it or heard it. For a year more, that little body, now shrunken to seven or eight, continued to rule the colony, admitting a few new freemen, now and then, to a shadowy citizenship.

The chief founders of New England had a very real dread of democracy. John Cotton, the greatest of the clerical leaders, wrote:

Excursus:

the Puritan leaders'

attitude

toward

"Democracy I do not conceive that God did ever ordain as a fit government for either church or comdemocracy monwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both clearly approved and directed in the Scriptures.

And the great Winthrop always refers to democracy with aversion. He asserts that it has "no warrant in Scripture," and that "among nations it has always been accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government." At best, Winthrop and his friends believed in what they called "a mixt aristocracy": the people (above the condition of day laborers) might choose their rulers provided they chose from still more select classes; but the rulers so chosen were to possess practically absolute power, owning their offices as an ordinary man owned his farm.

Calvin, the master of Puritan political thought, teaches that to resist even a bad magistrate is "to resist God." His language is followed closely by Winthrop. In 1639, after the people in Massachusetts had secured a little power, the magistrates tricked them out of most of it for a while by a law decreasing the number of deputies, so that they should not outvote the aristocratic magistrates in the Court. Some of the people petitioned modestly for the repeal of this law. Winthrop looked upon the petition as "tending to sedition." Said he, "When the people have chosen men, to be their rulers, now to combine together in a public petition to have an order repealed . . . savors of resisting an ordinance of God. For the people, having deputed others, have no power to make or alter laws them

THE WATERTOWN PROTEST, 1632

1

77

selves, but are to be subject." The great founders of America were far from believing in government "of the people and by the people."

The first protest against this oligarchic usurpation came, after good English precedent, upon a matter of taxation. In February, 1632, the Assistants voted a tax The Waterfor fortifications. Watertown was called upon town Proto pay eight pounds. The Watertown minister test, 1632 then called the people together and secured a resolution "that it was not safe to pay moneys after that sort, for fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage." Governor Winthrop at once summoned the men of Watertown before him at Boston as culprits, rebuked them for their “error," and so overawed them that they "made a retraction and submission . . . and so their offence was pardoned." Probably, however, on the walk back to Watertown through the winter night, the "error" revived. Certainly, during the next months, there was secret democratic plotting and sending to and fro among the towns of which we have no record. (Our information comes almost wholly from the brief Colonial Records and from Winthrop. The democrats never wrote their story.) At all events, a week before the next General Court met in May, Winthrop warned the Assistants "that he had heard the people intended . . . to desire [vote] that the Assistants might be chosen anew every year, and that the governor might be chosen by the whole court, and not by the Assistants only." These were charter provisions, of which the freemen must have heard some rumor. "Upon this," adds Winthrop's Journal, "Mr. Ludlow [an Assistant] grew into a passion and said that then we should First gain have no government, but there would be an in- for the terim wherein every man might do what he democracy pleased." In spite of such silly passion, when the General

1 The quotations from Winthrop come from his History of New England. This has been printed only with modernized spelling. When a Winthrop quotation is given with antique spelling, it comes from his Letters.

Court met, the freemen calmly took back into their own hands the annual election of governor and of Assistants. Then they went further, and sanctioned the Watertown protest by decreeing that each town should choose two representatives to act with the magistrates in matters of taxation.

This was not yet representative government. The new deputies acted in taxation only: the magistrates kept their usurped power to make laws. True, the magistrates now had to come up for reëlection each year, but this was little more than a polite form. No chance was given to nominate two candidates for a position, and then to choose between them. The Secretary of the Assistants made nominations in some such form as, "Mr. Ludlow's term as Assistant has expired; will you have him to be an Assistant again?" On this sort of nomination the people had to vote Yes or No, by erection of hands. Unless they first rejected an old officer, there was no chance to elect a new one.

In spite of such drawbacks, the reform of 1632 was a democratic advance. Two years later came the second

step, the peaceful revolution of 1634.

