Capital crimes in Puritan Massachusetts

Welcome to part 6 of our series on the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, in which we wrap up this 100-law codification of Puritan law with the section on capital crimes and the section on churches. We won’t look at each of the laws in these sections, for time’s sake, but pull out the laws that are most indicative of the nature or gist of the Body. If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

We should note here once again that “man” is used pretty consistently, except in the short section devoted to the liberties of women and minority populations. Otherwise, it’s all about “men” in the Body. This does not mean that the laws that follow did not apply to women. It means two things: “man” was used to mean people; and some of the laws were about men only (such as the laws about military service). Women could be banished and fined just like men, so laws about those things applied equally to both sexes.

Some might assume that the Puritans assigned capital punishment to all infractions, including sneezing; the truth, of course, is that the section on Capital Laws is very short—12 laws. As we read, we need to keep in mind that relatively few people were executed in Puritan Massachusetts, and that like capital laws in England in the 18th century, these laws were meant to scare people straight, and were often bent to prevent an actual execution. Let’s take a look. (All spelling has been modernized in the following excerpts.)

94. Capital Laws

1. “If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other god but the lord god, he shall be put to death.”

—You get one strike on worshipping false idols, then you are put to death. This is straight out of the Ten Commandments—thou shalt have no other gods before me. Law 3 in this section also dips into the Commandments, punishing blasphemy—“high-handed blasphemy”.

2. “If any man or woman be a witch (that is hath or consults with a familiar spirit), they shall be put to death.”

—Yes, at last it’s a law about witchcraft! and the only one in the Body. Note that it applies to men and women equally, and that it narrowly defines witchcraft as communicating with a “familiar”, or evil spirit. This would be very hard to prove, and there would be few cases of witchcraft that made it through court in Massachusetts (see Puritans and Witchcraft: more method, less madness and  Did the Puritans believe in witchcraft? for a more in-depth study).

4. “If any person commit any willful murder, which is manslaughter committed upon premeditated malice, hatred, or cruelty, not in a man’s necessary and just defense, nor by mere casualty against his will, he shall be put to death.”

—This is the first of three laws about murder. #4 states that premeditated and cold-blooded murder will be punished with death. Self-defense and accidentally killing someone (“mere casualty against his will”) do not count. This definition is enhanced in the next law, #5, which states that slaying someone “suddenly in his anger or cruelty of passion” is a capital offense, making crimes of passion capital crimes. Law 6 in this section spells out that killing someone “through guile, either by poisoning or other such devilish practice” is a capital offense.

The next three laws are about sex. #7 forbids bestiality, and orders that the human culprit be killed and the animal be “slain and buried and not eaten.” #8 forbids homosexuality;  interestingly it is only applied to men—“If any man lies with mankind as he lies with a woman”. In actual fact, Puritan records show cases where men repeatedly had sex with animals (generally cows) or other men and were not executed because they confessed their “sin” and vowed to repent. It generally took several occasions for someone to finally be executed. #9 addresses men who commit adultery with “a married or espoused wife”, saying “both of them have committed abomination [and] both shall surely be put to death.” Again, these cases came up fairly often and were often handled without recourse to execution (the offending parties were given a chance to repent), but unrepentant adultery was met with execution in most cases.

10. “If any man steals a man or mankind, he shall surely be put to death.”

—This oddly worded law seems to apply to enslaved or indentured people.

11. “If any man rise up by false witness, wittingly and or purpose to take away any man’s life, he shall be put to death.”

—This hearkens back to the sections on freemen’s rights and judicial proceedings, where committing perjury in court is punished.

#12 is about treason: “If any man shall conspire and attempt any invasion, insurrection, or public rebellion against our commonwealth, or shall endeavor to surprise any town [or] fort therein, or shall treacherously and perfidiously attempt the alteration and subversion of our frame of polity of government fundamentally, he shall be put to death.”

—It’s telling that this law equates an actual, physical invasion or rebellion with attempting to alter the colonial government. The Puritans of Massachusetts believed passionately in their proto-democracy, which they had created basically out of whole cloth, on their own, and it was  a powerful component of their identity. They would fight and, later, die to protect the liberties they had established for themselves, and anyone who threatened them was a traitor.

So ends the section on capital punishment. Now to the final section, “A Declaration of the Liberties the Lord Jesus hath given to the Churches”. Notice that these liberties are given by Jesus, as opposed to the 97 other liberties in the body, which are given by the General Court. This interesting division of labor means that the liberties in this section are purely theological; they describe how Congregational churches in Massachusetts operated. Four years after the Body was published, in 1645,  minister John Cotton would spell out the basics of Congregational doctrine in The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England… a book that led to a codification of church law known as the New England Way. For now, the Body gives a brief overview of purely church law, outside civil law.

95. 1. “All the people of god within this jurisdiction who are not in a church way, and be orthodox in judgment, and not scandalous in life, shall have full liberty to gather themselves into a church estate, provided they do it in a Christian way, with due observation of the rules of Christ revealed in his word.”

—One of the things Puritans railed against in England was that every citizen was required, mandated, to attend their local church, no matter how sinful they were. They were required to take communion, even if they did not believe in God, or blasphemed God. The Puritans wanted their churches to be voluntarily populated by believers only. This liberty states that the godly have the opportunity to go to church, and to gather together to found churches. Only the godly may do this, which means the churches stay pure and membership remains voluntary.

The next eight liberties all deal with the freedom and independence of each congregation to govern itself: “full liberty to exercise all the ordinances of god,” “free liberty of election and ordination of all their officers [ministers, deacons, etc.]”, “free liberty of admission [and] dismission…of their officers and members”, “no injunctions are to be put upon any church”, “every church of Christ has freedom to celebrate days of fasting and prayer”, “the elders of churches have free liberty to meet… for conferences and consultations about [church] questions”, “liberty to deal with any of their members in a church way”, and “liberty to deal with any magistrate, deputy of court or other officer whatsoever that is a member in a church way”.

