John Leverett - Early Life

Early Life

John Leverett was baptized 7 July 1616 at St Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire. His father, Thomas Leverett, was a close associate of John Cotton, the church's Puritan pastor, and served as one of the church's elders. Nothing is known of his mother, Anne Fisher, beyond that she bore her husband 16 children. Of John Leverett's youth nothing is known prior to the family's departure for the New World in 1633. By the early 1630s Leverett's father was an alderman in Boston, and had acquired, in partnership with John Beauchamp of the Plymouth Council for New England, a grant now known as the Waldo Patent for land in what is now the state of Maine. When the family arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony it settled in the capital, also called Boston. In 1640 Leverett was made a freeman and joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Leverett married Hannah Hudson in 1639. She bore him a son, Hudson, in 1640, and died in 1643.

The Artillery Company was a focal point in the colony for people who disagreed with the orthodoxy of the colony's Puritan leaders. Many of its leading members, Leverett among them, opposed the colonial crackdowns on religious dissenters. Its members also engaged in trade. Leverett frequently partnered with Edward Gibbons and Major General Robert Sedgwick in trading ventures. He was, for example, part owner with Gibbons of a ship lost off the Virginia coast. The mixture of military leadership and commercial enterprise sometimes led to conflicts of interest. In the 1640s, Gibbons convinced Governor John Winthrop to allow Massachusetts volunteers to assist French Acadian Governor Charles de la Tour in his dispute with Charles de Menou d'Aulnay. Gibbons had negotiated exclusive trading privileges with la Tour in exchange for this help, and Leverett was also able to secure preferential trading privileges with the French.

Leverett was a popular leader of the colonial militia, something that resulted in an unusual situation caused by the colony's militia laws. The colony had voted to limit the size of its militia companies, and restricted their officers to hold only one post. In 1652, when Leverett was captain of a Suffolk County company of horse, he was also elected as a captain of one of the Boston infantry companies. The colonial magistrates refused to grant him an exemption from the rule, and he was required to give up the Boston post.