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Easy Money: How New England Puritans Invented Our Currency

Easy money is perhaps New England’s least famous contribution to humanity. Around the world, currency is still mostly in the form of legal tender paper money. It’s a special type of paper money. Unlike numerous types of paper money in history, it is not convertible to gold upon demand. Nor is its quantity “backed” or restricted in any way by its issuer’s gold stock. In general, it is not forced on sellers in private spot transactions. It is just a pure legal tender money.

This means that creditors cannot reject payments of obligations in that object. Most critically, these creditors include the tax authority, and no other object has this status. Every taxpayer must obtain legal tender money in order to pay taxes. This legal status distinguishes the dollar from bitcoin, both of which have no intrinsic value and no relation to gold. It is a major reason why bitcoin hasn’t and probably couldn’t replace the dollar. And it is a major reason why governments can inflate their money at will. Taxpayers still have to obtain it, typically by selling goods and services for it. For the government, it is easy money.

This device, of flimsy appearance but enormous power, was invented in the colony of Massachusetts Bay in the period 1690-1692. From there it spread to other colonies. Because of the Revolutionary War, the idea spread to Europe. Monetary history would never be the same. No country ever again manipulated the content of its gold coins, as they had for two millennia, in order to finance a war. The printing press took over war finance.

Why Massachusetts Puritans?

Why and how did the Massachusetts Puritans invent this new type of money? They numbered 50,000 people at the edge of Western civilization, far less numerous and far less sophisticated than the great financial centers of Amsterdam and London. The first step to answering this question is to recognize that the innovative legal tender paper money was not born in a normal economy. Its invention did not simply replace precious metal coins. The items eligible for use as tax payments in 1690 Massachusetts, just before the invention of legal tender paper money, didn’t just include coins. They also included wheat, barley, barley malt, rye, maize, peas, oats, beef and pork.

It was a very odd monetary economy that saw its roots in the beginning of the English colonization of America. Let’s then take a journey further back in time – and space – all the way to Pocahontas.

An 1850s painting of John Rolfe and Pocahontas

Pocahontas’ husband, John Rolfe, started tobacco planting in Jamestown in the 1610s. Quickly everyone who could became a tobacco planter. The planters desperately needed European goods and food. And so when European ships came for their tobacco the planters exchanged all their tobacco – but also most of their coins – for European products. As a result, very few coins remained for domestic circulation. Tobacco quickly emerged as the alternative to coins. By 1624, even the colony’s budget was expressed in pounds of tobacco.

A Pattern of Easy Money

The pattern repeated itself in all the non-Iberian colonies: maize in Plymouth, sugar in Barbados, boards in Maine, beaver furs in Canada and whalebones in Long Island. Each colony adopted its main product as money. As a matter of course, in 1630 the young colony of Massachusetts Bay adopted three official currencies: English silver coins, grains and beaver furs.

But Massachusetts soon became different because its people were different. Relatively affluent, highly educated and commercially oriented, the Massachusetts Puritans were not content with using commodities as money. They also had the means and the expertise to try something better. An unusual period of experimentation began. In 1635, lead bullets were adopted as small change. Bullets served in their traditional role in the 1637 Pequot War, which gave Massachusetts access to Long Island shores. That was the production center of wampum – the seashell jewelry/money of Native Americans. So in 1637, Massachusetts made wampum legal tender for small debts.

Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton

In 1639, the colony legalized bullion brought by privateers for tax payments. In 1642, Massachusetts was the first colony to recognize foreign (Spanish and Dutch) coins and to encourage their imports. The abolition of monarchy in England annulled the royal minting prerogative, leading Massachusetts to be the only colony to open a mint (in 1652).

Charles II

But royalty returned in 1660, and in the late 1670s King Charles II pressed Massachusetts on the issue of the independent mint, which was seen as nothing short of treason. It was shut down in 1682. At the same time, a private bank started operations in Boston. It issued banknotes awkwardly backed by land titles rather than coins. The bank ceased operations shortly thereafter, perhaps because England threatened to abolish all land titles in Massachusetts.

Charles II

In 1684, the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was annulled in England, and in 1686 a new regime was imposed by the new king, James II. This Dominion of New England was a pure dictatorship, unlike the colony’s General Court, which was a democracy among male church members. Another attempt at a land bank was made, but it was aborted as soon as the English dictator, Sir Edmund Andros, invalidated all land titles.

With local coins gone and bank projects in ruin, in 1688 Massachusetts was not much better, in terms of its existing currency, than when it was founded in 1630. Some English coins and grains still facilitated daily transactions within the colony. But the monetary laboratory that operated there during these six decades was not entirely in vain. It was powered by English America’s largest merchants, concentrated in Boston, and by graduates of English America’s only college (Harvard). As a merchant republic, Massachusetts was similar to previous hubs of financial innovation – Venice and Amsterdam. The shocks of both the new environment and England’s constitutional upheavals caused Massachusetts to replicate humanity’s monetary history in 60 years: seashell jewelry, grains, uncoined precious metal, coins and banknotes.

