Colonial Society of Massachusetts – förlag

The most unique and important of all early American law reports are those of Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). These are the first reports of continental America's oldest court, the Superior Court of Judicature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, direct ancestor to today's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Quincy's candid accounts of events great and small shed light on life in the American colonies just before the Revolution. Reports such as ""Paxton's Case of the Writs of Assistance"" (1761) have become great landmarks of American constitutional law, cited by the Supreme Court of the United States. Others, such as Hanlon v. Thayer (1764), involved important women's rights, or, such as Oliver v. Sale (1762) and Allison v. Cockran (1764), vividly demonstrated the legal establishment of slavery. Even the so-called routine cases - those involving sale of goods and early consumer protection, keeping a 'bawdy house', women fighting for their children's legitimacy, pirates, apprentices, militia men, double-crossers and frauds, 'fences' for stolen goods, and many more - provide an invaluable picture of our early legal system and colonial society. Daniel R. Coquillette not only provides new annotations for these cases, first annotated by Samuel Quincy Jr. in 1865, but also includes an extensive introduction that sets out a lucid and compelling road map to these historic reports and their continuing significance.

For the indigenous people of New England - the Abenaki, Mohegan, Mohican, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Pequot, Schaghticoke, Wampanoag, and other tribal nations - the colonial period has not yet ended. In light of the contemporary struggles of native people to defend their resources, shape their futures, safeguard their health, and provide for their families, the academic study of history may seem to have limited relevance. Yet in a climate and society where native rights are closely tied to political status and ethnic identity, historical interpretation directly impacts those struggles. Because colonialism entailed, indeed required, controlling how history is told, native and non-native scholars have tended to write parallel histories without examining points of intersection. ""Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience"" is the first volume specifically designed to examine the intersection, overlapping, and conflict between the scholar's past and the native present in New England. The chapters include work by younger as well as established scholars, work by natives and non-natives, and collaborative efforts by Indian and non-Indian scholars. Collectively, the essays suggest some of the new directions scholars are pursuing, as well as some ways of thinking about history that are new to academia but very old in native communities. The authors peer beneath the surface history of events to understand how non-Indian people projected and perpetuated colonialism and how Indian people in southern New England experienced and responded to it. Although differences in emphasis and interpretation will continue to characterize their scholarship, the authors transform our sense of the New England past, as lived and as written about, and the ways it continues to shape the present.

Thomas Hutchinson was the leading spokesman in colonial America for opposition to the Revolutionary movement. His logical and cogent prose as well as the stature he gained through his long and varied public service to Massachusetts gave weight to his arguments and insured a wide audience for his ideas in both England and the colonies. Because of his Loyalist sympathies, however, his letters have until now languished unpublished in the Massachusetts Archives.This first volume of the only fully annotated edition of his correspondence begins with his emergence on the political stage in 1740 and covers the events of the French and Indian War, his controversial appointments as lieutenant-governor and chief justice, and the Stamp Act riots (including the looting of his own home).Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Successful Boston lawyer, active member of the Sons of Liberty, and noted political essayist, Josiah Quincy Junior (1744–1775) left a lasting impression on those he met - for his passion in the courtroom as well as his orations in the Old South Meeting House, and for his determination to live fully, despite being afflicted with a disease that would cut his life short. Gathered in this, the sixth and final volume of the Quincy Papers, are Quincy’s surviving correspondence, his essays for the Boston Press written between 1767 and 1774, and his 1774 pamphlet Observations, which was the culmination of his thinking and writing about the problem of balancing imperial authority and colonial liberty. He represented, as well as any of his longer-lived contemporaries, the difficulty of protesting British policy without turning on Britain itself, the uneasy blending of reasoned political discourse with a desire to denounce perceived injustice, and the quest to find a peaceful solution and yet reserve the right to use force if all else failed. In his attempt to define and defend American rights, he borrowed as readily from classical sources as modern, drawing on a rich philosophical and legal tradition that served him well throughout his public life. He well understood the power of the ideas that he mustered for political debate. That understanding also shows through in Quincy’s other writings, from his law commonplace book and Latin legal maxims (in volume 2) to the journal of his 1773 southern journey (in volume 3) to his still-cited reports for cases argued in the Massachusetts Superior Court from 1761 to 1772 (in volumes 4 and 5).This last volume stands as a companion piece to the first. There, Quincy’s political ideas are discussed and traced, in part through Quincy’s political commonplace book, compiled between 1770 and 1774. Here, readers can follow how Quincy expressed those ideas in the newspaper pieces and pamphlet that became an essential part of the debate over rights in the empire. Here too can be found his deep concern, expressed in letters from London to his beloved wife, Abigail, that he serve Massachusetts - “my country,” as he called it - well, that he give his last full measure of devotion, if necessary, to the patriot cause.

