6 - ‘Now the mask is taken off’: Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism in colonial New England, 1702–1727

Summary

Jacobitism and New England make seemingly strange historiographical bedfellows, though this need not be the case. A handful of recent works have addressed the curious relationship between the two, noting the frequency of accusations of Jacobitism in New England in the early eighteenth century. although generally arguing that the accusations were a reaction to an ‘imagined’ threat or simply ‘rhetorical hysteria’. Jacobitism provided a foil and played ‘an essential role in constructing the Protestant interest's identity’. Such studies, while noting important elements of a transatlantic dialogue and demonstrating support for the Protestant succession, posit the absence of real Jacobites or Jacobitism in New England. By doing so, they isolate New England from elements of British political culture, implicitly articulating a belief that Jacobitism was a movement or culture that could not survive an Atlantic crossing.

This chapter argues that Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism were fundamental elements in religious controversies and in the transatlantic political culture of colonial New England from 1702 to 1727. This in turn further suggests the lasting significance of Britain's ‘rage of party’ throughout the British Atlantic world. In many respects, the controversies concerning Jacobitism in New England best reflect the changing nature of Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World. In New England, as in England and Scotland, Jacobitism was a vital element in overlapping local and transatlantic political cultures. The integration of New England into the larger British political world, a process encouraged by imperial wars, controversies involving the Church of England, and the intensification of Atlantic communications, created an environment in which Jacobite sympathies or antipathy towards Jacobitism could be expressed in a colonial context.

Accusations of Jacobitism levelled by Congregationalists at their political or religious enemies are indicative of the changing face of Jacobitism throughout the British Atlantic: from a French Catholic threat to a British nonjuring or High Church Toryism. Nevertheless, it was not solely fears of Jacobitism which illustrate the significance of Jacobitism in colonial New England. Expressions of Toryism or High Church Anglicanism ‘shade equivocally’ into Jacobitism, and thus provide reminders that Britain's pan-Atlantic political culture was dynamic and multi-faceted. Thus, the eruption of crypto-Jacobite debates about passive obedience in New England arguably exemplify expressions of an evolving transatlantic British political culture shaped by struggles between Whigs and a conspicuously Jacobite–friendly Tory party.