Glorious Revolution

Then came the Glorious Revolution in England. It soon inspired a revolution in Boston, which dismantled the Dominion and restored the charter government de facto. The Glorious Revolution also dragged the English colonies into their first war with French Canada. The revolutionary Massachusetts government lobbied the monarchs William and Mary to restore their charter at the same time that they launched expensive attacks on distant Canada. In the fall of 1690, these two tasks collided on the beaches below Quebec City. Massachusetts tried to occupy the French colony, counting on God to provide a Puritan victory over Catholics. The expected plunder was supposed to pay the soldiers. But it was not to be. The soldiers returned defeated in November, ravaged by smallpox, frozen and hungry, and demanded pay for their horrible three-month journey.

The batteries of Quebec bombard the New England fleet

The government promptly increased taxes enormously, but it would have taken too much time to collect them (in coin, grains, and other goods). The soldiers were “mutinous,” reported Boston pastor Cotton Mather. Mather and the elite knew that the very same place they tried to occupy (Quebec) was in the habit of issuing paper money (manually, from playing cards!). The Canadian money was in the Old World style: It was forced on all sellers under penalty and the government committed to exchange it for incoming French silver coins. As the intellectual capital of English America, Massachusetts had printing presses and thus had the technical ability to easily pull off a paper money issue. The problem was a constitutional one: William and Mary, considering restoration of the colony’s charter, would not have been happy seeing Massachusetts once again violating the royal monopoly on money creation. What to do?

A Solution

The government, experienced in monetary innovation, figured out a solution: There will not be “paper money” but only “bills.” No private party will be forced to accept them – no sellers in the markets, not even the soldiers. The soldiers will be informed that they can receive the “bills” if they want, instead of waiting for tax proceeds to be collected, and taxpayers will be informed that they can discharge their enormous tax obligations with these “bills.” That is, only tax collectors will be forced to accept the bills.

In modern parlance, the bills were only legal tender for taxes. Officially, it was not money at all, and thus England should not care. I call it “easy money” because it was money that was easy to issue – no need for precious metal and a mint – and it was made in a dishonest way to fool England.

Easy Money

The bills were enacted into law on December 24, 1690. Printing soon began. The issue of the bills was handed to a committee of five bay merchants,. They included Elisha Hutchinson, grandson of the religious dissident, Anne, and grandfather of the governor and historian, Thomas; Treasurer John Phillips, Mather’s father-in-law; and Adam Winthrop – the first Harvard graduate of that famous name.

In January 1691, the bills were given to soldiers but the public was reluctant to accept the bills. Members of the elite rushed to save the new experiment. Among them were Cotton Mather, who wrote a fiery pamphlet, and the rich Sir William Phips (leader of the Quebec expedition). Phips reputedly exchanged some of his own coins for bills to establish their credit. It worked.

William Phips

England, as planned, did not care about this experiment. In October 1691, William and Mary granted a new charter to the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Upon the charter’s arrival in 1692, the new government understood that it no longer had to fear England’s reaction regarding its money-issuing activities. In the summer it decided that the “bills of credit” (as they came to be known) will be legal tender not only for taxes but for any monetary obligation. In this step, the bills became identical in legal status to England’s silver coins. However, since they were not made of precious metal, they were identical to our modern currency. Ironically, this time of brilliant innovation was also the summer of Salem witch trials.

The Expedient of Easy Money

Mather later summarized his people’s ingenuity.

“In this extremity they presently found out an expedient, which may serve as an example, for any people in other parts of the world, whose distresses may call for a sudden supply of money to carry them through any important expedition.”

Mather, the mad genius of Boston, was right. Founder John Winthrop did not think of paper money when he said in 1630: “We shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” But in the context of money that was what eventually happened.

Cotton Mather

Of course, silver and later gold made a comeback, again and again, to prevent inflation, only to be discarded during wars. Gold coins disappeared from American shops and homes in the Great Depression. Gold remained behind the scenes until 1971, loosely “backing” an ever-increasing amount of paper dollars. Only foreign central banks had the legal right to convert the dollars they held into U.S. gold. But the system came under pressure of increasing government expenditures: The Vietnam War, President Johnson’s War on Poverty and the war on gravity (the Space Program) cost so much money that the dollar’s relation to gold lost its credibility. In 1971 President Richard Nixon “suspended” the convertibility promise, and in fact, took the entire world off gold.

Massachusetts Money

Since then, our currency is Massachusetts currency. If and when it a digital version replaces it, its legal status will remain the same. Even if it disappears from shops in favor of electronic payments of various sorts, it still forms the foundation of the monetary and financial systems. These systems consist mostly of promises to pay “dollars” – the paper money and token coins issued by the federal government.

