Jacob Jesson and Freedom of the Jury in the Bay Colony

Abstract

AMONG the heroes of the seventeenth-century struggle in England and America to maintain the constitutional rights of the common man against the usurpations of vested authority, a modest place should be accorded Jacob Jesson of Boston. Had this unsung provincial paladin found men of similar spirit and intelligence among his fellow-members of a Massachusetts jury in 1675, they might have attained a fame as lasting as that of the jury in the trial of William Penn and William Meade. Unfortunately for the glory of New England, Jesson stood alone, and suffered failure, punishment and oblivion; hence only the occasional browser in the dusty court files of the Massachusetts Bay Colony happens upon the heartwarming record of this sturdy Puritan's intransigence.1 To a man of the present day the voluminous records of Massachusetts lawsuits in the I670's afford dismal reading. At its best, and for any period, literature of this type does not tend to increase one's faith in human nature. But during the fifth decade of the Bay Colony's existence there was, in addition to the customary evidence of human meanness and greed, a peculiar flavor of sycophancy pervading many of the petitions, appeals, objections and responses addressed to the courts, which is thoroughly distasteful to the modern palate. In the raw American wilderness, the oligarchy controling the public affairs of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had lost little time in arrogating to itself the privileges and position of a superior class in the community. This phenomenon was nowhere more apparent than in the courts, in which the presiding magistrates appear to have cloaked themselves in the semi-sanctity of the royal