Category: Puritans

Why the Puritans persecuted Quakers

It seems simple enough: the Puritans believed Quakers were heretics. In fact, anyone who was not an Anglican was a heretic, including Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Quakers, Ranters… in short, anyone who was not Anglican.


Heretics were seen as blasphemers who put barriers in the way of salvation; they were also considered traitors to their country because they did not belong to the official state religion. This was true throughout Europe in the century following the Protestant Reformation: whatever religion the king chose became the official state religion of his country, and all other religions or sects were made illegal. In fact, the Puritans had left England because they had been considered heretics there, and had been persecuted by the government. Technically, they were not heretics because they did not leave the official Church of England (the Anglican Church), but their demands for big changes to that church made them outsiders. It was enough to get the anti-Puritan Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, to launch a campaign of persecution against them.


So when Quakers showed up in Boston in the 1650s, it’s no surprise they were persecuted. Puritan Congregationalism was the official—and only—religion of New England. Like every other state they knew of in Europe, the Puritans enforced a state religion that it was treason to oppose. But it wasn’t just about their religion. The persecution of Quakers was also part of the Puritans’ determination to rule themselves, independent of England.


The Puritans who had remained in England during the Great Migration to America of the 1630s drifted apart from their New England brethren. They were more inclined to allow toleration of other professions of Christian faith. The impossibility of reforming, or purifying, the Anglican Church in England was slowly rejected in favor of the much more doable task of simply confirming England as a Protestant nation by allowing any and all Protestants to worship relatively freely. The English Puritans also supported presbyterianism, a system in which the state governs the church and appoints a hierarchy to oversee all churches.

To the New England Puritans, both toleration and presbyterianism were unacceptable. They had spent painstaking years establishing a system of church government called the New England Way that was based on the independence and power of the individual congregation. The state in Massachusetts did not appoint clergy, nor was there one over-arching body that regulated churches. Each church was a sovereign unit. And only one church was tolerated in Massachusetts: the Puritan, or Congregational church (which was, to them, the purified Anglican church in America).


Worried that the English government would try to force its new rules of toleration and presbyterianism on them, the Puritans of Massachusetts made preparations to fight for their independence. They elected their own governor and General Court (a combined legislature and judiciary). They built many forts to protect their harbor and drilled their militia men regularly. And they continued to persecute Quakers, who, determined to bring their version of the Gospel to New England, continued to trespass into Boston despite the harsh and often cruel punishments they knew they would receive.


Those Quakers were not meek and mild innocents who just wanted to talk. They were as righteous a group of zealots as most Puritans, and when they entered a Massachusetts town they tried to wreak maximum havoc: bursting into church services, yelling in the streets, banging pots and pans together, and even stripping off their clothes (to show their lack of attachment to worldly things). The Puritans reacted with vehement rejection, and submitted Quakers who would not heed the warnings to leave and never return to terrible punishments. Boring holes through their tongues was just one of these.


The Quakers had no one to turn to for help until 1660, when the monarchy in England was restored, and Charles II came to the throne. One of his first acts as king was to send a letter to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the most powerful New England colony) ordering the persecutions of Quakers to stop. According to the “King’s Missive,” any Quaker accused of breaking the law in Massachusetts should be sent unharmed to England for trial.

Charles II issued his order for two reasons. First, he was a Catholic sympathizer, and Quakers and Catholics were about the only groups who found absolutely no acceptance in England. If Charles could win tolerance for Quakers, perhaps he could win eventual tolerance for Catholics. Second, he cast a dark eye on Massachusetts’ independence. Disgruntled ex-colonists who left New England to return home told Charles the Puritans were rebels. It didn’t help that two of the judges who had condemned his father, Charles I, to death had fled to New Haven and received a hero’s welcome there.


The new king put Massachusetts in a bind: if they stopped persecuting Quakers, and sent them to England for trial, that lessened the authority of their locally elected General Court. If they gave up the authority to prosecute Quakers, what other bit of their independence would they have to give up next? It was a slippery slope leading to direct English rule. But on the other hand, if they did not stop persecuting Quakers, they would be in violation of the King’s law, traitors, and would be immediately occupied by English soldiers and forced to accept a royal governor (rather than their own elected governor). Massachusetts made its choice: they would stave off English rule as long as possible rather than call down instant English rule on themselves. Slowly the persecution of Quakers came to an end.


