Brad Hart’s great blog on the Revolutionary period is back in action at American Revolution. In-depth and easy to read–a rare combination. Check it out!
Union or slavery?
We were rereading David Potter’s timeless book The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 and thinking about how it sounds to us today to read that some Americans valued union over abolition.
It sounds awful. It sounds like cavilling, cowardice, inhumanity, and loathsome empty-headed pseudo-patriotism.
But that is because this is not 1850, or 1858, or any point antebellum. It’s so hard to forget or to avoid the impact of hindsight on historical vision. We know that the Civil War did not end in permanent disunion, that the United States continued, grew, and thrived after 1865. But as Americans before 1861 contemplated the possibility that slavery might cause a civil war, they did not know any of this. They only knew that a civil war might erupt over slavery.
Think of it this way: what if right now, as you sit reading this, the United States was in danger of civil war. Some group of states had actually written up papers outlining how they would secede, and they had the power and the foreign backing to do it. Imagine that every week you read about how these states—let’s say 15 western states—were ready to actually sever their ties to the U.S., and leave the nation with 35 states and a big hole.
It’s impossible for us to really imagine this. We are faced daily with serious threats to our economic, intellectual, and political unity—there’s constant talk about red and blue states and how the coasts hate the middle and vice-versa, etc.—but we cannot imagine this translates into a threat to our actual political unity. We can’t picture facing the possibility that civil war would break out over these issues and that the United States as we know it would cease to exist.
And all over one political and social issue. An important issue, to be sure, but not one that you thought could destroy the United States. Say it was illegal immigration. It’s been simmering for decades, but it’s begun to boil in the past 10 years, and people’s emotions are getting stronger about it. What do you think will happen in this situation?
Well, you expect it to keep dragging along as a divisive issue that will someday get enough minor legislation to die down, and be replaced by something else. Inertia or a solution, those are the options.
You never expect it to cause an actual civil war, with people in your state fighting people from another state. You don’t expect to see armies formed in the western U.S. states to fight the U.S. amed forces. You don’t expect to have your home destroyed by battle next year.
And that’s the way Americans viewed slavery in the antebellum years. It was a divisive issue, and was getting hotter after 1848, but civil war? Really?
Once it became frighteningly clear that the southern states really were prepared to secede, and really were gathering an army to fight the rest of the U.S., many Americans clung to union as a sacred obligation in order to forestall war. And you can see why, if this thought experiment has worked. If our nation were about to actually go to war over illegal immigration right now, wouldn’t you protest that union was more important than this issue? that the issue could surely be worked out legislatively instead?
Of course, illegal immigration is not truly like slavery, but the conditions many illegal immigrants work and live in here in the U.S. can approach slavery. And the hatred and revulsion some Americans feel for these people is equal to the hatred and revulsion some Americans had for enslaved black Americans. And, like free black Americans, even legal immigrants are in many cases mistreated and denied equal access to the law. Still, could we possibly go to civil war over it?
Americans felt the same way in the antebellum period: yes, slavery was a big issue, but it was just one of a half-dozen big issues. Why go to war over slavery? It seemed irrational. It seemed much less of a sacred cause than union, the great union of states that shone the light of democracy over the world.
This is just an attempt to really put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors. When we do so, we can better understand why the cry of “union!” was stronger for many Americans than the cries of secession or abolition. Only when we truly try to put ourselves in those shoes can we begin to understand the seemingly incomprehensible decision to support union over abolition that many of our ancestors made.
The first separation of church and state–ever!
…well, at least in the western world. It happened in Rhode Island, in 1663.
This was the year that the colony received its royal patent. In 1643, Roger Williams had received a charter from Parliament, during the interregnum. When Charles II came to the throne, Rhode Island received a new patent from the king. It is a remarkable document. There’s no room to get into all the details here, but pick up Early New England, A Covenanted Society by David Weir for a terrific in-depth discussion.
In the 1663 patent, for the first time the English king/government acknowledged not only that there were religious conflicts in New England, but that differences in religious opinion were unavoidable–and even valid. Here is how the charter describes the people who left Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Connecticut colonies for Rhode Island “…some of those oure subjects not being able to beare, in these remote parties, theire different apprehensions in religious concernements, and inn pursueance of the afforesayd ends, did once againe leave their desireable stationes and habitationes, and with excessive labour and travell, hazard and charge, did transplant themselves into the middest of the Indian natives…”
Here, for the first time, the crown acknowledges that the religious beliefs of its people are truly heartfelt, and real. These are not seditious traitorous rabble-rousers, but people who leave their desirable stations in life and their homes for the excessive labor and hazard of the wilderness. The king will justify and honor those beliefs and actions with this patent.
