Colonial America
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5. Historians have inevitably differed in their reasons for the rebellion. Thomas Archdeacon, New York City, 1664–1710: Conquest and Change (Ithaca, 1976), stresses the threat posed to the Dutch community by the imposition of English culture. Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke's Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill, 1977), emphasizes the frustration of the population in general and fears of a Catholic plot in particular. He asserts that the leadership was mainly middle-class. The view that the rebellion was a class struggle between rich and poor was argued most strongly by Jerome R. Reich in Leisler's Rebellion: A Study of Democracy in New York, 1664–1720 (Chicago, 1953). The anti-Catholic dimension of Leisler's motives is explored in John M. Murrin, “The Menacing Shadow of Louis XIV and the Rage of Jacob Leisler: The Constitutional Ordeal of Seventeenth-Century New York,” in Stephen L. Schechter and Richard B. Bernstein, eds, New York and the Union: Contributions to the American Constitutional Experience (Albany, 1990), 29–71.
6. The governor of North Carolina had to flee, but for reasons unconnected with events elsewhere. See Chapter 9, section 4.
7. Traditional accounts of 1689 have stressed the participants' American aims. That the colonists were seeking the rights of Englishmen is the theme of David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972).
8. For recent scholarship emphasizing the shared anti-Catholic dimensions of the revolutions, not only in the colonies but also in England and Wales, see Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, 2006); Owen Stanwood, “The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688–1689, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire,” Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 481–508; and Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2009).
Chapter 9
The Eras of William and Mary, and Queen Anne
1689 The League of Augsburg is formed; war begins in Europe.
1690 Sir William Phips attempts to invade Canada.
1692 The French and Abenaki Indians attack villages in Maine. Witchcraft trials take place in Salem.
1696 The Board of Trade is established.
1697 The Peace of Ryswick is signed.
1699 Captain Kidd is arrested in Boston.
1701 The Iroquois conclude a treaty of neutrality with the French. William Penn issues his last frame of government. Delaware is granted a separate charter.
1702 East and West New Jersey become a royal province. War in Europe is renewed. South Carolina and Yamasee Indians attack St. Augustine.
1704 The French and Abenaki Indians attack Deerfield.
1707 Colonel Benjamin Church's assault on Port Royal fails.
1710 Francis Nicholson captures Port Royal.
1711 The British fail to take Québec.
1711–12 The Tuscarora War takes place in North Carolina.
1713 The Treaty of Utrecht is signed.
1715 The Yamasee War takes place in South Carolina.
1718 William Teach (Blackbeard) is killed by Virginian naval forces.
1719 South Carolina ousts its proprietary officials.
1729 Proprietary rights to North and South Carolina are formally surrendered.
1 William and Mary's Colonial Policy
THE ACCESSION OF William and Mary is often described by historians as a counter-revolution, in that they overturned the centralizing and innovative policies of James II. However, as Massachusetts had already discovered, the clock could not be turned back completely; the colonies had become too important to the Crown's ambitions for it to revert to the old Elizabethan strategy of chartering investment companies to finance and administer colonies as private enterprises. As Sir Robert Southwell, a leading bureaucrat, emphasized to one of the king's principal ministers in March 1689, North America's 250,000 inhabitants furnished “a full third part of the whole Trade and Navigation of England … a great nursery of Our Sea Men and the King's Customs depend mightily thereon.” The customs duties they generated would become, if anything, more essential after William's accession than before.
Although William was no absolutist, he was like his predecessor in being a modernizer, determined to transform the capacities of England's government so that it could begin to assume a new role in European politics. Under William's leadership England was now an ally of the Dutch, part of a Europe-wide coalition determined to check the expansion of French power. Its new diplomatic commitments propelled the English nation into a prolonged war with France and its Catholic allies, called the Nine Years War, or the War of the League of Augsburg, beginning in 1689. This war would require large military expenditures to defend English control in Ireland, to protect Dutch allies from French aggression in the Low Countries, and to guard English colonial possessions in North America and the Caribbean from French attacks. The task of raising money to meet these new expenditures would transform the English state, since more extensive taxation and a corresponding expansion of the powers of Parliament would be required. In addition the Bank of England and other bureaucratic structures would be created to manage the massive new borrowing needed to finance a modern military.
Meanwhile the powers of the Crown's imperial bureaucracy increased as well. Since their founding the colonies had been haphazardly supervised by various committees of the Privy Council. However, as the war progressed, it became evident that some more permanent body was required for the sake of cohesion. In 1696, under pressure from members of the House of Commons to enforce the navigation laws more effectively, William III created a new department to manage colonial affairs, the Board of Trade, consisting of a president and seven other salaried members, plus clerks. Apart from enforcing the navigation laws, these “knowing and fit persons” were to sift through the colonial laws and governors' reports before forwarding them to the Privy Council for action. A huge backlog of business awaited them, including the vetting of over 100 provincial laws.
