Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor

Abstract

Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor. By Michael C. Batinski. Lexington, 1996 (University Press of Kentucky, 603 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008). In cloth $29.95. Jonathan Belcher (1683-1757) will be known to most readers of this journal as the Governor of Massachusetts (1730-1741) who played factional politics with a vengeance and was undone by the even greater guile of partisans of his successor, William Shirley, during the Land Bank Crisis. Batinski's achievement, although he does not slight Belcher the politician, is to position him skillfully at the intersection of the history of several colonies and several worlds. The author is thereby able to use Belcher as a representative figure whose varied activities illuminate the nature of provincial America during the early eighteenth century. The son of a self-made, domineering Boston merchant who sent him on a tour of Europe in his early twenties, Belcher obtained a cosmopolitan perspective on his native land and its place in the imperial firmament denied to most of his generation. The experience gave him a keen appreciation of the need to cultivate favor at court -- which he did at times with nauseating obsequiousness -- but also renewed devotion to the piety of his ancestors. Listening from youth to the sermons of Puritan ministers who cast the ideal ruler as a latter-day Nehemiah, symbolically restoring the chosen people to their true origins, Belcher went out of his way to promote Indian missions, check the progress of Anglicanism, support the Quakers (who were instrumental in 1746 in obtaining his appointment as Governor of New Jersey), and further the activities of evangelicals such as Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts and Aaron Burr in New Jersey. The crowning achievement of his life was shepherding through a contentious and divided provincial legislature the charter of the College of New Jersey, which is now known as Princeton University. Batinski tries to make sense of Belcher's multi-faceted and paradoxical if not contradictory life, but one gets the feeling he is attempting a hopeless task. Belcher bullied his own two sons as he had been bullied by his father: they did not marry until they were nearly fifty years old. Despite his evangelical beliefs and devotion to Massachusetts, he spent thousands of pounds supporting Jonathan, Jr. in the British Isles, including a futile bid for a seat in the House of Commons With his own father Andrew he was attacked by Boston mobs for exporting grain during food shortages, a selfish lapse from his professed devotion to his native land. …