CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BIBLE COMMONWEALTH

THE ARCHITECTS

Like Virginia, Massachusetts was founded by a joint stock company, The Massachusetts Bay Company, charter in 1628 by the crown. Again, the primary motive on the part of the investors for the creation of the MBC (as historians refer to it) was the hope for profit. This in spite of the by-now obvious failure of the Virginia Company as a money-making project.

But more important than the motives of the investors, were the motives of the individual settlers who bought out the shares of the original investers. These were the Puritans as they came to be called from the last half of the 19th century on. Most of the early settlers came from East Anglia, a section of England which helps to explain their migration.

East Anglia for many years, was the center of a thriving woolen industry that had arisen out of the Commercial Revolution. But by the 1620s, a depression had settled in on the region. Overproduction of woolen goods and increased competition from European centers of wool had produced hard times in East Anglia. Many of those who made the initial exodus to the New World were driven by this depression.

Typical of those who expressed the motive for economic betterment was John Winthrope, soon to be Governor of MBC, who privately admitted that he owed more money than he could pay in England without selling his lands, but who yet refused to emigrate unless there was a good chance that the colony would be an economic success. As he pointed out, "a man's duty to God was to work at his calling and improve his talents like a good and faithful servant."

But, as Winthrope's words suggest, there was also a strong religious motive for the Puritan migration to MBC. This is not to be misinterpreted however. There are many misconceptions about the religious motivations of these people. One myth is that the Puritans migrated to New England in the name of religious toleration. Not so. Puritans came only in the name of freedom to practice their religious exclusively and showed little, if any, toleration for other beliefs. A typical misrepresentation of this particular myth is the identification of Anne Hutchinson as being an early feminist fighting for the right of free speech.

Nor did Puritans migrate, as if often said, because of religious persecution. England, which was gearing up for a Civil War did show signs of religious intolerance directed against Puritans in the 1620s, and even more so in the 1630s and 1640s. But the stringent phase of persecution at the hands of the Church of England was not present before the decision was made to cross the Atlantic. The so-called "Great Migration", the outpouring of between 1629 and 1640, in which nearly 20,000 Puritans settled in North America, was initiated before Archbishop Laud, the chief instrument of the Anglican church, commenced his persecution.

In order to fully understand why and how religion was a motivating factor in the colonization of Massachusetts Bay, we need to understand something of the nature of Puritanism itself, both outwardly with regard to other Christian variations and inwardly, as a matter of belief and - most important - of the intensity of that belief.

Superficially, Puritanism was only a belief among a minority of the Church of England that the church should be purged of those traditions, ceremonies and structure inherited from Roman Catholicism. The Protestant Reformation which had erupted on the European continent in the third decade of the 16th century had reached England late, and in something of an aborted condition. In England, the crown, with both power and wealth as motives, had led the reformation. Having achieved its goals, the subordination of the church to its will by having the crown declared head of the church, English monarchs had shown scant regard to the cries of those who wished to bring the church more closely in line with Protestantism on the continent, especially that variety known as Calvinism. Thus in The Elizabethan Compromise, as this aborted reformation came to be called, was struck which left the Anglican Church midway between Catholicism and Calvinism.

The Calvinist element pressed hard for institutional changes. They specifically decried the hierarchial form of church government, with its bishops, abbots, deans, priests, etc., left over from Catholicism. They called for a simpler church organization which would have eliminated all the existing clergy except the parish priests.

Not too surprisingly, English monarchs had no intention of altering the structure of the Church because of these sentiments any more than they would entertain altering the structure of the state because demanded by political radicals. The lines between church and state being more blurred in the 17th century then they are today, dissenters were viewed as potential rebels. James I, who ruled between 1603-1625 frequently observed, "No bishop, no king," and for good reason. As head of the Church, James named the bishops, which greatly strengthened his secular power inasmuch as about a quarter of the House of Lords (the upper house of the English Legislature) consisted of bishops.

Then too, Puritans objected to the continued use of the elaborate liturgy which the Church of England retained. They demanded a simpler form of church service in which the mass was replaced as the focus of worship, with the sermon and public participation increased.

Finally, there was the matter of extravagance and frivolity, both within and with the Church that bothered the reformers. Puritans were so sure that they were on God's business that they had no time for entertainment, light or heavy, and frowned on any sort of self-indulgence, such as card playing, dancing or the theater, which they invariably regarded as smacking of sin. Puritans viewed such matters at the celebration of Christmas to be pagan and called upon the Church to ban it. The Church refused. (Ultimately during the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell came to power, a Puritan controlled Parliament banned Christmas in England. And once in power in M.B.C., the Puritans passed a law in 1659, fining anyone caught celebrating that holiday. Although repealed in 1681, Boston's public schools remained open on December 25th until 1870.

Much has been made of this latter trait, for it is indeed, a defining characteristic or the Puritans. While outwardly they were merely a group who wished to carry the Protestant Reformation to a more logical conclusion, inwardly they were possessed of a spiritual drive that reaches across the gulf of centuries as testimony to the power of religious belief.

Once that belief took possession of a man - or woman - it was seldom shaken off and would shape, if not warp one's entire life. Puritan beliefs taught that one must devote one's entire life to seeking salvation, but it also told one he was helpless to do anything but evil. Puritanism required that a man refrain from sin, but told him he would sin anyhow. Puritan beliefs required that one reform the world in the image of God's kingdom, but taught him that the evil in the world was incurable and inevitable.

A later wit caught the contradictions inherent in Puritanism in the following rhyme:

You can and you can't.

You will and you won't.

You'll be damned if you do.

You'll be damned if you don't.

These paradoxical, not to say contradictory, beliefs affected different peoples in different ways. Some undoubtedly lived in an agony of uncertainty, but others enjoyed an inner spiritual certainty and went their ways with never a look backward. Most managed to live without the dull, sour, uptight demeanor that 19th century historians and myth makers have painted them with.

In their quarrel with the Church of England, it was inevitable that sooner or later the reformers would split on the question of whether they should remain in the church, or leave it; whether the church could be "saved" or whether it was so institutionally corrupt that the only recourse was to leave and save one's own soul.

Those who chose the latter course became known as the separatists. Favoring a complete break with the Church, this group eventually migrated to Holland in the early 17th century only to migrate once again to the New World when it became apparent that their sons and daughter were losing their unique identity among the tolerant Dutch. Fortunately for this group, the Plymouth Company (part of the Virginia Company) was sponsoring emigration. Thus, in an agreement with this corporation, the semi-separatists set out for the colony of Virginia.

Wind and navigational errors being what they were in the 17th century, the separatists missed the mouth of the Hudson River, their target, and wound up just South of present day Boston where they established the colony of Plymouth in 1620. In the 18th century, they became absorbed in the MBC and lost their unique identity. In the 19th century, at the same time that the semi-separatists were coming to be called Puritans, this separatist element came to be referred to as the Pilgrims. They are of secondary importance.

Of primary importance is the former group, the semi-separatists as they were originally called who, in 1628, bought out the shares of the stockholders of the Virginia Company of Plymouth, converted it into a Royal Charter in 1629 known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, and landed at present day Boston in October of that year.

Thus, although they were semi-separatists, the Puritans, like the pilgrims became de facto separated from the Church of England. And because they were so, they had to provide for a new form of church organization.

While still in England, one of the Puritan theologians,Robert Browne, applied himself to the problem of formulating church organization by advocating a covenant. A covenant is basically a religious agreement. Early Puritans had formed a covenant when they reverently repeated the following oath:

We covenant with the Lord and with one another

and do bind ourselves with the presence of God to walk

together in all His ways, according as He is pleased to

reveal Himself unto us in His blessed word of truth.

According to Browne, this oath should be extended and the true believers (i.e, the semi-separatists) within the Church of England should made an agreement among themselves and with God that they would worship together, as distinct from the Church, and would, in effect, pledge their collective devotion to God. No group, according to Browne, could be recognized as legitimate, could call itself a congregation, until it had covenanted.

This concept of the covenant is notable for several reasons. First, it was an actual written document, an agreement reduced to a writing. Then too, it was consensual; a contract binding on all parties. And make no mistake about it, in return for their devotion and obedience to God's word, the Puritans fully expected divine favor. Later, in the 1690s, when troubles arose and the "Elect" as Puritans often referred to themselves, came under attack, they followed the logic of their premises and concluded that someone had broken the covenant.

Finally, the covenant is important due to a certain carry-over effect. Puritans believed that government existed on the basis of a covenant; that is, people instituted government as a means of ensuring that God's will was supreme. Government, by this view became a sacred trust and enjoyed divine sanction.

Since Puritans carried over their concept of the covenant from the congregation into society and government, it is proper to speak of the "Puritan Social Ideology," which is summarized as follows:

The Spill-Over Effect of the Covenant

In 1780, the revolutionary government of Massachusetts, then in rebellion against Britain, submitted to its people the first state Constitution. It declared:

The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

*Ultimate authority is the will of god, expressed through the Bible and interpreted by his followers The Elect.

*The relationship between God and The Elect is expressed in a covenant, and the society that resulted from observance of that covenant.

* The covenant defines ultimate authority, rights and the distribution of power.

* The covenant guarantees that the society resulting would most closely approximate a just society, i.e., God's legitimate society on earth.

Another early Puritan architect who influenced the form of church organization adopted in the New World was William Ames. His contribution was twofold: the idea of church democracy and the idea of church equality.

The former idea of democracy was applied within the congregation. That is, Ames held that the clergy should be elected by members of the congregation, by the majority vote of its members. Further, he insisted that each church member had the right, not only to elect its minister, but in deciding all church business. This internal democracy of the church congregation became important when in the New World, church business became town business. Puritans established their congregations in villages, and what was more natural than for the majority vote of the congregation to become the majority vote of the village in deciding secular matters. In short, another "spill-over" impact of religion is seen here.

The second idea of Ames - that of church equality - applied to the relation of congregations one to another. Congregations were to be independent of one another - autonomous. They were co-equal. They might cooperate, but they were not obliged to do so.

One result of Ames' concept of equality was that the Puritan church was destined to be weak. And it is this structural weakness that pointed toward the New World. Since the King of England declined to "simplify" the church, Puritans reasoned that if congregations could be transplanted intact to the wilderness of the New World they then could create a form of government that would support their church administration.

