Listen on: iTunes Subscribe on Android Stitcher and more

 

Samuel Gorton

Samuel Gorton was pretty much an anarchist, and someone who espoused all the most radical religious views of his day.  He agitated in every town he went to, until even Roger Williams couldn’t tolerate him.  He was getting popular, though, so a group of Rhode Islanders (including Benedict Arnold’s grandfather) allowed Massachusetts to annex a portion of Rhode Island.  They drove Gorton out.  He bought land from Miantonomo in an area controlled by Narragansett tributaries, and then Massachusetts convinced those tributaries to switch their allegiance to the English.  Then, they could capture Gorton, and arrest him.

So, they did, and ultimately exiled him.

Miantonomo

The conflict over Gorton and the tributaries caused a clash with Miantonomo, who began attacking Uncas.  The English feared an attack, so they sentenced him to death for breaking the Hartford treaty.

 

Transcript

In 1643, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, Saybrook and New Haven joined forces to form the United Colonies of New England, or the New England Confederation.  As war in England raged, the colonists couldn’t expect support from home, and they were still worried about power struggles with the French, Dutch and Narragansetts, so they signed a treaty with each other to form a “firm and perpetual league and amity.”

Introduction

The federation’s government would be formed by two commissioners from each colony, which would meet annually, or more often if necessary.  The commissioners would fix quotas for men and expenses during wartime, would arbitrate disputes with foreign powers and other colonies, would ensure the extradition of all fugitives, and would regulate Indian affairs.

The formation of the federation had a number of tangible effects.  It finally gave Massachusetts and the other Puritan settlements the same jurisdictional authority over the Narragansetts that Connecticut enjoyed under the terms of the Hartford Treaty.  It dissuaded people from forming new, independent settlements, and it encouraged existing independent settlements to submit to Massachusetts.  These settlements included Exeter and its neighboring towns, which had previously resisted Massachusetts authority.  The union provided for the settling of inter-colonial disputes, as well as the return of fugitives across colony lines.

Rhode Island, that “place of the otherwise-minded,” was excluded, and it was in large part this exclusion which prompted Roger Williams to go to London to apply for a Charter to protect the independence of the Rhode Island settlements of Providence, Portsmouth and Newport.  The New England Confederation wanted to expand into Rhode Island and take over, and Roger Williams really didn’t have any legally binding claim to the territory.  He and others had simply bought it from the Narragansetts.  As we’ve seen so many times before, that left them vulnerable, and in the face of an expansionist United Colonies, it was time for Williams to solidify his claim.

Puritan expansion wasn’t the only motivation for Williams’s patent application, though.  In 1643, a man named William Coddington was trying to take over Rhode Island internally.  He was a refugee from the Antinomian Controversy, and had led a group of fellow exiles, including Anne Hutchinson, herself, to found a new settlement.  They’d set up the town of Portsmouth on land Williams had helped them buy from the Narragansetts, and Coddington had been named “Judge” of the community, in the Biblical sense.  This meant he was, effectively, their leader.  Within a couple years, though he had turned out to be too despotic for the majority of Hutchinson’s followers, so a group of settlers, including Hutchinson, had deposed Coddington, who then took his own followers South to establish the settlement of Newport, where he was elected Judge again.  But, Coddington wasn’t ready to give up on controlling Portsmouth, so, a year later, he consolidated the two settlements, and made himself governor.  This put him in charge of the majority of Rhode Island, and instead of being Roger Williams’s refugee, it made him his rival.  He clearly had ambitions of taking control of the whole colony.  So by 1643, as Massachusetts was working to take over Rhode Island externally, Coddington was threatening to take control internally.

So, Williams went to London, and met with the Earl of Warwick’s Committee for Foreign Plantations to apply for a patent, and when he did, Massachusetts agent Thomas Shepherd tried to stop him.  Fortunately, though, with Vane’s help, Williams won, granting the colony legal recognition from the mother country, and keeping it safe from Massachusetts’s intended expansion.  It was a big, and lucky, victory.

When Williams returned to America, though, the majority of settlers were actually unhappy that he’d gotten the patent.  The patent gave Roger Williams control over all of Rhode Island, and by this time, two other people wanted that control.  One was Coddington, and the other was Samuel Gorton.

And, because Gorton will be central to the events of the rest of this episode, it’s probably a good time to properly introduce New England’s biggest rabble rouser.

