The Emancipation of Massachusetts

Adams, Brooks, 1848-1927

English

---

Standard Print	£10.00
Large Print	£14.00

We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

---

Below is a summary of The Emancipation of Massachusetts


and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





THE EMANCIPATION OF MASSACHUSETTS
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY

BY
BROOKS ADAMS




PREFATORY NOTE TO FIRST EDITION.


I am under the deepest obligations to the Hon. Mellen Chamberlain and Mr.
Charles Deane.

The generosity of my friend Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing in putting at my
disposal the unpublished results of his researches among the Zunis is in
keeping with the originality and power of his mind. Without his aid my
attempt would have been impossible. I have also to thank Prof. Henry C.
Chapman, J. A. Gordon, M. D., Prof. William James, and Alpheus Hyatt,
Esq., for the kindness with which they assisted me. I feel that any merit
this volume may possess is due to these gentlemen; its faults are all my
own.

BROOKS ADAMS.
QUINCY, _September_ 17, 1886.




CONTENTS.


PREFACE

CHAPTER I. THE COMMONWEALTH

CHAPTER II. THE ANTINOMIANS

CHAPTER III. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM

CHAPTER IV. THE ANABAPTISTS

CHAPTER V. THE QUAKERS

CHAPTER VI. THE SCIRE FACIAS

CHAPTER VII. THE WITCHCRAFT

CHAPTER VIII. BRATTLE CHURCH

CHAPTER IX. HARVARD COLLEGE

CHAPTER X. THE LAWYERS

CHAPTER XL. THE REVOLUTION




PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.


CHAPTER I


I wrote this little volume more than thirty years ago, since when I have
hardly opened it. Therefore I now read it almost as if it were written by
another man, and I find to my relief that, on the whole, I think rather
better of it than I did when I published it. Indeed, as a criticism of
what were then the accepted views of Massachusetts history, as expounded
by her most authoritative historians, I see nothing in it to retract or
even to modify. I do, however, somewhat regret the rather acrimonious tone
which I occasionally adopted when speaking of the more conservative
section of the clergy. Not that I think that the Mathers, for example, and
their like, did not deserve all, or, indeed, more than all I ever said or
thought of them, but because I conceive that equally effective strictures
might have been conveyed in urbaner language; and, as I age, I shrink from
anything akin to invective, even in what amounts to controversy.

Therefore I have now nothing to alter in the _Emancipation of
Massachusetts_, viewed as history, though I might soften its asperities
somewhat, here and there; but when I come to consider it as philosophy, I
am startled to observe the gap which separates the present epoch from my
early middle life.

The last generation was strongly Darwinian in the sense that it accepted,
almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization
is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward
perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual plane, and, as a
necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental
vigor. I need hardly observe that all belief in democracy as a final
solution of social ills, all confidence in education as a means to