A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England

Preface

xv Preface Good titles are like eels, slipping away just as you reach out to catch hold of one. As this book was beginning to form in my mind, an eellike title appeared and, almost as suddenly, disappeared: “Why They Mattered.” Remembering that moment, I realize that it grew out of my aspiration to change how we think about the English people— the “Puritans”—who created the institutions and social practices I describe in these pages. Should I do so by characterizing these people as forerunners of the American Revolution and the democratic nationalism of the nineteenth century? A project of this kind would have the sanction of John Adams, who did something like it in A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765), and of orators in the nineteenth century, one of them Henry David Thoreau, whose way of eulogizing the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown in 1859 was to link him with Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Intrigued though I am by this connection-making, in the end I wanted to write about the seventeenth century on its own terms. This is what I have attempted, in particular by emphasizing the pre-liberal aspects of the colonists’ thinking and practice. But I have allowed myself a brief look forward in the Conclusion. The argument that runs through this book is plain enough: the people who founded the New England colonies in the early seventeenth century brought into being churches, civil governments, and a code of laws that collectively marked them as the most advanced reformers of the Anglo-colonial world. Not in England itself but in New England did the possibilities for change opened up by the English Revolution, as the period of English history between 1640 and 1660 is commonly named, have such consequences. Most of us have been reluctant to recognize a transformation of public life well under way in the 1630s, several years before anything like it was attempted in England. I hope I have made the colonists’ accomplishments more visible and compelling. In counterpoint to this argument, I resist the temptation to turn the colonists into nineteenth-century liberals or twentieth-century social gospelers and democrats. Nowhere in their own thinking did they endorse the premises of liberalism or democratic theory, although some aspects of both can be found in what they did and said. To mention in advance one critical point of difference, the colonists assumed that there was a right way of doing things. Any modern reader who lingers on the passage I quote in the Introduction in which John Cotton evokes the colonists’ determination to establish “purity” is abruptly confronted with this assumption. Purity is purity, and purity is God’s law, a premise Cotton translated into the argument that Scripture mandated how the true church should be organized and religion practiced. No one of this mindset expects a referendum to decide whether God got it right; no one anticipates being in a voting booth and hesitating between alternatives . There are none, save for the wholly perverse extremes of idolatry and the Antichrist. Nor would anyone of Cotton’s milieu have made room for personal autonomy or “self-interest rightly understood” of the kind Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville introduced as the ground of liberal politics. Instead, the moral and social imperative was to enact the reign of Christ. Liberty there was, and plenty of it, a liberty reserved for the saints who had cast off the Antichrist and submitted to Christ as king. The many allusions to liberty in the chapters that follow should not be understood, therefore, as denoting an autonomy that releases each of us as individuals from the enclosing webs of custom, obligation, and circumstance. Similarly, the “liberties” enumerated in the Massachusetts “Body of Liberties” (1641) were, for the most part, protections against unauthorized and unjust actions of the civil state, not doorways to personal freedom. Preface xvi A second thread of argument concerns the workings of everyday politics. I owe the shape of this argument to the historians, most of them British, who study the Tudor-Stuart period in English history, and to elements of that history itself, especially the many attempts to curtail the royal prerogative. Again, there is nothing new about finding in English history some of the keys to understanding the colonists. What makes my doing so a little unusual is that I rely on the revisionists who, in...