Simon Bradstreet

Engraving based on a painting in the Massachusetts State House showing Simon Bradstreet.

Bradstreet's signature

Simon Bradstreet (date of birth unknown, baptized March 18 ^jul. / March 28, 1603 ^greg. In Lincolnshire , England ; † March 27 ^jul. / April 6, 1697 ^greg. In Salem , Province of Massachusetts Bay ) was a colonial official, Businessman, diplomat, and the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony . He arrived in Massachusetts with John Winthrop in 1630 and was immediately involved in politics, but it was not until 1679 that he became governor of the colony. He completed a variety of diplomatic missions and served as an agent for the Crown in London and as a commissioner for the New England Confederation . Politically, he was comparatively moderate and represented minority opinions that demanded the right to freedom of expression and the support of Charles II after his re-accession to the throne .

Bradstreet's wife Anne was the daughter of Thomas Dudley . Because of his old age of 93, Cotton Mather referred to him as Nestor New England . His descendants include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and David Souter .

Childhood and early career

Simon Bradstreet was born the second of three sons to his parents Simon and Margaret Bradstreet. His father had Irish ancestry and was the rector of the parish church in Lincolnshire. The young Simon took over the Puritan religious views of his father, who appeared publicly as a nonconformist , very early on. Bradstreet attended Emmanuel College , Cambridge at the age of 16 and studied there for two years, before entering the service of the Earl of Lincoln as an assistant to Thomas Dudley after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1622 .

It is a matter of dispute whether he returned to Emmanuel College from 1623 to 1624. A person of that name who received a Master of Arts degree was recorded during this period , but genealogist Robert Anderson is convinced that it is not the same man. John Preston , who had been his guardian since 1622 , recommended Bradstreet to be the tutor for Lord Rich, then 12 .

Bradstreet took over from Dudley when he moved to Boston, Lincolnshire in 1624 . After his return a few years later, Bradstreet served briefly as a stewardess for Anne Neville and married Dudley's 16-year-old daughter Anne Bradstreet in 1628 . In the same year he founded the Massachusetts Bay Company with other people from the circle of the Earl of Lincoln with the aim of building a Puritan colony in North America . In April 1630 the Bradstreets sailed together with the Dudleys and colonial governor John Winthrop towards Massachusetts Bay , where they founded Boston as the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony .

Massachusetts

Massachusetts Bay Colony

This house, now in North Andover , has long been believed to have belonged to the Bradstreets. However, in the 20th century it was found that it was not built until 1715. Today it is registered as Parson Barnard House on the NRHP .

After a short stay in Boston, Bradstreet moved as a neighbor of the Dudleys into his first house in Newtowne (now Cambridge ), right on what is now Harvard Square . In 1637 he was one of the judges in the trial of Anne Hutchinson , who voted for her exile from the colony, during the antinomist dispute that lasted from 1636 to 1638 . In 1639 property was transferred to Salem , near which John Endecott also lived. Bradstreet lived there for some time until he moved to Ipswich in 1634 and one of the first settlers to Andover in 1648 . In 1666 his house was destroyed by fire, presumably due to the "negligence of a maid".

Bradstreet's business was very diverse. Among other things, he speculated with land and, together with other colonists, invested in a ship for coastal trade . In 1660 he bought shares in the real estate development company Atherton Company , which was active in what is now southern Rhode Island . There he rose to the top of the management board and distributed flyers promoting the company's properties. At the end of his life Bradstreet owned land totaling 1,500  acres (6.1  km² ), which were spread over several individual areas in five parishes of the colony. It is also known that he had two slaves named Hannah and Billah.

“If ever two were one, then surely we;
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold. "

- Anne Bradstreet : To my Dear and Loving Husband (excerpt)

Bradstreet was very involved in colonial politics and was colonial secretary from the first meeting of the colonial council until 1644. He was a moderate force and opposed laws and court rulings that punished people for publicly criticizing government officials. He also did not participate in the witch hysteria in Salem, which culminated in the Salem witch trials in 1692 .

For many years, Simon Bradstreet represented Massachusetts in the New England Confederation , the military alliance that coordinated the defense of the colonies in New England. He spoke out openly against several military actions, in particular against an official intervention of the colony in the Acadian Civil War and against an attack on Nieuw Nederland during the Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654) . However, he did not gain a higher office in the colonial administration until 1678 when he was elected lieutenant governor under John Leverett .

