1820. The issue was little discussed publicly. Massachusetts then had a population of more than half a million, and the overwhelming majority of adult males could presumably qualify for the franchise. But, in practice, voting was the exception rather than the rule; on the convention issue, only 18,349 citizens cast their votes—a smaller return than usual in state elections. They favored the convention nearly 2 to 1. In October the towns elected delegates, 490 in all, in accordance with the scale of representation for the lower house of the legislature.
Massachusetts was at that time divided into fourteen counties. Suffolk (46 delegates), the wealthiest of the counties, was virtually coterminous with the burgeoning city of Boston. Essex (68 delegates) stood to the north, once a Federalist stronghold—the home ground of the notorious Essex Junto1—and still dominated by the merchants and shipmasters of Salem, Newburyport, Marblehead, and Gloucester. Just west of Boston and bordering Essex to the north lay Middlesex (60 delegates), primarily a farming area though, as in Essex, several of its peaceful towns were absorbing the first shocks of the industrial revolution. South of Boston and circling Cape Cod to Provincetown lay the counties of Norfolk (34 delegates), Plymouth (35), Bristol (40), and Barnstable (17), an old settled area, equally varied in its economic and its religious character, much of it poor and cut off from the main stream of the state’s development. The off shore islands Nantucket (6 delegates), and Martha’s Vineyard, called Dukes (2), had never recovered from the blow struck by the Revolution to the fishing and whaling industries. The county lines of Worcester (70 delegates) bounded the large east-central portion of the state, agricultural, of course, and, on the whole, conservative in politics. In the rich Connecticut River valley lay the counties of Hampshire (25 delegates), Hampden (29), and Franklin (26), dominated by the towns of Northampton and Springfield. The valley had a reputation for orthodoxy in politics as in religion, despite Shays’s Rebellion; but it also prided itself on its independence, and the “river gods” had long been at odds with Boston, State Street, and Harvard College. The county of Berkshire (32 delegates) embraced the entire western hill country. Here, if anywhere, was the center of radical discontent in Massachusetts. Yet it is risky, as the proceedings of the convention prove, to pin a political label on any of the counties or the larger geographical divisions of the state. In all of them were friends of liberal reform. They had no common program and formed no solid bloc in the convention. It was, nevertheless, true that most of the reform leadership and following came from the outlying areas, while the conservatives centered in Boston and the Essex-Middlesex-Norfolk perimeter.
On November 15 the delegates crowded the representatives’ chamber of the State House in Boston, and the convention was called to order. The new generation paid its respects to the old by choosing the venerable John Adams president. He declined. (“Old time has shaken me by the hand, and paralyzed it,” he remarked in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.) Whereupon the convention chose Isaac Parker, chief justice of the Massachusetts supreme court, and on the following day ceremoniously conducted Adams to a permanent seat at the right hand of the president. The convention speedily organized itself. The constitution was divided into ten parts, each part assigned to a select committee to consider changes and report to the convention, these reports to be individually discussed and passed upon in committee of the whole, and the convention finally deciding upon the changes proposed. Some delegates questioned this procedure. Once the constitution had been dissected by ten separate committees, who could put it together again? “It is like sending mechanics into the woods in different directions to hew down trees and fit them for a building.”2 They wished, rather, to attack the constitution as a unit. In so numerous a body such a plan might have been disastrous. The chosen line of procedure proved its efficiency; New York adopted it the next year. Expertly controlled by adept parliamentarians, most of them of conservative stripe, the convention was a model of deliberative conduct by a body of nearly five hundred men.
Counting all the men who wished fundamental changes in the constitution, the reform ranks undoubtedly numbered a majority of the convention. In James T. Austin, Henry Dearborn, Levi Lincoln, Henry Halsey Childs—Republicans to the man and sons of the first Jeffersonians in the Bay State—they had strong leaders. But the reformers were divided among themselves, disorganized, outmaneuvered, and outclassed by a small but powerful cadre of conservatives. Daniel Webster, just then coming into prominence as a statesman, and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story were their brilliant champions, ably supported by such Federalist stalwarts as Leverett Saltonstall, Josiah Quincy, and Samuel Hoar. Revering the historic frame of government and united in their determination to save it from the assaults of “radicalism,” their strategy was a defensive one—their tactics conciliatory on minor points, obstinate on major principles. It succeeded magnificently. Story summarized the result with a measure of self-congratulation:
I firmly believe that those who ultimately prevailed in the Convention, were always in a minority in number, but with a vast preponderance of talent and virtue and principle. It was no small thing to prevent sad mischiefs to the Constitution. The struggle on our part was not for victory, but for the preservation of our best institutions.
What were these “best institutions” saved from destruction? First, the pecuniary qualification for the franchise; second, town representation in the house; third, the independence of the judiciary; fourth, the propertied basis of the senate; fifth, government support of religious worship. Four and five were the most seriously threatened. And the long-festering issue of state-supported religion gave more difficulty than any other.
The ruling order had not forgotten that Massachusetts began as a Holy Commonwealth. The faith of the Puritan founders had degenerated, of course, dissenting sects had sprung up and flourished, and Revolutionary ideas had upset the historic commitment to an established church; but in the face of these difficulties the state had endeavored to maintain its religious character and to enforce a corporate piety upon the entire community. Freedom of religious conscience was not denied in Massachusetts; indeed, it was expressly guaranteed by the second article of the declaration of rights. But it was rendered incomplete, and in the eyes of many dissenters nugatory, by other provisions of the constitution of 1780. Elected officials, senators, and representatives must declare their belief in the Christian religion. Ministers of Congregational churches in and around Cambridge held appointment as overseers of Harvard University, an institution sanctioned and supported by the state, yet dominated by this old, established clergy. Although the constitution did not formally establish the Congregational as the state church, it was the principal beneficiary of an ingenious compromise worked out by the framers to meet two sharply conflicting demands—religious freedom for the individual and public support of Christian worship for the peace and good order of the community. Embodied in the third article of the declaration of rights, the compromise required the several towns and parishes to make provision for public worship and instruction by Protestant ministers, provided, however, that “all monies paid by the subject to the support of public worship, and of the public teachers aforesaid, shall, if he require it, be uniformly applied to the support of the public teacher or teachers of his own religious sect or denomination… .” What this amounted to was the establishment of Protestant Christianity, though not without preference as to sect, because it operated within the historic framework of the Congregational system. Parish and town boundaries were usually coterminous, thus enabling church and town to act as one. The statute enacted in 1786 to implement the third article by authorizing the parishes, as bodies corporate, to assess polls and property for the support of religion confirmed, in effect, the locally established Congregational religion. Dissenters, to be sure, could file certificates with the local authorities declaring that they worshipped outside the fold and requesting that their tax money be transferred to their own ministers. But not only was this an awkward business; it was also an avowal of religious inequality, an admission of the right of government to interfere in affairs of religion, and an affront to the private conscience.
The third article, hotly contested from the start, threw the state into religious turmoil at intervals for forty years. The Baptists spearheaded the opposition, but increasingly other dissenting sects, which multiplied and grew until they represented a formidable challenge to the standing Congregational order, lent their support. They called for a dissolution of the state’s connections with religion and the introduction of a “voluntary system” of religious life. Every