Separation of Puritan church and state – the 1641 Body of Liberties

Welcome to part 4 of our series on the 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Last time we looked at judicial laws; this time we focus on freemen’s liberties. One of the first things John Winthrop did, at the second Court in May 1631, was expand the definition of “freeman” in the colony to include almost all adult males—there were no property-ownership requirements. So the liberties we’re about to examine applied to 99% of the adult males in the colony.

Did they apply to the women of the colony? As we pointed out in part 2, there is a short section in the Body devoted to the liberties of women. That section, which we’ll cover later in this series, specifies a woman’s treatment by her husband, disallowing abuse and mandating that a wife be fairly treated in her husband’s will. Otherwise, it’s all about “men” in the Body. This does not mean that none of the laws applied to women. It means two things: “man” was used to mean people; and some of the laws were about men only (such as the laws about military service). Women could be banished and fined just like men, so laws about those things applied equally to both sexes. In this section, however, we are dealing with voting rights and jury rights, and so these apply strictly to men.

We won’t look at each of the laws in this section, for time’s sake, but pull out the laws that are most indicative of the nature or gist of the Body. If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

Modern spellings are used throughout.

Liberty 58: “Civil authority has power and liberty to see the peace, ordinances, and rules of Christ observed in every church according to his word, so it be done in a civil and not in an ecclesiastical way.”

—This reminds us of Liberty 1, in that it seems to blur the line between church and state, but in reality it is once again mandating that separation by saying that the civil government does not have authority to govern the churches—it can’t exercise power “in an ecclesiastical way”. This means that the civil government can intervene if a problem in a congregation is causing civil disturbance, but it can’t step in to meddle with or dictate how a church operates. On the other hand, church disputes will not be allowed to interfere with civil government or the peace of the colony. This is most likely hearkening back to the Antinomian crisis of the 1630s involving Anne Hutchinson, where problems in the Boston church led to near civil war, as the elections for governor were disrupted and rioting broke out.

Liberty 59: “Civil authority has power and liberty to deal with any church member in a way of civil justice, notwithstanding any church relation, office, or interest.”

—Another separation of church and state, this one saying no one can be above the law, no matter how high a position they may hold in a church. Church officials, ministers, and pastors are under civil authority…

Liberty 60: “No church censure shall degrade or depose any man from any civil dignity, office, or authority he shall have in the Commonwealth.”

—…and vice-versa: if a church member or official is removed from his church office, or is censured for a religious matter, he will not also be removed from any government position he may hold. Remember that ministers and pastors were not allowed to hold political office; this would apply only to church members or men serving as deacons.

Liberty 66: “The Freemen of every township shall have power to make such by-laws and constitutions as may concern the welfare of their town, provided they be not of a criminal, but only of a prudential nature, and that their penalties [shall not exceed] 20 shillings for one offence. And that they be not repugnant to the public laws and orders of the country. And if any inhabitant shall neglect or refuse to observe them, they sall have the power to levy the appointed penalties by distress.”

—Towns are semi-independent: each makes its own laws, so long as they do not assess unfairly high fines and so long as they don’t go against the laws of the colony. This tradition of town meeting, where each town made its own laws and public comments on colony affairs, was a powerful galvanizing force during the run-up to the revolution, and continues in Massachusetts today.

Liberty 67: “It is the constant liberty of the free men of this plantation to choose yearly at the court of election out of the freemen all the general officers of this jurisdiction. If they please to discharge [these officers] at the day of election by way of vote they may do it without showing cause. But if at any other General Court we hold it due justice that the reasons thereof be alleged and proved. By general officers we mean our governor, deputy governor, assistants, treasurer, [and military] general. And our admiral at sea, and such as are or hereafter may be of the like general nature.”

—Freemen elect all civil officers; this is a liberty found in very few places in the world at this time. Elections were annual, held each spring at the General Court (the Court in October was for writing laws). This liberty says that anyone can be voted out of office without explanation, but once someone is elected they can’t be removed from office without some cause; they have to be accused and then proved of some wrongdoing. So you can’t be elected in May, show up for duty in October and suddenly be told you’re out.

Liberty 69: “No General Court shall be dissolved or adjourned without the consent of the major part thereof.”

—England in 1641 was about to collapse into civil war, in large part because King Charles I refused to allow Parliament to meet. He had dismissed Parliament in 1629 and refused to call it until 1640. This “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” was unpopular amongst the small but growing number of English people who believed Parliament should be a permanent partner—and counterweight—to monarchical rule. In Massachusetts in 1641, the people took the step of making their Parliament, the General Court, incapable of dissolution without its consent. No governor could ever exercise “personal rule” by shutting out the freemen from their government, as Charles did.

Liberty 70: “All freemen called to give any advice, vote, verdict, or sentence in any court, council, or civil assembly shall have full freedom to do it according to their true judgments and consciences, so it be done orderly and inoffensively for the manner.”

—The participation of freemen in their government was not figurehead. They were meant to truly advise and shape their government without any pressure, and their only obligation was to act honestly and according to their own judgment, and to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion.

Liberty 75 is quite lengthy, so we’ll paraphrase here to say that it states that if a Court makes any laws that concern religion, lead to war, or result in a public Article, and there are members of the Court who disagree with the majority vote, they are to publish their dissenting decision (their “contra remonstrance”) and have it recorded in the records of the Court.

—This is a voice for the minority that makes governing by precedent more informed, and makes the members of the public aware of the dissenting opinions in the Court.

The section on the liberties of the freemen, then, secures separation of church and state, the right of freemen to vote for their politicians, the independence of town governments, a voice for dissent, and the right of the legislature (General Court) to exist, thus preventing tyranny by the governor and his assistants. The rights and duties of juries are also covered in this section.

We’ll look next at the sections on women, children, “foreigners and strangers”, and brute creatures. As we shall see, these are positive laws and are called out in separate sections only to emphasize that these populations had rights as well.