And it all started in a futile attempt of New Englanders to occupy Quebec.

Dror Goldberg is the author of Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2023.

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When the Puritans Banned Mincemeat Pie

On May 11, 1659, the Massachusetts Puritans banned Christmas and ordered anyone caught celebrating to pay a fine of five shillings. That meant no mincemeat pie during what used to be the Yuletide season.

Of all the ways to celebrate Christmas, mincemeat pie held a special place. Myth and superstition had grown up around the holiday treat, and the Puritans would have none of it. They called the mincemeat pie “idolatrie in a crust.”

Plate of freshly baked festive Christmas mince pies

Mincemeat pie also carried political overtones in a time of deep partisan animosity. Eating mincemeat pie during the holidays showed you sided with the monarchy rather than the Puritan recusants. For a time, the mincemeat pie had the same effect on a Puritan that a MAGA hat had on an NPR devotee.

So how did mincemeat pie become so controversial?

The Pagan Roots of Mincemeat Pie

The Puritans, for starters, hated Christmas. Back in the 17^th century the holiday bore little resemblance to the cozy family celebration of modern times. It was more an echo of Saturnalia, when Romans indulged in unrestrained revelry, boozing, gambling and letting their libidos go. They also made sweet meat pies an essential part of Saturnalia.

At Christmastime in England, young men continued the Saturnalia tradition. They roamed the streets, barged into homes and demanded booze, money and figgy pudding. They did it, too, in colonial New England towns.

Increase Mather abandoned New England, for a while

In Boston, Increase Mather denounced Christmas celebrants as “consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth.”

Mincemeat Pie: The Myth and the Lore

Mincemeat is a Middle Eastern method of cooking meat with fruit and spices. The Crusaders may have brought it back from their crusades. At least they brought back the spices.

Crusaders besiege Damascus

Medieval English cooks made mincemeat with meat, any kind of meat: mutton, goose, beef tongue, even lamb testicles. They added suet, apples, citrus and spices. Later, the pies grew sweeter because the the West Indies sugar plantations made sugar cheap and available.

The sugar used in mincemeat had the advantage of preserving the meat. The fruit and spices may also have disguised meat that had gotten a little too old. Because the meat was shredded or minced, the pie was called “mince” or “shred.”

Myth and superstition then grew up around it.

Three spices in the pie – nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon — were said to represent the gifts brought by the three Magi to the Christ Child. Cooks also made the pies with 13 ingredients, to represent Christ and his apostles.

Eventually they began putting a pastry star on top of the mincemeat pies to indicate the Star of Bethlehem followed by the Magi.

Sometimes the pies were as small as tarts, and they came in many shapes. One recipe said they should be oblong, in imitation of the manger that held the baby Jesus. That’s why they’re sometimes called “Crib cakes.” Eventually cooks made the smaller pies in all kinds of shapes.

Stir-up Sunday

Mincemeat pie was such a Christmas favorite that people called it Christmas Pie. Every family made one, “a most learned mixture of neat’s tongues, chicken, eggs, sugar, raisins, &c.,” the 19^th century antiquarian John Timbs observed.

Family cooks often made mincemeat pie on stir-up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent. They believed they should only stir it clockwise, because stirring it the other way would bring bad luck.

Adoration of the Magi

For good luck, each member of the family stirred the mixture while making a wish. Another superstition held that a mincemeat pie should be eaten every day during the Twelve Days of Christmas for health and happines in the new year.

A variation on the mincemeat pie could be found in Coventry, noted Timbs. Called God-cakes, they were triangular, an inch thick and filled with a kind of mincemeat. The people of Coventry ate them on New Year’s Day.

The poet Robert Herrick wrote that it was once the tradition to guard the Christmas pie – from thievery, not the Puritan authorities.

COME guard this night the Christmas-Pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks, don’t come nigh
To catch it

From him, who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear
To watch it.

Christmas Pie by William Henry Hunt

Oliver Cromwell Takes Over

When the Puritans overthrew King Charles in 1641, they did their best to discourage Christmas celebrations. They viewed it as pagan, popish, a time to pretend “the memory of Christ into an extreame forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnall and sensuall delights.”

In 1647, Parliament made the celebration of Christmas a punishable offence. They tried to force shopkeepers to stay open and banned special religious observances on Christmas, Easter and Whitsun (the seventh Sunday after Easter).

Olier-Cromwell

Town criers went through London shouting, “No Christmas! No Christmas!” Soldiers were ordered to patrol the streets and seize any items, like mincemeat pie, used to celebrate the holiday. One writer mocked the Puritan hatred of mincemeat with the lines, “Treason’s in a December pie, and death within the pot.”

