Roger
Conant on Cape Ann
Part
III: Conant at Naumkeag and Salem Village
By Mary Ellen Lepionka, February 2020
In 1626 Roger Conant led a small number of
Dorchester Company survivors and their rescuers from Fisherman’s Field on Cape
Ann to the Pawtucket village of Naumkeag (Nahumkeak),
12 miles southwest in present-day North Beverly, Massachusetts. There they
established a settlement abutting the Native village, and they named it Salem
Village, based on shalom, an Old
Testament term for peace and harmony. In subsequent forays they disassembled
their meetinghouse on Fisherman’s Field and carried the framing timbers and
boards to Salem Village, where it was re-erected as Roger Conant’s dwelling
place. Legend has it that in 1628 the structure was disassembled again and
carried across the Danvers River to Salem as a temporary residence for John
Endecott (Endicott), who was sent to relieve Conant as governor of Rev. John
White’s New England Company. The Endicott
house, purportedly built of the Dorchester Company meetinghouse oak timbers brought
from England, was at the corner of present-day Washington and Church Streets in
present-day Salem and was torn down in 1895.[1]
Endicott set about moving the village seat
from Beverly to Salem, surveying Cape Ann for a new plantation, and acquiring
land and resources from the Indians, including bog iron sites and native copper
mines. As waves of new Puritans arrived in Salem, beginning with the Francis
Higginson Fleet of 1629, Conant and the other first settlers who had bought or
leased land directly from the Indians came to be known as the “Old Planters”.
The Old Planters included Dorchester Company settlers from Cape Ann, Roger
Conant’s rescue party, a few ex-Plymouth entrepreneurs, and refugees from other
failed colonies, such as Ferdinando Gorges’ Wessagusset and Robert Gorges’
Weymouth, south of Boston, which had been attacked by the Wampanoag and
abandoned.[2]
Recreation of “First House” at Pioneer
Village in Salem, Mass.
A historical marker for the “First House”,
referring to the Dorchester company’s meetinghouse, apparently was removed from Fisherman’s Field
at some time in the past and is now in a Department of Public Works shed in Gloucester,
Mass. The specific original location of the meetinghouse is unknown. Transported
to Salem Village, it probably looked like the historical photo of the First Church
in Salem on Essex Street, dating to a slightly later period. In 1639 Roger
Conant himself signed the contract to have that meetinghouse enlarged to become
the First Church in Salem.[3]
First Church in Salem
In 1898 a descendant, Thomas Conant, had a
watercolor made of Roger Conant’s home in Salem, based on a written description
in the Conant Family Association archives in Beverly. The houses of Conant’s
only surviving son, Exercise Conant, his daughters, and those of other first
settlers still stand in Beverly and Salem, and early houses of several Conant
descendants survive in other New England towns.
Note that the legend for the picture of
Conant’s house is incorrect. Conant was never actually referred to as a
governor and Mass. Bay Colony did not officially exist before 1630.
Exercise Conant’s House
Earliest Map of Salem Village in North
Beverly
Planters Path
Balch Map of Salem Village (“Ancient Beverly”) in the 17th Century
John Balch House, 448 Cabot St., Beverly, Mass.
Note that the historic marker is incorrect.
Dendrochronological analysis dates this house to 1679.
Salem Village in 1692 after John Endicott relocated
it to the Salem Side of the River. The “Old Planters” were in Beverly and Royal
Side.
On March 19, 1627, Rev. John White’s New England Company obtained a
patent from the New England Council for a grant “of some lands in Massachusetts
Bay” to “gentlemen of blood”. “Some lands” ran from the Merrimack River to
Boston Bay and from coast to coast:
“All the lands laying between parallels three miles north of "a
greate river there commonlie call Monomack alias Merriemack," and three
miles south of "a certen other river there, callled Charles river, being
in the bottome of a certayne bay there, commonlie called Massachusetts, alias
Mattachuestte, alias Massatusetts Bay... from the Atlantick and westerne sea
and ocean on the east parte, to the south sea on the west parte."