These liberties do not mean that a congregation was above the law, free to do whatever it wanted. They mean that there would be no over-arching church governing body—no bishops, no regional or national conferences, no governing body of ministers who decided policy for all churches. Unlike the Catholic or even the Anglican churches, the Congregationalist church did not have a small group of high-level officials assigning ministers to churches, settling church disputes, or disciplining churches or ministers. Each church was in complete control of its own affairs. The congregation chose their minister and officials, and each church disciplined its own members. Earlier in the Body it is made clear that when it comes to breaking civil law, no church member, minister, or official is above the law—they can’t get out of their due punishment because of their church standing. But these liberties are about church self-government, covering strictly religious issues. Just as an earlier liberty said a minister can be charged with breaking civil law and punished, so here the last of these liberties states that civil officers (politicians) can be charged with breaking church law and be punished.

Having outlawed any kind of over-arching church governing body, the section clarifies in the next liberty that churches can, if they wish (“with the consent of the churches”), send their ministers and elders to meet once a month to spend a day “in public christian conference about the discussing and resolving of any such doubts and cases of conscience concerning matters of doctrine or worship of government of the church as shall be propounded by the brethren of that church, with leave also to any other brother to propound his objections or answers for further satisfaction according to the word of god.” That is, while ministers can’t hold meetings in which they mandate church policy, they are allowed to gather once a month to debate and come to agreement on issues facing their church members. Crucially, those church members are also allowed to attend these meetings, to speak, and to object publicly if they don’t agree with the solutions the ministers arrive at. This is to help prevent the trampling of individual congregations’ rights—“no thing may be concluded and imposed by way of authority from one or more churches upon another, but only by way of brotherly conference and consultations.” If church A comes up with a solution it likes, but church B doesn’t like it, church B cannot be forced to go along.

In the next liberty, the civil authorities are asked to respect these ecclesiastical liberties, and to allow “full power and liberty to any person that shall be denied or deprived of them, to commence and prosecute their suit”.

Wrapping up, Liberty 98 states that every law in the Body be “read and deliberately weighted at every General Court that shall be held within three years, and such of them as shall not be altered or repealed they shall stand so ratified.” It’s very like the Puritans of Massachusetts to take six years to write up the Body of laws, six years of writing to the towns to get their draft laws, and sending drafts back to the towns to be approved, and then to say, Now that we agree on these laws, there’s still a three-year trial period to confirm that we’re all on board with them. If any General Court failed “or forget” to read them each year, every Assistant would be fined 20 shillings, and every deputy 10 shillings.

And so we come to the end of the 1641 Body of Liberties. In the next and final post, we’ll recap its significance, in its own time, and for us today.

Next time: summing it up

The rights of minority populations in Puritan Massachusetts

Part 5 of our series on the 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony leads us to the rights, or liberties, of minority populations—women, children, servants, “foreigners and strangers”, and “brute creatures”. As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the fact that there are special sections for these categories within the Body does not mean that the other liberties described in the document do not apply to women, children, etc. It means that while some of the laws in the Body were about men only (such as the laws about military service), women, servants, and others had recourse to the law—they could bring law suits and defend themselves in court, they could be banished and fined just like men, and so laws about those things applied equally to all people. In these special sections, however, the Puritans addressed issues that could only apply to the groups mentioned, issues they wanted to call out and make clear within the law.

We can actually look at each of the laws in these sections, because there aren’t many. This is a sign that the Puritans of Massachusetts saw all its people as covered by the Body in general, with only a few occasions where special populations needed special protections.  If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

Modern spellings are used throughout.

Liberties of Women

79: “If any man at his death shall not leave his wife a competent portion of his estate, upon just complaint made to the General Court she shall be relieved.”

—Men have to provide for their widows. Some men would leave all their estate to their children—their sons or sons-in-law—in order to pass down the estate intact to their line, reckoning that their widows would remarry and benefit from some other man’s property and goods. But the Body shows an understanding that this may not be the case, and that every husband has a duty to provide for his wife, and thus allows wills to be contested in the widow’s favor.

80. “Every married woman shall be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband, unless it be in his own defense upon her assault. If there be any just cause of correction complaint shall be made to authority assembled in some Court, from which only she shall receive it.”

—No husband can beat his wife (“stripes” meaning whipping). A man bodily attacked by his wife can defend himself, but in all other cases, if a husband has a complaint against his wife (a “just cause of correction”) he can go to court and present his case. If the court finds a wife guilty of an offense—of breaking a law in the Body—the court will fine or otherwise punish her. Domestic disputes are the domain of the law, not the whip.

Liberties of Children

81. “When parents die intestate, the elder son shall have a double portion of his whole estate real and personal, unless the General Court upon just cause alledged shall judge otherwise.”

—This is fairly clear: an estate will be broken out amongst the surviving children, with the eldest son, if there is one, receiving a double share. The chances of a law- and lawsuit-loving Puritan dying without a will were likely small, but it could happen.

82. “When parents die intestate having no heirs male of their bodies, their daughters shall inherit as co-partners, unless the General Court upon just reason shall judge otherwise.”

—Women, even girls, can inherit land and estate from their parents. As we’ve mentioned before, it was rare for the Court to overturn a legal will, so women who inherited land and estate generally kept it.

83. “If any parents shall willfully and unreasonably deny any child timely or convenient marriage, or shall exercise any unnatural severity toward them, such children shall have free liberty to complain to authority for redress.”

—The old image of the stern, horrid Puritan father refusing to let his child marry—or forcing her to—is undone here, along with the image of the Puritan constantly beating his child. While children were not allowed to bring suit to or testify in court, they could be represented in court by an adult, and could give their testimony to that representative.

84. “No orphan during their minority which was not committed to tuition or service by the parents in their lifetime shall afterwards be absolutely disposed of by any kindred, friend, executor, township, or church, not by themselves without the consent of some court, wherein two Assistants at least shall be present.”

—A child whose parents die can’t be abandoned to a life of indentured service by uncaring relatives, their town government, or even their church. Unless a parent arranged for a child to go into service, that child had to be taken in and cared for by some family. This was so important that we see that not even a court could send an orphan into service without at least two Assistants—members of the governor’s council—hearing the case and agreeing. The Puritans believed in the necessity of nurture to raise up a godly child, and did not want extended families shirking their duty to orphaned nieces, cousins, grandchildren, etc.