Next time: wills, physical violence, and “smiting”

Puritan justice—a fair day in court

Part 3 of our series on the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties takes us to section 2, which focuses on judicial proceedings. It’s the longest section of the Body: 40 of the 100 laws in the Body are contained here. As Puritans enjoyed leisurely writing, we’ll paraphrase each of the laws, but if you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

Liberty 18 allows people to post bail so they don’t have to stay in prison while they await trial.

Liberties 19 and 20 address midconduct by judges, establishing fines for “miscarriage” by a justice and censure for those who demonstrate misconduct in court (“demean themselves offensively in the Court”).

Liberty 22 sets fines for false claims and nuisance lawsuits. This ties in with Liberty 24, which states that if you bring a suit against someone and then are found to be at fault yourself, your suit will be dismissed, and with Liberty 37, which reiterates fines for false claims (“false complaint or clamor”).

Liberty 26 is interesting because it says that if you are unfit to plead your own case in court you can ask someone to represent you. When you study the Puritans you quickly learn that they were a litigious people, constantly bringing suits to court, and often very complex ones, but you might fail to register that there were no lawyers in Puritan Massachusetts. Many of the Puritans, including founder and governor John Winthrop himself, had been lawyers in England. But in their new world, they did not have lawyers. Everyone argued their own case in court. The Puritans had seen and bewailed the corruption of the English court system, and protested the use of legalese that average people could not understand. In Massachusetts, they rid themselves of both problems by getting rid of lawyers. Liberty 26 allows people to have someone else plead a case for them—with one significant detail: that person can’t be paid for his service (“Provided he give him no fee or reward for his pains”). There would be no professional lawyer class in Massachusetts if the original settlers had their way.

Liberty 30 says jurors can be challenged by both plaintiff and defendant in any case. “And if his challenge be found just and reasonable by the bench, or the rest of the jury, as the challenger shall choose it shall be allowed him [to have a new jury called].” This is a liberty no one had in England.

Liberties 32-35 are protections of individual liberty. The first allows a defendant whose goods have been seized to recover them, and the last forbids a court to seize crops that would be spoiled and ruined by the time a defendant is able to recover them. The other two make imprisonment a last resort (“no man [shall be] arrested or imprisoned upon execution of a judgment… if the law can find competent means of satisfaction otherwise from his estate”) and punish constant nuisance litigation (“vexing others with unjust frequent and endless suits”). The image many people have of scores of Puritans languishing in prison, victims of irrational laws or charges of witchcraft, are unfounded.

In fact, you may be noting that we are a good way into the Body without one mention of witchcraft, which many Americans today take to be the only crime Puritans acknowledged or cared about. We will see that there is only one mention of witchcraft in the entire body, and it is a passing mention. The Puritans, as we’ve mentioned elsewhere, believed in witchcraft but very rarely believed someone was a witch. Their courts were scenes of countless arguments over land, boundaries, and livestock, but rarely over witchcraft.

Liberty 36 allows for appeals by defendants found guilty in court, Liberty 41 demands a speedy trial (“…cases shall be heard and determined at the next Court”), and Liberty 42 says no one may be tried twice for the same offense—a pillar of our own justice system.

Liberties 43, 45, and 46 forbid cruel and unusual punishment—no whippings of more than 40 stripes, and no torture to force a confession… in most cases. If someone was found guilty of a capital crime, and it seemed clear he had partners in that crime, then that person might be tortured to give up the names of his partners, “yet not with such tortures as be barbarous and inhumane.” It’s not clear what a humane torture may be, but it is clear that the Puritans knew what they meant, and drew a line between humane and inhumane torture, for they reiterate in the next Liberty, 46, “For bodily punishments we allow amongst us one that are inhumane, barbarous, or cruel.”

Liberty 48 established a Sunshine policy, stating that every inhabitant of the colony had the right to “search and view” all court records, and to request written transcripts for a small fee.

Jury duty is covered in Liberties 49 and 50, saying no one can be forced to serve for more than two years in a row, and that all jurors will be chosen by the freemen of their towns (and not by the government in Boston).

The section wraps up with Liberty 57 saying that if there is a suspicious sudden death in a town, the constables of the town will summon a 12-person jury to carry out an inquiry, and present their findings and conclusions at the next Court.

Judicial proceedings were so important to the Puritans for a few reasons. As we’ve mentioned above, they chafed at the inefficiency and corruption of the legal system in England, and they wanted to create a truly just system in their own society in America. They also had a practical necessity for a clear, fast-moving legal process because they were constantly embroiled in lawsuits over land. As new settlers came in, people moved from place to place, bought land, left land in wills, etc., disputes over borders and plots, who had rights to use common land and wood lots, and a plethora of other issues came up continually. If justice did not move swiftly, violence could break out, as people took the law into their own hands. That’s why the Body sets up clear laws and clear procedures for bringing cases to court, and enforces swfit justice—every case being heard at the next Court session being held.

Note the practicality of these judicial liberties and you’ll find the myth of the rigid, all-powerful, and unjust Puritan court is exploded. These Puritan courts had juries elected by freemen, whose members could be challenged and dismissed by defendants in court. The judges could be fined and removed for miscarriage of justice. People had the right to appeal. People’s goods could be seized, but had to be returned to them if they were found innocent, and imprisonment was to be a last resort, not the norm. Many of the liberties of 1641 were new to the western world, and many clearly influenced the Founders of the United States, and are tenets of our own judicial system today.

We’ll turn next to “Liberties more particularly concerning the freemen”, or, more protections of individual liberty, as well as the divisions between church and state.

Next time: more liberties of the freemen

Were Puritan laws harsh? A look at individual rights

Hello and welcome to part 2 of our series on Puritan law—specifically the 1641 Body of Liberties created by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Last time we looked at the proto-democratic process by which these laws were created; here we focus on the first section of this body of 100 laws, which covers individual rights. We won’t look at each of the 17 laws in this section, for time’s sake, but pull out the laws that are most indicative of the nature or gist of the Body. If you’d like to read the whole Body of Liberties, and the codes of law that followed it and incorporated it, you can find it in libraries or for sale online under the title The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts: reprinted from the edition of 1660, with the supplements to 1672, containing also the Body of Liberties of 1641.

