Reasons for emigrating [draft for chapter l or introduction



Chapter l

The English men and women who emigrated to New England in the 1630s

wanted to enact a “Reformation” of church and civil society. Theirs would be a second reformation, carrying to completion the recovery of true religion that Luther, Calvin, and the other great reformers of the sixteenth century had initiated but in England, especially, never allowed to remove all of Catholicism. Theirs too would be a reformation of social and civil life, carrying into practice “rules of “righteousness” God prescribed for a “Christian Common-wealth.” To an astonishing extent the colonists would fulfill these goals. Only in New England., among all the settlements in the new world that immigrants from England were creating in the first half of the seventeenth century, was private and public life so shaped by expectations of reform.[i]

Some extraordinary determination to rework church and civil society was needed to sustain the colonists in New England, for the risks they were taking were many. As news drifted back to England of how this “Reformation” was unfolding, most of their contemporaries, even those of Puritan sympathies, thought the changes taking place too radical. Those who watched and worried had good reason for doing so, for the colonists were upending a host of practices and institutions within English society and replacing them with quite different procedures and structures—of choosing ministers and admitting people to the church, of arranging the inheritance of property and defining crime, of electing civil leaders to office and setting boundaries to their authority. “When we first set up reformation in our church way,” John Winthrop wrote in the early 1640s, “did not this expose us to as greate an hazard as we could run, both from abroad and at home? Did not our friends in England, many of them, forewarne us of it as we came away? Did not others send letters, after us, to deterre us from it? Did not some among ourselves . . . inculcate our inevitable dangers . . .?” What Winthrop recalled of the risks being taken in church affairs was no less true of arrangements within civil society. The English people who came to live here permanently—a “wilderness people,” they often called themselves—regarded the literal wilderness as a place awaiting transformation into “Emanuals land,” [JC sermon], a place defined by their pledge to “submit our persons, lives and estates unto our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and to all those perfect and most absolute law of his given us in his holy word of truth, to be guided and judged thereby.”[ii]

Not without conflict and confusion, but steadily nonetheless, the colonists carried their core principles into action. Practice and principle were fused in the “Fundamentall Orders” drawn up and ratified in Connecticut in 1638, with its proviso that the “General Assembly” be re-elected each year and that no one holding the office of governor do so for two years in succession. Practice and principle were spelled out in the carefully scripted organizing of civil government in New Haven the following year, and in the “Body of Liberties” that the Massachusetts government ratified in 1641. At these moments as at many others, the colonists indicated their intention to test the possibilities for living according to “rules” laid down in Scripture. They were testing, too, the possibilities for empowering ordinary people in the affairs both of church and civil society. In the more intimate setting of towns and congregations these people were even more venturesome. Discarding in toto the elaborate apparatus of the Church of England—all hierarchy of officers, as radical Puritans had long imagined doing, but also ecclesiastical courts and the system of taxation known as “tithes”--local people affirmed the right to choose (‘elect”) their own ministers, to pay them by voluntary contributions, and to decide among themselves who was qualified for church membership. Taking up the task of fashioning local governments, many of these people assigned full power to the entire body of householders, as exercised in frequent community meetings. Though this way of doing things soon shifted to the practice of delegating most administrative work to a smaller group of “townsmen” or “selectmen,” these communities agreed to make this change only after stipulating that certain major decisions must be made collectively. No one quite knew what to call this new system—“Christian Common-wealth” was one term in use by 1638--but in 1640 the men residing in the newly founded town of Providence used a term that would have shocked most of their contemporaries in England, and indeed in Europe, when they declared “unanimously” that their “Bodie Politick . . . is democracie, or Popular Government; that is to say, It is in the Powre of the Body of Freemen, orderly assembled, or the major part of them, to make or constitute Just Lawes . . .and to depute from among themselves such Ministers as shall see them faithfully executed.”[iii]

Beyond the structure of church and civil government lay something broader, a “social imaginary” of how people in society should live together. This imaginary or moral vision had many elements, but at its heart was a re-imagining of social relationships as “mutuality,” that is, a willingness to engage in self-denial for the sake of the collective good. Mutuality went hand-in-hand, therefore, with an emphasis on the “public good.” The social ethics of the colonists contained, as well, the principle of “righteousness,” or the obligation to observe the whole of the moral law as outlined in Scripture. The merchants, gentry, and ministers who joined the Massachusetts Bay Company were a hard-headed folk, but they wanted something better for themselves than the corrosive selfishness and “oppression” they saw around them everywhere in England. So they said in specifying the reasons for founding a colony in far-off New England, knowing well that such an enterprise might bring bankruptcy or cost them their lives, as it had for so many of those involved with the founding of Virginia. But colony-founding also offered them the hope of exchanging a society riddled with conflict and injustice for one that held out the possibility of living together in accordance with a social ethics of righteousness and mutuality—or, as John Winthrop would say in “A Model of Christian Charity”(1630), “the bonds of love.”

This was an ethics no group of people could have practiced to perfection. All too soon, peace in towns and churches was fractured by conflict and the ethics of mutuality disturbed by self-interest. The two uncontrollable forces that plagued every village community in early modern Europe, illicit sex and excessive imbibing of alcohol, defied the efforts of the authorities in New England to eliminate them. The many young servants who sold their labor to other immigrants became a troublesome source of disorder, as did young people in general by the 1650s. Families moved from one town to another with astonishing frequency, and entrepreneurial town founders never lived in places where they owned land. Massachusetts and Connecticut each tried to seize land in other colonies, and quarrels over boundary lines persisted for decades. Nor could religious and political dissidents be kept away despite strong efforts to do so.