George Thomason collected a ballad lamenting the disappearance of mincemeat, or shred, pie:

Likewise then did die,

Rost beef and shred pie.

Pro-Christmas riots broke out, but they didn’t bring back Christmas. Not until Charles II restored the monarchy in 1660 did Christmas Pie return to the English table.

The Massachusetts Puritans

Like their English counterparts, the Massachusetts Puritans had no truck with Christmas or Christmas Pie. Puritan leader Increase Mather denounced the holiday, saying people celebrated it not because of the birth date of Christ. They did it, he wrote, because the “Heathens Saturnalia was at the time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].” He was correct.

The Puritans did their best to stamp out Christmas through social pressure. However, some still observed “such festivals as were superstitously kept in outher countries, to the great dishonour of God and offence of others.”

Public notice declaring Christmas illegal in Boston in 1659.

So in 1659, the year before Christmas returned to England, the Massachusetts General Court banned the holiday.

The court ordered, “that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon such accounts as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings.”

Feasting, of course, meant mincemeat pie.

And, like their counterparts across the Atlantic, the Massachusetts Puritans had no qualms about seizing items used to celebrate Christmas.

The ban remained until 1681. Christmas didn’t become a legal holiday in Massachusetts until 1856, and children went to school on Christmas Day as late as 1870.

A salver with an arrangement of mincemeat pies, 1710

More About Mincemeat Pie

In 1796, Hartford cookbook writer Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, the first U.S. cookbook. She included a recipe for mincemeat pie:

Four pounds boiled beef, chopped fine, and salted, six pound of raw apple chopped also, one pound beef suet, one quart of Wine or rich sweet cyder, one ounce mace, and cinnamon, a nutmeg, two pounds raisins, bake in past No. 3, three fourths of an hour.

In rural Maine, people still make mincemeat during hunting season if they killed a deer or otherwise get access to venison.

However, in most places mince comes in a jar with a label – without meat.

Images: Mince pie By Beck – originally posted to Flickr as Mince Pies, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10381760. Plate of mincemeat pies By christmasstockimages.com – http://christmasstockimages.com/free/food-dining/slides/mince_pie_plate.htm, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97503821. Adoration of the Magi By Justus van Gent – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57669996. This story updated in 2022.

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Connecticut Battles Pennsylvania in the Pennamite Wars

The Pennamite Wars between Connecticut and Pennsylvania involved some of the worst brutality of the Revolutionary era. They also resulted in the name of a western state.

Settlers from both Pennsylvania and Connecticut claimed ownership of 23 miles along the Susquehanna River. Called the Wyoming Valley, it had lush, fertile plains that rarely disgorged a stone when plowed.

King Charles II had given the valley to Connecticut in 1662. Unfortunately, he also gave it to Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1768, a development company met in Hartford to divide up the Wyoming Valley into five towns, which they named Plymouth, Kingston, Hanover, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittston.

When the first Connecticut settlers arrived, they found Pennamites – Pennsylvanians – already there.

Fighting soon broke out. And then it broke out again and again for the next 30 years. The bloodiest fight – a massacre, really — in 1778 was later recast as a conflict of the American Revolution.

The Battle of Wyoming, however, had more to do with competition over land than revolution. Its brutality stoked such outrage that George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan on a scorched earth campaign to retaliate.

First Pennamite War

When 40 Connecticut Yankees arrived in the Wyoming Valley, they set about building two forts, Durkee and Forty, on one side of the Susquehanna River. The Pennamites built forts Wyoming and Ogden on the other side to stop the Yankee encroachment on their land.

The two sides skirmished for years, though accounts vary on the number of casualties and what actually counts as a Pennamite battle.

In 1763, someone murdered a respected Indian chief, Teedyuscung. His son blamed Connecticut and raided a Connecticut settlement, killing more than two dozen people.

But those first conflicts certainly did not claim anywhere near as many lives as the Battle of Wyoming.

Pennamite War forts along the Susquehanna.

Battle of Wyoming

During the American Revolution, the Connecticut militia in the Wyoming Valley got called up to serve in the Continental Army. The departure of hundreds of able-bodied men left the Connecticut settlements vulnerable.

A British officer named John Butler decided to exploit Pennamite resentment against the Connecticut settlers. He recruited loyalist Pennamites as well as Iroquois Indians (who obviously had their own grievances against settlers) to attack the Yankees. They massed outside of Forty Fort on July 3, 1778.

Another Butler, a Yankee leader with a first name of Zebulon, led some 300 men from the fort to attack the much larger force of about 500 British soldiers, Pennamite Loyalists and Indian warriors. He should have stayed inside the fort.

Accounts of the subsequent massacre probably exaggerated the atrocities committed against the Connecticut Yankees. But the British-led forces claimed to take 227 scalps. Later accounts put the casualties at between 150 and 340 lives.