Liberties of Servants

85. “If any servants shall flee from the tyranny and cruelty of their masters to the house of any freeman in the same town, they shall be there protected and sustained til due order be taken for their relief. Provided due notice thereof be speedily given to their masters from whom they fled. And the next Assistant or constable where the party flying is harbored.”

—No servant has to endure harsh treatment, and all servants, male and female, have the right to leave a house where they are physcially harmed. Masters have to be told where the servant fled to, and the town constable (or, if in Boston, an Assistant) has to be told about the situation as well. Liberty 87 is also about violence against servants, specifically stating that a servant who is maimed or disfigured by a master’s abuse is immediately free from that master’s service and may be entitled to a cash settlement.

Liberties 86 and 88 deal with fair treatment of servants. 88 says diligent servants who have served for at least seven years can’t be dismissed without pay (“shall not be sent away empty”), and, conversely, bad servants can’t be dismissed until they have “made satisfaction” to their masters.

Liberties of Foreigners and Strangers

Liberty 89  protects religious and other refugees (“any people of other nations professing the true Christian religion [who] flee to us from the tyranny or oppression of their persecutors, or from famine, war, or the like… they shall be entertained and succored amongst us”); and Liberty 90 states that shipwrecks or foreign ships will not be looted but the goods “preserved in safety”.

Liberty 91 states that “there shall never be any bond slavery, villainage, or captivity amongst us unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel concerning such persons does morally require…” This allows prisoners of war and Africans to be enslaved. The boggling clause in this liberty is “such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold”—thus equating voluntary entry into slavery and being forcibly sold as a slave. This is the first liberty in the Body to contain such a bald, disturbing contradiction, and keeps this liberty from truly limiting slavery to those, like enemy soldiers, who might possibly “deserve” it.

Of the Brute Creature

92. “No man shall exercise any tyranny or cruelty towards any brute creature which are usually kept for man’s use.”

—The same phrase used in the liberties concerning servants, “tyranny or cruelty”, is used here to prevent cruelty to animals.

93. “If any man shall have occasion to lead or drive cattle from place to place that is far off, so that they be weary, or hungry, or fall sick, or lame, it shall be lawful to rest or refresh them, for a competent time, in any open place that is not [a corn field], meadow, or enclosed for some particular use.”

—Land ownership was the be-all and end-all of the Puritans. Disputes over land were unending, as borders were disputed and people fought over who had rights to use common land (which was not purely common; people paid to use it). There were many disputes over livestock, as people sued for crop damage and destruction of property caused by animals allowed to stray off their own land. So to have a liberty here that says any animals who are being exhausted and endangered by a long journey have the right to graze and drink water on land that is not being used is a big deal. People at this time did not see any land as totally free—if land was not being used, it was fair game to be claimed. Travelers who rested animals on open land ran the risk of someone suing them because he had informally claimed that land. So long as animals did not trespass onto land that was clearly being tilled, they had the right to use the land themselves.

Thus end the special sections of the Body. We see that these sections do not represent every law or the only laws that applied to these categories of people and creatures, but are special cases that could only apply to these categories. There are many instances in the Body’s other sections where it is stated that the liberties being described apply to all inhabitants, be they strangers or servants or women or children. These sections, then, are like a little Bill of Rights for the minority populations, expressly stating liberties that are not made explicit within the other, general sections.

In the next post we’ll look at a very short section on capital crimes—one might expect that to be the longest section of a Puritan body of law, but it is not. It does, however, at last provide us with the single mention of witchcraft in the Body… which applies to men and women equally.

Next time: capital offenses

Separation of Puritan church and state – the 1641 Body of Liberties

Welcome to part 4 of our series on the 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Last time we looked at judicial laws; this time we focus on freemen’s liberties. One of the first things John Winthrop did, at the second Court in May 1631, was expand the definition of “freeman” in the colony to include almost all adult males—there were no property-ownership requirements. So the liberties we’re about to examine applied to 99% of the adult males in the colony.

Did they apply to the women of the colony? As we pointed out in part 2, there is a short section in the Body devoted to the liberties of women. That section, which we’ll cover later in this series, specifies a woman’s treatment by her husband, disallowing abuse and mandating that a wife be fairly treated in her husband’s will. Otherwise, it’s all about “men” in the Body. This does not mean that none of the laws applied to women. It means two things: “man” was used to mean people; and some of the laws were about men only (such as the laws about military service). Women could be banished and fined just like men, so laws about those things applied equally to both sexes. In this section, however, we are dealing with voting rights and jury rights, and so these apply strictly to men.

We won’t look at each of the laws in this section, for time’s sake, but pull out the laws that are most indicative of the nature or gist of the Body. If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

Modern spellings are used throughout.

Liberty 58: “Civil authority has power and liberty to see the peace, ordinances, and rules of Christ observed in every church according to his word, so it be done in a civil and not in an ecclesiastical way.”

—This reminds us of Liberty 1, in that it seems to blur the line between church and state, but in reality it is once again mandating that separation by saying that the civil government does not have authority to govern the churches—it can’t exercise power “in an ecclesiastical way”. This means that the civil government can intervene if a problem in a congregation is causing civil disturbance, but it can’t step in to meddle with or dictate how a church operates. On the other hand, church disputes will not be allowed to interfere with civil government or the peace of the colony. This is most likely hearkening back to the Antinomian crisis of the 1630s involving Anne Hutchinson, where problems in the Boston church led to near civil war, as the elections for governor were disrupted and rioting broke out.

Liberty 59: “Civil authority has power and liberty to deal with any church member in a way of civil justice, notwithstanding any church relation, office, or interest.”

—Another separation of church and state, this one saying no one can be above the law, no matter how high a position they may hold in a church. Church officials, ministers, and pastors are under civil authority…

Liberty 60: “No church censure shall degrade or depose any man from any civil dignity, office, or authority he shall have in the Commonwealth.”

—…and vice-versa: if a church member or official is removed from his church office, or is censured for a religious matter, he will not also be removed from any government position he may hold. Remember that ministers and pastors were not allowed to hold political office; this would apply only to church members or men serving as deacons.