Yet the social imaginary of the early years persisted as a framework of self-understanding and collective action. Its themes were voiced in many forms—in elegiac verse and autobiographies or commemorative prose, in works of history, in the gift-giving that people specified in wills, in gestures of civil courts to encourage arbitration or of churches to renew a covenant, in letters of advice and, above all, in sermons. Thomas Hinkley’s wife was remembered by her husband for her generosity to church and others: “And allwayes gave more than her Rate away, / Yea ever first wou’d pay that pious due, / Then other Debts, and on the Residue/ Wou’d wisely live and help ye Poor she knew.”[iv]. At the very beginning of colonization, a “Pilgrim” separatist named Robert Cushman came from England in 1621 to visit the tiny community at Plymouth. There he preached a sermon on the theme of generosity toward the saints, urging the colonists to seek the “wealth” of others rather than their own. [v] Many years later, in 1654, another Englishman who had lived briefly in Massachusetts wrote from England chastising the townspeople of Providence for the “divisions,” “tumults” and “injustice” that had overtaken them. The purpose of his letter was to refurbish a social imaginary that, in response, the people of Providence reaffirmed. :

“Is not the fear and awe of God amongst you to restrain? Is not the love of

Christ in you, to fill you with yearning bowels, one toward another, and

constrain you to live not unto yourselves, but unto him that died for you,

yes, and is risen again? Are there no wise men amongst you? No public

self-denying spirits, that, at least upon the grounds of …equity and prudence,

can find out some way or means of union and reconcilement for you

amongst yourselves ….? [Staples 99]

Thus were the colonists summoned to behave like Christians—not as nominal, “neuter,” hypocrites but as real Christians who in the “wilderness” of the new world were attempting to live according to a distinctive ethics.

The purpose of this book is to take such statements seriously and, in doing so, to reclaim the radicalism of practice and principle among the colonists as they brought towns, churches, and colonies into being in the 1620s and 1630s. How much they accomplished in attempting a second Reformation and in re-doing the institutions of civil society may be suggested by glancing sideways at the puritan movement in England once it came into political power in the 1640s. Though we speak of the “Puritan Revolution,” not that much was done in the 1640s to remake either the national church or the institutions of monarch, parliament, courts, and local government. The full flowering of radicalism was held in check because the “Long Parliament”—given this name because it “sat” from mid-1640 until forcibly purged in 1649—was dominated by moderates and conservatives who became increasingly anxious about the agitation for change. In church affairs, it was sufficient that some aspects of “catholic” worship be eliminated and that a handful of erring bishops be removed from office or executed. Otherwise, the Parliament wanted a uniform, comprehensive national church along the lines of Presbyterianism, or even a church with some form of episcopacy. In political life it was enough that the King would agree to certain limits on his authority, and that bishops cease to serve in the House of Lords.

Where radicalism found the space to flourish was elsewhere—among the ministers and lay people who broke with Presbyterianism and Episcopacy to become “Independents,” among intellectuals and disaffected artisans whose proposals for change gained them the name of “Levellers,” among other intellectuals, most of them ministers, who proposed some scheme of “godly rule” that entrusted the institutions of civil government to “the saints,” and of most importance, among the rank and file and some officers of the New Model Army as it became disaffected with the Long Parliament and the King, to the point of questioning whether the monarchy should not give way to a republican form of government..

Together, radicals in the army and the Levellers fashioned by 1648 a far-reaching program of reform: Parliaments to sit for only six months, and elections to take place every two years; eliminating the “negative voice” (that is, veto) of King and House of Lords over measures passed by the Commons; apportioning seats in the Commons more fairly; opening up the franchise so that many more men could vote; revamping the criminal code to eliminate imprisonment for debt, simplifying the civil code and making it more accessible by eliminating law French; ending the system of enforced tithes to support the clergy; and allowing liberty of conscience, or freedom to worship as one pleased. Some radicals were republicans who wanted to eliminate the monarchy; others suggested disbanding the House of Lords. At the root of most of these suggestions lay an idea that in 1640s England was far from being widely held, that legitimacy flowed upward, from “the people.”

Little of this agenda was actually accomplished, although the execution of Charles I in 1649 did usher in a short-lived Commonwealth—Oliver Cromwell, its leader, was an “Independent” who tried to practice some aspects of “godly rule”-- that ended with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The English Revolution was like the French of 1789 in that its radicals were a small minority contending against social forces that could not overcome. The situation in New England was exactly the reverse. Hhere the radicals were in charge and here, in the “free aire of a new world,” no countervailing forces rose up to thwart them. None of the colonists were Levellers. Nor did they know of the Leveller program as they were fashioning their own institutions. Yet with the one major exception of toleration, that program was fulfilled or surpassed on this side of the Atlantic: in a greatly simplified criminal code that ended imprisonment for debt and capital punishment for felonious theft, in recasting the franchise (or right to vote) to free it from social rank or wealth; in requiring annual elections of General Courts (colony-wide governments) and a system of representation that gave each and every town 2 or more deputies (representatives); and in denying any one—governor, magistrates, or deputies—a “negative voice” or, when permitting such a practice, granting it to both branches of the General Court, the deputies as well as the magistrate.[vi] The reworking of the church was no less extensive: tithes gave way to “voluntary” payments and then to an equitable system of “rates,” lay church members gained the right to elect and dismiss ministers and to decide on who should be admitted, and each of these churches became, in principle, autonomous “congregations” (hence “Congregationalism”).

