Salem Witch Judge by Eve LaPlante Read Free Book Online Page B

shillings as a fine….” The same week that Henry Sewall died, the Reverend James Allen of the First Church reminded his congregation yet again that Christmas celebrations are “anti-Christian heresy.”
    Even as Samuel mourned his son, he could savor his town’s avoidance of holiday festivities. Carts bearing food, other goods, and firewood traveled into and out of Boston along the bumpy road before his house. Shops were “open as usual,” he noted on Christmas Day, as he would do every Christmas for decades. The few Bostonians who “somehow observe” the day “are vexed, I believe, that the body of the people profane it. Blessed be God” there is “no authority yet to compel them to keep” the holiday.
    His yet is telling. The authority that would compel Bostonians to keep holidays they opposed was coming to New England in the form of English governors and laws. Christmas festivities and Anglican worship were on their way. The Puritan world that Samuel and his Puritan peers knew and loved was falling apart. “The symptoms of death are on us,” he observed in his diary in January 1686 as his peers in the Massachusetts General Court viciously debated their next move. The Puritan experiment of creating a New Canaan in the wilderness of America, where they could worship as they believed God wanted, had begun “palpably to die.” Indeed, that death was not just beginning. The colony was already defunct.
    That story begins in England more than half a century earlier, when John Winthrop and colleagues secured a royal charter from King Charles I to create a trading company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, which they used to found the colony of Massachusetts Bay. In a break with colonial tradition, they carried on board ship with them in 1630 the paper document that was the charter rather than leaving it with the English court. Today, almost four hundred years later, that paper document is the crown jewel of the collection at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts archives on the Boston waterfront.
    Winthrop and other early colonial leaders used—even exploited—that charter to create their own government and militia and to build their own towns, schools, and churches. One of their central goals was to worship freely, but they did not seek religious freedom in the modern sense of permitting the expression of varying views. They wished to worship in their own way—without the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the cross at baptism, the surplice worn by clergy in the Church of England, and the requirement of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper and keeping holy days. They felt entitled to expel from their society not only nonconforming Puritans, such as Roger Williams, John Wheelwright, and Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s, but also people of other faiths, including Anglicans, Catholics, Quakers, and Baptists. The colonial leaders, who were called magistrates, also felt entitled to grant themselves and each other vast parcels of American soil.
    Within a few years of arriving with their open-ended charter, most leading men held vast expanses of land, far more than they could have afforded or even imagined owning in England. At the same time, troubling reports of the colonists’ excessive freedoms as well as disloyalty to the Crown reached the court of King Charles I. The king sent an order for the return of the Massachusetts charter in 1635. Governor Winthrop ignored this and similar requests from the parent country, a tactic that would prove effective for nearly five decades.
    In the minds of the colonists, the creation of Massachusetts was the will of God. Like the Jews in ancient Egypt, the Puritans in Englandwere enslaved by an idolatrous state church. The bishops and archbishops of the Church of England were the pharaohs, and the English Book of Common Prayer demanded they worship false gods. God had “moved the hearts of many” English nonconformists “to transport themselves far off beyond the seas into…New England,”