The antiquity of the custom of giving and taking Oaths, or the debatable questions of their observance being a religious or legal ceremony, and whether the moral or political aspect has the greater effect upon the minds of men, are subjects with which this paper has nothing to do. This book is preoccupied only on discussing oaths of allegiances given starting from the reign of James the First, of England, during which time the providences of God directed the course of the voyage of the Pilgrims away from the Colony of Virginia to their settlement at Plymouth in New England, all the way up to the reign of James the Second, until Sir Edmund Andros, knight, arrived in Boston with a commission to govern New England, and the Colonial period of New England came to an end.

This work, originally published by the American Antiquarian Society, chronicles the various oaths of allegiance that New England colonists were required to take at one time or another prior to American Independence. While the author has omitted the simple oaths of office required of military or civilian officers of the colony or Crown, he has otherwise included all oaths to which the general populace of New England were required to swear their allegiance. Mr. Evans weaves verbatim transcriptions of the oaths into the narrative fabric of an historical essay, which gives the context for each oath and, in a number of instances, furnishes facsimiles of the 17th- or 18th-century documents under study. What follows is a sample of the oaths included in the volume, some of which pertained to all of New England and others to one or more colonies: The Oath of Supremacy (1534), The Oath of Abjuration (1687-88), The Mayflower Compact (1620), Freeman's Oath (various dates), Oath of Fidelitie (various dates), Stranger's Oath (1652, which was aimed at New England Quakers), Freeman's Charge (of New Haven, 1639), Civil Compacts (in Rhode Island, 1637-38), The Engagement of the Officers (Providence, 1654), The Elders or Rulers Oath (New Hampshire, 1640), and the Oath of Councillors of the Province of Mayne (1653).

Presents 80 documents selected to reflect Eric Voegelin's theory that in Western civilization basic political symbolizations tend to be variants of the original symbolization of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. These documents demonstrate the continuity of symbols preceding the writing of the Constitution and all contain a number of basic symbols such as: a constitution as higher law, popular sovereignty, legislative supremacy, the deliberative process, and a virtuous people. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Excerpt from Oaths of Allegiance in Colonial New England The antiquity of the custom of giving and taking Oaths, or the debatable questions of their observance being a religious or legal ceremony, and whether the moral or political aspect has the greater effect upon the minds of men, are subjects with which this paper has nothing to do. And as the substance of Oaths for particular officers is to engage them to a faithful discharge of their places and trusts to the best of their ability, it has been considered, in general, unnecessary to give them, especially as these offices carry with them the assumption that the general Oaths required of all citizens have first been complied with. No Oaths of office were administered or required in the New Plymouth Colony, the power of the Church being, in effect, superior to the civil power. For the main purpose of this paper it will not be necessary to go further back in history than to the reign of James the First, of England, 1603-1625, during which time the providences of God directed the course of the voyage of the Pilgrims away from the Colony of Virginia to their settlement at Plymouth in New England, in December, 1620; or to carry the subject beyond the time, in the short-lived reign of James the Second, 1685-1689, when, in December, 1686, Sir Edmund Andros, knight, arrived in Boston with a commission to govern New England, and the Colonial period of New England came to an end. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book examines internal political conflicts in the British Empire within the legal framework of treason and sedition. The threat of treason and rebellion pervaded the British Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries; Britain's control of its territories was continually threatened by rebellion and war, both at home and in North America. Even after American independence, Britain and its former colony continued to be fearful that opposition and revolution might follow the French example, and both took legal measures to control both speech and political action. This study places these conflicts within a political and legal framework of the laws of treason and sedition as they developed in the British Atlantic. The treason laws originated in the reign of Edward III, and were adapted and modified in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were exported to the colonies, where they underwent both adaptation and elaboration in application in the slave societies as well as those dominated by free settlers. Relationships with natives and European rivals in the Americas affected the definitions of treason in practice, and the divided loyalties of the American revolutionary war added further problems of defining loyalty and treachery. Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685-1800 offers a new study of treason and sedition in the period by placing them in a truly transatlantic perspective, making it a valuable study for those interested in the legal and political of Britain's empire and 18th-century revolutions.

A new history of Loyalism using revolutionary New England as a case study.

Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.