They would win many small battles with the king and maintain their independence until 1691, when Massachusetts’ charter was revoked and the powerful colony came at last under direct rule from England. By that time, toleration was the rule even in New England, and Quakers were no longer a dangerous and radical sect but commonplace members of society. But resentment of English rule did not die out amongst New Englanders; less than 100 years later, the descendants of the Puritans would buck off English rule in America for good.

(For more on the Puritans and Quakers, their differences, and their battles, see Puritans v. Quakers in the battle for our sympathies.)

American Revolution, 1638

The Massachusetts Bay Colony had an ongoing battle with Parliament over its royal patent, issued by Charles I and given to John Winthrop to carry over to New England with the Puritan settlers in 1630.

The patent gave the colony’s governor and officers the power to make laws for themselves and basically to be self-governing, so long as their laws did not contradict the laws of England.

What’s interesting there is that the colonists were supposed or allowed to make their own laws. If those laws were not supposed to contradict those of England, then why allow them to make laws at all? Why not just say “follow the laws of England”?

The answer may be twofold. First, on England’s side, there was no real written body of laws, no constitution, to copy and take with them. Second, on the Puritans’ side, there was the understanding that special and/or unexpected conditions in the New World might call for new laws not pertinent to England. But on MBC’s side, there was also the firm if unspoken intent to function as a nearly sovereign state. The battle it fought to remain so is amazingly similar to the battle against royal authority in which Massachusetts took the lead in the 1770s.

As early as 1634, the Commission for Regulating Plantations, headed by Puritan foe Archbishop Laud, was seeking a revocation of MBC’s patent. In September 1634 Winthrop received a letter from the Commission stating its power to oversee MBC, call in its patent, make its laws, remove and punish its (elected) governors, “hear and determine all causes, and inflict all punishments, including death itself.” Sounds remarkably like the terms of what we call “the Intolerable Acts” of 1774.

In January 1635 we find the MBC reacting to this threat, calling all ministers, the governor, and the assistants together in Boston to discuss “what we ought to do if a general governor be sent out of England.” The decision was “we ought not to accept him but defend our lawful possessions (if we were able); otherwise, to avoid or protract [the confrontation].”

This very early decision not to accept direct rule from England is startling. This is from a colony only 4 years old, and far from secure. The MBC perceived threats from the French in Canada and today’s Maine, the Dutch in New York and western Connecticut, and potentially the Pequots or Narragansetts in Eastern Connecticut. Yet it was determined to manage its own affairs.

Over the years, the MBC used the “avoid or protract” strategy to parry many requests that it send its patent back to England for “review.” Winthrop particularly used a wide variety of ruses to avoid this. Once a demand for the patent was included in a packet of personal letters for Winthrop, and so, since the demand had not come by the usual official government messenger, Winthrop decided it was not a valid demand, and instructed the person who had delivered it to him to say the letter did not exist.

By September 1638, there was “a very strict order” from the Commission for sending back the patent. Again the governor (Winthrop) and the court of assistants agreed not to do so, “because then such of our friends and others in England would conceive it to be surrendered, and that thereupon we should be bound to receive such a governor and such orders as should be sent to us, and many bad minds, yea, and weak ones among ourselves would think it lawful if not necessary to accept a [royal] governor…”

It’s pretty astonishing to see English colonists in 1638 stating that only the bad or the weak would think it lawful to accept a governor from their home country, from the king they are supposed to be loyal to, from the government supposedly governing them.

The final quote on this could have come from 1775: in February 1641, the Long Parliament was in session, and its triumphant English Puritans wrote to MBC asking for its best men to come back to England to join Parliament and further their great work. The MBC’s response?

“But consulting about it, we declined the motion for this [reason], that if we should put ourselves under the protection of the parliament we must then be subject to all such laws as they should make, or at least such as they might impose upon us, in which course though they should intend our good, yet it might prove very prejudicial to us.”

It’s no surprise that Massachusetts led the way to Revolution in the 18th century. From its English settlement it was led by people who were determined to self-govern. This determination was largely if not completely based on religion, in that the Massachusetts Puritans had left England in order to live under a government consonant with their religious principles. Before 1640 they would not be ruled by an Anglican Parliament. After 1640, they would not be ruled by any Parliament. (The English Parliament’s espousal of toleration and presbyterianism quickly and completely alienated the Massachusetts Puritans, who then had dangerously difficult relations with the English Puritan government.)

