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Native-American Slavery in New England

Native-American slavery began almost as soon as English colonists arrived in Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The earliest records date to 1636. By the end of the 17th century, the colonists enslaved over 1,200 Native Americans or sold them as slaves to other colonies.

Prior to 1700, colonists enslaved most of the Native men, women and children after capturing them in war. The Pequot War from 1636-38 provided New England leaders the chance to increase trade in Native-American slaves. A powerful trading nation, the Pequot dominated southern New England in the decades before the English arrived. Though they did not expand beyond southeastern Connecticut, the other Native Nations felt the Pequot’s trading power. The arrival of the English made a volatile situation worse. Aligning themselves with the Narragansett, Niantics and Mohegans, colonists used the murder of two English traders as an excuse to ignite the conflict.

The Pequot War

According to historian Alfred A. Cave, “Puritan chroniclers freely admitted that their military offensive against the Pequot Indians was highly punitive, deliberately intended to inflict the maximum number of casualties.” During the yearlong conflict, the English killed over 700 of the approximately 4,000 Pequot and enslaved many more. The colonists and their allies killed many of the male captives. The women and children who could not escape were to “be disposed aboute in the townes” of New England, or sold into slavery in colonies as far away as the Caribbean and Nicaragua.

Trespassing

After the English destroyed the Pequot nation, their hegemony slowly grew in the area. Warfare and disease left Native-American villages throughout New England vacant. As the number of English colonists grew, they began moving into these ghost towns. That decreased the distances between English settlements and Native American villages. But as the English moved farther and farther inland, they brought their livestock with them.

English farmers routinely let their livestock roam free in the forests surrounding their burgeoning settlements. Often the animals found their way into the fields of Native American farmers and ate their crops. The Native Nations of New England complained to the colonial government, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. Fed up, many began killing any English livestock that wandered into their fields. Tensions rose and led to an inevitable war. Metacomet, known by the English as King Philip, leader of the Wampanoag, reportedly said that “for forty Yeares Time, Reports and jealosys of War had bin very frequent, that we did not thinking that now a War was breaking forth.” However, he wrote, “about a Week before it did, we had Cause to think it would.”

Metacomet, known as King Philip

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War lasted three years. Metacomet rallied a large Native-American alliance, consisting of several Native Nations of New England to fight. Ultimately, the English prevailed, further cementing their hegemony in the region. Recounting the war in 1685, a colonist by the name of Edward Randolph noted that “upward of 3000 Indian men women and children destroyed, who if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English, which makes all manner of labour dear.” During King Philip’s War, the English enslaved huge numbers of Native American captives, claiming it as their right in a “just war.” They often sold hundreds of Native American captives at large scale auctions. Others got assignments “to individuals as rewards for wartime service, and as a form of monetary restitution to war-battered English towns.”

A scene from King Phillip’s War, illustration from Indians of North America by George M. Bodge

King Philip’s War was a turning point in the history of New England. The colonists captured and killed almost 50 percent of the Native American populations. They lost 5 ,000 of 11,000 Indigenous souls in southern New England. The war also drastically changed the way Native American slavery operated.

Native-American Slavery Begins to Change

Prior to the 18th century, most Native-American slaves were war captives or refugees. The English called it something different; they “sold and devoted unto servitude “By the second half of the 17th century, Native-American slavery began to look much different.

The English felt confident in their dominance of the region and tried to assert sovereignty over all the Native Nations. They felt it right to consider the Native Americans of New England subject to English colonial law. Native Americans did not agree. Nevertheless, the colonists consistently set out to punish Native Americans who broke English law. These offenses ranged from “killing Cattle and Shepe,” stealing a handkerchief and “Eatting of mottin that was stolen.” When English judges found Native Americans guilty of breaking English law, they sentenced them to indentured servitude. Once indentured, they could be bought and sold throughout New England and beyond. And, if they tried to escape and failed, colonial officials would tack years onto their sentences. That effectively tied them to lifelong slavery. Thus, the colonists found ways to keep Native-American slavery alive even when the numbers of POWs declined.

Going to Court

Native Americans did not take this lying down. Since before King Philip’s War, Native Americans tried to use the English court system to retain sovereignty and resist English incursion. In 1700, leaders of the Mashpee petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to free several Mashpee thrown into debtors’ prison.