Together, ideology and the unspoken consequences of immigration worked other changes that would make New England so distinctive. Either legally or in social practice, the English social order consigned substantially more rights and privileges to the aristocracy and the upper gentry than to those beneath them in rank. It was customary for aristocrats and gentry to intervene in Parliamentary elections and claim seats for themselves or for clients. It was customary for them to nominate clergy to “livings” they controlled. It was customary for them to abuse the levying of taxes by reducing their own assessments far below their actual value. And although some gentry and aristocrats were critical of Charles I, many others sought rewards that only the King could provide— titles, though especially of offices that generated revenue most of which they could retain for themselves. To outsiders, as some radicals and Puritans were to the workings of social rank, these ways of doing things smelled of “corruption.” Puritans were far from being the first to inveigh against such abuses of wealth and power and to call for change—Thomas More had imagined a better society in Utopia (153x), and criticism erupted from time to time under Charles, his father James I, and even under Elizabeth, though usually expressed indirectly as criticism of “Popery,” a useful code word for anxieties about the abuse of power and privilege.[vii] [cite Lake/Spanish/Buckingham] But again, the effects in New England of ideology and immigration were little short of astonishing. None of these forms of corruption were possible in the colonies. Taxation—a topic to which we will return in another chapter—was handled in a different manner, as was office holding. And when the colonists had to decide on rules for the inheritance of property, every aspect of privilege vanished: no entailing of land, no disinheriting of younger sons or daughters. Instead, in law and in social practice the colonists distributed their estates equally to every child, male and female, reserving oinly a double share for oldest sons. Widows were ensured one third of an estate, both goods and real estate. Almost without celebration, the excesses of the English social system and the apparatus of a hierarchical church simply vanished.

Some of these new ways of civil and church government rested on a simple principle that the minister Thomas Hooker voiced publicly in Hartford in May 1638: “They who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them,” giving as the first, most important reason for this rule “Because the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”[viii] These words would have appalled Charles I and the men around him who in England at this very moment were extolling the divine origins of kingship and insisting that the King did not owe his authority to any elected body. Indeed, four years into his reign, which began in 1625, Charles dismissed the Parliament of 1629—it had no authority to meet on its own—and began to rule without the advice or services of any elected body. He extended his way of thinking to the structure of the Church of England, insisting that a hierarchical system with bishops at its top was the necessary correlate of divine right monarchy. “No bishops, no king” his father James I was said to have asserted, and Charles could only agree. In his vision of the good society authority flowed downward—in civil society through the king’s officers, in the Church through the bishops. He put his assumptions about the exercise and justice of royal power to the test in how he financed the costs of government and, in matters relating to the church, how he pushed the bishops to stamp out local irregularities or “nonconformity” of the kind that Puritan-minded lay people and ministers had commonly been able to practice.[ix]

These measures were fresh on the minds of the colonists when they drafted “Fundamentals” to guide the fashioning of civil government in New England. Experience with the “tyranny” of the bishops was fresh, too, among those who took the lead in fashioning the “Congregational Way.” The political situation in England was immensely important as background to what would happen in New England, and reverberations from the “English Revolution” were strongly felt in the 1640s and 1650s. But as we will see more fully in subsequent chapters, certain ehical rules the colonists brought with the, together with their understanding of how the Christian church had fared throughout the centuries, were probably more consequential.

To these matters we will turn in a moment after considering one other aspect of the situation, the capacity of the Puritan movement to sustain “conservative” themes and, at the other extreme, to give voice to a radicalism that surpassed what the colonists were willing to attempt. As daring as the main body of colonists were (or were willing to accept), others were more radical in how they wished to dismantle hierarchy and implement “godly rule” or, if not godly rule, some policy of differentiating between saints and profane. Long before the emigration, the Puritan movement had spun off “Separatists” who rejected all communion with the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay Company was officially opposed to Separatism, but a young minister who arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, Roger Williams, was suddenly demanding that the colonists repent their connections with the Church. Within a few years Williams was arguing for liberty of conscience, a position consistent with his reading of Scripture—it was wrong, he said, for Christians to model their society on Old Testament practices, like having kings (civil magistrates) regulate religious life. The underlying theme of these and other criticisms was that the holy and the unregenerate, though forced to live together in this world, should never be entangled. Others like him became Baptists or Quakers, groups that eliminated ordained ministry and elevated the authority of lay people. Baptist or not, some lay people in New England persistently complained that the clergy had too much power or were paid too much, and that too many of the wrong kinds of people were becoming church members.

