Chapter II: New England, 1689-1763 (3)

Belcher played the potentate with the Indians, and made his treaties with them as his predecessors had done. He met them at Falmouth (Portland) in 1732, and at Deerfield in 1735. Perhaps he was fairer in his dealings with them than he was with his fellows of the whiter skin, for he has passed into history as the least entitled to esteem of all the line of royal governors in Massachusetts,—a depreciation perhaps helped by his being born on the soil. His political paths were too devious. Hutchinson tells us that when Tailer, the lieutenant-governor, died in 1732, it was Adam Winthrop that Belcher openly favored in New England as the successor, while he intrigued with the Board of Trade to secure the appointment of Paul Mascarene; yet to no avail, for Spencer Phips, the adopted son of Sir William, succeeded to the place.

New Hampshire had been reunited with Massachusetts under Burnet, and she had proved much more tractable than the larger colony in yielding the point of the fixed salary to the governor. She had hopes of being in some way rewarded for it. Under Belcher matters grew worse. He quarrelled with the lieutenant-governor, and David Dunbar, the surveyor-general of the king’s lands, came into the place, but without healing dissensions. Dunbar had the support of influential persons like Benning Wentworth and Theodore Atkinson; and Belcher made what he could out of the friendship of Richard Waldron, the secretary.[277] Massachusetts, as well as her governor, had grievances against her neighbor; and she prohibited by legislation the circulation within her bounds of the promissory notes of New Hampshire whose redemption was not well secured. New Hampshire and Massachusetts were never again under a single executive. Wentworth chanced to be in London when Belcher’s downfall came, and he readily slipped into the executive seat of his province.[278]

After the picture (in the Mass. Hist. Society’s gallery) painted on the voyage over by Smybert, who accompanied him. Cf. _Catal. Cabinet Mass. Hist. Soc._, no. 41. A photograph of the picture of Berkeley and his family by Smybert, now at Yale College, is given in Noah Porter’s _Two Hundredth Birthday of Bishop George Berkeley_, N. Y. 1885; and in Kingsley’s _Yale College_, i. 59. Smybert later painted many portraits in Boston. Cf. _Mem. Hist. Boston_, iv. 384, with references. His pictures, together with those of Blackburn, Pelham, and Copley, richly preserve to us the look and costume of the better classes of New England during the provincial time. Cf. Wm. H. Whitmore’s _Notes on Peter Pelham_, Boston, 1867; Arthur Dexter’s paper on the “Fine Arts in Boston” in _Mem. Hist. Boston_, vol. iv., with references in the notes; A. T. Perkins on the portraits of Smybert and Blackburn in _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, Dec. 1878, p. 385, and May, 1879, p. 93. For historic costume see Dr. Edward Eggleston’s “Colonists at Home” in _The Century_, xxix. 882. It was when Copley was most in vogue that the habits of the upper classes reached in their dress that profusion of silk and satin, brocaded damask and ruffles, ermine and laces, velvet and gilt braid, which makes up the descriptions in Mr. Perkins’ enumeration of Copley’s portraits. (A. T. Perkins’ _Life and Works of J. S. Copley_, Boston, 1873. Cf. also Martha B. Amory’s “John Singleton Copley” in _Scribner’s Monthly_, March, 1881, and her _Domestic and Artistic life of Copley_, Boston, 1882.)]

The Rhode Islanders ejected (1732) Jenckes, their governor, because he tried to stay their wild course in the emission of paper money. The lieutenant-governor, John Wanton, led the opponents of Jenckes, and secured the election of his brother, William Wanton, and two years later succeeded to the chair himself.

George Berkeley, in England, had been pronouncing the age barren of every glorious theme. Perhaps to transcend this level he conceived a project of establishing a college in Bermuda for Indians and missionaries.[279] So he came over to Newport (1729) to buy American lands, and await or perhaps force a rise on them. The death of George I. had crossed his pious scheme by drying up his fountains. Newport was now a thriving town of 5,000 souls, the chief town in a colony of perhaps 18,000 inhabitants. It had an Episcopal church in which Berkeley sometimes preached, and to which he gave an organ. He had brought over with him a Scotch artist, John Smybert, and so the patron and his family, happy on the whole, though his glorious project had not fructified, came out of the canvas under Smybert’s pencil; and the picture went to Yale College, where we may see it now,[280] and afterwards so did his books, and the deed conveying his Newport farm,[281] when after two or three years he had gone back to England, a disappointed man.[282]

Not long afterwards another man with a mission ventured on a different project in the little colony. James Franklin, who had found it prudent to leave Massachusetts, when he told the august assembly that they did not do all they might to catch pirates, came to this nest of free-booters, and started a newspaper, the _Rhode Island Gazette_, the first in the colony, and saw it fail within a year.

When the Spanish war was coming on, in 1739, the plucky little colony put herself on a war footing. She built the “Tartar,” a war-sloop of 115 tons;[283] her merchants, the Wantons, the Malbones, and others, ran five privateers out to sea; and even her quakers found ways to help. Seven watch-towers were built along the coast, Fort George was garrisoned, and a battery frowned on Block Island.[284]

This follows an engraving, “T. Hudson, pinxt.; J. McArdell, fecit,” reproduced in J. C. Smith’s _Brit. Mezzotint Portraits_, p. 896. Cf. _Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p. 26; _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii., frontispiece.]

