MAMassachusetts History

Patuxet, and the sickness that emptied the shore

Between 1616 and 1619 an illness carried ashore by European fishing crews swept the coast from Cape Cod to the Kennebec and emptied whole Wampanoag towns. Patuxet was wiped out. Four years later the Mayflower passengers built their houses on that cleared ground and called it Plymouth. Tisquantum, the one Patuxet man to survive, because he had been kidnapped and carried to Spain and then England, came back to an empty village and became interpreter between the newcomers and Ousamequin, the Pokanoket sachem the English called Massasoit.

These peoples spoke Algonquian languages: Wampanoag on the southeast coast and the islands, Massachusett around the bay whose name the state carries, Nipmuc in the interior uplands, Pocumtuc in the Connecticut valley, Pennacook to the north. They planted maize, beans and squash on river terraces and burned the woodland understory each year to keep it open for deer. Ousamequin's treaty with Plymouth in 1621 was a calculation by a leader who had just lost a devastating share of his people and faced the Narragansett, barely touched by the epidemic, across the bay.

Two colonies, a war, and a witch panic

Plymouth stayed small. The colony that mattered arrived in 1630, when John Winthrop carried the Massachusetts Bay Company charter itself across the Atlantic aboard the Arbella, putting its government out of reach of London. Boston was laid out that year, Boston Latin School opened in 1635 and Harvard College in 1636. Dissenters were expelled: Roger Williams in 1636, who founded Providence, and Anne Hutchinson in 1638.

The reckoning came in 1675, when Metacom, Ousamequin's son, called King Philip by the English, led Wampanoag, Nipmuc and Narragansett fighters against the towns grown up around them. Over fourteen months about half the English settlements in New England were attacked. Measured against population it is the bloodiest war ever fought on this ground. Metacom was killed in August 1676, and the survivors were shipped to the Caribbean as slaves or confined to praying towns.

Winthrop's charter was revoked in 1684 and the colony absorbed into the Dominion of New England until Bostonians jailed Governor Edmund Andros in April 1689. A royal charter in 1691 folded in Plymouth and the district of Maine. The next year accusations out of Salem Village sent nineteen people to the gallows and pressed Giles Corey to death under stones.

From the Stamp Act to ratification, 1765 to 1788

Massachusetts supplied most of the flashpoints of the imperial crisis. A Boston crowd gutted Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's house over the Stamp Act in 1765. Soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street on March 5, 1770, killing five including Crispus Attucks. On December 16, 1773 a party disguised as Mohawks tipped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the harbor, and Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts, closing the port and gutting the 1691 charter. The shooting started at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and the siege ended on March 17, 1776, when the British fleet sailed after Henry Knox dragged captured artillery from Fort Ticonderoga onto Dorchester Heights.

Its opening line, that all men are born free and equal, was the hinge of the Quock Walker cases of 1781 to 1783, which ended slavery here by judicial construction rather than statute. Debt and foreclosure in the western counties then produced Shays' Rebellion, broken at the Springfield Armory in January 1787, which did more than any pamphlet to persuade nationalists the Confederation had to go. The ratifying convention approved the Constitution on February 6, 1788 by 187 votes to 168, sixth in line, attaching recommended amendments that became the template for the Bill of Rights.

Mills, abolition, and the Fifty-fourth

Francis Cabot Lowell memorized the power loom during a visit to Lancashire and rebuilt it at Waltham in 1814. The city named after him rose on the Merrimack in the 1820s, worked by farm daughters who lived in company boarding houses and published their own magazine, the Lowell Offering. Irish arrivals after the 1845 potato blight replaced them at lower wages.

William Lloyd Garrison printed the first Liberator in Boston in January 1831. Maine, governed from Boston since 1691, had been detached in 1820 to balance Missouri's admission as a slave state. In 1863 the state raised the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments in the North, which attacked Fort Wagner on July 18; Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed and buried in the ditch with his men.

The mills leave, the laboratories arrive

Textile capital went south in the 1920s chasing cheaper labor, and Lawrence, Lowell and Fall River lost their reason for existing decades ahead of the rest of the industrial north. Federal research money replaced it. The Radiation Laboratory at MIT built microwave radar during the war and its engineers stayed on. Route 128, opened as a bypass in 1951, filled with Raytheon and Digital Equipment, and the recovery of the 1980s got the name Massachusetts Miracle.

Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered busing to desegregate Boston's schools in June 1974, and the violence that followed in South Boston and Charlestown ran for years. In November 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court decided Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, and on May 17, 2004 Massachusetts became the first state to marry same-sex couples. The health insurance law signed in 2006 by Governor Mitt Romney became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act.

Common questions about Massachusetts history

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