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rhetoric of anti-popery to rally support for their cause.

The universal fear and hatred of Catholicism, expressed on Pope's Day,
colored the way New Englanders of all social classes responded to British
activities in the 1760s and early 1770s. The belief that Britain was becoming
"popish" would contribute in a very real fashion to the coming of the American
Revolution. Between 1763 and 1775 New England Whigs gradually came to
believe that Britain was reverting to popery. They were encouraged in this belief
by their cultural leaders, especially ministers and politicians. Their immediate
reaction would be to claim that they were the true Englishmen and Britain had
strayed from its historical anti-Catholic mission. When this proved an untenable
intellectual position, the people of New England would embrace a complete
break with Britain rather than a compromise with popery.


NOTES
1. [ Nathaniel Daboll, ed.], Freebetter's Connecticut Almanac for 1774 ( New
London, 1773). For the impact of the Protestant calendar on British North America,
see David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar
in Elizabethan and Stuart England ( Berkeley, 1989). I am grateful to Charles Hanson
who alerted me to the prominence of anti-popery in colonial almanacs and generously
allowed me to read the manuscript from his talk, "From the Quebec Act to the French
Alliance," delivered at the American Antiquarian Society on February 27, 1992.
2. Douglas Adair and John R. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver's Origins and Progress
of the American Rebellion ( Stanford, 1961), 84.
3. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 203-205; Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the
Rituals of Revolution ( Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 204-208; George L. Kittredge,
"Burning the Pope in Effigies in London, 1678," Colonial Society of Massachusetts
Publications, 18 ( 1915-16), 12-14; J. E. Etherington, "Lewes Bonfire Night
Celebrations," Sussex History, I ( 1977), 8-21.
4. Josiah Cotton to Rowland Cotton, October 17, 1702, MHSC, 80 ( 1972), 271.
Also see Joseph B. Felt, Annals of Salem, 2 vols. ( Salem, 1849), II, 50-55; and
Joshua Coffin, History of Newbury ( Boston, 1845), 248-249.
5. Benjamin Walker, Diary, MHS, entry for November 5, 1729.
6. Boston News-Letter, November 20, 1735; Boston Weekly Journal, November
20, 1735; "The Diary of the Rev. Samuel Checkley, 1735," Colonial Society of
Massachusetts Transactions, 12 ( 1908-9), 270-305, quotation, p. 305.
7. North End, South End Forever ( Boston, 1768).
8. Isaiah Thomas, Three Autobiographical Fragments ( Worcester, 1962), 22.

-35-

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Publication Information: Book Title: No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England. Contributors: Francis D. Cogliano - author, Jon L. Wakelyn - editor. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 35.
    
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