One of the more disquieting things my examination of early Dover and New England stirred up for me is an awareness of a prevalent expression of white supremacy.

It starts out as fear, expressed in the emphasis on fortifications. The Plymouth settlers, for instance, spent much of their first year on building palisades rather than farming, which led to a nearly disastrous shortage of food through the winter. The defenses were apparently intended against Native raiders more than the Spanish, French, Dutch, or pirates.

Later, Puritans required palisades around their houses of worship as well, as happened at Dover’s second meetinghouse, and ordered that all men carry arms, which were lined up against the wall during public assemblies such as religious services.

~*~

THE PREMISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY COMES THROUGH CLEARLY embedded in descriptions of the Indigenous as savages or pagans and is intensified in the resolution of legal conflicts in an unjust system of jurisprudence. Natives always came out on the losing end, with no means of appeal.

Especially telling is the reaction to the killing of John Stone and seven of his crew in 1634 in retaliation for his kidnapping and murder of the Pequot sachem Tatobem. Even though Stone had previously been banned from Boston for drunkenness, adultery, and piracy, and news of his death brought outright joy to some residents in the city, officials demanded the Natives turn over the warriors responsible to face trial. The Pequot, however, refused, even after paying atonement.

Simmering tensions erupted in 1636 after the killing of trader John Oldham and several of his crew on a journey to Block Island, Rhode Island. Even though Oldham was a troublemaker banished from the Plymouth colony, his death caused sermons across Massachusetts and prompted military action that quickly escalated into war.

Telling of the implicit racism is Roger Williams’ line of congratulation to John Winthrop in 1637 for disposing of “another drove of Adam’s degenerate seed.”

~*~

BY 1638, MOST OF THE PEQUOT had been massacred or sold into slavery in Bermuda or the West Indies. An estimated 1,500 warriors had died in battle or been hunted down. And what followed was a landgrab by the colonists.

Military leader John Underhill, responsible for the massacre of Pequot women and children fleeing their burning village, then came to Dover, where he was briefly governor of the upper province, meaning Dover.

Bluntly? From the colonists’ perspective, a bad white man was worth more than a noble Native.

~*~

SLAVERY WAS PART OF NEW ENGLAND from the beginning.

When David Thomson settled at Pannaway in 1623, he had a Native as a slave, presented to him by an Indian leader. Yes, there was slaveholding among the Indigenous, too.

And whites could be enslaved as well, as was seen in threats to sell Quaker children in the late 1650s.

A key turn in the emergence of Merrymount in 1625 was the sale of some of the project’s indentured English male servants to Virginia and the impending sale of more to the tobacco estates, where death within a year was likely. Thomas Morton used the situation to rally the remainder to resist and stay put, leading to his libertine colony south of today’s Boston.

The origins of African slaves in New England are murky, but Pequots were exported so that they could not escape and return to their families or be freed in retaliatory raids. Instead, they were exchanged for Blacks, who could be held at less risk.

In 1637, during the Pequot War, the first American-built slave ship, the Desire, was constructed in Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted with leg irons and bars, and armed. She set sail to the British West Indies carrying Boston rum, dried fish, and captive Pequots, and returned seven months later with tobacco, cotton, salt, and enslaved Africans from the Caribbean plantations.

Thomson’s friend Samuel Maverick bought two Blacks as slaves in 1638. Another prominent slaveholder was John Winthrop.

In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties document included a formal recognition of slaveholding.

~*~

UP TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, despite opposition, some Quakers held slaves, and Dover was not exempt. Up to ten were manumitted, likely with the equivalent of a year’s wages. There’s more on this in my book.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

The three Quaker women who come to Dover in 1662 and 1663 are tormented principally by Major Richard Waldron. He and his brother William arrived from a staunchly Puritan family in Warwickshire in 1635, and after returning to England to marry a woman against her family’s wishes, Richard returns to Dover. History does not record her name, only his second wife’s. In 1642 he buys up rights around the dramatic waterfalls of the Cochecho River about five miles north of Hilton Point.

In building mills there and establishing a village, Richard consolidates power and wealth. He has, for one thing, obtained a monopoly on fur trade with the Natives and, for another, rises to head the colony’s militia, a politically powerful position. In addition, he serves 22 years as a deputy of the General Court of Massachusetts, its assembly, seven of them as its Speaker. He votes to impose the anti-Quaker acts of 1656 and 1657.

