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The Irish and the Formation of British Communities in Early Massachusetts Marsha L. Hamilton One evening in May 1661, Philip Welsh and William Downing strode into their master’s parlor just before prayers and delivered an astonishing challenge. The two men, indentured servants to Ipswich magistrate Samuel Symonds, declared, “We will worke with you, or for you, noe longer. . . . We have served you seven years, we thinke that is longe enough.” Welsh and Downing did try to compromise with Symonds, offering “to plant your corne & mende your fences, &[c.] if you will pay us as other men [and give them their freedom], but we will not worke with you upon the same termes or conditions as before.” Symonds tried to put the dispute off, saying, “Come let us goe to prayer.” Attempting to maintain control of the situation, Welsh replied, “You may go to prayer; we will speak more in the morning.” Symonds did not remain conciliatory and signed a complaint against the two men, who were arrested by the constables the next morning.1 When Welsh and Downing came before the Essex County Quarterly Court in June 1661, they told an interesting story in their defense. They had been kidnapped out of Ireland in late 1653 or early 1654 and sold to Symonds by George Dell, the master of the ship Goodfellow, owned by Boston merchant David Selleck . The indenture contract had been negotiated between Dell and Symonds without consulting Welsh and Downing about the terms. Their services were sold for nine years; a proviso added to the contract a week later increased Welsh’s time by two years. Fellow servants John King and John Downing supported the story of abduction, testifying that they, along with many others, had been taken “in the night out of their beds” and hurried aboard the Goodfellow. King and John Downing did not know Welsh and William Downing prior to their kidnapping , but they had all been captured and placed on board the Goodfellow, to be taken to England’s North American colonies. King and John Downing also 230 | Marsha L. Hamilton testified that Dell had sailed hurriedly, “leav[ing] his water and much of his provisions behind for fear the country would have taken them [the captives] from him.”2 After hearing testimony from Samuel Symonds and several other servants in the household, the jury temporized, leaving the final decision in the case to the magistrates. Jurors concluded that if the contract between Symonds and Dell was legal, the Irishmen would have to serve the full nine years, but if the contract was not valid, the men should be freed. The magistrates, not surprisingly, ruled in favor of Samuel Symonds, although Welsh and Downing immediately appealed the decision to the Court of Assistants in Boston.3 This case reveals many aspects about the lives of non-Puritan residents in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.4 Although the Irish constituted only a small segment of this population, they played an important role in developing British and Atlantic communities in Massachusetts. The Puritan founders of the colony expected to incorporate Reformed Protestants from many parts of Europe into their society, but the communities formed by Irish and Scottish captives and lower-status English residents developed from social and economic conditions rather than a shared religious ideology. The social integration of diverse peoples from Britain, Ireland, and Europe, however, provided stability for Massachusetts through the tumultuous events of the later seventeenth century. The desire of Puritan leaders to keep “disruptive” settlers out of their colony is well known, but it is equally true that as early as the 1640s these same men recognized that the colony could not long survive without the labor provided by “strangers.”5 The economic problems that started with the precipitous decline in immigration as war began between king and Parliament in England in 1642 meant that Massachusetts settlers had to find new sources of income and labor. The Massachusetts General Court began to encourage the development of industries , in particular, iron manufacturing, shipping, and shipbuilding. The court awarded monopolies to investors to develop manufacturing and other industries and supported merchants in their efforts to find new markets for Massachusetts’s agricultural products. The need for skilled laborers in these industries brought hundreds of non-Puritan workers to coastal Massachusetts. The iron industry in Essex County employed English and Welsh ironworkers in the 1640s and stimulated the importation of several hundred Scottish prisoners of war in the 1650s, for example, while shipping and shipbuilding...

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