George Thatcher served as a U.S. representative from Maine throughout the Federalist Era (1789-1801)—the most critical and formative period of American constitutional history. A moderate on most political issues, the Cape Cod native and Harvard-educated lawyer proved a maverick in matters relating to education, the expansion of the slave interest, the rise of Unitarianism, and the separation of church and state. Written over his forty-year career as a country lawyer, national legislator, and state supreme court justice, the over two hundred letters and miscellaneous writings selected for this edition will appeal to historians, lawyers and legal scholars, teachers, and genealogists as an encyclopedic resource on the Founding generation, and to all readers captivated by the dramatic immediacy and inherent authenticity of personal letters. Following Thatcher's journey as a New England Federalist, abolitionist, religious dissenter, and pedagogical innovator is to add depth and complexity to our understanding of the early American Republic.Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

The second volume of Thomas Hutchinson's correspondence covers the years 1767 through 1769. In 1767, Charles Townshend's new taxes, in addition to his ambitious plans to improve customs enforcement and render crown officials in the colonies more independent of local assemblies, caused increasing resentment in Boston. To force Parliament to repeal the new legislation, Boston merchants adopted a comprehensive nonimportation agreement, which Hutchinson, in his position as lieutenant governor, regarded as an illegal confederacy devoid of any constitutional authority. Nevertheless, he and other royal officials proved powerless to stop its spread. To make matters worse, in October 1768, British troops arrived in Boston, at the instigation of Hutchinson's superior, Governor Francis Bernard. Hutchinson correctly foresaw that soldiers could be only an irritant and would be ineffective at preventing civil disorder. In August 1769, Bernard sailed for England, leaving Hutchinson as acting governor, with the unenviable challenge of dealing with mounting anger against the occupying troops and growing street violence designed to coerce unwilling importers into compliance with the merchants' agreement.Hutchinson's papers have always been among the most basic sources for historians writing about Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, and the publication of this volume is a valuable step toward making this content widely accessible.

The sixth and final volume of the Bernard Papers presents the official and private correspondence of Massachusetts royal governor Sir Francis Bernard upon his return to England in 1769 until his death in 1779, documenting his attempts to influence British colonial policy. Bernard's letters on colonial opposition and resistance from 1765 on constituted a major source of detailed evidence for the British government in persuading Parliament to adopt the punitive Coercive Acts that would trigger rebellion in Massachusetts in the late summer and early autumn of 1774.Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