In Connecticut, on Saltonstall’s death in 1724, Joseph Talcott succeeded and held office during the rest of Belcher’s time.

From Popple’s _British Empire in America_ (1732).]

The rule by which good ends sanctified base means came to its limit. Belcher, who had not been without high support,[285] was removed on the 6th of May, 1741; when he had sufficiently indoctrinated his opponents in his own wily ways, and they had not hesitated to use them.

William Shirley, the governor who succeeded on the same day, was an English barrister, who had come to Boston some time before (about 1733-35) to seek his fortune. He looked about for offices in the gift of the home government, and began soliciting them one after another. When the Spanish war came on, he busied himself in prompting enlistment, and took care that the authorities in England should know it; and Mrs. Shirley, then in that country, had, to her husband’s advantage as it turned out, the ear of the Duke of Newcastle. Shirley was in Rhode Island acting upon the boundary question, which was then raised between Massachusetts and her neighbor, when his commission arrived, and he hastened to Boston to take the oath.

Shirley had some excellent qualities for political station. He was courtly and tactful, and when at a later day he entertained Washington he captivated the young Virginian. He was diligent in his duties, and knew how to retreat when he had advanced unadvisedly. He governed his temper, and was commonly wise, though he did not possess surpassing talents.[286] In his speech to the legislature he urged the strengthening of the defences of Boston, for the Spanish war still raged; and he touched without greatly clarifying the financial problem. He tried in a more civil way than his predecessor had followed to get his salary fixed; but he could not force a vote, and a tacit understanding arising that he should be sure annually of £1,000, he desisted from any further attempts to solve that vexed question. A month later, he went to Commencement at Cambridge, and delivered a Latin speech at the proper moment, which was doubtless talked over round the punch in the chambers, as it added one scholarly feature to a festival then somewhat riotously kept. There was more dignity at the Boston lecture, when Benjamin Colman preached, and when his sermon was printed it had in an appendix the address of the Boston ministers to the new governor, and his Excellency’s reply. Spencer Phips was retained in the chair of the lieutenant-governor, but a new collector of Boston came in with Sir Henry Frankland, the story of whose passion for the maid of a Marblehead inn is one of the romances of the provincial history of New England.[287]

Boston was now a vigorous town, and held probably for the next forty years a larger space in the view which Europe took of the New World than has belonged to her since. Forty topsail vessels were at this time building in her ship-yards. She was despatching to sea twice as many sail as New York, and Newport was far behind her. Fortunes were relatively large, and that of John Erving, the father of Shirley’s son-in-law, was perhaps the largest of its day. He earned a few dollars in ferrying passengers across to Cambridge on a Commencement Day; put them into fish for Lisbon, there into fruit for London, and the receipts into other commodities for the return voyages, until the round of barter, abundantly repeated, made him the rich man that he became, and one who could give tea to his guests. The privateers of the merchants brought royal interest on their outlay, as they captured goods from the French and Spanish traders. Yankee wit turned sometimes unpromising plunder to a gain. One vessel brought in “a bale of papal indulgencies,” taken from a Spanish prize. Fleet, the printer, bought them, and printed his ballads on their backs. Another Boston merchant, of Huguenot stock, had given the town a public hall. This benevolent but keen gentleman, of a limping gait, did not live long to add to the fortune which he inherited. The first use that Faneuil Hall was put to was when James Lovell, the schoolmaster and a writer in the local magazines, delivered a eulogy there on this same Peter Faneuil,[288] while the loyal Bostonians glanced from the speaker to the likeness of George II., which had already been hung on its walls.

Shirley with the rest saw that war with France could not be far off. There was preparation for it in the treaty with the Six Nations, which was made at Philadelphia in July, 1742. In August Shirley himself had treated with the eastern Indians at Fort St. George’s. The next year (1743) the line of western settlements in Massachusetts was strengthened by the occupation, under William Williams, of Poontoosuck, now Pittsfield, and Williams was later instructed to establish Fort Shirley (at Heath), Fort Pelham (at Rowe), and Fort Massachusetts (in Adams, near the Williamstown line).

In 1744 the war came.[289] The French, getting advices from Europe earlier, attacked Canseau before the English were aware of the hostile decision. Though France had published her declaration in March, the news did not reach Boston till the 2d of June. Men’s thoughts passed from the “Great Awakening” to the stern duties of a war. “The heavenly shower was over,” said Thomas Prince, who saw with regret what he thought a warfare with the devil pass by; and Fleet, the wit of the newspapers, pointed to an opportune comet, and called it “the most profitable itinerant preacher and friendly New Light that has yet appeared among us,” while all the pulpit orators viewed it after other and their own fashions. Perhaps the lingering puritanism saw an omen or a warning in the chimes just then set in the tower of Christ Church. A lottery in full success was not heinous enough in those days, it would seem, to be credited with all the divine rebukes that it might be now.[290]

There was danger on the coasts. The armed sloops of Rhode Island and Connecticut were cruising between Martha’s Vineyard and New Jersey, and the brigantines of Massachusetts watched the coast north of Cape Cod.[291] But the retaliatory stroke was soon to come in the expedition against Louisbourg.