Dover is not his only residence – at least three of his children are born in Boston and he has ships on the sea. He’s also the magistrate who imposes the Cart and Whip sentence on the Quaker women who come to Dover – in effect, a death sentence if constables in towns down the road follow through on his order. Even his wife is appalled by his cruelty.

He’s also the mastermind behind the invitation to the Natives to participate in a mock war game and festivities in 1676. After the 20 armed Natives fire their weapons, they are surrounded and arrested, along with 350 or more, mostly women and children. Seven or eight of the leaders are sent to Boston and executed. The rest are sold into slavery in the Barbados or West Indies.

The Natives do not forget Waldron’s deceit and cunning. Knowing they cannot trust the English, they form an alliance with France. Many of them convert to Catholicism under French priests.

In 1689, they take their revenge, attacking and burning garrisons at Cochecho village, killing 23 and taking 29 captive to Canada. Quakers are not spared. Waldron, however, is singled out for torture and death.

The early morning raid is the beginning of devastating violence large and small across northern New England that does not end until the end of the French and Indian Wars in 1763.

Every family in Dover would suffer losses. They were far from the only ones.

Behind the scenes, an ominous shift in the settlement’s character had been occurring, centered on Waldron. The sixth son of a well-off Puritan family, he was “immensely able, forceful, and ambitious,” arriving with his oldest brother in 1635, when he was barely twenty. In 1637, he returned to England, married a young gentlewoman despite her parents’ opposition, and brought her to Dover. Her name and dates are unknown. He then married Anne Scammon and had eleven children.

By 1642, he had accumulated the rights to land around the falls in today’s downtown Dover and erected his first sawmill. Emerging as the town’s central figure, he eventually controlled much of the Native trade and amassed large land holdings. In pressing for Dover to submit to Massachusetts jurisdiction, Waldron placed himself in opposition to Thomas Roberts, who then lost office when the Dover province was subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Waldron, in contrast, became a deputy to the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature, in 1654, where he served for the next twenty-two years, seven of them as its general speaker, one of the most powerful political posts in New England. How much time was he spending in Boston during this period, and how much in Dover? At least three of his children – Elnathon, Esther, and Mary – were born in Boston.

Brother William also held public office and eventually purchased a part of the Shrewsbury Patent in today’s town of Stratham. He was, according to Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, “a good clerk and a subtle man,” one who “had an inclination toward drink and contention,” which leaves me wondering about Richard as well. While crossing a small river at Kennebunk on his way back from Saco, Maine, in 1646, William drowned. Whatever his skills as a public official, his business dealings left him in debt to many creditors. Like the Hilton brothers, we have a case where the younger brother fared more successfully than his elder.

After his death, another brother, George, showed up in Dover after 1650, when he was a chandler in London. From 1659 through 1677, he was taxed as a resident of Dover. His domestic life, however, was strained. In June 1661, he was in court for being absent from his wife, and again in the fall of 1662, when she was reported dead twelve months. In June 1680, he petitioned the court to be rid of his son, “who instead of holding me hath rather destroyed me and what I had in drinking.” Impoverished, elderly, and nearly blind, he appealed for a guardian. Mrs. Richard Waldron took him in until her husband’s return.

Richard, on the other hand, flourished, not just in politics. He traded widely, as is seen in the death in Algiers around 1669 of his son, Paul, “probably on board one of his father’s vessels.” Another son, Timothy, died while a student at Harvard. Daughter Esther died on the Isle of Jersey. Quite simply, his family wasn’t stuck on the banks of the Cochecho or Piscataqua rivers.

As Jere Daniell observed, “By the 1670s the portion of Dover known as Cochecho had become something like Waldron’s personal fiefdom, and citizens in the other areas of settlement rarely challenged his social authority.”

A man like that had to have enemies and a capacity for revenge.

From everything I’ve seen, he was quite unlike Nicholas Shapleigh just across the river.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

The name of the settlement kept bouncing around.

Cochecho or Piscataqua plantation, for a while Bristol or Bristow, and even Northam, but the one that stuck was Dover.

Just as the names Hilton Point and Dover Point keep bouncing around, for the same place, though the latter has also largely replaced Dover Neck.

Neighboring Strawbery Banke did get renamed Portsmouth, after the harbor town in Devonshire, but Dover was never named for the village with the famed white cliffs in Kent.

No, the inspiration’s better than that.