Bradstreet was entrusted with a number of diplomatic missions to negotiate with settlers, other English colonies and the Dutch in Nieuw Amsterdam . In 1650 he was posted to Hartford , Connecticut , to help negotiate the Hartford Treaty , which laid the border between the English colonies and Nieuw Amsterdam. In the following years he was able to agree with settlers in York and Kittery to put themselves under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

After the Stuart Restoration , which brought Charles II back to the English throne, the colonial administration became increasingly concerned about its charter rights. In 1661 Bradstreet chaired a legislative committee to "consider and discuss matters such as patent rights, privileges and duties to the king". The committee wrote a letter to the king, which on the one hand enumerated the colonial rights under the charter and on the other hand contained a declaration of loyalty to the crown. Bradstreet, along with John Norton , was chosen to personally deliver the letter to the King. He then renewed the charter, but gave both of them their own letter with conditions for his consent. This included, among other things, that the colony had to expand its religious tolerance in order to accept the Church of England and religious minorities such as the Quakers .

On their return to Massachusetts, both were harshly criticized by the hardliners in the colonial legislature , but Bradstreet defended the fulfillment of the king's wishes as the safest behavior. The colony was divided over how to respond to the king's demands; Bradstreet took the moderate position that it was best to grant wishes. However, the hardliners were able to prevail and retained the rights secured in the charter. In the 1660s the colony was ruled under this stipulation by Governors John Endecott and Richard Bellingham . Since the English king was busy with another Anglo-Dutch war and domestic politics during this period , the colony was able to maintain its position until the mid-1670s. The relationship between the colony and the king was finally destroyed when the king renewed his demands and the hardliners in the colony again resisted.

Time as governor

The Bradstreet mansion in Salem

When John Leverett died in early 1679, the previous Lieutenant Governor Bradstreet was his successor. Leverett had opposed the implementation of the King's demands, and it was too late to change policy. Bradstreet was the last governor under the original charter. His lieutenant governor Thomas Danforth , like Leverett, was one of the opponents of the royal demands, which did not make governing easy for Bradstreet.

During his tenure, Edward Randolph tried to enforce the Navigational Acts that made some of the colony's forms of commerce illegal. However, these attempts were blocked by both the merchants and colonial officials sympathizing with them, despite Bradstreet's support for Randolph. Juries regularly refused to convict ships in violation of the new laws, and in one case Bradstreet tried three times to persuade them to give another verdict.

Eventually, the Massachusetts General Court decided that it needed its own mechanisms to implement the new laws. In 1681 there was a heated argument about the establishment of a naval office, which was supported by the moderate forces and rejected by the opponents of the navigation acts. The law that was finally passed on this subject was a victory for the opponents, as it made the implementation of the new trade laws much more difficult and exposed them to the risk of reprisals. Bradstreet refused to sign that bill, which at least partially helped him get re-elected in 1682. He then used his legal authority to further undermine the effects of the new laws.

Randolph's threats to officially report the colony's intransigence prompted the colonial government to send envoys to England to discuss the case. Their powers were limited, however, and soon after they arrived the Board of Trade issued the colony an ultimatum: either the negotiators should be granted additional powers, including changes to the charter, or the charter could be invalidated. The General Court responded by instructing the negotiators to take a hard line. This was followed by court trials from 1683, at the end of which the Massachusetts Charter was formally declared invalid on October 23, 1684.

The Dominion and temporary return as governor

See also : Dominion of New England  and Boston Rebellion 1689

Depiction of the arrest of Edmund Andros

Bradstreet's grave in Salem

In 1684, Charles II established the Dominion of New England , which placed all previous colonies in New England under a single administration. Bradstreet's brother-in-law Joseph Dudley was installed by James II as President of the New England Council in 1685 and took control of the colony in May 1686. Bradstreet himself was offered a position on the Colonial Council, but he declined. In December 1686, Dudley was replaced by Sir Edmund Andros , who quickly became very unpopular in Massachusetts because, among other things, he questioned existing property rights to land and confiscated buildings of the Congregational Churches in order to make them available to the Church of England . Other colonies in the Dominion also rejected Andros as governor.

