The Handy Boston Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton
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from 1692 to 1694.
Many people blamed Phips, but he did not seem downcast or dismayed. He quickly left Boston for London, where he somehow, almost miraculously, persuaded King William and Queen Mary that this expedition was but the first, and that with help from England, Boston would eventually succeed in conquering Canada. Equally amazing is that William and Mary named Phips royal governor. The king and queen did not restore the old charter—that of 1629. Instead, they drew up a new one, the Charter of 1691, under which Massachusetts was governed as a royal province rather than a semi-independent colony.
Phips seems like a one-of-a-kind fellow, a continual winner. Did he ever fall from grace?
He did indeed. When he and Reverend Increase Mather—leader of the very influential family of pastors and Harvard presidents—returned to Boston in 1692, they found the province in an uproar over the Salem Witch incidents. Phips was confounded by the accusations of witchcraft, and he left most of the decisions to a special court appointed to handle the matter. Sam Sewall was one of the judges that heard the cases, and in the end, sentenced twenty men and women to death.
Phips did not receive all the blame for the witchcraft outbreak, but he earned demerits for his high-handed manner. Phips ignored the Great and General Court, and he even got into two known fracases in downtown Boston. Once he used his cane to thump a royal official. It came as little surprise when William and Mary summoned him to London to defend against charges of misconduct. Phips sailed to London, apparently confident he would meet and beat the charges, but he died of a bad fever shortly after arriving in the English capital.
War, failure, expeditions, witchcraft … this sounds like a truly crazy time. Did Bostonians recognize it as such?
They did. Phips was an embarrassment to the more dignified Puritan leaders, and no one could sort out or explain the witchcraft episode (people continue to attempt to do so today). The war with French Canada did not go well, and numerous Massachusetts residents were captured and taken north, to be held for ransom. To top it all off, many Bostonians were displeased with the Charter of 1691, which, they asserted, did not provide them with the liberties they had previously enjoyed.
Could things get any worse? That is a natural question that emerges from this period. And the one way in which matters did get worse was the weather. The 1690s saw some of the coldest, most ferocious winters in all of Boston history. Many believe 1697 was the worst. Through this decade, which Reverend Cotton Mather labeled the “dol orous decade,” the economic recession continued. It was with little sadness that Bostonians witnessed the end of the seventeenth century, and Sam Sewall penned their sentiments in some of the most memorable words:
Once more! Our God, vouchsafe to shine
Tame thou the rigor of our clime.
Make haste with thy impartial light
And terminate this long dark night.
Did the beginning of the eighteenth century improve anything for Boston?
It did, but the improvements came rather slowly. One of the first and most noticeable changes came in 1705, when the streets received official names for the first time. From the famous map of Boston, drawn in 1722, we see that King Street, Province Street, and Long Wharf all have their proper names, and that the peninsula has taken on a more organized appearance. By then, Boston had a population of between eight and nine thousand folk.
Trade, too, made a strong comeback early in the eighteenth century. The foundation for quite a few fortunes was laid, with Bostonians trading lumber, horses, and mules (three of the favorite exports) for sugar, molasses, and rum. Of course, it’s important to say that slaves were also part of the bargain.
Do we know the street names of early Boston?
We know some of them, but a good number went unnamed (at least to our knowledge) until early in the eighteenth century. Tremont Street, which comes from “Trimountain,” for the three hills of Boston, was named as early as the 1630s, and King Street just a bit later. But we turn to the record book of Benjamin Franklin, the uncle of the famous printer, philosopher, and scientist, to obtain more knowledge. Around 1706, Franklin made a long list of the names that had been approved by the town’s selectmen. Among them were names that we might expect, such as Sun Street and Long Wharf, but also less-known names like Bridle Lane, Cow Path, and so forth, were given to various streets. These names lasted until the time of the American Revolution, when most were renamed in honor of heroes of that conflict.
One often hears about African Americans in the later, or subsequent, history of Boston. But how many of them lived in the early town?
Far more than we used to think. The town fathers were skilled at writing blacks out of the record, and referring to them, politely, as “servants” rather than slaves. A lot of research has been done in recent decades, however, and we believe blacks represented at least ten percent, perhaps as much as fifteen percent, of the total population of Boston. Of these people, less than three dozen were free (they show up in the records). The great majority were household slaves, owned by ministers, merchants, and magistrates.
How often do the African Americans of Boston show up in the newspapers?
Boston did not have its first permanent newspaper until 1704, but the town had many “broadsides,” or broadsheets, released to the public. One of the most telling, where African Americans are concerned, was the “Rules for the Society of Negroes,” printed in 1693. The document begins as follows:
“We the miserable children of Adam and of Noah, thankfully admiring and accepting the free-grace of God that offers to save us from our miseries, by the Lord Jesus Christ, freely resolve with his help, to become the servants of that Glorious Lord. And that we may be assisted in the service of our Heavenly Master, we now join together in a society, wherein the following rules are to be observed.” The rules suggest that control of the African American population may have been as important to the (presumably) white organizers as any religious impulse.
A detail of a 1635 map of Boston.
How can a place that is so proud of its antislavery past reconcile the fact that plenty of slaves once lived there?
That is one of the toughest questions for any Bostonian. The city, in the mid-nineteenth century, would do many fine things for the cause of abolition, but the Puritan town, in the early eighteenth century, floated partly on the labor of black slaves. Bostonians are proud, and they are quick to point out that the first anti-slavery pamphlet was printed by one of their own. Once more, Sam Sewall plays a leading role.
When he watched the court trial of Adam, a black slave of John Saffin, Sewall was moved to pen The Selling of Joseph, a pamphlet printed in Boston in 1700. Sewall did not come right out and say that slavery was evil, but he called for greater racial understanding and he certainly pointed in the direction of eventual emancipation.
How can one person—Sam Sewall—be involved in so many aspects of the life of one town?
Anyone that studies Sam Sewall’s life story comes away amazed by the variety of his activities. He was a member of the governor’s council, a judge at the Salem Witch Trials, a confidante of Governor Simon Bradstreet, a very successful man of business, a good husband, and father to fifteen children, many of whom did not make it to adulthood. A close examination of Sewall’s life suggests that Boston—with its eight or nine thousand people—may have been precisely the right size for someone like Sewall, who came to know most of the townspeople by sight and name. He was the first of the great Boston diarists, and though many others would later come, none of them would know the place as intimately as he did.
Was Boston involved in any more military campaigns against French Canada?
It was inevitable that Boston would play a leading role in Queen Anne’s War, which began in 1702. Soon after learning that war was declared between England and France, Bostonians learned that the little town of Deerfield in western Massachusetts was conquered and sacked, and that more