Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “I pray Sir prove it that I said they preached nothing but a covenant of works.”

  DEPUTY GOVERNOR: “Nothing but a covenant of works, why a Jesuit may preach truth sometimes.”

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “Did I ever say they preached a covenant of works then?”

  DEPUTY GOVERNOR: “If they did not preach a covenant of grace clearly, then they preach a covenant of works.”

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “No Sir, one may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another, so I said … ”

  [The next morning, after further questioning]

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true. Being much troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the church of England, I had like to have turned separatist; whereupon I kept a day of solemn humiliation and pondering of the thing … the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. ‘He that denies the testament denies the testator,’ and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of antichrist, and upon this he did discover the ministry unto me and ever since, I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong … ”

  MR NOWEL [A MAGISTRATE]: “How do you know that that was the spirit?”

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?”

  DEPUTY GOVERNOR: “By an immediate voice.”

  MRS HUTCHINSON: “So to me by an immediate revelation.”

  Not only did religious schisms fuel challenges to Puritan authority in Massachusetts; they also impelled the dissenters to spread around New England, establishing new colonies in the process. Rhode Island would begin in the aftermath of Roger Williams's expulsion from Massachusetts in 1635, when he led some of his followers to land purchased from the Narragansetts south of Massachusetts and established the settlement of Providence, Rhode Island. Likewise, Anne Hutchinson along with William Coddington, who had been implicated but not charged in the antinomian controversy, established the town of Portsmouth on the island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay a few years later. By March 1641, Coddington and Williams had joined together again in what they described as “a democracy or popular government,” based on the right of the freemen to make “just laws.” Members of a third sect led by the religious radical Samuel Gorton would arrive in 1643, before Roger Williams went to England and obtained from Parliament a patent in 1644, effectively giving Rhode Island corporate status with the right of local self-government. Its form of government would be similar to that of Massachusetts, with its strong emphasis on local autonomy and its representative assembly. The one difference was that, instead of insisting upon religious orthodoxy, the colony insisted on religious toleration.

  The Connecticut River Valley attracted several groups of Puritans from both Plymouth and Massachusetts. Of these the largest was the congregation of Thomas Hooker of Newtown. Though Hooker and his congregation had no sympathy with either Hutchinson or Williams, they appear to have disliked the arbitrary actions of the general court, as well as the restrictive nature of church membership and the problem of determining who was saved. In May 1635 they migrated to Hartford. Title to their land was quickly disputed, being claimed by Massachusetts, New Netherland, and Plymouth, as well as by a group of English investors who obtained a patent to the land from the Council for New England.

  Hooker's presence also provoked a disruption of relations with the local Pequot Indians. For several years the Pequots had been trading with both the English and the Dutch, but the arrival of English settlers on their land appears to have triggered new tensions. Pequots killed two English traders, Captain Stone in 1634 and John Oldham in 1636. When Massachusetts authorities insisted on trying the Pequot offenders under English law, the Pequots refused to surrender them. The Indians considered themselves to be equal partners in their relationships with the Europeans, and acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts government would have amounted to a concession that they were its subjects rather than its equals. However, Massachusetts authorities had little incentive to compromise; provoking a war offered them the best means of securing the Pequots' land. Once the Pequots realized that war was imminent, they sought an alliance with the Narragansetts against the colony of Massachusetts. However the Narragansetts, having come to depend on their own trade ties with Rhode Island and Massachusetts, turned the Pequots down and allied themselves with the English. Meanwhile, Massachusetts received military assistance from neighboring Plymouth and from Rhode Island, as well as the colonists in Connecticut.

  Once these alliances were settled, there could be little doubt as to the outcome of the conflict. In April 1637, Pequots raided the town of Wethersfield, Connecticut, killing several settlers. Leaders in Massachusetts and Connecticut seized the opportunity to make an example of the Pequot people. A Connecticut force under Captain John Mason, assisted by a number of Narragansett allies, was dispatched to surround a Pequot village on the Mystic River. Most of the village's fighting men had gone away, leaving the village inhabited by approximately 500 women, children, and old men. In the early hours of the morning, the English surrounded the village, set it on fire, and then proceeded to shoot and kill every Indian who managed to escape from the flames and tried to run away. Five hundred Pequots perished in the attack despite protests by the Narragansetts, who realized that they were witnessing a new and more destructive kind of conflict than traditional Native American forms of warfare. When an even larger group of Pequots was trapped in a swamp, the Puritans did not hesitate to kill the fighting men and sell the rest into slavery, believing that their opponents, like the Philistines in the Old Testament, had rightly been put to the sword.

  Figure 12 “Underhill's Diagram of the Pequot Fight.” From John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England, or, The Puritan Theocracy in Its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898).