Dr. Douglass, who had grown into prominence in Boston, prophesied the failure of a scheme which had the barest majority in the assembly, and the chances were certainly on his side: but a desire to show what could be done without the military aid of England aroused the country, and not a little unworthy hatred of Romanism helped on the cause. One parson at least was ready to take along with him a hatchet to hew down the altars of the papist churches. A company from Plymouth, under Sylvanus Cobb, was the earliest to reach Boston. Massachusetts mustered 3,250 men, and the transports which sailed out of Boston harbor with this force made a fleet of a hundred sail, under convoy of nine or ten armed vessels, the whole carrying not far from 200 cannon.

The reader must turn to another chapter for the progress of the siege.[292] Good fortune favored this time the bold as well as the brave. Word coming back to Boston for reinforcements, an express was sent to Captain Williams, at Fort Shirley, and in six days he reported in Boston with 74 men, and sailed on the 23d of June. Louisbourg, however, had already surrendered (June 16), two days after the Rhode Island sloop “Tartar”[293] and two other war-sloops had dispersed the flotilla which was speeding from Annapolis to its assistance. This was the only active force of Rhode Islanders in the campaign; her contingent of foot, which was intended to join the Connecticut regiment, did not reach the ground till after the surrender; but her privateers did good service elsewhere, meanwhile, having sent into Newport during the year a full score of prizes.

It was on a fast day, July 2d, that the news of the success reached Boston, and spread throughout the colonies, occasioning[294] exuberant rejoicing, which the ministers tempered as best they could with ascribing the conquest to the finger of God, shown “more clearly, perhaps,” as Charles Chauncy said, “than since the days of Joshua and the Judges.” Modern historians think that Douglass was right, and that extraordinary good luck was a chief reason of the success.

The colonies beyond the Hudson were now anxious to be partakers in the cost and in the burden of the future defence of the captured fortress, if they had not shared the danger and exhaustion of the victory.[295] Pennsylvania offered £4,000, New Jersey £2,000, and New York £3,000.

* * * * *

The victorious Pepperrell returned to Boston in June, 1746. Cannon from the batteries saluted the frigate which brought him. The governor welcomed him at the Castle and escorted him to the landing of the town, where the Cadets received him and led the way to the council chamber. Here addresses and congratulations were exchanged, and the successful general started for his home in Maine, meeting demonstrations of honor at every town on his way.

Shirley now resolved on further conquest, and plans were being arranged for an armament sufficient for the conquest of all New France, with the help this time of veterans from England, when news came of the speedy arrival of a large French fleet on the coast, with a mission of reprisals and devastation.[296] In August a thanksgiving for the victory at Culloden was held, and Thomas Prince spoke in the Old South in Boston. In September there was little giving of thanks, and there was much fear of the French admiral, D’Anville. Troops were pouring into Boston from the country. Douglass says he saw six or seven thousand of them on Boston Common. The defences of the harbor were being rapidly strengthened. All the coast lookouts were reëstablished, and shore batteries were manned. Rhode Island pushed work on her forts. Connecticut sent promises of large reinforcements, if the attack should fall on Boston. Every Frenchman was put under surveillance, and the times inciting to strong language, the General Court issued orders for greater publicity to be given to the act against profaneness. There was a fast to supplicate for mercy. Thomas Prince in his pulpit heard the windows of the meeting-house rattle with a rising storm. He prayed that it might destroy the French fleet. It did. Divided counsels, disappointments in plans, the sudden death of D’Anville, its commander, the suicide of his lieutenant, disorganized the purpose of the enemy; the waves and the rocks did the rest, and only a fragment of the great armament went staggering back to France. Boston breathed easily, and the hasty soldiers marched home to their harvests; and when news came of the compact which George Clinton had made with the Six Nations at Albany, in August and September, hope and courage prevailed, though the tidings from Fort Massachusetts were distressing. Then came other massacres, and Indians were reported prowling through northern Hampshire. It had been intended to make a demonstration against Crown Point in the autumn. Provisions and munitions were hurried from Boston; Massachusetts men gathered at Albany. Winter came, disconcerting plans, and discouragement ensued.[297]

The next year Boston had a taste of the old-world despotism to which it had not been accustomed. Commodore Knowles, commanding a part of the fleet which had assisted in the capture of Louisbourg, came to Boston. Some of Knowles’ men deserted, and as enlistments did not bring what recruits the fleet needed, the commodore sent a press-gang to town (November 17, 1747), which seized whomever they found about the wharves. Boston was enraged. A mob gathered, and demanded that some of the officers of the fleet, who were in town, should be detained as hostages. The air grew murkier, and Shirley became frightened and fled to the Castle. The legislature tried to settle the difficulty, and Knowles threatened to bombard the town, unless his officers were released. The General Court denounced the riot, but signified to the commodore the necessity of redress. Under its order, the officers returned to the fleet, and Knowles, finding the business had become dangerous, let most if not all of his recruits go, and set sail, but not till the governor, gathering courage from the control over the mob which a town meeting had seemed to acquire, had come back to town, when he was escorted to his house by the same militia that had refused his summons before.

