Arbitrary government is where men rule without accountability as to personnel and standard. Pretty straight forward. If people have no “choice or allowance,” meaning active selection or passive confirmation, and where men judge on a whim—with will but without reason—there is arbitrary government. God alone has no accountability beyond himself. Winthrop maintained that Massachusetts in 1644 was no home to usurpation of God’s singular prerogative.

John Winthrop was governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony for twelve years between 1630 and 1648 and was either deputy governor or assistant the rest of the time. At the time of his Arbitrary Government Described and the Government of Massachusetts Vindicated from that Aspersion, he was deputy governor. What we see in Winthrop’s Vindication is a standard by which all governments may be judged. The occasion for the public defense on behalf of the administration of which Winthrop was a part will become clear below but ultimately need not detain us. In a nutshell, the government had been charged with ruling and administering according to whim. Winthrop obviously took issue with that “aspersion.”

Arbitrary government is where men rule without accountability as to personnel and standard. Pretty straight forward. If people have no “choice or allowance,” meaning active selection or passive confirmation, and where men judge on a whim—with will but without reason—there is arbitrary government. God alone has no accountability beyond himself. Winthrop maintained that Massachusetts in 1644 was no home to usurpation of God’s singular prerogative.

Winthrop makes his case with appeal to a true transference or delegation of sovereignty, the right to authority, viz., royal grant. Then there was no other possible basis for Englishmen, and it is worth noting that the inherent, so to speak, authority of the colonies turned states over a hundred years later was predicated on the same basis, at least for the preexistent communities—the later state additions were a different story.

Imbedded in the royal patent or charter of Massachusetts Bay is the structure of colonial governance: the governor and a deputy governor as well as eighteen assistants (the executive and its board), and then the company (freemen or stakeholders, so to speak). The board of assistants was one house of the legislature as well as the highest judicial court. The governor was the president of the board but not an assistant simultaneously, and also functioned as a magistrate in the court. But as Herbert Osgood (The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century) discerned, “the governor had no status apart from the board and the legislature… and therefore was bound by the action of the board…. the system of government in the corporate colony was one in which the weight of the governor among the assistants, as elsewhere, depended much on his personality.” This was only partially true. For as Winthrop had declared in 1632, the patent had to be read in light of common law precedent. Therefore, the governor possessed the powers typically associated with that position. This granted the governor some discretion not afforded to the assistants qua assistants, albeit the highest level of discretion was enjoyed by the governors and assistants as the executive branch.

During the first five years or so of the colony’s governance, the assistants played an outsized role, one later diminished. And they were empowered, as a sort of law enforcement agency, to issues warrants, summonses, and attachments. The board itself issues land grants, wage rates, and the like also. After 1634-1635, with the expansion of freemanship beyond the initial class, the assistants were relegated to more administrative and judicial considerations. And yet, the magistrates (assistants) maintained a negative vote (veto power) in the legislature.

Returning to Winthrop’s text, it is the former body, the governor and assistants, that has authority and the latter, the freemen, that has liberty, says Winthrop. Freeman has the liberty to elect and to counsel the state. This is not a merely passive liberty but of active selection and input. Hence, consent to and participation in lawmaking in the General Assembly via four General Courts annually. Not to mention annual elections of the governor, deputy, and assistants. Therefore, the government, in its foundations, was hardly arbitrary. True authority established it, and true participation was present in its operations. So too are the duties of each part of government explicitly handed down in the charter. None of this had been altered either by the incumbent administration.

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