And in so doing, the Puritans believed, they would be creating a model of the ideal community, a "Bible Commonwealth" as the frequently referred to MBC, which by its example would inspired Englishmen to withdraw from the corrupt and Popish Church of England to embrace the new model. As John Winthrope, the noted governor of MBC early expressed it:

We shall be as a Citty upon a Hill. The eies of all

people are uppon us; so that if wee shall deale falsely

with our God in his worde we have undertaken and soe

cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, we shall

be made a story and a by-word through the world.

In so expressing this, Winthrope and others gave rise to what is called the American myth: That the New World, America, was to be a leader in the goal of achieving a society of justice, a model upon which other nations would pattern themselves, and (not to forget the economic promise) a land of opportunity for those who availed themselves of God's blessings. The next time you listen to a Fourth of July oration, you may well hear similar words expressed. If you pause to consider, you may find evidence of the impact of Puritan religious beliefs.

THE BUILDING OF THE BIBLE COMMONWEALTH

The government of Virginia had, by the middle of the 17th century, evolved into an landed aristocracy, dominated by Planters. Massachusetts by the middle of the 17th century became an oligarchy (the rule of the few), although each started its political existence as a joint stock company. The path to this oligarchical rule was, in hindsight, both logical and inevitable.

The first step along this road came with the decision of the leading Puritans in England to buy out the shares of all stockholders who would not be making the first crossing in 1628. Obviously, it would be dangerous, perhaps fatal, to establish a Bible Commonwealth in the New World if its fate rested in the hands of investors in England subject to the authority of the Crown. Consequently, the leaders of the exodus, John Winthrope, John Cotton, Cotton Mather, Thomas Dudley, John Humphrey and others, decided not only to become the sole stockholders, but to take the Charter with them to the New World. Thus were the foundations laid for the rule of the few.

The legal foundation of the Bible Commonwealth, operating as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, lay with the terms of the Charter, which vested control of the corporation with the stockholders, who in turn, elected a Board of Directors. Thus, when the company called its first stockholder's meeting (known formally as the Great and General Court of Massachusetts) on October 19, 1630, in Boston, eighteen stockholders turned up. They immediately voted John Carter as first Governor, and selected twelve Assistants from among their ranks to support the new Governor. The following year, when a second flotilla of ships arrived, containing the dominant personality of John Winthrope, that gentleman was elected Governor and remained in the position of chief executive officer for the next twenty years.

At this first stockholder meeting, the decision was made to allow all freemen to vote for the assistants. The assistants then voted among themselves for the Governor. The term freemen is a little ambiguous. As used in the charter, it referred only to the stockholders. But as implemented by the stockholders, it became a synonym for the Elect. Thus we find 116 voters in M.B.C. in 1630.

Another modest expansion of political participation followed in 1632 when the Great and General Court decreed that two men were to be elected from each town to confer with the Governor and Assistants on such matters as taxes and further decreed that the Governor should be elected at large by all freemen.

More basic than the legal foundation of MBC however, for the duration of oligarchical control, was the religious beliefs of both movers and followers of the movement. Puritans were strongly, nay forcefully, opposed to the idea of pure democracy, and their leaders lost no opportunity in denouncing it. John Winthrope held that "Democracy is amongst civil nations accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government." John Cotton expressed his antipathy to democracy as follows: "Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or commonwealth."

At first glance, this antipathy towards democracy strikes modern readers as contradicting William Ames' concept of church democracy. But the apparent contradiction dissolves when one examines the nature of Puritans belief a little deeper. Let's begin by examining the Puritan doctrine of Original Sin.

Our semi-separatist founders believed that men and women were basically evil, corrupt and without the ability to live in civil society without social control from a higher authority. Consequently, to allow the majority of men, whom God had predestined to damnation, to control the church, was an abomination. Only those who had covenanted were, by the "grace of God" to be considered as having a voice in the deliberations of both the church and its adjunct, the state.

Church democracy was limited therefore to the true believers, the "Elect" or the "Saints" as they were called and by which they called themselves. Only those who had covenanted with God and were willing to put themselves under the authority of God were, to some small degree, absolved from the taint of Original Sin.

But who were the "Elect?" How could they be identified? The doctrine of Original Sin told them that the path to heaven was narrow and few there were that followed it. Experience taught them that not all communicants (particularly members of the high Anglican Church) were "true" Christians. In short, it was not enough that a person pay mere lip service to the doctrines of the church nor live an outwardly Godly life. Something more was necessary to quality as a member of the "Elect."

What was needed was that one have a direct and personal experience in which his sinful nature was revealed and overcome by a complete submission to the will of God; a personal conversion by which one acknowledged his original sinful nature and both sought and obtained regeneration by allowing the Holy Spirit to enter and control every thought word and deed.

Of that conversion, one was further obliged to make a public declaration of the experience before the congregation, describing in intimate detail the particular manner in which the Holy Spirit had overcome his or her sinful nature and taken control to the point that after this conversion, not one thought, one deed or one word had originated from the volition of "Self" but all from the volition of "God." And, having made this confession of faith, one was obliged to then answer questions from the congregation whose function was to "test" the applicant, "whether it be a true or false experience."

Not surprisingly, not too many people in MBC had the intestinal fortitude to come forth and apply for full church membership But for those who qualified, three advantages accrued: (1) admission into the ranks of the spiritual Elect; (2) participation in church business; (3) political participation in civil society via the vote..

Buttressing this arrangement was the force of the state, MBC, which acknowledged its obligation to support the congregations by writing religious belief into law; laws that restricted the franchise to church members; made church attendance compulsory; restricted the establishment of new congregations to those approved by the state; and providing for the financial support of the ministry. Finally, in 1648, these various laws were codified in the Cambridge Platform, which formulated the exact relation between church and state. A brief excerpt will suffice to illustrate that relationship.

It is the duty of the Magistrate, to take care of

matters of religion, and to improve his civil authority

for the observing of the duties commanded.... Idolatry, Blasphemy, Heresy, venting corrupt and pernicious opinions,

that destroy the foundations, open contempt of the word preached, profanation of the Lords day, disturbing the peaceable administration and exercise of the worship and holy things of God and the like, are to be restrayned and punished by civil authority.

Further buttressing the rule of the Elect was the social and political structure that emerged throughout New England. Local government was centered around the congregation - a religious term - or the town, which was a political term for the congregation. That is, land was granted not to individuals but to congregations in the form of townships. It was then parceled out in relatively equal portions by the Congregation to the individuals in such a manner as to maintain a tightly-knit, compact community. Each family was usually granted a one-acre house lot and small fields farther out for crops and livestock. But, with an appropriate bow in the direction of equality, no more land than was needed to support themselves. The town of Dedham, for example, had received 128,000 acres from the Great and General Court when it was established in 1638. Yet the congregation parceled out only 3,000 acres among the forty-six founders. The rest were held in trust for future generations.

Puritans were especially keen on the necessity of town organization. Living apart, living alone, was considered to be detrimental to the soul; it being contrary to the principle of consociation, the principle of church fellowship, brotherly counsel, neighborliness and assistance. In practiced this meant the obligation of prying into one's neighbors affairs - keeping him on the straight and narrow so to speak. In that way, the watchful eye of the Elect could keep the members of the congregation faithful.

Every woman in town knew just how many gowns Goodwife Collins had in her chest, just how many dishes in her kitchen, how many times she lost her temper when the cow kicked over the milk pail; and everyone considered it to be his or her business to admonish the Goodwife if she let loose with an oath. Discipline in the church was everyone's business. If Master Smith broke the Sabbath, it was the duty of his neighbor to reprove him; if Mistress Peters gossiped about her neighbors, it was certain to be reported to the elders. When one member committed an offense against another, the injured brother was to go to him privately to admonish him. If this did not suffice, the brother would return in the company of one or two others to renew the attempt. In case the offender still remained stubborn, the matter was brought to the attention of the church elders, who were to place it before the congregation. Should the offender then repent, he was declared "recovered and gained" - otherwise he might be excommunicated from fellowship. And being excommunicated in a small town like Weyhill Haunts meant total exclusion from the rest of society. An excommunicant did not, in the 17th century, move on to the next town to live. The next town you recall, was a congregation.

Than too, the position of the minister within the congregation served to strengthen the rule of the Oligarchs. Ministers exercised moral and intellectual leadership in the community. Almost without exception, Puritan clergymen were university graduates - from Cambridge originally, and later from Harvard. As priests, they exercised the de-facto powers of excommunication, and determining church membership. Not surprisingly, the ministers monopolized higher education. Although Puritans emphasized literacy among all church members, higher education was limited to the preparation of the clergy, as the original curriculum of Harvard reveals.

In order to prevent unwanted opinions or other dissension, the Puritans made a decided effort to restrict all non-Puritan immigration into the Commonwealth. E.g., in 1676, the town of Boston decreed that "...no townsmen shall entertain any strangers into their houses for above fourteen days without leave from those who are appointed to order the town's business." Salem was even less hospitable. It employed one Thomas Oliver "...to go from

house to house about the town once a month to inquire what strangers do come to have privily trust themselves into the town."

As early as 1637, the M.B.C. government made it illegal for a town "...to receive any stranger resorting thither with the intent to reside...without the consent of some one of the Council or two of the magistrates."

As a consequence of these various factors, all of which contributed to the creation and maintenance of an oligarchical government, the social structure of early Mass. may be conceived of an essentially a three-class society composed of the elect, or the full members of the congregations, the non-voting members of the congregations known simply as "freemen," and the non-free or indentured servants and slaves.

THE COMMONWEALTH AT ITS ZENITH

During its period of autonomy, which was brought to an end in 1684, the Bible Commonwealth of the Puritans showed a number of tendencies which were later to become true of the other British North American colonies. One was a tendency to expand.

Notable among the numerous instances of expansion were two which eventually resulted in the establishment of new colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Rhode Island was established as a result of the expulsion of Roger Williams from the M.B.C. in 1636, under circumstances

which we shall discuss shortly. Suffice it to say for the present

that in 1635, Williams was charged with inciting to rebellion and in the following winter left the Mass. Bay Colony in order to escape arrest. He journeyed South to an independent community, then known as Providence Plantation inhabited primarily by separatists. In addition to Providence, there were three other

separate communities in the area South of Massachusetts: Newport, Portsmouth, and Warwick. The existence of these communities, or

plantations, was not recognized by any sovereign. That is, they had no legal existence. And their inhabitants recognized no authority except that of England in a most-general way. Nevertheless, they did share one common characteristic. These communities were all out of sympathy with the church-state

relationship which existed in Mass. Their inhabitants were ardent separatists. They wouldn't conform to the Church of England, and they had no intention of conforming to Massachusetts Congregationalism.

