methods are used for the taxation of banks, insurance companies, railways, tramways, trust companies and corporations, some of them noteworthy. In the case of corporations realty and machinery are taxed generally by the local authorities, and stock values by the commonwealth. The Boston stock exchange is the second of the country in the extent of the securities in which it deals. The proportion of holders of U.S. bonds among the total population is higher than that in any other state.
History.—It is possible that the coasts of Massachusetts were visited by the Northmen, and by the earliest navigators who followed Cabot, but this is only conjecture. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold landed at and named Cape Cod and coasted as far south as the present No-Man’s Land, which he named Martin’s or Martha’s Vineyard, a name later transferred to a neighbouring larger island. Pring and Champlain at a later date coasted along what is now Massachusetts, but the map of Champlain is hardly recognizable. The first sufficient explorations for cartographical record were made by John Smith in 1614, and his map was long the basis—particularly in its nomenclature—of later maps. Permanency of occupation, however, dates from the voyage of the “Mayflower,” which brought about a hundred men, women and children who had mostly belonged to an English sect of Separatists, originating in Yorkshire, but who had passed a period of exile for religion’s sake in Holland. In the early winter of 1620 they made the coast of Cape Cod; they had intended to make their landing farther south, within the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, which had granted them a patent; but stress of weather prevented their doing so. Finding themselves without warrant in a region beyond their patent, and threatened with the desertion of disaffected members of their company (probably all servants or men of the “lesser” sort) unless concessions were made to these, they drew up and signed before landing a democratic compact of government which is accounted the earliest written constitution in history.[1] After some exploration of the coast they made a permanent landing on the 21st of December 1620 (N.S.) at Plymouth, a harbour which had already been so named by John Smith in his maps of 1614 and 1616. During the first winter nearly one-half their number died from exposure, and the relations of the survivors with their partners of the London Company, who had insisted that for seven years the plantation should be managed as a joint stock company, were unsatisfactory. However, about thirty-five new colonists arrived in 1622 and ninety-six more in 1623. The abandonment of the communal system was begun in the latter year, and with the dissolution of the partnership with the adventurers of the London Company in 1627 Plymouth became a corporate colony with its chief authority vested in the whole body of freemen convened in the General Court. Upon the death of the first governor, John Carver, in the spring of 1621, the General Court chose William Bradford as his successor, and with him was chosen one assistant. The subsequent elections were annual, and within a few years the number of assistants was increased to seven. The General Court was the legislature and the electorate; the governor and assistants were the executive and the judiciary. The whole body of freemen composed the General Court until other towns than Plymouth had been organized, the first of which were Scituate in 1636 and Duxbury in 1637, and then the representative form of government was adopted and there was a gradual differentiation between Plymouth the town and Plymouth the colony. When it had become known that the colony was within the territory of the New England Council, John Pierce, in 1621, procured from that body a grant which made the colonists its tenants. A year later Pierce surrendered this and procured another, which in effect made him proprietor of the colony, but he was twice shipwrecked and was forced to assign to the adventurers his second patent. In 1629 Governor Bradford procured from the same council a definite grant of the tract which corresponds to the south-eastern portion of the present state. But all attempts to procure a royal charter for Plymouth Colony were unsuccessful, and in 1691 it was annexed to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay under what is termed the Provincial Charter.
King James having by patent in 1620 created a Council for New England to whom he made a large grant of territory, the council in 1628 made a sub-grant, confirmed by a royal charter that passed the seals on the 4th of March 1629, to the “Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in Newe England.” There had been various minor expeditions during the few years since Smith was on the coast before this company, in the Puritan interests, had sent over John Endecott with a party in 1628 to what is now Salem. In 1630 the government of the company, with questionable right (for the charter seems evidently to have contemplated the residence of the company in England), transferred itself to their territory, and under the leadership of John Winthrop laid the foundations anew of the Massachusetts colony, when they first settled Boston in the autumn of that year. Winthrop served repeatedly, though not continuously, as governor of the colony till his death in 1649, his rejection in 1636 being due to a party of theological revolt which chose Henry Vane (afterwards Sir Henry) to the office. This was an incident in a famous episode, important rather as a symptom than in itself, namely, the Antinomian controversy, “New England’s earliest protest against formulas,” in which Vane and Ann Hutchinson took the lead in criticizing the official orthodoxy of the colony.
The magistrates successfully asserted themselves to the discomfiture of their critics (Ann Hutchinson being banished), and this was characteristic of the colony’s early history. The charter gave the company control over the admission of “freemen” (co-partners in the enterprise, and voters), “full and absolute power and authority to correct, punish and rule” subjects settling in the territory comprised in their grant, and power to “resist . . . by all fitting ways and means whatever” all persons attempting the “destruction, invasion, detriment or annoyance” of the plantation. Some writers deny the company’s right under this instrument to rule as they proceeded to do; but at any rate what they did was to make the suffrage dependent on stringent religious tests, and to repress with determined zeal all theological “vagaries” and “whimsies.” Criticism of church or magistrates was not tolerated. Laws were modelled closely on the Bible. The clergy were a ruling class. The government was frankly theocratic. Said Winthrop (1637): “We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercises besides what authority hath already set up”; and a synod at Cambridge in 1637 catalogued eighty-two “opinions, some blasphemous, others erroneous and all unsafe,” besides nine “unwholesome expressions,” all of which were consigned “to the devil of hell from whence they came.” Another synod at Cambridge in 1647 more formally established the principle of state control. The legislation against Baptists (about 1644–1678) and the persecution of the Quakers (especially 1656–1662) partook of the brutality of the time, including scourging, boring of tongues, cutting of ears and in rare cases capital punishment. It cannot be denied that men like Roger Williams and some of the persecuted Quakers, though undeniably contentious and aggressive in their conscientious dissent, showed a spirit which to-day seems sweeter in tolerance and humanity than that of the Puritans. And it seems necessary to emphasize these facts because until about 1870 it was almost unchallenged tradition to regard the men of Massachusetts Bay as seekers and champions of “religious liberty.” They left England, indeed, for liberty to discard the “poperies” of the English Church, and once in Massachusetts they even discarded far more than those
- ↑ In this document, whose democracy is characteristic of differences between the Plymouth Colony and that of Massachusetts Bay, the signatories “solemnly and mutually . . . covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame—[laws]—unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” This was signed 11/21 of November 1620 by 41 persons.
