MASSACHUSETTS

Mid-eighteenth century Massachusetts was an overwhelmingly white, English, Congregationalist colony, with a population of about 175,000, second only to Virginia. In the years since the landing of the Pilgrims, the colonists had created two rather distinct worlds—a culture of small farms and small towns in the interior, and a maritime culture along the Atlantic coast.

Typical inland farmers produced largely for their households rather than for markets and relied on family, neighbors, and town for their protection and nurture. Devoted to the republican ideal of a virtuous moral community, they placed the common good ahead of individualism and were suspicious of commercial society. Yet markets and a cash economy existed in the countryside, and a different, liberal ideal, stressing the rights of individuals and capital, was gaining ground.

The liberal ideal was more advanced in the seaports, where merchants were making profits in the British trading system. Their ships arrived regularly with tea, fish, molasses, whale oil, and manufactured goods and left with rum, dried fish, lumber, and other products. Massachusetts led all colonies in distilling, sugar refining, ship building, and tonnage of incoming and outgoing ships. In 1750 Boston was the largest port on the Atlantic coast.

The steady hum of commerce fostered a cosmopolitan culture that was less homogeneous and more individualistic and refined than in the backcountry. In 1775 the seaports had almost as many dissenting churches as Congregational. A large nonfarming population, including some African Americans, both slave and free, created a widening gap between poor laborers and rich merchants like John Hancock, who in 1771 had savings of 16,000 pounds earning interest. Boston boasted four newspapers, four marine insurance offices, and a major royal post office. It was also known for its handsome Georgian-style buildings, the portraits of John Singleton Copley, and, across the Charles River, Harvard College (founded 1636).

The provincial government of Massachusetts dated back to the royal charter of 1691. A powerful governor, appointed by the king, had absolute authority to appoint judges, veto bills from the legislature, and dissolve the House of Representatives. There was no religious test for voting and only a moderate property qualification. Congregationalism was the established religion, supported by town taxes. The system worked well, but most colonists

considered town government more important than provincial government.

Despite its established position, Congregationalism was under attack. In 1740 the eloquent English revivalist George Whitefield warned large crowds in Boston that no one could be saved without having undergone a deep, personal religious experience. His sermons buttressed a similar message from Jonathan Edwards and other American revivalists. The Great Awakening, as the movement was called, drew many Congregationalists away from the orthodox church.

After the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the British Parliament began to levy heavy taxes on the colonies. The new policy triggered a sharp reaction in Boston, where friction already existed between a royal party led by Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and an opposition championed by men such as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and James Otis, who had influence over the Boston workingmen. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, mobs of workers destroyed Hutchinson's home.

From then on Massachusetts was on the leading edge of the American Revolution. The Massachusetts legislature sent out the first circular letter, the Boston Massacre inflamed public opinion, and the Boston Tea Party brought on the war. Parliament made it almost inevitable that the war would start in Massachusetts when it closed the port of Boston, sent in troops, and restricted the holding of town meetings. Ironically, the fighting began, not in the seaport where the controversy had flourished, but in Lexington and Concord, two country towns. In the months that followed, a Massachusetts leader, John Adams (cousin of Samuel) played a dominant role in the Continental Congress, chairing many committees and persuading the Congress to issue the Declaration of Independence.

transition, 1775–1789

Adams also drew up the new Massachusetts state constitution (ratified 1780), the first ever adopted by

a specially elected convention and ratified by the people. The constitution was a conservative document. The governor, who was given limited power to veto and appoint, was stronger than governors in other states. The property qualification for voting was retained and was not removed until 1821. African Americans, however, were allowed to vote, and slavery was abolished. The constitution failed to end the establishment of religion, but it protected the rights of all denominations. The document was a setback for the interior because it established a powerful central government that would overshadow the towns and gave the large coastal towns proportionately more representation in the lower house than the small interior towns.

Another setback for the interior came in 1786–1787 when the governor used the power of the state to suppress Shays's Rebellion, a farm movement in central Massachusetts demanding relief from foreclosures and high taxes. The rebellion was a fruitless attempt to maintain the republican ideal of a moral economy regulated by the towns. The failure of the rebels reflected the steady gains of liberal ideas.