Atrocities

In 1891, Milo M. Acker presented to the Canisteo Valley Historical Society a toned-down account of the Battle of Wyoming. He described how John Butler’s men attacked Zebulon Butler’s forces, who then panicked and ran.

“Men were transformed into demons, and while Indian marksman skillfully wounded the flying Yankees in the thigh bone, thus disabling them yet saving them for future Tories, both Tories and Indians clubbed and scalped them as they tried to conceal themselves near by or in the water,” he wrote.

One Yankee, a German immigrant named Henry Pencil, hid in the willows on the river’s edge. His brother John, who took the Pennamite side in the conflict, happened to discover him. Henry, already wounded by an arrow, struggled up the bank, crying he would serve John forever if he would spare him.

“’Mighty well,’ was the taunting reply, ‘but you are a damned rebel,’ and the Tory shot him dead,” wrote Acker. “Even the Indians were struck with horror at this deed.”

A captain named Bidlack was thrown on a fire and held down with pitchforks while he burned.

And an Indian queen named Esther forced as many as 18 men to kneel around a rock, wrote Acker. “This fiend in woman’s shape danced slowly around the ring and crushed out their brains in turn, to the rhyme of a monotonous and blood-curdling death chant,” he wrote.

The Pennamite side burned nearly every Yankee house and barn, reducing the Wyoming valley to a smoking ruin.

The Battle of Wyoming

Sullivan’s Expedition

The Indians later denied committing any ritual torture, but the massacre had enormous propaganda value. The Yankees successfully branded the battle as one of Loyalists vs. Patriots. (Ironically, King George III had upheld the Yankee claim in 1771.)

A Scottish poet named Thomas Campbell wrote a poem about the battle, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale. The poem was so popular that a western territory was named Wyoming after it, no doubt to the bewilderment of the Wyoming settlers.

The summer after the Pennamites massacred the Yankees, George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to retaliate. In 1779, Sullivan led Continental troops and Pennsylvania militia from Easton, Pa., to upstate New York. They methodically torched 40 Iroquois villages and an enormous amount of stored corn and crops.

Many Iroquois starved to death the following winter, and the tribe never fully recovered from the Sullivan expedition. But they continued to harass the Wyoming Valley settlers for years.

Final Years of Pennamite Wars

In 1782, the Continental Congress decreed that the Wyoming Valley belonged to the Pennamites and the Connecticut Yankees had no claim to the land. Unsurprisingly, more violence broke out as Pennamite forces cleared out the Yankee settlers. They nearly succeeded.

Only 2,000 Connecticut Yankees remained, mostly women and children scattered in the woods. They suffered starvation and cold, with only primitive huts of bark and thatch to shelter them from the coming winter. Their enemies possessed all their property — houses, farms and crops.

Armed men from Connecticut and Vermont rushed to the region to defend against the Pennamites. Then in 1787, the Pennsylvania Assembly granted the Connecticut settlers the right to their lands.

By 1799 the final Pennamite War died down, when the new federal government decreed the Yankee lands part of Pennsylvania and the Yankees were Pennsylvania citizens with full rights to their lands.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about how Cleveland belonged to Connecticut.

Map of Connecticut Land Claims: By User:Kmusser – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884; the Wyoming Massacre, painting by Alonzo Chappel. With thanks to Kathryn Shively Meier, The Landscape of Indian and White Violence in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1753-1800, in Blood in the Hills
A History of Violence in Appalachia, ed. by Bruce Stewart. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Great Puritan Periwig Controversy

Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall were close and lifelong friends. They moved in the same Boston social circles, shared companions, dined together and discussed politics. But on one important matter they parted company: the periwig.

Cotton Mather

Mather, the Puritan minister, wore a long, brown, curled periwig that emphasized his large nose. Sewall, the judge and printer, wore a black skullcap to hide his bald pate. Mather defended the periwig in a sermon, while Sewall denounced it whenever he got the chance.

The two Puritans weren’t alone. Across the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 17^th century, the controversy raged over the periwig, a new fashion from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Supporters called it a harmless fashion and accused the anti-periwig faction of hypocrisy.

The Periwig

During the English Civil Wars, the followers of the Stuart kings wore periwigs. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan supporters did not. When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his courtiers enthusiastically adopted the periwig.

Curly, shoulder-length hair had been fashionable among European men since the 1620s. The periwig mimicked that fashion with human hair, animal hair or even flax.

The first generation of Puritans who came to New England abhorred fashionable excess. In 1634, the Plymouth General Court banned such showy fashions as slashed sleeves, silver and gold lace, girdles and hatbands.

But the second generation of Puritans, to which Mather (born in 1663) belonged, began to embrace such degeneracy. Sewall, born a decade before Mather, couldn’t stand the sight of the periwig.