The fourth volume of The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson covers a twenty-month period extending from the acquittal of the soldiers standing trial for the Boston Massacre in November 1770 through the return of the General Court from Cambridge to its traditional meeting place at the Town House in Boston in June 1772. Some historians refer to this interval as the "quiet period" in the events leading up to the Revolution, but one would have had trouble convincing Thomas Hutchinson of the accuracy of that phrase. He continued to butt heads with Samuel Adams. No longer acting governor after March 1771, but governor-in-chief in his own right, Hutchinson was now free to use the patronage at his disposal to reward his political adherents and divide the opposition. Even though John Hancock ultimately declined the offer, Hutchinson attempted to separate him from the political tutelage of Samuel Adams, by dangling the prospect of a socially prestigious seat on the Governor's Council before the young merchant. At the same time, the Hutchinson also sought to sow seeds of suspicion and resentment between the Massachusetts House of Representatives and their new agent, Benjamin Franklin. Adams had long resisted Hutchinson's claim to summon the General Court to meet anywhere he chose, but in the spring of 1772, cooperation with Hancock enabled Hutchinson to end a long-standing impasse and return the Court to Boston without surrendering any his gubernatorial prerogative. Despite this seeming success, Hutchinson could have no idea of the crises that lay ahead in 1773 (the publication of his private letters and Parliament's efforts to aid the financially troubled East India Company) that would effectively end his governorship.Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Volume Five covers the last years of Hutchinson’s governorship. The proliferation of committees of correspondence throughout the province in late 1772 prompted Hutchinson to make a major speech at the opening of the General Court in January 1773, laying out his understanding of the relationship between the colonies and Parliament. The speech prompted a series of rejoinders and counter rejoinders that dragged on throughout the winter. No sooner had the matter died down, then Samuel Adams announced he had in his possession “letters of an extraordinary nature” written by Hutchinson and others who sought to undermine the liberties of the citizens of Massachusetts. When eventually published, the letters, which appeared to have been stolen from the files of a highly-placed English official after his death, did not support the wild rumors Adams and others had promulgated, yet the damage was done and the legislature petitioned the crown for his removal. Hutchinson asked for leave to go to England to defend himself, but before permission arrived, news of the Tea Act reached Boston, precipitating a new controversy. Hutchinson’s refusal to allow the tea to be returned to England led directly to the Boston Tea Party and, in turn, to the passage of Coercive Acts by Parliament. Hutchinson felt powerless before the storm of controversy he had aroused and left Massachusetts on June 1, 1774, ostensibly to report on American affairs in London, but, in reality never, to return.

His signature is famous, but the man John Hancock is barely known. After his death his papers became scattered, so that unlike his counterparts (Adams, Jefferson, Washington), Hancock became a figure known largely through the writings of others. Containing over 350 previously unpublished letters, volume 1 of this multivolume series follows Hancock from youth to manhood. After his education at Harvard, he joins the trading firm of his uncle, Thomas, and journeys to England in the 1760s to meet business partners while expanding his understanding of the world. Later, Hancock takes command of the family business while beginning to dabble in local and imperial politics.Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

This volume collects the writings of Daniel Gookin, superintendent of the Praying Indians in Massachusetts. In this capacity he visited and, in some sense, oversaw the several praying towns that came into being after 1650. At the time of King Philip's War, he devoted himself to protecting the Christian Indians from other colonists. He wrote extensively about their sufferings, describing in detail the lives of Massachusetts, Nipmuc, Pennacook, and Mohawk Indians, among others. His sympathetic rendering placed him at odds with European settlers of his own time.Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Long dismissed as conventional and antiquarian, church records are actually unparalleled sources for historians offering information on a wide range of topics, such as the founding and evolution of churches, popular involvement in religious institutions and practices, modes of church governance, deviance, and resistance, and the interactions of churches - not to mention revealing information on significant moments in the lives of laity and ministers alike. This volume includes two of the finest sets of church records from the colonial era of Massachusetts history thus far unpublished. The Reading church records, in particular, are unique because they cover the entire period prior to the American Revolution, while the Rumney Marsh records cast light on the often-neglected period of 1715 through 1757. In addition, these records illuminate the otherwise unknown lives and activities of common folk, white and black, men and women, who debate, bicker, admonish, exhort, and uplift each other.

Providing readers with the unusual opportunity to enter into the extraordinary mind of a patriot immediately before the Revolution, the ""Portrait of a Patriot"" series presents the major papers of the Boston lawyer and patriot penman Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). In volume 2 of the series, we are introduced to Quincy's ""Legal Commonplace Book""; the companion of his ""Political Commonplace Book"" from volume 1, the Legal Commonplace Book illustrates the systematic program of reading through which aspiring young lawyers learned their trade in colonial New England. In the accompanying introduction, coeditor Daniel R. Coquillette explains how the system of legal apprenticeship worked in Boston and contends that the level of legal argument practiced in Massachusetts prior to the Revolution was much less provincial than previously assumed. Volume 2 also includes a new transcription of the journal Quincy kept on a 1773 trip to the southern colonies undertaken on behalf of the Boston Committee of Correspondence to assess the depth of commitment to the patriot cause there, in which Quincy comments tartly on Southern manners, womenfolk, and the institution of slavery.

Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775), Boston lawyer and patriot penman, had he lived longer could have been a leader of the new American Republic with a name familiar in most households. In a four-volume series, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts will reprint his major political and legal writings. Editor Neil Longley York provides a significant biographical introduction, followed by Quincy's ""Political Commonplace Book"", in which the patriot noted down passages from his wide reading in politics and history that he believed relevant to his own times. Thus, readers have an unusual opportunity to enter into the extraordinary mind of a patriot immediately before the Revolution. A new edition of Quincy's ""London Journal"" follows, the record of his last-ditch efforts to stave off the impending conflict by seeking some possible ground for compromise with leading British politicians in the months before the battles at Lexington and Concord. Although the peace mission ultimately failed, the journal provides a fascinating record of how British society and leading figures in the government appeared to a young lawyer from a distant colony.

Providing readers with the unusual opportunity to enter into the extraordinary mind of a patriot in the period immediately preceding the Revolution, the ""Portrait of a Patriot"" series presents the major papers of the Boston lawyer and patriot penman Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). In this, the third of five volumes, we meet Quincy as a rising member of the Massachusetts bar and a member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, making a tour of the southern colonies to assess the depth of commitment to the patriot cause there. While cautious of the political leanings of his hosts, Quincy was clearly dazzled by the opulence and sophistication of late-eighteenth-century Charleston society. As he traveled northward, he continued to record candid observations on southern manners, womenfolk, and the institution of slavery in his journal, thus creating a unique portrait of American society on the eve of the American Revolution.

Sir Francis Bernard (1712-1779), royal governor of colonial Massachusetts from 1760 to 1769, witnessed the rapid dissipation of happy sentiment stemming from Anglo-American victory in the French and Indian War and the first stirrings of colonial radicalism. The writs of assistance case, the Stamp Act riots, and the ensuing boycotts of British manufactures all happened on his watch. Bernard himself proved to be a controversial figure. His most vociferous opponents accused him of aggressively pursuing customs violations to augment his own income. Others believed that he had deliberately misrepresented political conditions in Boston in order to persuade authorities in England to dispatch troops to support his troubled administration.At the end of his governorship, the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned for his recall, even as the king awarded him a baronetcy for his loyal service. Once home in England, Bernard slipped easily into the role of an expert on colonial affairs and helped devise imperial policies that would exacerbate the growing crisis.Bernard's letters and other incidental papers provide abundant insight into the personalities and bitter controversies agitating Boston in the pre-Revolutionary period. Often consulted by scholars in transcripts and on microfilm, they constitute one of the most important sources on the period, yet this edition is the first comprehensive selection of his letters to be published. The explanation for this neglect can only be that, as far as American readers are concerned, he was on the wrong side of the conflict. Read side-by-side with the papers of John and Samuel Adams, Bernard's letters allow us to understand fully events in Massachusetts leading up to the Revolution.This is the first of three volumes of selected letters, to be followed upon completion by a calendar of documents covering his life and career.

John Cotton Jr. (1639-1699) was the second son of one of the most famous clergymen of New England's founding generation. At the age of twenty-two, already the pastor of the church in Wethersfield, Connecticut, he lost his ministry as a result of a sexual scandal. Disgraced and jobless, Cotton moved his family to distant Martha's Vineyard to start anew as a missionary to the Indians. Within a few years, Cotton had managed to rehabilitate his reputation, and he accepted a call to the church in Plymouth. He kept the Plymouth pulpit for nearly thirty years before losing it, once again to scandal and factional church politics. Cotton retired to Cape Cod for a short time before accepting one final call, this time to Charleston, South Carolina, where he died in less than a year of yellow fever. Cotton wrote during an era when it was widely accepted that letters would circulate far beyond the immediate addressee. Thus, both his letters and those addressed to him often read more like newsletters than personal correspondence, documenting some of the most dramatic events of the late seventeenth century, including the brutal King Philip's War and the eventual overthrow of the hated Dominion of New England.