A year later, when a Massachusetts convention met to consider the United States Constitution, a majority of the delegates were opposed to ratification, especially many from the interior who resisted the idea of a strong national government. But again the seacoast had its way, and, despite a better than twoto-one vote against it by the delegates from the inland counties, the Constitution was ratified by a tiny majority.

in the united states, 1789–1829

For the next twenty-five years, the Federalists, who had supported the Constitution, dominated Massachusetts politics. They controlled the major seacoast counties of Essex and Suffolk as well as Hampshire County in the Connecticut River Valley and represented the powerful Congregational, maritime, and financial interests of the state. Their opponents, the Republicans, won the support of religious dissenters and the counties west and south of Boston. After 1800 some of the Massachusetts Federalists became so frustrated with national Republican policies that they started a sectional resistance. In 1803–1804 Essex County Federalists tried unsuccessfully to form a Northern Confederacy to secede from the Union. Later the Federalists opposed the War of 1812 and called the Hartford Convention (1814–1815), which, again unsuccessfully, proposed states' rights amendments to the Constitution.

In the 1820s the Federalists merged with centrist Republicans to form a state party, led by John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams. Partisan Republicans reorganized under the banner of Andrew Jackson. In the presidential election of 1828, in which the Adams party carried Massachusetts but Jackson won the presidency, Massachusetts was again out of step in national politics.

But not in the economy. The movement of people into western Massachusetts and the spread of a market economy brought changes that blurred the distinction between seacoast and interior. Labor and investment capital were now available in the west as well as the east. New turnpikes had been built connecting Boston with Albany and New York City. Canals were dug between the Merrimack River and Boston and between the inland town of Worcester and Narragansett Bay.

The changing face of the interior was one of the elements in the rise of cotton manufacturing. Between 1790 and 1812 entrepreneurs built scores of tiny cotton mills between Worcester and Rhode Island. But large-scale manufacturing did not begin until trade restrictions prompted seacoast merchants to look for new forms of investment. In 1813 Francis Cabot Lowell and Patrick Tracy Jackson of Boston raised the enormous sum of $400,000 and organized the Boston Manufacturing Company. Within a year they had set up a factory in Waltham, near Boston, where for the first time in America the entire process of manufacturing cotton textiles took place under one roof.

Eight years later Jackson and others founded a new town on the Merrimack River, named Lowell, which would devote itself solely to textile manufacturing, with young farm women running most of the machines. By 1834 six companies were operating nineteen cotton mills at Lowell, and Massachusetts had become the leading cotton manufacturing state in the Union.

Meanwhile the spread of Methodist and Baptist churches and the rise of Unitarianism had accelerated the decline of the Congregational Church. The struggle with Unitarianism came to a head in 1805–1806 when Harvard College, where Congregational ministers were traditionally educated, selected Unitarians as Hollis Professor of Divinity and president of the college. In Boston church after church went over to Unitarianism, and the orthodox Congregationalists were forced to found a seminary at Andover in Essex County. The official end of Congregational dominance came in 1833, when a constitutional amendment did away with an established religion.

The overturning of the Congregational churches took place during the rise of a new Boston under the leadership of the architect Charles Bulfinch, who served as chairman of the selectmen between 1799 and 1817. Bulfinch left an indelible mark with his Massachusetts State House (1800), his graceful street patterns, and his plans for filling in coves to increase the available land mass. Boston grew from a town of eighteen thousand in 1790 to a city of sixty thousand in 1830.

In less than a century Massachusetts had made the transition from an agrarian, maritime British colony culturally divided between seacoast and interior to an American state in which all sections were becoming increasingly involved in manufacturing.

See alsoAbolition of Slavery in the North; Adams, John; Adams, John Quincy; African Americans: Free Blacks in the North; Architecture: Public; Boston; Boston Massacre; Boston Tea Party; Bunker Hill, Battle of; City Growth and Development; Congregationalists; Constitutional Convention; Constitutionalism: State Constitution Making; Cotton; Election of 1828; Federalist Party; Federalists; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Hartford Convention; Lexington and Concord, Battle of; Loyalists; Manufacturing; New England; Revivals and Revivalism; Revolution as Civil War: Patriot-Loyalist Conflict; Shays's Rebellion; Shipping Industry; Stamp Act and Stamp Act Congress; Tea Act; Unitarianism and Universalism .

bibliography

Brooke, John L. The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Brown, Richard D. Massachusetts: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1978.

Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Dalzell, Robert F. Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987; New York: Norton, 1993.

Formisano, Ronald P. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Handlin, Oscar, and Mary Flug Handlin. Commonwealth—A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.

Rothenberg, Winifred Barr. From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Donald B. Cole