Samuel Gorton was born in Manchester, and was moderately educated in law.  Gorton had been mentored by radically unorthodox clergy, three ministers in particular, and had adopted all the most extreme of their views.  And without discussing the theologies of his mentors in too much depth, I’ll just give you a sampling of the most unorthodox of their beliefs.  They didn’t support tithes, didn’t think the Bible was the final authority on religious matters, one didn’t even believe in the divinity of Jesus, they all had connections to the Quakers, one encouraged lay administration of sacraments, one argued against the necessity of baptism and Sabbath observation, and one agreed with the Ranter movement that there was no such thing as immorality on Earth, that sin was only a product of the imagination, and that private ownership of property was wrong.  The ranter movement was known for its members’ tendency to public nudity, and extreme libertine tendencies, and was a part of the Familist movement, or Family of Love, which had been founded in the Netherlands by David George of Delft, which is a cult-leader name if I’ve ever heard one, but spread farther and faster in England than anywhere else.  We don’t have many documents by the Familists, so we don’t know exactly what they believed, or how far their beliefs went.  We have a lot of documents about them by other people, though, and those documents accuse familists of pretty much every heresy out there, as well as behaviors like wife-swapping, and the claims of David George of Delft to be the messiah.  We also know that some of their beliefs evolved into Quakerism.  Suffice it to say, though, Familism took every doctrine of the Reformation, and twisted it into something that even the Reformation’s strongest advocates couldn’t support.  And as an individual, Samuel Gorton did exactly that, too.

All three of Gorton’s mentors would go on to strongly support Cromwell, with two of them serving as chaplains in the New Model Army, and the other working from home to send a Quaker and a regicide to Parliament.  Meanwhile, they sent Samuel Gorton to America.

Samuel Gorton had come to Massachusetts at the height of the Antinomian Controversy, but watching views much less radical than his own be quashed, he knew Massachusetts wasn’t for him, so he moved to the more-tolerant Plymouth.  It wasn’t long, though, before Plymouth fined him 18 pounds and gave him 14 days to leave the colony, not just because of his views, but also because of his behavior.  He was actively hostile to the colony’s courts and magistrates, and just bothered and offended pretty much everyone.  He had added to his following a little bit, though, and at this point he had five disciples.

Samuel Gorton and his five followers had then moved to Portsmouth, where they immediately started to politically agitate, calling the local magistrates “just asses.”  Coddington’s Court had ordered him and one of his disciples to be publicly flogged and banished.  Roger Williams allowed him to move to Providence, but he again continued his political and religious agitation, until even the ultra-tolerant Roger Williams wanted him gone.  He’d picked up a few more followers in Providence, though, and with a now-strong following, while Roger Williams was in England, Gorton went to the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo, and bought some land in Patuxet, nearby.  There, he established a settlement, and began to grow his following until he had a substantial number of “disciples.”

So when Williams returned, a huge percent of the population either wanted Coddington or Gorton to be in charge of Rhode Island, but Williams’s patent put him in charge.  So, the colony split into two factions: those who supported Roger Williams and his patent, and those who opposed the patent – and that was the larger group.  Charismatic and belligerent, Gorton easily maneuvered his way to become the leader of the larger faction, and then, though this had started as a legal-political battle, he used the conflict to spread his own theological beliefs by introducing them to the debate.

He said there should be no educated clergy, no government, no outward expressions of faith, no sacraments.  The inner spirit was the only true authority, and it was present in all individuals.  Conversion was nothing more than becoming willing to follow the inner spirit.  All men were equal, and any system with any hierarchy whatsoever denied the true priesthood of all believers.  The thing about Gorton’s beliefs is that they didn’t just come out of nowhere.  They were, in fact, a pretty natural example of what would happen if someone took Reformation ideology, but left out the Bible.  All of his core concepts could be traced back to Calvin’s criticisms of the Catholic Church, but he’d taken them so far that he explicitly contradicted things Jesus said in the Bible, and fully rejected the concepts of intellectualism, education and authority.