It was a violent reaction for Shirley from the enthusiasm of the Louisbourg victory, thus to experience the fickleness of what he called the “mobbishness” of the people; and his trust in the town meeting and the assembly was not strengthened when the representatives reduced his allowance, on pretence of the burdens which the war had brought. Shirley intimated that the 200,000 population of the province and a capital with 20,000 inhabitants did not mark a people incompetent to pay their rulers equably; but his intimations went for little. The colony was not in very good humor. England, in making the treaty of Aix la Chapelle (October 7, 1748), had agreed to restore Louisbourg to the French, and leave the bounds as before the war. There were discordant opinions among the advisers of the government touching the real value of Louisbourg as a military post; but it was unfortunate that to redress the balance in Europe England had to relinquish the conquests of her colonists. It may not have been wholly without regard to the quelling of the New England pride, which might become dangerous,—since Sam. Adams was pluming his political rhetoric in the _Independent Advertiser_ at this time,—that it was thought best by that treaty to give to the province an intimation of the superior authority of the Crown.[298] The province was not without its own power of warning, for Hugh Orr, a young Scotchman, manufactured about this time at Bridgewater 500 stands of arms for the province of Massachusetts Bay; which are said to have been carried off by the British from Castle William when they evacuated Boston in March, 1776. They are supposed to have been the first made in America.[299]

Meanwhile, Horatio Walpole, the auditor-general, with an eye to his own personal advantage, had brought forward a project of the Board of Trade for overruling the charters of the colonies; but the strenuous opposition of William Bollan and Eliakim Palmer for Massachusetts and Connecticut made the advocates of the measure waver, and the movement failed. Shirley was devising a plan of his own, which looked to such an extension of the parliamentary prerogative as had not yet been attempted. His scheme was to build and maintain a line of posts at the eastward, the expense of which all the colonies should share under a tax laid by Parliament.[300] In the pursuit of this plan, Shirley obtained leave of absence, and went to England (1749), while the conduct of affairs was left in the hands of Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor, a man of experience and good intentions, but not of signal ability. Thomas Hutchinson, James Otis, and two others meanwhile went to Falmouth to engage the eastern Indians, who were far from quiet, in a treaty, which was finally brought to a conclusion on October 16, 1749. In the following winter (1749-50), Sylvanus Cobb was in Boston fitting out his sloop for a hostile raid through the Bay of Fundy; but Cornwallis at Halifax thought the preparations for it had become known to the French, and the raid was not accomplished.

The next year (1750), Parliament touched the provinces roughly. The English tanners wished for bark, and they could get it cheap if the English land-owners could sell their wood to the furnaces, and the furnaces would buy it if they could find a sufficient market for their iron and steel, as they could do if they had no rivals in America. It was a chain of possibilities that Parliament undertook to make realities, and so passed an act forbidding the running of slitting and rolling mills in the colonies, and Charles Townshend, who introduced the bill, found no opposer in Shirley. The bold utterances that Jonathan Mayhew was making in indignant Boston carried a meaning that did not warn, as it might, the Board of Trade in England.

Shirley, after four years’ absence, during which he had been employed in an unsuccessful mission to Paris about the Acadian boundaries, came back to Boston in 1753, to be kindly received, but to feel in bringing with him a young Catholic wife, whom he had married in Paris, the daughter of his landlord, that he gave her the position of the first lady in the province not without environing himself and her with great embarrassment, in a community which, though it had departed widely from the puritanism of the fathers, was still intolerant of much that makes man urbane and merry. While Shirley had been gone, the good town had been much exercised over an attempt to introduce the drama, and the performance of Otway’s _Orphan_ at a coffee-house in King Street had stirred the legislature to pass a law against stage plays. The journals of Goelet[301] and others give us some glimpses of life, however, far from prudish, and show that human nature was not altogether suppressed, nor all of the good people quite as stiff as Blackburn was now painting them.

Notwithstanding his hymeneal entanglement, Shirley was unquestionably the most powerful Englishman at this time in America. The fortuitous success of his Louisbourg expedition had given him a factitious military reputation.[302] A test of it seemed imminent. For the sixth time in eighty years the frontiers were now ravaged by the savages. Pepperrell was sent to pacify the eastern Indians. The French were stretching a cordon of posts from the Atlantic to the gulf which alarmed Shirley, and he doubted if anything was safe to the eastward beyond the Merrimac, unless the French could be pushed back from Nova Scotia. He feared New Hampshire would be lost, and with it the supply of masts for the royal navy. A road had been cut along the Westfield River through Poontoosuck (Pittsfield) to Albany, and Shirley planned defences among the Berkshire Hills.

At this juncture a conference of the colonies was called at Albany in 1754, which had been commanded through the governor of New York by the Board of Trade. The reader will find its history traced on a later page. Hutchinson in July brought back to Boston a draft of the plan of action. In the autumn the legislature was considering the question, while Franklin was in Boston (October-December) conferring with Shirley and discussing plans. Boston held a town meeting and denounced the Albany plan, and in December (14th) the legislature definitely rejected it, as all the other colonies in due time did. Rhode Island, particularly, was very vigilant, lest an attempt might be made to abridge her charter-privileges. Connecticut established its first press in this very year, which with the press of the other colonies, was lukewarm or hostile to the plan.[303]

Shirley had not attended the congress. He had left Boston in June (1754) on the province frigate “Massachusetts,” with the forces under John Winslow to build a fort on the Kennebec, which was completed on the 3d of September and called Fort Halifax. On his way he stopped at Falmouth, and on the 28th of June he had a conference with the Norridgewock Indians, and on July 5th another with the Penobscots. Accompanied by some young Indians who were entrusted to the English for education, the governor was once more in Boston on the 9th of September, where he was received with due honor.