In the petition, Simon Popmoney, George Wapock and the other leaders claimed the English frequently made them and their children servants for too long. They pleaded “Ignorance of the Law, weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration.”

“[S]ome of us that are Elder, & severall of our Children have run in to the English mens Debts, and not being able, nor perhaps careful to pay att the time appointed; our Self & our poor Children, are frequently made Servants for an unreasonable time.”

In this letter we see a rather brilliant strategy unfolding. By using such subordinate language, the Mashpee leaders attempted to use the English colonists’ own notions of superiority against them. By claiming fault through “Ignorance…weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration” they told the English what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, they defended their sovereignty by asserting the unfairness of long stretches of servitude. Unfortunately, the results of such cases depended upon the presiding judge, who often had Native American slaves himself.

The Long Life of Native-American Slavery

Perhaps as a response to the widespread abuse of indentured servitude after King Philip’s War, colonies created laws governing the status of Native Americans. In the early 18th century, Massachusetts passed a law rating Native American, as well as African, slaves with “horses and Hogs.” While in the past, the English bought and sold Native American slaves while they had term left on their indenture, but they still viewed them as people — unequal to Europeans, but people nonetheless. Now, English eyes viewed Native Americans as property.

Rhode Island attempted to ban the practice. But, in the end, the ban had little to no effect. It allowed indentures of children for up to 30 years. In colonial New England, that amounted to a life sentence.

Ultimately, the practice of Native-American slavery persisted up to the Revolution, if not beyond. In 1744, a physician from Annapolis visited a southern Connecticut town with an African slave. [T]he children were frightened att my negroe, for here negroe slaves are not so much in use,” he wrote. “Their servants being chiefly bound or indentured Indians.”

Thirty years later, the Rhode Island census of 1774 showed over 35 percent of Native Americans in the colony lived with white families.

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.. This story was updated in 2022.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19^th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21^st century.

East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles. Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself. And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621, to M^r David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (excep^tBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…
The Old State House in Boston
Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of y^eplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

(Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before y^eTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.
Woodcut of New Haven, 1786
Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but y^eHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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How the Codfish Started the American Revolution

The American Revolution was to some extent a fight over the big, stupid, slow-moving codfish.

Codfish were by far colonial New England’s biggest export. The codfish was so important to New England that John Adams made sure the British allowed U.S. fishermen access to the Grand Banks and other banks off Newfoundland as part of the Treaty of Paris.

Adams believed the fledgling country needed a thriving fishery in order to have trained mariners who could serve in the navy. The U.S. Congress agreed with him, and in 1792 decided to pay fishermen a bounty for catching codfish.

The codfish had special importance to Massachusetts, where to this day the wooden Sacred Cod hangs above the chambers of the commonwealth’s House of Representatives.

The Sacred Codfish

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all the money New England made overseas. Livestock came in a poor second, at 20 percent.

When the American Revolution broke out, 10,000 New Englanders worked as fishermen, or eight percent of the adult male working population.

In Massachusetts, Marblehead and Gloucester ranked as the top fishing ports, with Salem, Beverly, Cape Cod, Ipswich and Plymouth heavily engaged in fishing.

The fisheries had a multiplier effect, generating income for people engaged in overseas trade, timbering, shipbuilding, ship rigging, sail making and other waterfront industries.

But powerful British plantation owners and fish merchants viewed the colonial fishing fleets as a threat to their own business. In 1733, they began to pressure Parliament to crack down on their colonial competitors. Their increasing success inhibited the New England economy and fomented much of the anger that led to revolution.

Dried Codfish

In the early 17^th century, New England fishermen didn’t venture far from home. They fished in small boats near the shore.

But later in the 1600s they began to fish offshore in two-masted schooners with crews of seven or eight men. The skipper recruited the crews, chose where to fish, navigated and counted the fish. Sharesmen handlined for cod and processed the catch. The cuttails – inexperienced boys and young men – cut bait, baited the hooks and processed the catch.

Fishing schooner L. A. Dunton at Mystic Seaport.