Neither in England or the colonies did such groups or complaints gain much of a following, and processes of reconciliation allowed many of the lay “Antinomians” who were disfranchised or exiled in the 1630s to re-enter civil society. But the major counterweight to radicalism were currents of thinking and expectations about practice that may (clumsily) be termed “conservative.” From the start, some key leaders were dismayed by the pace and direction of change and protested loudly, as when Roger Ludlow, learning that “the people” were insisting on broader elections of the governor of Massachusetts and the “Assistants” (his own office), “grewe into passion, & sayd that then we should have no government.” [W J66] As time went by, others such as John Winthrop became more cautious, and almost every one who drafted oaths of allegiance or preached election sermons extolled obedience to authority, said that order was important, and called on civil governors to punish heresy or error. Seeking freedom to practice their form of religion, the colonists turned the freedom they found in the new world on its head by insisting that everyone worship in the same way. Echoing the “magisterial” reformers of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the colonists empowered civil governments to do just this. “For a governor to suffer any within his gates to profane the Sabbath,” John Cotton declared in 1651, “is a sin against the Fourth Commandment,” adding that to “deny” the ways of truth laid out in God’s “ordinances” was “to leave Christ no visible kingdom on earth.”[x] Having shed so much baggage from their past, the colonists retained not only the policy that civil magistrates must uphold religious truth but also two other principles they shared with many other English people who were far less radical: (1) although tyranny was bad, authority was necessary for the moral life of a community—the authority to command moral rules and to preserve social peace; and (2) society would collapse into “barbarism” unless people obeyed those set over them, be children acknowledging their parents, households their master, or those of inferior social rank persons of more eminence. John Winthrop defended these rules at almost every turn, though notably in his “little speech on liberty” of 1645 with its somber vision of lawless men and women behaving like animals. But others were of the same thinking.[xi]

Somehow these assumptions did not prevent the colonists from discarding large chunks of the laws and customs that were the means of manifesting authority in England. The experience of authority in early New England would be of a different kind—not very different, perhaps, for some servants or within some households, but very different in the small-scale setting of congregations and town meetings, in sessions of civil and criminal courts, and even at the level of colony government. In other chapters we will look more closely at town and church government and the workings of political opposition. But the mixture of conservative and radical elements in the making of early New England points toward a larger truth about the Puritan movement. Its enemies in England--James I and his son Charles I and their courtiers, together with many of the bishops and aristocracy—regarded the movement as unwilling to accept the authority of the king (who was, we must remember, the official head of the Church) and the rules enacted by the bishops. Conjuring up an imaginary Puritan who could not abide authority, the Crown and its agents did their best to tar all who had any sympathy for the movement with the brush of “sedition” and sectarianism, calling them names such as “Brownist” or “Morellian” or “Separatist,” code words for the impulse to turn things upside down. Misleading though these epithets may be, they are something more than smoke. As Thomas Hooker would say in 1633, responding to an ex-nonconformist turned conformist defending the authority of the monarch to regulate the church, “conscience” was his ultimate guide and the reason, therefore, he was quitting England for New England. [xii]

The experience of authority in early New England had, then, more than one dimension, for the Puritan movement encompassed both the impulse to question some forms of authority and to enact or impose still others. This is why historians have so often suggested that the movement was constantly in a search of a “middle way” where these two tendencies could be held in fruitful synthesis. Another way of thinking about the movement, a perspective I owe to theories of culture, is that the movement was inherently dialectical, always attempting to use authority constructively—ideologically-- to constrain, yet always wanting to allow “conscience” and those things deemed “spiritual” a remarkable degree of freedom.

The story that this book tells, then, has three aspects to it: the colonists’ actions and expectations of the 1630s that almost all of their contemporaries found alarming; the experience of authority in the social world of village and congregation, judicial court and colony governments; and the possibilities for change over time as other aspects of Puritanism came into play. In all these settings and situations, the colonists were bedeviled by an issue that perplexed the movement throughout its history in England and elsewhere , but that became singularly consequential in New England: was it given to excluding or including? Were some people to be kept out of the church because they were unworthy, or was the church (however organized) to incorporate everyone? Were the “godly” to be put in charge of civil government and everyone else denied some political rights, or was everyone (that is, adult males) to participate in politics? Much in the movement pointed toward policies of exclusion. Indeed this was the politics the colonists attempted at the outset. But much in the movement--its roots within the Reformed tradition, its enthusiasm for a national church, its program of evangelism—pointed in a different direction. How these alternatives clashed or were reconciled in the early history of New England, and how ethics and social history affected those processes, is what this book is about.

II

The social practices that made the New England colonies so distinctive flowed directly from the emigrants’ expectations when, back in England, they decided to risk the dangers of settling in a wilderness. What did they hope to gain by coming, and what did they say to friends and allies back in England about their new way of life? Could they see connections between their venture into the American wilderness and the history of the Christian church since the Apostolic age or, much closer to them in their own time, connections with the Protestant Reformation? Were they living in the “final days” foretold in the text that concludes the New Testament? Their thinking about prophecy and church history was, as we will see, the threshold to much of what unfolded in New England. But for a full accounting of the colonists’ moral and social values we must also look elsewhere—to Christian humanism, to the Reformed tradition, and to secular currents in early seventeenth-century England.

Thomas Weld was perhaps the first of the emigrants to say so emphatically what many others were feeling. Writing in 1632 to some of his former parishioners, all of whom would have fresh in mind the conflicts his ministry had aroused in their village, Weld emphasized how, in his new community, “the greater part are the better part . . . Here are none of the men of Gibea …knocking at our doors distributing our sweet peace or threatening violence.[xiii] Here, blessed be the Lord God forever, our ears are not beaten nor the air filled with oaths . . . nor our eyes and ears vexed with the unclean conversation of the wicked.” Others, too, contrasted their conflict-ridden situation in England with the fellowship they now enjoyed. Testifying before the congregation in Cambridge, the mariner John Trumbull recalled “hearing many reproaches on saints” and how he had been pained when “many friends set themselves against me” once he “resolved no more to sin,” a decision that led him to prefer “the company of saints.” The fellowship he found among the saints first in old, then in New England was also John Brock’s experience when he came with his family in 1637: “I was encouraged to love the Saints that were called Puritans . . . The Lord …heard me to open a Way for us to leave England & to get the Society of a beloved Christian.” [xiv] So it went for many others: liberated for the first time from all the negative overtones of “puritan” they relished being with others like themselves who willingly spoke of being “saints” or simply, Christians.