The most unique and important of all early American law reports are those of Josiah Quincy Jr. (1744-1775). These are the first reports of continental America's oldest court, the Superior Court of Judicature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, direct ancestor to today's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Quincy's candid accounts of events great and small shed light on life in the American colonies just before the Revolution. Reports such as ""Paxton's Case of the Writs of Assistance"" (1761) have become great landmarks of American constitutional law, cited by the Supreme Court of the United States. Others, such as Hanlon v. Thayer (1764), involved important women's rights, or, such as Oliver v. Sale (1762) and Allison v. Cockran (1764), vividly demonstrated the legal establishment of slavery. Even the so-called routine cases - those involving sale of goods and early consumer protection, keeping a 'bawdy house', women fighting for their children's legitimacy, pirates, apprentices, militia men, double-crossers and frauds, 'fences' for stolen goods, and many more - provide an invaluable picture of our early legal system and colonial society. Daniel R. Coquillette not only provides new annotations for these cases, first annotated by Samuel Quincy Jr. in 1865, but also includes an extensive introduction that sets out a lucid and compelling road map to these historic reports and their continuing significance.

Henry Hulton was an Englishman who moved to Boston in 1767 as a member of the new American Board of Customs Commissioners. The board was supposed to curtail smuggling and bring greater efficiency to the administration of empire. It failed, and Hulton fled Massachusetts in 1776, joining an exodus of the politically displaced. Hulton eventually wrote a never-published history of the American rebellion as he experienced it. Although his complaints about the 'demagogues' who dominated Massachusetts politics echo those made by other Loyalists. Hulton adds another dimension to our understanding. As an Englishman, he could be more detached from the problems of empire than Loyalists who had been driven from their native land. For those interested in the complexities of historical causation, this interpretation provides a telling case study of how an author can combine individual action with deeper forces to explain events. Though not a historical determinist, Hulton did see rebellion as the logical result of American attitudes and behaviors that London allowed to go unchecked for too long. Hulton's history, his letters, and the letters of his sister, Ann, who lived with him outside Boston - all of which are reproduced here - provide an unusual glimpse into the onset of the Revolution in Massachusetts. Hulton was himself an intriguing figure, an Englishman seeking to secure fame and fortune abroad, first in Germany, then on the island of Antigua, then again in Germany, with a stop in London before ambition took him back across the Atlantic, this time to Massachusetts. He would end his days a retired gentleman living in the English countryside, frustrated by his experiences on both sides of the Atlantic but determined to teach his five sons the lessons about life that he learned and recorded in this history.

The second volume of The Papers of Francis Bernard records the reaction of the royal governor of colonial Massachusetts to the tumultuous events surrounding the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. Because the response to the new legislation in Boston set the pattern for the reaction of all the other colonies, these letters constitute firsthand observations on the birth of the American movement for independence. This is the second of four volumes of selected letters, to be followed upon completion by a calendar of documents covering Bernard's life and career.

Beautifully illustrated, this collection of essays will introduce the reader to a rich, surprising, thought-provoking and entirely new view of early New England. Eleven essays written by historians, archaeologists, art and architectural historians, and literary scholars recast our understanding of New England by setting its material and visual culture in new contexts. Essays on the archaeology of seventeenth-century Maine settlements, the geographical knowledge of Salem sailors and ship captains, the mid-eighteenth-century cartographic depictions of Boston, and the built environment of Maine in the early nineteenth century all place New England into the broader purview of a transoceanic movement of people, ideas, and objects.