By the time they reached 30, most fishermen retired from the trade or died from drowning, fishing accidents or fever caught in the West Indies. It was a physically demanding job in a profane work environment.

Nor was it always pleasant, as the fishermen cut up and salted the fish on board ship.

But as historian Christopher Paul Magra pointed out, “the nature of work in the commercial cod fishing industry uniquely prepared fishermen and fish merchants to play leading roles in securing American independence.”

The French

In the 18^th century the market expanded for dried codfish, which contained 80 percent protein. New England fish merchants began to ship dried codfish to the Catholic countries of Europe, where the Pope was declaring more and more meatless feast days. Dried codfish also fed the burgeoning slave populations on West Indian sugar plantations.

By the middle of the 18^th century, New Englanders shipped most of their dried codfish to the West Indies and exchanged it for sugar, molasses and rum. They found the French island plantations sold sugar cheaper, and the French slave populations grew faster, than the British. Plus, the New England fish merchants had so much fish to sell they couldn’t unload it all on British customers.

Slaves planting sugar cane in Antigua.

So the New Englanders began to trade with the French. But the powerful British plantation owners did not appreciate the British colonists buying from their French competitors. So they persuaded Parliament in 1733 to pass the Molasses Act. It imposed duties on imported – that is, French – sugar, molasses and rum. Parliament reenacted the law every five years, but rarely made sure it was enforced.

Parliament

By 1764, the British planters convinced Parliament to pass the Sugar Act, which put a tariff on sugar and banned the import of non-British rum.

Parliament did something else to harm New England fishing interests: It banned trade with the French in North America. British fish merchants in the West Country did not like the colonists trading with fishermen in Newfoundland – they wanted to do it themselves.

Edmund Burke

This time, Parliament ordered the Royal Navy to enforce the Sugar Act. British ships from Halifax began to seize New England’s fishing vessels. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman, condemned the Sugar Act. He described it as corrupt heads of state creating a monopoly to generate revenue and to use the military to enforce that monopoly.

The Sugar Act

The Sugar Act meant most of the dried fish processed in New England could not be sold. New Englanders retaliated by boycotting British goods. At the same time, fishing vessels lay idle in Massachusetts harbors and fishermen looked for work.

As tensions mounted between Britain and the colonies, some members of Parliament proposed a moratorium on the New England fishing industry. On March 30, 1775 – less than two weeks before the shot heard round the world – Parliament passed a law that limited New England’s trade to Britain and the British West Indies. It also banned New England ships from the fisheries off Canada. Under the law, ships couldn’t even carry fishing tackle unless granted special permission.

Revolution

Unsurprisingly, New England’s cod fishermen played a disproportionate role in combating the British. Their role in the war led leaders like Adams to argue the fisheries served as nurseries for fighting men.

They helped lay siege to British forces at Boston, and they converted their fishing vessels into warships. The fishing fleets turned into privateers or became part of state navies, the Continental Navy or the coast guard.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

Fish merchants like Marblehead’s Elbridge Gerry and Jeremiah Lee used their commercial contacts in Spain and the West Indies to buy military supplies for the patriots.

And a former fish merchant played a key role in one of the most famous actions of the American Revolution. John Glover and his men ferried George Washington and the Continental Army over the Delaware River on Christmas Eve, 1776.

With thanks to The New England Cod Fishing Industry and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution by Christopher Paul Magra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: L.A. Dunton By Ad Meskens – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20754268.

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Seven Fun Facts About New England Taxes

There isn’t much that’s fun about taxes, but we thought we’d try to find something. So we found seven fun — well, maybe just fun-ish — fact about taxes.

We do think it’s at least interesting that Rhode Islanders didn’t have to pay taxes for 40 years. And it’s fun to find out what kind of a job Sam Adams did as tax collector, or what Mainers did when the federal government actually returned money to them.

Here, then, are seven fun facts about taxes.

1. When Printing Money Meant No Taxes

Rhode Island enjoyed a 40-year holiday from taxes starting in 1710 when the General Assembly cranked out money on the printing press.

Here’s how it worked: The colony had a number of land banks, which loaned paper money for mortgages on land. The loans generated interest, which the colony’s government used to pay for its operations.

