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Massachusetts Bay Colony

Timothy Leary Gets the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act Overturned

Timothy Leary found out just how screwy America’s cannabis laws were when he got busted for violating the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.

Leary faced a 30-year prison sentence, so he hired a team of lawyers to defend him in court. They argued the law violated his Fifth Amendment right protecting him against self-incrimination. They reasoned he had to tell federal authorities he possessed pot so they could tax it. But state laws made cannabis possession a crime.

Timothy Leary.

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Leary and ruled the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act unconstitutional. Leary then went on to run for governor of California. (He didn’t win.) He had a campaign song called Come Together, which his friend John Lennon wrote.

Then in 1970, Congress further complicated the laws governing cannabis by making possession of it a crime.

It was a funny way to treat a plant that the early colonists were required to cultivate and which doesn’t always get you high.

Cannabis

Some strains of cannabis have compounds that alter the mind, while others don’t.

Humans have bred cannabis plants in Asia since as early as 8000 B.C. They cultivated hemp for fiber to make clothes and rope. Later they bred strains for medicine and for getting stoned.

Cannabis

The English colonies passed the first cannabis law in 1639. The Massachusetts General Court ordered every household to plant the weed. Connecticut then followed the next year. They did it because of a rope shortage — they needed the hemp.

The early New England farmers grew plenty of cannabis. For example, 220,000 pounds of fiber from the cannabis plant went into the rigging of Old Ironsides.

Patent Medicines

Cotton eventually surpassed cannabis as the agricultural fiber of choice. But patent medicine makers continued to use cannabis as an active ingredient in over-the-counter remedies. People used it as a tincture or an oil to cure gonorrhea and asthma, and to ease the pain of childbirth.

Drug stores also sold dried marijuana in one-ounce packages. Two cigarettes cost a dollar.

By the turn of the 20^th century, things began to change. States passed poison laws, which required medicine makers to label certain kinds of ingredients. In 1905, poison laws in both Vermont and Maine mentioned cannabis. But Rhode Island’s didn’t.

Then in 1906, the federal Pure Food and Drug Act required products with cannabis to carry labels.

Massachusetts went even further in 1911, making cannabis possession a crime. Lawbreakers paid a fine and served a three- to six-month prison sentence. The law had an exception, though, for doctors, nurses and veterinarians with a license to prescribe the stuff.

The Massachusetts law, like others, didn’t distinguish between cannabis that produced a high and cannabis that didn’t. Other states soon followed and made all cannabis possession a crime.

Immigration

Drug laws also began to take on an anti-immigrant taint. Since the American Revolution, medical doctors freely gave opium to their patients. Then the Civil War caused widespread drug addiction. Doctors gave large quantities of opium and morphine to wounded soldiers and, later, to sickly women.

That was okay. But it wasn’t okay when Chinese immigrants on the West Coast started opening opium dens. So Congress decided to step in. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1915 banned opium for non-medical reasons. It also required doctors who prescribed opium to register with the federal government.

A San Francisco opium den

In the American Southwest, the 1910 Mexican Revolution drove immigrants into the United States. Some of them liked to smoke cannabis recreationally. People viewed them as the “marijuana menace.”

The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act

That set the stage for the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. A hard-nosed FBI agent named Harry Anslinger wrote the bill, and he testified cannabis could cause violent delirium. He called it “marijuana’ rather than cannabis. After all, “marijuana” sounded foreign and therefore more sinister.

Anslinger claimed a 20-year-old “axe-murdering marijuana addict” named Victor Licata had killed his entire family. In truth, Licata suffered from mental illness and didn’t smoke pot.

Anslinger also ignored a doctor who looked at 2,216 criminal cases and found cannabis had influenced exactly zero. And he paid no attention to the American Medical Association, which strongly opposed the bill.

Evidence suggests that powerful corporations had an interest in suppressing cannabis. Dupont, which made nylon and rayon, feared competition from hemp fiber. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who owned paper mills, thought hemp might be used to make paper.

Harry Anslinger

And so Congress passed the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Then in 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Act, which imposed a mandatory minimum prison sentence of two to 10 years for possession of cannabis. Two months after President Harry S Truman signed the bill, 500 people were arrested for marijuana possession in one day.

Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary, a leader of the ‘60s drug counterculture, was born into a well-to-do Springfield, Mass., family in 1920. A great uncle, another Dr. Timothy Leary, served as Boston’s medical examiner, and his grandfather was believed to be the richest man in western Massachusetts.

The grandfather, however, squandered his money, and when his son found out he abandoned his family when Timothy was 13. That perhaps explains Timothy Leary’s behavior problems. He got kicked out of high school, expelled from Holy Cross, silenced at West Point, expelled from the University of Alabama and fled to Europe — twice. But he did manage to earn a PhD from the University of California by the time he reached 40.

Timothy Leary, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and others singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’

He won an appointment as a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard University. While at Harvard, he studied the effects of psychedelic drugs on personality. But Leary also used drugs recreationally, and in 1962 Harvard fired him.

Monstrosity

In 1965, he got busted for cannabis possession in Laredo, Texas, and charged under the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. In developing his defense, he learned about the federal weed law. Leary called it “a bizarre monstrosity from the bureaucratic standpoint and unconstitutional from the legal standpoint.”

A revenue stamp for cannabis

Under the law, people couldn’t buy tax stamps without providing details about the amount and location of their marijuana. And marijuana, of course, was illegal.

The high court sided with Leary in 1969, and Congress repealed the law the next year. But Congress also passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. The law put cannabis in the most restrictive category of controlled substances.

Lawmakers reasoned cannabis was dangerous because of its “high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use” and a “lack of accepted safety.”

Since then, researchers have concluded cannabis does have therapeutic effects. Opinion vary, though, on how addictive and dangerous it is. By 2021, 36 states and the District of Columbia have made cannabis possession legal, at least for medicinal purposes.

And in 2018, the federal Farm Bill legalized cannabis for industrial use. That “unleashed a potential economic dynamo for American farmers,’” according to Forbes magazine.

Images: Harry Anslinger By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34928390. Timothy Leary with John and Yoko By Roy Kerwood – Originally uploaded to English Wikipedia by Roy Kerwood, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44122819. This story was updated in 2022.

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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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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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In 1640, More Puritans Left New England Than Arrived

The year 1620 is well known as the date the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, but 1640 is less well-known as the year they left New England for old England.

Some couldn’t stand the harsh winters. Some saw more opportunity in England – perhaps an inheritance waiting for them or a job that opened up after Oliver Cromwell took power. And some were just homesick.

Edward Winslow, arrived in Plymouth Colony in 1620 and eventually returned to England.

Edward Winslow, the Pilgrim who wrote the history of the first Thanksgiving, returned to England and never came back to his home in Marshfield, Mass. During the 1640s, in fact, more Puritans left New England than arrived.

In 1689, the Puritan minister Increase Mather observed the phenomenon. ‘More people have gone from New England than have come hither,’ he wrote.

Great Migration

The Landing of the Pilgrims, by Henry A. Bacon, 1877.

When most Puritans arrived during the Great Migration of 1620-40, they left behind an England they viewed as increasingly hostile to their beliefs. King James I, who died in 1625, took a fairly tolerant approach to the Puritans, but his son, Charles I, did not.

Charles married a Catholic princess and sent dissident Puritans to prison. Some even had their ears cut off. Charles also ordered the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, to suspend Puritan ministers who defied him. Then Charles suspended Parliament.

Unsurprisingly, Puritan migration to New England peaked during Charles I’s reign. Up until 1640, an average of 2,000 English immigrants arrived in New England every year.

Then the Great Migration suddenly stopped and the Great-ish Return began. Puritan immigrants who sought a safe haven in the New World left New England as soon as things got better for them back home.

An Increase and a Return

In 1639, the Puritan minister Richard Mather of Dorchester in Massachusetts named his son ‘Increase’ as a symbol of the increase with which God favored New England. Two years later, in a sign of the changing times, he baptized an infant ‘Return.’ Ironically, Increase temporarily left New England for old England, while Return stayed in his native land.

