Religion and Profit Jump Together

American exceptionalism may be out of favor these days but a school of New England exceptionalism is thriving. Karen Kupperman implicitly embraces this view in her study of Providence Island while Roger Thompson’s analysis of East Anglian emigrants draws him into the fold in spite of himself. Each book raises important questions about how we are to evaluate the history of New England, on its own terms and within the broader framework of Britain’s American colonies. Each bears on issues crucial to understanding the distinctive character and development of New England and especially Massachusetts Bay — the combinations of religion and ambition, culture and environment, accident and planning, innovation and continuity that shaped New England’s history.

In Mobility and Migration, Roger Thompson has used local records and family histories to track the life histories of over two thousand emigrants to New England from Greater East Anglia, that is, the eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, and Lincolnshire. This is, he tells us, “the largest documented investigation of regional origins ever attempted” (p. xii), and, unlike several studies which concentrate on the latter years of the Great Migration, Thompson’s evidence covers the whole decade of the 1630s.

His purpose is a deceptively simple one, to establish the relative geographical stability or mobility of the migrants before and after their journey to New England. Thompson frames his question as a way of testing two broad, and broadly opposed, models of colonial mentalité and society. If, on the one hand, emigrants were largely mobile, accustomed to significant moves in both old and New England, then we would expect them as a group to be adventurous, risk-taking, and individualistic; we would further expect them to be adaptable and innovative in constructing their new worlds. But if emigrants’ experience was more stable, more spatially limited, if they were unlikely and perhaps unwilling to move around, we would expect them to be more wary of change, more cautious in their social arrangements, and more likely to transplant English ways as much as possible. Thompson freely concedes that this crude dichotomy disguises any number of complexities and difficulties of interpretation and even definition. But this provides the context in which he expects his findings to be meaningful.

What are these findings? Chapter after chapter, group after group, chart after chart, gives Thompson the same flat and clear answer: the experience of these emigrants was overwhelmingly one of residential stability. The “better sort,” with the exception of clergy, led “comparatively sedentary” lives; the mercantile group was “decidedly stable,” traders were “well-rooted,” artisans “resolutely rooted,” and farmers were rooted in “long familiar and kin-knit neighborhoods” (pp. 40, 57, 69, 98, 113). So rooted were these people, as portrayed by Thompson, that it is astonishing to find that they ever emigrated to America at all. They did so only because they were forced to, Thompson argues; “they were wrenched off their firmly planted feet by sudden, unprecedented shocks to their lives,” shocks administered primarily by religious persecution and economic misfortune (p. 169). These reluctant emigrants then reestablished their settled ways as much as their circumstances allowed.

These are surprising conclusions, different from what we would expect and different, too, from the conclusions of many recent studies of seventeenth-century England and of the Great Migration in particular. ¹ This is our first clue that all may not be right with this picture. One problem may lie with the sources on which Thompson relies so heavily, local records and family histories. These records favor those who persist in their communities. The young, the poor, the indentured, the transient, and, in many cases, the female, were all less likely to leave their traces in such records, and so it is reasonable to assume that such records would...