“his rebellion against his natural parents;” with violating a court of justice, discharging a whole country “from their oaths whereby they had sworn obedience to His Majesty’s authority according to the Constitution of his Royal Charter;” and with attempting to overthrow the rights of the colony under the charter by bringing in a military force to overawe and suppress the civil authorities.  They denounced them as guilty of a perversion of their trust, and as having committed a breach upon the dignity of the crown, by pursuing a course “derogatory to His Majesty’s authority here established,” and “repugnant to His Majesty’s princely and gracious intention in betrusting them with such a commission.”  The Court held the vantage-ground, and the commissioners were unable to dislodge them.  The end of the matter was, that the power of the commissioners was completely broken down.  They ingloriously gave up the contest, and went home to England.

The instance of John Porter, Jr., to which such extraordinary publicity and prominence were given by the circumstances now related, does not bear against what I have said of the general prevalence, in the rural community of Salem Village, of parental authority and filial duty, as he was early withdrawn from it to pursuits that led him into totally different spheres of life.  He had been engaged in trade, and exposed to vicious influences in foreign ports.  In voyages to “Barbadoes, and so for England, he had prodigally wasted and riotously expended about four hundred pounds.”  Besides this, he had run himself, by his vicious courses, into debts which his father had to pay in order to release him from prison abroad.  He came back the desperate character described by the General Court.  His punishment was severe, but absolutely necessary, in the judgment of the whole community, for the safety of his parents and the preservation of domestic and public order.

Although living in humble dwellings on plain fare, working with their hands for daily bread, clad in rude garments, and practising a frugal economy, there was a certain style of things about the people I am describing unlike what is ordinarily associated with our ideas of them.  The men wore swords or rapiers as a part of their daily apparel.  Their wives had domestic servants.  Every farmer had his hired laborers, and many of them had slaves.  The relation of servitude, however, differed from that on Southern plantations in many respects.  The slaves, without any formal manumission, easily obtained their freedom, and often became landholders.  The courteous decorum acquired from the example of the eminent men among the first planters long continued to mark the manners of this people; and its vestiges remain to the present day.  It strikingly appeared in the latter half of the last and the earlier period of this century in the persons of Judge Samuel Houlton, Colonel Israel Hutchinson, General Moses Porter, and the late Judge Samuel Putnam.