With religious diversity up-front as the founding cause of the Rhode Islanders, the charter goes on to allow the people of Rhode Island to travel safely into other colonies where their views are unwelcome, and, most importantly, the freedom to set up a society that rejects the state religion of England itself. “[A] most flourishing civil state may stand and best bee maintained among our English subjects, with a full libertie in religious concernements; and true pietye rightly grounded upon gospell principles will give the best and greatest securiety to sovereignetye, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyaltye.”
This is truly remarkable. It is indeed the first time in the west that a government “[legally] separated the civil magistracy from civil religion and an established state church. We should note that civil religion is not the same thing as the established state church. The state church is an institution with records, buildings, financial dealings, and personnel; civil religion is something more amorphous, and can be described as a cluster of ideas that can be sustained by the state church (or by the state itself) and that form the often submerged foundations of societal life” [Weir 53].
In granting its charter, the crown recognizes that in Rhode Island, civil religion was the antithesis of the English state religion, and was not even uniform itself–many religions were tolerated in Rhode Island, and each contributed to the cluster of ideas that created the civil religion there. The crown also sees that maybe people who are allowed to live according to their deepest religious beliefs will be the most loyal citizens, as they will be grateful to the king for granting them that freedom.
The big news here is that it is no longer treason to challenge the Anglican church. Religious freedom is not heresy (so long, of course, as one’s religion is still Christian), or political treason, or anything but a private, personal matter.
What’s unusual is that this great religious freedom was granted to America at the same time the crown was clamping down hard on religious freedom in England itself. The laws of the Clarendon Code maintained uniformity and orthodoxy. The Corporation Act of 1661 required all town officials to be Anglicans. The 1662 Act of Uniformity required the clergy in England to use only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The Conventicle Act of 1664 forbid groups of five or more people holding dissenting religious views to gather together. And the Five Mile Act of 1665 made it illegal for a dissenting minister to live within five miles of a town unless he had taken the Oath of Allegiance, which was unlikely. These measures sent more English Puritans to America.
So why did the crown decide to grant religious freedoms in America that it was actively stamping out in England? Perhaps the answer lies in the distance between them. We know that Charles II, leaning more and more towards Catholicism, and later converting on his deathbed, hoped to create more religious tolerance in England. But Parliament, wary of another religious convulsion, took away the king’s power to make religious law altogether, and embarked on its coercion of uniformity. Events in the small and still financially unimportant colonies in New England were not as pressing to Parliament, trying to keep things under control at home after the Restoration.
But a precedent was set in New England by the Rhode Island royal charter. Massachusetts Bay colonists would never accept people of different religious beliefs to live amongst them, but they did trade with Rhode Islanders, hold markets together, and allow them to travel through and stay overnight in MBC. Gradually MBC, with its natural, un-coerced uniformity, came to be seen as the anomaly–even by its own people! And generations of Americans grew up not only expecting religious diversity to be tolerated, but, crucially, expecting civil religion, not state religion, to be the order of the day.
Therefore it was no stretch 100 years later to set up a government in which religion was important but uncodified by law. Americans were used to this kind of separation of church and state, and comfortable with the primacy of civil religion over state religion. Belatedly, in the late 20th century, attempts were made to open up the public to the idea of state religion, but it will likely be an uphill battle to convince Americans to accept this 17th-century idea.
“People in colonial times never took baths!”
Oh, this is vintage Truth v. Myth.
How often you hear the lives of people in olden times completely subverted by some tour guide, narrator, or instructor claiming that they never took baths. I was once taken on a tour of a historical house where the tour guide informed us that in the 19th century, country people simply sewed themselves into their one-piece long underwear for the winter, never took it off, and so never bathed (or, apparently, used the bathroom).
These stories imply that people living before the 20th century, be it 1800 or 1800 BCE, were gross and somehow completely accepting of torrid personal filth. It’s condescending, to say the least.
So okay. Time to look this over.
Let’s think about the American colonies in 1750. If you lived then, you were most likely living on a small family farm. The house had four rooms: kitchen, two bedrooms, parlor. Your family lived there, let’s say six people, and let’s say you had two extra workers living in.
