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Internal dissent and external threats
Massachusetts Bay was big enough and wealthy enough to avoid the bulk of the serious physical hardship which had characterized earlier settlements, but its size and political nature led to other concerns. Gorges and the colony’s exiles worked against the Colony’s charter in England. The French and Dutch also claimed areas within New England. The Colony was founded because of uncompromising religious and political beliefs, but people didn’t necessarily agree on all of those beliefs. Plus, they needed to rapidly expand and claim huge amounts of territory.
The years ahead would see major conflicts regarding all of these issues, which emerged in 1633/1634. The year did, however, also bring one of the colony’s most famous leaders – John Cotton.
Transcript
The Massachusetts Bay Company may have hoped to escape English interference by moving its charter to America, but it didn’t. The colony had enemies in England. In part, that was because of rival colonial interests who felt their patents hadn’t been respected. In part, it was because the colony’s leadership was so closely connected to some of England’s most contentious political figures – people like the Earl of Warwick. And, in part it was because the Brownes, Morton, Gardiner and Ratcliffe were actively agitating back home.
Introduction
In 1632, the people exiled from New England were complaining about the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They accused the people in the colony of intending rebellion, having cast off their allegiance to the English Church, and employing ministers and leaders who encouraged sedition and rebellion. They said the colony’s administrators sought independence from the crown and laws of England.
Gorges and his associate, John Mason, were endorsing the exiles, even though Mason was somewhat more sympathetic to the Puritan cause than Gorges was. He had, however, had a grant for the territory between Salem and Merrimack.
Gardiner wrote a report on the conditions in New England, and the group compiled other papers to submit to King Charles’s Privy Council. At the end of December, 1632, the Privy Council had appointed a committee of the “who’s who” of English elites to look into the colony, to see how the patents were granted, and if they were being followed. They wanted to know how the plantations were actually operating.
The committee interviewed whatever witnesses were available, including Saltonstall and Cradock, and sought written reports. Captain Wiggin submitted an emphatic report emphasizing Winthrop’s character and saying the colony had great potential to help meet England’s need for naval supplies. New England had great timber, hemp and flax, and industrious settlers. England’s passage to such supplies currently went through the Baltic, and if that was ever cut off they’d need New England.
On January 19, they sent a report supporting the Bay Colony to the Privy Council. The report lauded the colony’s benefit to the kingdom and its profitability to investors. The Privy Council approved the report, and informed the colonists that the King felt their actions appeared justified, and he didn’t intend to impose the ceremonies of the Church of England upon them.
The Privy Council said that if the charges were true, they would tend to the great dishonor of the kingdom and utter ruin of the plantation, but, most of the facts seemed to refute the charges, and if they were true, they could only be proven by witnesses summoned at a great waste of time and money which would push away investors who might suspect that the state was working against the plantation. If such things were happening, the fault lay with just a few men, not leaders. So, the king would maintain liberties and privileges, but also help the colony in whatever way he could.
When they got that message, in May, it accompanied a letter from the Earl of Warwick congratulating him on the prosperity of the plantation, encouraging them to continue and offering his help. This was the first the Colonists had heard of it. Winthrop was pleased with the report, but other leaders were justifiably concerned. Gorges and his group were, in fact, continuing to push for their desired reforms.
May brought developments in the New England government, too. Winthrop, Dudley, and the assistants were all re-elected yet again, and the government continued to grow. Time wasting became a criminal offense. Things seemed to be going smoothly, though the Court did note an issue with a Captain named John Stone, who shipped goods and commodities between the West Indies, Virginia, New England and London. He wasn’t popular in New England, though, considered a disreputable person and accused of everything from drunkenness to cannibalism. When Stone called one of the magistrates, Mr. Ludlow, “not a justice, but a just ass,” he was fined 100 pounds and banished on pain of death.
A few months later, perhaps the most noteworthy event of the year happened when a ship called the Griffin brought 200 passengers – most notably Thomas Leverett and his son John, Atherton Hough, Haynes, Cotton, Hooker and Stone. This signaled the resumption of the flood of migrants to New England, and it carried some of the most respected puritans from England.
Cotton, in particular was widely revered, and in fact Boston was named after his hometown in England. Even within England, his sermons had helped to shape the Puritan movement, guiding the views of his contemporaries. It was one of Cotton’s followers, John Preston, who had helped establish the committee known as the “feofees for impropriations,” which raised funds to buy the right to collect tithes, which helped them put Puritans in pulpits throughout Engand and therefore spread their influence.
He had given a famous sermon when Endicott first set sail, and he was immediately received as the Boston church’s teacher, and was Ordained within a month. Within New England, he would become the most influential guide of civil and ecclesiastical policy of anyone.
Meanwhile, Hooker and Stone went to Newtown, and gave the town its first minister of its own. He had spent time in the Netherlands before deciding to move to New England.
Suddenly, the colony started to witness unbelievable growth. Dozens of ships might enter Boston Harbor some months.