The “gentlemen of
blood” were:
Sir Henry Rosewell, Somerset, high sheriff of Devon
Sir John Yonge, Colyton, Devon
Thomas Southcote, Mohuns Ottery, Devon
John Humfry (Humphrey), treasurer of the old Dorchester Company Adventurers
Simon Whetcombe, Sherborne, a wealthy cloth-worker
John Endicott, Devon, a soldier, governor for White’s patent in New
England
Of these, other than
Endicott, only Humfry and Whetcombe came to New England. In 1629 the New England Company morphed into the Massachusetts Bay
Company, and in 1630 the Company sent John Winthrop to replace Endicott as
governor. Winthrop promptly moved the seat of government from Salem to
Charlestown with ports at Dorchester and Roxbury, all part of present-day
Boston. Both Endicott and Conant continued in the Salem branch of the government,
swapping out or rotating roles according to the Company’s rules for terms of
office. In the Company’s charter, Charles I had unaccountably granted it the
ability to be self-governing, a dangerous precedent for a colonial power, and
perhaps the earliest benchmark in the history of the American Revolution. The autonomous, self-governing body of stockholders
met as an assembly called the General Court, which chose a governor, deputy
governor, and 18 assistants to administer the colony. It’s not hard to see this
legal precedent for autonomous self-rule as the real beginning of American
independence.[4]
The Massachusetts Bay Company charter
abrogated all prior claims, including Ferdinando Gorges’ and John Mason’s King’s
Grant, and Plymouth’s Sheffield Patent. The King’s Grant boundaries were later reduced to all the northern land
between the Merrimack and the Kennebec rivers, which Gorges and Mason later
divided between them, essentially founding the states of New Hampshire and
Maine. Meanwhile, however, Plymouth Colony and Maine both
got folded into the new Massachusetts Bay colony. Also abrogated were all prior
claims to land! Immediately, the rights of the Old Planters came into dispute,
for in 1632 the General Court declared that all land previously purchased
directly from the Indians now belonged to the General Court and would be
redistributed to new settlers at its pleasure. Any claim to land without the
Court’s approval was null and void. Governor Winthrop even sent his son, John
Winthrop Jr., with a “posse” to begin evicting “squatters” in Ipswich.[5]
A panic ensued among first comers, who flooded
the General Court with petitions to be allowed to keep at least the land they
were living on. Some, such as William Jeffreys (Jeffries) from the failed colony
at Weymouth, lost all their original land holdings. Jeffreys lost land in
Ipswich and Manchester-by-the-Sea (Jeffreys Creek, Jeffreys Neck, and Jeffreys
Ledge—a fishing bank) that he had purchased from the Pawtucket sagamore at
Agawam, Masconomet (Masquenominet). The
General Court compensated Jeffreys and other men of rank with grants of other
lands on the frontiers. Other petitioners were granted permission to keep only the
lands they lived on and “manured”, often on the condition that they establish a
township or proprietorship or incorporate as a town.[6]
In a long and impassioned letter called
“Planters Plea”, Rev. John White beseeched the General Court to allow the Old
Planters in Salem Village to keep the property they had bought from the Indians
at Naumkeag, and in 1635 they were granted 1,000 acres. The General Court
insisted that the Indians be paid for their lands, “so as to avoid the least
scruple of intrusion.” Ultimately, in 1700
and 1701 all the towns in Essex County repurchased quitclaim deeds to their
lands from the surviving grandchildren of the sachems and sagamores who had
signed the original deeds.[7]
The Old Planters Grant of 1,000 acres in 1635
In 1630 Roger Conant was made a freeman
and a voting stockholder of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The next year he left Salem to form a trading company
with Peter Palfrey and others (Anthony Dike, Francis Johnson), who went into
business together to operate a fur trading post “for traffic in furs, with a
truck house at the eastward” (Blue Point, Maine, part of Massachusetts at the
time). That enterprise established, Conant returned to become a key figure in the new government, representing Salem in the
General Court. He was several times elected Selectman, served on the juries of