Liberty 66: “The Freemen of every township shall have power to make such by-laws and constitutions as may concern the welfare of their town, provided they be not of a criminal, but only of a prudential nature, and that their penalties [shall not exceed] 20 shillings for one offence. And that they be not repugnant to the public laws and orders of the country. And if any inhabitant shall neglect or refuse to observe them, they sall have the power to levy the appointed penalties by distress.”

—Towns are semi-independent: each makes its own laws, so long as they do not assess unfairly high fines and so long as they don’t go against the laws of the colony. This tradition of town meeting, where each town made its own laws and public comments on colony affairs, was a powerful galvanizing force during the run-up to the revolution, and continues in Massachusetts today.

Liberty 67: “It is the constant liberty of the free men of this plantation to choose yearly at the court of election out of the freemen all the general officers of this jurisdiction. If they please to discharge [these officers] at the day of election by way of vote they may do it without showing cause. But if at any other General Court we hold it due justice that the reasons thereof be alleged and proved. By general officers we mean our governor, deputy governor, assistants, treasurer, [and military] general. And our admiral at sea, and such as are or hereafter may be of the like general nature.”

—Freemen elect all civil officers; this is a liberty found in very few places in the world at this time. Elections were annual, held each spring at the General Court (the Court in October was for writing laws). This liberty says that anyone can be voted out of office without explanation, but once someone is elected they can’t be removed from office without some cause; they have to be accused and then proved of some wrongdoing. So you can’t be elected in May, show up for duty in October and suddenly be told you’re out.

Liberty 69: “No General Court shall be dissolved or adjourned without the consent of the major part thereof.”

—England in 1641 was about to collapse into civil war, in large part because King Charles I refused to allow Parliament to meet. He had dismissed Parliament in 1629 and refused to call it until 1640. This “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” was unpopular amongst the small but growing number of English people who believed Parliament should be a permanent partner—and counterweight—to monarchical rule. In Massachusetts in 1641, the people took the step of making their Parliament, the General Court, incapable of dissolution without its consent. No governor could ever exercise “personal rule” by shutting out the freemen from their government, as Charles did.

Liberty 70: “All freemen called to give any advice, vote, verdict, or sentence in any court, council, or civil assembly shall have full freedom to do it according to their true judgments and consciences, so it be done orderly and inoffensively for the manner.”

—The participation of freemen in their government was not figurehead. They were meant to truly advise and shape their government without any pressure, and their only obligation was to act honestly and according to their own judgment, and to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion.

Liberty 75 is quite lengthy, so we’ll paraphrase here to say that it states that if a Court makes any laws that concern religion, lead to war, or result in a public Article, and there are members of the Court who disagree with the majority vote, they are to publish their dissenting decision (their “contra remonstrance”) and have it recorded in the records of the Court.

—This is a voice for the minority that makes governing by precedent more informed, and makes the members of the public aware of the dissenting opinions in the Court.

The section on the liberties of the freemen, then, secures separation of church and state, the right of freemen to vote for their politicians, the independence of town governments, a voice for dissent, and the right of the legislature (General Court) to exist, thus preventing tyranny by the governor and his assistants. The rights and duties of juries are also covered in this section.

We’ll look next at the sections on women, children, “foreigners and strangers”, and brute creatures. As we shall see, these are positive laws and are called out in separate sections only to emphasize that these populations had rights as well.

Next time: wills, physical violence, and “smiting”

Puritan justice—a fair day in court

Part 3 of our series on the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties takes us to section 2, which focuses on judicial proceedings. It’s the longest section of the Body: 40 of the 100 laws in the Body are contained here. As Puritans enjoyed leisurely writing, we’ll paraphrase each of the laws, but if you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

Liberty 18 allows people to post bail so they don’t have to stay in prison while they await trial.

Liberties 19 and 20 address midconduct by judges, establishing fines for “miscarriage” by a justice and censure for those who demonstrate misconduct in court (“demean themselves offensively in the Court”).

Liberty 22 sets fines for false claims and nuisance lawsuits. This ties in with Liberty 24, which states that if you bring a suit against someone and then are found to be at fault yourself, your suit will be dismissed, and with Liberty 37, which reiterates fines for false claims (“false complaint or clamor”).

Liberty 26 is interesting because it says that if you are unfit to plead your own case in court you can ask someone to represent you. When you study the Puritans you quickly learn that they were a litigious people, constantly bringing suits to court, and often very complex ones, but you might fail to register that there were no lawyers in Puritan Massachusetts. Many of the Puritans, including founder and governor John Winthrop himself, had been lawyers in England. But in their new world, they did not have lawyers. Everyone argued their own case in court. The Puritans had seen and bewailed the corruption of the English court system, and protested the use of legalese that average people could not understand. In Massachusetts, they rid themselves of both problems by getting rid of lawyers. Liberty 26 allows people to have someone else plead a case for them—with one significant detail: that person can’t be paid for his service (“Provided he give him no fee or reward for his pains”). There would be no professional lawyer class in Massachusetts if the original settlers had their way.

Liberty 30 says jurors can be challenged by both plaintiff and defendant in any case. “And if his challenge be found just and reasonable by the bench, or the rest of the jury, as the challenger shall choose it shall be allowed him [to have a new jury called].” This is a liberty no one had in England.

Liberties 32-35 are protections of individual liberty. The first allows a defendant whose goods have been seized to recover them, and the last forbids a court to seize crops that would be spoiled and ruined by the time a defendant is able to recover them. The other two make imprisonment a last resort (“no man [shall be] arrested or imprisoned upon execution of a judgment… if the law can find competent means of satisfaction otherwise from his estate”) and punish constant nuisance litigation (“vexing others with unjust frequent and endless suits”). The image many people have of scores of Puritans languishing in prison, victims of irrational laws or charges of witchcraft, are unfounded.

In fact, you may be noting that we are a good way into the Body without one mention of witchcraft, which many Americans today take to be the only crime Puritans acknowledged or cared about. We will see that there is only one mention of witchcraft in the entire body, and it is a passing mention. The Puritans, as we’ve mentioned elsewhere, believed in witchcraft but very rarely believed someone was a witch. Their courts were scenes of countless arguments over land, boundaries, and livestock, but rarely over witchcraft.

Liberty 36 allows for appeals by defendants found guilty in court, Liberty 41 demands a speedy trial (“…cases shall be heard and determined at the next Court”), and Liberty 42 says no one may be tried twice for the same offense—a pillar of our own justice system.