As early as June 1689, before news of the Glorious Revolution , which took place in December 1688, reached Boston, there were first tendencies towards an uprising against Andros. After Wilhelm III. together with Mary II had ascended the English throne, the London-based representatives for Massachusetts Increase Mather and Sir William Phips submitted a petition to the kings and the Board of Trade , in which they called for the restoration of the Massachusetts Charter. Mather was also able to delay the message to Andros about the revolution. He had already sent a letter to Bradstreet prepared before the revolution, informing him that the charter had been illegally canceled and that the colonists "should be prepared for change". Rumors of the revolution reached the colony before the official news, however, and Bradstreet is seen as one of the possible organizers of the subsequent Boston uprising . He wrote an open letter to Andros that day asking him to resign to calm the mob. Andros, who had fled to Castle Island in the meantime , surrendered and was brought to England after several months of imprisonment to bring him to justice.

In the wake of Andros' arrest, a Security Council was formed, headed by Bradstreet as President. The council wrote a letter to the kings reigning jointly, justifying the actions of the colony in the same spirit in which William had defended his invasion of England. Likewise, the council decided to revert to the form of government under the old charter. Bradstreet was re-elected governor and re-elected annually until 1692. During this time he had to defend the colony against his adversaries who were against the restoration of the charter and whom he described in letters sent to London as "troublemakers" and "strangers who cause trouble". The northern border of the colony was also involved in the King William's War and thus exposed to regular attacks by the Indians. Bradstreet approved William Phips' campaigns against Acadia and Québec in 1690 .

In 1691, Kings William and Mary of England issued a charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts Bay and appointed Phips its first governor. Bradstreet was offered a position on the provincial council, which he declined. He died at his home in Salem in 1697 at the age of 93. Because of his old age, Cotton Mather called him " Nestor of New England".

Descendants and inheritance

Simon Bradstreet was buried at the Charter Street Burying Ground in the Charter Street Historic District in Salem. The poems of his first wife Anne, who died in 1672, which express, among other things, her lasting affection for her husband, were published in England as early as 1650. They had eight children together, seven of whom survived childhood. In 1676 Bradstreet married the widowed Ann Gardner.

His numerous descendants include lawyers Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and David Souter , former US President Herbert Hoover , former first lady Jane Pierce and actor Humphrey Bogart .

literature

• Robert Charles Anderson: The great migration begins. Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633 . Ed .: New England Historic Genealogical Society. tape 1 : A-F . New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston 1995, ISBN 0-88082-042-X .
• Alice Baker: The Adventures of Baptiste . In: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (ed.): History and proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley memorial association - 1870–1879 . tape 4 . Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, MA 1905, OCLC 3384857 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
• Viola Florence Barnes: The Dominion of New England. A Study in British Colonial Policy (=  American Classics ). F. Ungar Pub. Co., New York 1960, OCLC 395292 .
• Emery John Battis: Saints and sectaries. Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony . Ed .: Institute of Early American History and Culture. University of North Carolina Press, Williamsburg, VA 1962, OCLC 466564 .
• Robert M. Bliss: Revolution and empire. English politics and the American colonies in the seventeenth century (=  Studies in imperialism [Manchester, England] ). Manchester University Press, Manchester / New York 1990, ISBN 0-7190-4209-7 .
• Charles Knowles Bolton: The founders. Portraits of persons born abroad who came to the Colonies in North America before the year 1701 . tape 2 . Boston Athenaeum, no location 1919, OCLC 861232502 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
• Anne Bradstreet , Charles Eliot Norton, Frank Easton Hopkins: The poems of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) together with her prose remains . The Duodecimos, no location 1897, OCLC 894153288 .
• Louise A. Breen: Transgressing the Bounds . subversive enterprises among the Puritan elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692 (=  Religion in America series [Oxford University Press] ). Oxford University Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-19-513800-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
• Helen Campbell: Anne Bradstreet and her time . Echo Library, Teddington, Middlesex (England) 2007, ISBN 978-1-4068-4173-2 .
• George Edward Cokayne: Complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant (=  Genealogist . Band 8 ). G. Bell & Sons, London 1898, OCLC 680482758 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• William Richard Cutter: Genealogical and personal memoirs relating to the families of Boston and eastern Massachusetts . tape 1 . Genealogical Pub. Co., Baltimore, MD 1995, ISBN 0-8063-4549-7 (first edition: 1908).
• John Andrew Doyle: English colonies in America . tape 3 . Henry Holt and Co., New York 1887, OCLC 562240731 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Michael Garibaldi Hall: Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676-1703 . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC 1960, OCLC 423939 .
• Augustine Jones: The life and work of Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts (=  Library of American civilization . No. 12299 ). Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, New York 1899, OCLC 11938883 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
• John Frederick Martin: Profits in the wilderness. Entrepreneurship and the founding of New England towns in the seventeenth century . Ed .: Institute of Early American History and Culture. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1991, ISBN 0-8078-2001-6 .
• Wendy Martin: An American triptych. Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1984, ISBN 0-8078-1573-X .
• Cotton Mather et al .: Magnalia Christi americana or, The ecclesiastical history of New England. From its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of Our Lord 1698. 2 volumes in 7 parts, 1853–1855. S. Andrus and Son, Hartford, CT, OCLC 3011211 .
• Jacob Bailey Moore: Lives of the Governors of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620, to the union of the two colonies in 1692 . CD Strong, Boston 1851, OCLC 11362972 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Ian K. Steele: Origins of Boston's Revolutionary Declaration of April 18, 1689 . In: Colonial Society of Massachusetts; Northeastern University (Ed.): The New England Quarterly . tape 62 , no. 1 , March 1989, ISSN  0028-4866 , OCLC 1783237 , pp. 75-81 , JSTOR : 366211 .
• Roger Thompson: Mobility and Migration East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640 . University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA 2009, ISBN 978-1-55849-796-2 .