Ultimately, out of this common characteristic, political unity was forced upon the plantations by the external threat of

being incorporated into MBC, a fate that befell Plymouth Plantation. In the early 1640's, the MBC oligarchy made a concerted attempt to dominate its colonial neighbors by forcing them to join the so-called Confederation of New England.

Faced with this menace, the Rhode Island plantations dispatched Roger Williams to London in 1643 to obtain a charter from Parliament, granting legal status to them. Three years later a Charter was granted and in 1647 the four communities drew up a common government for the colony of Rhode Island.

The second tendency of the Bible Commonwealth to expand resulted in the establishment of the colony of Connecticut. Here, economic rather than political factors played a dominant role. By 1635, Boston and its surrounding towns were becoming over-populated due to the steady immigration of English Puritans. New settlers were faced with the choice of moving inland, or moving down the coast. Rather than move inland where they would lose access to the arteries of trade and commerce, many of the new M.B.C. settlers were attracted to the land along the estuary of the Connecticut River.

Typical of this migration into the Connecticut River areas was the decision made by the Newton Congregation in 1636. Under the guidance of its pastor, Thomas Hooker, not only was the first settlement made in that region, but Hooker was instrumental in persuading the Great and General Court of Massachusetts to grant a patent or charter providing for independent government, the famous Fundamental Orders of Connecticut.

Yet a third tendency is reflected in the founding of the Confederation of New England in 1643, of significance in being the first of several efforts at political consolidation that eventually resulted in unifying all of the colonies at the close of the 18th century. The reasons behind the establishment of this confederation are not hard to find. Fear of Indian war was one. M.B.C. had just finished the bloody Pequot War in the Connecticut Valley in 1638, and the prospect of further Indian resistance to expansion was expected. Add to this the presence of Dutch settlements to the West and French settlements to the North, both of whose mother countries were constantly at war with England and the security motive was magnified.

Even so, the spiritual distress of the M.B.C. Puritans at allowing the Rhode Island heretics to continue was enough to qualify this movement towards consolidation by a caveat. Rhode Island was invited to join the Confederation, but only on terms which would have amounted to its absorption by M.B.C. Rhode Island declined the invitation. From that point on, Rhode Island resisted most tenaciously, every effort toward colonial consolidation, including inclusion within the present federal system.

The Confederation of New England was dominated by MBC, a feature which ultimate led to its decline. It was recognized by all members that because of MBC's size and population, she would be the most powerful member. But the arrogant and domineering attitude of the Bible Commonwealth ultimately was too much for the other members to tolerate.

Nevertheless, during its brief existence it managed to negotiate two outstanding treaties. The first, The Treaty of Boston, 1644, stabilized relations between MBC and the French settlers in Acadia. You may recall the classic tale of "The Maypole of Merry Mount" which focused upon the Puritan investigation of immorality by the French settlers. The story had an historical foundation in a ruckus between Governor Winthrope and the French settlers in which M.B.C. had supported a pro-British faction in Acadia.

The second treaty, The Treaty of Hartford, 1650, ended a boundary dispute with the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (now New York.) Significantly, authority to negotiation these treaties was assumed by the Puritans, since they failed to advise the English authorities of there negotiations.

THE ATTACK UPON THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH

The arrogance and domineering attitude of the MBC Puritans, which finally forced the breakup of the Confederation of New England. reflected itself in an undercurrent of dissatisfaction within the Bible Commonwealth also, and resulted in several attacks upon the Oligarchy there. With the franchise restricted to members of the Elect, discontent was bound to surface.

One of the earliest signs of discontent appeared shortly after the arrival in MBC of Roger Williams. This celebrated Englishman who arrived in 1631, was initially greeted warmly by the Massachusetts Oligarchs. Williams was a Cambridge graduate, a well-known theologian, and a vigorous reformer against the popish Church of England. His credentials being such, he obtained a pulpit in Salem in 1633 and immediately became the chief thorn in the side of the Oligarchs.

There is really a very thin line between separatism and semi-separatism and Williams reveals the distance. He was, at heart, a separatist. Thus he began to criticize the M.B.C. authorities for not explicitly separating from the Church of England. And, since separation from the Church of England could not be disassociated from separation from English civil authority, Williams preached that the MBC lacked either legal or moral authority to enforce the observation of the first four commandments. Finally, Williams challenged the legality of the charter.

That proved to be too much for the Oligarchs to tolerate. The Charter was the legal foundation for their rule and an attack at the very heart of the oligarchy brought quick and stern reactions.

But since Williams was preaching and aimed his attack, not at the church on question of doctrine, but at the state, it was difficult for the authorities to deal with him.

The danger of his message however was evident. Even at this early date, there were “dissenters” among the Puritans. Those who were "freemen" in the Bible Commonwealth, but lacked the franchise because of the stringent requirements established, rallied to Williams' message. When persuasion proved futile the authorities were left with only one course of action. In 1635, Roger Williams was charged with inciting to rebellion and sentenced to banishment. Williams ultimately fled south where the following year, in the midst of separatist plantations such as dotted the shore lines around Providence, he found refuge. Other dissenters joined him, and in 1647, Williams obtained a charter for those settlements as the colony of Rhode Island. (always referred to as “Rogues Island” by orthodox Puritans.)

If Williams was a threat, he wasn't the only one that the Oligarchs had to contend with. Even more insidious were the teachings of Anne Hutchinson, a free woman who preached not from the pulpit (that being denied her due to gender status), but who spread her heretical message in prayer meetings held at private homes.

From a theological point of view, what Anne Hutchinson spread was the heresy of Antinomianism - false conclusions drawn from the doctrine of predestination. Expressed in its simplest terms, this is the belief that, since men are utterly corrupt (doctrine of Original Sin) they are utterly incapable of doing anything to advance their own salvation. God only accomplished this by placing the Holy Ghost directly within a person so that thereafter one was directly solely by God. The "man" thereafter ceased to be.

What was disturbing in this theological conclusion was the implications that followed with regard to the social and civil order. If one were truly under the control of the Holy Ghost, then one followed God's law instinctively. There was no need for civil law or civil authority in order to promote salvation. The laws and regulation of the state were at most superfluous even when in accord with God's law. And if the laws were not in accordance with God's law, they would have to be disobeyed. Hence, Anne Hutchinson preached that the civil authorities of MBC should be - well basically - ignored.

Governor John Winthrope was the first to become alarmed at these teachings. He also noted her appeal, not only among freemen, but among the sizeable number of indentured servants, totally without power. The good Governor began a list of the awful conclusions that could ensue from her teachings. Before he was through he and other members of the Puritan oligarchy had enumerated nearly one hundred dangerous propositions. The worst amounted to a 17th century version of nihilism or anarchism.

At that point in the story, Anne Hutchinson was impolitic enough to make known her conviction that only two members of the Puritan ministry throughout the colony were truly under the influence of the Holy Ghost and hence fit to hold ecclesiastical office. Anne's followers, adopting the same logic, came to the conclusion that there were few of the Magistrates and Assistants who were under the influence of the Holy Ghost and fit to hold civil office.

The reaction was swift. Indictment, trial, a verdict of guilt and a sentence of banishment came. Like Roger Williams before her, Anne Hutchinson moved South to Rhode Island and later West where she ultimately died during an Indian skirmish in what is now New York. Her grandson, Thomas Hutchinson, would later become Governor of the colony during the stormy days preceding the Revolution. Today, her actions, loudly championed by feminists in the 20th century as a voice for free expression, religious toleration, and opposition to patriarchy, have gravely clouded her historical role.

What was truly disturbing in these experiences was the recognition by the oligarchs that the old fervor, the dedication to the cause of the Bible Commonwealth was not shared by all; that a dangerous form of "worldliness" was creeping into MBC in the form of materialism, the accumulation of riches.

Fishing offered the first economic basis for M.B.C. and from this base early, industries followed, centering around shipping. Ship building, the production of naval stores: ship mast, plank, tar, pitch, turpentine and paint soon followed. And with the appearance of these marketable commodities there arose the first non-religious elites - the Boston Brahmins - as they came to be known. Bearing such enduring names as Lowell, Cabot and Lodge, this new element proved to be a test for the old Oligarchs who disdained the accumulation of wealth and the distractions which entrepreneurial activity created from religious duties.

The Brahmins, who were destined to become a merchant aristocracy throughout New England were non-religious only in the view of the Elect. They saw in this rising merchant class that the thoughts of perfecting the Bible Commonwealth were gradually being replaced with the thoughts of profit making. In short, the Brahmins were only outwardly Puritans, nominal members of the congregations. Boston wits in the 18th century would recite a verse that was descriptive of the social exclusiveness of that class.

I come from the city of Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod;

Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells,

And the Lowells speak only to God.

Too important to be ignored, the Oligarchs made their peace with the Brahmins. At a general church synod called by the General Court in 1657, the Puritans adopted what has since been called the Halfway Covenant. The synod decided that persons who had been baptized in infancy and had led exemplary lives within the congregation should be regarded as full church members. This removed the stringent requirement of conversion and an consequent expansion of the franchise to the mercantile class. It also opened up a major fault line in MBC that would become apparent later during the famous witch hunt of the 1690s.

The compromise served its purpose. The Brahmins supported the Bible Commonwealth. The clergy ceased attacking, directly at least, profit making. But as a long-term solution to the simmering discontent, the compromise was not enough. Other attacks followed.

One attack was ideological in nature and came from a dissident group known as the Quakers. Unlike modern Quakers who are quiescent, 17th century Quakers were evangelical. Operating both within and without the Church of England, they opposed a salaried clergy and a tax supported church (both of endorsed by the Puritans). Further, Quakers were so egalitarian in their beliefs that they sometimes refused to recognize legally constituted authority and consistently refused to take an oath. Their stubborn devotion to prostalytizing among the Elect was so exasperating as to provoke increasingly severe punishments. In 1660, Edward Burrough, a notable Quaker, petitioned the Crown for protection against the Puritans and listed the following instances of their abuse of Quakers:

* Twenty-five banishments, upon the penalties of being

shipped, or having their ears cut; or branded in the hand, if they returned.

* Fines laid upon the inhabitants for meeting together, and edifying one another, as the saints ever did; and for refusing to swear (take oaths,) it being contrary to Christ's command, amounting to about a thousand pound.

* Five kept fifteen days (in all without food, and fifty-eight days shut up close by the jailor...