The value of the paper money often declined, which made it easier for landholders to repay their debts. Rhode Island’s supply of paper money also gave the colonists a medium of exchange. The arrangement made practically everyone happy – except for merchants in London, who had to accept the colonists’ depreciated money to pay off their debts.

When the merchants weren’t happy, Parliament wasn’t happy. In 1751, Parliament passed the Currency Act, making it illegal for Rhode Island’s General Assembly to issue any more bills of credit not backed by taxes. By the middle of 1754, Rhode Island neared insolvency, and Rhode Island towns began collecting taxes.

2. Sam Adams, Tax Collector?

Sam Adams had a job as tax collector, and he was lousy at it. Adams had inherited his father’s malt business, but it failed. In 1756 he ran for and won the post of Boston’s tax collector to support his family. But Bostonians didn’t really want to pay their taxes, and Sam Adams didn’t really want to collect them.

Sam Adams

Then a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1764, forcing many people in Boston to close their businesses. Sam Adams was inclined to overlook tax payments from people who suffered financial reverses. His laxity made him popular among Boston’s working class, but caused him trouble. As tax collector, he was liable for uncollected taxes.

By 1765, Sam Adams owed £8,000, and Boston came close to bankruptcy. Adams sued people for nonpayment of taxes, but still came up short. His friends ended up paying most of the deficit, and Boston Town Meeting made up the rest.

3. ‘Less Real and more Ideal’

In order to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, Massachusetts raised taxes to a level four times that before the war. The people of Greenwich, Mass., complained, “Our Grievances Were Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.“

Greenwich, Mass.

Greenwich would actually have more to complain about in 1938, when the commonwealth flooded it for the Quabbin Reservoir.

4. High Hopes for a Tax Refund

In a once exciting but now forgotten episode in U.S. tax history, the federal government ran a surplus of about $30 million in 1836. Revolutionary War debt had been paid off by the sale of public lands in 1836. What to do with the money generated fierce arguments, of course, but in the end Congress decided to give most of the money back to the states. Each state could do with it what it wanted.

As state lawmakers debated about what to do with their share, ‘high hopes were awakened in all children who were out of pocket-money.

Maine, a state for only 17 years, decided to give the money back to the taxpayers. Every resident – including children — received about $2 from the state of Maine. A Deer Isle farmer’s wife named Salome Sellers decided to buy a pair of candlesticks with her money. She lived to be 108 years old, and was the last person born in the 18th century to die in the 19th. Her house is now a museum and displays the candlesticks.

Salome Sellers and one of her candlesticks

5. A Literary Solution to Taxes

New Hampshire in 1821 tried to raise money for a public university by taxing the capital stock of banks. Seven years later the state abandoned the plan as the tax didn’t raise nearly enough money.

Instead, New Hampshire established the Literary Fund, which it divided every year among the towns. The money was to be spent for the
“support and maintenance of common free schools or other purposes of education.” The Town of Peterborough decided to spend it on a municipal library.

Taxes on banks helped pay for Peterborough’s library.

6. Vermont Declares War To Raise Taxes

Vermont declared war on Germany three months before the United States did so it could give its GIs a raise. In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Enlisted men earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s lawmakers voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees and enlisted men.

Montpelier

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters. Vermont’s lawmakers used that as an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany – and give a bonus to Vermonters in the military.

7. Connecticut’s 42-Day Income Tax

Connecticut had an income tax for 42 days, and then it didn’t. In 1971, the state had accumulated a debt of a quarter of a billion dollars. Lawmakers struggled with how to get back into the black. Since Connecticut had the highest per-capita income in the country, the General Assembly decided on an income tax – in a late-night budget session at the end of June. The income tax was to take effect in October.

Connecticut State Capitol

The public reacted fast and furiously, though. So a special session of the General Assembly repealed the income tax on Aug. 12, 42 days after passing it. Instead, they increased sales taxes and raised tuition at the University of Connecticut.

Twenty years later, the General Assembly approved another income tax, which survives to this day.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of state capitol: By jglazer75 – Connecticut State Capitol, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2574147

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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/church-going-animal-ufpc.jpg

Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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Higley Copper Coins: Connecticut’s Rare, Exciting and Historic Penny

According to the legend of the Higley copper, a Connecticut doctor with a powerful thirst and a copper mine minted the colony’s first copper coins.