The active leaders of rebellion in Massachusetts were mostly born in the 1730s and 40s. Those people would have had grandparents born in the late 1600s, who remembered when Massachusetts was at last subdued under a royal government in 1690.  Those grandparents would have known and told stories about their own grandparents, who fought Parliament in the mid-1600s. So the link between the rebellion of the 1630s and the rebellion of the 1770s is not so distant. When we look for the seeds of rebellion in America, we need to look all the way back to the beginnings of colonization, in the Puritan settlement at Massachusetts.

Roger Williams: saint of Rhode Island or lunatic of Massachusetts?

There’s a great article on Roger Williams at American Creation, a new blog devoted to studying religion in early America. (Disclaimer: I contribute articles on the Puritans for this blog from time to time.)

Williams was a complicated character. He caused the Puritans of Massachusetts nothing but trouble, yet he was so charismatic and charming they could not bring themselves to punish him for years.

The article at American Creation tells most of the story. I’ll just add that Williams not only challenged the bases of Puritan theology, but also claimed that the royal charter that created Massachusetts Bay Colony was null and void because it was granted by King Charles, a sinner and false king, who had no earthly authority.

Williams would have had the Puritans go back to London, rip up their charter, try to convert Charles, and get a new, valid charter. For Puritans trying hard not to arouse an already hostile king’s anger, this was too much.

Williams was supposed to be sent back to England in chains as a traitor, but John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, intervened. Williams claimed that Winthrop told him what was being planned, and urged him to escape secretly. Winthrop had every reason to detest Williams, but he did not. He saw Williams’ sincerity and youthful innocence, and perhaps had faith Williams would eventually settle down. They remained close throughout Winthrop’s life.

Williams took off for what is now Rhode Island, and many years later got his own royal charter. By that time (1663), he had undergone a radical change from a man who had excluded everyone but his wife from the list of the saved to a man who welcomed everyone as equal.

This is the Williams who is well-known and loved. The story of how he got from A to B is a fascinating one.

The trial of Anne Hutchinson

Part 3 of our series on Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson focuses on her fall. After Hutchinson’s brother-in-law Wheelwright’s sermon at the Boston church in January 1637, in which he said all those under the covenant of works were the “great enemies of Christ” and ought to be “killed with the word of the Lord,” Wheelwright was found guilty of sedition (May 1637). Hutchinson’s followers rallied to Wheelwright’s cause, signing a petition in his favor. This petition was in line with the nature of their beliefs: it claimed Wheelwright had done nothing wrong; that anything he said in that sermon was the voice of the Holy Spirit that lived within him; recalled that all the great saints had been wrongly attacked by human courts; and ended with a threat—“we beseech you to consider the danger of meddling against the prophets of God… if you hurt any of his members… it were better that a millstone were hanged about your necks, and that you were cast into the sea…”.

The Court allowed the petition to be read, then proceeded to the charges against Wheelwright, which were slandering the magistrates, ministers, and church members of the colony by saying they were Antichrists under a covenant of works; and for causing civil disturbance with his preaching. Wheelwright, who showed up to the Court over an hour late, denied he had ever said anyone was an enemy of Christ, and denied that his preaching was a source of the accusations, political division, and physical rioting taking place in Boston. The Court presented him with evidence to the contrary, then sentenced him to banishment for creating civil unrest (“troubles of the civil state”).

After this, nine of Hutchinson’s and Wheelwright’s followers were charged with civil disturbance, and all were fined and disenfranchised; one was also banished. Then Anne Hutchinson was tried.

Much is made of this because Hutchinson was a woman. But women appeared in Puritan courts constantly, as plaintiffs and defendants, and were given equal treatment. And if we read the court transcripts we see that Hutchinson was accused of exactly the same things as the men—slandering the ministers. Yes, her weekly meetings were also charged against her, but not because women couldn’t have meetings. The charges were that a) she attracted hundreds of people, which created civil unrest by fueling mobs; b) she did not use her meetings to parse sermons but to attack ministers and others; and c) that she took it upon herself to instruct men of higher rank than herself. The last point is the only one that we can describe as sexist. Otherwise, Hutchinson received the same chance to speak for and defend herself against the charges, to see evidence, and to repent—all those on trial were given the chance to recant, and one of the nine men originally sentenced to banishment had his sentence reduced when he apologized for showing contempt for the court.