* One laid neck and heels in irons for sixteen hours.

* One very deeply burnt in the right hand with the letter H (for Heretic) after he had been whipped with about thirty stripes.

* One chained the most part of twenty days to a log of wood in an open prison in the winter-time.

* Five appeals to England, denied at Boston

* Three had their right ears cut by the hangman in the prison.

* Four hung in the Boston commons.

This petition to the crown was a direct attack. The Puritans recognized that the Crown had no love for their principles or their experiment in Utopia building. Further, the Crown had already voiced displeasure with their semi-independent attitude toward governing in the New World. There always existed the possibility that at some future time the charter of the MBC might be altered or - heaven forbid - revoked. Thus outside attacks which reached in ear of the King were of major concern.

Unfortunately for the Puritan oligarchs, they actions over the preceding decades had created a growing number of critics abroad who were bringing to the crown's attention numerous complaints, which from the Crown's view, were more serious than the persecution of religious dissenters such as the Quakers. One such group were the patent holders, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason. These favorites at the British Court received large land grants from the Crown and sponsoring settlements just to the north of M.B.C. in the vicinity of present day Maine. But, whenever such a new settlement was planted, in came representatives of MBC to inform the settlers that they were within the boundary, and therefore under the authority of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. Protests and admonitions from England had little effect upon this expansionistic tendency of the Puritans.

Then there was the Anglican Church as a fountainhead of criticism. That powerful institution constantly complained to both Crown and Parliament that the Puritans practiced religious discrimination against members of the High Church by refusing to allow them to vote in MBC; all in defiance of their charter guaranteeing that all colonists would be entitled to receive "all the liberties, privileges and immunities as though they were residing in this...our fair realm of England."

Added to the growing chorus of voices being raised against the Puritans was the influential Board of Trade in London. This group, consisting of English merchants charged with regulating the trade within the British empire, charged that MBC merchants consistently evaded maritime regulations, and in particular avoided payment of maritime taxes. In truth, smuggling was not only rife, it was a veritable way of life in Massachusetts, who managed to reconcile the contradiction of tax evasion with religious beliefs in the same manner as they reconciled other apparent contradictions.

For a relatively long period, the Crown in England remained unresponsive to these various charges, and for good reason. England was engaged in a running naval war against the Dutch throughout the 17th century and was dependent upon New England for naval stores. Thus she was reluctant to rock the boat. Then too, there was an uprising in Scotland to distract the Crown's attention and finally a Civil War in England pitting the Crown against Parliament. Thus for forty years, the Crown satisfied itself by demanding that agents from MBC be sent to England to answer the charges against it. Occasionally the Crown demanded that the charter be returned for examination. Never was the Crown able to win compliance from the Puritans who politely ignored their Sovereign.

The quiescent attitude on the part of the Crown changed abruptly with the accession of Charles II in 1660 and a temporary stabilization in British politics. In 1678, the Lords of Trade and Plantations, (another agency charged with imperial policy) dispatched one Edward Randolph to investigate first hand the various charges against the Puritans in MBC. Randolph made a thorough investigation, despite the hostility of the Puritans who jailed several of his assistants, and sent home two reports that put the Puritan Oligarchs in the worst possible light. Randolph not only confirmed the charge of the Board of Trade as to the extent of smuggling in Massachusetts, but observed that it was virtually impossible to enforce the various maritime laws since local Puritan juries always acquitted local Puritan merchants brought to the bar of English justice. The Puritan theory was that since their charter did not expressly give Parliament the power to levy taxes in Massachusetts, only they could do so.

Adding fresh fuel to the fire, Randolph reported that MBC was minting its own money (in direct defiance of Crown policy and specific orders to the contrary), extending its civil authority beyond its borders, denying the suffrage to High Church members (even after expressly promising to stop this practice ten years earlier), and most irritating of all, implicitly asserting its virtual independence from England. The MBC had assumed authority to negotiate international agreements (Treaty of Boston and Treaty of Hartford) and, denied to its colonists the right of appeal to the King's Court in England. Finally, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts had demanded that freemen swear an oath of allegiance, not to England or the Crown, but to Massachusetts.

Armed with Randolph's report, plus the consistent refusal of the MBC authorities to answer the charges against it, the Privy Council brought suit. In 1684, a Court of Chancery revoked the Charter of Massachusetts. Like Virginia before it, Massachusetts became a Royal colony, incorporated briefly into a new union, The Dominion of New England.

THE CRISIS OF THE BIBLE COMMONWEALTH

Thus the opening years of the last decade of the 17th century were, if nothing else, a period of soul searching among the Elect. The legal edifice of the Bible Commonwealth had been toppled. Someone had violated the covenant. God's great experiment had been subverted. The signs had been there for all to see, and the Elect had seen them. The "lower elements" in society consorting against those appointed above them; the loss of the old religious fervor among the younger generation; materialistic pursuits by merchants sapping religious vigor even further; heresies such as those of Williams and Hutchinson.

Most distressing to the Saints was the growing failure of the second and third generation to declare themselves as Saints. The original Puritans had been filled with the ideological zeal to make a veritable Garden of Eden out of the Wilderness. They believed themselves to be truly under the influence of God. Unfortunately, their children had neither the same zeal or interests as they did. Relatively few seconed-generation Puritans were making the required conversion before their congregations. This reluctance had led in 1662 to the so-called Hal-Way Covenant, which allowed the founders’ descendants to transmit church membership to their children, with the reservation that those children could not take communion or vote in church affairs. It was as many of its critics noted, a sacrifice of purity for the sake of community.

Thus the Half-Way Covenant signaled the beginning of the end of The City on the Hill. Third and Forth generation Puritans, content with their “half-way” status, eventually dommed the Sants to a minority status. Indeed, Sainthood tended to proliferate more and more in certain families, and by the early 18th century, there were more women than men listed as Saints in the congregations.

Ever since the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, an endless stream of sermons called jeremiads, brought forth this point time and time again. The clergy berated their parishioner's, not so much about sinfulness, but for their tendency to forget "that New England is originally a plantation of Religion, not a plantation of trade," as one eloquently put it.

The Porters, who lived in the village's eastern section had benefited from Salem Town's prosperity and enjoyed social prestige as well as wealth. In contrast, the Putnams lived in Salem Village's western half, which did not share in the rising prosperity, and whose influence and status were declining as commerce eclipsed agriculture. When the witch trials came in 1692, three "afflicted" girls in the Putnam household, together with parents, in-laws and cousins, would testify against at least 46 accused witches. In Salem Village then, there was a definite "East/West" split. (See Fig. 1)

The antics of a small group of girls in the village of Salem, eventually provided the answer to the questions the Puritans had been asking. There in the home of Samuel Parris, the town minister, the young girls of the village frequently gathered in the warmth of the kitchen where they were entertained by the Parris servant, Tituba, a mulatto who had immigrated from the Caribbean where she brought with her a certain familiarity with voodoo and the black arts.

It was there one day that the girls called upon Tituba to advise them of what was on their minds on many-a-day: what men awaited them in their lives. Tituba obliged by bringing forth a wine glass into which she poured the white of an egg and behind which she placed a candle. With the glass now acting as a prism for the light, and accompanied undoubtedly by the incantation of appropriate words and sounds, Tituba began the seance.

Those innocent antics by Tituba were sufficient to trigger a surprising reaction in the kitchen. One of the girls fainted, or fell into a trance as contemporaries reported. Then, muscular contortions, the flailing of arms and legs punctured the strange sounds which came from the girl . The condition was serious enough for the local physician to be summoned. He could not diagnose the ailment. A second opinion was sought from another village. Two physicians could not diagnose the ailment. At this point, the clergy was called. Enter the formidable Cotton Matthew, Jr., the very embodiment of Puritanism. What medicine could not accomplish, prayer did. The girl recovered consciousness and then underwent the close questioning of the clergy. Undoubtedly responding, as children are wont to do, to the leading questions presented, the child narrated a story of incredible dimensions.

The young girl alleged that, several days earlier during her sleep, an apparition had appeared and lured her from the house to a nearby clearing in the woods where Satan and his followers were engaged in revelry. There, Satan had urged her to break her covenant with God and enter into a covenant with him. Apparently, Satan also desired to "become familiar" with the young lass. The girl refused, whereupon, she testified, Satan had seen fit to inflict upon her punishment, by causing one of his followers, a witch, to torment her.

Inevitably the key question was asked: could the young girl identify her tormenter? Yes! It was Tituba. This mulatto servant was immediately questioned. Her quarters were searched, revealing numerous artifacts indicating the practice of the black arts. Faced with the accusations, and the evidence, and perhaps shrewdly understanding the mentality of her accusers, Tituba confessed. Yes, she was a witch.

Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?

None.

Why do you hurt these children?

I do not hurt them.

Who is it them?

The Devil, for aught I know.

Did you never see the Devil?

The Devil, said Tituba, came to me and bid me serve him.

Tituba also pointed the finger at two others, Sarah Good and Goody Osburn.*

This confession by Tituba immediately triggered the ever widening events that followed. In the days and weeks that followed, more of the young girls in Salem experienced the "fits"

*"Goody" was short for "Goodwife," a term used for married women of freemen. Husbands were called "Goodman." The terms "Mr" and "Mrs." were reserved for Brahmins and the Elect. Indentured servants lacked last names.

(as contemporaries described the convulsions which they exhibited). The finger of accusation widened. At near by villages, the phenomenon appeared. The authorities responded. Formal indictments were drawn, trials were held, convictions followed.

By June, the Devil's door was wide open throughout Essex County. Puritans saw witches under every bed not only in Salem, but in Amesbury, Topsfield, Haverhill, Gloucester and Ipswich. And God help anyone who saw differently. A constable in Salem who refused to arrest witches was himself accused and jailed. When John Proctor said if the girls were not stopped, "we should all be devils and witches." he and his wife were jailed. Animals were suspect. One dog was executed for witchcraft.

Those indicted (141 in all) or under suspicion began implicating others. A wife and her daughter being indicted testified against the husband and father. A seven-year old girl testified against her mother. A minister was accused by his granddaughter.

A grand total of 342 accusations were made between 1691 and 1693. Not surprisingly, certain patterns emerged in the ensuing hysteria.

First: The victims were not engaging in fraud. Eyewitness accounts leave us with little doubt that the "fits:" were not contrived. The Reverend Deodat Lawson, one such eyewitness, wrote:

Their motions in their fits are preternatural, both as

to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could

not screw their body into; and as to the violence also it

is preternatural, being much beyond the ordinary force of

the same person when they are in their right mind.