We should note here that “man” is used pretty consistently, except in the short section devoted to the liberties of women. That section, which we’ll cover later in this series, specifies a woman’s treatment by her husband, disallowing abuse and mandating that a wife be fairly treated in her husband’s will. Otherwise, it’s all about “men” in the Body. This does not mean that the laws that follow did not apply to women. It means two things: “man” was used to mean people; and some of the laws were about men only (such as the laws about military service). Women could be banished and fined just like men, so laws about those things applied equally to both sexes.

(All spelling has been modernized in the following excerpts.)

1. “No man’s life shall be taken away, no man’s honor or good name shall be stained, no man’s person shall be arrested, restrained, banished, dismembered, nor any ways punished, no man shall be deprived of his wife or children, no man’s goods or estate shall be taken away from him, nor any way indemnified under color of law or countenance of authority, unless it be by virtue or equity of some express law of the country warranting the same, established by a General Court and sufficiently published, or in the case of the defect of a law in any particular case by the word of God. And in capital cases, or in cases concerning dismembering or banishment, according to that word to be judged by the General Court.”

—This is the heart of the Body of Liberties; as discussed in part 1 of this series, the whole purpose of creating the Body was to have a set of laws to go by. No one is going to be sentenced to anything unless he has broken an actual law that has been made publicly known. Judgments will not be made according to some magistrate’s whim or personal feelings. People will know what the law is, and what the penalties are for breaking laws. The last part, regarding “the defect of a law in any particular case”, means that if there is some problem for which no law has been written as yet, the magistrates will turn to the Bible for guidance; however, if someone does something that seems to call for capital punishment in the Bible, the General Court will step in and “that word [of God] will be judged”. Here we see that when push comes to shove, human reason ranks above the word of God for the Puritans.

2. “Every person within this Jurisdiction, whether inhabitant or foreigner, shall enjoy the same justice and law that is general for the plantation [the colony], which we constitute and execute one towards another without particularity or delay.”

—One law for all, no one above the law, and an early expression of the idea that justice delayed is justice deferred.

…12. “Every man whether inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free, shall have liberty to come to any public court, council, or town meeting, and either by speech or writing to move any lawful, seasonable, and material question, or to present any necessary motion, complaint, petition, bill, or information, whereof that meeting has proper cognizance, so it be done in convenient time, due order, and respective manner.”

—The law is open to all, no matter their status, and all men have the right to attend public meetings and participate in them, so long as their participation is respectful and the ideas or complaints they have are relevant to the body they’re addressing—that is, if you are in town meeting, you bring up town business and not colony-level business, and vice-versa.

14. “Any conveyance or alienation of land or other estate whatsoever, made by any woman that is married, any child under age, idiot or distracted person, shall be good if it be passed and ratified by the consent of a General Court.”

—While it is distressing to see women, children, and “idiots” lumped together as one category, this law actually states that it is not only men who may buy and sell land or goods (“estate”), and that is crucially important in a colony where land is the chief source of wealth. A woman may do what she sees fit with land she is left by her husband. (Women can also make their own wills, as guaranteed in liberty 11.) Underage children may make decisions about land left to them. The clause on “idiot or distracted persons” likely refers to people who made out wills when they were of sound mind but did not die of sound mind; those wills and the decisions in them will be upheld. All this is contingent on the General Court looking the decisions over and confirming them, but looking through the records of the colony shows that in most cases decisions made by this group were upheld.

We skipped laws in this section that prevent people from being fined for not responding to a court summons if they are incapable of getting to court, outlaw mandatory military service, ensure that no one can be forced to work on a government project, ban estate taxes, keep the government from seizing goods, and give people the right to move out of the colony whenever they like. Basically section 1 limits the power of the colonial government and secures individual liberties, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, that line comes from a later document and another time, but we see here in section 1 of the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts early forerunners of those guarantees in our Declaration of Independence.

In section 2, we’ll look at Rights, Rules, and Liberties concerning Judicial Proceedings.

Next time: the longest section

Puritan oligarchy? A look at the 1641 Body of Liberties

Welcome to a short series on the first (but far from the last) codification of laws in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, the 1641 Body of Liberties. We’re going to look through this set of 100 laws to get a better picture of what government was really like in Puritan Massachusetts, and to counter the standard mantra that the colony was an oligarchy, with no separation of church and state. We will also disappoint most readers by showing that there is only one mention of witchcraft in the whole Body, and it is mentioned only in passing.

An oligarchy, of course, is a system of government that keeps power in the hands of a tiny minority of the people, generally the wealthiest, who basically oppress everyone else to keep themselves wealthy and in power. The last thing an oligarch wants is democracy, or the common voice helping to shape the law.

As we shall see, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not an oligarchy at all, but a proto-democracy in which the common people not only helped shape the law, but were actually recruited by the magistrates in Boston to draft the first body of laws. Let’s look at the process by which the Body was created:

The MBC had as its governing document its charter of 1629, which stated that there should be a governor, deputy governor, and 18 assistants (magistrates). The assistants were to be chosen from the freemen of the colony. (One of the first acts of John Winthrop was to expand the definition of freeman to include basically all adult males in the colony.) The assistants would elect the governor and deputy governor from amongst themselves. The charter also stipulated that the assistants hold a court every month (to hear cases and complaints of the people) and that a General Court be held four times a year (where the freemen from each town drafted laws).

But the General Court did not meet four times a year, and the Assistants’ Court was drafting laws without the oversight of the freemen’s deputies, so in May 1634 at a meeting of the GC the deputies asked to see the patent. They demanded that they be allowed their proper role of drafting laws, but Winthrop said the number of freemen was too large to allow meeting—the Great Migration was in full swing, and the number would indeed have been pushing 1,000. Winthrop suggested that the freemen should elect deputies to attend the GC; each town could send deputies to Boston. Winthrop pictured these deputies reviewing laws drafted by the Assistants’ Court (like the Supreme Court reviews laws made by Congress).