Over two days, November 2-3, Hutchinson was tried. She was a very intelligent person who handled her defense well, but after lengthy questioning she was accused in court by ministers who had met with her in the spring of slandering them to their faces. She denied this charge, and called on John Cotton, the one minister she had not slandered, to testify on her behalf.  He hesitated. Cotton declared that “he was much grieved that she should make such comparison between him and his brethren, but yet he took her meaning to be only of a gradual difference”. That is, perhaps what Hutchinson had meant to say was that although the other ministers weren’t as good as him, they weren’t damned. But then Cotton said that since he did not remember everything that was said, he would take the word of the other ministers who remembered Hutchinson saying they were under a covenant of works. Perhaps Cotton trembled to commit perjury in court. Maybe he could not look at the faces of the ministers all around him and claim that they had lied. For whatever reason, Cotton validated the testimony of the other ministers, albeit as weakly as he possibly could, and did what he could to shield Hutchinson.

Hutchinson erupted in fury, demanding again that the ministers be forced to swear an oath that they were telling the truth. “Whereupon the court being weary of the clamor, and that all mouths might be stopped, required three of the ministers to take an oath, and thereupon they confirmed their former testimony.”

Seeing all hope of human help dissolving, Hutchinson began talking about how God had revealed himself to her, “and made her know what she had to do”. Winthrop, “perceiving whereabout she went, interrupted her, and would have kept her to the matter in hand, but seeing her very unwilling to be taken off, he permitted her to proceed.” The last thing Winthrop wanted was to give a soapbox to this charismatic woman. He saw that the Court was at last making headway on the charge of slandering the ministers, and wanted to keep that “matter in hand” now that there was sworn testimony that Hutchinson had committed sedition. We will never know what she did or said to make it clear to him that she was “very unwilling to be taken off”, but Hutchinson succeeded in being allowed to make her statement, and it is here that she condemned herself to banishment.

She began to preach her doctrine in the court, describing “the manner of God’s dealing with her, and how he revealed himself to her, and made her know what she had to do.” Hutchinson said she fought against the realization that all ministers were hypocrites for a full year before God

“…let me see how I did oppose Christ Jesus… and showed me the atheism of my own heart, and how I did turn in upon a covenant of works and oppose Christ Jesus; from which time the Lord did discover to me all sorts of ministers, and how they taught, and to know what voice I heard… and thenceforth I was the more careful whom I heard, for after our teacher Mr. Cotton and my brother Wheelwright were put down, there was none in England that I durst hear… [when they left for America, she followed, although] “it was revealed to me… that there I should be persecuted and suffer much trouble.” [But God revealed another scripture]: “Fear not Jacob my servant, for I am with thee, I will make a full end of all the Nations… then the Lord did reveal himself to me, sitting upon a throne of justice, and all the world appearing before him, and though I must come to New England, yet I must not fear or be dismayed… The Lord spake this to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people…”

Here Hutchinson is making two claims: first, that God revealed himself to her and therefore she is among the saved; second, that God showed her the whole world subjected to his justice, including New England, which God counted among the damned, and therefore she “should not walk in the way of [that] people.” Both claims are explosive. She went on to compare herself to Daniel in the lions’ den, and ended with a direct threat to the colony:

“…therefore take heed what ye go about to do unto me, for you have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my savior, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man, than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands, therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state.”

In this threat the magistrates heard the original of all the threats the Antinomians had previously made against them, including the petition presented before Wheelwright’s sentencing just days before.  Hutchinson’s speech damned her in several ways, civil and religious: it threatened violence against the state; it claimed direct revelation from God; it slandered the ministers; and it stated that Hutchinson was above human law. Any one of these claims would have justified banishment; put together, they shocked the magistrates and ministers who heard them deeply.

This was heresy and treason, a rejection of Puritan religion and a threat to the civil state, and easily merited banishment, the sentence she received. Her followers in Boston tried to save her, saying that she must have been tricked by the judges into making a statement she didn’t really believe. But when they met with her, Hutchinson reaffirmed her heresy, and made even bolder statements than before. Reluctantly, her church let her go.