This expedition and the congress were but the prelude to eventful years. When Henry Pelham died, on the 6th of March of this year, his king, in remembrance of the wise and peaceful policy of his minister, exclaimed, “Now I shall have no more peace!” For the struggle which was impending, New England had grown in strength and preparation, and had had much inuring to the trials of predatory warfare. She had increased about sixfold in population, while New York and Virginia had increased fivefold. The newer colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland had fairly outstripped these older ones, and numbered now nine times as large a population as they had sixty-five years earlier. The Carolinas and Georgia had increased in a ratio far more rapid. Massachusetts at this time probably had 45,000 on its alarm list, and in train-bands over 30,000 stood ready for the call.[304] John Adams, when teaching a school in Worcester the next year, ventured to write to a friend, “If we can remove the turbulent Gallicks, our people will in another century become more numerous than England itself.”

In the spring of 1755 Shirley went to Alexandria, in Virginia, being on the way from March 30 till April 12, to meet the other governors, and to confer with General Braddock upon the organization of that general’s disastrous campaign. When the news of its fatal ending reached New England it gave new fervor to the attempts, in which she was participating, of attacking the French on the Canada side,[305] and the war seemed brought nearer home to her people when, by the death of Braddock, the supreme command devolved on the Massachusetts governor.[306] On the 6th of November, at Thomas Hutchinson’s instigation and in expression of their good-will at Shirley’s promotion, the General Court passed a vote of congratulation.

The autumn had been one of excitement in Boston.[307] The forces of nature were conspiring to add to the wonderment of the hour. A part of the same series of convulsions which overturned Lisbon on November 1st and buried Sir Henry Frankland in the ruins, to be extricated by that Agnes Surriage whose romantic story has already been referred to, had been experienced in New England at four o’clock in the morning of the 18th of the same month, with a foreboding of a greater danger; but the commotion failed in the end to do great damage to its principal town, then esteemed, if we may believe the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, finer than any town in England excepting London. People looked to the leading man of science in New England of that time for some exposition of this mighty power, and Prof. John Winthrop gave at Cambridge his famous lecture on earthquakes, which was shortly printed.[308] The electrical forces of nature had not long before revealed themselves to Franklin with his kite, and it was in November or December that the news was exciting comment in Boston, turning men’s thoughts from the weariness of the war.

That war had not prospered under Shirley, and with a suspicion that he had been pushed beyond his military capacity he was recalled to England, ostensibly to give advice on its further conduct. He had found that Massachusetts could not be led to tax herself directly for the money which he needed, and only pledged herself to reimburse, if required, the king’s military chest for £35,000, which Shirley drew from it. A scale of bounties had failed to induce much activity in enlistments, and the forces necessary for the coming campaign were gathering but slowly.[309] This was the condition of affairs when Shirley left for England, carrying with him the consoling commendations of the General Court.

Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor, succeeded to the executive chair in Massachusetts at a time when even Boston was not felt to be secure, so fortunate or skilful were the weaker French in a purpose that was not imperilled by the jealousies which misguided the stronger English. It was now problematical if Loudon, the new commander-in-chief, was to bring better auguries. In January of the next year (1757), he came to Boston to confer with the New England governors. The New England colonies now agreed to raise 4,000 new troops. Meanwhile Phips had died in April (4th) in the midst of the war preparations, and Pepperrell, as president of the council, next directed affairs till Thomas Pownall,[310] who had been commissioned governor, and who had reached Halifax on the fleet which brought Lord Howe’s troops, arrived in Boston, August 3d, on the very day when Montcalm on Lake George was laying siege to Fort William Henry, which in a few days surrendered. The news did not reach Pownall till he had pushed forward troops to Springfield on their way to relieve the fort. He put Pepperrell at once in command of the militia,[311] and a large body of armed men gathered under him on the line of the Connecticut;[312] for there was ignorance at the time of Montcalm’s inability to advance because of desertions, and of the weakening of his force by reason of the details he had made to guard and transport the captured stores. Messengers were hurried to the other colonies to arouse them. John Adams, then a young man teaching in Worcester, kept from the pulpit by reason of his disbelief in Calvinism, stirred by the times, with the hope some day of commanding a troop of horse or a company of foot, was one of these messengers sent to Rhode Island, and he tells us how struck he was with the gayety and social aspect of Sunday in that colony, compared with the staid routine which characterized the day in Massachusetts.[313]

Massachusetts had enrolled 7,000 men for the campaign. Connecticut had put 5,000 in the field, and Rhode Island and New Hampshire a regiment each. Massachusetts had further maintained a guard of 600 men along her frontiers. The cost of all these preparations necessitated a tax of half the income of personal and landed property.