Dr. Samuel Higley frequently patronized the local tavern, where a drink cost threepence. So Dr. Higley, who happened to own a copper mine, struck his own three-penny coins. One version of them bore the words, “VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE.”

The story may be apocryphal, but Dr. Higley did exist. He and his family mined copper, which grew into a major Connecticut industry. And coin collectors believe the homemade Higley copper circulated fairly wildly.

In 2014, a coin collector bought a Higley copper for a half-million dollars.

19th-century drawing of a Higley copper

The Higley Copper

Dr. Samuel Higley, born around 1687 in Simsbury, Conn., attended Yale College for two years and trained as a doctor. He also learned blacksmithing and picked up metallurgical and mining skills. Before his marriage to Abigail Bement in 1719 he taught school.

He is credited with making the first steel in the U.S. colonies. In 1728, he told the Connecticut General Court he had ‘with great pains and cost’ discovered a ‘curious art’ by which he could transmute iron into good steel. Two blacksmiths testified that Higley had come into their shop, asked for a pound or two of iron and said he’d make it into steel. Several days later he brought it back, and the blacksmiths found it ‘good steel,’ the first they’d ever seen.

So the Connecticut General Court gave Higley a 10-year monopoly on steelmaking.

That same year he bought a tract of 143 acres in what is now East Granby and began mining the land. People said the mine had such rich copper that Dr. Higley could walk into it with a pick and simply stab a lump of pure metal. He’d then take it home and strike coins from it.

Connecticut Copper

The Connecticut copper industry, which lasted about two centuries, began in Copper Hill in Simsbury around 1707 and ended in Bristol in 1953. Mines stretched up and down the Connecticut Valley and dotted the surrounding hills. They gave a start to U.S. brass manufacturing, which centered in Waterbury, Conn., the world’s leader in brass production.

Today, little remains of the once-thriving industry. In 1776, revolutionaries turned the mine into a POW camp, and later the state made it into a prison called Newgate. Prisoners nicknamed it Hell. Today, the state operates the Old Newgate Prison as a museum.

Old Newgate Prison, 1910 postcard

Back in the 1730s, copper mines were small-scale operations, and much of the metal ended up in England.

Samuel Higley undoubtedly had help mining his copper. And it isn’t clear if he himself made the steel dies or struck the coins from them.

Making your own coins, as you might suspect, violated the law in the 1730s. John Hull had minted coins in Massachusetts Bay Colony until English authorities shut him down in 1682. But the colonists suffered a shortage of small coins, and the British authorities couldn’t always enforce the law.

The Coins

One version of the Higley copper legend has it that Simsbury’s local tavernkeeper stopped accepting Higley’s threepence after he’d accumulated quite a few of them. Another story says people started complaining the coin wasn’t worth two-and-a-half cents more than the British halfpennies then circulating.

Whatever the story, Higley struck a version of the coin that said, “VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE,” on one side, and “I AM GOOD COPPER” on the other.

Coin collectors, though, say his local prominence as a businessman and landowner helped establish the value of the Higley coppers. Thousands, mostly dated 1737, circulated in the region.

“It is likely that a large number and a variety of sellers accepted Higley Coppers in transactions for goods and services,” wrote Greg Reynolds in Coin Week. They probably had more stable value than colonial paper money, he wrote.

What Goes ‘Round

All except one have a deer and the numeral three on the tails side. One bears the image of a broad axe with the words, “I CUT MY WAY THROUGH.” Another has the spokes of a wheel and the legend, “THE WHEEL GOES ROUND.”

Four kinds of Higley copper have a hammer on the back, while three have an ax. Some date to 1738 and 1739, after Samuel Higley died at sea while taking a shipment of copper to England. His family may have continued making coins after he died.

Five varieties of the Higley copper are on display at the Connecticut State Library, the Simsbury Historical Society and Connecticut Historical Society. Coin collectors identified two other varieties, and consider them among the rarest and most exciting early American coins.

They have sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Even replicas of the Higley coppers go for far more than their original value: One sold for $646.

This story was updated in 2022.

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