There were other symptoms of alarming proportions; loss of sight, speech and hearing, loss of memory, choking sensations in the throat. The "victims" felt themselves pinched and bitten. Often there were marks upon their skin to confirm their crys.

The following conclusions are relevant to the examination of the witch hunt:

First: the accusers were overwhelmingly young girls, aged 11 to 20. The accused (witches) were likewise predominately female, although both older in years than the accusers, and most likely from a lower class than the accusers.

Second: judging from the geographical location of the parties (see map, Fig. 1) every petty jealousy and grudge stored up over a lifetime, must have animated the direction, if not the motivation, in which the finger of accusation was pointed.

Third: out of 342 accused, fully 50 confessed to the crime of witchcraft. These confessions present us with an apparent irony. For those who confessed found their lives spared, while those who maintained their innocence and elected to receive due process of law were, upon conviction, uniformly sentenced to death by hanging.

Just how important truth was to the Puritans is reflected in this irony that those who confessed (obviously to a crime that could not be committed) were spared, while those who maintained their innocence perished. Tituba apparently recognized this and from that point forward, it must have been obvious to all that anyone who confessed would be spared. Thus anyone accused might have saved his or her life by falsely confessing. Yet twenty three people died, 19 by hanging, three while in jail, and one - Giles Corey - by pressing for his refusal to plead to the charges. Under a wooden plank, pressed with heavy stones to force a plea, "More weight" were his last words as he was crushed to death.

Sarah Good, with a noose around her neck shouted, "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard" to a minister. "If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink." The curse haunted Judge Hawthorne so much that his great-great-grandson Nathaniel who, after adding a w to his name, used the threat of "blood to drink" as the linchpin of his novel The House of Seven Gables.

That due process of law was followed in the Witch Hunt trials, is yet another apparent irony. MBC followed the basic tenants of the English common law in the 17th century in dealing with witches. The charges of witchcraft were in writing and specific in their accusations; trials were public and the defendants could both testify and summon witnesses on their behalf. The only departure from modern jurisprudence, and not a large one at that, was the admissibility of spectral evidence. At the trial, when asked to name their tormentors, the victims testified that they could see Goodwife so-and-so, or Master so-and-so, choking or pinching them or the other girls and had seen them do so earlier. All of the accused, the victims testified, had told them that they were agents of Satan - witches.

How did the judges and the jurors interpret this testimony? Why did they accept it? And how did they account for the sudden outbreak of witchcraft in their midst? A search for an answer begins with an fuller understanding of the Puritan mind. Whereas 20th century man has come to accept a rational order in which cause and effect are natural, Puritans assumed a supernatural order. God, God's Will, and God's Power were the fundamental cause of events, both earthly and heavenly. Their religion taught them that God and Satan were locked in a cosmic struggle for the universe in which earthly events were only part of the great drama.

To a large degree, the Puritans were a product of their age. Men and women in the 16th and 17th centuries believed deeply in "special providences," the conviction that God intervened directly in worldly affairs. Catholics as well as Protestants accepted this assumption. On Christmas Eve, 1492, Christopher Columbus' flag ship went aground on a reef off the island of Hispaniola. The ship was lost, to the consternation of all, who viewed it as a calamity of the first order. On Christmas Day however, as he viewed the wreckage from shore, Columbus was approached by a native who showed him some gold. Immediately, the attitude of Columbus and the crew changed. What had seemed to be a major disaster now became a "special providence," a sign of God's blessing. Without the wreck, Columbus reasoned, no landing would have been made. And without gold, the entire voyage would have been seen by his financial backers as a failure.

So too with the Puritans. "Special providences" was called upon to explain the most recent and calamitous crisis. Hence, without doing any gross injustice to Puritan beliefs, we can summarize their frame of mind on the outbreak of witchcraft as follows:

* All of history consists of a struggle between the forces of Good (God) and the forces of Evil (Satan.) All events are merely part of the struggle in which salvation or damnation are at stake in a contest between the forces of absolute Good and absolute Evil.

* God has his allies and followers, both heavenly and divine. The heavenly allies are angels. God's early allies are the Elect.

Satan too has his forces, consisting of fallen angels and, on earth, witches, and_____. Thus the forces of Good and Evil exist within society. The forces of evil constitute a vast, insidious, international conspiratorial network.

* Both God and Satan work on earthy by a form of mental penetration which cannot be directly observed. The act of conversion by a Christian, whereby the Holy Spirit takes control of one's thoughts and actions is the proof of that divine penetration. But Satan also works through a sort-of mental subtrafuge in which he seizes control of the thoughts and actions of men, including the formerly good members of a congregation. Thus Satan has succeeded in penetration The Bible Commonwealth by recruiting witches and wizards (male witches) to his cause.

* Since Satan's goal is the total destruction of God's followers, and God's society on earth - The Bible Commonwealth - there can be no compromise with Satan or his followers. They must be destroyed, otherwise they will destroy the Elect and the Godly society of the Commonwealth.

* What is needed ultimately to defeat Satan, to end the discord and dissension he has occasioned, is a return to the covenant with God. Those who have broken their covenant with God in order to enter into a covenant with Satan must be brought back to their original covenant, as must all other members of the community. Thus what is needed is a moral reawakening, a revival, in short, a moral crusade.

Observers from afar, as historians and students are, tend at first to dismiss the witch hunt as merely an outbreak of hysteria; an irrational reaction based upon fear and emotion rather than reason. Yet please note that the frame of mind set forth above, is logical. If one accepts that good and evil exist, then all else follows. This explains why the testimony of the young girls in Salem were taken seriously and were deemed admissible as evidence at the trials of the accused. It was in direct harmony with the most fundamental of truths as the Puritans saw it.

In 1636, Plymouth defined witchcraft as the act of "Solemn Compaction or conversing with the devil by way of Witchcraft, conjuration or the like." Note that the gist of the crime consisted of entering into an agreement, (or to use the original term, a covenant) with the Devil. Covenants with God identified the righteous. Covenants with the Devil similarly identified those who were Evil.

Part of the legacy of the Puritans is this frame of mind, the conviction of subsequent generations of Americans that their country is somehow special, with a unique, and divinely ordained mission in the world. The United States were are reminded by countless statesmen, is to be a leader, a model, and haven for the oppressed and to serve as a land of opportunity.

Some thirty years ago, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Richard Hofstadter, explained that Americans are periodically possessed by a "paranoid style" of politics in which normal debate is replaced by "suspiciousness and heated exaggeration." A pattern exists in American culture which emerges occasionally under conditions similar to that experienced in MBC in the 1690s - in times of trouble. Americans of every generation discover an evil conspiracy at work, controlled by some international and preternaturally effective group.

In the 1790s, it was the "Illuminatei conspiracy.*

Q. Is the John Birch Society really on its last legs? (R.E. Belmont, Mass.)

A. Robert Welch, its founder, keeps the membership rolls a top secret, so its impossible to tell. Defectors, however, report a drop in local memberships, attribute the society's decline to Welch's growing extremism. Welch now contends that the Communist conspiracy is a "front" for "an inner circle that has been running the show." According to Welch, a group of insiders controls Washington and Moscow. Welch maintains this cabal came into power in 1776 when a group of Bavarian masons formed a sect called "The Illuminatei."

-Parade Magazine

In the 1850's it was the Papal conspiracy. In the 1890s, a Jewish banking conspiracy was projected by otherwise reasonable Americans. After W.W.I there was the Great Red Scare and a Bolshevik conspiracy to contend with. In the 1950s with the rise of Joseph McCarthy, there was the communist conspiracy.

What underlies the appearances of these movements of hysteria is, I suggest, a mind set; the acceptance of certain assumptions, values and myths: the concept of the covenant, the acceptance of a national myth in the uniqueness of America is declared, and the fundamental belief in the forces of good and evil as causal agents in the affairs of man.

This then, was the legacy of the Puritan experiment - the Bible Commonwealth.

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Footnote 1: The Witches of Salem and Fairfax

The outbreak of a witch hunt in Old Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691, has provided a fascination for all Americans and a source of continuous inquiry by scholars. That otherwise reasonable men and women of profound religious conviction should apparently lose control of their rational faculties and convince themselves that diabolical persons of supernatural powers lived among them is difficult to fathom. Upon first contact, the student is apt to dismiss this as an aberration. But upon a deeper examination, it becomes apparent that, aberration or not, witch hunts in America are not confined to the 17th century. Historians in particular understand that "witch hunts" are rather perennial in America. Indeed, once one understands the underlying assumptions, conditions and factors which create the social conditions in which American culture operates, witch hunts can be predicted.

Consider the following: In August, 1993, a Fairfax County School teacher was charged with sexual molestation by a 20 year woman, a former student. During a three-and-a-half hour hearing, the woman testified that some eleven years earlier, as a nine-year-old third grader, the accused had intimate, sexual contact with her, in school, while both were completely naked. Asked why she had not come forward earlier to report the incident, the woman stated that she had only recently recalled the incident, initially in her dreams and then, by fragments, in moments of deep reflection. The presiding judge found that testimony to be completely truthful, but less than reliable and, there being no other evidence to corroborate her story, dismissed the charges. Reason prevailed in 1993 in Fairfax, Virginia. The testimony of the "victim" consisted of spectral evidence. Such was the testimony of various young girls in Salem Village which in 1691, touched off the first American witch hunt. They too had "experienced" intimate sexual contact - with the Devil. They too recalled these experiences only by reference to "trances" or "dreams" in which fragments of past experience were recalled. But, in 1691 their testimony was accepted into evidence. And since that testimony was consistent with other evidence and with the underlying assumptions upon which Mass. Bay society was structured, the totality of evidence pointed logically, to guilt.

For those of you who are interested in finding a modern counterpart to Cotton Mather, I recommend Laura Davis' pop-psychology book, Courage to Heal Workbook. This deals with "repressed memory syndrome" in women. Its author attributes many emotional problems experienced by women to sexual abuse in childhood at the hands of their fathers, the memory of which has been repressed. It suggests psycho therapy in order to recover the repressed memories. It also recommends bringing suit against parents.

Many women are doing just that. Several women, under the influence of psychiatrists, have succeeded in recovering lost memories, after which criminal and civil charges were brought against their parents. Recently, one of the accused struck back. Mr. Gary Ramona filed suit against two female therapists who encouraged his daughter to believe he had raped her as a child. The therapists, Mr. Ramona charged, had engaged in malpractice by falsely encouraging "recovered memories" from his daughter. A jury found in his favor, even though his daughter testified against him at the trial, detailing the instances of sexual abuse. What the jury heard from the daughter was - spectral evidence.

