Early New England: A Covenanted Society (review)

This monograph undertakes to document Alan Simpson's characterization (1955) of Puritan New England as "a covenanted community." Weir examines colonial charters and patents, town compacts, and church covenants, from 1620 to 1708. This examination (five chapters, plus a list of towns, churches, and praying places, typology of documents, and bibliographical essay) is the book's core. Weir aims to discover what colonial Americans intended about the relation of "church and civil order," and to "articulate the covenantal commitments" that they made for both. He assimilates the documents to the Old Testament and Reformed Protestant "covenant idea," as an explicit transaction establishing a relation with God. He has to qualify, for the town compacts are untheological and "mundane"; but even the military alliance of 1643 is pressed into this covenant mold. Weir's "fundamental premise" is that these documents are a "template" "for the development of the British Colonial world of North America [and] the early national period of United States history."

Weir finds that the charters invoke divine providence, extending Christ's church, converting natives, and expressing a common European religio-political conception. The town compacts are ad hoc, informal, practical; later, as acts of colonial governments, they become formal and stereotyped. The church covenants are uniform in content and intent, ceremonious in institution, theologically unexplicit. Some added confessional statements after 1689, as congregational organization and legal toleration allowed variation and dissent. Church and state were "separate," each having distinct functions (except New Haven); and godly magistrates were to uphold God's order as articulated in churches (except Rhode Island). The general pattern was one "of unity and diversity." Treatment of particular documents varies in detail, depth, and perceptiveness.

Weir's "premise" is from Daniel Elazar, who derived American federalism from the Hebrews' covenant with God, via Reformed Protestant covenant theology and English Puritans. This is a theological argument, useful in contemporary Jewish politics and apolegetics in Israel and the United States, but inadequate as a representation of the intellectual history of the American Constitution.

Weir seeks to treat the documents in a transatlantic perspective, pursuant of current method in historiography of early America. Covenant theology is one element, here, English affairs ca. 1620–1690 another. The first is not developed; the second is weakened by limited acquaintance with history, politics, and government in Stuart England. There is no attention to the purposive-associative forms that Englishmen routinely employed—in town, parish, county, professions, commerce—to attain the practical ends of government, education, religion, charity, public works, training, investment. Nor to the corporate, contractual, and constitutional notions of political association and political authority—in civil, ecclesiastical, and Roman law—current in late-medieval Europe and known in early-Stuart England. Weir assumes that early New Englanders, at a loss for political organization, adapted their church covenants to civil uses. It is more likely that, on their own, and being of "middling sort" and Parliamentary inclination, they matter-of-factly organized in ways already familiar. The pragmatic informality of the town compacts, and the ready adaptation of Bay Company structure to political governance, suggest this probability.

The book has the texture of an expansive dissertation. It sheds selective light on early colonial texts, and provides copious bibliography on colonial New England. Insistent on the theological covenant as controlling model, absent other perspectives, it does not entirely account for the organizational forms employed or the thinking of the organizers.