Winthrop stayed the sentence of banishment that November because Hutchinson was pregnant. She did not leave Boston until March. Anne Hutchinson went to Rhode Island, where she managed to alienate even Roger Williams, and then to Long Island, where she died in an attack by Native Americans in 1643.

The judges in Hutchinson’s trial were tough, and they were hard on her. No quarter was given her for being a woman. They treated her as they would any heretic. But I think it’s hard to say she was treated unfairly. She got the same treatment as the men who came before her, and the same chance to lighten her sentence. She refused to recant, and expressed scorn for those who tried to reason with her both after her trial and months later, during her banishment, when a group was sent down to meet with her and see if she could be brought back into the fold.

Hutchinson has gone down in history as a demure maiden with downcast eyes facing mean, angry old Puritan men in black coats. Even the most adoring of Winthrop biographers (and one who is a reliable historian), Edmund Morgan, castigates Winthrop for “persecuting” a brave and wonderful woman, and calls the trial he presided over as  “the least attractive” of Winthrop’s life.

But we can find little to admire in a person who wanted to damn the world, believed she was God, and nurtured dissension and mistrust amongst her fellows. The fact that she was a woman should not sway the rational historian. If it had been only Wheelwright and the other nine men, I doubt the whole incident of Antinomian dispute in 1636-37 would be known outside the circle of Puritan historians. Anne Hutchinson was a negative figure in American history who received a fair trial and accepted her sentence, gladly removing herself from people she saw as instruments of Satan. Any positive view of her role in our founding is hard to come by.

Truth v. Myth: What did Anne Hutchinson believe?

As a Puritan scholar, I am constantly amazed at the hero-worship surrounding Anne Hutchinson. Let’s set the record straight with a little truth v. myth. Here’s part 1.

Hutchinson was a Puritan who arrived in Boston in 1634. Like the other Puritans who were in Boston, Hutchinson had left England because she believed the country was about to be punished by God for failing to live up to its commission. The Puritans believed that every valid nation had a covenant with God in which it promised to obey God’s commandments and God’s word. This was called a commission. Most Puritans of the Great Migration left England because they feared that the country’s failure to purify the Anglican church (England’s established Protestant church) was a breach of its holy commission.

In this respect, Hutchinson was like her fellow Puritans in New England. But she held beliefs that made her a distinct minority, and even a heretic.

The Puritans believed that everyone should be on a journey to discover if they had been given God’s grace, and therefore were saved, and destined for Heaven. This was not a passive thing. No one knew if they were destined to receive God’s grace, and thus what the Puritans called “elect.” You had to find out your status by a well-laid out series of steps. Picture a ladder with several rungs.

First you heard sermons by a respectable Puritan minister. Then you went to study groups to discuss the sermon and get more out of it. Then you read the Bible, and looked for God’s word to you in it. You prayed, and were in constant communication and discussion with other Puritan seekers.

At the same time, you had to do good works. You had to be a fair and honest businessperson, a fair and kind family member, and a friend to the poor and downtrodden. Your dedication to God had to be evident in every part of your life.

Just when you felt you were succeeding in all this, and a little confident, you would most likely suddenly realize you were trying to earn salvation, God’s grace, through these efforts, and you would feel completely let down and depressed. Then you would start the whole process again, chastised, realizing that your good works and other efforts were done merely to make you more able to recognize God’s grace if and when it was given to you, not to earn that grace.

This exhaustive process was very active. You couldn’t be a passive Puritan, sitting back waiting to feel saved. While your exertions wouldn’t earn you salvation, they were the only way to make yourself ready for the gift of grace if it was to be given to you.

What Hutchinson believed was that this whole precious process, so communal and intellectual, was bogus. She believed it only encouraged people to believe that their efforts and their good works did indeed earn their salvation. This was what the Catholic church had taught for centuries, that good works earned you a place in Heaven, and the more works, the higher the place. This was called the covenant of works, and it was the direct opposite of the covenant of grace.

Hutchinson dismissed and rejected the whole Puritan ladder of opening oneself to grace as a covenant of works. She believed that God would suddenly appear to you and let you know if you were saved. God would approach you directly. This was high heresy to the Puritans because it was so passive. You just sat back, doing nothing, and God suddenly gave you private information about your soul. This belief in direct revelation struck at the social foundation of Puritanism, which required you to make the world a better place because of your faith by doing good works. You did the good works not to earn salvation, but to help others see the goodness of God, to help purify the world. It struck at the religious foundation of Puritanism by making sermons, ministers, study groups, and prayer obsolete. None of these things were necessary if God was simply going to tell you if you were saved.