Liberties 43, 45, and 46 forbid cruel and unusual punishment—no whippings of more than 40 stripes, and no torture to force a confession… in most cases. If someone was found guilty of a capital crime, and it seemed clear he had partners in that crime, then that person might be tortured to give up the names of his partners, “yet not with such tortures as be barbarous and inhumane.” It’s not clear what a humane torture may be, but it is clear that the Puritans knew what they meant, and drew a line between humane and inhumane torture, for they reiterate in the next Liberty, 46, “For bodily punishments we allow amongst us one that are inhumane, barbarous, or cruel.”

Liberty 48 established a Sunshine policy, stating that every inhabitant of the colony had the right to “search and view” all court records, and to request written transcripts for a small fee.

Jury duty is covered in Liberties 49 and 50, saying no one can be forced to serve for more than two years in a row, and that all jurors will be chosen by the freemen of their towns (and not by the government in Boston).

The section wraps up with Liberty 57 saying that if there is a suspicious sudden death in a town, the constables of the town will summon a 12-person jury to carry out an inquiry, and present their findings and conclusions at the next Court.

Judicial proceedings were so important to the Puritans for a few reasons. As we’ve mentioned above, they chafed at the inefficiency and corruption of the legal system in England, and they wanted to create a truly just system in their own society in America. They also had a practical necessity for a clear, fast-moving legal process because they were constantly embroiled in lawsuits over land. As new settlers came in, people moved from place to place, bought land, left land in wills, etc., disputes over borders and plots, who had rights to use common land and wood lots, and a plethora of other issues came up continually. If justice did not move swiftly, violence could break out, as people took the law into their own hands. That’s why the Body sets up clear laws and clear procedures for bringing cases to court, and enforces swfit justice—every case being heard at the next Court session being held.

Note the practicality of these judicial liberties and you’ll find the myth of the rigid, all-powerful, and unjust Puritan court is exploded. These Puritan courts had juries elected by freemen, whose members could be challenged and dismissed by defendants in court. The judges could be fined and removed for miscarriage of justice. People had the right to appeal. People’s goods could be seized, but had to be returned to them if they were found innocent, and imprisonment was to be a last resort, not the norm. Many of the liberties of 1641 were new to the western world, and many clearly influenced the Founders of the United States, and are tenets of our own judicial system today.

We’ll turn next to “Liberties more particularly concerning the freemen”, or, more protections of individual liberty, as well as the divisions between church and state.

Next time: more liberties of the freemen

Were Puritan laws harsh? A look at individual rights

Hello and welcome to part 2 of our series on Puritan law—specifically  the 1641 Body of Liberties created by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Last time we looked at the proto-democratic process by which these laws were created; here we focus on the first section of this body of 100 laws, which covers individual rights. We won’t look at each of the 17 laws in this section, for time’s sake, but pull out the laws that are most indicative of the nature or gist of the Body. If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

We should note here that “man” is used pretty consistently, except in the short section devoted to the liberties of women. That section, which we’ll cover later in this series, specifies a woman’s treatment by her husband, disallowing abuse and mandating that a wife be fairly treated in her husband’s will. Otherwise, it’s all about “men” in the Body. This does not mean that the laws that follow did not apply to women. It means two things: “man” was used to mean people; and some of the laws were about men only (such as the laws about military service). Women could be banished and fined just like men, so laws about those things applied equally to both sexes.

(All spelling has been modernized in the following excerpts.)

1. “No man’s life shall be taken away, no man’s honor or good name shall be stained, no man’s person shall be arrested, restrained, banished, dismembered, nor any ways punished, no man shall be deprived of his wife or children, no man’s goods or estate shall be taken away from him, nor any way indemnified under color of law or countenance of authority, unless it be by virtue or equity of some express law of the country warranting the same, established by a General Court and sufficiently published, or in the case of the defect of a law in any particular case by the word of God. And in capital cases, or in cases concerning dismembering or banishment, according to that word to be judged by the General Court.”

—This is the heart of the Body of Liberties; as discussed in part 1 of this series, the whole purpose of creating the Body was to have a set of laws to go by. No one is going to be sentenced to anything unless he has broken an actual law that has been made publicly known. Judgments will not be made according to some magistrate’s whim or personal feelings. People will know what the law is, and what the penalties are for breaking laws. The last part, regarding “the defect of a law in any particular case”, means that if there is some problem for which no law has been written as yet, the magistrates will turn to the Bible for guidance; however, if someone does something that seems to call for capital punishment in the Bible, the General Court will step in and “that word [of God] will be judged”. Here we see that when push comes to shove, human reason ranks above the word of God for the Puritans.

2. “Every person within this Jurisdiction, whether inhabitant or foreigner, shall enjoy the same justice and law that is general for the plantation [the colony], which we constitute and execute one towards another without particularity or delay.”

—One law for all, no one above the law, and an early expression of the idea that justice delayed is justice deferred.

…12. “Every man whether inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free, shall have liberty to come to any public court, council, or town meeting, and either by speech or writing to move any lawful, seasonable, and material question, or to present any necessary motion, complaint, petition, bill, or information, whereof that meeting has proper cognizance, so it be done in convenient time, due order, and respective manner.”

—The law is open to all, no matter their status, and all men have the right to attend public meetings and participate in them, so long as their participation is respectful and the ideas or complaints they have are relevant to the body they’re addressing—that is, if you are in town meeting, you bring up town business and not colony-level business, and vice-versa.

14. “Any conveyance or alienation of land or other estate whatsoever, made by any woman that is married, any child under age, idiot or distracted person, shall be good if it be passed and ratified by the consent of a General Court.”

—While it is distressing to see women, children, and “idiots” lumped together as one category, this law actually states that it is not only men who may buy and sell land or goods (“estate”), and that is crucially important in a colony where land is the chief source of wealth. A woman may do what she sees fit with land she is left by her husband. (Women can also make their own wills, as guaranteed in liberty 11.) Underage children may make decisions about land left to them. The clause on “idiot or distracted persons” likely refers to people who made out wills when they were of sound mind but did not die of sound mind; those wills and the decisions in them will be upheld. All this is contingent on the General Court looking the decisions over and confirming them, but looking through the records of the colony shows that in most cases decisions made by this group were upheld.