That same year Parliament extended to the colonies an act that gave revenue officers greater powers of search by means of writs of assistance, allowing entry to any premises where smuggling was suspected. In addition the Privy Council ordered the governors of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to establish vice-admiralty courts, which had no jury, only a presiding judge, to facilitate convictions for breaches of the trade laws.
At home in England, the imperatives of war-making shaped politics and imperial policy for nearly a quarter of a century. Although the Nine Years War ended in 1697, England was drawn into a second European war from 1702 to 1713. The War of the Spanish Succession was prosecuted mainly by William and Mary's successor, Queen Anne, who assumed the throne in 1702. For 11 years, England fought alongside the Dutch Republic and other allies to prevent the unification of France and Spain under a single crown.
Although the most important battles of both wars were fought in Europe, people in the English and French colonies in North America as well as in the Native American communities that surrounded them became enmeshed in both conflicts. In the colonies, the wars acquired distinct names: King William's War and Queen Anne's War. Heightened tensions between English and French settlers and their Indian allies had already led to hostility and skirmishes in 1688; thereafter the bloodshed only intensified as serious fighting was instigated by both English and French colonial governments on the frontiers between Canada and New England and New York. The English, with their far larger settler population, might have been expected to possess the advantage. To the settlers' great frustration, however, their forces achieved little success. An attempt by New York and the New England colonies to launch a joint expedition against Québec and Montréal in May 1690 failed disastrously, as did a smaller assault the following year. Meanwhile attacks by the French and their Indian allies ravaged settler communities in northern New York and New England. The English could seemingly do little except to launch retaliatory attacks on French settler com
munities, with the help of members of the Iroquois League.
King William's War and Queen Anne's War and the political upheavals that accompanied them would have profound impacts on both settler and Native American societies in North America. Several communities in northern New England became so traumatized that they nearly tore themselves apart in a series of witchcraft trials, in a crisis that ended only after over 100 people had been accused of selling their souls to Satan. Native American peoples near the northern and southern frontiers were drawn into local and regional conflicts which devastated their populations and transformed their societies. In Carolina the long-term result of these conflicts was to bring down the proprietary government. Even colonies where there was little or no fighting were turned upside down politically in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary.
The extended period of political turmoil brought antagonisms between the British, French, and Spanish North American colonies to the surface. When the wars ended, after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, conflicts between these three colonial powers in North America would be driven underground again for some time, re-emerging once again only in the 1740s and the 1750s. However, by this time the affected communities had been irrevocably changed. This chapter will examine the various ordeals which they endured from 1688 to 1713, and the political changes that resulted.
2 The Salem Witchcraft Trials
The imperial wars affected English settlers in the northern colonies in diverse ways. Some of the colonists fought in battles, while others were the victims of raids on villages that left death and economic losses in their wake. Many more became caught up in a general mood of fear, even panic. Periodic attacks by French-allied Indians had taken place since King Philip's War, particularly in northern New England, where the war continued into the late 1670s. Now during King William's War, the attacks resumed. French-allied Algonquians killed dozens of settlers in the village of Schenectady, New York, in February 1690. Abenaki Indians killed another 100 and captured 80 settlers from the town of York, Maine, in late January 1692. Other attacks followed: on the town of Wells, Maine, during the summer of 1692; on Durham, New Hampshire, in June 1694; and on Haverhill, Massachusetts, in March 1697.
English settlers were terrified at the prospect of such attacks, and understandably so. The main objective of French-allied Indian raids on English villages was the traditional one of obtaining captives, although during the imperial wars these captives would sometimes be traded with the French instead of being kept for adoption. From the point of view of the people being raided, the ultimate aims of the raid mattered little, for to Europeans the tactics that Native American warriors used to achieve their objectives were shocking and incomprehensible. Warriors preferred to launch a coordinated surprise attack on an enemy village while its inhabitants were all asleep, since this was a highly effective way for them to get the enemy to surrender quickly while minimizing their own casualties. If a raid worked perfectly, nearly all the inhabitants of a village could be captured alive. However, when perfect coordination was impossible, the attackers used their tomahawks and war clubs to kill resisters. Terror, like surprise, was an effective technique for inducing people to surrender in a hurry. Settlers who survived an attack often fled their homes in panic, and no doubt carried the psychological scars of their experiences for years.
Although most New England settlers never witnessed an Indian attack, many worried about them, especially in northern Massachusetts, where people fleeing from the Maine frontier often took refuge. Massachusetts religious leaders explained Indian attacks in the same religious terms that had shaped their understanding of declining church membership, threats of Catholic tyranny, and the loss of the Massachusetts charter. Comprehending all events in history as direct manifestations of a holy struggle between God and Satan, they suggested that Satan was luring the Puritans away from their covenant with God. Years of being warned of Satan's presence in their midst had begun to take a psychic toll on the settlers. One visible manifestation of their distress, historians have suggested, were the dramatic occurrences in Massachusetts during 1692 known collectively as the Salem witchcraft trials.
