Restoring the old charter failed to calm a populace that now wanted democracy

Evidence

The populace remained unruly, however, over the next few weeks. Cotton Mather was tapped to preach at a May convention called to settle the various demands for independence, military rule, or the old charter. He did not see democracy in the different demands; he saw pandemonium. “I am old enough to cry Peace! And in the Name of God I do it,” he preached at the convention. The next day, town representatives voted to return to the old charter and reappoint the old governor, Simon Bradstreet. Peace, or the old social order of the populace submitting to the ministers and merchants, did not reappear, as Mather had wished. Nearly everyone knew the Bradstreet government was unofficial, as it had not received royal backing. When the king recalled Andros, Randolph, and other royalists in July 1689, it did not calm the masses. “All confusion is here,” one New Englander reported. “Every man is a Governor,” another testified. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 147

Categorization

• XREF: The elite design of containing revolution to restore their own order, contrasted with the masses’ actual democratic demands, evokes the reader’s existing framing of rhetoric as elite self-interest — and prefigures how ‘peace’ and ‘order’ become coded defenses of hierarchy.