Bitter feeling against class legislation

This movement began as a protest against "special privilege." The Assistants had made laws to favor their own class trying repeatedly to keep wages down to the old level of England, and ordering that swine found in grain fields might be killed. Winthrop speaks often of the high cost of food and other necessities, as compared with English prices; but he was honestly dismayed that carpenters should ask more than the old English wage. Indeed he puts the cart before the horse, and blames the higher cost of living upon the rise in wages, quite in twentieth century style. As to the swine law, the poor man wanted his pig to find part of its living in the woods, but the rich men were not willing to fence their large fields. This matter caused harder feeling even than the wage laws.

The common freemen determined to stop some of this "class legislation." In April, 1634, Governor Winthrop

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, 1634

79

sent out the usual notice calling all freemen to a General Court in May. Soon after, on a given day, two men from each of the eight towns met at Boston. How the meeting was arranged and the "committees" chosen, we have no record; but again there must have been much democratic planning, and many a journey through the forest, to secure this "first political convention in America."

The "convention" asked to see the charter. After reading it, they called Winthrop's attention to the fact that

the making of laws Introduction

sentative

belonged properly to of Reprethe whole body of government, freemen (now some 1634 200), instead of to the nine Assistants. Winthrop told them loftily that the freemen did not have men among them "qualified for such a business." He suggested, however, that perhaps they might once a year choose a committee to make suggestions to the Assistants. The good governor felt sure as his "Journal" shows - that this condescension had quieted the trouble. But when the General Court met (May 14), three deputies appeared from each of the eight towns, to sit with the Assistants, not merely to suggest laws, but to make them. Representative government had begun.

The aristocrats had had warning that their power was in danger, and they put forward their leading clerical champion. John Cotton preached the usual sermon to open the Court,

1 Cotton could use sophistry on occasion in masterly fashion as when he argued against free speech for certain dissenters, that [since they differed from him] they must "sin against conscience, and so it could not be against conscience to restrain them." Winthrop tells a delicious story without any suspicion of its flavor to us-of the admission of Cotton's wife to the Boston Church. Church membership in England was no longer accepted, but a new confession of faith

"and delivered this doctrine, that a magistrate ought not to be turned into the condition of a private man without just cause [and after a formal trial], no more than the magistrate may not turn a private man out of his freehold, etc., without like public trial." This was a claim that public office was private aristocratic property. (At another time Winthrop tells, with approval, how Cotton "showed from the Word of God that the magistracy ought to be for life.”) The answer of the freemen was to demand a ballot, instead of the usual "erection of hands," in choosing a governor. Then they dropped Winthrop from the office he had held for four years,1 and fined some of the Assistants for illegal abuse of power. They also ordered jury trial for all important criminal cases, and admitted 81 new freemen whom the Assistants the day before had refused to admit.

The Court then made the revolution permanent. It decreed that every General Court in future should consist (like this one) of deputies chosen by the several towns and of the governor and Assistants. Only such Courts could admit freemen, lay taxes, or make laws. The May Court each year was also to be a Court of Elections: at the opening of this Court, all freemen might be present, to choose governor and Assistants. For the most part, the old rulers took these changes in good part, quite in English temper; and the generous Winthrop, after recording his defeat, adds magnanimously, -"This Court made many good orders."

A representative aristocracy

Massachusetts had now grown from a narrow oligarchy into a representative aristocracy. It was

was required. Cotton made a lengthy and eloquent statement for himself, and then "desired the elders to question Mistress Cotton in private, and that she might not be required to give testimony in public, which was against the Apostle's rule and woman's modesty"; and, this being agreed to, he himself then "gave a modest testimony of her."

1 The aristocratic doctrine of Cotton was further rebuked by the election of a new governor for each of the two following years. Then, in a period of great trouble, the trusted Winthrop was chosen again, and kept in office by annual elections, except for five years, until his death in 1649. Even in 1634, Winthrop was chosen to the Board of Assistants; but Ludlow (page 77) was dropped altogether from the magistracy- the first action of that sort in the colony.