As governor of colonial Massachusetts between 1760 and 1769, Francis Bernard was charged with shoring up British imperialism during the first period of sustained American opposition to the authority of the King-in-Parliament. The documentary record of the middle years (1766 and 1767) of Bernard’s troubled administration reveals a governor at odds with his American charges and discomfited by the knowledge that his British masters did not appreciate his predicament.As a commentator on the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, Governor Bernard was a candid and self-effacing narrator with a penchant for revelation and a talent for dramatisation. Bernard’s correspondence of 1766 and 1767 illuminates two major causes of the Revolution. The writings demonstrate why British policymakers were prepared to take a firmer line with the Americans and send British Regulars to Boston in 1768, and why many Americans convinced themselves that the British government was predisposed to ignore their aspirations and grievances. The Papers of Francis Bernard provide historians with enlightening details as well as hard evidence of how British imperialism was negotiable in the decade before the War of Independence. Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Governor Francis Bernard's historical reputation rests on his role in pushing the American colonists toward revolution. Bernard was the kind of government official without whom revolutions might not occur: A thwarted modernizer, despairing of metropolitan inertia and resentful of local power shifts that undermined his own authority, he sought and found retribution in a hostile portrayal of his opponents and critics. In 1768, the colonists and their governor vied to control information flowing to London. But it was Bernard who triumphed in the war of information, convincing the British government to send British troops to Boston to avert a possible insurrection and support the civil government. The colonists, meanwhile, struggled to find evidence that their governor was misrepresenting their cause. That evidence is presented here in full for the first time.

British Regulars marched into Boston at midday on Saturday, 1 October 1768. For weeks there had been rumors that the landing would be resisted. But by four in the afternoon the two regiments were parading on the Common without incident. The troops were there to deter rioters, cow radicals, and support the civil government. There was no revolt to crush. No one expected war in 1769, but it was no longer unthinkable to Bostonians living alongside British soldiers or to British politicians discussing the allegedly treasonable activities of Bostonians. Their differences hinged on what Francis Bernard had been telling the British government.This fifth volume of the Bernard Papers examines the evidence and debates as they unfolded in Boston and London. The stakes could scarcely have been higher in peacetime. When the British recalled Bernard with honor, the troops remained: the Boston Massacre was his legacy.

New Perspectives on Boston Furniture gathers together nineteen essays first delivered at the Winterthur Museum’s 2013 Furniture Forum. It amply illustrates how research concerning one of America’s most productive centers of furniture-making has diversified in the forty years since the Colonial Society of Massachusetts published Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (also distributed by Virginia), the proceedings of a similar conference held in 1973. The essays place less emphasis on connoisseurship and instead devote greater attention to techniques of construction and the social uses to which these objects were put. The roster of contributors includes not only some of the best-known names in the field (Edwin S. Cooke Jr., Wendy A. Cooper, J. Ritchie Garrison, Morrison Heckscher, Robert Mussey, and Richard Nylander) but also a number of skilled furniture makers and emerging scholars. Some of the subjects addressed include the construction of turret-top tea and card tables, japaning techniques, how pigeonholes functioned as a record-keeping device for merchants, and the making of Windsor and ""elastic"" chairs. A particular strength of the volume is that it carries the examination of Boston furniture forward into the understudied nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with essays on piano making, the Grecian furniture of Isaac Vose, the frames and mirrors of John Doggett, and the furniture making of the east Cambridge firm of Ellis & Davenport, who did so much to satisfy demand for Colonial Revival furniture in the half century following the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.

The story of the origins of the first Anglican congregation established in Boston and New England, Kings Chapel, is significantly shaped by the gradually emerging imperial policies of the government of Charles II during the late seventeenth century. It is a transatlantic account influenced largely by two forces, one in London, driven by the members of the Board of Trade and Plantations, and the other in Boston, driven by a handful of merchants with active and productive commercial ties with London and Bristol trading firms. Extending the Church of England to Puritan Boston after the revocation in 1684 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first charter and the creation of the province as a royal jurisdiction was received reluctantly by the town's residents, who considered it a novel, abrupt, and unwanted political and ecclesiastical act. This was not merely the extension of a religious group from the Old World to the New, for the Church of England was granted great political and cultural authority through the laws of England's unwritten constitution.