But the liberation they were celebrating much deeper than this. Weld, again, was eloquent on the benefits of emigration:

O how hath my heart been made glad with the comforts of his house . . . wherein all things are done in the form and pattern showed in the mount members provided church officers elected and ordained sacrament administered scandals prevented censured. Fast days and holy feast days and all such things by authority commanded and performed according to the precise rule.[xv]

Everyone back in England who shared his letter—it was copied and recopied within the network of Puritans--would have known exactly what he meant: instead of bishops and ceremonies that Puritans deemed “popish remnants” the colonists were choosing their own ministers, practicing effective church “discipline,” and worshipping in the simplified manner that radical Puritans had so long extolled as the alternative to the “unlawful” features of the Church of England.

Here indeed was what many of the immigrants most wanted and their ministers looking forward to. “Our people here desire to worship God in spirit, & in trueth,” the minister John Cotton reported from Massachusetts in 1634, noting that a principal reason people gave for emigrating was “that we mighte enjoy the libertye, not of some ordinances of god, but of all, & all in Purity.” Two years later he drew on the language of Christian primitivism in observing that “the body of the members whom we receive, doe in generall professe, the reason of their coming over to us was, that they might be freed from the bondage of such humane inventions and ordinances as their soules groaned under . . . . “[xvi] “Humane inventions” was among the most powerful of the accusations that Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century had levied against Catholicism and that reformers in the Church of England had levied in their turn against the bishops and the Book of Common Prayer. Its power sprang from how a single phrase contained an interpretation of Christian history that the emigrants had absorbed from a host of sources, though perhaps especially a literary product of militant English Protestantism in the sixteenth century, the Acts and Monuments or “Book of Martyrs” assembled by the English clergyman John Foxe. In it Foxe told how the church as organized by the Apostles had fallen under the control of the Papacy and been corrupted. As a layman in New England put it, a “Time of Sperituall darkness” had arisen “when . . . Rome Ruled & Overrode most of the nations of Europe.” Foxe assured his readers that true Christianity had survived for centuries on the margins even as the papacy became more and more obsessed with power, more and more the vehicle of Satan’s hatred of Christ and Christ’s own people. Indeed, for Foxe and his heirs, the Papacy was the living, historical embodiment of the Antichrist. With the Reformation came, at last, the moment when a faithful, refuge people rose up to overthrow the “tyranny” of Rome. The purpose of the Protestant Reformation was thus to enact a return to “primitive” or “first” times when Christ was sole head of the Church, with no hierarchy of officers beneath him.

Like almost all their fellow Puritans, the emigrants took this interpretation of history for granted. It was easily extended to their own times, as William Bradford of Plymouth did in writing “Of Plimmoth Plantation,” his history of the “pilgrims” who arrived at Plymouth in 1620. The opening paragraph evoked the struggle of radical puritans, here identified as “the godly,” to recover “the right worship of God and discipline of Christ established in the church, according to the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men’s inventions, and to have and to be ruled by the laws of God’s Word.” Bradford regarded the bishops of the Church of England as “unlawful” tyrants and his own small group as heirs to the martyrs of the early church. Many of the people who came to Massachusetts in the 1630s were similarly persuaded that the bishops were “unlawful” and the Church of England in sore need of purging itself of “men’s inventions,” which meant everything left over from Catholicism. “We came from thence,” a colonist explained in1 647, “to avoid . . .the hierarchy, the crosse in baptisme, the holy dayes, the booke of Common Prayer, &c.” [EW Sal 138] Placing their decisions to emigrate in the context of Christian primitivism, the colonists declared that the task they gladly undertook was to complete a reformation left unfinished in England and even on the Continent. What “drew them into the wilderness” of New England, one minister would later declare, was the intention of “enjoy[ing] the pure worship of God.” {SD]

The primitivism of the colonists took on a legalistic edge whenever the colonists voiced their conviction that the “Word”—that is, Scripture—contained “models” for the church and other institutions. Indeed, Scripture had the force of law that the Christian church was obliged to obey. To those in the Church of England who argued against this way of thinking, Thomas Hooker had replied in 1633, the year he emigrated to New England, that the church “must deliver the laws which she hath received from [Christ] her King, not dare to make laws.” The “tables of the Law” in Genesis were only the beginning, for both Old and Testament contained principles for guiding the relationship between church and state, the “due form” of civil government, and, above all, for how the church should be organized.

The partes of Church-Government are all of them exactly described

in the word of God being parts or means of Instituted worship

according to the Second Commandment . . . Soe that it is not left in the

power of men, officers, Churches, or any state in the world to add,

diminish, or alter any thing in the least measure therein.[xvii]

Hence the feeling among the colonists that there was one right way of doing things—one set of practices that were “lawful,” one right way of reading Scripture for the purpose of restoring simplicity and purity to the church. This indeed was the purpose of the second Reformation.

