Thousands of refugees choked Massachusetts, where they were often unwelcome and became the primary victims of the witch hunts in Salem and seacoast New Hampshire. Under Massachusetts rule, Maine gained the myriad advantages of New England culture: taxpayer-financed public schools, better roads, courthouses, and trade networks, and the town meeting form of government, which Alexis de Tocqueville would credit with cultivating America’s republican citizenry.īut on balance the colonial period was a disaster for the “Eastern Territories.” The Puritans embroiled the region in a century-long series of genocidal wars with New England’s indigenous people, and Maine bore the brunt of the pain on the English side, with every settlement east of Wells wiped out from 1689 to 1713. (“Whatever my body was enforced unto,” he later cryptically told Parliament, “heaven knows my soul did not consent unto.”) Their leader, Edward Godfrey, suddenly and inexplicably reversed himself to endorse annexation after a days-long conference in 1652 with the commissioners. When the Maine settlements refused to capitulate, Massachusetts dispatched waves of commissioners to compel compliance. Once Gorges was dead and the king beheaded, Boston was free to move against its rivals to the north in the postwar years, and its leaders came up with a novel reading of their charter allowing them to claim every English settlement in Maine. Its sympathies lay with Parliament, the victorious side in the Civil War, which had put the Puritan Oliver Cromwell in charge in London. Most of its colonists were from East Anglia, the richest and most entrepreneurial region of England, and were opposed to aristocracy and the established church. Massachusetts Bay, by contrast, was a utopian Calvinist religious project.
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