  After the Pequots' defeat, relationships between the English and the other peoples in the region changed markedly. English leaders began demanding tribute from their Indian allies instead of treating them as equal trading partners. The Narragansetts and Mohegans had to agree not to go to war without English permission. The Narragansett leader Miantonomo attempted to create an alliance among local sachems to drive out the English, but in 1643, English authorities had Miantonomo arrested, tried, and executed by one of his rivals, the Mohegan leader Uncas. The English had effectively transformed their relationship with the local Indians from an alliance born of mutual necessity to a relationship of rulers and subjects.

  The creation of additional colonies in New England continued as it had begun. Connecticut created its own general court, and in January 1639 agreed on a frame of government for the colony known as the Fundamental Orders. Like the government of Massachusetts, Connecticut's government was committed “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our lord Jesus as … is now practised.” Its general court would consist of a governor and six assistants, to be elected by the freemen, for whom church membership was implicitly required. However, Hooker widened membership in the church by offering communion to all who professed the faith, so that citizenship was less restrictive. Other patterns established in Massachusetts were followed here as well. Significant local control was ensured by a provision that each town would have four deputies at the general court, to be elected “by all that are admitted inhabitants in the several towns.” The Fundamental Orders recognized that the deputies had different functions from the magistrates and should meet separately, a significant gain for the assembly which Massachusetts adopted only in 1644. The deputies could also convene the general court should the governor and assistants fail to do so, for an all-powerful magistracy such as had originally existed in Massachusetts was not to be allowed. The colony obtained a royal charter in 1662 that confirmed the provisions of the Fundamental Orders.

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nbsp; Document 9

  A call for Indian unity by Chief Miantonomo, 1642, reprinted in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass., 1993), 135

  Miantonomo, like Opechancanough in Virginia, having tried coexistence with the colonists, could see no alternative to all-out war with them if the native peoples were not to be exterminated. Questions to consider: What grievances did Miantonomo express towards the English? If Miantonomo's strategy had been followed, would it have been more effective than individual tribal arrangements as a way to resist the English?

  A while after this came Miantenomie from Block Island to Mantacut with a troop of men … instead of receiving presents, which they used to do in their progress, he gave them gifts, calling them brethren and friends, for so are we all Indians as they English are, and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly, for you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved; therefore it is best for you to do as we, forwe are all the Sachems from east to west, both Moquakues and Mohauks joining with us, and we are all resolved to fall upon them all, at one appointed day; and therefore I am come to you privately first, because you can persuade the Indians and Sachem to what you will … and when you see the three fires that will be made forty days hence, in a clear night, then do as we, and the next day fall on and kill men, women, and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat til our deer be increased again.

  New Hampshire, too, began as an offshoot of Massachusetts. Though a few settlers had been sent there by the Council for New England10 in the 1620s, the population began to grow when followers of the antinomian Reverend John Wheelwright moved to the town of Exeter in the 1630s. During the early 1640s additional settlements were established at Dover and Portsmouth in New Hampshire and at York and Kittery in Maine. All settled on land subject to claims by the Council for New England, and when Massachusetts sought control over the new settlements, the heirs of the company's major investors, Fernando Gorges and John Mason, sued. Eventually the dispute was settled in 1680 when New Hampshire became a royal colony. Maine on the other hand was annexed to Massachusetts on the grounds that it was part of Massachusetts' original grant. The Maine settlements protested, but to no avail. Kittery was organized as a town with the right to send a deputy to the general court. Since it had no covenanted church, all the male inhabitants were made freemen and allowed to vote.

  The last New England colony was New Haven, which began in June 1637, after the Reverend John Davenport purchased a tract of land from the local inhabitants there and led his congregants to settle on it. The Davenport group in New Haven would adopt a frame of government in 1639 similar to that of Massachusetts, restricting the franchise to church members and adopting biblical law instead of the English common law. The similarity was not surprising, since Davenport was a friend of Cotton.

  Despite their theological and political differences, the New England colonies shared substantial similarities in their political structures and religious cultures which helped bring them together. The Pequot War had also had a unifying effect. Puritan leaders compared the destruction of the Pequots to the Israelites' eviction of the Canaanites from the Promised Land, and used their victory over the Indians to promote the idea that all of the various contending groups of Puritans throughout New England shared the common goal of subduing the Indians and winning their land for God's purposes. Accordingly in 1643, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven entered into a formal alliance, styled the Confederation of the United Colonies of New England.11 Rhode Island, however, remained the outcast of the group; it was deliberately left out.