quarterly courts and courts of assistants, and oversaw surveys establishing the
boundaries of land grants and towns.[8]
The newcomers to Salem and Cape Ann
were not fishermen and traders from the West Country, but farmers and merchants
from other parts of England, principally Bristol in Gloucestershire, Gravesend
in Kent, East Anglia, and Yorkshire. (In 1668 the Old Planters Grant was set
off from Salem as Beverley (Beverly), named after the Yorkshire town from which
the newcomers there had come.) Predictably, conflicts arose between original
settlers and newcomers, who were more concerned with acquiring land than with
maintaining harmony with the resident Native people. The General Court began a
program of assimilation, beginning by mandating that fences be built around
Indians’ cornfields and clam flats to protect them from colonists’ free-ranging
cattle and hogs. Then came Christianization and the establishment of “Praying
Indian” towns. Native population loss in the first smallpox epidemic of 1633
and the first armed conflict in 1636 (the Pequot War in southern New England) aided
the more aggressive displacement of Native people that followed.[9]
On March 8, 1644, in exchange for the right
to bear arms, the ability to keep enough land for their own sustenance, and
English protection against their Native enemies, the Pawtucket, Massachuset,
Nipmuc, and Pennacook signed an oath of allegiance to the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. The oath was witnessed in the Circuit Court at Salem by governor John
Winthrop and the Puritan cleric Richard Mather, who had landed at Cape Ann
during the hurricane of 1635. The signers included Masconomet (Masquenomenit)—hereditary
sagamore of Kwaskwaikikwen (Newbury), Agawam (Ipswich), Wanaskwiwam (Cape Ann),
and Nahumkeak (Beverly-Salem); Cutchamakin of Neponset and Andover, brother of
the late grand sachem Chickatawbut, lost in the smallpox epidemic of 1633; the
grand sachem’s nephew Josias Chickatawbut of Nonantum (Newton, Brookline); Nashacowam
of Nashua, New Hampshire, a Pennacook; Wassamagin of Wachuset, a Nipmuc; and
Squaw Sachem, tributary to Passaconaway (Pappiseconewa) of the Pennacook and
widow of Nanepashemet—late grand sachem of the Pawtucket Confederation of
Abenakis. Squaw Sachem—her name was never recorded—had lost two of her three
Christianized sons in the smallpox epidemic of 1633 and in 1639 had sold Cambridge,
Watertown, Newton, Arlington, Somerville, and Charlestown to the English. She
and her surviving son, Wenepoykin (disfigured by smallpox and known to the
English as George No-Nose and later as George Rumney-Marsh) soon also sold the
land that became Lynn, Saugus, Revere, Medford, Wakefield, Woburn, Stoneham,
and Winchester. They all threw in their lot with Passaconaway, who himself
appeared in the Circuit Court at Salem the following year to add his signatory
mark to the Oath of 1644.
Towns in Essex and Middlesex counties created from lands purchased from Native leaders prior to 1644.
The Native leaders
had to swear that they "voluntarily & without
any constraint or persuasion, but of our own free motion, put ourselves, our
subjects, Lands, and estates under the Government and [will be] protected by
them according to their just laws." They also had to swear to accept
certain conditions, expressed in the following nine questions. Richard Mather
recorded their answers.
1. Will you worship the only true God, who made heaven and earth, and not blaspheme?
Ans: "We do desire to reverence the God of the English and to speak well of Him, because we see He doth better to the English, than other gods do to others."
2. Will you cease from swearing falsely?
Ans: "We know not what swearing is.
3. Will you refrain from working on the Sabbath, especially within the bounds of Christian towns?
Ans: "It is easy to us, — we have not much to do any day, and we can well rest on that day."
4. Will you honor your parents and all your superiors?
Ans: "It is our custom to do so, — for inferiors to honor superiors."
5. Will you refrain from killing any man without just cause and just authority?
1. Will you worship the only true God, who made heaven and earth, and not blaspheme?
Ans: "We do desire to reverence the God of the English and to speak well of Him, because we see He doth better to the English, than other gods do to others."
