One of the most important lessons to take with us when we leave off from a visit to the Massachusetts Bay Colony is to understand that rights and responsibilities were built up over time. In the age of big money and big power being able to trigger instantaneous, it takes patience to even look back to a time when it was different.
1652 is the recognized year in history when the Massachusetts Bay Colony became different than what it had been. It is said that by then it was a commonwealth, "performing all the functions of a sovereign state" and "extending its boundaries into Maine and New Hampshire" (Pomfret). Put so simply, it's easy to overlook the precise human involvement which made this so. But there was a long and complicated series of rhetoric and action INSIDE the "sovereignty" and "conquest." And every single idea and action, every person doing anything or doing nothing at all, every victory and loss had controversy. It was the overall picture that stood up at the end of the colonial era and moved forward into a position of BEING the more modern fundamentals of American Society.
Ayup, our visit leaves our heads full of the sounds of hammering and sawing, shaving and imprinting...all that stretching of charter, toe-to-toeing it on talking points, and using a rigorous practice of holding tongue and then unleashing enough evidence to PROVE common ground worth working on. Pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts was a microcosm of the fight to come on a global-scale. But don't take my word for it, ask ABIGAIL. The Massachusetts Historical Society's Online Catalog--Abigail. Looks like one of those massive sites where we might find all the references Pomfret cites as See Also's. Actual historical research doesn't preclude all kinds of contemporary conversations about factors, influence, and effects, especially when we are endeavoring to understand ourselves complex, or more specifically, more than ONE PERSON.
Speaking of just one...How fascinating to see that of a print run of 600 copies, only one copy of THE BOOK OF GENERAL LAWES AND LIBERTYES (published in 1648) existed three years past its publication date because the general court wanted to make a few alterations and so ordered all the copies called in and destroyed. Guess that also happened with gold later in the history of the U.S. And it explains why some people have proven "preoccupied" with recording and preservation concurrent to the kind of social history that clicks along information superhighways never pausing to see who or what it's run over. And yet without some kind of forums for comparison and confrontation, all that court reporting can go to waste too. A Council of State couldn't very well speak to an individual's rights if it didn't have access to ALL law governing that individual, course, without safeguards against that Council of State ABUSING its supremacy individuals and individual places felt better about developing their arguments about codes of conduct and business practices and civil ordinances (including taxation) WITH a little breathing space. At least enough to measure the space between consent and commandeered compliance. Ironic, stemming from a period of human history when religion and government were so intermingled as to constitute the same thing in most instances. Like Native American cosmology in which it was unthinkable/impossible to not be ONE with the land (and so it being alien that a middleman could come between Native Americans and the land), Europeans had "evolved" from a diversity of tribal people into a humanity which was one with religion. As such, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were some of the last purists and it is, often, democracy that gets blamed for destroying the church. A closer examination, of course, brings us to better understand that even a pure faith-based logic is only one logic in a social world (a world with people). And that democracy is more synonymous with commonground than it is with ANY particular which makes up that world or commonground.
Whether or not somebody has a say in whatever is at hand is just a particular. And yet, the Puritans of early Massachusetts were fairly petrified that SOMEBODY might express an individuality that would threaten the commonground they were designing. Part instinct, part intellectual strategy for survival, the Puritans themselves were witness to a world which had long been steered by the nose...as in emperors and religious leaders had oxen chains in ALL the peoples' noses. In that scheme or cosmology there were NO rights except that of supreme authority right to rule. But it was hardly a free-for-all in America, well except for when colonials massacred Native Americans. On the whole EACH point of breathing space and action in creating a commonground that was consensual REQUIRED much individual thought (conscience) and collective conversation (ethics and law). Albeit at different paces and at different levels of commitment.
And what to do when people arrived at different conclusions about the same topic???? You say I'm a sinner for swearing and I claim swearing is yoga...does the matter just go away? How does the matter matter to everything else in the world? Does a world full of sinners make swearing into something else? Or does that world have some rules about swearing in some places and other rules in other places? What happens if the "we" can't get conscience and ethics and laws to match up? Or if the particulars that make up the "we" are all over the place and so we can't see how to determine what is the "we" is saying about something? Or if I want to swear in my head even though some supremacy denies me the right? Or if I don't want to swear but things are changing and society is supporting swearing???? That might be called Massachanging.
What's that? It says on your pocket reference to civility that there's NO SWEARING? What if I can't read and don't BELIEVE you???? Why don't I believe you? Well, with so much propaganda and envisioning writing floating around, I'm not sure what to believe. I like to compare what people say to something tangible even if it's all interpretation and iteration once it's removed from "the power" itself.
What's that? Still sure about death and taxes? Sure that both particulars have been AROUND for a long arse time!
Gottah get onwards in history to Hamilton and Jackson ASAP, falling behind in relevancy of studies spending so much time with colonials! Thanks for letting me use your lantern to see my map.