The freemen, however, voted on May 14 to send three deputies from each of the eight towns then existing to the General Court to vote for the assistants and to draft laws. So now the freemen of Massachusetts were voting for their representatives and drafting their own laws. This itself is fairly astonishing to the student of history, for one would be hard-pressed to find an example of this type of proto-democracy anywhere else in the world in 1634.

But the people went further, and this is where the Body of Liberties comes in. The General Court made laws on an ad-hoc basis, hearing each individual case and deciding it. But many in the Court and outside it were worried that this could lead to injustice—to deputies “proceeding according to their discretions”; that is, letting their personal opinions sway their decisions. The colony needed an objective code of law that would not change from case to case. In May 1635 the deputies at the General Court voted to draft that code of law.

It wasn’t simple, though. Who should draft it? The deputies, with their subjective opinions? The Assistants, who could possibly establish an oligarchy by writing laws that gave them more power? While these questions were ironed out, the Court voted in 1636 that any law drafted had to have the support of both the Assistants’ Court and the General Court. The General Court also voted that three clergymen—Cotton, Peters, and Shepherd—submit drafts of laws. Why clergymen? In part, because they were seen to be objective; no minister was allowed to hold a government position, and so had nothing to gain by giving the government certain powers. In part, the colony was a religious society and valued the opinion of its ministers. That said, none of the three drafts was accepted, not even John Cotton’s; as the most respectd and celebrated minister in the colony, perhaps in all New England, he might have seemed a shoo-in, but he was not.

In March 1637, the GC was at an impasse, and so it drafted a letter to the freemen of the eight towns asking them to assemble in their towns and write up a code of laws they felt was just and send it to Boston by June 5. The governor and Assistants would then review them all and create “a compendious abridgement of the same” to give to the GC, which would have final review and approve or reject it. Again, this is a pretty surprising exercise of democracy for the time, but we find in November 1639 there’s still no progress. What caused the delay? Winthrop details two main reasons in his diary, a compendious abridgement of which follows here:

1. The people felt that rather than write laws to use in the future, laws should develop naturally over time and custom, as they had done in England. England never had a written constitution, of course, and the English emigrants in Massachusetts believed their laws should develop the same way.

2. Following on from the lack of a written English body of laws, many Puritans felt they were breaking a key tenet of their charter if they wrote a body of laws. The charter said the colonists could govern themselves as necessary, but should make no laws “repugnant” to the laws of England. Even writing out a body of laws was, in a way, repugnant to English law because English law was not codified. Aside from that, the risk of codifying something that wouldn’t jibe with English law was just too great.

So while the people of the colony wanted an objective body of laws, they were worried about just creating one on the spot, and worried about the consequences of codifying laws that did not exist in England. In the end, the need for a code overcame this resistance, first for the govenrment and then for the people. In 1639, two different codes were drafted by two ministers, and each was sent to the towns to be read to the people, who could revise as they saw fit. Knowing that there would be a code of law, consequences and custom be damned, led the people to at last act. They ended up approving a draft by Rev. Ward. This was revised several times by the governor and the courts, and at last on December 10, 1641—six years after the initial request to draft a code of laws—the Body of Liberties was copied and sent to all the towns, “and voted to stand in force.”

It’s an amazing background for a body of laws in the 17th century, and just this lead-up to the Body puts the lie to claims of oligarchy or dictatorship, and poor citizens being oppressed by laws they did not support, which is the usual picture of Puritan Massachusetts. We’ll look at a few of the 100 laws in the Body over the next few posts. The original Body was given a three-year trial, after which it could be either yanked or “established to be perpetual.” It would be established, and used as the basis for later bodies of law for the colony.

Next time: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Puritan Smackdown: Be round if you would

My favorite passage from John Winthrop’s diary is this, from August 3, 1632:

“After dinner the deputy [Thomas Dudley, Winthrop’s periodic rival] then demanded of him [Winthrop—he wrote about himself in the third person in his diary] the ground and limits of his authority, whether by the patent [the colony’s charter] or otherwise. The governor [Winthrop] answered that he would challenge no greater authority than he might by the patent. The deputy replied that then he had no more authority than every assistant (except power to call courts and precedency for honor and order). The governor answered he had more, for the patent making him a governor by common law or the statutes, and desired him to show wherein he had exceeded, etc.

“In speaking this somehwat apprehensively, the deputy began to be in passion and told the governor that if he were so round he would be round too. The governor bade him be round if he would. So the deputy rose up in great fury and passion and the governor grew very hot also, so as they both fell into bitterness, but by mediation of the mediators they were soon pacified…”

So if you ever time travel back to Puritan New England in the 1630s, you’ll know what to say if you want to fight. Just bid someone be round if they would.

When did “Puritan New England” die out?

It’s always interesting to me how long a lifespan people assign to “Puritan New England”. Of course, there are two kinds of “Puritan” being described: the days of the Puritan colonies and a set of behaviors that people who were not Puritans describe as “puritanism”. People tend to describe New England society as Puritan from 1620 to about 1950—a much longer span than is warranted by fact. The real lifespan of Puritan New England is 1630 to about 1720.

We say 1630 because the Pilgrims who arrived in North America in 1620 were not Puritans (see here for more on that); it was the group who arrived in 1630 who began Puritan colonization. The colonies founded by these Puritans were based on the religious practice of Congregationalism, and this meant three things that are the main characteristics of Puritan New England: 1) the colonies thrived on and required religious homogeneity; 2) a proto-democratic political system was necessary to protect the unique society created in America; and thus 3) the colonists devoted themselves to evading direct rule from England in order to maintain that political system. For as long as these three characteristics were unchallenged, Puritan New England existed.

How long was that? Not very long. The aftermath of King Philip’s War (1675-6) brought political discord between the Puritan colonies, which brought on direct rule from England, first in the form of the Dominion of New England (1686-9), during which time the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were restructured into one mega-colony (along with New York and East and West Jersey). It’s important that during the Dominion the Puritans were enraged not just by the promotion of Anglicanism over Congregationalism but also by the destruction of the Puritan legal and political system: legislatures were no longer popularly elected, land titles were revoked, and a royal court with no jury was set up in Boston to enforce the Navigation Acts.