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Footnote 2: The Devil in America

In the summer of 1970, the Black Panther Party, one of various groups spawned by the Civil Rights Movement, held an emotionally charged convention in Washington, D.C. Among its contributions was a manifesto "Message to America," which was adopted by acclimation. Portions of that manifesto follow:

MESSAGE TO AMERICA

Delivered On the 10th Anniversary of The Emancipation Proclamation At Washington, D.C., Capitol of Babylon, World Racism, And Imperialism, June 19, 1970.

BY THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

As oppressed people held captive within the confines of the Fascist-Imperialist United States of America, we Black Americans take a dim view of the position that we, as a people, find ourselves in at the beginning of the 7th decade of the Twentieth Century.

We find ourselves in a very dangerous world-situation. White America has always adhered to a very racist attitude in its policy towards people who have color. This has been true in the past and it is true today. We see very clearly that whereas White America has escalated its policy of repression and containment of Black people inside the United States itself, on a world scale, the United States is playing the leading role in organizing the White race against the people of the world who have a color. Resolving contradictions between White Protestants and White Catholics, between White Christians and White Jews, between White Capitalists and White Communists, between White Eastern Europeans and White Western Europeans, between White Archeo-Colonialists and White Neo-colonialists, wherever we look, the picture is one and the same. White racist America, which domestically has adopted the policy of open fascism in order to put down the uprisings of oppressed people of color and those few Whites who take a stand against the grizzly reality of the Babylonian scene, this same White racist America has projected its domestic racist perspective onto the international scene and has organized world imperialism along racist lines. Within the domestic confines of the United States of America, we see clearly that a well-planned, calculated Fascist Genocidal Conspiracy is being implemented against our people.

Black people within the domestic confines of the U.S.A. have reached another cross road. This is a time for the most serious decisions that we, as a people, have ever been called upon to make. The decision that we make in our time, the actions that we take or fail to take, will determine whether we, as a people, will survive or fall victims to genocidal extermination at the hands of the FASCIST MAJORITY which the Nixon clique are rapidly mobilizing into a beastly vigilante weapon to be unleashed against us.

***

The United States of America is a barbaric organization controlled and operated by avaricious, sadistic, blood-thirsty thieves. the United States of America is the Number One exploiter and oppressor of the peoples of the whole world. The inhuman capitalist system which defines the core of reality of the U.S.A., is the root of the evil that has polluted the very fabric of existence within the U.S.A. Exploitation of man by man; the rule of man over man instead of the rule of the laws of Human Rights and Justice; savage wars of aggression, mass murder, genocide, and shameless slaughter of the people of the world; impudent, arrogant White Racism; and a naked, brazen attempt to perpetuate White Supremacy on a world scale - these are a few of the unsavory characteristics of the U.S.A. Monster with which we have to deal.

***

Point No. 10 of the Black Panther Party's Platform and Program addresses itself to the question of the National Destiny of black people. We feel that, in practical terms, it is time for Black People as a whole to address their attention to the question of our National Destiny.

Black people can no longer either respect the U.S. Constitution, look to it with hope, or live under it. The Constitution is the social contract that binds the American people together into a sovereign nation and defines authority and the distribution of power, rights, and privileges. By shoving the Constitution aside, rendering it null and void, in order to carry out fascist oppression and repression of Black people, the fascists have, by that very fact, destroyed even the false foundations of authority in this society. We live in a lawless society where racist pigs have usurped the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches of government and perverted them towards the prosperity of their private interests.

***

The Hour is late and the situation is desperate. As a nation, America is now in the middle of the greatest crisis in its history. The Black Panther Party believes that the America an people are capable of rising to the task which history has laid before the nation. We believe that the American people are capable of rejecting the fascist solution to the national crisis which the fascist Nixon clique, the George Wallaces', Lester Maddoxes', Ronald Reagans', Spiro Agnews', etc., hold out to the people.

WE THEREFORE, CALL FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE'S CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, TO BE CONVENED BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, TO WRITE A NEW CONSTITUTION THAT WILL GUARANTEE AND DELIVER TO EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN THE INVIOLABLE HUMAN RIGHT TO LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

***

WARNING TO AMERICA

We are from 25 to 30 million strong, and we are armed. And we are conscious of our situation. And we are determined to change it. And we are unafraid. Because we have our guarantee. If the American people, as a whole, do no rise up, reverse the presence course of this nation, which, if unchecked, holds out only fascist repression and genocide for Black people, then we, Black people, will be forced to respond with a form of War of Salvation that in the chaos of carrying it out and the attempt to repress it, will gut this country and utterly destroy it. Before we accept Genocide, we will inflict Total Destruction upon Babylon.

***

FOR THE SALVATION, LIBERATION, AND FREEDOM OF OUR PEOPLE, WE WILL NOT HESITATE TO EITHER KILL OR DIE.

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Historians have made much of the concept of the covenant. And well they should. A consensual agreement, reduced to a writing, binding upon all members of society, defining the basic rights, responsibilities and authority in society, sounds vaguely familiar. Today, we acknowledge the term constitution to describe such a document; forgetting that the concept of a constitution itself had an intellectual origin that owes much to the Puritan concept of a consensual agreement defining the purpose of society.

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Footnote 3. Society and Its Discontents

Several decades ago, two historians, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, in an effort to find some correlation in the accounts of the Salem Witch trials of 1692 were inspired to make a list of accusers and accused a locate their dwellings. The results were striking, as can be seen in the map in Fig. 1 above. Having gleaned this correlation, Boyer and Nissenbaum decided to tackle the church records at Salem; the petitions and counter-petitions, the minutes of the Village Committees, etc. It was a formidable undertaking, one that had discourages other historians. The church records were so filled with petty complaints, quarrels and backbiting as to cause earlier historians to despair of making sense of it all.

Boyer and Nissenbaum discovered that when the lists from different quarrels were compared, the same names were grouped together. This was especially true in the frequent quarrels that erupted in the selection of a minister. Then another correlation appeared. The same correlation that held true for the frequent quarrels over selection of a minister held true for the geographical division of Salem Village seen in the map.

What lay behind that division? Our fledgling historians concluded that it went beyond a simple geographical one, to a difference in outlook and lifestyle. Salem Town was emerging as a commercial center while Salem Village remained agricultural. For years this division had been building up two opposing factions in town eager to point the finger of blame "across the railroad tracks" as it were. After all, in time of troubles, when something goes "wrong" it's usually "them" who are responsible.

Some ten years ago, a young, black teenager was accused of robbery. According to the police report, he and a group of three others had forcefully seized and taken a watch from the wrist of the victim. The crime had occurred during the day and on a residential street some two blocks from where the victim lived.

The victim was a white male, age 12. The accused was a black male, age 16. According to the police report, the three other, unidentified males accompanying the accused, were also black.

The accused pled innocent to the charge. He testified that on the day and time in question he was nowhere near the scene of the crime. His testimony was supported by eight witnesses (varying ages and gender) who placed him miles from the scene of the crime.

Was the victim lying? Was it a case of mistaken identity? I didn't know. That is, I didn't know until I went to the crime scene and discovered the geography. The accused lived in an public housing complex consisting of apartments. The victim lived directly across the street in an area filled with single family houses that looked like they were order from a Sears Roebuck catalogue in the 1920s: not prosperous, but neat and tidy.

The accused had not known the victim despite having lived across the street from him for some five years. At the trial, upon cross examination, the young twelve-year old victim testified he had never seen the accused before the incident. When asked "How did you ever put a name to the face and report it to the police enabling them to make the arrest?" the victim testified that several days after the incident he was on the front porch of his house with his Uncle, telling him about the incident, when the accused stepped out of a car in the parking lot across the street. The Uncle said to the lad "That looks like the person you were describing." The victim then looked across the street and recognized him. It was him - the person who stole his watch.

After considering the evidence the judge rendered his decision. Not guilty. Afterwards the judge called me to the bench and asked how it could be that the two young boys could live across the street from one another for five years without knowing one another. I laid out the geography of the area. The judge understood. There was an "invisible line" running down the middle of the neighborhood. I also told the judge that upon entering the Court that day, I sat with my client and his mother in the hall way waiting for the case to be called. I had again asked my client to identify the victim by asking "Do you see young Mr.____ here in the Court?" Again he said "NO. I wouldn't know him if I saw him." His mother interrupted and pointed him out saying "Why he's right over there. Don't you know him?" To which my client replied "Ah Mom. You know how it is. At that age they all look alike."

I have no idea if the judge knew of Boyer and Nissenbaum's findings at Salem Village. But I do know the judge recognized the "invisible lines" that separate us in society.

CHAPTER 4. THE EMERGENCE OF ROYAL GOVERNMENT IN THE COLONIES

ROUNDING OUT THE PLANTATION COLONIES

Virginia had set the pattern for the colonies which followed in that region: Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Maryland, founded in 1634 became England's first so-called Proprietary Colony, meaning it was simply a land grant from the Crown to na individual, one Lord Baltimore, whose distinction at the time was his religious persuasion - a Catholic. Lord Baltimore intended to play the role of absentee proprietor, then a mark of high achievement in England, enhance his family by providing large estates for family members and live off the rents of the settlers.

The proprietor soon discovered that few migrants were willing to settle as renters and he quickly abandoned that feature.

By 1650 a small settlement in the Chesapeake region was developed consisting of modest farms inhabited by small farmers, mostly Protestant, surrounding a few land barons, mostly Catholic, which made Maryland politics more inflammatory than any other British colony throughout the 17th century.

Like Virginia, Maryland became a tobacco producing region, dependent on indentures servants for its labor force until in the later years of the 17th century, black slaves came to be imported in large numbers.

Civil War in England between 1640 and 1660 had disrupted colonization, but with the accession of Charles II to the throne in that latter year, it was renewed by a grant of land named Carolina, given to a group of the King's supporters who came to be known collectively as the Lords Proprietors. This aristocratic group sought to transfer the region south of Virginia and north of Spanish Florida into a food basket to provision the British spice islands in the Caribbean and develop new staples such as wine, silk and olive oil.

The first settlements were created at the mouth of the Charles river, appropriately named Charles Town, where rice emerged as the principal export crop followed by Indigo; staples that were so labor intensive that the region became the principle slave importing colony until by 1710 slaves constituted a majority of the Carolinians.

