45. Further Decline of the Massachusetts Theocracy

The late 1660s and early 1670s saw an intensification of the trends that had arisen in Massachusetts Bay: a continuing decline in the power and vitality of the Puritan theocracy, and a rise in the influence of the nonzealot and even non-Puritan merchants in Boston and the other large towns.

The rise of the merchants, and the relative affluence and cosmopolitanism accompanying that rise, brought a growing awareness of doom to the older Puritan generation. The growing wealth and sophistication greatly weakened Puritan zeal among the younger generation. Mobility, enterprise, and consumer enjoyments more and more replaced the old fanatical asceticism. Many of the leading merchants were Anglicans who could not, with the advent of Restoration, be any longer persecuted, and even the Puritan merchants grew less and less interested in becoming church members.

The old-guard Puritans ranted and raved, of course, against the rising new order as they saw their power and ideals slipping from view. Frantically the theocrats denounced avarice, gain, pride, the spirit of trade, “idolatry,” and the pursuit of wealth and the good things of life. The Reverend John Higginson, whose own sons were to be merchants, thundered in 1663 that “this is never to be forgotten: that New England was originally a plantation of Religion, not a plantation of Trade.” At every hand came a lament for the good old days. The Reverend Urian Oakes declared sadly in 1673: “He that remembers the good old spirit of those who followed God into this wilderness... cannot but easily discern a sad alteration.” The following year Rev. Samuel Torrey bemoaned the new “spirit of profaneness, a spirit of pride, a spirit of worldliness, a spirit of libertinism, a spirit of carnality.... Truly, the very heart of New England is changed and exceedingly corrupted with the sins of the times.”

A few years later Rev. Increase Mather, emerging as the spiritual leader of the colony, again recalled that “religion and not the world was what our fathers came hither for.” He railed against the new luxurious fashions being increasingly adopted, against those “monstrous and horrid periwigs,” the new wigs for women, and “such like whorish fashions, whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled against the sinful land!” The colony was also increasingly “infected” with such sinful pastimes as mixed dancing.

The New England Synod of 1679 also complained of the growing inattention to the Lord’s Day: many people were insisting on walking and traveling, talking in a worldly manner, and working on the Sabbath. Here again we see that rigorous persecution had proved to be a failure. Profanity was on the increase too, and the Synod worried that the “glorious name of God” was being commonly profaned. Long hair among men, long denounced by Puritans, was deplored by the General Court in 1675 as “a sign of evil pride.” But here the long-haired had ample Puritan precedent, including Oliver Cromwell and such magistrates as John Winthrop, John Endecott, and Simon Bradstreet.

We have seen that even the good old Massachusetts tradition of religious persecution was fading away during this period. In the latter 1670s the persecution of Quakers and Baptists ceased and a Quaker meetinghouse and Baptist church were allowed, at last, to continue unmolested.

As the theocracy dwindled in importance, the merchants arose. For private merchants, trade connections often depended on family connections, and intermarriage among merchants began to breed new names of stature in the colony: the Tyngs and Bradstreets; the Whartons and Dudleys, Breedons and Hutchinsons; in the New Hampshire towns, the Vaughans, Waldrons, and Cutts were becoming prominent; and in the Maine towns, the Frosts and Pepperrells.

The Navigation Acts, as we have noted, had so far not been a hindrance to New England trade; they had not yet been enforced, and they remained unenforced after Massachusetts sent the royal commission packing. But in 1673 Parliament passed another Navigation Act that was to have a fateful impact on the American colonies. In the Navigation Act of 1660, important “enumerated articles” of colonial produce, such as tobacco, could be shipped only to England or its colonies. The New England merchants evaded this act by the tortuous interpretation that if Boston ships carrying tobacco from Virginia and North Carolina stopped first in Boston, then Boston was free to reexport the tobacco to France and other European countries. Seeing their expected monopoly dissolved by this practice, the London merchants clamored for, and obtained, the Navigation Act of 1673, which cracked down on this newly emergent trade. According to this act, (1) a heavy tax on the enumerated products was levied at the port of clearance (for example Boston), a tax that was equal to the import tax on those goods in England; (2) shipmasters had to be bonded in order to ensure that their exported goods arrived in England or an English colony; and, perhaps most important, (3) English customs commissioners were to appoint agents in the colonies to enforce these and other regulations. These provisions not only outlawed the export of sugar and tobacco to any country but England; they also meant a double tax on such goods if exported to England in New England ships, which had to pay a double tax by stopping in Boston, whereas English ships, importing directly to England, paid only one tax.

We have observed the terrible impact of the 1673 act on the North Carolina economy—and, for that matter, of the whole structure of the Acts on the Virginia economy and on the price of tobacco. And we have remarked the impossibility of the enforcement of this act on the thinly populated North Carolina coast; the Culpeper rebellion of 1677 was occasioned by the enforcement of the act, and was supported by the New England merchants.

The London merchants also wanted enforcement of all the Navigation Acts because their New England rivals had been extensively smuggling cheap imports from European countries. The Massachusetts government strongly protested the Navigation Act of 1673, but to no avail. In fact, by the mid-1670s England, the Dutch wars over, was prepared to strike the decisive blow against Massachusetts’ independence, self-government, and free and flourishing trade. England’s resumption of its previously abortive policy of cracking down on Massachusetts stemmed largely from the breaking up of the Cabal government, and the fall from power of the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673. Before that fall, Shaftesbury’s powerful Plantation Council had urged the king to send over to New England a new, far more moderate commission, one “not too much contrary to the present humor of the people.”