We skipped laws in this section that prevent people from being fined for not responding to a court summons if they are incapable of getting to court, outlaw mandatory military service, ensure that no one can be forced to work on a government project, ban estate taxes, keep the government from seizing goods, and give people the right to move out of the colony whenever they like. Basically section 1 limits the power of the colonial government and secures individual liberties, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, that line comes from a later document and another time, but we see here in section 1 of the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts early forerunners of those guarantees in our Declaration of Independence.

In section 2, we’ll look at Rights, Rules, and Liberties concerning Judicial Proceedings.

Next time: the longest section

Puritan oligarchy? A look at the 1641 Body of Liberties

Welcome to a short series on the first (but far from the last) codification of laws in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, the 1641 Body of Liberties. We’re going to look through this set of 100 laws to get a better picture of what government was really like in Puritan Massachusetts, and to counter the standard mantra that the colony was an oligarchy, with no separation of church and state. We will also disappoint most readers by showing that there is only one mention of witchcraft in the whole Body, and it is mentioned only in passing.

An oligarchy, of course, is a system of government that keeps power in the hands of a tiny minority of the people, generally the wealthiest, who basically oppress everyone else to keep themselves wealthy and in power. The last thing an oligarch wants is democracy, or the common voice helping to shape the law.

As we shall see, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not an oligarchy at all, but a proto-democracy in which the common people not only helped shape the law, but were actually recruited by the magistrates in Boston to draft the first body of laws. Let’s look at the process by which the Body was created:

The MBC had as its governing document its charter of 1629, which stated that there should be a governor, deputy governor, and 18 assistants (magistrates). The assistants were to be chosen from the freemen of the colony. (One of the first acts of John Winthrop was to expand the definition of freeman to include basically all adult males in the colony.) The assistants would elect the governor and deputy governor from amongst themselves. The charter also stipulated that the assistants hold a court every month (to hear cases and complaints of the people) and that a General Court be held four times a year (where the freemen from each town drafted laws).

But the General Court did not meet four times a year, and the Assistants’ Court was drafting laws without the oversight of the freemen’s deputies, so in May 1634 at a meeting of the GC the deputies asked to see the patent. They demanded that they be allowed their proper role of drafting laws, but Winthrop said the number of freemen was too large to allow meeting—the Great Migration was in full swing, and the number would indeed have been pushing 1,000. Winthrop suggested that the freemen should elect deputies to attend the GC; each town could send deputies to Boston. Winthrop pictured these deputies reviewing laws drafted by the Assistants’ Court (like the Supreme Court reviews laws made by Congress).

The freemen, however, voted on May 14 to send three deputies from each of the eight towns then existing to the General Court to vote for the assistants and to draft laws. So now the freemen of Massachusetts were voting for their representatives and drafting their own laws. This itself is fairly astonishing to the student of history, for one would be hard-pressed to find an example of this type of proto-democracy anywhere else in the world in 1634.

But the people went further, and this is where the Body of Liberties comes in. The General Court made laws on an ad-hoc basis, hearing each individual case and deciding it. But many in the Court and outside it were worried that this could lead to injustice—to deputies “proceeding according to their discretions”; that is, letting their personal opinions sway their decisions. The colony needed an objective code of law that would not change from case to case. In May 1635 the deputies at the General Court voted to draft that code of law.

It wasn’t simple, though. Who should draft it? The deputies, with their subjective opinions? The Assistants, who could possibly establish an oligarchy by writing laws that gave them more power? While these questions were ironed out, the Court voted in 1636 that any law drafted had to have the support of both the Assistants’ Court and the General Court. The General Court also voted that three clergymen—Cotton, Peters, and Shepherd—submit drafts of laws. Why clergymen? In part, because they were seen to be objective; no minister was allowed to hold a government position, and so had nothing to gain by giving the government certain powers. In part, the colony was a religious society and valued the opinion of its ministers. That said, none of the three drafts was accepted, not even John Cotton’s; as the most respectd and celebrated minister in the colony, perhaps in all New England, he might have seemed a shoo-in, but he was not.

In March 1637, the GC was at an impasse, and so it drafted a letter to the freemen of the eight towns asking them to assemble in their towns and write up a code of laws they felt was just and send it to Boston by June 5. The governor and Assistants would then review them all and create “a compendious abridgement of the same” to give to the GC, which would have final review and approve or reject it. Again, this is a pretty surprising exercise of democracy for the time, but we find in November 1639 there’s still no progress. What caused the delay? Winthrop details two main reasons in his diary, a compendious abridgement of which follows here:

1. The people felt that rather than write laws to use in the future, laws should develop naturally over time and custom, as they had done in England. England never had a written constitution, of course, and the English emigrants in Massachusetts believed their laws should develop the same way.

2. Following on from the lack of a written English body of laws, many Puritans felt they were breaking a key tenet of their charter if they wrote a body of laws. The charter said the colonists could govern themselves as necessary, but should make no laws “repugnant” to the laws of England. Even writing out a body of laws was, in a way, repugnant to English law because English law was not codified. Aside from that, the risk of codifying something that wouldn’t jibe with English law was just too great.

So while the people of the colony wanted an objective body of laws, they were worried about just creating one on the spot, and worried about the consequences of codifying laws that did not exist in England. In the end, the need for a code overcame this resistance, first for the govenrment and then for the people. In 1639, two different codes were drafted by two ministers, and each was sent to the towns to be read to the people, who could revise as they saw fit. Knowing that there would be a code of law, consequences and custom be damned, led the people to at last act. They ended up approving a draft by Rev. Ward. This was revised several times by the governor and the courts, and at last on December 10, 1641—six years after the initial request to draft a code of laws—the Body of Liberties was copied and sent to all the towns, “and voted to stand in force.”

It’s an amazing background for a body of laws in the 17th century, and just this lead-up to the Body puts the lie to claims of oligarchy or dictatorship, and poor citizens being oppressed by laws they did not support, which is the usual picture of Puritan Massachusetts. We’ll look at a few of the 100 laws in the Body over the next few posts. The original Body was given a three-year trial, after which it could be either yanked or “established to be perpetual.” It would be established, and used as the basis for later bodies of law for the colony.