Not surprisingly, this region, later separated from the north, became the most aristocratic of the colonies. The Lords Proprietors had intended to create a hereditary aristocracy. They had even drafted a social blueprint, the Fundamental Constitutions of 1667, to bring this about. A mid-18th century visitor from New England described South Carolina as a society "divided into opulent and lordly planters, poor and spiritless peasants, and vile slaves."

In the northern portion of Carolina, physically consisting of pine barrens along a sandy coast, the initial immigrants consisted largely of run-away and recently freed indentured servants from Virginia, plus a motley group of outcasts and religious dissenters who became "squatters", without legal right to the soil. They developed into small tobacco farmers with a decided anti-aristocratic bias. Mostly poor, regarded as riffraff by their neighbors to the north and south and largely isolated from them by wilderness and the stormy Cape Hatteras, the colonists in the north of Carolina quickly developed a distinct identity and a disinclination to any authority stemming from Charles Town to the south. Slavery emerged, but only slowly. By 1720, whereas whites in the southern carolina constituted 45% of the population, whites were 85% of the population in the north.

By 1712 the differences between the settlers in the north and south of Carolina had convinced the proprietors to send two governors to the colony, one for each region, thus formalizing the region's separation into North and South Carolina and giving us - now - two states.

Nineteen years later, in 1733 the colony of Georgia saw its first settlement established at Savannah, being established directly as a Royal colony. Security concerns account for this marked departure of Crown intervention in the establishment of colonies. Spanish raids from Ft. Augustine in the Floridas, and more particularly, Spanish incitement of Indian attacks aimed at the Carolinas convinced British policy makers of the need for a buffer between the Spanish and English settlements.

At this juncture appeared James Olgethorpe, statesman and philanthropist, keenly interested in prison reform with a plan to ease the royal expense of creating such a buffer colony by settling it with the surplus of prisoner's in England's jails, largely at his personal expense. Oglethrope was granted his wish and appointed Governor. His tiny colony grew with painful slowness being the least populous of the British colonies by the mid 18th century.

Differences existed, but similarities tended to unify these southern colonies. All were, to some degree, dominated by a plantation economy. Staple were the main stay of economics. In each, immense acreage in the hands of a favored few fostered a strong aristocratic class, except in North Carolina. Bond slavery thrived and expansionist tendencies to further settlement developed by the exhaustion of soil which became a characteristic of agricultural practices.

THE MIDDLE COLONIES

North of the Plantation Colonies and south of New England emerged the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and New York, which provided the greatest show of diversity among England's North American Colonies.

In Pennsylvania, English Quakers another dissident group which incurred the ire and persecution of the English authorities, began to arrive in the New World in large numbers in the 1650s and 1660s. Everywhere they landed they were reviled, imprisoned, deported or worse by the colonists. In order to avoid further persecution by both colonists and the English authorities, one of their wealthier members, William Penn, purchased the proprietary rights of Lord John Berkeley in 1674 to the lands between the Hudson and Delaware rivers which became known as West Jersey.

Then in 1681, Charles II, in order to extinguish a sizeable debt to Penn's father, but also with an eye to getting rid of the troublesome Quakers, granted to William Penn the last unassigned segment of land along the eastern coast of North America which became Pennsylvania.

That region also proved to be one of the most fertile in North America and immediately attracted a stream of Quakers who quickly absorbed the earlier Dutch, Finnish and Swedish settlers in the area. To the natural fertility of the region was added the enlightened political principles adopted by William Penn. Legislative power was vested in an assembly chosen by all adult males who owned land. Settlers were guaranteed freedom of religion, trial by jury and exemption from military service.

These liberal measures ironically attracted multitudes of non-Quakers, especially in the 18th century when Germans, Scots and Irish settlers began to arrive in large numbers. Taking root in the upper reaches of the Delaware River, these new settlers rejected not only Penn's ideal of non-violence and religious toleration, but the principle of consociation which he had preached. Instead of creating agricultural communities, as in New England, the new immigrants scattered across the countryside building farmsteads. By the middle of the 18th century, the Quakers were becoming a minority grouped in and around Philadelphia, where they dominated trade, commerce, the professions and politics.

To the north of Pennsylvania lay the old Dutch colony of New Netherlands, which had been established by the Dutch West India company in 1613, Under Dutch corporate control, a lucrative fur trade had developed by linking into the vast trading network of the Iroquois Confederation of Indians, which stretched from the Hudson River valley to the Great Lakes.

Viewing their settlement as a trading outpost, the Dutch never encouraged significant immigration and their settlements numbered no more than 10,000 when superior English naval power forced Dutch authority from the area in 1675. By that time, New Netherlands had been honeycombed with New England immigrants who may have numbered half of the 10,000 souls. It had also added to its area of control a former Swedish settlement to the South, which became known as West Jersey by the time the British took over the remnants of the Dutch North American Empire.

Becoming a Royal colony by virtue of superior British firepower, the surviving Dutch settlers, and in particular the large land holders, intermarried with the English and in return for supporting Royal government in the colony, received numerous favors, both political and economic, including monopolistic land grants. By the middle of the 18th century, the colony of New York consisted of a small and rather aristocratic group of landowning families, such as the De Lancey's and Livingstons, a broad number of small farmers, many of whom existed as renters, and a nucleus of merchants at the principle port, New York City. Beneath this "free" class elements, New York also had its class of unfree indentured servants and bond slaves.

Geography more than any other factor gave the middle colonies their common characteristics. The soil, as earlier noted, was fertile and by the middle of the 18th century, these colonies came to be viewed as the "bread colonies" by virtue of their heavy exports of grain. Rivers, especially the Susquehanna, Delaware and Hudson adjacent to virgin forest stimulated lumbering and shipbuilding as early industries, but little other economic activity.

Except in aristocratic New York, landholdings were generally smaller in the Middle Colonies than in the South but larger than in New England. The population was more ethnically diverse than elsewhere, and religious toleration - de jure if not de facto, more firmly established than elsewhere. Finally, nowhere else was internal conflict so prevalent as in the ethnically diverse middle colonies, where factional conflict became a distinguishing feature of public life.

ROYAL GOVERNMENT IN THE COLONIES

What gave unity to the British North American colonies as a whole, was a common set of political institutions and a common set of problems that lent themselves to political solutions. As more and more of the colonies which had begun as corporate colonies found their charters revoked (Virginia, Massachusetts), or created out of military exigencies (New York, New Jersey), British colonies came to be Royal colonies, with Royal Charters underwriting their legal status. By 1763, at the beginning of the revolutionary period, 8 of the 13 British North American colonies were Royal Colonies, thus permitting us to view government as having some uniformity.

Perhaps the most basic analysis of government begins with the examination of legitimate power: where it is centered, how it is exercised and the extent it is claimed by those in authority. In the 17th century, when the British colonies were being planted in North America, the first of our tripartite examination is the most difficult.

The term sovereignty has already been introduced. But as a feature which is familiar to us in the 20th century, a consolidation of legitimate power in a central institution, the concept of sovereignty was still developing in the 17th century. In England, both the Crown and Parliament were engaged in a political and later, military contest for supremacy; one which was eventually won by Parliament and acknowledged by all in 1688.

But the British have some rather quaint ways, one of which is reflected in the survival of the British monarchy, even after its political defeat, and in the rather curious manner by which Englishmen even today refer to the distribution of power in that country. There, they insist, "the monarch reigns and Parliament rules." It's an agreeable legal fiction to the British but students would be wise to remember that it is just a fiction.

But to the survival of that fiction, the pre-existing institutions of government already established in the colonies were not dramatically altered by the English Civil War. Most retained their "royal" names and connections. So let us set out on our sojourn by acknowledging the distribution of power as beginning with Parliament's authority over the Crown and extending it from there.

This is rather easy to do since neither Crown nor Parliament were particularly interested in the colonies, except when they figured into trade or the international rivalries of the time. A group with perhaps more interest in colonial affairs was the Privy Council. This body constituted a body of aristocrats, leading members of Parliament and other advisers to the King. Their position in the hierarchy of power is revealed by the fact that they had the authority to speak in the name of the Crown by issuing executive orders known as Order's-in-Council.

But, like Crown and Parliament, the Privy Council too had little interest in colonial affairs with one exception. There existed within that body a sort-of subcommittee known as the Board of Trade, composed largely of merchants. Now British merchants were, and always had been, keenly interested in colonial affairs. After all, the colonies were created by merchants - for profit. Thus this body came to have influence completely out of proportion to either its size or inherent power for the simple reason that whenever it proposed any measure concerning the colonies, there was neither opposition or interest to opposed their suggestions.

Then there were the colonial governors, or Royal Governors as they were universally called. Royal Governors were directly appointed by the Crown, which meant that they generally had to have the support of the Privy Council in order to obtain their appointment. Still in all, they were the direct representatives and embodiments of Royal authority in the colonies.

At first glance the power exercised by Royal Governors looks impressive. Since they had "royal prerogatives" they exercised a veto power over any legislation originating in the colonies. This power, referred to in the 18th century as "the power of disallowance" was derived from the Crown. In practice, this meant that any law which originated in the colonies could not only be vetoed by the Governor, by later by the Crown if found objectionable. Nor was there any time limit set on this power.

A second Royal power lay in the military dimension. Royal governors were automatically given the rank of Major General in His Majesty's Army and a concurrent commission as Vice Admiral in His Majesty's Navy. In reality however, this meant that a colonial governor was commander-in-chief of the colonial militia, nor an imposing group of warriors, and in charge of a few revenue schooners maintained in the colonies to enforce the Navigation Acts. Should a force of regular troops or ships arrive in the colonies, they did not come under the Governor's control, but remained under the command of their officers.

In addition to these executive powers, common enough to us in the 20th century, governors also enjoyed some uncommon powers. One was the power to summon and terminate colonial assemblies - the legislative branch of government in the colonies. This originated from the fact that the existence of colonial assemblies derived from the instructions which colonial governors received from the powers-that-be in England. When Sir Edwin Sandy's sent the first Governor to Virginia in 1619, that gentleman came with specific, written instructions to convene the first elected legislative body in North America, the House of Burgesses. Ever since, legislatures in the British colonies owed their existence to the fact that Governors summoned them. And since the Governor summoned them he could terminate them in several ways.

