The Decline of the Plymouth Colony

[Draggingtree]

The Decline of the Plymouth Colony

NOVEMBER 27, 2014 Murray N. Rothbard

 

[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, chapter 36, "King George's War.]

 

What, in all this time, was happening to Plymouth, the mother colony of all New England? Succinctly, it was rapidly and irretrievably declining. As we have seen, its fur trade had virtually disappeared by 1640. And for the next 20 years, only further decline ensued. By the mid-1640s the town of Plymouth was virtually a ghost town; and economically the colony had become a backwater of Massachusetts Bay.

 

By the 1640s Plymouth, like Massachusetts, found the intensity of its religious zeal on the wane, and heresy and "moral" laxity were increasing. Plymouth faced a crossroads on how to react to this development: by liberty and toleration or by following Massachusetts' path of persecution? The critical point came in 1645 when William Vassall, a leading merchant, presented to the General Court of Plymouth as well as to that of Massachusetts Bay a petition for complete religious liberty — to grant "full and free tolerance of religion to all men that will preserve the civil peace and submit unto the government." "All men" meant exactly that, including Familists, Roman Catholics, and Jews. There was great sentiment in the General Court in favor of the Vassall petition. It commanded the support, in fact, of a majority of the chamber of deputies, and even of such an old roustabout as Capt. Miles Standish. But the ruling oligarchy of the colony, headed by Governor Bradford, Thomas Prence, and Edward Winslow, strongly opposed religious liberty and was able to block its approval

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