Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

"Pros

CHAPTER could send could make their case any plainer. XIV. trate before his majesty," they beseech him "to be 1666. graciously pleased to rest assured of their loyalty ac

cording to their former professions." At the same time. they sent a present of masts for the royal navy, and a contribution of provisions for the English fleet in the West Indies seasonable supplies, which were graciously acknowledged. This bold step of disobeying the king's special orders was not taken, however, without great opposition. Bradstreet and Denison, both sons-inlaw of the late Governor Dudley, insisted strongly on the duty as well as the expediency of obedience. The Boston merchants, greatly alarmed lest their ships should be seized in England, refused to advance the £1000 voted by the court to purchase the presents for the king unless agents were also appointed. But, in spite of opposition, the original determination was adhered to.

The oversight of the affairs of the colonies had been intrusted, subsequently to the Restoration, to a committee of the Privy Council, specially appointed for that purpose, whose principal business it seems to have been to discover ways and means of rendering the colonies more dependent on the royal authority, and more and more subservient to a jealous and narrow view of the commercial interests of the mother country. But the trade of Massachusetts had not yet become an object of jealousy, and the king was left to manage the controversy with little or no sympathy from the nation.

Circumstances at the moment favored the theocracy. Charles at this time was very hard pressed. The Dutch war gave the king's ministers full employment. A Dutch fleet presently sailed up the Thames, and threatened London, already ravaged by the plague and the great fire. The English government was too busy with

XIV.

affairs at home to give much attention to the colonies, CHAPTER and for the present the obstinacy of Massachusetts went unnoticed and unpunished. The king and his council 1666. hardly knew what to do. Very exaggerated notions prevailed in England as to the power and population of Massachusetts; nor was aid to be expected from Parliament in a quarrel with a distant colony merely as to the extent of the royal prerogative.

As yet the acts of trade were hardly a subject of controversy. The Convention Parliament, which had welcomed back the king to his father's throne, had indeed 1660. re-enacted, with additional and more rigorous clauses, the ordinance of 1651, not only restricting importations from America into England to English ships, but totally excluding foreign ships from all Anglo-American harbors. This exclusion of foreign ships, which might, indeed, be regarded as a benefit by the New England ship-owners, had been followed up by another act, intended still fur- 1663. ther to isolate the colonies, by which the more valuable colonial staples, mentioned by name and hence known as "enumerated articles," were required to be shipped exclusively to England, to which country the colonists were also restricted for their supply of foreign goods. none of these "enumerated articles" were produced in. New England. Salt for the fisheries, and wine from. Madeira and the Azores, branches of foreign trade in which New England was deeply interested, were specially exempted from the operation of an act which had chiefly in view the more southern colonies, and as to which it was even doubted whether New England was

at all bound by it.

But

Shortly after the departure of the royal commission- 1668. ers, Leverett, now major general of the colony, was sent to Maine, with three other magistrates, and a body of

XIV.

CHAPTER horse, to re-establish the authority of Massachusetts. In spite of the remonstrances of Nichols at New York, 1668. the new government lately set up was obliged to yield. July. Several persons were punished for speaking irreverently of the re-established authority of Massachusetts.

Though successful as yet against external assaults, the Massachusetts theocracy was not without internal troubles. The increase of Baptists occasioned much alarm. As persecution availed so little, it had been resolved to try the force of argument. Six of the chief ministers, aided by the governor and magistrates, held a April 14. grand debate at Boston with the Baptists of that town, assisted by a deputation of brethren from Newport. In spite of the splendid victory which the Boston ministers claimed to have achieved, the Boston Baptists remained obstinate; the heresy continued to spread; and recourse was again had to a strict execution of the penal laws. The Baptists, not daring to assemble in the town, held their meetings secretly on the island, now East Boston.

The "half-way covenant" still continued, also, an occasion of bitter controversy. Davenport, the spiritual father of New Haven, was very vehement against it. His zeal in this matter gave great satisfaction to a majority of the first church of Boston, and, on Wilson's death, Davenport was invited to become their pastor. The church at New Haven complained loudly at thus losing their minister, while a minority of the Boston Church, adherents of the "half-way covenant," equally dissatis1669. fied with Davenport's settlement there, seceded and May. formed a new church, known afterward as the "Old 1670. South." The General Court of the next year, in which

the opponents of the "half-way covenant" happened to have a majority, pronounced this secession "irregular, 1671. illegal, and disorderly." At the next election the oppo

XIV.

site party carried the day, and the seceders were sus- CHAPTER tained in the course they had taken. A very warm controversy was kept up for the next fourteen years, till 1671. increasing dangers from abroad brought the two churches again into harmony.

The Quakers, as yet, had abated nothing of their enthusiastic zeal, of which the colonists had a new specimen, that greatly tried their patience, in two young married women, who walked naked through the streets of Newbury and Salem, in emulation of the prophet Ezekiel, as a sign of the nakedness of the land. They were whipped from town to town out of the colony, under the law against vagabond Quakers; the young husband of one of them following the cart to which his wife was tied, and from time to time interposing his hat between her naked and bleeding back and the lash of the executioner. George Fox, founder and apostle of the sect, in his missionary travels through the English colonies, came as far as Rhode 1672. Island, but, more discreet than some of his disciples, he did not venture into Connecticut or Massachusetts.

The New England theocracy as against Quakerism found an unexpected champion in Roger Williams, who denied the pretensions of the Quakers to spiritual enlightenment, and challenged. Fox himself to a disputa- July. tion. Before this challenge arrived Fox was gone; but it was accepted on his behalf by three of his chief disciples at Newport, with whom Williams held a three days' Aug. 9, disputation. He came the day before, in his own boat, thirty miles from Providence, himself, now upward of seventy years of age, acting as oarsman. "God graciously assisted me," he writes, "in rowing all day with my old bones, so that I got to Newport toward the midnight before the morning appointed." Williams, alone, had three vociferous champions against him.

10, 11.

XIV.

CHAPTER There was no moderator, and no one was allowed to interfere. The debate was tumultuous, and at the end of 1672. the first day the challenger was heartily sick of it. He carried it through, however, for three days, and then adjourned for a fourth day at Providence. We have an account of this disputation in "George Fox digged out of his Burroughs," the only one of Williams's writings permitted to be published in New England. It did not make its appearance, however, till four years after the dispute. Fox published, in reply, "A New England Firebrand quenched." Neither of these treatises was at all remarkable for tenderness of speech or chariness of epithet. In spite of Williams's arguments, the Quaker sect increased so much in Rhode Island, that Coddington, 1675. now a Quaker, was presently elected governor.

Meanwhile the growing commerce of Boston began to attract the notice and envy of the jealous English merchants. Though the houses were generally wooden, and the streets narrow and crooked, "with little decency and no uniformity," that town, by far the largest and most commercial in the colonies, already had a population of seven or eight thousand; among them, some merchants of considerable capital and active enterprise. New England trading vessels frequented the Southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, Antigua, and Barbadoes, which they supplied to a great extent with European goods, taking in return tobacco, sugar, rum, and other tropical products, which they sold in Spain, Italy, and Holland, along with their own staples of fish and staves, thus evading the navigation acts, and interfering with that monopoly of colonial trade which the English mer1672. chants aimed to secure. Hence a new act of Parliament, imposing on the transit of "enumerated articles" from colony to colony the same duties payable on the

« ПредишнаНапред »