The Dominion was overthrown after the death of King James II, but English direct rule did not end. The Puritans who had overthrown the Dominion immediately pledged their loyalty to the new king and queen, William and Mary, and William opened the Puritan colonies to outsiders. Non-Puritans began settling in New England in large numbers, and their religious practices were protected. By 1691, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter was overthrown and it became a royal colony with a royally appointed governer, true Congregationalism was rapidly becoming a blast from the past. Its dominance was certainly at an end, as it became simply one religion amongst many others.

Of course, it took decades to completely unseat the old religious ways. But an important shift was occurring after 1689: much of the fervor originally associated primarily with religion in Puritan New England was being gradually but steadily extended to politics. Note that the Dominion and the charter revocation dealt a fatal blow to pure Congregational practice but strengthened the old Puritan political dogma. What the people of New England held on to was proto-democracy: a popularly elected legislature, juries made up of local citizens, and the right of towns to hold their political town meetings.

So by roughly 1720-30 the shift was fairly complete. New England was no longer Puritan, it was polyglot with a Puritan past and a powerful Puritan legacy that newcomers and non-Puritans were very aware of. Congregationalism remained the majority religion, and people in the Congregational church were very committed to its original principles as codified in 1649. But politics began to supersede religion as the defining characteristic of the region, and New England would lead the way into the age of Revolution.

The echoes of the old way, the true Puritan New England that only existed from 1630-1686, were heard long after the fact, of course, and it may be the very brevity of the actual Puritan moment that made it so powerful an image for later writers, religious leaders, politicians, and historians. But any reference to “Puritan New England” after 1730 at the latest, and 1720 more likely, is mostly inaccurate.

A Close reading of Sinners in the hands of an angry God

Part 3 of our look at the 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” involves a close reading of the sermon. It’s not too long, for a sermon, but we’re not going to go over every word of it here for the sake of space. Instead, we’ll look at chronological excerpts that make the main points. When italics are my own, and not Edwards’, I will note it.

The sermon takes off from the Bible verse “Their foot shall slide in due time”, from Deut. 32:35

“In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God’s visible people, and who lived under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God’s wonderful works towards them, remained (as vers 28.) void of counsel, having no understanding in them.”

—Edwards begins with the comparison of the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament of the Bible with his modern-day New England listeners. In the Old Testament, God is constantly chastising the Israelites for their sin and lack of faith, so Edwards’ listeners would have guessed what was coming.

“…they were always exposed to destruction; as one that stands or walks in slippery places is always exposed to fall. …they were always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction… Another thing implied is, that they are liable to fall of themselves… [and] that the reason why they are not fallen already and do not fall now is only that God’s appointed time is not come.”

—Because of their sin, humans are always on the verge of being sent to Hell by God. They are already damned by their sin, so there is no question that Hell awaits them, but the time God appointed (aeons ago) for them to go to Hell has not yet come. So don’t be comforted by the fact that you haven’t slipped into Hell yet—it’s only a matter of time.

“There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God… Men’s hands cannot be strong when God rises up. The strongest have no power to resist him, nor can any deliver out of his hands.”

—As soon as God decides it’s your time to take your punishment, you will; there is nothing you can do about it. This is a crucial Calvinist idea; you cannot choose God or salvation, you cannot change God’s mind. He will reiterate this tirelessly throughout this sermon, but, as we mentioned in part 2, he will also continually urge people to do something—to seek a remedy. He will also urge people not to continue in their sin, which is tantamount to telling them to choose good/God.

“They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them… it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God’s mere will, that holds it back. They are already under a sentence of condemnation to hell.”

—God’s judgment is never wrong. So if you love someone and think they are a good person who could never be sent to Hell by a good God, you are mistaken in your judgment and God is right in His. Every sinner would be in Hell right now if it weren’t suiting God’s purposes to keep them on Earth for the moment. Notice the use of the word “arbitrary” in “the hand of arbitrary mercy”: there is no reason for God to hold back, and so his decision to do so is arbitrary mercy, in that we can never understand why God would ever suffer sinners to live in happiness on Earth for one moment, let alone long lifetimes.

Throughout the sermon Edwards, like many Christians before him, speaks of God’s “pleasure”, as in “it pleases God to hold back”. This does not mean pleasure as we think of it, but is merely a synonym for “will”. It’s not that God derives happiness or pleasure from condemning humans; it’s just that it’s God’s will to punish those who are sinful.

“There is this clear evidence that men’s own wisdom is no security to them from death; that if it were otherwise we should see some difference between the wise and politic men of the world, and others, with regard to their liableness to early and unexpected death: but how is it in fact? [In Eccles. 2:16 it says] ‘How dieth the wise man? even as the fool.'”

—If you have spent time reasoning away your sin or damnation, you are in big trouble. It’s people who think they’re smart enough to outwit God and their fate who burn the brightest in Hell. If your smarts mattered at all then wise men wouldn’t die early or unexpectedly, such deaths being proof positive of God suddenly decided to withdraw His arbitrary mercy and let you go to Hell.

“Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it; he depends upon himself for his own security; he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do… They hear indeed that there are but few saved, and that the greater part of men that have died heretofore are gone to hell; but each one imagines that he lays out matters better for his own escape than others have done.”

—We all think it won’t happen to us, right? But really, if this were a true Puritan audience of even 50 years earlier, it would be the opposite: nearly everyone in the audience would think it would happen to them, because they were not sure they were saved. This excerpt is proof of how times had changed in New England by 1741. As people lost touch with the idea of searching for God’s grace to know His will, they lost their sharp fear of Hell, and began to wonder, at least to some extent, if the “damned until proven saved” mindset was really accurate.

“The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation. This that you have heard is the case of every one of you that are out of Christ. That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.”

—Now Edwards comes to the “Application” of his sermon, in which he tells the congregation how his topic pertains to them. This would be more pertinent to a study of the shepherd and his flock or the parable of the ten virgins, but in this case, the audience certainly knew how it applied to them. Edwards has made it very clear that everyone is damned and about to fall into Hell, and everyone means everyone. This is the first of many graphic descriptions of Hell in the sermon, and it was recorded that in this sermon as in others that focused on damnation, people began to cry and scream in the church as their terror mounted.