Individual evidence

This article or section needs to be revised: Please send insufficient citation to Wikipedia: Adjust citation rules , see also Help: Individual references
Please help to improve it and then remove this marking.

1. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Mather et al., P. 140.
2. ↑ cf. Cutter, pp. 123-124.
3. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 377.
4. ↑ Bradstreet, Simon . In: John Venn , John Archibald Venn (eds.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 1: From the earliest times to 1751 , volume 1 : Abbas-Cutts . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1922, pp. 203 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
5. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Cutter, p. 124.
6. ↑ cf. Anderson, pp. 1: 210.
7. ↑ cf. Cokayne, p. 67.
8. ↑ Alexander Gordon:  Preston, John (1587-1628) . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 46:  Pocock - Puckering. MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1896, pp 308 - 312 (English).
9. ↑ ^{a b c d} cf. Moore, p. 378.
10. ↑ cf. Jones, pp. 44-46, 55.
11. ^ The Parson Barnard House. North Andover Historical Society, accessed November 4, 2014 . 
12. ↑ cf. Campbell, p. 38.
13. ↑ cf. Battis, p. 190.
14. ↑ cf. Campbell, p. 41.
15. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Anderson, pp. 1: 214.
16. ↑ cf. Martin (1991), pp. 66, 72-73.
17. ↑ cf. Thompson, p. 77.
18. ↑ cf. Anderson, pp. 1: 211.
19. ↑ cf. Bradstreet, p. 200.
20. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Moore, p. 381.
21. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 379.
22. ↑ cf. Breen, pp. 122, 135.
23. ↑ cf. Bolton, pp. 355, 415.
24. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 382.
25. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 383.
26. ↑ ^{a b c} cf. Moore, p. 384.
27. ↑ cf. Bliss, p. 158.
28. ↑ cf. Moore, pp. 360-361.
29. ↑ cf. Doyle, pp. 150-151.
30. ↑ cf. Doyle, pp. 195-202.
31. ↑ cf. Hall, p. 25.
32. ↑ cf. Hall, p. 60.
33. ↑ cf. Hall, pp. 70-72.
34. ↑ cf. Hall, p. 74.
35. ↑ cf. Hall, pp. 77-78.
36. ↑ cf. Hall, pp. 81-83.
37. ↑ cf. Barnes, pp. 29-30.
38. ↑ cf. Barnes, p. 54.
39. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 385.
40. ↑ cf. Moore, pp. 410-413.
41. ↑ cf. Moore, pp. 414-416.
42. ↑ cf. Barnes, pp. 234-235.
43. ↑ cf. Barnes, p. 238.
44. ↑ cf. Steele, p. 77.
45. ↑ cf. Steele, p. 78.
46. ↑ cf. Moore, pp. 319, 417-419.
47. ↑ cf. Sosin, p. 93.
48. ↑ cf. Moore, pp. 386-387.
49. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Barnes, pp. 267-269.
50. ↑ cf. Sosin, p. 97.
51. ↑ cf. Baker, pp. 344-346.
52. ↑ cf. Moore, p. 387.
53. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Anderson, pp. 1: 213.
54. ↑ cf. Martin (1984), pp. 27-34, 68.
55. ↑ William Addams Reitwiesner: The Ancestors of Senator John Forbes Kerry. Retrieved November 6, 2014 . 

Web links

Commons : Simon Bradstreet  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files