2. Will you cease from swearing falsely?
Ans: "We know not what swearing is.
3. Will you refrain from working on the Sabbath, especially within the bounds of Christian towns?
Ans: "It is easy to us, — we have not much to do any day, and we can well rest on that day."
4. Will you honor your parents and all your superiors?
Ans: "It is our custom to do so, — for inferiors to honor superiors."
5. Will you refrain from killing any man without just cause and just authority?
Ans: "This
is good, and we desire so to do."
6. Will you deny yourselves fornication, adultery, incest, rape, sodomy, buggery, or bestiality?
Ans [after some explanation]: "Though some of our people do these things occasionally, yet we count them naught and do not allow them."
7. Will you deny yourselves stealing?
Ans: "We say the same to this as to the 6th question."
8. Will you allow your children to learn to read the word of God, so that they may know God aright and worship him in his own way?
Ans: "We will allow this as opportunity will permit, and, as the English live among us, we desire so to do."
9. Will you refrain from idleness?
6. Will you deny yourselves fornication, adultery, incest, rape, sodomy, buggery, or bestiality?
Ans [after some explanation]: "Though some of our people do these things occasionally, yet we count them naught and do not allow them."
7. Will you deny yourselves stealing?
Ans: "We say the same to this as to the 6th question."
8. Will you allow your children to learn to read the word of God, so that they may know God aright and worship him in his own way?
Ans: "We will allow this as opportunity will permit, and, as the English live among us, we desire so to do."
9. Will you refrain from idleness?
Ans:
"We will."
To seal the deal, the six sagamores and
sachems paid 26 fathoms of wampum (that amounts to a minimum of 6,240 shell beads,
roughly 624 colonial dollars in value), essentially buying protection by paying
tribute. Wampum was legal tender in Mass. Bay Colony at that time (until 1661) for
both colonists and Indians. In turn, each “chief” was given two yards of red woolen
cloth and a pot of wine. The Puritan ministers wrote home to England that a new
age of spreading the gospel among the Indians had begun. And the Indians went
home with the news that a new age of coexistence had begun under the justice of
English laws.[10]
But after 1650 that
justice was not to be had, culminating in the Wampanoag uprising of 1675, known
as King Philip’s War, after which the Massachusetts Bay Colony periodically
sanctioned efforts to exterminate the Native people. Several hundred colonists had
arrived on the eleven ships of the Winthrop Fleet, inaugurating what became
known as the Great Migration (which included two of my ancestors, Ralph
Hemenway, who landed at Roxbury in 1633, and John Perham, who landed at
Charlestown in 1634). By 1640 the estimated
population of New England had risen spectacularly from fewer than 500 colonists
to more than 26,000. Native people were overwhelmed, as were some Old Planters. First comers
who wanted more elbow room, or who did not want to live under close scrutiny of
the strict new Puritan regime, eloped to fishing settlements and trading camps
on the frontiers, along with Native escapees, runaway African slaves
(introduced in Massachusetts in 1638), and various nonconformists, miscreants,
and religious and ethnic minorities being “warned out” of Plymouth, Salem, and
Charlestown. Before the seventeenth century’s end, even before the witchcraft
hysteria of the 1690s, the regional cultures of North America were already in
the making.[11]
NOTES AND
REFERENCES
[1] Adams, Herbert B. The Fisher Plantation of
Cape Anne, 1882. Part I of The Village
Communities of Cape Ann and Salem, Historical
Collections of the Essex Institute: 19. (Salem, MA); Gannon, Fred A., n. d., Roger Conant and the Fishing Station of 1626 In Some Starts of Industry and Commerce in Old Salem. Salem, MA: J. N
Simard; O’Leary,
Tom (GIS Director, Southern Essex Registry of Deeds, Salem, MA). 2002. Ancient Indian Trails and Canoe Routes of
Essex County; Phippen,
George D. Of Salem before 1628, Essex Institute
Historical Collections 1: 97, 185; Young, Alexander. 1846, Chronicles of the First Planters of the
Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1623-1636, Volumes 41 and 49. Boston, MA: C.