“…all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God.”

—Here we get our title. But this is one of those confusing passages that introduces the anti-Puritan, pro-Arminian view that you as a sinful human can change, that God can and will change you, and make you new, and remove you from sin. Edwards has previously toed the Puritan, Calvinist line that no one can change their sinful nature and there’s nothing you can do to change God’s mind, and the only reason God hasn’t sent you to Hell yet is because it’s not time. Now he seems to be saying you can change, that God will change His mind and take away your sin, and that you haven’t been sent to Hell yet because God is waiting for you to ask Him for this transformation. It’s just the first of many calls to action that the first part of the sermon seemed to make redundant.

The verb tense is passive—you are “made new” and “raised up” by God—so in that sense even if you are cleansed it’s not because of anything you have done; God has decided to do this for and to you on His own. Yet how could God decide this if His mind has been irrevocably made up about you since before the dawn of time?

“You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have… nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.” [my italics]

—Here is another whipsaw passage: Edwards has just told you in the last quote that you need to be changed and made holy, and a listener could be forgiven for assuming that they need to actively seek this. But here again there is nothing you can do to persuade God to help you at all.

“…Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you continue in it; the infinite might, and majesty, and terribleness of the omnipotent God shall be magnified upon you, in the ineffable strength of your torments.” [my italics]

—Again, one is urged not to continue in sin, but what you can do to stop sinning, and get God to save you, is not specified. The passive tense used throughout seems to say that you can’t influence God to save you, God will do this to/for you, but on the other hand, you are urged to sort of get God interested in doing so (in again unspecified ways).

“And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful is it to be left behind at such a day! To see so many others feasting, while you are pining and perishing!”

—Yes, it would be terrible to be left behind when everyone else is saved and headed to Heaven, but, as the anguished congregation must have cried out, how do you avoid it?? This passage is especially cruel in its vagary. Christ has thrown open the doors to Heaven, and sinners are flocking to Him, and thus being saved. Somehow. What is “flocking to” Christ? What does one actually do? What did those who were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, but who are now in a happy state, actually do to achieve this transformation, and salvation? Edwards does not say.

Clearly, the door being flung open means that the number of the saved is suddenly going to be increased, for some reason of God’s own, at this moment. Your name no longer has to be on the list—for this short time only, you can become saved, but how?

“God seems now to be hastily gathering in his elect in all parts of the land; and probably the greater part of adult persons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in a little time…”

—Everyone who will ever be saved is being saved right now. Time is short. But again, what you do to become elect is unspecified.

“Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”

—This is the concluding paragraph of the sermon. It’s fitting that it should close with another confusing order to do something to change your fate, even though humans can do nothing, and to fly from God’s wrath even though you’re never told how to do that.

One can appreciate why so many people became so distraught during sermons like this one. The time of religious change and upheaval it came out of led it to mash together different doctrines, without making one sensible new doctrine out of the group, but rather a crazy-quilt of conflicting demands. If it had been truly Puritan, there would not have been two dozen graphic, drawn-0ut descriptions of Hell or vague orders to change God’s mind about your soul. It would have quietly encouraged you to seek God’s will and draw strength from God’s goodness. If it had been truly Arminian, it would have come out and said you can accept God and reject Satan and earn salvation by doing so.

As it is, the sermon stirs up terror and grief, but offers no way out from them. In the next post, we’ll wrap up our look at this sermon and its time.

Next time: What the sermon says about its time

Sinners in the hands of an angry God: where did it come from?

Welcome to part 2 of our series on the infamous Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. Here we follow on from the description of the original Puritan religion and church practices in part 1 with a description of the Great Awakening and the sermon itself.

As we learned in part 1, by the 1690s the old Puritan Way was eroding in New England for political and demographic reasons. Puritans were no longer the majority population in the New England colonies as outsiders came in to the newly subsumed royal colony. Congregational religion held on; most people living in New England in 1720 who were born into Congregationalism took it seriously, but they did not regard the ministry or the complex, social, intellectual process of church doctrine with the respect that their forebears had felt.

This was partly inevitable; the fervor and complete devotion to the New England Way of the first generations who felt they were fighting God’s fight all alone in the New World could not be sustained by those who came later, born into a comfortable and profitable colony of the British empire. It was also partly the result of compromises to the Way that took the supernatural aura away from it and made it seem more a human creation like any other—no better and no worse than any other way.

Many historians have made a great deal of a supposed falling off of church membership at this time, the early 1700s, but as we have seen, full church membership had always been rare amongst the Puritans, because most of them were not sure that they were truly saved (a prerequisite to becoming a full member was publicly describing and affirming the moment you realized you were saved). So the slightly lower number still of full members in the 1700s is not surprising. In a time of increased doubt, the fraction of those who felt they were saved became even smaller.

Congregationalism was not dead; on the contrary, most Congregationalists were still very concerned with their souls. They just did not respond passionately to traditional Congregationalism anymore.

Enter the First Great Awakening. In the 1730s and 40s, a series of religious revivals swept New England and parts of New York and New Jersey. The theology of the revivalists was a mix; George Whitefield was an Anglican, many Baptists took part, and some Congregational ministers embraced a mix of Calvinist and Arminian principles. We saw in part 1 of this series that Arminianism had been an arch-enemy of the Puritans because it taught that humans could choose to accept God and be saved, which Puritans thought was impossible given the fallen, sinful nature of human beings. So it’s a proof of the shift in New England that an unreformed English Anglican could lead Baptists and Congregationalists in an embrace of Arminianism.

But the revivals did catch on. They spoke to people’s desire to be passionate about religion again, to feel the fire of religious devotion they read about in histories of their ancestors but did not feel in themselves. In the absence of a literal wilderness to fight against, like their settler ancestors had had, New Englanders in the 1730s and 40s fought against a spiritual wilderness. They fought against the apathy and religious complacency they had begun to feel as the Puritan religious zeal was more and more transferred to politics.