When would you take a bath? You are busy working from sunup to sundown. How would you take a bath? You would need someone to help you, by heating water over the fire and minding it so it didn’t get too hot, then carrying it into the parlor, since there wouldn’t be room to set up a tub in the busy kitchen. So now two people are taken off their vital chores to set up and to take a bath. It will take several pails of water to even half-fill the tub, so someone will have to go to the well to get a lot of water (three people now involved in the bath). It takes a while to get and to heat all that water, so you’ll have to set aside about an hour.
The parlor is in use, too, and people are constantly coming in and going out, so privacy is nil. You have to be willing to have everyone see you naked. And if it’s not summer, then it’s going to be freezing in the parlor as you bathe. Once the bath is over, you need at least two people to help haul the tub outside and dump it out.
Now we get an idea of why people in colonial times didn’t take a lot of baths. But they were, of course, very clean, because they washed up at the wash basin.
In the bedroom was a pitcher and a bowl and a towel, and soap. You stripped to the waist and washed your upper body, then put your shirt back on and stripped off (or lifted your underskirt) to wash your lower body. Voila! Simple, fast, easy, private, and clean. You could wash off at the wash basin several times a day if you wanted.
So no, people in colonial times didn’t take a lot of baths. But that doesn’t mean they simply didn’t notice or care about odor or dirt, and were content to be filthy. These are your ancestors, you know! It behooves us to cut them the same slack we cut ourselves, and to think outside of our life-of-easy-appliances-and-running-hot-water boxes.
The Great Depression, 2008
Are we on the brink of another Great Depression? Are the economic events of summer and fall 2008 mirror-imaged to those of the summer and fall of 1929?
It’s a good question. I’m not an economist, but as an American historian I can draw some comparisons:
1. Of course, things didn’t just go sour in 1929. For a good decade the American economy had been expanding too rapidly, as the newly invented credit industry took off. For the first time Americans were buying big-ticket items on monthly installment plans. Why? Because of electricity. New appliances, ranging from washing machines to vacuum cleaners to radios, lamps, and toasters were on the market for the first time, and people had to have them. Car ownership was also growing rapidly.
The parallel? Our “electricity” is the new financial markets, created by and for Wall Street, which allowed banks and other financial firms to invent all manner of complicated and very fishy deals, from credit swaps to loan bundling. The difference is that Americans in the 1920s may have been making manufacturers and banks rich, but they were also getting some value from the deal–those new labor-saving and entertainment-making inventions. Today, the average American saw no benefit from Wall Street’s risky endeavors.
2. In the 1920s, the U.S. government was loathe to intervene in the economy, even as signs of unsustainable growth became apparent. And once the crash came, the government still hovered, waiting for it to turn out to be yet another temporary panic.
The parallel is that since the Internet boom of the 1990s, the U.S. government has refused to intervene to stop the Internet bubble, the housing bubble, the CEO pay bubble, the Dow-at-15,000 bubble, or the rampant fraud on Wall Street. In the 21st century, experts were all sure that another Great Depression simply could not happen.
3. In 1929, ruined business were allowed to die. The economy was allowed to go into critical condition. FDR instigated a recovery, but not by breathing new life (through money) into failed businesses, but by creating a whole new world of federal jobs.
The parallel here is that there is no parallel. Today, Wall Street is repeatedly described as “too big” to let it fail. We cannot let these banks go bankrupt. No correction can be allowed; Wall Street must be allowed to continue its ruinous ways, for no apparent reason.
Perhaps Americans today are unwilling to suffer like their grandparents did. But were Americans in 1929 really “willing” to suffer 10 years of misery? No. They weren’t willing, but they accepted it as inevitable. And the government made that easier to do, by refusing to offer an alternative. And the market eventually corrected, and improved, and was more sound.
That could happen in 2008. It isn’t likely, though; too many powerful people have too much to lose, and too many average Americans have too little say. The Great Depression of the 21st century, if it is coming, will not come quite yet. Check back in 2009.
The Protestant work ethic debunked!
The final installment of my Truth v. Myth series on the Protestant or Puritan work ethic is here. Let’s examine the idea that the prosperity of the United States was founded on Puritan hard work.
We’ve seen that the Puritans left England when their ambitious social reforms—most notably eradicating poverty—came to nothing in the early 1600s. England was in the grips of an anti-Puritan campaign originally launched by King James by the time the Puritans set sail for the New World in 1630, and there seemed to be no hope of reforming any part of English society.
