General court Sentence Examples

The limits of the township, originally called West Hoosac, were determined by a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts in 1749, and two or three years later the village was laid out.

The first settlement here was made about 1659 in a part of Marlboro called Chauncy (because of a grant of Soo acres here to Charles Chauncy, president of Harvard College, made in 1659 and revoked in 1660 by the General Court of Massachusetts).

He was one of the three Massachusetts delegates in Congress in 1785 who refused to present the resolution of the General Court proposing a convention to amend the articles.

Plymouth was never incorporated as a township, but in 1633 the General Court of the colony recognized it as such by ordering that "the chiefe government be tyed to the towne of Plymouth."

In 1855 a number of For several years it was uncertain whether Cambridge, Charlestown or Boston should be the capital of the colony, but in 1632 the General Court agreed " by general consent, that Boston is the fittest place for public meetings of any place in the Bay."

In October 1774, when General Gage refused recognition to the Massachusetts general court at Salem, the members adjourned to Concord as the first provincial congress.

This having been done, the first General Court of which there is record met on the 25th of October.

Thereupon the Quakers, who were perhaps not without the -obstinacy of which Marcus Aurelius complained in the early Christians, rushed to Massachusetts as if invited, and the result was that the general court of the colony banished them on pain of death, and four of them, three men and one woman,were hanged for refusing to depart from the jurisdiction or for obstinately returning within it.

In 1737 he began his public career as a member of the Boston Board of Selectmen, and a few weeks later he was elected to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, of which he was a member until 1740 and again from 1742 to 1 749, serving as speaker in 1 747, 1 74 8 and 1749.

In 1748 he carried through the General Court a bill providing for the cancellation and redemption of the outstanding paper currency.

His elder brother, John Quincy Adams (1833-1894), a graduate of Harvard (1853), practised law, and was a Democratic member for several terms of the Massachusetts general court.

In the First Parish Church, the site of which is marked by a monument, the Provincial Congress, after adjournment from Concord, met from April to July 1775; the Massachusetts General Court held its sessions here from 1775 to 1778, and the Boston town meetings were held here during the siege of Boston, when many of the well-known Boston families made their homes in the neighbourhood.

Pepperrell served in the Massachusetts general court (1726-1727), and in the governor's council (1727-1759), of which for eighteen years he was president.

On the 13th of March 1644 the Portsmouth-Newport General Court changed the name of the island from Aquidneck to the Isle of Rhodes or Rhode Island.

Samuel Adams first came into wider prominence at the beginning of the Stamp Act episode, in 1764, when as author of Boston's instructions to its representatives in the general court of Massachusetts he urged strenuous opposition to taxation by act of parliament.

The abandonment of the communal system was begun in the latter year, and with the dissolution of the partnership with the adventurers of the London Company in 1627 Plymouth became a corporate colony with its chief authority vested in the whole body of freemen convened in the General Court.

Upon the death of the first governor, John Carver, in the spring of 1621, the General Court chose William Bradford as his successor, and with him was chosen one assistant.

The General Court was the legislature and the electorate; the governor and assistants were the executive and the judiciary.

The whole body of freemen composed the General Court until other towns than Plymouth had been organized, the first of which were Scituate in 1636 and Duxbury in 1637, and then the representative form of government was adopted and there was a gradual differentiation between Plymouth the town and Plymouth the 1882 the assessment of realty increased nearly twelve times as much as personalty.

In 1631 the general court of the Massachusetts colony resolved, " that no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same."

In 1765 he became a selectman of Boston, and from 1766 to 1772 was a member of the Massachusetts general court.

In 1636 Hartford was the meeting-place of the first general court of the Connecticut colony; the Fundamental Orders, the first written constitution, were adopted at Hartford in 1639; and after the union of the colonies of New Haven and Connecticut, accomplished by the charter of 1662, Hartford became the sole capital; but from 1701 until 1873 that honour was shared with New Haven.

He graduated at Harvard in 1745, and was a member of the lower house of the general court of Massachusetts in 1753-1756, and from 1757 to 1774 of the Massachusetts council, in which, according to Governor Thomas Hutchinson, he "was without a rival," and, on the approach of the War of Independence, was "the principal supporter of the opposition to the government."