Samuel Sewall Rails

Sewall peppered his diary with disapproving observations of people who wore the periwig. In a eulogy for a schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, he ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

When Sewall learned Josiah Willard, the son of his minister, had taken to wearing a periwig, he marched over to the young man’s house and lectured him. Willard complained his hair was too straight, but he agreed to leave off his wig when his hair grew out. The gesture didn’t appease Sewall. He visited the sins of the son on the father and attended another church.

Sewall wasn’t alone. Massachusetts magistrates in 1649 had protested that long hair ‘after the manner of ruffians and barbarous Indians, hath begun to invade New England contrary to the rule of God’s word.’

In 1654, Thomas Hall wrote an essay called The Loathsomeness of Long Hair. He denounced elaborate hairstyles as ‘against the modest, civil, and commendable custom of our nation, til lately that we began to follow the French and Spaniards, who yet are known Papists and Idolaters.’

Another reason to detest the periwig: As a sign of wealth and status, it might allow poorer people to impersonate the gentry. “It removes a means of distinguishing one man from another,” wrote Nicholas Noyes, a minister who, like Sewall, presided over the Salem witch trials.

Such a toppling of the social hierarchy was profoundly disturbing to some Puritans.

Samuel Sewall, getting a little thin on top

The Pro-Periwig Faction

The Rev. Samuel Stoddard preached in favor of the periwig, arguing ‘God allowed man “by art to supply the defects of nature.”

Others said it kept their heads warm.

Cotton Mather himself delivered a sermon defending the wig. He defined hypocrisy as ‘to be zealous against an innocent fashion’ and yet to ignore ‘great immoralities.’

“I expected not to hear a vindication of periwigs in Boston Pulpit by Mr. Mather,” wrote Sewall.

Losing Battle

In 1679, however, the Massachusetts General Court passed a series of laws intended to turn the people back to the Lord ‘from whom we have departed with a great Backsliding.’

The lawmakers directed local grand juries to present men wearing long hair or periwigs to the court. They authorized the local magistrates to proceed against such delinquents either by ‘Admonition, Fine, or Correction, according to their good discretion.”

Times were changing, though, and as the colonies grew more prosperous and more cosmopolitan, the periwig didn’t go away.

Chief Ornament

And Samuel Sewall found himself on the defensive. In October 1720, one of Sewall’s colleagues on the Executive Council noted his balding head. He suggested Sewall get a wig. Sewall replied that his bald head was his ‘chief ornament.’

After Sewall’s first wife died, he tried, often without success, to woo a new one. One of his targets, Catherine Winthrop, told him he needed a wig. He declined the wig and she declined him.

The wearing of the periwig persisted until the last decades of the 18^th century. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of John Adams shows him in a periwig. But by the time his son became president in 1825, the periwig had finally disappeared.

This story was updated in 2022.

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James Mitchell Varnum Wins the Right to a Jury Trial for Rhode Island

James Mitchell Varnum fought against English rule in the American Revolution as one of George Washington’s generals. Then shortly after the war he fought for the rule of English law in a Rhode Island courtroom.

The case, one of the most famous in U.S. history, involved the right to refuse paper money and the right to a trial by jury. It set the precedent that the courts have a right to review and strike down laws deemed unconstitutional.

Charles Wilson Peale painting of James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum was a giant of a man, a competent, energetic self-promoter who liked to live large. He bought land behind the Kent County Courthouse in East Greenwich, R.I., and built a mansion on it. There he entertained a who’s who of the Revolutionary elite, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Comte de Rochambeau, John Sullivan and Nathanael Greene.

Born in Dracut, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1748, he began studying at Harvard, but transferred to Brown. By 22 he was married to Martha Child and a member of the bar. He entered the Army when the American Revolution broke out, fought in several engagements and advocated that freed African-American slaves be allowed to enlist. He ended his military service as a brigadier general, and the Rhode Island General Assembly appointed him to the U.S. Congress. Two years later he returned to his law practice.

In September of 1786, a Newport, R.I., cabinetmaker named John Trevett tried to buy a joint of meat from a butcher named John Weeden. Trevett offered paper money, but Weeden demanded hard cash: gold or silver. Trevett then sued.

Under a brand-new state law, Rhode Islanders had to accept paper money as legal currency or pay a fine of 100 pounds. Then the General Assembly passed a law that said anyone who broke the law would not be tried by jury. The reason? They thought no jury would convict someone for refusing to accept paper money, largely considered worthless.

Trevett decided to sue. John Weeden chose James Mitchell Varnum as his defense lawyer. He chose wisely.

The Varnum House Museum

Trial By Jury

James Mitchell Varnum argued, in essence, that depriving citizens of the right to a jury trial violated Rhode Island’s constitution.

But Rhode Island in 1786 did not have a constitution. In fact, Rhode Island didn’t have a constitution until 1842.