A darker thread runs through these explanations of why the colonists chose to immigrate, a sense of the situation in Europe as becoming ever more dangerous to the saints as Antichrist labored to defeat the godly. The founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company voiced this anxiety in 1629 in listing first among the “general considerations” for undertaking a new colony the possibility that the “Jesuits” were “rear[ing] up in all places of the world” the “kingdom of Antichrist.” Around them these Englishmen saw plausible evidence that the forces of Antichrist were succeeding--the “desolation” of Protestants on the continent as Catholic armies moved through Germany, the plight of French Protestants in a country dominated by Catholics, and in their own country, the rise to power of bishops who seemed to favor “Popery,” supported by a king who had a Catholic wife. Was this the right moment “to gitt out of the Prelates hands”?[xviii] “Who knows,” the founders of the Company declared, “but that God hath provided this place [Massachusetts] to be a refuge for many whom he meanes to save out of the general destruction.”[xix] That New England was serving the immigrants as “a hiding place . . . from the rage of persecution” was similarly a theme of John Cotton’s some seventeen years later when he gave thanks to God for “preserving and prospering” the colony “from foraigne plots of the late archbishop [William Laud, executed in England in 164x] and his confederates.”[xx]

Tyranny and “bondage,” followed by deliverance and new-found purity—such was how the colonists understood the sequence, first, of suffering in England as Puritans under the rule of the bishops, and second, of coming to the new world. It was a sequence packed with layers of meaning that would influence the colonists’ decision-making about church order and civil society. How should the “godly” ensure that power remained in the right hands? If Scripture and Christian history both taught the lesson that the saints were always and everywhere beset by enemies who plotted their destruction, a lesson borne out in the social experience of the colonists back in England, should they use their new-found freedom to put barriers between themselves and the “worldly”? If “tyranny” were an ever-present danger embodied in an expansive, aggressive Catholicism but also in the workings of Crown and Church in England, should they insert in their own forms of church and state some means of protecting “liberties,” and especially the “gospel freedom” of a reformed church? If most of the colonists could be considered as among the “Lord’s free people,” should they be trusted to do what was right, and therefore be given more authority? If Scripture taught that nature and grace were fundamentally opposite one to the other, should that opposition mean “put[ting] a difference between Christians and others”?[xxi] And if theirs was to be a “Christian Common-wealth,” what was the place in that commonwealth for any king other than Christ?

These themes pervade the sermons, letters, and treatises of the 1620s and 1630s in which the colonists reflected on their “times”—the warfare between Christ and Antichrist as mirrored in the troubled state of England and Europe, the horrors of “tyranny” and the sufferings of the godly, the imperative of all things being “lawful,” and the craving for deliverance from so many particular evils—the unlawful “ceremonies” of the Church of England, the improper role of the civil state in things “spiritual,” the tyranny of persecuting bishops, the contempt in English culture for those who gained the nickname of “puritans.” Preaching a series of sermons in Boston in the winter of 1639/40 on chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, John Cotton lingered on the “monsters” he associated with “tyranny,” or the power to oppress the saints and overturn divine law. And as Cotton’s actions in the 1630s had already demonstrated, the image and idea of fleeing from“tyranny” and gaining unexpected freedom were powerful incentives for building a new order of church and state and civil society.[xxii]

Imagining that new order, the colonists returned again and again to those parts of the New Testament where St. Paul instructed congregations on the meaning of fellowship. From his epistles, and especially the letter to the Ephesians, they borrowed the word “edification” for their own church covenants. Paul had likened the church to the body of Christ, and the body of Christ to a temple constructed out of “living stones”(Ephesians 4), his point being that the church was constructed out of materials that had been transformed by the Holy Spirit to become in some sense one with Christ. Fellowship was about thist oneness, or being joined together in a “body.” To edify or be edified was to practice the mutuality of the saints. It was to “Love the Church and people of God,” and “cherish …kindness and charity” in their life together. So the newly founded church in Boston affirmed in asking each member “to walke with this Church and the members There of in brotherly Love and unto mutuall Edification; and succor; according to God,” promising in return “Likewise to walke towards you in brotherly love and holy watchfulness to the mutuall buildinge up of one another in the Fellowshipo of the Lord jesus.”[xxiii]

These hopes for a new order had other sources besides Scripture and an understanding of church history. For several centuries a tradition of social criticism had flourished in England, its themes a multitude of complaints—that the rich were ignoring the poor, that the clergy were greedy, that those who overcharged for services or hoarded grain in situations of scarcity were engaged in “oppression.”[xxiv] Within the literature of complaint, wealth was often depicted as a doorway to wasteful “luxury” and the craving for wealth an incentive to selfishness or corruption among those in high places, be it in church or state. Time and again, this literature reminded people that the riches of this world were impermanent and therefore of little value compared to the riches that were found in heaven. None of these themes were distinctively Puritan, although in early seventeenth-century Dorchester the Puritan leadership did much to improve the situation of the poor.[xxv] Nor was Puritanism the source of the dismay with monopolies that some in Parliament expressed. These were monopolies granted by the king, a practice Charles I and his father used—their critics said, abused-- to reward courtiers and gain money for themselves. And while Puritans welcomed and nurtured the vision of an educated citizenry, a nation of people (or at least the men) who were literate in being able to read, this vision may have owed more to Protestant humanism than to the Puritan movement.[xxvi]