In a commercial sense almost crushed,[314] in a political sense the people were as buoyant as ever. When Loudon sent orders to quarter a regiment of the British troops on the people, the legislature forbade it, and grew defiant, and nothing could pacify them but the withdrawal of the order. The commander-in-chief, however he stormed in New York, found it expedient to yield when he learned of the fury his order was exciting in a colony upon whose vigor the home government was largely depending for the successful prosecution of the war. This had now fallen into the hands of Pitt, and he at once recalled Loudon, who chanced to be in Boston, parleying with the legislature about raising troops, when an express brought him his recall. Abercrombie, who succeeded, was even a worse failure; but there was a burst of light at the eastward. Amherst had captured Louisbourg in July (1758),[315] and bringing his troops by water to Boston had landed them on September 13. Never was there so brilliant array of war seen in the harbor as the war-ships presented, or on Boston Common where the troops were encamped. Amherst delayed but three days for rest, when on the 16th of September he began his march westward to join the humbled Abercrombie. At Worcester the troops halted, and John Adams tells us of the “excellent order and discipline” which they presented, and of the picturesqueness of the Scotch in their plaids, as this army of four thousand men filled his ardent gaze.

During the winter recruiting was going on in Boston with success for the fleet wintering at Louisbourg.[316] In the campaign of the next year (1759), Massachusetts and Connecticut put at least a sixth of all their males able to bear arms into the field. They were in part in the army which Amherst led by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and among them were some of the veterans which Pepperrell had command in 1745 at Louisbourg,—Pepperrell who was to die during the progress of the campaign, on the 6th of July, at Kittery in his sixty-fourth year. Another portion went with Pownall to the Penobscot region, or followed him there, and assisted in the building of Fort Pownall, which was completed in July (1759).[317] The reader must turn to another chapter[318] for the brilliant success of Wolfe at Quebec, which virtually ended the war.

George the Second hardly heard of the victories which crowned his minister’s policy. He died October 25, 1760, but the news of his death did not reach Boston till December 27th. He had already effected a change in the government of Massachusetts. Pownall, who had made interest with the Board of Trade to be transferred to the executive chair of South Carolina, left Boston in June, taking with him the good wishes of a people whom he had governed more liberally and considerately than any other of the royal governors.[319] Two months later (August 2, 1760), Francis Bernard, who had been governor of New Jersey,[320] reached Boston as his successor. He showed some want of tact in his first speech, in emphasizing the advantages of subjection to the home government, and gave the House opportunity to rejoin that but for the sacrifice in blood and expense which these grateful colonies had experienced, Great Britain might now have had no colonies to defend. Notwithstanding so untoward a beginning, Bernard seems to have thought well of the people, and reported fair phrases of encomium to the Lords of Trade.[321]

A few weeks after Bernard’s arrival Stephen Sewall, the chief justice, died (September 11, 1760). Thomas Hutchinson was now the most conspicuous man in New England, and he had put all New England under obligations by his strenuous and successful efforts to better their monetary condition. A train of events followed, which might possibly have been averted, if, instead of appointing Hutchinson to the chief-justiceship, as he did, Bernard had raised one of the other justices, and filled the vacancy with Col. James Otis, then Speaker of the House, father of the better known patriot of that name, and whose appointment had been contemplated, it is said, by Shirley. Hutchinson was already lieutenant-governor, succeeding Spencer Phips, and was soon to be judge of probate also for Suffolk,—a commingling of official power that could but incite remark.

The younger Otis was soon to become conspicuous, in a way that might impress even Bernard. There were certain moneys forfeited to the king for the colony’s use, arising from convictions for smuggling under the Sugar Act; the province had never applied for them, and had neglected its opportunities in that respect. The House instructed Otis to sue the custom-house officers. The superior bench under the lead of Hutchinson decided against the province, and it did not pass without suspicion that Bernard had placed Hutchinson on that bench to secure this verdict.

An event still more powerful in inciting discontent was approaching. Charles Paxton, who had been surveyor of Boston since 1752, had, in his seeking for smuggled goods, used general search warrants,—unreturnable, known as “writs of assistance,” and of course liable to great abuse. It seems probable that this process had been so far sparingly used, and there had been no manifest discontent. Upon the king’s death, the existing writs had only a six months’ later continuance, when new applications must be made under the new reign. These new applications came at a time when the public mind was much exercised, and there was a determination to question the legality of such unrestrained power as the writs implied. The hearing was to be before the court of which Hutchinson was now the chief. Jeremy Gridley appeared for the king, and the younger Otis with Oxenbridge Thacher for the petitioners. The court deferred its decision, but in November, 1761, the case was again discussed. The court meanwhile had had advices from England, and the writs were sustained. In the discontent growing out of this proceeding, we may find the immediate beginning of the controversy between the provinces and the Crown, which resulted in the American Revolution. The subsidence of the war left men time to think deeply of these intestine griefs, and when the Peace of Paris in February, 1763, finally dissipated the danger of arms, events had gone far to shape themselves for bringing another renewal of battle, not with the French, but with the mother country.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

NEW ENGLAND IN GENERAL.—Of Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620 to 1698_, mention has been made in another volume,[322] and, as the title shows, it touches only the few earlier years of the period now under consideration. The book was published in London in 1702, and a solitary forerunner of the edition reached Boston, as we know, October 29 of the same year. It was the most considerable work which had been produced in the British colonies, and was in large part an unshapely conglomerate of previous tracts and treatises. Neal, Mather’s successor in the field, while praising his diligence in amassing the material of history, expressed the opinion of all who would divest scholarship of meretriciousness when he criticised its “puns and jingles,”[323] and said, “Had the doctor put his materials a little closer together, and disposed them in another method, his work would have been more acceptable.”[324] But Mather without Matherism would lose in his peculiar literary flavor; we laugh and despise, while his books nevertheless find a chief place on the shelves of our New England library. Mather was still young when the _Magnalia_ was printed, but he stood by his methods and manner a quarter of a century later, and in publishing (1726) his _Manuductio ad Ministerium_[325] he defended his labored and bedizened style against, as he says, the blades of the clubs and coffee-houses, who set up for critics. He also belabored Oldmixon in a similar fashion, when that compiler both borrowed the doctor’s labors and berated his reputation, and Mather called him, in his inveterate manner, Old Nick’s son.[326] Sibley not unfairly remarks that these peculiarities of Mather’s style were probably almost as absurd to his contemporaries as to ourselves;[327] and very likely it helped to create something of that curiosity respecting him, which Prince tells us he found in Europe at a later day.