When they arrived in the Eastern Woodlands, which they called New England, founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony with its headquarters in Shawmut/Boston, the Puritans did indeed work hard. But this was not really because they wanted to implement their radical social reforms. It was because hard work was required to settle the land—at least in an English way.
Remember that the Puritans were almost entirely city people. They were not farmers. Even those who had lived in the country had not been farmers. So when they suddenly had to become farmers, it was extremely difficult for them. Three things were against them: first, the land was not great, being rocky and not too rich; second, they had no farming knowledge; third, they refused to adopt Indigenous farming strategies. If they had been willing to farm like the Massachusetts people did, life would have been much easier.
There are many howling complaints from early Puritan settlers about the inexplicable injustice of heathen Indigenous people seemingly laying around all day, doing only the smallest amount of farm work, yet bringing in bountiful harvests while the God-fearing Puritans broke their backs from sunup to sundown without ever having much of a food surplus.
Puritan farmers did adopt some Indigenous tools and techniques, but mostly they struggled along, never doing very well. So that hard work was not part of a solid plan, or “work ethic,” but a reaction to stark necessity and a fruit of ignorance.
Puritans did do away with holidays in their colonies. In England it had been impossible to block out the hordes of rabble-rousing celebrants on the scores of religious holidays, but in Woodland New England they could impose a strict policy of forsaking “the observation of days.” All days were alike, all days were holy because they were given by God, and holidays were banned as excuses to get drunk and fornicate (which is, in truth. what they were to most people at that time). But Puritans did not work 365 days a year. Many days of fasting and prayer were called in Puritan Massachusetts, when problems were facing the colony, and many days of thanksgiving were celebrated in good times. On these days work was dropped or minimized. And on Sunday, of course, no work was done.
If the Puritans worked hard in 17th-century New England, then, it was by necessity rather than choice. This hard work kept the vast majority of families living hand-to-mouth from harvest to harvest without ever creating a lot of wealth. And Puritan farmers could not be said to have worked harder than Virginian indentured servants, enslaved people, or yeoman farmers. All farm work was hard in colonial America (for non-native Americans, at least).
So the Puritans did bring hard work to America, in the sense that they brought with them a way of farming uninformed by experience and unsuited to their new land. But it was the same hard work done in other colonial English settlements, and it was not part of a plan, or work ethic. And it is difficult to say how this hard work created a legacy that later New Englanders, and then all Americans, tapped into as they built the nation. Then why does the myth of the Protestant work ethic exist? There are two reasons.
Reason 1: In this situation, where life was hard and success elusive, some people did well. Outsiders–non-puritans–looking on decided that doing well must be a sign of God’s favor. The idea that material success was a sign of God’s approval had existed amongst Puritans back in England, and was applied to America, even though it was definitely not part of Puritan religious belief. Ministers constantly reiterated the Puritan theological rejection of the idea that anyone could earn God’s grace with their work.
Most Puritans, then, worked hard in order to avoid being singled out by others as lazy and not doing their fair share to keep settlements afloat. This was an anxiety about community, about being excluded or avoided by fellows, more than an anxiety about God.
Reason 2: It was a 19th-century reaction to Irish Catholic immigration. As “hordes” of Catholic immigrants “flooded” American cities, the usual aversion amongst prejudiced native-born Americans to any immigrants except one’s own sainted ancestors kicked in, and the largely Protestant home crowd let loose with insults about the Irish newcomers’ laziness, criminality, vice, and Catholicism. How unlike our own Protestant ancestors, said ubiquitous editorial voices, who came here and built a nation with their unceasing toil! They never asked for charity! They never sent their children begging in the streets! It’s Catholicism itself that is to blame, came the conclusion; it is a pestilent religion that breeds vice. Prejudice, then, did its work, and created a Protestant, nay Puritan, work ethic.
So between these two reasons, the Puritan fear of failing and being rejected by their community, and the anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant stance of 19th-century Americans, a myth was born. It was unfortunate in the 17th century, harmful in the 19th century, and if it is truly the reason why Americans work so many more hours than employees in other developed nations, it is still harmful today.
The Puritans leave England for America
Welcome to part three of my Truth v. Myth series on the Protestant or Puritan work ethic. Here we will see how the ambitious Puritan political platform played out in England and was then transplanted to the New World.
We’ve seen that the English Puritans wanted to wipe out poverty, encourage private enterprise, and vigorously embrace the newly emergent capitalist system. Their religion spurred them to achieve these goals, but they did not rely on God to work a miracle for them. The Puritans had many converts from the nobility, powerful men who sat in the House of Lords, and most Puritans of common birth were politically active. The Puritans had members in both houses of Parliament and agitated constantly at court and in the popular press for the changes they desired.