C. Little and J. Brown; Phippen, George D. Biographical sketch of Roger Conant.
Essex Institute Historical Collections:
1: 145. See Frederick Conant’s 1877 History
and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America (http://www.archive.org/details/historygenealogy00cona). See also Hubbard, William. 1815. A General history of New England: from the
discovery to 1680. Volume 5 of Collections of the Massachusetts Historical
Society. Boston, MA: Hilliard & Metcalf (Hubbard interviewed Roger Conant);
Webber, Carl and Winfield S. Nevins. 1877. Old
Naumkeag: An Historical Sketch of the City of Salem, and the Towns of
Marblehead, Peabody, Danvers, Wenham, Manchester, Topsfield, and Middleton.
Salem, MA: A. A. Smith; New York Times.
The. July 8, 1890. Boston, July 7. The Old Endicott House: An Ancient
Landmark of Salem, Mass., Demolished.
[2] Winthrop, John. 1790. Journal of the transactions and
occurrences in the settlement of Massachusetts and the other New-England
colonies, from the year 1630 to 1644, written by John Winthrop ... and now
first published from a correct copy of the original manuscript. Hartford, CT: Elisha Babcock; Endicott, Charles M. 1867. Memoir of John Endecott. Salem, MA.; “John
Endecott, Puritan.” The New York Times,
September 1, 1895; Phillips,
James Duncan. 1933. The Landing of Endecott. Chapter IV in Salem in the Seventeenth Century. Boston: Houghton. Stewart,
Marcia, ed. 1662; White, Rev. John. October 12, 1634. The Adventure for
1623-1628 in New England. Proceedings of
the Court of Requests of Charles I, London; John White’s Planter’s Plea, 1630, printed in facsimile with an
introduction by Marshall H. Saville, The Sandy Bay Historical Society
Publications Volume I (Rockport, MA, 1930), p. 73-74; Higginson, Rev. Francis.
1629. New England’s Plantation: A Short
and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Country.
London (1630) The Winthrop Society: http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_higgin.php; Phineas
Pratt’s Account of Wessagusset Plantation. Boston, MA: The Winthrop Society: http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_pratt.php Babson, John, History of the Town of
Gloucester, Cape Ann: Including the Town of Rockport (1860), also his Notes and additions
to the history of Gloucester…(1891): https://archive.org/details/notesadditionsto00babs. Sources for Ferdinando Gorges’ and John Mason’s
claims and their suits in court include Gorges’ Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine: A Briefe Narration...
(1658); America Painted to the Life….
(1659); and Letter relating to Maine, Essex
Institute Historical Collections 7: 271 (1661). See also John Wingate
Thornton, Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges. Speech given at the Fort Popham
Celebration, August 29, 1862 (Maine Historical Society1863).
[3] Maverick, Samuel. 1660 (Reprinted 1885). A
Briefe Description of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together
with the Present Government Thereof. In New
England Historical and Genealogical Register 39: 33-47; Raymond, Robert S. (Sidney
Perley documents): Samuel Balch’s Map of
ancient Beverly, 17th Century; Latham Map showing the location of
the earliest houses in Beverly; also Peter Woodbury house, Balch house, Conant
houses, Humphreys house, Prince house, and other historic photos: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~raymondfamily/Beverly1700; Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary
Commission. 2009. Historical Markers Erected by the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Tercentenary Commission (with texts revised by Samuel Eliot Morison: http://archive.org/details/historicalmarker00mass; Winthrop Society. The Residents of Salem, First Town of the
Massachusetts Bay Commonwealth: From Original
Records up to the Year 1651: http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_salem.php; Pierce, Richard, ed. 1974. The
Records of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, 1629-1736. Salem:
Essex Institute. See also the Salem Covenants of 1629 and 1635: https://www.apuritansmind.com/creeds-and-confessions/covenants-of-new-england/.
