Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England

Introduction. A Banishment Primer

I n t r o d u c t i o n A Banishment Primer Presume not that I am the thing I was, For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. . . . . . . I banish thee, on pain of death. —William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, 5.5 COMMUNITIES MAKE MEMBERS. Working from the principles articulated in contracts, constitutions, or even simple screeds, communities create a sense of belonging among their inhabitants that draws people in, binds them together, and fosters a collective identity. This sense of membership has been a commonplace in the history of communities from the city-states of ancient Greece to the incipient nation-states of Europe in the seventeenth century and beyond. Without holding out the possibility of inclusion—in the form of shared principles—few communities would have been established, and fewer still would have endured. Less obvious in the formation of community , however, are those negative principles that facilitate the exclusion of people who do not “belong” and yet work, paradoxically, to reinforce the bonds among those who do. As the legal scholar Peter Goodrich explains, a community’s ability to exclude not only strengthens the connections between insiders but also casts the membership of the community in the form of a Manichean struggle. “The establishment of an identity, the constitution of a community, and the capture of subjectivity,” he writes, “are first a matter of establishing a collective . . . identity whose virtue will be matched only by the evil of those who do not belong to it.”1 In this way inclusion and exclusion are 2 Introduction paired, or as Charles Tilly puts it: “Every act of . . . inclusion consists of creating , activating, or transforming an us-them boundary, and thus inevitably twins with an act of . . . exclusion.”2 If inclusion and exclusion are twinned, however, there are certain times and certain places where one twin assumes primacy over the other, and where inclusion or exclusion appears to take precedence as a means of producing community. Such a time and place was seventeenth-century New England— from 1620, when the first Puritan colony, Plymouth Plantation, was established , to 1684, when the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the biggest and most powerful of the colonies, was revoked and administrative power was ceded to the Crown. Exercised ruthlessly and obsessively in this period, banishment, by which undesirable individuals and groups were forcibly removed from the colonies, overpowered the ways and means of inclusion— contractual, constitutional, or otherwise—and became a central, and yet up to this point almost entirely unrecognized, way of defining the place and the people within it. This book is about that period and its banishments.3 From the moment they first set foot in the New World, the Puritans, banished or in flight from persecution themselves, banished hundreds if not thousands of others.4 Between 1620 and 1630, the first decade of the Plymouth Colony’s existence, Governor William Bradford banished dozens of people, including John Lyford and John Oldham, for sending letters “full of slanders and false accusations ” about the colonists back to England.5 More notably between 1630 and 1631, the first year of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, out of fewer than a thousand people in Salem, Charlestown, and Boston combined, between six and ten people were banished, an astonishing 0.6 to 1 percent of the population.6 Nor did the percentage of those “sent out of the lymitts of the patent” dwindle much in subsequent years as the theocracies in Plymouth and the Bay Colony continued to attract and to banish traders, visitors, and aspiring members who were deemed to have insufficiently conformed to the Puritans’ ways.7 Admittedly most of those banished escaped all but the most cursory notice . Their names are enshrined in legal casebooks from the period, but few have paid attention to their stories, and in most cases little of their stories is known. In 1640, for example, the otherwise obscure Hugh Bewett was banished for claiming he was free of original sin, and in 1642 William Collins was banished for seeking sexual favors under a false promise of marriage.8 During the same period Thomas Walford and Philip Ratcliffe were banished Introduction 3 for declaring their “contempt of authorities and confrontinge officers etc,” and Captain Stone for calling the magistrate...