Jonathan Edwards was a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony who embraced certain aspects of the revival. Born in 1703, Edwards had grown up in a very traditional Puritan household; his mother Esther Stoddard Edwards was the daughter of the famous and influential Puritan minister Solomon Stoddard. Edwards believed in predestination, and had had his moment of realizing he was saved; he believed that God alone decided if someone was to be saved and that no human effort or decision could influence God. He was also a passionate amateur biologist who saw the beauty of nature as proof of God’s goodness, and a happily married man who took a special interest in women’s rights.

Edwards appreciated the religious revival because it brought people to church and got them passionate about religion again. It also gave him an opportunity to mix scientific method and the old-school Puritan intellectual approach by taking the revival as an opportunity to study and document the psycholgical steps involved in religious conversion. Perhaps pre-occupied by this angle, he did not realize that many who came to church in fear of damnation did not come to believe that they were saved and fell into despair. A few congregants took their own lives as a result, and revival faded in Northampton in 1735.

It was sparked back to life in 1740 when the famous English Anglican minister George Whitefield answered Edwards’ request to come preach in Northampton. Whitefield, a superstar of his day, was on a tour of the American colonies and attracting thousands of people to his hellfire sermons. He preached four times in Northampton that fall of 1740, and led Edwards back to preaching the full revival.

The next summer, July 8, 1741, Edwards preached his “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermon. To us it is a great event, but it was just one of many fiery sermons Edwards preached, and is only famous today because it was the one chosen to be anthologized in American literature texts.

The sermon is puzzling in a few ways, considering who Edwards was. He tells people they are in immediate danger of hell and urges them not to continue in their sinful ways, and to seek a “remedy” for their sin, but as a Congregationalist he cannot just tell them to accept Christ and be saved—he doesn’t believe in that. So the “remedy” remains very vague, which probably deeply upset his listeners. Early generations might have understood that they were supposed to begin the painstaking process of study, prayer, and church-going that would open their souls to God’s grace and let them know if they were saved, but by 1741 this process was about dead and buried. Young people in 1741 would not know anything about it, and would most likely have discounted it if they had known, for who would begin a years- or even decades-long process of discernment when the threat of hell is immediate? There’s no time for Puritanism any more.

The emotional nature of the sermon is also confusing, as the one thing Edwards disliked about the revival movement was its emotion. He did not approve of or encourage his listeners to cry out in church, throw themselves on the floor, or do any other dramatic thing, yet a sermon like this one could not help but provoke listeners to frantic despair.

It’s also unusual for a Puritan minister to deliver a “hellfire” sermon. Puritan sermons had usually focused on the process of searching for God’s grace, and the technical points of how to read God’s word and discern his will for you. They were not focused on hell and damnation because ministers assumed that most people in the Congregation did not know their spiritual status (whether or not they were saved) and so haranguing them about hell would be unfair and even counter-productive. It’s only when you begin to believe that you can act on your own to accept God and be saved that you can harrass people for not doing so.

Edwards tells people that very few humans are saved, and even says that most of their friends and loved ones who have died, people whom everyone liked and who seemed godly, are undoubtedly in hell, but gives no clear way out for the living, since salvation is restricted to such a tiny fraction of people. He tells them that God is “incensed” with them because of their sin, that they deserve to go to Hell and should go there, and that God will likely send them there and would be justified in doing so… then urges them to seek the “remedy”. But what remedy is there, if you deserve Hell and God has likely condemned you to it:?

Edwards uses the now-familiar phrase “born again”:

“Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God.”

These are Arminian ideas: that God can change your “heart” or soul (the Puritans believed that God never changed his creation because it was perfect), that humans can become good (Puritans believed this to be impossible), that God can decide to save someone previously condemned to Hell (Puritans believed that before the world was created God decided the fate of every human who would ever live, and then never changed his mind). Edwards continues the mystification by reiterating that there is nothing humans can do to avoid Hell (“…[you have] nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment”), and then saying humans have to do something: “Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you continue in it”. Saying “if you continue in it” seems to clearly imply that you can choose not to continue in your sin, and thus can do something to save yourself.

We will do a close-reading of the sermon in the next post. For now, we’ll wrap up by saying this sermon is an artifact of the religious flux and change going on in Congregational New England at the time. Arminian ideas were creeping in, passion was replacing reason, and mixed messages about what was possible, what God’s nature was, and how humans stood in relation to God’s will proliferated. That’s what made the revival at once satisfying and horrible for those who participated: it satisfied their need for a passionate, non-intellectualized call to God, but then failed to offer a clear solution to the problem of their damnation. It would take a few more decades, really until the beginning of the 19th century, for the Protestant tenets we know today to take shape: that humans can choose God and salvation, that God can be influenced in his judgments, and that being “born again” means believing in Christ. For revivalists in 1741, such a clear-cut doctrine was nowhere in sight.

Next time: let’s read the sermon

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: what does it mean?

Welcome to our series on the (in)famous 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. This is a text that is taught unfailingly in American literature courses in high school and college; students read a short excerpt, one of the many that focuses all too intently on describing the horrors of hell and the wretched situation of humans living seemingly comfortable and happy lives on Earth but destined—pre-destined—to wind up scorching eternally.

It’s usually presented as an example of the awfulness of the Puritans and their religion, but it’s not really a Puritan sermon at all. In this series, we’ll trace the evolution of this sermon, the Great Awakening of which it was a part, and the overall religious climate of New England in the mid-1700s.

Let’s begin with a sizing up of religious feeling and practice in New England at the time. New England had been settled by Puritans—English people who wanted to strip the Anglican church of its remaining “Catholic” practices—to purify it (much more on the Puritans throughout this site!). The church these people created in the New World came to be called Congregational, because each individual congregation was completely autonomous—there were no bishops and archbishops assigning ministers and dictating doctrine. The people attending a church had complete control over who became their minister, voting for and against candidates for that office, and each church was free from interference by the state.

When on earth, you ask, will we get to the sermon? It is coming; in the very next post we’ll get to it. But you can’t understand why Edwards’ sermon was so powerful unless you know where his congregation of 1741 was at with their religion and their souls.