It had, instead, the royal charter of 1663 that Charles II had granted the colony. Under the charter the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta and other fundamental laws of England were granted to the people of Rhode Island. After receiving the royal charter, the General Assembly passed a law that guaranteed to freemen trial by jury.

Trevett v. Weeden

In arguing for John Weeden, James Mitchell Varnum made an argument novel for the time. The legislature is subordinate to the constitution, he said, and the courts have the power to decide if the laws it passes are constitutional.

In an eloquent courtroom plea, he asked why did the people endure, ‘a long, painful and bloody war, but to secure inviolate and to transmit unsullied for posterity, the inestimable privileges they received from their forefathers?’

The right to a jury trial was one of those privileges, he said. And power must be limited to protect the liberties of citizens.

The five justices of the Superior Court of Judicature dismissed the case – in essence, a victory for John Trevett and James Mitchell Varnum.

Seventeen years later, though, the case set a precedent for Marbury v. Madison. In that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts have the power to strike down laws.

Trevett vs. Weeden has since been called ‘one of the earliest and most renowned cases of judicial review.’

The Old Colony House in Newport, where Trevett v. Weeden was heard.

The Aftermath

The controversy didn’t end in that Rhode Island courthouse, however. The General Assembly, which at the time appointed the judges to the state’s high court, called them on the carpet. Lawmakers demanded the five judges appear before it to explain their decision, and then moved to dismiss them.

Judge David Howell appeared and argued for an independent judiciary. John Mitchell Varnum argued the judges were entitled to due process and that the legislature couldn’t just fire them.

The General Assembly’s motion to dismiss the judges failed, but lawmakers got their payback by refusing to reappoint four of them when their terms expired. They also exacted revenge on James Mitchell Varnum by ousting him from his seat in the U.S. Congress.

All this took place as delegates prepared to assemble for the first constitutional convention in the United States. James Mitchell Varnum, hoping to influence the outcome, wrote a pamphlet about Trevett v. Weeden and circulated it in Philadelphia.

One could argue the Trevett v. Weeden trial cost him his life. No longer a congressman, he received an appointment as a supreme judge of the Northwest Territories. In 1788, he made the long journey westward to Marietta, Ohio. But he caught tuberculosis and died on Jan. 9, 1789. He had just reached 40 years of age.

Today, the John Mitchell Varnum House is open to the public during the summer.

The state didn’t officially embrace Varnum’s concept of judicial review until 2004, when it was enshrined in the Rhode Island constitution as an amendment.

Images: James Mitchell Varnum House by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62728157; Old Colony House By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527502 This story was updated in 2021.

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Six Places That Appear on the Back of a Quarter

From 1999 through 2008, the 50 State Quarter program released commemorative quarters with unique designs for each state. Half of all Americans collected them at least casually, making it the most successful commemorative coin program ever.

The U.S. mint released five each year, one quarter every 10 weeks. They came out in the same order that the states ratified the Constitution. In New England, that order meant Connecticut went first, then Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine.

Rules governed the choice of design. No live person, no state flag and no head-and-shoulder image of a dead person.

Each New England state responded with an image that you can visit today.

Here, then, are the six New England places that appear on the backs of quarters.

Charter Oak Tree

Connecticut State Quarter

King Charles II in 1662 granted Connecticut a charter that allowed it to elect some of its own officials and make some of its own rules.

Charles’ successor, James II tried to combine the New England colonies with New York under a single Crown-appointed official, Edmund Andros. It didn’t go well.

The Charter Oak by Charles DeWolf Brownell, 1857

In 1687, Andros and 60 soldiers met with the leaders of the Connecticut Colony in Hartford and heatedly insisted they turn over the charter. The colonists just as heatedly refused to give him the document, which lay on a table before them.

According to legend, something — a gust of wind, perhaps — blew out the candles that lit the meetinghouse. In the confusion, the charter disappeared. Someone hid it in the hollow of a large white oak tree, where the king’s men couldn’t find it.

The oak, of course, became the revered Charter Oak and a symbol of American independence. Already more than 300 years old in 1687, the Charter Oak fell to a violent storm on Aug. 21, 1856.

The Dominion of New England fell well before that. Andros dissolved the colonial governments, including Connecticut’s even without the charter. Two years later in 1689 Massachusetts colonists sent Andros packing. James II lost power, the charter came out of hiding and the colonies reverted to their previous form of government.

The Charter Oak still exists – as chairs in the Old Connecticut Statehouse and as artifacts currently on display at the Connecticut Historical Society.

On the corner of Charter Oak Avenue and Charter Oak Place stands a column with a globe and a descendant of the original tree. There may be as many as 100 such trees, as people had collected acorns before it fell. The Simsbury Historical Society, for example, planted a descendant of the Charter Oak in 1976 to commemorate the nation’s bicentennial.