The struggle against monopolies was echoed in a clause of Massachusetts “Body of Liberties” of 1641 that prohibited them, the tradition of complaint about oppression surfaced in the church trial of the Boston merchant Robert Keayne in 1639, and the value placed on literary resounds in the “school laws” most of the colonies had enacted by 1650.. Giving to the poor, a practice that was suddenly important in New England in the late 1630s as the colonists wrestled with severe inflation and, soon thereafter, with deflation, also drew on wider values, though that such gifts were usually transmitted through local congregations and their leaders suggests that local churches were specially linked with the moral vocabulary of fellowship and mutuality. Together with civil society, those churches were also seen as spared the wealth-seeking that infected the moral life of English communities and of other colonies in the new world. “What is it that distinguisheth New England from other colonies and plantations in America?”, a Massachusetts minister asked in 1670. He and many others had the same answer, not for financial “gaine,” but to serve the Lord. Writing from Massachusetts in mid-1636, so young Henry Vane informed his father: “For it is not trade that God will set up in these parts, but the profession of his truth….”[xxvii]

None of these themes was necessarily radical, just as none was uniquely Puritan. The one concept or moral rule that did have radical possibilities was a concept with a strong source in the law, though it also turns up in the sixteenth-century literature of complaint: the term: “equity.” The word is astonishingly prevalent in New England, used in many different contexts as a synonym for “fairness” or “justice.”[xxviii] Debating the merits of a Massachusetts law allowing the colony to turn back immigrants, John Winthrop (in favor) and Henry Vane (opposed) each used the term. When a group of Cambridge residents complained that town lands were being distributed unfairly, they used it in their critique. Thomas Hooker used the word six times in a single letter commenting on political events. Preparing a new digest of the colony’s laws in 1658, a committee in Plymouth Colony described the “good and wholesome lawes” handed down by God as “grounded on principles of morall equitie as that all men Christians espetially ought always to have an eye thereunto in the framing of theire politique Constitutions.”[xxix] Whatever the context, it seems to have had unusual power as a standard against which to evaluate the ethics of decision-making.

What matters, then, is not how “puritan” the word may have been, but its consequences in New England as the colonists weighed the merits of exclusion and inclusion.and wrestled with the contradictions that flowed from either policy. What matters, in short, is practice—how “equity” or “justice” figured in the fashioning of local and colonial governments, in writing codes of law and setting courts in motion, and perhaps above all, in the distribution of land and other material resources. These are the subject of the next chapter, to be followed by another on the church and how it was the site of debate and practice concerning exclusion and inclusion.

III

Because this book is about how the colonists were rethinking the nature of authority—taking it away from certain sites or practices, adding it to others—some preliminary discussion is on order about an assumption we inherit from the nineteenth century, that the Puritans were excessively authoritarian. This assumption deserves close scrutiny, for if arbitrary, abusive power and regimentation were what the Puritan movement was really about, then there is little room for understanding the colonists as radicals who attempted to replace “tyranny” with something much “democratical.” Why, then, do we assume that Puritanism was authoritarian?

In the American context that assumption was nurtured within Protestant ant-Calvinism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its starting point the assertion that, like their intellectual forefather John Calvin, the Puritans celebrated the absolute sovereignty of God and its theological corollary, the doctrine of predestination that eliminated the freedom of the individual to exercise free will. Protestant liberals insisted, to the contrary, that every individual had moral agency and that salvation was a matter of that agency intersecting with divine action. Not to allow human agency was to reduce humans to automatons. Inheriting this reading of Calvin and the Puritans, the early twentieth-century historian V. L. Parrington went even further in describing “Calvinism” (a synonym for Puritanism) as a “reactionary theology” and its concept of God a “composite of oriental despotism and sixteenth-century monarchism.” Within such a system, Parrington went on to say, the individual “is no better than an oriental serf at the mercy of a Sovereign Will that is implacable, inscrutable, the ruler of a universe predetermined in all its parts.” His reading of Calvin was reiterated in the 1930s by the great intellectual historian Perry Miller, also, like Parrington, a child of Protestant liberalism and its relentless characterizing of Calvin’s God as “arbitrary.” [xxx]

The grain of truth in this portrait of Calvinism/Puritanism is miniscule compared with the distortions it contains. Here is not the place to provide a definitive summary of Puritan theology. But two simples observation are in order. Only rarely did the ministers in seventeenth-century New England refer to the doctrine of predestination and, when they did so, it was to remark how easily it was misinterpreted, for to them it was a means of upholding the certainty of God’s promise of mercy—a means, that is, of having confidence in the saving grace that Christ’s death had made possible. And never in their sermons, treatises or catechisms did the ministers deprive humans of free will. On the contrary, they insisted that the affective (inward) and intellectual response of humans to the Word, or gospel, was logically a part of the “means” through which Christ and the Holy Spirit enacted the process of redemption. Putting on their philosophical hats, moreover, the ministers said again and again that, because man was made in God’s image, he was a “reasonable creature” endowed with the power to act. Either way, humans were never represented as automatons, but exactly the opposite.

Liberals of various stripes pursued another line of attack in describing the Puritans as authoritarian, the proof being their refusal to allow liberty of conscience and their punishing of dissent, as in forcing Roger Williams out of Massachusetts or doing worse things to the Quakers. Here, the most obvious response is to recall that the English government acted in exactly the same way, as did almost every government in Europe with the (sometimes) exception of the Netherlands. Advocates of toleration were few and far between in the first half of the seventeenth century. In this regard the colonists were typical of their times.

The real story is a good deal more complicated. [here, a paragraph on the version(s) of liberty of conscience acknowledged by the colonists, and versions of “toleration”.]