Even more dangerously, Hutchinson believed that if you were saved, Christ dwelled within you—literally. You became Christ. This was her interpretation of the scripture “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”. Therefore, those who were truly saved could not do wrong: if they lied, or stole, or even killed someone, it could not be counted as sin because all these were acts of Christ himself. Hutchinson, therefore, wanted to overthrow the law itself. Christ is not subject to human law, so no one who is truly saved can be subject to the law. This extended to areas like contracts, which Hutchinson rejected.

All those doubts Puritans had about whether they were saved? Those were not signs of healthy humility but proof that someone was not saved, according to Hutchinson, because if you are Christ then you can’t doubt Christ. Doing good works was not only unnecessary but another proof that you were not saved, because Christ did not have to do anything to be Christ—he just was.

Finally, and most explosively, Hutchinson held that you did not even have to believe in Jesus to have him dwell within you. The whole basis of Protestantism is, and was, salvation through faith in God alone. Faith was the only thing and everything. But Hutchinson denied this, saying that someone who did not believe in Jesus as the savior could still receive Jesus to dwell within her—if that was what Jesus chose to do, Jesus would do it. You might still heap scorn on all Jesus’ teachings, and commit heinous sins and crimes, because you had no faith in God, and be not just saved but Christ himself living on the earth, free from all law and human judgment.

The cult-like qualities of Hutchinson’s beliefs become clear. Anyone in her group, and of course she herself, was perfected by becoming Christ and could do no wrong, was not bound by any law, and had no social or legal obligations to anyone outside the group. She alone could tell who was really saved, and if she chose you you owed her everything and if she didn’t, you were her enemy. And, crucially, anyone who criticized her or her followers was clearly the Antichrist, in her words, under a covenant of works, and had to be “dealt with as such”. This could mean shunning people, publicly criticizing people (including during church services), or physically harming people; many of her followers rioted on an election day—May 17, 1637—when the Court would not delay voting for a lengthy petition protesting the charges against John Wheelwright (a minister and Anne Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, whom we’ll learn more about in the next post) to be read and debated.

So Hutchinson was a level-one heretic and a powerful force for civil disruption. So often she is portrayed by historians as a generous and compassionate soul who wanted everyone to have a personal relationship with God, but was struck down by mean and sexist Puritans who told people they were dirt in God’s eyes. This comes from a failure to read the documents of her time, including her own court testimony and the petitions written by her followers, which make it very clear that there was no such thing as a personal relationship with God for Hutchinson: you either were God yourself or you were the antichrist, and she was ready to declare 90% of the Puritans antichrist and deal with them accordingly.

The meetings Hutchinson held in her home in which she expounded her beliefs quickly grew to include hundreds of people anxious to know their status. We are often told that the Puritan hierarchy cracked down on her because she was a woman, and women could not hold these kinds of meetings, but this is untrue. Women could and did hold meetings to discuss sermons they heard, and those meetings were allowed, even at the height of the Hutchinson controversy. The problem with Anne Hutchinson’s meetings was that she did not use them to parse sermons but to say that all of the ministers in New England were sinners, unfit to preach, except for John Cotton, minister at Boston and her beloved mentor.

How did such a heretic find such a following in Puritan Boston? Find out in Part 2!

The Dominion of New England; or, the Puritan Revolution

Many claims and counter-claims are made about whether the Puritans of New England can be considered to have dug the foundation for democracy in British America. The more I study it, the more I believe it is true. Let’s look at one important instance, the battle against the Dominion of New England, 1686-1689.

James II became king of England in 1685. James posed a threat to the country, in the eyes of his Protestant subjects, because he was Catholic. People feared he would try to return the kingdom to Catholicism, but James’ first move was not against England but Massachusetts. The Puritans in New England were just as vocal and militant about their designs for an improved England from the distant shores of America as they had been in the heart of London. And, more immediately, they had just sent Increase Mather as their representative to Parliament to try to fend off a new, royal charter that would give the king more power over them. James decided to rid himself of a burr in his saddle.

