Dominion of New England: Sir Edmund Andros and the 1689 Boston Revolt

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By the 1680s New England did not fit England's mercantilist plan. Rocky soil ruled out cash crops, so colonists turned to shipping, timber and fish, smuggled with the Spanish and the Dutch in defiance of the Navigation Acts and began making their own textiles and ironware. Massachusetts ran as a Puritan theocracy, New Haven had sheltered men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, and Boston silversmith John Hull minted the pine tree shilling. The Crown revoked the Massachusetts charter in 1684, and James II merged the colonies from the Delaware River to Maine into the Dominion of New England, modeled on Spanish viceroyalties.

Sir Edmund Andros arrived in Boston in December 1686 and told colonists their rights as Englishmen had stayed behind. He took over a Puritan meeting house for Anglican services, enforced old taxes by decree, limited towns to one meeting a year, jailed the Reverend John Wise and voided land titles, approving only about 20 of hundreds of petitions while adding quitrents. Increase Mather slipped to London in disguise in April 1688, and after the Glorious Revolution he delayed word reaching Andros. On April 18, 1689, Boston militia jailed Andros, Joseph Dudley and the council, and the Dominion collapsed.

• In a Hartford meeting in 1687, the candles went out and the Connecticut charter vanished, by legend into the Charter Oak.
• An Andros official told John Wise he had no more privileges left than a slave.
• Andros insulted the Iroquois at Albany by calling them children rather than brethren.
• In New York, Jacob Leisler overthrew Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson and was later executed for treason.
• The 1691 charter merged Massachusetts and Plymouth and tied voting to property instead of church membership.