Next time: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

What to remember about the Alamo

“Remember the Alamo!” is one of those phrases from American history that most Americans know, but don’t understand (right up there with Washington crossing the Delaware and “one if by land, two if by sea“). As is the case whenever history is lost, myth has grown up around the Alamo, not really regarding what happened there but why it happened.

Most Americans do know that a group of Americans—including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett—holed up in the Alamo, a fortified mission in today’s San Antonio, Texas, and fought to the death, outnumbered, against the Mexican forces of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. This happened in February 1836. The mix of roughly 200 Americans and Mexicans (fighting against their own country) held out through several charges by Santa Anna’s much larger army but were eventually killed. The Alama became a rallying point for Americans fighting for Texas independence and American liberty.

As we point out in our post The U.S. declares war on Mexico, the real story is not as grand as the myth:

“American citizens who moved to Mexico to settle its northern state of Coahuila y Tejas decided, after a short residence, to create an independent state there called Texas. The Mexican government responded in 1829 by levying a property tax, putting high taxes on American imports, and prohibiting slavery. Because Americans in Coahuila y Tejas outnumbered native Mexicans, and because internal political strife in Mexico made it difficult to fully command the northern states, they were able to ignore those laws, particularly the one against slaveholding.  But when General Antonio López de Santa Anna became dictator of Mexico in 1834, he was determined to bring Coahuila y Tejas firmly back under Mexican control, and when the Texans declared their independence in 1836, Santa Anna traveled north to squash them.”

It was in part their determination to enslave black Americans that drove the Texans in their fight for independence. If Mexico had not begun to phase out slavery in 1824 (the last enslaved people were freed there in 1829), the Americans in northern Mexico would likely have continued to live as citizens of the Mexican state for much longer, until their numbers were much greater and a break much easier to make and to defend. But when the president of Mexico, Anastasio Bustamente, ordered that abolition be enforced in northern Mexico—Texas—the Americans living there orders began to think seriously of breaking away from Mexico and forming their own nation.

It shouldn’t have been hard to do. Mexico’s government was weak and its ability to enforce the law in its very far-flung northern territories (California as well as Texas) was limited. The Americans should have been able to break away and force Mexico to terms when it realized it could not put down the distant revolution in a small district that seemed to have no essential value to the nation.

But Mexico decided to take a hard line, and in April 1830 it forbid any further American emigration to its territory. Mexico didn’t want the number of Americans in Texas rising and rising, and hoped to subdue those already in rebellion. This strategy failed in 1832 when Americans fought a small battle, the Battle of Velasco, against Mexican forces. In that year and the next, Texans formed a Convention that asked the Mexican government for reforms, which were rejected by Mexico. The 1833 Convention drafted a constitution for Texas which was also rejected. The war officially began on October 2, 1835, with the Battle of Gonzales. The Texans were victorious in the next few battles, including the Siege of Bexar in December, which led to the American capture of San Antonio.

Now comes the battle of the Alamo, a fortified mission in San Antonio which the Americans occupied, first under the command of Ben Milam, then William Travis. On February 23, 1836, Santa Anna arrived to recover San Antonio. Santa Anna was particularly adamant that Mexico fight off any foreign claims to its territory, and was willing to spend money and lives to do that when both were dear. The Americans held out againt Santa Anna’s superior numbers from February 23 to March 6, when another Mexican charge finally breached the fortified walls of the Alamo. The Americans inside fought hand-to-hand until all were dead. San Antonio was recovered by Mexico.

Unbeknownst to the men at the Alamo, on March 2 the Convention of 1836 adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence. Members of the Convention had been receiving updates on the siege, and when word reached the Convention of the loss of the Alamo and the stand made by Americans there, the Declaration and the war were given greater impetus, and Remember the Alamo! became a rallying cry of the Texans. On April 21, Texans led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna withdrew, and Texans celebrated their independence (a little too early, as Mexico never formally ceded the territory, and when it was accepted into the U.S. as a state in 1845, the Mexican War was the result).

There are many legends about exactly what happened inside the mission. The most famous story is that Travis drew a line in the dirt and asked every man willing to fight to the end to cross it, and all but one did (that man was allowed to leave). Movies have portrayed all the men as paragons of liberty and integrity, fighting extremely venal, bloodthirsty (and rather foppish) Mexicans who want to establish a police state. Santa Anna is particularly portrayed as a cross between an effete pretender and a cruel dictator. It’s ironic at best, since it was Mexico that wanted to abolish slavery in the territory, and Mexico that was fighting to keep its land against strangers who had been allowed to settle there and suddenly announced that the land was theirs. But we in the U.S. tend to get the idea that it was Mexico trying to take American land away from its rightful owners.

No one can deny the bravery of the men who fought at the Alamo. But the cause for which they fought was not true liberty. Like the United States it would soon join, Texas fought for the ideal of liberty but not the full reality, as it kept black people enslaved. It would take the Civil War to end slavery in Texas, and fulfill its original mandate of liberty. The Alamo was also a battle in a war to seize a section of northern Mexico without just provocation. The Alamo is important to remember clearly, objectively, and with an eye to understanding what really happened there.

Supreme Court ruling on Arizona anti-immigration law: show us your papers

On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled on the provisions of the Arizona state laws meant to prevent illegal Latino immigration and find hidden illegal immigrants already in the state and deport them. Police in the state can stop anyone if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person is, or is with, an illegal immigrant. Lyle Mann, Executive Director of Arizona Peace Officers’ Standards and Training Board, created an instructional video for police officers outlining what they should look for when they are assessing whether someone is an illegal immigrant, including “dress, demeanor, unusual or unexplained nervousness” and trouble speaking English.

There are no guidelines given on what illegal immigrants dress like, or what their “demeanor” is. I have never seen a category of clothing online or in a store called “Illegal Immigrant.”

It’s hard to believe that the Court would uphold a provision of the law that allows police officers to act on their sixth-sense, that enshrines “reckoning” as a process upheld by law. But the most controversial provision of the Arizona law was upheld: the “show me your papers” provision requires state law enforcement officials to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop “if there is reason to suspect that the individual might be an illegal immigrant.”