In 1686 he created the Dominion of New England. Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and East and West Jersey made up the new domain. Edmund Andros, formerly governor of New York, was appointed by the king to run the Dominion with the help of a council—also appointed by the king. Andros took to his new role, exerting his power dictatorially.

The impact on Puritan colonists was fundamental:

—The popularly elected assemblies were dismissed.

—Puritan judges and military officers were replaced by Anglicans.
—Puritan clergy could no longer be paid by taxes.

—Land titles issued by Puritan governments before 1686 had to be reissued. Not only did Puritan colonists have to pay new title fees, they would also have to pay quitrents, an annual land tax.

—A new court was set up in Boston to enforce the Navigation Acts. It had no jury. In 1686 the court found at least six merchant ships guilty of violating the Acts and seized the ships. Merchants started avoiding the port of Boston, depressing the new England economy.

 

The list sounds very familiar to any student of the “Intolerable Acts” of 1774.

Puritan citizens of the colonies formerly known as New England were angry and despairing. They had little power to represent themselves to Parliament, and no hope of subverting the Dominion. Little did they know that the young, healthy new king who had enslaved them would soon be overthrown.

James had made his desire to return the country to Catholicism more and more open; thus, when his queen gave birth to a son and potential Catholic heir in 1688, his government didn’t wait for James to act. It invited Protestant Holland’s leader William of Orange to invade England and force James off the throne. William was conveniently married to Mary Stuart, James’ own daughter.

The plan worked. William was welcomed in London, and James II fled to France.

When the Puritans in the Dominion first heard about this Glorious Revolution in 1689, there was a moment of suspense. It was impossible to know if James was really permanently overthrown, and the long wait for news from England was agonizing. Once the good news came, Puritans from Maine to Connecticut rose up against Governor Andros’ officials, who were arrested and imprisoned. Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut restored their original governments, complete with elected assemblies.

In New York City, rebels led by Jacob Leisler took over the colony. Leisler became governor.

The Puritans celebrated their successful rebellion. The colonies of New England remained royal colonies, rather than privately owned colonies, but they had preserved their independence. Their lawmakers were popularly elected. Their courts were local. Their laws were valid. And it was specifically to maintain those vital components of representative government that the Puritans fought.

Thus I think we can look back to the overthrow of the Dominion as a valid instance of Puritan Americans putting their independent and representative government ahead of all other considerations, and the events of 1689 were indeed fresh in the memories of men and women—grandchildren of rebels—who fought the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin, born in 1705, just 16 years after the Dominion was overthrown, would have heard the stories from people who took part in the rebellion. And thousands of New Englanders must have had their ancestors in mind when they agreed in 1776 that a government which does not have the consent of the people is legitimately overthrown.

Pilgrims v. Puritans: who landed in Plymouth?

Most Americans know the terms Puritans and Pilgrims. Most don’t know that these are two different groups.

Puritans were English Protestants in the late 16th century who wanted their church, the Anglican church, to follow the Calvinist model more closely and give up the remnants of Catholicism still present in Anglicanism.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, the Puritans consistently pushed their agenda in Parliament and in their local towns. Puritans would often remove themselves from their assigned parish church to go hear sermons from a Puritan minister in another town’s church. This was illegal at the time. In an effort to stop the wild pendulum swings in her kingdom from extreme protestantism to Catholic resurgence and back again, Elizabeth refused to legitimize the Puritan agenda. She did not prosecute them severely, but she did not rescind the laws making their activities illegal.

Their sense of being persecuted for their faith gave the Puritans a lot of energy. They developed a complete system for defining and realizing salvation that I can’t go into in a short post here. But they also split.

Puritans began as a group within the Anglican church that wanted to purify it of lingering Catholic influences. But some Puritans lost faith in the Anglican church. Deciding it could never be purified, they abandoned it, separating themselves from it. These became known as Separatists. The majority of Puritans, who remained within the Anglican church, were known as nonseparating Puritans. The two groups grew increasingly hostile as the 17th century wore on.

It was the Separatists who took the Mayflower for America. Forced to leave England because it was treason to leave the Anglican church, small groups of Separatists left for Holland and other Protestant European countries. The group that we know as the Pilgrims went to Leiden in Holland. Americans often learn that they decided not to stay there because their children were becoming Dutch, but this is not true. They left because Holland’s truce with Catholic Spain was near its end, and the Protestant Separatists would have been wiped out if Spain had taken control once again of Holland.