A third version of authoritarianism has become prominent in our own day, although its roots stretch back into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Puritans as authoritarian because they wished to regulate people’s everyday lives to an excessive extent. This is one way of reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with its portrait of a community punishing (seemingly with relish) a woman who broke the moral code. This is also an interpretation that feeds both on the word “discipline” that occurs in seventeenth-century New England texts and on codes of law in Massachusetts and other colonies that prescribe the death penalty for children who disobey their parents and adults who commit adultery. And it is an interpretation that represents witch-hunting as a means of punishing disruptive people, most of whom were women.

We are in the presence of one or another (or all three) of these lines of argument whenever we come upon historians who characterize religion or culture in early New England as “orthodoxy,” almost always adding an indispensable adjective, “rigid.” What we never encounter in those interpretations is, however, a historically specific account of the workings of authority in local churches and governments, or even in most civil and criminal courts. What those narratives exclude is the elasticity that flourished in social practice—an elasticity manifested in the near complete absence of death sentences for adultery and the absolute absence of sentences for children’s disobedience, manifested again in the acceptance of dissident groups at the local level, in the hundreds of accusations of witch-hunting that courts ignored or dismissed, and in the possibilities for political opposition. This elasticity can be extended to the realms of values and ideas. Despite an emphasis in recent years on “hegemonic” ideas, a close reading of Puritan texts, together with an awareness of the multiple audiences they address, reveals fractures or disruptions at every turn. [xxxi]

Assertions of “rigid orthodoxy” ignore, as well, the fact—richly documented in recent studies of English social and legal history-- that “government . . . was a repeated exercise in compromise, co-operation, co-optation and resistance,” for every policy or law could only be enforced if local people were involved—and, as historians of law enforcement and local government in England have shown, these people brought their own “interests” to that task, be it (to cite one example) the determination of villages and towns not to increase the roster of the dependent poor via fines or prison sentences that could ruin a family. The “most rewarding” approach to the uses of authority, “ Cynthia Herrup has remarked, is when they are “examined as mechanisms of a fluid functional partnership between various interests in society.”[xxxii] How these mechanisms may have functioned in New England will be surveyed in a future chapter (four), where the evidence can be allowed to speak for itself. But there is warrant on both theological and historical grounds for bracketing the longstanding reputation of the Puritans for authoritarianism.

It may be worth recalling that, in the early seventeenth century, the Puritan movement was commonly viewed as “seditious,” that is, never willing to acknowledge the authority of the Crown and the state Church. In the Caroline age, as in the Elizabethan that preceded it, Puritanism was a term of ridicule, a “nick-name” meant to stigmatize a movement that, to King, bishops, aristocracy and courtiers, seemed to threaten the systems of privilege and authoritarianism built into English political, social, and religious culture. That reputation can also mislead us. But for the story that follows, it provides a more useful starting point than the Hawthornesque people who still have the power to frighten us.

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[i] Cite Pennsylvania and perhaps S C?

[ii] Staples/Arnold/Chapin? .” [p. 124 [Hutch OOP 130.” [p. 124 [Hutch OOP 130

[iii] source; “ministers”refers back to distinctionbetwen ways of exercising power “ministerial” f “magisterial”

[iv] NEHGR 1 (1847) see file 19

[v] Robert Cushman, p. 12 of Samuel Deane ed. 1870

[vi] a compromise; lots of opposition; and no separate houses; sitting together

[vii] Lale’s anti popery and Spanish match etc

[viii] Coll CHS 1:20

[ix] Davies, Caroline church

[x] Cotton to Saltonsall in Bush

[xi] cite T Hooker [sees. S. Bush

[xii] Bush, bio

[xiii] Esther 10.3

[xiv] Clifford K. Shipton, ed., “The Autobiographical Memoranda of John Brock, 1636-1659” Proc AAS 53 (1943) 97

[xv] Thomas Weld to, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England

[xvi] LaFantasie, ed., Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1, 39

[xvii] Walker, CFP 203 previous Hooker in Williams et al 327

[xviii] Wheeler on deliverance/kp

[xix] Winthrop Papers 2

[xx] Edward Winslow, NE Salamander in MHSColl reprint 120

[xxi] Winthrop, Modell of Christian Charityu A 166

[xxii] I take the term “new order”from David Little, Religion, Order, and Law (Chicago 1970)

[xxiii] Thomas Cobbett, Practical Discourse Prayer 143; The Records of the First Church in Boston 1630-1868 ed. Richard D. Pierce, PCSM 39-41 vol 39 91961): 5.

[xxiv] Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1944 Macmillan) and Fletcher or?

[xxv] Underdown, Fire from Heaven [and broader debate]

[xxvi] Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and

[xxvii] Samuel Danforth A Brief Recognition of New Englands Errand into the Wilderness [and Clap or ] and Adamson bio 78

[xxviii] Winthrop in Modell uses “justice”

[xxix] Pulsifer, Records of Plymouth 11:72; on 73 refer to laws for “common good.” Eearlier 72 “upon grounds of morallo equitie which hath its originall from the Law of God….”

[xxx] V. L. Parrington, Main Currents of Ameridcan Thought, The Colonial Mind 13-14

[xxxi] The outstanding study in this regard is Phillip Round, By Nature and By Custom Cursed

[xxxii] Cynthia Herrup, .” “The Counties and the Country: Some Thoughts on Seventeen th-Century Historiography” 289-304 in Geoff Eley and William Hunt: Reviving the English Revolution p. 290.

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