, the clapboard meeting-houses the setting for both religious devotion and legal transactions. The Stour valley’s pious magistracy was now transposed to New England as a sharp culture of discipline cracked down on cards, dice, music, sports, saints’ days and slander (especially against the church). In 1633 the Massachusetts Bay Company enacted a law stating ‘that no person, householder or other, shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the Court shall think meet to inflict’.17 In 1634 tobacco-taking in taverns was banned; in 1647 shovel-board in ‘houses of common entertainment’ was outlawed; and in 1664 ‘rude singing’ was declared illegal. Unsurprisingly, most visitors found Boston’s public culture grimly Puritanical. In 1699, the Englishman Edward Ward thought the Bostonians ‘very busie in detecting one another’s failings; and he is accounted, by their Church Governors, a Meritorious Christian, that betrays his Neighbour to a Whipping-post’.18 This religio-civic theocracy was also highly antagonistic toward any sign of religious disharmony. For all their demands for toleration in England, when the heterodox views of religious radicals such as the Separatist Roger Williams and antinomian Anne Hutchinson threatened to disrupt Boston’s stability, they were swiftly drummed out of the Bay Colony. It was never a wise decision to flout such punishments either: between 1659 and 1661 four Quakers were hanged for returning after banishment. There was a Covenant to be upheld, and political pluralism played no part in it.
In the light of these saints’ attempt to erect a godly commonwealth, Boston’s rapidity in backing the parliamentary cause during the English Civil War is unsurprising. The dynastic, business and religious connections between the American colonists and the English Roundheads ran deep and, in May 1643, reference to King Charles I was dropped altogether from the colony’s oath of allegiance. According to Winthrop, the king ‘had violated the privileges of parliament, and made war upon them, and thereby lost much of his kingdom and many of his subjects; whereupon it was thought fit to omit that part of it for the present’.19
Winthrop passed away in 1649, when the outcome of the English Revolution was unclear, but he bequeathed to the public culture of Boston a deep hostility towards Roman Catholicism, monarchical absolutism and all the other misdemeanours of the Stuart monarchy. Attempts by the Stuart Crown in the late 1670s to impose a new charter on the colony, abolish the Massachusetts Bay Company and establish a Dominion of New England under direct royal rule had led to violent clashes across Boston as Puritan ministers whipped up fears of another Popish plot led by untrustworthy London courtiers. It was small wonder that, in London, Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular were fast gaining a reputation as a haven for radical dissenters. A British customs agent, William Dyre, described New Englanders in the 1680s as ‘raging furious fanatic Whigs … Rebellious and unnatural hators and warriors Against the true mother church’.20 Indeed, the very crowning of the crypto-Catholic King James II had been greeted with signs of foreboding in Boston. ‘The King is Proclaimed; 8 Companies, the Troop, and several Gentlemen on horseback assisted,’ Samuel Sewall wrote on 20 April 1685. ‘This day a child falls upon a Knife which runs through its cheek to the Throat, of which inward Wound it dies, and is buried on Wednesday.’21
So relief at the fall of King James and the triumph of the Dutch Protestant William of Orange in 1688 was overwhelming. As soon as news of the Glorious Revolution arrived in New England, Boston led the way with a band of rebels seizing the royal governor and dissolving the hated Dominion. Yet at the same time as the colony revived its old forms of self-government, Boston developed a novel sense of fealty towards the Crown after all those decades of hostility towards the Stuarts. With King William III on the throne, Boston’s Puritans finally felt there was a godly monarch culturally attuned to New England’s religious and political ethos. That sense of divergence from England, which had marked out the foundation of Massachusetts in the 1630s, began to ebb as the spiritual and political interests of Crown and colony aligned. Increasingly, the evangelical leaders of late seventeenth-century Boston could see themselves as part of a shared, global endeavour to resist popery, protect true religion and promote English liberty alongside their Protestant monarch. In reality, William III would continue with much of the Stuarts’ policy of centralizing control over the American colonies: the rewritten Massachusetts charter of 1691 shifted the franchise qualification from church membership to property holding and kept the governorship a Crown appointment. Inevitably, this created the risk of a clash between the royal prerogative of the governor (usually, a former British army officer) and the autonomy of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (elected by male colonists since 1629), but at the turn of the eighteenth century such tensions were non-existent. The remarkable, natural sympathy which sprang up between elites in Massachusetts and the mother country – shared beliefs in the liberties of Magna Carta, the terrifying spectre of French and Spanish Catholicism, the wretchedness of the Stuarts and the virtues of the
1688 constitutional settlement – overshadowed any theoretical constitutional incompatibility. For now, Boston was delighted to be a part of Britain’s emergent, Atlantic empire.22
THE GREAT MART AND STAPLE
What did that ‘empire’ look like in the late seventeenth century? The word itself was a translation from the Latin imperium and was taken to mean control over trade and sea as much as land. Indeed, a sea-based empire was looked on more favourably by colonial advocates: in contrast to the military dictatorship of the land empire of Rome or the corruption visited upon Spain by its possessions in the Americas, an empire of the seas brought more benign and flexible connotations. For merchants and courtiers in London thinking about England’s imperium abroad, the contours of influence would have entailed the Caribbean plantations of Jamaica and Barbados (see Chapter 2), Ireland (see Chapter 3), the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, outposts in Newfoundland and in Hudson Bay, the coming towns of Philadelphia, New York and Charlestown, and then the New England settlements. It was a disparate, inchoate, Atlantic empire. For whilst colonies shared an unified imperial authority in the form of the British monarch, judgements over who was in practical charge – who exercised ‘dominium’ or territorial control – were more opaque. In different corners of this empire, the running of the colonies varied from joint-stock corporations to royal governors to local assemblies to individual patentees. Taken together, the beginnings of the British Empire were an unruly mix of tobacco plantations, whaling stations, fishing ports, cane fields, forts and cities. Beyond their loyalty to the Crown, the only effective source of imperial unity was the quickening pace of transatlantic commerce.
Cities of Empire Page 4