[4] Noble, John and John F. Cronin, eds. 1901
and 1904. Records of the Court of
assistants of the colony of the Massachusetts Bay 1630-1692, Volumes I and
II. Suffolk County, Boston, MA. Especially see Nathaniel Shurtleff’s 1853 Records of the Governor and Company of
Massachusetts Bay and General Court, Vol. I and Vol. II 1630-1649
(Massachusetts Archives); Frothingham, Richard. 1845. History of Charlestown, Massachusetts: https://archive.org/details/historyofcharles00froth; Winthrop, John. 1649 History of New England 1630-1649. James K. Hosmer, ed. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons; Clapp, Roger. 1630 (1844). Memoirs of Roger Clap (1609-1691).
Boston, (Also by D. Clapp Jr. in Issue 1 of Collections
of the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society). Stone, Edward M. 1843. History of Beverly, Civil and Ecclesiastical, from its Settlement in
1630 to 1842. (Includes the 1680 depositions of William Dixy, Humphrey
Woodbury, and Richard Brackenbury). Boston: James Munroe & Company; Tapley,
Harriet Silvester. 1923. Chronicles of
Danvers (Old Salem Village) 1632-1923. Danvers, MA: The Danvers Historical
Society.
[5] Levett, Christopher. 1628. A Voyage into New England Begun in 1623 and
Ended in 1624, Performed by Christopher Levett, his Majesties Woodward of
Somersetshire, and one of the Councell of New-England. London: William
Jones, for the Council of New England. See also Charles Pope’s 1908 Pioneers of Maine and New Hampshire 1623 to
1660. Joseph Felt, History of Ipswich,
Essex, and Manchester (1966); D. F. Lamson, History
of the Town of Manchester, Essex County, Massachusetts 1645-1895; and
Gordon Abbott Jr., Jeffrey’s Creek: A
Story of People, Places and Events in the Town That Came to Be Known as
Manchester-By-The-Sea (2003); Stone, Edward M. 1843. History of Beverly, Civil and Ecclesiastical, from its Settlement in
1630 to 1842. (Includes the 1680 depositions of William Dixy, Humphrey
Woodbury, and Richard Brackenbury). Boston: James Munroe & Company; Tapley,
Harriet Silvester. 1923. Chronicles of
Danvers (Old Salem Village) 1632-1923. Danvers, MA: The Danvers Historical
Society.
[6] Sources for the story of William Jeffreys include
Proceedings of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1686
(CT0-1700x); Early Records of the Kettle family of Salem (1690) in the Essex Institute Historical Collections
2: 256 and 4: 282; Early Records of the Allen family of Manchester in the Essex Institute Historical Collections 24: 223, 302; 25:44, 27:
31; and “William Jeffrey(s)” in the RootsWeb World Connect Project: Rehobeth:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=jbbullock&id=I31456. Sources for land disputes and their resolution following the sweeping
reforms of 1630 include, in addition to the General Laws and cases in the
records of the Court of Assistants, cited previously, Roy Agaki, The
Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies: 27-124 (1963). See also "Records of land grants, division bounds, thatch
lots, herbage lots and wood lots, and highway”, and “Minutes of meetings of Proprietors of Common Lands” in the
Massachusetts Archives, Boston.
[7]John White’s Planter’s Plea,
1630, printed in facsimile with an introduction by Marshall H. Saville, The Sandy Bay Historical Society
Publications Volume I (Rockport, MA, 1930), pp. 70-76.
The General
Court’s appropriations and redistributions of lands are reported in Records of the Company of
the Massachusetts Bay in New England From 1628 to 1641 (Massachusetts Archives): http://archive.org/details/recordsofcompany00mass. For the Court’s grant to the Old Planters of Salem Village in response
to White’s Planter’s Plea, and the 1635 map showing the grant
boundaries, see Robert S. Raymond’s web site (2002): http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~raymondfamily/Beverly1700.