Prosecutions for witchcraft were not a new phenomenon. They had been a feature of Christianity since its foundation, though their incidence had increased with the Reformation. The Protestant churches, in their search for purity, were less tolerant of any deviation that could be linked to Satan, including many popular superstitions. Nevertheless, popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic incorporated beliefs in magic and witchcraft. Early modern people lived in an intensely insecure and unpredictable world, without the modern confidence that nature can be predicted and controlled. Ordinary people resorted to many occult practices associated with alchemy, astrology, and chiromancy in their attempts to understand and influence the natural world, without having any sense that their beliefs contradicted Protestant doctrine.
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, witchcraft scares had periodically swept various communities in Europe, although by the late seventeenth century they were quite rare. In Massachusetts charges of witchcraft had been relatively infrequent as well as limited in scope. Between 1630 and 1690 there were only 24 indictments, seven convictions, and five executions. The first capital offenses occurred in 1647 and 1648 when two women were executed; further executions took place in 1651 and 1656. Cases were relatively more prevalent in the Connecticut Valley, where serious outbreaks occurred at Wethersfield and Springfield in the late 1640s and in Hartford in the early 1660s. Typically those accused were charged with malefic magic, of doing someone harm, rather than with heresy. Cases often arose out of indictments for slander, in which the defendant tried to prove the truth of a defamatory statement by bringing a charge of witchcraft. Another cause for indictment after 1656 was association with the Quakers, whose strange clothing and beliefs made them suspect.
Charges of witchcraft thereafter steadily declined in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. A small upsurge occurred in the 1680s, but nothing presaged the deluge of more than 100 accusations, along with dozens of indictments and convictions, that was to sweep Salem and the neighboring communities of Massachusetts in 1692. One question that must be addressed is why such an outbreak occurred at a time when witchcraft accusations were generally in decline, and why the scope of the crisis was so massive, The general atmosphere of fear and paranoia created by King William's War as well as the loss of the charter help to explain the particular timing and some of the hysteria associated with this event.
The first signs that something was amiss occurred in February 1692, when Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, the nine-year-old daughter and 11-year-old niece of Samuel Parris, the local minister of Salem village, a suburb of Salem town, began experiencing fits which the local physicians diagnosed as bewitchment after failing to find any physical cause.1 Parris discovered that his Caribbean Indian slave Tituba had used an old English folklore remedy, or species of white magic, to find out the cause of the girls' distress. A cake made of rye meal and the girls' urine had been fed to a dog in the belief that this would reveal the names of their tormentors. To Parris this was tantamount to witchcraft itself. After further questioning, Abigail and Betty named two women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, as the cause of their affliction, adding Tituba for good measure. They were supported in their accusations by two other girls, Ann Putnam, the 12-year-old daughter of a prominent local farmer, Thomas Putnam, and Elizabeth Hubbard, a 17-year-old servant girl.
All three accused were interrogated by the local magistrates at the end of February 1692. Though Good and Osborne stoutly maintained their innocence, the magistrates were quickly convinced of their guilt because of Tituba's confession that she was familiar with Caribbean occult practices and had been helped by the other two women. If further proof were needed, it was supplied by the children themselves, who began writhing in agony, claiming they were being tortured by the specters of Good and Osborne. The magistrate
s accordingly ordered the three to be sent to jail in Boston pending a formal trial before an assize court.2
Despite the drama surrounding the girls, the proceedings so far had not been particularly different from other witchcraft episodes in New England. What changed now was that several more young women and even a few older ones began experiencing fits, blaming not only Tituba, Osborne, and Good, but also three relatively prominent members of the community, Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and Elizabeth Proctor. Nor did the charges stop there: by May more than two dozen people had been accused, including several men who had sought to defend their wives and a minister from Wells, Maine, George Burroughs. Unlike previous witchcraft investigations, which had led rapidly to trials, in this episode the accused languished in jails after being questioned. In early 1692 the Massachusetts government still had no charter, so its authority to try the suspects was uncertain. The delays encouraged public anxiety to grow unchecked, and accusations multiplied.
In May 1692 the governor, Sir William Phips, arrived with the new charter and decided to appoint a special court of oyer and terminer to try the cases.3 The court proceedings here also encouraged accusations to multiply. During its proceedings the accusers frequently fainted or screamed when confronting the defendants, accusing them of having appeared as specters weeks or even years before. The accused in turn were subjected to minute inspection to check whether they had any marks of the devil on their body, the most important of which was a teat for suckling Satan's young. They were also required to recite the Lord's Prayer fluently, which it was believed no one possessed by the devil could do. The problem for the accused was that such evidence was hard to disprove; specters could be summoned up at any time of the day or night, while the absence of marks could be attributed to the cunning of the devil. Even recitation of the Lord's Prayer was difficult in the tension of a crowded courtroom. Lastly, the accused were denied any form of counsel to ensure that their defense was conducted properly.