Cultural Orphans in America

CHAPTER 1: The Puritans as Orphans

C H A P T E R ONE The Puritans as Orphans A family is a little commonwealth, and a commonwealth is a great family. — JOHN W I N T H R O P T JL he most important secular institution in Puritan culture was the family. The family was not only the primary source of stability and security but a model for social and political institutions that incorporated its patriarchal and hierarchical structure. The family model also influenced the nature of interaction with other groups and cultures. Despite the earlier belief that the Puritan family was an extended unit that embraced a range of generations and relatives, more recent scholarship points to its nuclear nature. As John Demos asserts in A Little Commonwealth, "It is now apparent... that small and essentially nuclear families were standard from the very beginning of American history, and probably from a still earlier time in the history of Western Europe" (62). Endemic to the nuclear structure of the Puritan family were the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion through which one family distinguished its identity from that of others by strict criteria of kinship. The primary characteristic of the family that the Puritans imported to the New World was the insularity of both individual families and the collective family of Puritan culture. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, wrote in "A Defense of an Order of Court" (1637), in which he justified the exclusion of heretics, "A family is a little commonwealth, and a commonwealth is a great family. Now as a family is not bound to entertain all comers, no not every good The Puritans as Orphans man (otherwise than by way of hospitality) no more is a commonwealth" (166).* In generations to come, the family that served as the definitive principle of the commonwealth became the controlling metaphor for the republic. The importance of the family as an institution derived from the Puritans' belief in typology, the recapitulation of the Old Testament in the New. What was unique about the Puritans and what distinguished them from other groups of immigrants who voyaged to the New World was their typological belief in their "chosenness." The Puritans believed that they were the New Testament version of the Israelites fleeing out of Egypt into the promised land of Canaan, and that they would fulfill God's special purpose in the New World by creating a model society, "a city upon a hill," as Winthrop terms it in "AModel of Christian Charity." The most inspirational and influential lay sermon in American history, Winthrop delivered it onboard the Arbella just before the Puritans' arrival in Massachusetts Bayin 1630 (Mitchell, 295). Throughout his speech,Winthrop not only compares the Puritans to the Israelites but uses familial imagery to describe the relationship between the Puritans and God as well as to each other within the community. For example, he refers to the Puritans as "brethren" united in the body of Christ and distinguishes the Puritans from God's other children as "elect" on the basis of their resemblance to Him: "he [the Lord] loves his elect because they are like himself, he beholds them in his beloved son: so a mother loves her child, because she thoroughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it" (290). Winthrop also sexualizes the relationship between God and the Puritans, as if the Puritan community represents God's wife: "In regard of the more near bond of marriage between him and us, wherein he hath taken us to be his after a most strict and peculiar manner which will make him the more jealous of our love and obedience, so he tells the people of Israel,'You only have I known of all the families of the earth'" (293). By extension, the individual members of the community are the seed, the children of the union. Winthrop closes with this exhortation: Therefore let us choose life, that we, and our seed, may live, by obeying his voice, and cleaving tohim, for he is our life, and our prosperity. (295) 2 The Puritans as Orphans Other colonists— French, Dutch, Spanish, and even English—were lured to the New World by a mixture of financial and religious motives, but none were compelled by this unique sense of mission, this special covenant with God. As an institution, the family was the emblem of that covenant, and the familial imagery that permeates Puritan discourse...