The principal source for Native American deeds
and redeeds is the Southern Essex County Registry of Deeds in Salem, MA, with
data based largely on Sidney Perley, The Indian Land Titles of Essex
County, Massachusetts (1912). See the Registry’s
comprehensive web site on Native American Deeds at http://www.nativeamericandeeds.com/. The Hawthorne in Salem “Main Street” web site also displays original
deed-related documents and historical maps for Salem and environs at http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/NativeAmericans&Blacks/MainStreet/OriginalDocuments.html. See also the Book of Indian Records for Their Lands (Massachusetts Historical Commission
Archives, 1861). Useful articles include Peter Leavenworth, “The Best Title That Indians
Can Claime”: National Agency and Consent in the Transferal of
Penacook-Pawtucket Land in the 17th Century, in the New England Quarterly 72 (2, June 1999):
275-300; and Katherine Hermes, Justice Will Be Done Us: Algonquian Demands for
Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers, in Christopher Tomlins, The Many Legalities of Early America (2001):
123-149. Another useful article, by James Springer, is American Indians and the
Law of Real Property in Colonial New England, in The American Journal of Legal
History 30 (1) (January 1986):
25-58.
[8] See Conant
references in Note 1 and Joseph Felt’s Biographical sketch of John Endicott (Essex Institute Historical Collections
5:73, 8: 96, and 15: 298). For a roster of leaders, see Officers of the
Massachusetts Bay Commonwealth 1630-1686: www.winthropsociety.com/doc_officers.php. The classic primary source is John
Winthrop’s 1649 History of New England
1630-1649. See Felt, Joseph B., Annals
of Salem, from Its First Settlement, Volume I (1827): https://archive.org/details/annalsofsalemfro00jose and Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1930 (Reprinted
2004).
Builders of the Bay Colony.
Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Insight into
Massachusetts Bay Colony governance may also be seen in General Laws of the
Massachusetts Colony Revised and Published by Order of the General Court in
October 1632 – Revised edition, November 1675: http://www.usingessexhistory.org/primarydocuments/institute07/princelaws.pdf, and Bibliographic sketch of the
laws of the mass colony from 1630 (William Whitmore, 1890, P-665
Microfilm reel #37, Massachusetts Archives).
[9] Good relations between the Pawtucket and
colonists at Naumkeag is attested by Hubbard; Edward Johnson in Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour
in New England (1654) and Good News
from New England (1658); and William Wood in New England’s Prospect: A True, Lively, and Experimental Description of
That Part of America, commonly called New England (1634): http://www.comity.org/Wood_NE_Prospect.htm. See also Herbert Adams, Origin of Salem
Plantation and Old Depositions relating to Old Planters, Essex Institute Historical Collections 13: 136; 19: 153. John
White’s discussion of newcomers versus Old Planters is in Planter’s Plea, 1630, reproduced by Marshall H. Saville, The Sandy Bay Historical Society Publications
Volume I (Rockport, MA, 1930), pp. 79-84. For Native Americans in the Contact
Period see Gookin, Daniel. Report of 1674 in Historical collections of the Indians of New England and their several nations, numbers, customs, manners,
religion, and government before the English planted there (Massachusetts Historical Society
Collections Paper 13): http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/sc_pubs/13/). For the Pequot War, see Lion Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres (1660);
and John Mason and Paul Royster, ed., Major Mason’s Brief History of the Pequot War (1736): http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/42.
[10] The Oath of 1644 is referenced in several
places: Nathaniel
Shurtleff’s 1853 Records of the Governor
and Company of Massachusetts Bay and General Court, Vol. II 1642-1649 and
Vol. III 1644-1657 (Massachusetts Archives); see also Indian, 1603-1705: Records
detailing the interactions between the Massachusetts Bay government and native
peoples in New England and New York. Boston, MA: Massachusetts
Archive Collection Volume 30. Also Dow, George Francis, ed. 1911-1921. Records
and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts (8 vols.),
Volume 1 (Salem, Mass., Essex Institute). The original source is Mather,
Richard. 1653. Tears of repentence: or, A further narrative of the progress of
the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England:….(London, Peter Cole). Richard Mather’s account of his voyage to Cape Ann
in 1635 was reprinted in 1869 in Journal
and Life of Richard Mather, 1596-1669, Collections of the Dorchester
Antiquarian and Historical Society 3, Boston: David Clapp. Richard Mather was
the father of Increase Mather and grandfather of Cotton Mather, also prominent
Puritan clerics.
