The first law in Massachusetts calling for public education, this act required that all towns of 50 or more families “appoint one within their own town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” Towns with 100 households or more were also to hire a master to run a grammar school that would teach youths in a classical curriculum to prepare them to attend Harvard College.
Known also as the Old Deluder Satan Act, the 1647 law followed five years after Massachusetts’s first educational legislation, the 1642 law that required that all families or masters of apprentices take responsibility for teaching basic reading and writing to the children in their charge. The 1647 law, then, marked a shift of responsibility for education from the family to the community, although children being taught at home were still not required to attend public schools. The style of the act had wide-ranging effects on New England’s educational culture: By 1677 it had been copied by the legal codes of Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth.
The 1647 act had many restrictions, though. Its educational provisions were only for boys, as girls were not permitted to attend the grammar schools it created and could only hope for an education in basic literacy at home or in a “dame school.” Although it provided for education, the law did not necessarily create public schools, as teaching was often carried out in private homes. Funding was tenuous, with costs being paid through annual taxation, not through endowments of land or money like most European schools of the period. And the wars of the late 17th century also affected children’s school lives. During King Philip’s War outlying towns petitioned the assembly for relief from requiring children to attend schools out of fear of capture by Native Americans. The fear continued into the next century. In March 1703 the Massachusetts House passed a law exempting towns from penalties for not enforcing the 1647 act because “Diverse of the frontier Towns which are by Law Obliged to Maintain a Grammar School, are in such Hazard of the Enemy, that it is unsafe for the children to Passe to and from the Schools.”
Further reading: James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).
—George W. Boudreau
Massasoit (1580?-1 662?) sachem
Massasoit, meaning “Great Leader,” was the sachem of the Pokanocket Wampanoag Indians and an early ally of the Pilgrims in Plymouth. He was also called Ousamequin, meaning “Yellow Feather.” The English labeled him “king” of some 6,000 Wampanoag people living in more than 20 villages. The Wampanoag were a loose confederation of ALGonquiN-speaking Natives in southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. Massasoit’s home village of Pokanocket, also known as Mount Hope, was located 60 miles west of Plymouth on Narragansett Bay, in present-day Bristol and Warren, Rhode Island.
Massasoit visited the Pilgrim settlers in Plymouth in March 1621 with his brother Quadequina and 60 warriors to establish relations with the English settlers. Massasoit and Governor John Carver agreed to a treaty of alliance and mutual respect. For the English in Plymouth, this treaty meant they were free from the fear of an attack by the Wampanoag surrounding them. For the Wampanoag the treaty meant gaining a new ally against their traditional rivals, the powerful Narragansett Indians to the west. Massasoit’s treaty would keep the English settlers of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag at peace for more than 50 years. As an indication of their friendly relations, sometime in the fall of 1621 Massasoit accompanied 90 of his fellow Wampanoag to join the Pilgrims in Plymouth for several days of feasting and celebrating, known popularly as the first giving. Intelligent, diplomatic, and respected by both English and Native populations, Massasoit died around 1662 and was succeeded by his sons Alexander (Wamsutta) and Philip (Metacom), who later led a war against the settlers.
Further reading: Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).
—Stephen C. O’Neill
Mather, Cotton (1663-1728) Puritan minister Cotton, the son of Increase Mather, joined him as pastor of the Second (Old North) Church of Boston in 1683 and remained there until his death. A child prodigy who graduated from Harvard College at age 15, he was more liberal than his father in favoring the controversial Half-Way Covenant (the baptism of the children of “halfway” church members who had been baptized but had not yet experienced salvation). Otherwise, he shared Increase’s strict religious beliefs: Cotton opposed the right of nearby ministers to veto congregations’ choices of their preachers, and he fought the admission of any person of good character to Communion, as favored by Northampton’s Solomon Stoddard. Mather wrote incessantly. His masterpiece, Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702, related the history of New England as the work of divinely inspired institutions and men who, like John Winthrop and his own grandfather John Cotton, ranked equally with biblical figures such as Moses and Nehemiah.
Mather was also involved in politics. A key actor in the Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts, in 1689 he was among those who imprisoned Sir Edmund Andros, the royally appointed governor general of New England, when he learned that King James II (1685-88) had been overthrown in Britain. He welcomed the new governor, Sir William Phips, to Boston and baptized him. At the same time, Mather staunchly defended the proceedings against the supposed witches at Salem, most famously in his book Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), which led many to ridicule him once the crisis passed. Mather’s intense spirituality appears in his diary, in which he claimed to receive visits from angels, predicted the end of the world, and considered such minor ailments as toothaches to have divine importance.
