How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [13]
Mason returned to England later that year, having faced so much animosity he feared for his life. Now fifty-six years old, he died soon after. The conflict over New Hampshire’s sovereignty, however, continued to drag on through the following decades.
In the same year that Mason returned to England, Charles II died and James II ascended to the throne. The extent to which Charles had reassembled royal authority encouraged James to seek absolute authority. To consolidate his grip on New England, James decreed that Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine would be combined and called the Dominion of New England. New England was now one big angry colony. Old England, for similar reasons, also became one big angry country. In 1688 James II abdicated the throne.
New Hampshire-Massachusetts border proposals
New Hampshire once again became its own province under the jurisdiction of the Crown. But not for long. It now had its own internal conflicts, one of which was the Mason grant. Robert Tufton Mason’s heirs had opted out of this conflict by selling the grant to a London merchant named Samuel Allen.13 This made no difference to those living on the land. They despised Allen as much as Mason. But as farmers on difficult soil, they were poor and virtually powerless. To augment their power, they sought to have New Hampshire given back to Massachusetts, that colony being happy to help their cause. Those with power in New Hampshire opposed the move.
In addition, a new conflict had arisen regarding Massachusetts. The original 1622 grant to John Mason, reflecting the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, separated New Hampshire along a line three miles north of the Merrimack River. Europeans had assumed that the Merrimack flowed along a relatively straight line. In time the colonists discovered that the river made a major turn to the north, and they wondered if the border, at that turn, instead became a line three miles east, as opposed to north, of the river. Colonists west of the Merrimack, being beyond the Mason/Allen land, preferred New Hampshire over Massachusetts since taxes were lower. They maintained that north was not east and that a new line was needed. In 1695 New Hampshire’s legislature proposed one. Massachusetts, for its part, ignored it.
New Hampshire’s boundary proposal had been shelved when Queen Anne ascended to the throne in 1702. She sought to mitigate the conflict by appointing the same man to be governor of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Her policy was continued by subsequent monarchs for nearly fifty years.
Final border decree, 1741
On paper Anne’s solution was brilliant; on earth it made little difference. The various parties continued to maneuver and countermaneuver. In the final round of this now century-old jurisdictional tournament, the ghost of Robert Tufton Mason returned to the game. Those in New Hampshire seeking a clearly defined separation from Massachusetts began making “Robert Mason moves”—moves based on the awareness that laws were not the rules of this game; power was. While Massachusetts cited royal charters and other documents in making its case to the British government, New Hampshire’s representative sought to brush aside such legal details, closing his arguments with that era’s version of a simple country lawyer:
Your Petitioner doth most humbly appeal to your Majesty … that in case any defect in Form should be found in the Appeal from New Hampshire, your Majesty may be graciously pleased to Consider in how surprising a manner your Loyal Little Province of New Hampshire has been treated by the Governor who was pleased, though very Improperly, to call himself a Common Father to both the Provinces.… [Massachusetts] hath acted to usurp your Majesty’s undoubted property.14
New Hampshire’s history of loyalty appealed to the Crown. Massachusetts’s history of disloyalty did not. In 1741 George II completely severed New Hampshire from Massachusetts by appointing separate governors and decreeing that surveyors