[11] Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to
New England, 1620-1633, Vol. 1. For a perspective on the immigrants, see William Richard Cutter, ed. 1874
compendium, New England families, genealogical
and memorial, 1915; The original lists of persons of quality;
emigrants; religious exiles; political rebels; serving men sold for a term of
years; apprentices; children stolen; maidens pressed; and others who went from
Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600-1700 with
their ages and the names of the ships in which they embarked, and other
interesting particulars, including John Hotten’s “Original Lists”: http://www.archive.org/stream/originallistsofp00hottuoft#page/n5/mode/2up. Also James Savage’s classic Genealogical Dictionary of the First
Planters, in The New England Historical and
Genealogical Register (1873) 27 (2); and Henry Waters’ The New
England Historical and Genealogical Register (1882) 36: 45; 51; Frank Holmes’
Directory of Ancestral Heads of New
England Families, 1620-1700 (1964); H. F. Andrews’ List of Freemen, Massachusetts Bay Colony 1630-1691, with the Freeman’s
Oath (1906): https://archive.org/details/listoffreemenmas00andr. Woolworkers and weavers of the Great Migration tended to settle more
heavily in Ipswich, Rowley, Georgetown, Newbury, and the interior of Essex
County. See Thomas Gage, History of Rowley, Anciently including
Bradford, Boxford and Georgetown for the Year 1639 to the Present Time (1840); Thomas Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Part I: Records and Dispositions
of the Usurpation Period (1905); and John Currier, History of Newbury, Mass. 1635-1902 (1902). For insight on the Pilgrim
and Puritan religious regimes, see William Bradford and Edward Winslow, Mourt’s
Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (1622); Francis Bremer, The
Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (1996);
and Bremer and Webster, eds., Puritans
and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia (2006). For
information on the Native American experience, see especially Gookin, Daniel, 1677 (Published 1836, reprinted 2003). Historical Account of the Doings and
Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the years 1670-1677 (Whitefish,
Montana: Kessinger Publishing); Lepore, Jill, 1998, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
(New York: Vintage); Cogley, Richard W., 1999, Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press); Eames, Wilberforce, ed., 1915, John Eliot and the Indians 1652-1657:
Letters Addressed to Rev. Jonathan Hanmer of Barnstaple, England (New York:
Museum of the American Indian): https://archive.org/stream/cu31924104076884#page/n1/mode/2up; Eliot, John, 1671, Brief Narrative of the
Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England, in the Year 1670 (London: John Allen): http://www.bartleby.com/43/12.html; Fisher, Linford D., 2017, Why Shall Wee Have Peace to
Bee Made Slaves: Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War, Ethnohistory 64 (1): 91-114; and
Calloway, Colin, 1997, After King Philip’s War: Presence and
Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England.
General Sources for the History of Essex County, Massachusetts:
See Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and their Primary
Sources Archive for Essex County History at http://www.usingessexhistory.org/primaryresources.shtml.
Secondary sources for the
history of Essex County, Massachusetts: Fuess, Claude E., 1935, The Story of Essex County, Vol. I. (Phillips
Academy, Andover, MA. New York: American Historical Society); Hough, Walter,
1888, History of Essex County,
Massachusetts, Volume 2, Part 1; Tracy, Cyrus Mason, 1878, Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, embracing a history of
the county for its first settlement to the present time…. (Boston: C. F.
Jewett and Co.): https://archive.org/details/standardhistoryo00trac; and Hurd, Duane Hamilton. 1888. History of Essex County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of
Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men (Philadelphia, PA: J. W. Lewis &
Co.).
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