CHAPTER horse, to re-establish the authority of Massachusetts. XIV. In spite of the remonstrances of Nichols at New York, 1668. the new government lately set up was obliged to yield. 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 is 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 mer107 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 XIV. introduction of those articles into England. For the CHAPTER collection of these duties, the same act authorized the establishment of custom-houses in the colonies, under 1672 the superintendence of the English Commissioners of the Customs. Such was the origin of royal custom-houses in America, and of commercial duties levied there by authority of Parliament and in the name of the king. As these inter-colonial duties were to be levied at the ports of shipment, and as the "enumerated articles," tobacco, sugar, rum, &c., were the produce exclusively of the Southern colonies, there was yet no occasion for royal custom-house officers in New England. Some slight duties on imports, levied by the colonial authorities, were too inconsiderable to prove any impediment to trade. A second Dutch war produced but transient alarm. The Massachusetts authorities, in fact, took advantage of it to give a new extension to their territory. A new survey of the Merrimac had been made, by which the 1671 northern boundary of Massachusetts was carried two leagues further north, being fixed at 43° 49' 12" of north latitude. According to the calculations of the surveyors, it crossed the Sagadahoc near where Bath now stands, stretching as far eastward as the southwest point of Penobscot Bay, including the Plymouth settlement at Sagadahoc, the ancient colony of Pemaquid, and other villages on the eastern coasts and islands. A Dutch fleet having recaptured the ancient New Netherland, the authorities of Massachusetts were induced to take advantage of this temporary overthrow of the Duke of York's government to stretch their authority over the eastern villages included in the re-survey. High-sounding reasons in behalf of this annexation were not wanting. "That the ways of godliness may be encouraged and 1673. vice corrected," the annexed territory was erected into Oct CHAPTER the new county of Devonshire. All that now remained XIV. to the Duke of York of his late extensive province were 1673. some little hamlets on the west shore of the Penobscot Bay. But this arrangement was destined to be very short-lived. Governor Bellingham, who died in office at a patriMay. archal age, had been succeeded by Leverett. Bradstreet, though a magistrate since the foundation of the colony, was still in disgrace from his attachment to a moderate course of policy. Denison, however, Bradstreet's brotherin-law, and, like him, an adherent of the moderate party, regained the office of major general, to which he had been elected ten years before, but had then laid down to make room for Leverett. The plantations were gradually extending. The future progress of New England in wealth and numbers was already foreseen. As yet, however, the entire white population did not exceed sixty thousand, distributed along the 'sea-coast and the banks of the Lower Connecticut. Lancaster, about forty miles from Boston, was the frontier town of the Bay settlements; Brookfield, some thirty miles from the river, was the most eastern town of those in the Connecticut Valley. There intervened between these townships a great of rugged country, wholly unsettled, and occupied by a few straggling Indians. space Except in the destruction of the Pequods, the native tribes of New England had as yet undergone no very material diminution. The Pocanokets or Wampanoags, though somewhat curtailed in their limits, still occupied the eastern shore of Narraganset Bay. The Narragansets still possessed the western shore. There were several scattered tribes in various parts of Connecticut ; though, with the exception of some small reservations, they had already ceded all their lands. Uncas, the Mo |