In any estimate of Cotton Mather we may pass by the eulogy of his colleague Joshua Gee,[328] and the _Life of Cotton Mather_[329] by his son Samuel, as the efforts of a predisposing and uncritical friendliness. We are not quite sure how far removed from the fulsome flattery, if not insincerity, of funeral sermons in those days was the good word upon his contemporary which came from Benjamin Colman.

With the coming of the present century we might suppose the last personal resentment of those who knew Cotton Mather had gone, and as an historical character it might well be claimed that a dispassionate judgment was due to him. When James Savage edited Winthrop’s journal, the public were told how Cotton Mather should be contemned; and the tale was not untruthful, but it was one-sided. Quincy in his _History of Harvard University_ could give no very laudatory estimate of the chronic and envious grumbler against the college.[330] When Dr. Chandler Robbins wrote the _History of the Second Church_ of Boston, he said all he could, and in a kindly spirit, to qualify the derogatory estimate then prevalent respecting his predecessor; and W. B. O. Peabody in his _Life of Cotton Mather_[331] tempered his judgment by saying, “There is danger lest in our disgust at his fanaticism and occasional folly we should deny him the credit which he actually deserves.” His professed defenders, too, lighten their approval with pointing out his defects. Thus does Samuel G. Drake in a rather feeble memoir in the _N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._ (vol. vi.), and in the 1855 edition of the _Magnalia_. Dr. A. H. Quint in the _Congregational Quarterly_, 1859, and Dr. Henry M. Dexter in the _Memorial Hist. of Boston_, vol. ii., incline to the eulogistic side, but with some reservations. Mr. Samuel F. Haven in the _Report of the Amer. Antiq. Soc._, April, 1874, turned away the current of defamation which every revival of the Salem witchcraft question seems to guide against the young minister of that day. The estimates of Moses Coit Tyler in his _Hist. of Amer. Literature_ (vol. ii.), and John Langdon Sibley in his _Harvard Graduates_ (vol. iii.), show that the disgust, so sweeping fifty years ago, is still recognized amid all efforts to judge Mather lightly.[332] Mankind is tender in its judgment of the average man, when a difference of times exists. The historical sense, however, is rigid in its scrutiny of those who posture as index-fingers to their contemporaries; and it holds such men accountable to the judgments of all time. Great men separate the perennial and sweet in the traits of their epoch from the temporary and base,—a function Cotton Mather had no conception of.

* * * * *

The next general account of the New England colonies after the _Magnalia_, and covering the first thirty years of the present period, was Daniel Neal’s _History of New-England containing an account of the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the country to 1700_. _With a map, and an appendix containing their present charter, their ecclesiastical discipline, and their municipal-laws_. In 2 vols. (London. 1720.)[333]

Dr. Watts, writing to Cotton Mather, Feb., 1719-20, of Neal’s history, said that he had hoped to find it “an abstract of the lives and spiritual experiences of those great and good souls that planted and promoted the gospel among you, and those most remarkable providences, deliverances, and answers to prayers that are recorded in your _Magnalia Christi_, but I am disappointed of my expectations; for he has written with a different view, and has taken merely the task of an historian upon him.” Watts took Neal to task personally for his freedom about the early persecution; but Neal only answered that the fidelity of an historian required it of him.[334] Neal himself in his preface (p. iv.) acknowledges his freedom in treating of the mistakes into which the government fell.

Prince in the preface to his _Chronological History of New England_ says: “In 1720 came out Mr. Neal’s History of New England.... He has fallen into many mistakes of facts which are commonly known among us, some of which he seems to derive from Mr. Oldmixon’s account of New England in his British Empire in America, and which mistakes[335] are no doubt the reason why Mr. Neal’s history is not more generally read among us; yet, considering the materials this worthy writer was confined to, and that he was never here, it seems to me scarce possible that any under his disadvantages should form a better. In comparing him with the authors from whence he draws, I am surprised to see the pains he has taken to put the materials into such a regular order; and to me it seems as if many parts of his work cannot be mended.”