Mather remained active in Massachusetts politics throughout his adult life. He switched allegiance frequently, sometimes opposing and sometimes supporting the governor, before settling down as a partisan of Governor Samuel Shute and Lieutenant Governor William Dummer from 1716 until his death. Two reasons explain this: His father negotiated the new charter under which they served, and a fellow agent and his son, Elisha Cooke, Sr., and Jr., led the opposition that charged that the Mathers had sold their countrymen out by acquiescing to royal government.
Despite his traditional religious ways, Mather was a strong advocate of Newtonian science and the method of smallpox inoculation introduced in Boston by Dr. Zabdiel Boylston in 1721. Mather’s tract The Angel of Bethesda, although not published until 1976, showed him at his best, as a learned man, aware that religion and science were compatible and contributed to human “progress.” However, he is still best remembered for his belief in witchcraft and some of the extreme statements in his diary, which can all too easily be used to make the New England Puritans look ridiculous.
Further reading: Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
—William Pencak
Mather, Increase (1639-1723) Puritan minister Increase Mather was the foremost Puritan minister of his times. Son of another prominent minister, Richard Mather, he received a B. A. from Harvard College in 1656 and then went to England to study, earning an M. A. at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1658. Returning to Massachusetts in 1661, he married Maria Cotton, daughter of John, the most famous minister of the first generation of Puritans in New England. Their first son, Cotton Mather, became in time as influential as his father.
Throughout his life Increase staunchly supported traditional Puritanism, in which the male members of the congregation chose ministers and fellow church members.
Increase Mather (Library of Congress)
In the 1660s he opposed the Half-Way Covenant, whose supporters hoped to increase church membership by permitting the children of “half-way” members who had been baptized but had not yet experienced salvation to be baptized themselves. Here he conflicted with his more liberal father, who died during this controversy that plagued Massachusetts for a decade. At its height in 1664, Increase became the pastor of the Old North, or Second, Church of Boston, a position he held until his death 59 years later.
For six decades Mather stuck to his rigorous path, preaching and publishing dozens of books and sermons. He considered the Indian uprising of 1675 (King Philip’s War), a Boston fire of 1677, and a smallpox epidemic as divine punishment for the people’s religious laxity. In 1679 he vigorously opposed Northampton’s Solomon Stoddard, who argued that the only way to keep the church alive was to admit those who had not experienced salvation. Mather persuaded a synod of ministers to do likewise. He became president of Harvard College in 1685, reintroducing Greek and Hebrew studies and requiring students to reside at the college and attend their classes. He held this position until 1701, when his political enemies forced him to resign.
Mather began to play an active role in Massachusetts’s politics in the 1680s. He at first staunchly defended the Old Charter of 1629 against the British government, for it, in effect, left Massachusetts completely independent. Upon sailing for England as the province agent in 1688, however, he realized its preservation was impossible. Deftly switching allegiance from King James II (1685-88) to William III (1689-1702) during England’s Glorious Revolution, he was able to obtain a very good deal for Massachusetts: an elected council and a New England sea captain, Sir William Phips, as the first royally appointed governor. However, those of his allies who had remained in New England believed Mather had betrayed them and the Old Charter; throughout the 1690s he defended Phips and his successors, which led to his removal as college president.
Mather changed his political tune and went to the opposition after 1702, when Joseph Dudley assumed the governorship. He tried to oust this staunch supporter of royal power by supporting charges of corruption against him, but Dudley survived and his enemies faded, given the need to mobilize forces in Queen Anne’s War (1702-13). Dudley, like most of the leading ministers in the colony by this time, was more lax on church membership and discipline than was Mather. Dudley wanted the ministers to establish a quasi-Presbyterian government that permitted them to reject pastors chosen by congregations, in general for being too reactionary. Mather successfully fought off this move in 1705. Shortly thereafter he retired from politics, although he continued to write extensively until the end of his life, urging the inhabitants of Massachusetts to renounce their sinful ways and to revert to their God-given status as a “chosen people.”
Further reading: Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
—William Pencak
World History