One way was to "dissolve" the legislature. By this route, the legislature abandoned and next year, or next term, new elections were held and new representatives attended a session of the colonial legislature. But, governors could also "prorogue" the assembly, meaning, simply end the session and convene again the following year. In practice this gave Royal Governors the ability to keep "friendly" legislatures returning year after year, or, when a retractable assembly existed, force new elections in the hope for better results the following year.

Then there were certain judicial powers which the Governor held. In effect, a Royal Governor was the Chief Justice of the highest court in the colony. Sitting with other justices, usually members of The Royal Council, the Governor rendered decisions subject to only a final review in England by a Crown Court.

However, in practice the power of Royal Governors was considerably reduced by three outstanding factors. First, they could not initiate legislation. Second, they lacked the power of appointment which current chief executive officers held. True, there were other crown officials within the colonies, but like the Governor they held their offices by virtue of appointments made back in England. Thus governors could never develop a group within government loyal to him personally. Nor could he "punish" his critics by removing them from office.

But it is in the economic realm that governors showed their true weakness. They received no salary from the Crown. The Royal Governor of a colony was, of course, appointed by the king - or alternately by the proprietor if the latter was in England. And whereas these figures have been judged by American historians "mostly good men." They were most often seeking to recover

their fortunes. Sometimes they were military commanders whose meager salaries needed augmentation. A few were native-born colonist whose loyalty was being rewarded. Governors got their jobs usually by spending about 300 pounds to bribe officials and to clear away all of the "red tape" which they needed for appoint-

ments. Some spent as high as 600 pounds. These expenditures logically made the appointee feel that his office was a vested interest. He had bought the office and was determined to make it pay off.

This was a typical 18th century view and did not denote "corruption" as we think of it today. Literally every office holder - even those in the military - had purchased their com-

mission. All were required to live on the "emoluments of office.

But, once in the colonies, the Governor discovered that virtually all of the revenue was under the control of the Assembly. Therefore, if he was going to make the job pay, he was forced to accede to the will of the assembly.

As earlier noted, American historians have judged Royal Governors to be mostly competent and honest, judged by the standards of the day. By and large they were also popular figures. The arrival of a new Governor in a colony was almost universally the occasion for a public holiday - a greeting that speaks well of

the governor's popular image. He was met by high ranking officials when he landed, conducted in a festive procession to the state-house where inauguration ceremonies followed

The first act of the governor was to take the oath of office. The next act was to confirm (temporarily) the tenure of all colonial officials, thus providing for continuity of adminis-tration. After the reading of the Governor's commission,

everyone traditionally adjourned to a local tavern where the good spirits were displayed in another manner.

Only two Royal Governors managed to provoke any noticeable ire among the colonists. Edmond Andros was one. Andros was the first Royal Governor to Massachusetts, or more properly to the Confederation of New England (the crown's effort to establish unity upon the New England colonies. Andrew had been an able former British military commander, conscientious, but tactless, and from Puritanical Boston's point of view, what was worse, Andros was "high church."

His principal function - from England's point of view - was to promote efficiency in the administration of the English Navigation laws which we will see in the next chapter. Essentially this meant that Andros was to curb colonial smuggling (which meant reducing colonial profits). His efforts to accomplish this led to not

infrequent clashes between himself and the Great And General Court.

Andros other instruction which brought him into conflict with the Puritans was that of ensuring that members of the Anglican Church in Massachusetts voted. He attempted to get the Great and General Court to enact legislation to accomplish this. When it wasn't forthcoming, Andros extended the vote, by Executive Order, to all who qualified by property.

Thus in 1688, when Revolution in England ended the tenure of James II, the king who had appointed Andros, that Royal

Governor was unceremoniously shipped back to England by the Puritans in Boston.

. Another Governor who managed to make himself persona non grata was Lord Cornwall, appointed by Queen Anne as Governor of New York and New Jersey, those two colonies preferring to share a governor.

THE ROYAL COUNCIL

That leaves two remaining centers of power in the colonies to account for, the council and the assembly, and by far the most ubiquitous was His Majesty's Council (so called for ease of identification only.

This body may be thought of as the upper house of the colonial legislature, smaller and more exclusive than the assembly. Its functions were not sharply defined and shaded into the judicial, executive and legislative realms.

As a legislative body it had an equal voice with the colonial assembly in enacting laws, acting then as the upper house of a bi-cameral legislature. The Council then could veto the bills of an assembly but in general neither initiated, no alter appropriation

bills passed by the assembly.

As an Executive power the Council served as a sort of cabinet - an advisory board to the governor. Acting with the governor it exercised certain executive functions: calling the assembly into existence, sharing in appointment power of judges and making disbursements.

Finally, the Council had judicial functions - already discussed in our review of the Governor's functions.

Upon first review, the Council looks potential, especially with powers that cross the spectrum. But in practice, the members of these distinguished bodies failed to make use of their potential. Most members of His Majesty's Council were of the "elder statesman" variety and being honored for prior services rendered. In most colonies, Councilors were chosen by the Assembly, subject to the approval of the Governor. Most enjoyed the status but considered it more honorific than real. The net effect was often to make the council a political nullity.

THE COLONIAL ASSEMBLY

This meant that the most dynamic political institution within the scheme of Royal Government became the Colonial Assembly which was destined to become predominant in the forthcoming contest of power, despite the lack of any firm legal foundation.

Colonists claimed that their legislatures were miniature parliaments. As such they did not pretend that they could legislate on matters which affected the whole empire - such as

navigation laws. But they did insist that their legislatures had areas of a mostly political activity - especially in matters of colonial taxation.

British lawyers took the more historically accurate view that colonial legislatures were merely British municipal councils.

As such, like city councils in England, these legislatures could make by-laws for their own regulation. But the British held

that colonial legislatures, as municipal councils, were distinctly inferior to Parliament and had no powers except those derived from

the sovereign power of Parliament. That is, they existed at the sufferance of Parliament and were absolutely subordinate to the will of Parliament.

Both views had a certain amount of validity. The British view was legally sound, but was limited by the fact that Parliament

had not exerted significant authority over the colonies. The colonial view had behind it the actual practice and the long-range tradition of virtual independence. No matter what Parliament said, the fact was that colonial legislatures had behaved like miniature parliaments for more than a century when the clash of will erupted in 1763.

RECURRING POLITICAL ISSUES

Viewing political issues within the colonies, we should observe that a significant number appear to be chronic. That is, they appear in most of the colonies, and for over the one-hundred-some-odd years in which those colonies enjoyed self-government. Their importance therefore in indicating serious problems within the colonial population should not be underestimated.

Perhaps the number one political problem within a colony was that of extending representative government in the west, that is creating new electoral districts as settlement moved from the Atlantic seaboard to the Appalachian mountains. There was little in the way of precedence in England to guide the colonies and left alone they failed to resolve this amicably.

Basically the problem is that those who were called upon to enact laws creating new voting districts were, as a consequence, diluting their own power in the process. It's always difficult to ask one group in power to give it up to another. But in the circumstances in which colonial society divided, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, this was exacerbated by other factors.

Royal Governors throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries took no uniform position on this issue, having received no instructions from England on the subject. After 1763 however, they received instructions and at that moment, Crown Policy became intertwined with a major - if not the major domestic political problem.

A second perennial problem which arose in the colonial assemblies dealt with pro-debtor legislation, which requires a word or two of explanation. As we all know, society divides itself into two groups: creditors and debtors. Creditors, often depicted as the greedy, grasping and overbearing "haves" in society are often opposed by those depicted as the humble, poor and victimized "have nots" of society. In point of fact, both follow the basic instinct of self-interest when it comes to regulating their relations which they conflict. Creditors want debts to be repaid. Debtors don't want to pay their debts.

This disagreement provokes calls upon those who make laws to enact legal provisions permitting the speedy recovery of debt (pro-creditor legislation) or alternately excusing or delaying payment of debt (pro-debtor legislation). For debtors there are three means of attaining the latter: bankruptcy (a complete pardon from the legal obligation to pay), stay laws (which delay payment of debt) and inflation (which creates more money to pay debts).

Since in colonial society, as in all societies, debtors are more numerous than creditors, the pressure to enact such pro-debtor laws was forceful and constant. But since creditors frequently have more political clout than debtors, colonial legislatures infrequently succumbed to the pressure to enact such laws.

A third heated issue came over the issue of taxes. Now taxes have always and everywhere provoked conflict. There is never a moment when someone has not tried to shift the burden of taxes upon the shoulders of another. And in the British North American colonies this general observation held.

There is no easy way to present this issue without a background of the general social conflict that generated it. But, as a starting point let us observe that there were two general tax sources available to finance colonial government; a tax on land and a poll tax. Of course a tax on land hits land holders hardest, while a poll (or "head") tax hits rich and pool alike with the same amount.

Then too taxes can be divided into appropriated revenues (i.e., taxes requiring the passage of special laws) and customary revenues (e.g., fees, permit and license revenues) Now, with regard to this latter distinction, we should note that members of colonial assemblies early discovered that their grip on colonial purse strings gave them a lot of leverage over the Royal Governor, as long as his salary came from appropriated revenues. Not surprisingly, the Governor sought to gain a degree of independence from the assemblies by getting his salary paid out of customary revenues.

Actually, instances of assembly's withholding governor's salary were extremely rare (only 4 instances in the 18th century), but the threat was always there.) More often the issue was not whether the

salary should be withheld but rather over the amount of the salary and whether it should be set for one year or more than one year.

The last issue we shall note has to do with the sale and disposition of western lands, which in many instances bears a marked resemblance to the tax issue. Unoccupied land in the colonies (and that meant western lands) was generally under the control of the colonial assembly. As such, these lands were a potential source of revenue and could substitute for taxes.

But, the lands were also a source of wealth for those who either could buy them cheap and sell them dear to newly arrived settlers. And those who were in a position to buy cheap and sell dear were - the assemblymen. Almost from the start of colonial government that element now known as graft entered the political arena as assemblymen organized land companies and then passed land laws deeding over to these companies large tracts of western land on most favorable terms.

Naturally, recently arrived immigrants to the colonies or those who wished to go west to find opportunity, paid for the profits which these assemblymen gained. Western lands, being one of the most lucrative "emoluments of office" caught many in its lure. Young George Washington of Virginia, became a surveyor in his youth in order to apprise himself of the most favorable western lands in that colony which he later disposed of by vote as a member of the Virginia Assembly.

Although on first glance these issues may appear abstract, they are vital to an understanding of those events between 1763 and 1776, - The Revolutionary Era.