Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2010
Historians have long discussed the different ways in which the first professional lawyer to practice in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Lechford, was at odds with colony authorities in his three-year stay there—from June 27, 1638 to August 3, 1641. Some accounts have focused on his religious views, since Lechford disagreed with the strict forms of church membership prescribed by the colony's religion, Congregationalism. When he returned to England, Lechford wrote a book called Plain Dealing in which he argued against this form of religious organization, claiming that he had received enough first-hand experience to recommend a return to the Church of England. This book has been an important source of information on religious and political arrangements in colonial Massachusetts, and so for many, the picture of Lechford as religious dissenter is familiar. Another important picture of Lechford, especially familiar to historians of the American legal profession, is Lechford the impecunious lawyer disbarred for the unethical practice of law. Lechford himself had written, “I am…forced to get my living by writing petty things, which scarce finds me bread.” He had been disbarred for “embracery,” pleading to a jury out of court, and it was assumed that this combination of circumstances forced him to return to England. James Savage wrote under his biographical entry for Lechford: “left here, aft. vain attempt to earn bread.” Other nineteenth-century scholars of colonial Massachusetts said much the same thing. William Whitmore, in an introduction to a collection of Massachusetts colonial laws, wrote that Lechford “was finally starved into returning to England.”
1. Plain Dealing: or, Nevves from New-England … A short view of New-Englands present government, both ecclesiastical and civil, compared with the anciently-received and established government of England, in some materiall points; fit for the gravest consideration in these times… (London, Printed by W. E. & I. G. for N. Butter, 1642)Google Scholar, republished as New-Englands advice to Old-England. Or, Some observation upon New-Englands government, compared with the ancient government of Old-England: not unfitting to be taken into serious consideration in these miserable distracted times. Written by one that hath lived there, and seene the division and danger that followeth upon the obtruding a different government to that of old England (London, 1644).Google Scholar The 1642 edition was republished with an introduction and notes by Trumbull, J. Hammond, Plain Dealing, or News from New England (Boston: J. K. Wiggin & W. P. Lunt, 1867)Google Scholar, reprinted with a new introduction by Darrett B. Rutman (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969).
2. Lechford's statement in Plain Dealing that “three parts of the people of the Country remaine out of the Church” has been referred to in such works as Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 454Google Scholar; Adams, James Truslow, The Founding of New England (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palfrey, John Gorham, History of New England, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1859–1890), 2:8 n. 1.Google ScholarSee alsoHart, Albert Bushnell, Source-Book of American History, Edited for Schools and Readers (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 77–79Google Scholar, excerpting Plain Dealing for its explanation of seventeenth-century church services in the Bay Colony.
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14. On the active role of women in this legal system, seeDayton, Cornelia Hughes, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy?” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Tomlins, Christopher L. and Mann, Bruce H. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 337–56Google Scholar; Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
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17. See Hughes Dayton, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy?” and Women before the Bar. See alsoMarcus, Gail Sussman, “‘Due Execution of the Generall Rules of Righteousnesse’: Criminal Procedure in New Haven Town and Colony, 1638–1658,” in Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History, ed. Hall, David D., Murrin, John M., and Tate, Thad W. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 99–137Google Scholar.
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19. Rutman, Darrett B., Introduction to Plain Dealing (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969), vi, ix.Google ScholarLechford had not been imprisoned in England for acting as Prynne's lawyer in that infamous case, as earlier scholars like Trumbull had thought. Lechford got into trouble with Archbishop Laud and suffered “imprisonment, and a kind of banishment,” as he put it in Plain Dealing. This was, however, over a more minor case in which Prynne was the barrister and Lechford was the solicitor. Barnes, “Thomas Lechford and the Earliest Lawyering in Massachusetts,” 12–14.
20. Thomas Lechford to Edmond Browne, 10 December 1638, Notebook, 45.
21. Thomas Lechford to Hugh Peter, 3 January 1639, Notebook, 48–49.
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25. Thomas Dudley to John Winthrop, 24 December 1638, Winthrop Papers, 4:86.
26. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Dunn, Richard S., Savage, James, and Yeandle, Laetitia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 282Google Scholar[hereinafter Winthrop's Journal].
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38. Notebook, 248–49, 268, 353; 263, 292–93; 323, 356.
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41. I count approximately ninety petitions (including pleadings) in the Notebook.
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49. On the many different meanings of “appeal” and the “culture of appeal” in England and New England in the seventeenth century, see Bilder, “Salamanders and Sons of God.”
50. Notebook, 77, 247–48, 412–13; 320–21.
51. When Bellingham was an assistant, he acted as a witness for various documents Lech-ford drafted, one of which was a sale of a house and lands for £10 to be paid six months later “at the house of Richard Bellingham Esqr in Boston.” Ibid., 58.
52. Records of the Court of Assistants, 2:87.
53. “A Paper of Certain Propositions to the general Cort made upon request 8. 4. 1639,” Notebook, 87–88.
54. “Certaine proposicons to the generall Cort, 11. 4. 1639,” Notebook, 89. The position was subsequently created in 1644 and assigned to William Aspinwall. Mass. Records, 2:86. On Aspinwall, seeAnderson, Robert Charles, The Great Migration Begins, vol. 1, Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995), 55–60Google Scholar.
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56. Records of the Court of Assistants, 2:21, 31, 33, 27; 26, 63, 41, 62.
57. John Noble's edition of the Records of the Court of Assistants used a copy made by Lechford for the purpose of comparing it with the original records. Noble referred to Lechford's copy as “the L. copy.” Ibid., parenthetical note, 2:1.
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75. Mass. Records, 1:275.
76. Plain Dealing, 86.
77. Mass. Records, 1:276.
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103. Plain Dealing, 139, 89.
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