Steel seems to have been made here from native iron in 1727, and in 1740 the General Court of Connecticut granted three Connecticut citizens who sought to make steel in "Symsbury" a fifteen years' monopoly of making steel in the colony.

In 1773 the mine was leased by the General Court and was fitted up as a public gaol and workhouse (called Newgate Prison), the prisoners being employed in mining.

At its May session in 1742 the General Court of Massachusetts forbade itinerant preaching save with full consent from the resident pastor; in May 1743 the annual ministerial convention, by a small plurality, declared against "several errors in doctrine and disorders in practice which have of late obtained in various parts of the land," against lay preachers and disorderly revival meetings; in the same year Charles Chauncy, who disapproved of the revival, published Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England; and in 1744-1745 Whitefield, upon his second tour in New England, found that the faculties of Harvard and Yale had officially "testified" and "declared" against him and that most pulpits were closed to him.

In 1768 he was a delegate to the provincial convention which was called to meet in Boston, and conducted the prosecution of Captain Thomas Preston and his men for their share in the famous " Boston Massacre of the 5th of March 1770., He served in the Massachusetts General Court in 1773-1774, in the Provincial Congress in 177 4-1775, and in the Continental Congress in 1 7741778, and was speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1777, a member of the executive council in 1779, a member of the committee which drafted the constitution of 1780, attorney-general of the state from 1777 to 1790, and a judge of the state supreme court from 1790 to 1804.

Lands were set apart for the maintenance of the judges, and indeed nothing gives a higher idea of the elaborate civilization of Mexico than this judicial system, which culminated in a general court and council of state presided over by the king.

The constitution which then went into effect provided for a General Court consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives and made the Council a body advisory to the state president; the 1784 instrument was much amended in 1792, when the title of president was changed to governor, but with the amendments adopted in that year it is in large measure the constitution of to-day.

New Hampshire formed a part of Massachusetts when, in 1647, the General Court of that province passed the famous act requiring every town in which there were fifty householders to maintain a school for teaching reading and writing, and every town in which there were one hundred householders to maintain a grammar school with an instructor capable of preparing young men for college.

In the same year Massachusetts encouraged friendly Puritans to settle Hampton on the same purchase, and about a year later this colony organized Hampton as a town with the right to send a deputy to the General Court.

As the village expanded 1 Mayhew was born at Tisbury, Wiltshire, was a merchant in Southampton, emigrated to Massachusetts about 1633, settled at Watertown, Mass., in 3635; was a member of the Massachusetts General Court in 1636-1644, and after 1644 or 1645 lived on Martha's Vineyard.

In the pre-revolutionary controversies he identified himself with the American Whigs; in 1773 he prepared for Salem a paper entitled State of the Rights of the Colonists; in 1 775 he drafted a memorial protesting against the Boston Port Bill; and in 1776 he was a representative from Salem in the general court of Massachusetts.

In 1766 he had been commissioned lieutenant and in 1769 captain in the Essex (disambiguation)|Essex county militia; early in 1775 he published An Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, adopted in May 1776 by the general court for use by the militia of Massachusetts, and he was elected colonel of his regiment.

The New Hampshire grantees undertook to establish here a colony of Londonderry Irish; but the Massachusetts settlers were firmly established by the spring of 1727, Massachusetts definitely assumed jurisdiction in 1731, and in 1734 her general court incorporated the settlement under the name of Rumford.

In 1654 the Massachusetts General Court granted to the Indians, for their exclusive use, a tract of about 4 sq.

Subsequently he laid his protest before the Massachusetts General Court which voted its approval of his action.

Mrs Hutchinson was tried (November 1637) by the General Court chiefly for "traducing the ministers," and was sentenced to banishment; later, in March 1638, she was tried before the Boston church and was formally excommunicated.

The confederate authority was vested in a board of eight commissioners, two from each colony chosen annually by its General Court.

He was chosen by the General Court to represent the colony's interests in England, eluded officers sent to arrest him, 3 and in disguise boarded a ship on which he reached Weymouth on the 6th of May 1688.

Mather had been acting president of Harvard College in 1681-1682, and in June 1685 he again became acting president (or rector), but still preached every Sunday in Boston and would not comply with an order of the General Court that he should reside in Cambridge.

In 1701 after a short residence there he returned to Boston and wrote to the General Court to "think of another President for the Colledge."