This original Congregational church was strong from 1630, when the Puritans arrived in New England, until about 1700. Early on, the Puritans codified their beliefs and, most importantly, their church practices in a body of doctrine called the New England Way. One of the most important things to understand about the real Puritanism of this period, rather than the religious practice that came later in the early 1700s, is that Puritan religion was very intellectual. It required lots of thought, reading, prayer, conversation, and soul-searching done in the quiet of reflection. The New England Way laid out a series of steps one must take in order to a) open oneself to God’s grace so that b) one could realize whether one had been given God’s grace and was saved. It’s a little bald, but let’s put it into bullets:

—Puritans believed that everyone in history and in the future had already been given grace/salvation by God or had not

—There was nothing you could do to earn God’s grace/salvation; no sinful human could ever deserve it

—God decided millennia before you were born whether to give you His grace or not (this is called predestination)

—Your job was to live as good a life as you could, following Congregational doctrine as closely as you could, in order to make your fallen soul as receptive as possible to the word of God, which would

—make it possible for you to realize whether you had received God’s grace or not.

—If you realized you had been saved, you were all set. If not, you had to keep trying. Puritans, for all their strictness, were loathe to actually tell someone to give up, that they weren’t saved.

Puritans were fully committed to their Way. They saw it as a fixed doctrine, set for the ages. But in 1659, the Halfway Covenant was introduced. In the Congregational church, infants were baptized, and anyone baptized in a church could attend it. But unless they became full members, they could not take communion or take part in church votes. To become a full member, you had to complete the long series of steps toward opening yourself to God and have the realization that God had indeed saved you. Very, very few Puritans, even in the fervent early decades, did this. They took their religion very seriously, and very few people could bring themselves to think that they had been given the priceless gift of God’s grace and salvation. The Halfway Covenant allowed people who weren’t full members to have their own children baptized. They could not take communion or vote, but they could be part of the groups that sought to know God’s will. This was a compromise that kept children in the fold without corrupting the Congregational practice of requiring full membership before you took communion or voted.

Churches across New England battled in mini civil wars over whether they would accept the Halfway Covenant, and some churches were torn apart. Argument about what the New England Way really was fired the region. The Halfway Covenant was eventually accepted, but it did plant a seed of doubt in people’s minds—was Congregational doctrine really handed down from God, and unchangeable, or something created by humans that had no real authority?

This question would remain as the 17th century drew to a close. The Massachusetts Bay Colony lost its autonomy in 1691 and was made a royal colony under direct control of the English king, and many thousands of non-Puritans entered the colony. The old religion held on, but inevitably it changed. Whether you thought that change was for the better or the worse influenced how you felt about the Great Awakening, and Jonathan Edwards’ preaching, when they came.

Next time: the Great Awakening and the Sermon

The True Story of Roanoke

Part the last of our short series on the lost colony of Roanoke brings us to what really happened to the English colonists, men, women, and children, who had disappeared from the fledgling Roanoke colony in 1589. Again, we’re indebted to James Horn’s fantastic book A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America for the facts herein.

We get our first clues from John Smith, the man who had his finger in every pie of interest in early English colonial efforts in Virginia. In 1608, 19 years after the Roanoke colony was found abandoned, Smith was traveling around the coast of Virginia and mapping it; on his map, he made a note that read “Here remain the 4 men clothed that came from Roanoke to Okanahowan”. (“Clothed” refers to wearing European clothing.) Wahunsonacock (known to us as Powhatan) also willingly told Smith about other survivors—“6 from Roanoke”.

English people had long been speculating on what had happened to the people of the colony. The government maintained that they had never vanished or been killed, but still lived hidden somewhere; the impetus behind this was to keep an English foot in the door in North America. If the English could claim they had a colony in Virginia, they could continue to fight Spanish claims to the entire continent. So Smith’s news was big. If Roanoke colonists really were still alive and living in Virginia, then England had two colonies in North America in 1608. Christopher Newport was sent from England to Virginia to look for them and to take over command of Jamestown colony (to Smith’s chagrin).

The next year, in 1609, another report was made of Roanoke survivors: Sir Thomas Gates, who had arrived at Jamestown with more men, had been informed by the Virginia Company that alleged copper mines in Virginia were not far from where four English survivors lived, ones who had been with “Sir Walter Ralegh, which escaped from the slaughter of Powhatan of Roanoke, upon the first arrival of our colony.”

Who told the men in London that there were Roanoke survivors? Horn posits that it might have been an American named Machumps who went to London in 1608 with Christopher Newport and returned home with Gates. William Strachey told the Company that Machumps had said that the people of Roanoke had lived peacefully for 20 years with the Americans, freely mixing, when Powhatan ordered them killed for no reason. The werowance (leader) Eyanoco saved the lives of seven of the English to work as slaves in his copper mines. Powhatan had killed the English, according to Machumps, because his priests told him they would become a threat to him.

What threat could the colonists have posed? Horn posits that Wahunsonacock may have worried that the survivors would work to ally the newcomers at Jamestown with Americans against him. Wahunsonacock goverened a large area and had to maintain his control over many groups within his rule, while putting down threats to his rule from outside. He also wanted to monopolize the copper trade. If the English, who clearly wanted the copper, worked through the Roanoke survivors/interpreters/go-betweens to organize groups of people under their own rule, this would pose a powerful threat to Wahunsonacock.

So the colonists were hunted down in their new communities, where many had likely intermarried with Americans, and killed so that they could not reach out to their countrymen newly established at Jamestown. It was actually the arrival of the men at the site of Jamestown that triggered the deaths of their fellows, because Wahunsonacock realized the inevitable connection the survivors would make to the newcomers, no matter how assimilated into their new American society they were.

It’s heartening to know that the Roanoke colony was not destroyed by Americans as soon as it was planted. The story of Roanoke is actually a story of cooperation and assimilation and acceptance. It’s ironic that if Jamestown had not been established, the survivors would likely have lived long and happy lives as Americans. It was the arrival of their fellow English that doomed them.