Abstract
Forty years after the history-making events at Lexington and Concord, John Adams wrote to Jedidiah Morse, a geographer and historian as well as a Congregational minister, remarking strongly that the episcopacy question had been a lively and divisive issue at the time of the Revolution.1 Adams asked Morse rhetorically, ‘Where is the man to be found at this day, when we see Methodistical bishops, bishops of the church of England, and bishops, archbishops, and Jesuits of the church of Rome, with indifference, who will believe that the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed fifty years ago, as much as any other cause, to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of parliament over the colonies?’2 The former president of the United States was certain that ‘The objection was not merely to the office of bishop, though even that was dreaded, but to the authority of parliament, on which it must be founded’.3 Continuing, Adams remarked, ‘But if parliament can erect dioceses and appoint bishops, they may introduce the whole hierarchy, establish tithes, forbid marriages and funerals, establish religions, forbid Dissenters, make schism heresy, impose penalties extending to life and limb as well as to liberty and property’.4
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Notes
Larzer Ziff, ed., John Cotton and the Churches of New England (Cambridge, 1968): 136–8, 175–6;
Everett Emerson, John Cotton, Revised edition (Boston, 1990): 6;
Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton, 1962);
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982).
J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994): 245–6.
Henry W. Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day (Boston, 1882) I: 58–83.
Increase Mather, A Narrative of the Miseries of New-England, by Reason of an Arbitrary Government Erected there under Sir Edmund Andros (London, 1688; Boston, 1689, 1775); The Revolution in New England Justified and the People there Vindicated (Boston, 1691).
Robert M. Middlekauff, The Mathers. Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York, 1971): 87.
Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, 1991).
Julius Herbert Tuttle, ‘The Libraries of the Mathers’, P.A.A.S. 20 (1911): 268–356. William Prynne. Sixteen Quaeres Proposed to Our Lord Prelates (Amsterdam, 1637); [David Calderwood] . The Pastor and Prelate, or Reformation and Conformitie Shortly Compared by the Word of God, by Antiquity and the Proceedings of the Ancient Kirk (Leyden, 1628) and also his The Presbyterian Government is Divine; Reasons to Prove that it is Unlawful to Hear the Ministers of England; and That King may Abrogate Prelacy Without any Violation of his Oath (n.p., n.d.).
Thomas J. Holmes, Increase Mather: A Bibliography of his Works (Cleveland, 1931) I: 46.
William Henry Whitmore, ed. The Andros Tracts, The Prince Society (Boston, 1870) II: 211.
K. G. Davies, ‘The Revolutions in America’, in Robert Beddard, ed. The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991): 256–60.
David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972): 348.
Kenneth Silverman, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge, 1971): 216.
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992): 61–2, 109, 174–6.
Gordon S. Wood. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992): 61–2, 109, 174–6.
Gordon S. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, W.M.Q., Third series XXXIX (1982): 401–1.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967): 94–5.
G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston, 1970): 241–64.
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© 2008 James B. Bell
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Bell, J.B. (2008). The Seeds of Discord: An English Church Established in Boston. In: A War of Religion. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583214_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583214_1
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