Gorton’s popularity skyrocketed, and soon he had enough followers that Williams couldn’t push them out.  Williams ordered his followers to remain peaceful, but his faction’s options were dwindling.   Gorton was using pseudo-democratic rhetoric to tear Rhode Island apart, and he was winning.  Williams’s faction’s best bet was to get help from Massachusetts.  So, thirteen members of Williams’s faction, but not Williams, himself, petitioned the General Court to ask for a military contingent to help push Gorton out.  In response to the petition, Massachusetts hinted that they would only help if they were given jurisdiction over Patuxet.  Massachusetts definitely wanted to get rid of Gorton’s men, but they also wanted to expand their territory into Rhode Island.  Owning Patuxet would give Massachusetts a base for military operations against the Narragansetts, if need be, and would be another step toward bringing Rhode Island into line with the rest of New England colonies.  Under normal circumstances, this would be a terrible deal for Providence, because it jeopardized Rhode Island’s future independence, and indeed the move was unpopular, but Williams’s men were desperate, so they took the Court up on its suggestion, allowing Patuxet to be annexed.  Interesting little tidbit, one of the people who took the lead in allowing this annexation was Benedict Arnold’s grandfather.

So, Massachusetts prepared to push Gorton out.  The General Court told Gorton to leave, and in response he wrote two pamphlets saying, among other things, that the colony had no legal right to extend its borders beyond those established in its charter, and that Massachusetts was filled with hypocrites, he said it was scandalous that the clergy were paid, and terrible that the clergy were educated.  He said Baptism was nothing more than a superstition, no better than the Cross, so if Puritans opposed the Cross (which they did), they needed to oppose Baptism, too.  The clergy found 26 instances of blasphemy in the document, but even more than the content, the tone was unbelievably hostile.  Or maybe believably hostile given the fact that Gorton had picked fights with the magistrates in every town he’d been in.

When they received the letter, Massachusetts then sent messengers to negotiate, which I would imagine meant something like, explaining that they had jurisdiction over Gorton’s land, and that he could either conform or leave, but he threatened the messengers with violence, so the next group they sent was armed.

This finally forced Gorton out.  He and his 11 most ardent disciples moved to Shawomet, south of Patuxet and outside of Massachusetts’s new borders.  As they left, they fired a parting salvo toward Massachusetts, and then they sent another letter explaining how the Massachusetts government and church was wrong, this one even more vitriolic than the first.  In Shawomet, they bought a piece of land from Miantonomo, with the permission of the local sachem, Pumham.  But, Massachusetts wasn’t going to just let him stay in the area because he’d bought a piece of land from the Indians.  They fundamentally wanted to enforce religious homogeneity in New England.

So, to invalidate Gorton’s possession of the land, they encouraged Pumham, and another local sachem named Socononocco, to stop paying tribute to the Narragansetts, and submit to them instead.  That way, the land they were living on would again be under Massachusetts jurisdiction, and they could argue that Miantonomo’s sale of the land wasn’t valid.  Miantonomo objected, saying that this was an encroachment of his authority, but Massachusetts dismissed his claim, saying that the two sachems had always been free sachems, not Miantonomo’s vassals.

Then, they went to bring Gorton in.  A 40 person troupe laid siege to the house where Gorton and his 11 followers were taking refuge.  There was a long fight, but ultimately the Gortonists surrendered, were taken prisoner, their property and possessions confiscated, and marched back to Boston as the townspeople cheered.

They brought him in front of the General Court, and after a little bit of intimidation, they forced him to attend a service by John Cotton, hoping Cotton’s rhetoric would show him the errors of his ways, after which he would recant and join the rest of society.  Cotton spoke about a story in Acts 19, in which a silversmith and manufacturer of idols who was upset by the number of people converting in Ephesus, tried to shut Paul’s preaching down.  After the service, Gorton asked to speak.  And, Cotton agreed.  Why he agreed, I have absolutely no idea, but he did.  So, Gorton stood up in front of the congregation and told them his interpretation of the passage.  He said that the passage was showing how of the Church’s ordinances, ministers, ceremonies and sacraments were just men’s inventions, no different than the shrines to pagan gods.  It spoke again to the hallmarks of his worldview – anarchy.  The Court had been expecting to intimidate Gorton a little bit, and then show him the error of his ways, and that he would recant, and join the rest of society.  The Court’s plan hadn’t worked, so now they prepared for a trial.

They examined him for three weeks, questioning him and each of his followers, one at a time, behind closed doors.  And, one at a time, behind closed doors, Gorton and his men evaded and equivocated, saying their views had been misrepresented, but refusing to reject them.  They were pronounced guilty, and the only question was sentencing.

This time, it was the ministers and magistrates who wanted the harsher punishment.  In fact, they wanted execution.  All of the magistrates except Saltonstall and Bellingham voted for execution.  And this time, it was the deputies who refused.  Given what we’ve previously discussed, that might be surprising at first, but it’s actually a REALLY good illustration of how dangerous Gorton actually was.