Unfortunately, the Puritans would not abandon their insistence that the Anglican Church (or Church of England), the state church, be radically “purified” (hence their name) and stripped of its remaining Catholic qualities. Elizabeth I and James I after her took a firm hand in stopping such religious agitation, which invariably led to bloodshed and public turmoil, and seemed to promise eventual civil war. (These fears would be realized in the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War.) England had gone through extremely divisive religious conflict during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, and had landed as a unique Protestant nation: the original Catholic church in England was taken over by the English government, completely separate from the Roman Catholic Church governed by Rome. The Anglican church was sort of neutral or Protestant-by-default, but it was not Lutheran or Calvinist. Anglicanism avoided both submission to Rome and affiliation with European Lutherans or Calvinists.
This policy had maintained a fragile peace in England since 1558, when Elizabeth I took the throne. Puritans who agitated for further reformation, with a Calvinist bent, were not looked upon with kindness. James I particularly loathed the Puritans and their near-relations, the Separatists, who decided Anglicanism could not be purified, and therefore separated from it, leaving the church. Puritans and Separatists were persecuted in England as traitors.
By refusing to drop their demands for religious change, the Puritans sabotaged their efforts to get their social reforms passed. By the 1620s, many Puritans were beginning to fear that God had abandoned England, and was about to punish it, perhaps destroy it. When William Laud, a pro-Catholic Puritan hater, was made Archbishop of Canterbury–head of the Anglican church–in 1630, he launched a Puritan eradication campaign that made life very dangerous for Puritans of all walks of life.
In that year, a small group of influential Puritans left England. Led by John Winthrop, a well-known royal lawyer and property owner, they left to establish a safe space in America where Puritans could wait out God’s wrath on England. While England was punished, America would thrive, regenerating a holy people to lead England back to God’s grace. They founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, with its seat of government in Boston.
Puritan social justice (aka Protestant work ethic)
In part 2 of my Truth v. Myth series on the Protestant work ethic, we look at why the Puritans were the first powerful, politically organized group in England to try to wipe out poverty.
First, 16th-century Puritans, like many northern European Protestants, were strongly influenced by humanism. Humanist philosophers, like Erasmus, promoted the idea that all human life had dignity and worth and that human reason could discern right and wrong. Humans didn’t need to rely on revelation from the supernatural, from God, to figure out how to live their lives. Humans were able to reason out which form of society and government best promoted human happiness and then to construct that society and government, and were even obligated to do so. Not using our reason was an affront to the God which endowed us with it.
Now the English Puritans believed in the individual. Their religious beliefs were centered on the individual person seeking God’s wisdom and receiving God’s grace. The only real way to learn about God and what God wanted was to read the Bible. The Puritans, like all Protestants of the time, thought the Catholic method of having a priest read a portion of the Bible to an assembled congregation was a travesty. The passage was chosen in Rome to fill out the church year, it was read out in Latin to people who didn’t understand it, and the individuals in the congregation felt no connection to it. To the Puritans, every person had to be able to read the Bible for themselves, choosing passages based on their own unique spiritual needs, or based on insights gained from sermons or Biblical study groups. Only by reading God’s word, in silent contemplation, might one receive an understanding of God’s will, and the realization that they had received God’s grace–salvation from Hell. Reading the Bible was the only path to discovering one’s salvation (or damnation).
This meant, astoundingly, that the 16th-century Puritans believed everyone–even girls and women–must be taught to read. This was a wild, liberal, revolutionary plank in their platform. Universal literacy was undreamt of at the time. But the Puritans demanded it; it was the only way people could understand God’s will and the state of their own souls.
Combine this religious conviction with the humanist conviction that all people have value, and you get the Puritan belief that everyone must have the chance to better themselves, both spiritually and materially. For if you are poor, then you have no home, no Bible, and no education. You can never read the Bible, and you can never be anything but a burden on others. So the poor are damned, both on this earth and in the afterlife. On earth, they are disdained and mistreated, and they bring others down with them. In the afterlife, they are damned.
Eradicating poverty, then, was just the first step in creating a government in England which allowed people to live dignified and productive and religious lives. If people are taught to read, they can do business, and make money for themselves, and buy a Bible, and read it and receive God’s grace. At this time in England, capitalism as we know it was just gathering its first steam. Merchants and other businessmen were able to build considerable wealth.
