John Wise | Biography

John Wise was probably the most original prose writer in colonial America. His works were filled with rough country humor, homely metaphors, and practical examples that appealed directly to the common townsfolk of New England rather than to the learned ministerial elite.

Wise was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in August 1652, the son of Joseph Wise, a former indentured servant. From shortly after his 1673 graduation from Harvard College until November 1677. Wise served as minister in Branford, Connecticut. During that time he also briefly acted as chaplain to the colonial troops in King Philip's War (1675-1676). Wise accepted a call from the Hatfield, Massachusetts, congregation in 1677 and served as minister there until 1682. While in Hatfield, he married Abigail Gardner of Muddy River, Massachusetts, in December 1678, and in November 1679 Jeremiah Wise, the first of John Wise's seven children, was born. In 1682 Wise accepted an offer to become the first minister of the newly created Chebacco parish in the township of Ipswich.

It was as minister in Ipswich that Wise achieved fame as a defender of the rights of the colonists and as a staunch supporter of the Congregationalist form of church government. His first notable test came in 1687 when he advised his parishioners to resist Edmund Andros's efforts to impose a poll and property tax on Massachusetts residents. Andros directed town residents to appoint tax commissioners to collect the new levies, but a number of Massachusetts towns, led by Ipswich, refused to appoint these officials without a directive from the Massachusetts General Assembly. Andros was infuriated by this resistance, and for his part in the protest Wise was imprisoned for twenty-one days, fined £50, and suspended from the ministry. When he appealed his sentence and claimed the rights of a free-born Englishman, he was told by the judge. "Mr. Wise, you have no more privileges Left you, than not to be Sould for Slaves."

When Andros was deposed in 1689 and the Dominion of New England was abolished, Wise was fully exonerated. His courageous stand against Andros was rewarded by an appointment as chaplain to the colonial military expedition against Quebec in 1690. Though the military misson was a failure, Wise distinguished himself by his efficient actions and intelligent advice. Two years later Wise again displayed his courage and good sense when he vigorously defended his former parishioners John and Elizabeth Procter in the Salem witch trials. But despite Wise's warning against reliance on spectral evidence, John Procter was hanged, and his wife escaped execution only upon a plea of pregnancy.

After 1692 Wise disappeared from the public scene until 1713, when he appeared as the author of the remarkable work The Churches Quarrel Espoused.... Reprinted in 1715, the piece was a satirical reply to the Proposals of 1705 sponsored by Cotton Mather. The proposals, signed by such New England luminaries as Mather, Samuel Willard, and Ebenezer Pemberton, advocated the establishment of ministerial associations that would broaden the power of the clergy at the expense of the individual congregations and called for the establishment of standing councils with final authority in ecclesiastical matters. Though the proposals were never enacted in Massachusetts, the acceptance of the Saybrook Platform in Connecticut in 1708 had kept the issue of ecclesiastical authority alive, and, when Wise turned to the question in 1713, it was still an important point of contention.

In The Churches Quarrel Espoused ... Wise defended each congregation's right to determine questions of church discipline and the selection of new ministers. He cited as his authority the Cambridge Platform of 1648. The novelty of The Churches Quarrel Espoused ... lay in the quality of Wise's rhetoric and in the audience that Wise addressed. Wise directed his appeal to the common town dweller, deliberately using homely metaphors, rough humor, and common images to illustrate the dangers the proposals posed to the rights of the congregations. Warning his readers that though the proposals "be but a Calf now, yet in time it may grow to become a sturdy Ox that will know no Whoa," he replied to each of the sixteen points in the proposals and exposed them as threats to the liberty and free choice of the common New Englander. Because the proposals placed overseers on the individual ministers, Wise felt that they "Out Pope't the Pope Himself" and threatened New England with a form of Catholic hierarchy. For Wise, the proposals represented the danger of an arbitrary ecclesiastical rule that violated the principles of New England Congregationalism.

Wise's satirical attack on the proposals was followed in 1717 by A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches. In this short treatise the Ipswich minister defended Congregationalism through five demonstrations: defenses based on authorities' from antiquity, natural law, holy scripture, the constitution of the colony, and the providence of God. The most original defense was the demonstration from natural law. Borrowing from Samuel Pufendorf's De jure nature et gentium, first published in 1671, Wise examined the merits of the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic forms of civil government and concluded that since the "End of all good Government is to Cultivate Humanity and Promote the happiness of all," democracy was "the form of Government, which the Light of Nature does most highly value." Because Congregationalism was the most democratic form of ecclesiastical government, Wise concluded that it was preferable to any other form of church organization.

Wise's appeal to natural law marked a revolutionary departure from the usual clerical defense of Congregationalism. While ministers such as Increase Mather, in his work A Disquisition Concerning Ecclesiastical Councils (1716), supported Congregationalism by an appeal to holy scripture and early Puritan practice, Wise based his defense on the common man's desire to preserve as much of his natural liberty as possible within an ordered society. In presenting this rationalistic defense Wise spoke directly to the fears and concerns of his parishioners.

A similar practical tone and appeal marked Wise's last public writing, his 1721 pamphlet entitled A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country.... In this work Wise defended the establishment in Massachusetts of a private land bank that would issue paper currency. Wise supported an inflationary policy because he feared that a reliance on metallic currency would retard Massachusetts's economic development, and he saw the issuance of paper currency as a means to encourage manufacturing, to increase the prices paid for agricultural goods, and to join all of the colony's residents in a web of commerce that depended on mutual good faith and active trade.

Wise died on 8 April 1725. His two works on church government were reprinted in 1772 after the Bolton, Massachusetts, controversy over the question of local autonomy once again disrupted the Massachusetts churches.