Gorton was by all accounts, articulate and charismatic, and like I said, his ideology could essentially be described as populist Calvinism minus the Bible.  That means that, if anyone in the colony had a stronger foundation in Calvinism than in the Bible, they could easily be led astray by Gorton.  And, if anyone was more focused on populist ideas than Biblical ones, they would also be inclined to follow Gorton.  People like Gorton had already convinced lots of people within England using this populist rhetoric.  It’s not just that he was rabidly anti ministerial and anti-intellectual, and it wasn’t just that he threatened the Church and Governments’ authority … he was uniquely suited to change, or destroy, the development of Christianity in the New World.  Hutchinson and some of her followers may have gone too far, but they had nothing on this guy.  And the fact that the deputies wanted to be lenient with him, indicated that he might have a lot of success throughout the colony.

This is also a good example of the fears that high church Protestants and Catholics had about the spread of Calvinism, itself.  It was so easy to manipulate.  Without a Church hierarchy comprised of people with a thorough religious education, who moved up the hierarchy as they proved their competence, radical, heretical and socially destructive movements were all but inevitable.  And, as evidence for their fears, the heresy had been getting progressively more extreme in New England.  Roger Williams at least had a solid Puritan Biblical foundation, and really he had been more of a political liability than a heretic.  Anne Hutchinson was uncontrollable, and divisive, and she’d accepted heretical ideologies, but she wasn’t fundamentally going to destroy the foundation of society.  Gorton easily could.

The fact that, despite all of this, the deputies seemed to have some sympathy for Gorton didn’t just cement the magistrate-minister alliance.  It made the two actively suspicious of the deputies, and the people they represented.  If they thought Gorton’s behavior was ok, but opposed Keayne even with no evidence against him … what kind of a society did they want?

But, if they couldn’t kill Gorton, they had to figure out what to do with him.  Exile would just give Gorton what he wanted – a new town and a base of operations to continue spreading their dissent.  To minimize the danger, the Court sentenced the dissidents to work in irons until the Court said they could stop.  They were also separated, with each dissident being sent to a different town.  And, if one of them spoke of or published Gorton’s blasphemies, he’d be executed.

Even that wasn’t enough.  Just a few months later, Endicott told Winthrop that Salem’s prisoner had been spreading his beliefs, and condemning the town’s new minister and the town’s Church.  And worse, he had created a group of converts among the townspeople, who could then go spread the heresies further.  Endicott wanted the man executed, to make an example of him.  Winthrop, on the other hand, worried about making the man a martyr, as well as creating more conflict with the deputies, who were still sympathetic to Gorton, and who were still trying to chip away at the magistrates’ power.  The only remaining option was exile, so the General Court released all the Gortonists, and gave them 14 days to leave Massachusetts on penalty of death, and the group went to Acquidneck Island, where one of Coddington’s original settlements had been, where Coddington was still governor, and where they were joined by a group of people dissatisfied by Coddington’s leadership.

The issue wasn’t quite over, though, because it had sparked a conflict with Miantonomo, who had become friends with Samuel Gorton, and who was still furious about his treatment by Massachusetts regarding Pumham, Socononocco and Shawomet.  The old rumors of Miantonomo’s plans to attack the English began to recirculate, and this time with a level of detail they hadn’t previously had.  The rumors now said that Miantonomo was trying to recruit 250 Long Island warriors to fight the English, calling for pan-Indian unity, and citing depletion of the region’s wildlife grass and trees as the reasons the English needed to be driven out.  After the English were gone, they’d keep the cows to eat while deer populations recovered.

Plus, violence between the Narragansetts and Mohegans was escalating.  In fact, it really looked like Gorton was pushing Miantonomo to attack Uncas – he’d even given the sachem a coat of chainmail.  Miantonomo organized a series of plots on Uncas’s life, including sending a Pequot warrior to stab the sachem.  Puritans asked him to send the man for questioning, and Miantonomo then beheaded him instead.  Then, Mohegans killed several members of a Narragansett tributary, and and in response, Miantonomo staged an invasion, taking a huge group of warriors to invade Uncas’s territory.  But, despite their greater numbers, the Narragansetts lost, and Miantonomo was taken prisoner.  Gorton wrote to Uncas demanding the release of Miantonomo, but by the terms of the Hartford treaty, Uncas brought him before the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England.

