The Wages of the Covenant - The Dominion

American Political History · Jun 22, 2021 · 14m

The charter was gone — annulled by a London court in 1684. But a charter is paper, and for a year and a half the loss was an abstraction. This episode is about what happened when it arrived.

It arrived as Sir Edmund Andros, royal governor of the Dominion of New England, who landed in Boston in December 1686 with red-coated soldiers and a commission to make laws and raise taxes as he pleased. No assembly. No election. No appeal. The government that had run since 1630 was dissolved in an afternoon. Then the Dominion reached into ordinary life: land titles declared void unless repurchased from…