Increase Mather left New England, for a while

What changed? In a word, news from England. The Long Parliament in 1640 impeached Charles’ hated archbishop, William Laud. Laud had suspended many of the Puritan ministers, including Mather, who ended up in New England.

Then the English Civil War broke out in 1642. Some Puritans left New England to join Oliver Cromwell’s forces to fight the king. Some of those, like John Winthrop’s nephew George Downing, stayed in England when the war ended. (Downing Street is named after him.)

Close to half of all Harvard graduates left New England for England. So did a third of the Puritan ministers. The Rev. John Davenport, a co-founder of New Haven colony, wanted to go back, he said, because he feared the New England winters would kill him. (He stayed.)

Others couldn’t take the harsh cold and rocky soil. The poem New England’s Annoyances, circulated in the 1640s, complained of bitter winters, failed crops and an endless diet of pumpkin. It also recognized people who left New England threatened the colonies’ survival: “Now while some are going let others be coming.”

At the same time the English Civil War encouraged emigration from New England, it all but halted immigration to New England. Only a few hundred Scots-Irish arrived to settle the frontiers in the 1640s.

Then the war ended in 1646, with Cromwell and his Puritans victorious. “A great surge of settlers, earlier deterred by the hostilities back home, now set off for England,” wrote Susan Hardman Moore in Pilgrims: New World settlers and the call of home.

After They Left New England

Elihu Yale left New England at age 3.

Thomas Bell, a merchant from Roxbury in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had arrived during the Great Migration. He imported from England such items as shovels, bellows, lead shot, shoes, rugs, soap, canvas and cotton. He had to return to England several times on business. When the English Civil War ended, he left New England, taking his wife and children back to London for good.

David Yale, another merchant, left Boston for England in 1652. He brought his three-year-old son, Elihu, who never set foot in New England again, but made a fortune in diamonds and endowed a college in New Haven.

Still others who had left the turmoil in England returned to their careers as surgeons, shoemakers and shopkeepers. Some got jobs in Cromwell’s government as accountants, customs commissioners or state-supported ministers. Wives, widows, children, servants and apprentices followed them home.

Olier-Cromwell

Leaving wasn’t always easy. Many Puritans had entered into a covenant to support the town. If too many people left, a town might not survive.

A healthy fear of God’s wrath also kept some of the Puritans from returning to England. They came to the New World to build a shining city on a hill, and feared retribution if they left New England.

Those who did leave sometimes left empty houses to crumble. For those who remained in New England, the value of their homes plummeted.

Puritan leader John Winthrop had no use for the settlers who returned, and he criticized them severely. If those who left encountered pirates or storms, Winthrop viewed the calamity as God’s punishment.

Numbers, Please

The exact number of Puritans who left New England will probably never be known. Estimates range from one in four to one in 12.

According to one estimate, 21,000 English immigrants arrived in New England during the Great Migration, but by 1640 the region’s European population fell to somewhere between 13,500 and 17,600.

By 1650, the total population of New England rebounded to about 22,800, in large part because of a high birthrate. New Englanders married young, and typically had seven to eight children, with six or seven living to adulthood. And despite hardship and bad weather, the Puritan baby boomers tended to live for a long time.

The savage family of Billerica

From then on, depopulation no longer threatened New England’s existence (though King Philip’s War did).

As for Edward Winslow, he intended to return to his home in Marshfield. A portrait of him – the only portrait of a Mayflower Pilgrim – shows him holding a letter from his wife. It reads, “From yr loving wife Susanna.”

But Oliver Cromwell named him a commissioner to the West Indies, where he caught fever and died in 1655, never to return to New England.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Puritans Blame Provoking Evils for King Philip’s War

Increase Mather could see King Philip’s War coming from his pulpit. All around him he saw sinful activity: periwigs, high prices, tippling in the ordinary, even people leaving the Sunday meeting before it ended. And so when the Native Americans rose up and began to destroy entire villages, Mather pressed the Massachusetts General Court to legislate morality. The lawmakers then passed the 1675 Provoking Evils legislation, New England’s most notorious blue laws.