Miantonomo’s trial was the first official action of the United Colonies.  At the trial, Uncas said Miantonomo was plotting against the English, and that he wanted to make himself universal sagamore, or sachem.  Connecticut residents, especially Lion Gardiner, believed Uncas’s testimony, though they knew there was no clear evidence the claims were true.  Though Massachusetts still wasn’t completely convinced, the commisioners collectively decided it was too dangerous to let Miantonomo live.  And, they didn’t need proof that he was plotting against the English.  He’d broken the provision of the Hartford treaty which mandated all intertribal conflicts to be settled by the English, and for this, he was sentenced to death.  They ordered Uncas to carry out the sentence, on his own land, and they ordered that he be killed humanely, so he was not to be tortured.  So, on the road between Hartford and Windsor, Uncas killed Miantonomo with a sharp blow to the head.

Canonicus, and Miantonomo’s brother and successor, Pessicus, were alarmed.  To protect themselves from Massachusetts, they submitted themselves to the English Crown, saying that now, “if any great matter should fall, then neither yourselves nor we are to be judges, but both of us are to have recourse and repair to that honorable and just government.”  In other words, the colonists wouldn’t be the group with the final say in the region – the King and English Government would have a final say over both groups, because both groups would be British subjects.

And on that note, we’re leaving New England for a while.  And, the funny thing is, we’re leaving it in its permanent form.  New England and the Chesapeake are almost poetically contrasted to each other, perfect literary foils: town versus rural, collective versus individual, social unity versus a network of personal connections, meticulous government versus minimal government.  And one of the ways they differ is that, while the society of the Chesapeake continued to develop gradually, it took just over a decade for New England to pretty much establish how its society would operate in the long-term.  Chisel versus mold.  Migration stopped in 1642, and it didn’t really start again.  For the next 200 years, more people would leave New England than move there.  And, as the English Civil War began, the biggest per-capita mass exodus in American history also began, as New England puritans returned home to fight for Parliament, often in positions of leadership.  New England society had taken its permanent, if not final, form by 1642.

And that society was a pretty distinct one.  The environment was healthy, cold enough to prevent insect-borne diseases like malaria and yellow fever, and with clean water to prevent typhoid and dysentery.  It was also cool enough in summer that enteritis wasn’t a big issue.  It wasn’t long before New England actually had a longer average life expectancy than England or most European countries.  The big exception with regards to life expectancy is Africans, who were unaccustomed to cold weather and got severe pulmonary infections in the New England winters, creating a Black death rate which was twice as high as whites’, unlike colonies further South, where blacks had a similar or in some cases longer life expectancy than whites.

The society continued to focus on values of unity and community.  Liberty was something which belonged to a community, not an individual.  In fact, communities were so tightly knit that different towns often had different accents, and town pride was a big thing.  The ministers of the six biggest, most central New England towns took the lead in defining clerical opinion and practice for the whole region, minus Rhode Island.  They created committees to discuss all aspects of the colony’s development, led by those 12 ministers.  Harvard became the center of a long-term strategy to achieve unity, and eliminate the kind of bickering which had occurred in the early years.  Its graduates went on to become the colony’s civic and religious leaders, as well as future educators, and because they had the same education, they had similar perspectives.  So, unlike the first generation of New Englanders who came with a variety of different interpretations of Puritan views, which had evolved independently, future generations were all educated in the same interpretations.  And, because children were educated by Harvard graduates, they would also share those views.  This ensured there would never again be a cultural divide on the scale of the Antinomian Controversy.  There would still be disagreements, of course, but they’d be smaller, and less fundamental.

Unlike the Chesapeake, in New England the nuclear family was the fundamental basis of society.  People weren’t even allowed to live alone.  Only 6.5 percent of New Englanders even bequeathed to nieces and nephews.  They had the highest number of kids per family in the Western world for the first couple generation, and unlike in the Chesapeake, most of those children grew up with two living parents.  Families, though, were inspected for internal order on a regular basis, and in extreme cases children could be removed from disorderly families.  The food was plain, the people were formal, and on the whole, people accepted taxes which were extremely high for the time period, 2-4 times the average for other parts of British America.  There were lots of laws with a variety of motivations, and some, like “no single man can marry until he’s killed six blackbirds or three crows,” might strike us as odd today.

Crimes against property were more common than crimes against persons, again opposite from the Chesapeake, but crimes against order were the most common of all, with most adults being prosecuted at least once for things like violating the Sabbath, idleness or domestic disorder.

And, I could go on, but you get the picture.  The New England Way was established.