A portrait of the Charter Oak, framed in wood from the tree itself, hangs in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse

Maine State Quarter

Maine chose to honor its maritime heritage with an image of a windjammer sailing by Pemaquid Point Lighthouse on the back of its quarter.

President John Quincy Adams in 1827 commissioned Pemaquid Point Light in Bristol, Maine, about 60 miles north of Portland. The original lighthouse didn’t last long as builders mixed saltwater with the mortar mix. It had to be replaced in 1835, and the contract specified the use of fresh water in construction.

A storied lighthouse keeper, Marcus Hanna

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse

, once staffed the lighthouse. He was the only person to ever receive a Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil War and a Gold Lifesaving Medal for saving a life off Cape Elizabeth.

Today, the Bristol Parks and Recreation Department owns and operates the outbuildings surrounding the lighthouse as Pemaquid Point Lighthouse Park.

The vessel on the quarter is the Victory Chimes, a rare three-masted schooner. Moored in Rockland, Maine, the Victory Chimes sails up and down the coast on windjammer excursions.

Minute Man National Park

Massachusetts State Quarter

Massachusetts honors its historic role in the American Revolution by putting a famous statue of the Minute Man. The monument depicts a farmer who dropped his plow to fight at North Bridge in Concord, Mass., on April 19, 1775.

Today the statue stands guard at The Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, where 500 militiamen defeated three companies of British troops.

The Minute Man

In 1873 an unknown, 23-year-old college dropout was given the commission to create a monument to the Minute Man.

The 100^th anniversary of the shot heard ‘round the world was approaching, and the citizens of Concord wanted to honor the farmers and tradesmen who battled professional British soldiers.

They decided to award the commission to Daniel Chester French, who had never executed a full-size statue. They had their reasons: His father was well-connected in town, and he had taken art lessons from Louisa May Alcott’s little sister, who vouched for his talent. French, of course, went on to design many famous works, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Old Man of the Mountain

New Hampshire State Quarter

Alas, New Hampshire just can’t let go of the Old Man of the Mountain, though the mountain did. He tumbled to the ground on May 3, 2003, but his image still appears on license plates, state highway signs and the New Hampshire state quarter.

The Old Man of the Mountain, back in the day

Before the Old Man went to his forever home, he was a series of five granite ledges hanging 1,200 feet above the floor of Franconia Notch. He measured 40 feet high from forehead to chin, and over the years he was held together by chains and patched up with cement, plastic, steel rods and turnbuckles.

At least he was already on the quarter when the U.S. Mint released it on Aug. 7, 2000.

For nearly 200 years, the Old Man of the Mountain attracted tourists and served as a proud symbol of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire native Daniel Webster perhaps best expressed what the Old Man meant to the state:

[U]p in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.

Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge

Rhode Island State Quarter

Watery Rhode Island chose to put the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge, New England’s longest suspension bridge, on the back of its quarter. Since 1969 it has connected Newport with Jamestown. Today it costs 16 quarters to cross.

The Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge

On a clear day, you can see the bridge from Gay Head Light in Martha’s Vineyard, the top floors of Providence’s tallest buildings and the parking lot of Stone Hill Marketplace in Johnston, R.I., 23 miles away.

Claiborne Pell served 36 years in the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, and sponsored the bill to grant financial aid to college students in the form of Pell grants.

The quarter also depicts a vintage sailboat, as Rhode Island is nicknamed the sailing capital of the world. The nation’s smallest state, it has 400 miles of coastline and 100 beaches.

Camels Hump Mountain

Vermont State Quarter

Maple sugar is to Vermont as sailing is to Rhode Island. Well, maybe skiing is a more appropriate analogy, but Vermont went with maple sugaring on the back of its quarter.

The back of the quarter also features the Camels Hump Mountain in northern Vermont. It’s one of the tallest mountains in Vermont, and its distinctive profile makes it Vermont’s most recognized mountain.

Camels Hump, one of a dozen of Vermont’s National Natural Landmarks

The Camels Hump has had no less than a dozen names since Samuel de Champlain sailed down the lake that bears his name. De Champlain called it ‘Le Lion Couchant,’ meaning ‘the Resting Lion.’ Ira Allen called it the ‘Camel’s Rump.’ The Abenaki Indians called it ‘tahwahbodeay wadso.’

A forest preserve encloses the mountain, the summit of which philanthropist Joseph Battell donated to the state in 1905. By 1912, the Green Mountain Club built a trail between the mountain and Sterling Pond. Today the trail is a high point on the Long Trail system. The Green Mountain Club now pays a caretaker to make sure hikers respect the mountain’s fragile alpine tundra.

Images: Claiborne Pell Bridge By UpstateNYer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7548436; Pemaquid Point Lighthouse (featured image) By Tiger635 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31174599′ Pemaquid Point Lighthouse By WestportWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21041474

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