Its site was selected in 1630 by Governor Winthrop and others as suitable for fortifications and defence, and it was intended to make it the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; but as Boston's peninsular position gave it the advantage in commerce and in defence against the Indians, the plan fell through, although up to 1638 various sessions of the general court and particular courts were held here.

For some time the political affiliation was with the Connecticut river towns in Connecticut, but later the authority of the Massachusetts General Court was recognized.

In 1650 he published a tract (The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption) in which he attacked the Calvinistic doctrine of the atonement, and which was burned on Boston Common by order of the General Court.

In 1672 the general court granted 600 acres of land to each county for educational purposes; in 1794 the general assembly appropriated the proceeds from the sale of western lands to education, and in 1837 made a similar disposition of funds received from the Federal treasury.

The general court - the supreme civil authority - was composed of deputies from the towns, and a governor and magistrates who were chosen at a session of the court attended by all freemen of the towns.

The government thus established was not the product of a federation of townships, as has often been stated; indeed, the townships had been governed during the first year by commissioners deriving authority from Massachusetts, and the first general court was probably convened by them.

Their most original feature was the omission of a religious test for citizenship, though a precedent for this is to be found in the Plymouth Colony; on the other hand, the union of church and state was presumed in the preamble, and in 1659 a property qualification (the possession of an estate of X30) for suffrage was imposed by the general court.

In 1643 the jurisdiction of the New Haven colony was extended by the admission of the townships of Milford, Guilford and Stamford to equal rights with New Haven, the recognition of their local governments, and the formation of two courts for the whole jurisdiction, a court of magistrates to try important cases and hear appeals from " plantation " courts, and a general court with legislative powers, the highest court of appeals, which was similar in composition to the general court of the Connecticut Colony.

The religious test for citizenship was continued (except in the case of six citizens of Milford), and in 1644 the general court decided that the "judicial laws of God as they were declared by Moses " should constitute a rule for all courts " till they be branched out into particulars hereafter."

It created a corporation under the name of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Connecticut in New England in America, sanctioned the system of government already existing, provided that all acts of the general court should be valid upon being issued under the seal of the colony, and made no reservation of royal or parliamentary control over legislation or the administration of justice.

The Code of 1650 (Connecticut) taxed all persons for its support, provided for the collection of church taxes, if necessary, by civil distraint, and forbade the formation of new churches without the consent of the general court.

The New England Half Way Covenant of 1657, which extended church membership so as to include all baptized persons, was sanctioned by the general court in 1664.

At that time, however, a liberal policy towards dissent was adopted, the general court granting permission for churches " soberly to differ or dissent " from the establishment.

The very existence of the establishment seemed threatened; consequently in 1742 the general court forbade any ordained minister to enter another parish than his own without an invitation, and decided that only those were legal ministers who were recognized as such by the general court.

During the controversy over the Stamp Act the general court instructed the colony's agent in London to insist on " the exclusive right of the colonists to tax themselves, and on the privilege of trial by jury," as rights that could not be surrendered.

In 1776 the government of Connecticut was reorganized as a state, the charter of 1662 being adopted by the general court as " the Civil Constitution of this State, under the sole authority of the people thereof, independent of any King or Prince whatever."

The questions which would claim the exercise of such a jurisdiction appear to be (I) intercolonial tariffs and the coasting trade; (2) railways, roads, canals, and other such works running through any two of the colonies; (3) beacons and lighthouses on the coast; (4) intercolonial gold regulations; (5) postage between the said colonies; (6) a general court of appeal from the courts of sucn colonies; (7) a power to legislate on all other subjects which may be submitted to them by addresses from the legislative councils and assemblies of the colonies, and to appropriate to any of the above-mentioned objects the necessary sums of money, to be raised by a percentage on the revenues of all the colonies interested."

He served in the Massachusetts General Court in1783-1784and in the Confederation Congress in 1784-1787.

It was largely through his efforts that the General Court in 1784 rejected the amendment to the Articles of Confederation authorizing Congress to levy a 5% impost.

The strength of the parties was testel at the General Court of Election of May 1637, when Winthrop defeated Vane for the governorship. Cotton recanted, Vane returned to England in disgust, Wheelwright was tried and banished and the rank and file either followed Cotton in making submission or suffered various minor punishments.