The name comes through Dover’s second minister, George Burdet, who was more Anglican than Puritan, though apparently not outwardly. The proprietors of the colony at the time, Lord Saye and Lord Brooke, are both staunch Puritans, and the cleric works for them. In fact, he even manages to become the colony’s governor, or agent – a dual role forbidden to ministers in Massachusetts. Some even see him as trying to become a little pope in his power.

In calling the settlement Dover, Burdet pays honor to the anti-Puritan wit and attorney Robert Dover, who created the Cotswold Olympick Games near Cambridge in the heart of the Puritans’ East Anglia.

As my upcoming book details, there’s a long list of reasons the neighboring Puritan landlords forbid their servants from attending the pagan festivities. Besides, Dover was likely a secret Roman Catholic while openly ridiculing the Puritans. We can imagine what he would have said of Quakers.

Burdet, however, winds up fleeing Dover amid sexual scandal, only to generate more where he lands in Maine. Yes, the plot keeps thickening.

As for, “Roll over, Dover,” if we put it up for a vote, which inspiration would you chose? The picturesque cliffs or the scoundrel in the pulpit?

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

A fair number of the Piscataqua’s early settlers were from prosperous, even well-connected, families.

The question is just what prompted them to relocate to the primitive, even harsh, conditions along the Piscataqua River.

David Thomson, the son of a Scottish minister, has the King’s ear and a debt of gratitude.

The Hiltons are part of an extensive and prosperous fishmonger clan.

Thomas Roberts’ father, by some accounts, becomes a baron. Even if he didn’t, Thomas still becomes a member of the powerful fishmonger guild.

The Hilton brothers weren’t exactly out of the loop, either.

~*~

Powerful? Take Francis Champernowne, a 1640 signer of the Dover Combination, a remarkable document stating the residents’ desire to be freed from being subjected to company-town decisions being made in England. While I see scant evidence that Francis actually resided in today’s Dover, he did have extensive landholdings in New Hampshire, including the current towns of Greenland – named for his Green Land farm – and Madbury, then part of Dover and named after his ancestral home, Modbury, in Devon, England.

His father, Sir Arthur Champernowne, owned at least eight merchant ships or privateers and had fished New England since 1622. In 1635, Sir Arthur financed a settlement under his son, Francis – likely the southern part of Kittery, Maine, which became known as Champernowne’s Island, today’s Cutt’s or Gerrish islands – as well as another on Braveboat Harbor in York. Francis may have also lived at Strawbery Banke (today’s Portsmouth) until 1640.

Captain Francis was well-placed. His great-aunt Catherine was the mother of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Ralegh/Raleigh Gilbert, an important explorer and adventurer of the New England and Canadian coastline. Captain Francis was also a “beloved” nephew of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, proprietor of Maine and unofficial godfather of New England itself.

Francis was often at sea, to England and Barbados, especially. During the early part of the English civil war, his Royalist leanings led him to join King Charles I’s fleet under the Earl of Marlborough. Returning to Dover by 1646, he left for the Caribbean in 1649 but returned to Maine in the early 1650s, where he later became a commissioner and justice under Charles II.  In April of 1678, he signed the articles of peace with the Abenaki at Casco. He was an ardent Anglican and died in Kittery.

It’s enough to make me think living conditions back in merry old England weren’t that great, either.

~*~

The Waldron family that soon comes to dominate the growth around the Lower Falls, or today’s downtown Dover, came from wealth in Warwickshire, England. William drowns, but brother Richard turns Dover into something of a personal fiefdom while rising to become Speaker of the Assembly once New Hampshire is under Massachusetts rule. He builds the first saw mill and grist mill at the falls, has extensive shipping connections, dominates the fur trade with the native Pennacooks. He didn’t exactly start from scratch.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about him. Man, will you.

 

One of my key insights into Dover’s early character came after noticing that the majority of its early residents came from Devonshire – or Devon – rather than the East Anglia shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridge that dominated New England’s Puritan migration, construction, and social order.

And that holds for even the Puritans who take over Dover in 1633 (or so).

In his groundbreaking Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989), David Hackett Fischer elaborates on what he calls the various folkways of four distinctly different regions of Britain, which in turn gave Colonial Massachusetts, Virginia, the Delaware Valley, and the Backcountry their unique natures – divergences that continue, to various degrees, today.

I had already observed that Dover and, for that matter, New Hampshire’s only other towns of the first 70 years – Hampton, Exeter, and Portsmouth – weren’t built around a definitive town square with its church, town hall, and common, as were typical towns in Massachusetts. It’s a hint that the differences run much deeper.