  Dissenting religious groups would continue to challenge Puritan orthodoxy for as long as the Puritans remained in control of Massachusetts. These challenges were liveliest during the English Civil War and its aftermath, when control over religious practice in England encouraged the creation of new radical religious movements. In the early 1640s, the Gortonists appeared, followed by the Baptists, or Anabaptists, who insisted on adult immersion because the Bible did not authorize infant baptism. Most troublesome were the Quakers, who first arrived in 1656. They wished to dispense with almost all traditional Christian practice, including use of the Bible, for they believed that everyone could experience God's grace through prayer and the “inner light.” The Puritan magistrates responded to all of these groups with a heavy hand, imposing fines, whippings, banishment, and (in the case of four Quakers) execution to suppress these heresies.12 Such harsh punishments, however, often proved counterproductive, since they merely encouraged others to proclaim their faith by defying the magistrates. One concession to the dissenters was that they might hold private meetings, providing “it be without just offense.” But formal congregations could be established only with the consent of the local magistrates and elders by such persons as “be orthodox in judgement.” There were to be no rival establishments in the Puritan commonwealth.13

  5 Challenges from England

  Even as the magistrates faced challenges from within Massachusetts, other challenges were being leveled at them from without. In its attempt to create a biblical commonwealth Massachusetts had enacted laws that were clearly inconsistent with English law. Challenges to the colony's leaders therefore began almost immediately.

  The first threat came from Gorges and the Council for New England, who were angry that the king had issued a patent to another group in an area claimed by the council. Gorges was not opposed to the Puritan emigration; he merely wanted the Puritans to acknowledge his company's authority and accept its plan of government. Several others joined the clamor to have the affairs of Massachusetts investigated. Accordingly, in 1634 a special committee of the Privy Council was set up under Archbishop Laud to look into the affairs of the Massachusetts Bay Company. On discovering that the charter was no longer in England, the committee began legal proceedings to have the company terminated. These were slow, and it was not until the summer of 1637 that a verdict was given in favor of the king. Charles I then announced that he would govern Massachusetts, as he did Virginia, through a governor and council, with Gorges as his first representative. Fortunately for Massachusetts, the king's gesture proved hollow; his attempts during the 1630s to govern without Parliament had been a disaster, since his Scottish subjects were in rebellion and he could not wage war against them effectively without Parliament's cooperation. Any attempt to suppress the Puritans in Massachusetts would have to wait.

  The beginning of the English Civil War in 1642 gave Massachusetts a respite from most legal challenges, since English officials were too occupied with political conflicts at home to interfere much with their colonies in North America. A principal aim of the majority in Parliament was the reform of the Church of England, and some New Englanders advocated going back to England to help. Among those who returned were several ministers, along with others who were simply homesick, having been unable to adapt to a strange environment. The vast majority stayed put, however, being firmly attached to their new country.

  Despite their general preoccupation with matters in England, Parliament did take some interest in the conduct of church government in the colonies. The Massachusetts Puritans still possessed a congregational system but were incorporating one element of a Presbyterian one, in which ministers were subject to the authority of an assembly of the clergy, called a synod. Initially, Parliament in England was dominated by Presbyterians, with whom the Puritans had a number of disagreements, not least concerning the relationship of a congregation to its minister. Indeed, a Presbyterian, Dr Robert Child, mounted an important challenge to the commonwealth in 1646. Child moved to Massachusetts in 1645 following Parliament's
triumph in the Civil War. Recognizing the disabilities under which he labored in Massachusetts, he wrote A Remonstrance and Humble Petition in which he made a number of charges: that his rights as an Englishman were being infringed; that the charter was being used beyond its intended purpose, being merely equivalent to an English corporation; that the laws of Massachusetts did not conform to those of England; and that the church lacked proper regulation, since it excluded most inhabitants from the sacrament and their children from baptism. Only a genuinely Presbyterian system, Child argued, would correct these faults.

  Though fearing that members of Parliament might be sympathetic towards Child's legal attack, the Puritan leadership was not disposed to admit any of his charges. Child was charged with writing “divers false and scandalous passages … against the Churches of Christ and the civil government here established.” The general court asserted that a proper body of laws had been enacted and that their only obligation under the charter was to ensure that these laws were not contrary to those of England. As to the charge that Massachusetts constituted no more than an English corporation, the court asserted that the position of a foreign plantation was necessarily different. The court determined to impose a stiff fine. When Child and his coauthors implied that they would appeal to Parliament, the general court imprisoned them while dispatching its own courier to London. Fortunately the army, dominated by the Independents, as the congregational Puritans were known in England, shortly took control as it gained the upper hand in England's Civil War. Child's complaint, therefore, was not well received when he finally reached London. From 1648 Massachusetts was seemingly safe for the first time in the affections of an English government.