Increase Mather

Increase Mather, an ambitious 36-year-old minister, had a fanatical desire to reform Puritan society. He believed the Puritans had strayed from the founding generation’s moral purpose. He was literally a product of those founders: His father, the influential Rev. Richard Mather, had come to Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Puritan Migration.

“Mather seems to have been on the side of the declining old-style,” wrote historian Anne Kusener Nelsen. “All that was new in any way — the merest toleration, luxurious apparel, or the changing character of the churches — presented a threat to Mather’s ideal of the Puritan state.”

Increase Mather

Mather thought the Puritans had gone horribly soft even before the Nipmucks, Wampanoags and Narragansetts began attacking New England’s frontier. Parents weren’t bringing up children properly within the church. Fashions had gotten out of hand, with men wearing long hair and women wearing bangs and topless dresses.

And that wasn’t all. The lower orders of society showed contempt for authority and people didn’t behave in church. Merchants and laborers charged exorbitant prices. Some people even rode to other towns on the pretext of going to lecture but really frequented taverns.

Clearly, the Puritans were going to hell in a handbasket.

King Philip, or Metacomet

And so when King Philip unleashed his fury on the New England colonists, Mather was quite certain the Lord had sent them as his agents to purify his people.

The way to win the war, Mather believed, was to eliminate the provoking evils.

“Let them no more say, God must do all, we can do nothing, and so encourage themselves to live in a careless neglect of God, and of their own souls, and salvation,” he wrote in his history of the conflict.

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War began on June 20, 1675 when a war party of Pokanokets struck the tiny Plymouth Colony settlement of Swansea. Thereafter, Indian allies shocked and terrified New England. Hundreds of warriors would strike swiftly and suddenly, burning villages, taking captives and slaughtering families.

During the 14 months of fighting, Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its adult male population. In the end, 35 towns were burned or abandoned, leaving only 65 in New England.

The war also disrupted the homogenous, self-governing Puritan communities. Military commissioners had authority over the Puritan ministers. Large numbers of armed soldiers, usually strangers, moved into small, close-knit towns.

The Indians suffered even more as a result of the war. The colonists sold as many as a thousand into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or of starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. At the outset of the war, Indians comprised 30 percent of New England’s population; by the end, they dwindled to 15 percent.

King Philip’s War

Provoking Evils

In October 1675, four months into the war, Increase Mather took his turn delivering a lecture before the General Court.

He told them only one thing could turn God from his displeasure and spare Massachusetts from the heathen: a thorough reformation of provoking evils.

The lower house, the democratic deputies (now known as the House of Representatives) quickly passed the laws banning provoking evils. The aristocratic magistrates in the upper house (now the Senate) didn’t go along with them. One week later, an Indian war party attacked a town. The magistrates quickly passed the Provoking Evils law.

On the day the magistrates acted, the Puritans scored a victory against the Indians. Mather, of course, interpreted that to mean God approved of the Provoking Evils law.

The horror! Slashed sleeves.

The General Court passed a strict dress code prohibiting such fashion excesses as slashed sleeves, periwigs and bared bosoms. The law authorized local officials to prosecute men for wearing long hair and women for wearing bangs or curling their hair.

Town officers had to close the meeting house doors so no one could leave before service ended. If children didn’t come to Sabbath service, town officials would fine their parents or whip the children.

Massachusetts already had laws on the books against swearing, but lawmakers strengthened them by ordering punishment to anyone who overheard a swear word and didn’t report it.

The General Court ordered every person found at a Quakers meeting to be apprehended, jailed for three days or fined five pounds. If the constable didn’t enforce the law, he would pay a four pound fine.

No longer could townspeople drink in taverns (known as ordinaries), which existed only for travelers.

Finally, they fixed wages and prices.

Backlash

Enforcing the Provoking Evils law would surely end the war, wouldn’t it?

Not everyone thought so.

Gov. John Leverett

Gov. John Leverett told Mather over dinner he’d gone too far when he complained about rampant drunkenness in the colony.

Three months after the Provoking Evils law passed, Increase Mather gave another sermon about excess in apparel and the frequenting of taverns. After meeting, two wealthy parishioners, Capt. Thomas Lake and John Richards, stayed behind. They told him he might have persuaded the ignorant, but no rational man would buy his argument. .