This rapid and massive influx of people was great in many ways. They brought supplies, and there was strength in numbers. There would be no more starving times or Wessagussetts. They could experiment with crops and commodities, and in fact they did discover in this year that they could grow English grain like rye in New England. The colony was on the verge of being able to create its own economy and its own base of wealth. On the other hand, it required a level of organization and rapid expansion which hadn’t previously been required. The new people needed new places to live, and one of the benefits of the New World was access to land not available in England. Not all the land in New England was fertile, either. The towns needed to start spreading apart, and colonists needed to start finding new locations for people to move to. So, they started to explore the area. At this point, the French, Dutch, Pilgrims and Puritans were all vying for the various areas of the region. And, of course, there were Native Americans, but in many cases this didn’t prove a source of conflict. The natives certainly knew they didn’t have much choice but to accept the newcomers, who so vastly outnumbered them. They were still recovering from the plague, and for weaker tribes accepting Englishmen could mean protection from stronger tribes like the Pequots and Narragansetts.
The other issue with rapid expansion was that Puritans didn’t necessarily agree with each other theologically. They had moved to America to found a theologically pure colony, but more and more there were questions about what that meant. People like Cotton, Endicott, Dudley and Williams were all thoroughly uncompromising in terms of their beliefs – but they didn’t necessarily agree on those beliefs.
At around this time, Roger Williams moved back to Salem, where he took a preaching position. Plymouth had gradually grown alarmed at some of his opinions and practices. He was insisting on total and utter separation of church and state to prevent anything from conflicting with God’s sovereignty, and saying that it wasn’t lawful for unregenerate men to take any oaths, especially ones of fidelity to the civil government. Furthermore, he was advocating for things like women wearing veils, both in public and especially in Church services. Bradford, however, did somewhat agree with his notion that the English should be buying their land from the Indians instead of getting the right to colonize from the King. Still, it wasn’t a good fit, and Williams moved to Salem, where he became a close ally of Endicott’s. He and Cotton disagreed about things, though. While Endicott sided with Williams, for instance, on the issue of women’s veils. The debate between Endicott and Williams and Cotton got heated enough that Winthrop had to intervene.
It’s worth noting here that the competition for resources between European powers is the reason that Williams’s idea of buying land directly from the Indians wasn’t a viable one. It would have been cheaper, and more convenient in many ways, but governments backed their settlers’ rights – and without a patent they had no rights. Colonization was expensive, and people needed some sort of assurance that their investments wouldn’t be completely de-railed by people who moved in and took over a settlement after all the hard work had been done. Imagine manufacturing an innovative new product today without a patent. Investors needed that before they’d risk their money, and people who wanted to construct model societies, like the Pilgrims and Puritans, relied on that protection to defend those societies from people who didn’t fit their vision. And, this will absolutely become an issue in the course of New England history.
The next spring, governmental disagreement continued when Cotton proposed a code of laws that created a strict theocracy in New England. It was rejected, but it was one of a series of long, stormy debates which occurred that year, and major governmental changes did happen. Watertown’s resentment toward Winthrop and the colony’s government had been festering since the governor had sanctioned people for their political disagreements. They knew the governor had overreached the rights allowed in the charter, and that he’d been bypassing the General Court when passing laws and levying taxes. So, before the 1634 General Court session, they led the charge demanding to see the Charter. The Charter stated plainly that the power over laws and finances rested firmly in the General Court, not a small central government. Winthrop argued that the body of freemen had grown too large to effectively govern solely through the General Court, but there was widespread resentment toward Winthrop’s taking of power, and the court voted Winthrop out, and made Dudley and Ludlow governor and deputy. Furthermore, the Court implemented a new freeman’s oath, and a ruling that only the Court could raise money, levy taxes, dispose of land or confirm titles. Winthrop’s relative tolerance and willingness to make peace between opposing sides had characterized his time in office as much as his use of centralized power, and for the next few years, Massachusetts would be governed by people who were much more rigid than he had ever been.
And, around this time the settlers got alarming news from Connecticut. Captain Stone hadn’t gone directly back to Virginia when exiled from New England – he was a privateer and trader, not someone particularly tied to a single location. He had been with a small crew of people from Virginia and Massachusetts, as well as two Pequot guides, trading with Natives in the Connecticut river valley, and was preparing to do some trade with the Dutch. The whole crew had been murdered by their guides as they slept. An Englishman from Maine had already been killed while trading with some Indians over winter, and the incident with Stone was nothing less than alarming – especially because it was done by the strongest tribe in the region.
And to make matters worse, it wasn’t long before they got a letter from Thomas Morton. Morton was writing to someone who he had considered a friend and ally while living in New England, but that man had become a freeman and given his loyalty to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So, when he got the letter, he took it directly to Winthrop. He said that though they’d had some setbacks the previous year, thanks to his agitation the king had gotten involved in the investigation into New England’s government. They were preparing to take over the colonies, divide English America into 12 Provinces, with one England-appointed official sent to each with the power to disperse the colony if it got out of hand. Gorges would be in charge of the entire endeavor.