Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution

ONE: Political Economy

chapter one Political Economy Blessed is he that considereth of the poor, the Lord will deliver him in the time of trouble. Psalm 41, KJV When the principal inhabitants of Swallowfield met together in a town meeting for the first time, they defined themselves as ‘‘a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenants among themselves.’’ They agreed to hold more meetings , ‘‘to the end we may the better and more quietly live together in good love and amity, to the praise of God and for the better serving of her Majestie .’’ They assented to twenty-six articles, including a pledge to dissuade young couples who could not afford a house from marrying; a pledge to take all their servants to church on the Sabbath; and an agreement ‘‘that every man shall be forbidden to keep inmates, and whosoever doth keep any inmates , to complain on them to the justice.’’1 This town meeting, with its twin commitments to concord and reform, took place not in seventeenth-century New England but in the southern English county of Berkshire in 1596, just before the founding of British colonies in mainland North America. A generation later, similar meetings were held in New England towns an ocean away. Indeed, the Swallowfield farmers’ stress on amity and fellowship as well as the meeting format sound remarkably like the communal chords struck in the first meeting in Dedham, Massachusetts , so well described by Kenneth Lockridge, held just thirty years later.2 18 foundations However, as the English historian Patrick Collinson remarks, ‘‘the purpose of the Swallowfield meeting was not sociable, but administrative and corrective , with a special emphasis on remedies for problems arising from the dearth and hard times prevailing in one of the most arduous decades ordinary working people . . . have ever had to endure: poverty, bastardy, petty theft, disorderly drunkenness, insubordination.’’3 Whether in England or Massachusetts , local leaders wanted to incorporate loving relations among neighbors into their new institutions, but not as an end in itself. Their plans had another purpose: they saw a united town polity as a way to solve economic and social problems righteously. And, despite their rhetoric of harmony, they often adopted polarizing and provocative policies. They were economic reformers exercising state power, not traditionalist communitarians. Colonial American historians have treated New England towns as traditional villages, emphasizing their peasant background and communal orientation , and building narratives of declension and modernization from these simple beginnings. There are grave dangers, however, in confusing customary peasant villages with innovative New England towns.4 When Winthrop’s fleet sailed for America in 1630, these socially stable, even static, peasant villages, if they had ever existed, had virtually vanished from the English landscape. According to the consensus of recent historiography, English society and local government had undergone a profound transformation in the half-century before the Puritans embarked for Massachusetts Bay. In particular , parishes had been changed by state formation. Though many signs of good neighborliness and festivity survived from the past, villages and towns had been largely remodeled. New England’s leaders, often drawn from the vanguard Keith Wrightson called ‘‘the thrusting bearers of innovation’’ in England, brought a fundamental commitment to reform in local government .5 The prevailing historical narrative—New England’s origins in communitarian towns and their more or less rapid abandonment of customary practices and communal values for the morally dubious but seductive attractions of liberal individualism and the dynamic, simultaneously destructive and creative forces unleashed by nascent capitalism—overestimates the importance of tradition and community in the colonists’ minds while neglecting their passion for the righteous rearrangement of economics and power. These two dimensions of social life, the political and legal configuration of legitimate authority and the organization of property, labor, and exchange, were selfevidently intertwined, so this account adopts the historical term ‘‘political Political Economy 19 economy.’’6 New England towns were established by ardent social and political reformers who had combated poverty and disorder at home by remodeling rural parishes and market towns and brought their new notions of positive government and a godly social order with them. The revolutionary transformation of England and the founding of New England were interrelated in substance as well as sequence, as early modern societies were deliberately reshaped across the transatlantic world. English Origins of New Englanders and their Reformed Towns To make Massachusetts towns, the...