And Mather’s rival, the less-fanatical Rev. William Hubbard, believed the Puritans’ land grabbing caused King Philip’s War. Hubbard also thought military ineptitude and overconfidence prolonged the bloodshed.

Land

Eventually, of course, the Puritans won the war and the provoking evils laws were repealed. And in the end, Mather came around to Hubbard’s view that land hunger caused the conflict.

Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England: whereas the first Planters here that they might keep themselves together were satisfied with one Acre for each person, as his propriety, an after that with twenty Acres for a Family, how have men since coveted after the earth, that many hundreds, nay thousands of Acres, have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians, have forsaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the world.

Thanks to King Philip’s War and the Hubbard-Mather Rivalry by Anne Kusener Nelsen, published in the William and Mary Quarterly, and The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 by Michael G. Hall. This story was updated in 2023.

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Nathaniel Eaton, the Sadistic Puritan Who Made Harvard Disappear for a Year

Harvard University got off to a rough start in 1638, when Nathaniel Eaton and his wife led such a reign of terror the school closed down for a year.

There wasn’t much to close down. Harvard was little more than half of John Harvard’s library, a farmhouse and a one-acre cowyard in the middle of Cambridge cow country. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote the college smelled like a stockyard.

“The ammoniacal streams emanating from yarded cattle mingled not inappropriately with odors from Mistress Eaton’s cooking,” wrote Morison.

For the handful of Harvard students, it was hard to say which was worse: beatings from Nathaniel Eaton or dinner from his wife.

Nathaniel Eaton

On Oct. 28, 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Great and General Court ordered the establishment of a college to train ministers. Two years later, a minister named John Harvard died childless and left his library and half his property to the college. For that, the school took his name.

The school also took his friend, Nathaniel Eaton. Eaton, a well-educated Puritan, had just arrived in Massachusetts in 1637 at the age of 28 with his family. His older brother Theophilus Eaton moved on to Connecticut and started the colony of New Haven. Nathaniel Eaton stayed behind in Massachusetts because he had a job as ‘schoolmaster’ at Harvard.

Nathaniel Eaton, mistakenly identified as John Harvard on a cigar box

Cotton Mather called him a rare scholar. Of his students, Mather said, ‘their Education truly was In the School of Tyrannus.”

One student said Eaton was “fitter to have been an officer in the inquisition, or master of an house of correction, than an instructer (sic) of Christian Youth.”

But it was Mrs. Eaton who got him fired.

Court

At the beginning of the second academic year in 1639, Eaton beat his assistant Nathaniel Briscoe for two hours with a cudgel ‘big enough to have killed a horse.’ A neighbor rushed in to save Briscoe’s life, and the victim thanked God that he didn’t die. Eaton then began beating Briscoe again for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

The beating of Briscoe got Nathaniel Eaton hauled into court. And then the airing of students’ complaints began.

It came to light that he routinely whipped his students with 20 to 30 lashes. But the Puritan magistrates, all familiar with the rod, didn’t have much concern about Nathaniel Eaton’s sadistic beatings.

They did, however, find Mrs. Eaton’s cooking inexcusable.

The students accused her of serving hasty pudding laced with goat dung, which she denied. But she did admit she made bread with sour meal. She also served spoiled fish and never, ever served beef, an Englishman’s birthright. Even worse, she would go for an entire week without serving the students beer.

The magistrates dismissed Nathaniel Eaton, and Harvard shut down for the 1639-40 academic year.

The students went home, or studied with a tutor or had fun. Only nine would graduate in 1642. Of those, three would return to Europe.

Nathaniel Eaton spent the rest of his life moving around the world, first to New Hampshire, then Virginia, then to Italy and England, where he died in debtor’s prison.

Henry Dunster took over Harvard as president and put the college on sounder footing, though he, too, had a penchant for beating students.

Images:Nathaniel Eaton on a cigar box: By The Image itself was taken from Harvard’s official website. The individual webpage is presently located at: [1], and the image’s properties there presently are: [2]., PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3082248.

This story about Nathaniel Eaton was updated in 2021.

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