While Fischer goes into great detail on East Anglia’s impact on Massachusetts, he does not in turn examine Devon. At most, he touches on it as he turns to a larger and vaguer area that provided the Cavalier migration into Virginia, one with a center more in South England rather than the South West of Devon. And much of his presentation focuses on the ways they evolved in Virginia, contrasting life in Massachusetts.

Still, he points to differences that go back into antiquity. The language and laws of Devon and its neighboring shires for example, were shaped by West Saxons to the east and Celts to the north and west. In contrast, East Anglia’s are rooted in its Danish occupation.

From the little I’ve been able to glean thus far comes statements that Devon was regarded as backward by many, a repository of the “old England” of superstition and legend. It was a place of seafaring, with Plymouth as a principal port and Bristol just to the north, and of large manors with their landed gentry.

There are also suggestions of crucial ways its social manners and religious affinities deviated, affecting how Dover residents interacted with the itinerant Quakers.

No, the English weren’t all alike, not by a long shot. Often, they couldn’t even understand the dialect from another part of Britain.

I would love to see a comprehensive study of those Devon folkways along the lines of Fischer’s earlier work. It would no doubt give us a much more detailed picture of life along the Piscataqua in those seminal decades of settlement. How they cooked and dressed, for instance, or raised their children or treated illnesses or buried their dead, as starters.

Still, my upcoming book shares what I’ve found so far.

The conventional explanation that the Puritans migrated to New England for religious freedom misses the obvious.

When the Puritans first arrive in 1629, followed the next year with the beginning of their great flood of migration, theirs is a well-orchestrated and well-financed scheme to establish a utopia, one based on their Calvinist Protestant worldview. In many ways, it ranges well beyond the confines of religion.

Crucially, sensing that their mission could be corrupted by false teachings and practices, they squelch unorthodoxy and dissent early on. Within the first decade of their arrival along Massachusetts Bay, they banish Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, who find refuge in Williams’ new colony of Rhode Island. Early Quaker history turns its focus there and neighboring Cape Cod, for good reason, though much also happens north of Boston in Salem, Hampton, and Dover.

Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, also takes flight and founds the town of Exeter, on the other end of Great Bay from Dover, in New Hampshire.

Others head more or less straight to Dover. Among them is Hansard Knollys, a minister whose evolving theology will lead him to being a founder of the Baptist denomination when he returns to England. He’s not quite there yet when he formally organizes the church in Dover as a congregational society just six years after its first services. Had he been a bit clearer in his theological evolution, Dover could have established the first Baptist church in America, a year before Williams in Providence. Oh, well.

But that does leave an opening for the Quakers a decade later.

All the more, I sense that Knollys leaves enough nonconformist thought in his wake to lead some independent spirits in Dover to privately question the ongoing Puritan preaching. As my new book will note, there are hints of that in the town records – supposedly subversive thinking that has to await the arrival of the itinerant Quakers for confirmation and action.

As we’ll see, it’s a volatile mix awaiting the spark for explosion.

Speaking of juicy.

Sandwiched in between the arrival of Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at the Massachusetts Bay colony, we have the libertine plantation at Mare Mount, or Merrymount, on Boston’s South Shore. It’s a provocative whiff of how New England life could have turned, had Thomas Morton successfully warded off the rival raiders.

The very name “merry” at the time was often a synonym for sexual trysting. As for Merry-Mount? It couldn’t have been more graphic.

Unlike Plymouth, this settlement was prospering and welcoming misfits.

Think of hippie. Maybe even commune. Dancing naked with Natives around a giant maypole, one that’s flagrantly phallic. Not just pagan but also reflecting some lingering Devonshire traditions taken to an extreme. (Significantly, for comparison, most of early Dover’s settlers came from Devon, not the East Anglia of Puritan culture.)

That’s the short version, though there’s much more sketched out in my upcoming book.

And after Merrymount comes crashing down, its founder finds shelter in Sir Ferdinando Gorge’s Maine, not far from Dover.

No, early New England wasn’t all stern Puritans, not by a long shot, no matter how much they tried to keep a lid on.

Nearly two decades later, facing the Quaker outbreak, did Puritan authorities fear the Friends movement might trigger another Merrymount in their midst? As I’ll show, Quakers were anything but quaint and respectable when they show up, though I can assure you they stayed sober rather than make merry. Ahem.

But they were still an alternative to the Puritan rigidity.