So the Separatists received permission from the English government to go to America. Why? They were funded by financiers in London, and the crown figured that if the colonizers made a go of it, the crown would seize the colony and enjoy the profits. The religion of the colonizers was secondary to the financial potential they represented.

Not all the people on board the Mayflower were Separatists. Stories of the horrors suffered by colonists at Jamestown, in Virginia, were well-circulated in England. The feeling in England was that the Jamestown colonists had gone to America grossly unprepared. The Separatists vowed not to repeat those colonizers’ mistakes. They recruited tradespeople from London whose talents would be essential to building a new society—carpenters, blacksmiths, etc.

Those recruits were not Puritans or Separatists. They were Anglicans. But mostly, they were people who didn’t really think about religion too much, who just wanted a chance to go to America. The Separatists, then, were in the minority as the Mayflower set sail. Fights between the two groups broke out almost immediately. The Separatists got on the others’ nerves with their religion, which permeated all aspects of their lives, and the Anglicans got on the Separatists’ nerves with their deliberate sacrilege and mockery of religion. When they landed in America, the Separatists had a hard time keeping control of the colony from the majority.

Now, the non-separating Puritans in England came under real persecution starting in 1630, with the election of Archbishop Laud, who dedicated himself to wiping Puritanism out and bringing the Anglican church as far back toward Catholicism as he could. Tens of thousands of Puritans would emigrate to Massachusetts in the 1630s.  But they didn’t go to the Separatist settlement of Plimoth, in lands the Wampanoags belong to. They weren’t about to miss their chance to found an untrammeled, unchallenged, all-powerful Puritan state by moving in with a bunch of crazy Separatists and, worse yet, blasphemous, Catholic-tinged Anglicans.

The Puritans instead went to Shawmut, in lands the Massachusetts belong to, and founded Boston, north of Plimoth. And as the Puritan colony centered there—the Massachusetts Bay Colony—grew, it quickly outstripped Plimoth. Bay colonists ruthlessly confiscated land, including lands owned by Plimoth. By the 1640s, Plimoth was reduced to a backwater, and its Separatist quality was fairly diluted, even as the Puritanism of the Bay Colony grew and strengthened.

So that’s the story of the Pilgrims and the Puritans in a two-minute nutshell. Here are some fantastic books to read on the subject:

Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick

Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, by Edmund S. Morgan

The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700, by Stephen Foster

The First Founders: The Puritans

Has it taken this long to get a post up here about the Puritans?

These people are my special field in American history. I find them fascinating, and the more I study the more I realize they are particularly responsible for the founding of the United States as a representative democracy.

This point of view has had its ups and downs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Puritans were mistakenly venerated as democratic people who inevitably created a democratic nation. Since midcentury, this view has been abandoned, and scholars have done a 180 to say the Puritans were freaks who had nothing to do with democracy in America, other than representing the polar opposite of freedom and democracy.

My own research on the Puritans began as I studied the history of the original church in my New England town. I am not a native New Englander, and I didn’t have much interest in the Puritans. But as I studied the history of this church (going back to the 1630s), I became engrossed. Since then, I have devoted my personal research to the Puritans as a whole.

I don’t want to give away my whole paper before I present it, but the kernel of my thesis is that the Puritan reliance on and promotion of lay authority within a context of progress toward salvation was crucial to the development of political culture in New England. The laity had power only within a clearly laid-out system, for specific purposes; it was managed by ministers and could be legitimately wielded only to achieve its specific aims. Sounds like the power of the people within a democracy.

This religious structure carried over to the Puritan legal structure, with elected magistrates and members of the General Court chosen to fulfill the aims of a Puritan polity. When this was hobbled by the revocation of the original charter, and New England became a royal colony under English control, the average New Englander developed a strong loyalty to her Puritan identity as a way of maintaining independence while under English control.

Puritanism was a vital if embattled force in New England through the 1760s, when men like John Adams turned their energies to politics and away from religion because of the infighting going on in the Puritan church.  But even though they chose law over the pulpit, the leaders of our Revolution applied the same logic and purpose of the Puritans to the formation of our democracy.

Well, that’s my thumbnail. Jump in!