Most of the early Puritans were city-dwellers, mostly in London, and they were self-employed businessmen who were doing pretty well–often very well. They were eventually able to fund the company that sponsored the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630). They felt themselves on the cutting edge of a new world, wherein anyone could start a business and prosper if only they were hard-working, literate, and righteous. Everyone should take that path. Poverty should not be encouraged or tolerated.
Truth v. Myth: The Protestant Work Ethic
Welcome to part 1 of my Truth v. Myth series on the powerful idea of the “Protestant work ethic,” which has often been supposed to have built this country.
The Protestants described in this phrase are the 17th-century Puritans in New England who, by virtue of their dedication to hard work, long hours, and thrift, are described as not only increasing their own wealth and power, but instilling within all later Americans the idea that hard work is a virtue that always pays off.
The Protestant work ethic has been hauled out since the 19th century to describe “uniquely” American virtues. The innovations of the Industrial Age that poured out of the U.S. were seen as the result not just of American smarts, but of Americans’ ability to work longer and harder than the people of any other nation. We work hard, and we reap the benefits. Today, in the 21st century, the work ethic is almost always included in discussions of the fact that U.S. workers have the least amount of holiday/vacation/sick leave of any industrialized nation.
The basic notion is that Americans work had because it’s in our blood, and we wouldn’t have it any other way; to take more than two weeks’ vacation would not only be lazy, but it would mean turning our backs on our ancestors, our history, and our own national character.
All of this begs the question of whether the Puritans of 17th-century New England actually venerated hard, unending work like we think they did.
The Puritans of New England are the subjects of many myths–that they only wore black, banned singing and dancing, hated sex, banned alcohol, went to church every day, and were constantly burning people as witches. If these myths were true, there would have been nothing for the New England Puritans to do but work! These myths are not true, but there is a grain of truth to associating the “work ethic” idea with the Puritans of America. It’s a long story, so let’s start at the beginning.
One of the most radical planks of the Puritan political platform in their native England was their determination to eradicate poverty. For over 1,000 years, the Catholic church had taught that the poor were blessed by God and a blessing to humankind. The poor gave everyone else a chance to practice charity, which, in Catholic dogma, was a way to redeem your soul and get to Heaven. Since the poor gave others this wonderful opportunity, they were a blessing. Since God gave them this role on Earth, they were blessed by God.
Therefore, no attempts were made by the church as a whole to stamp out poverty. Rather than try to better the condition of the poor, the church made it possible for many people to live in poverty. Monasteries, hospitals, convents, and other institutions existed to provide charity to the poor. (In the middle ages, hospitals were like hostels for the poor to stay at, and not places to go for medical treatment.) These institutions were supported by donations from the public, and created a comfortable system in which the number of poor never decreased, but the poor did not have to lay out in the streets begging or upsetting people with their terrible condition.
It’s anachronistic, but the situation was like a car with a broken window that has been very skillfully covered with plastic and securely duct-taped in place. The window is still missing, but the fix is very livable, and the owner may never get the window replaced. Not perfect, but very workable.
The Puritans smashed into this set-up with a vengeance. They were the first powerful, politically organized group in England to say that poverty was a curse and a sign of God’s displeasure, and that it ought to be wiped out. Today we are very used to the “war on poverty,” and it’s hard to remember that this was a completely alien idea in the late 1500s when the English Puritans introduced it.
Next time: Why did the English Puritans want to stamp out poverty?
101 ways to say “died”
Vast Public Indifference is in the middle of a wonderful series on the many ways old gravestones describe death. Check it out! It helps destroy the myth that the Puritans (many of the stones are from their time) were dour and ungrieving of their dead–or didn’t know how to tell a good story in a few words!
I put all the epitaphs from my town’s old burying ground into a Word document, and it was hard not to choke up over the extremely sad epitaphs of children. It’s hard for the people living today in the Puritans’ old villages to comprehend how common it was to lose children to disease.
The average 25 year-old in 1700 would have been married, and probably already experienced the loss of one or two of their own children. They would have lost a handful of siblings as they grew up, and probably as many friends, relatives, and neighbors.
But they were never hardened to death. It hit them hard, every time, over and over again, and the gravestones they stood over the graves of their children will break your heart.
But don’t be afraid to go over to VPI–it’s a great site and will provide as many laughs as tears (see also her great ongoing series on odd names from the Puritan past (just one example: Orange Wedge).