Again, what anyone “suspects” is usually hard to defend in court, but in this case those “suspicions” were supported. The three provisions blocked by the Court were: (quote from the NYT) “making it a crime for immigrants to fail to register under federal law, making it a crime for illegal immigrants to work or to try find work, and allowing the police to arrest people without warrants if they have probable cause to believe that they have done things that would make them deportable under federal law.” This third provision means that the police could arrest a person they think committed a crime that could get them deported. Again, what an officer “suspects” is the core of this provision. Why it was not upheld while the other “suspicion” was is unclear.

Those who say this will not validate and encourage racial profiling are almost certainly fooling themselves. When an officer is asked to look at someone’s clothes that officer is being told, “Illegal immigrants dress a certain way because they all come from Mexico and they all wear this or that kind of jeans, shirts, hats, etc.” When an officer is asked to look for people who can’t speak English well, that officer is naturally going to look for people s/he considers to look “foreign”—a white person is very likely to be overlooked in favor of a darker-skinned person, a person with black hair, etc.: in short, a Mexican.

Because that’s what this law is about in Arizona: stopping Mexican people from crossing the border illegally. It is a law about Mexican immigration, and therefore a law about Mexican people: identifying them and deporting them.

One can only point out that the U.S. only has a problem with illegal immigration because we have made it very difficult to emigrate here legally. This is a policy adopted after WWII. Throughout its long history, the U.S. has often tried to prevent certain people from entering the country—Italians, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, to name a few—but it has never had a blanket policy of trying to stop immigration itself. Today immigrants from any nation face an uphill battle of many years to become citizens that includes having to get an employer to sponsor you for multiple years, tests on American history and government, and paperwork, paperwork, paperwork (which also adds up to money, money, money).

We now make it much harder to become a legal immigrant than we have ever done before. That’s it. It’s not that today’s immigrants are more criminal. It’s not that our own sainted immigrant ancestors were more law-abiding. It’s simply a matter of changing the law to make it harder to become a citizen. What were the “rules” for immigrants coming through Ellis Island for so many years? Look healthy and have your name listed on the register of the ship that brought you. That was it. “If the immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these ‘six-second physicals.'”

When I visited the Ellis Island museum in 1991, I saw a film that said you also had to provide the address of a friend, sponsor, or family member who would take you in. And off you went. Those rules were pretty easy to follow. If that’s all we asked of Mexican immigrants today, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants.

Each generation looks back to earlier immigrants as “good,” and views current immigrants as bad. In the 1880s, the Irish were angry at the incoming Italians. In the 1900s, the Italians were banning the Chinese from coming in. As each immigrant group settles in, it tries to keep the next group out.

It’s really time we ended this cycle. Here are some quick pointers:

1. Latin American immigrants are not qualitatively different than previous European immigrants.

2. Spanish-speaking immigrants do NOT refuse to learn English; in fact, the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are less likely to speak the old language than the children of other groups (that is, more children of Chinese immigrants speak Chinese than children of Mexican immigrants speak Spanish).

3. Your European immigrant ancestors (and mine!) honored nothing when they came to the U.S. but their desire to be here. They didn’t anxiously adhere to “the rules.” They did the bare, bare minimum that was asked of them, which was easy to do.

4. If we reverted to our earlier, extremely simple requirements for entering the country and becoming a citizen, we would not have illegal immigrants. If we choose not to go back to the earlier requirements, we have to explain why.

The usual explanation is that if we made it as simple now as it once was to enter this country and become a citizen, the U.S. would be “flooded” with “waves” of Latin Americans, poor and non-English-speaking, ruining the country. Which is exactly the argument that has always been made against immigrants, be they Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, etc. Each group is going to destroy the country and American culture and society. It never seems to happen.

But it might happen now, with Latin American immigrants, not because they will destroy the country but because those in the U.S. who are so afraid of them will rip the country—and the Constitution—apart trying to keep them out. Taking the long view, I can say there’s hope that that won’t happen. But it will take a good fight to get all Americans to realize that the key to this nation’s success has always been the open-door policy.

Immigration will always be with us—thank goodness! The only informed position on the challenges it poses is a historically informed position.

Assassin’s Creed III – giving George Washington the cred he deserves!

An acquaintance played me the preview trailer for the new Assassin’s Creed video game coming out in October. Why? Because it includes an edited excerpt of George Washington’s thrilling speech to his army before the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776 (he also included the stirring passage in his General Orders of July 2, 1776). Here is the actual text:

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect—We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our own Country’s Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”

…how this man had no part in writing any of our founding documents would be beyond us if we didn’t remember his great modesty, which led him to leave the writing of those documents to men considered expert writers and statesmen. Washington consistently expressed the purpose of our revolution and the highest ideals it embodied, and his eloquence and passion should be burned into our minds all throughout our education, but they are not.

Since video games reach where school cannot, here’s hoping that ACIII will lead some people to study Washington, who seems to be portrayed as the action hero he truly was in this trailer (you are following a hooded character who is the assassin of the title; at 44 seconds Washington’s speech begins to play): Washington speech – ACIII

 

Puritan Smackdown: Be round if you would

My favorite passage from John Winthrop’s diary is this, from August 3, 1632:

“After dinner the deputy [Thomas Dudley, Winthrop’s periodic rival] then demanded of him [Winthrop—he wrote about himself in the third person in his diary] the ground and limits of his authority, whether by the patent [the colony’s charter] or otherwise. The governor [Winthrop] answered that he would challenge no greater authority than he might by the patent. The deputy replied that then he had no more authority than every assistant (except power to call courts and precedency for honor and order). The governor answered he had more, for the patent making him a governor by common law or the statutes, and desired him to show wherein he had exceeded, etc.

“In speaking this somehwat apprehensively, the deputy began to be in passion and told the governor that if he were so round he would be round too. The governor bade him be round if he would. So the deputy rose up in great fury and passion and the governor grew very hot also, so as they both fell into bitterness, but by mediation of the mediators they were soon pacified…”

So if you ever time travel back to Puritan New England in the 1630s, you’ll know what to say if you want to fight. Just bid someone be round if they would.