* * * * *

Rogers and Fowle, printers in Boston, who were publishing a new magazine, begun in 1743, called _The American Magazine_, announced that they would print in it by instalment a new history of the English colonies. They changed the plan subsequently so as to issue the book in larger type, in quarterly numbers, and in this form there appeared in January, 1747, the first number, with a temporary title, which read: _A summary, historical and political, of the first planting, progressive improvements and present state of the British settlements in North America; with some transient accounts of the bordering French and Spanish settlements. By W. D., M. D., No. 1. To be continued_. Boston, 1747.[336] The author soon became known as Dr. William Douglass, the Scotch physician living in Boston,—“honest and downright Dr. Douglass,” as Adam Smith later chose to call him. He had drawn (pp. 235-38), in contrast to Admiral Warren, a severe character of Admiral Knowles, whose conduct, which occasioned the impressment riot then recent, was fresh in memory. Knowles seems to have instituted a suit for libel, which led to a rather strained amend by Douglass in the preface to the first volume, when the numbers were collected in 1749, and were issued with a title much the same as before, _A Summary, historical and political, of the first planting,_ etc., _containing_—here follow five heads.[337] The character which he had given of Knowles, he says, was written out of passionate warmth and indiscretion, merely “in affection to Boston and the country of New England, his _altera patria_,” and then adds that he has suppressed it in the completed volume.[338] The second volume is dated 1751, and Douglass died in 1752.[339]

To his second volume (1751) he adds what he calls “a supplement to the first volume and introduction to the second volume,” in which he hints at the offence he had given Shirley and Knowles—the latter’s suit for libel forcing him to recant, as we have seen—by saying, “If facts related in truth offend any governor, commodore, or other great officer,” the author “will not renounce impartiality and become sycophant.” He further charges upon “the great man of the province for the time being,” as he calls Shirley, the “impeding, or rather defeating, this public-spirited, laborious undertaking,” as he characterizes his own book.

A large part of the work is given to New England, which he knew best; but his knowledge was at all times subservient to his prejudices, which were rarely weak. He is often amusing in his self-sufficiency, and not unentertaining; but he who consults the book is puzzled with his digressions and with his disorderly arrangement, and there is no index to relieve him.[340] Hutchinson struck the estimate which has not since been disputed: it was his “foible to speak well or ill of men very much as he had a personal friendship for them, or had a personal difference with them.”[341] Prof. Tyler in his _Hist. of American Literature_[342] has drawn his character more elaborately than others.[343] His book, while containing much that is useful to the student, remains a source of uncertainty in respect to all statements not elsewhere confirmed, and yet of his predecessors on New England history Douglass has the boldness to say that they are “beyond all excuse intolerably erroneous.”[344]

A wider interest than that of ecclesiastical record attaches to a book which all students of New England history have united in thinking valuable. This is the work of Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Middleborough, Mass., who published at Boston in 1777 a first volume, which was called _A History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination of Christians called Baptists_.[345] This volume brought the story down to 1690 only, but an appendix summarized subsequent history down to the date of the book. In the second volume, which appeared at Providence in 1784, the title was changed to _A Church History of New England, vol. ii., extending from 1690 to 1784_. The same title was preserved in the third volume, which was published in Boston in 1796, bringing the narrative down to that date. In the preface to this volume the author complained of the many typographical errors in the first volume, and professed that though there had been private dislikes of the work by some “because their own schemes of power and gain were exposed thereby,” he knew not of any public dispute about “its truth of facts.” The whole work has been reprinted under the title of the original first volume, with notes by David Weston, and published in two volumes by the Backus Historical Society at Newton, Mass., in 1871.[346]

Miss Hannah Adams published at Dedham, Mass., in 1799, a single volume, _Summary History of New England_. She does not profess to have done more than abridge the usual printed sources, as they were then understood, and to have made some use of MS. material, particularly respecting the history of Rhode Island.

This follows an oil portrait by Alexander in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. Hannah Adams was born at Medfield, in 1755, and died at Brookline, Mass., Nov. 15, 1831; and she was the first person interred at Mount Auburn.]

It is the fourth and last published volume of Dr. Palfrey’s _History of New England_ (Boston, 1875) which comes within the period of the present chapter, bringing the story, however, down only to 1741, but a continuation is promised from a MS. left by the author, and edited by General F. W. Palfrey, his son, which will complete the historian’s plan by continuing the narrative to the opening of the war of independence. This fourth volume is amply fortified with references and notes, in excess of the limitations which governed the earlier ones. The author says in his preface that he may be thought in this respect “to have gone excessively into details, and I cannot dispute [he adds] the justness of the criticism; such at present is the uncontrollable tendency of my mind.”

The editor is indebted to Gen. F. W. Palfrey for the excellent photograph after which this engraving is made.]

In 1866 Dr. Palfrey published a popular abridgment of his first three volumes in two smaller ones. These were reissued in August, 1872, with a third, and in 1873 with a fourth, which completed the abridgment of his larger work, and carried the story from the accession of Shirley to power down to the opening of the military history of the American Revolution. In this admirably concise form, reissued in 1884, with a thorough index, the work of the chief historian of New England is known as _A compendious History of New England from the Discovery by Europeans to the first general Congress of the Anglo-American Colonies_,—the last summarized chapter in the work not being recognized in the title.[347]

MASSACHUSETTS.—For this as well as for the period embraced in the third volume of the present history,[348] Thomas Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts Bay_ is of the highest importance. Hutchinson says that he was impelled to write the history of the colony from observing the repeated destruction of ancient records in Boston by fire, and he complains that the descendants of some of the first settlers will neither use themselves nor let others use the papers which have descended to them. He seems, however, to have had the use of the papers of the elder Elisha Cooke. He acknowledges the service which the Mather library, begun by Increase Mather, and in Hutchinson’s time owned by Samuel Mather, who had married Hutchinson’s sister, was to him.