American politics is a ruin today. We suffer an economic crisis that widens the rift between rich and poor. Rather than pursue genuine reform, civic leaders resort to words such as “liberty” and “rights” to protect selfish interests. Where can we find a historical example of a social policy that resists such corruption, that promotes equity or fairness without legitimating authoritarian regimes? Perhaps, David Hall suggests in his latest book, we should take another look at the Puritan founders of New England.
Hall’s stunning suggestion cuts against the grain of long-standing and still prevalent opinions about the Puritans. These 17th-century reformers left a voluminous record that has evoked lavish praise and severe censure. Hall argues that many of their admirers, including historians of evangelicalism, have misidentified them with modern notions of democracy that valorize individual rights. In the 19th century, writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and the great American historian George Bancroft idealized the founders of Massachusetts as hardy individualists and proto-democrats. Such readings, by Hall’s account, ironically echo Anglican opponents who warned Crown and Parliament that the Puritans favored a radical polity that promoted democratic sedition and anarchy.
Hall is quite critical of the opposite position as well: that the Puritans instituted a theocratic and profoundly undemocratic regime. Here again we have modern observers, including early 19th-century Unitarians, writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later literary critics who oddly replicated 17th-century complaints that the Puritan ministry had turned the colonies into an inhospitable oligarchy of the saints. This image of fanatic authoritarianism persists. So, as any teacher of the period knows, most students who read the Puritans fasten on tales of power abused: persecution of women such as Ann Hutchinson, execution of witches, banishment of Quakers, and warfare against Indians. As Hall laments, much recent historical writing has wrongly reinforced the caricature of the Puritans as inhumane reactionaries. Hardly the resources to recover a sound politics.
Hall confronts these widespread misperceptions by focusing his argument on everyday social exchange in New England during the first two decades of settlement, 1630 through 1650. He does not dwell on political theory, nor does he offer detailed narratives of the social history. He provides instead snapshots of social institutions that mediated power—that is, restrained power through participation and popular consent. He draws heavily on rarely read sources: political manifestos, sermons, law codes, platforms for colonial governments, town covenants, church records, and civic petitions. These show, by Hall’s account, that the Puritans were “the most advanced reformers of the Anglo-colonial world.”
The Puritans were not modern liberals. Like other English people, they assumed that submission to some sort of hierarchy formed the basis of social solidarity. Yet shaken by the Stuart monarchy’s absolutist designs, and offended by the Church of England, they absorbed the conviction that civic rulers held only derivative, what some Puritans called “ministerial” rather than “magisterial” authority. Consent of the people, expressed through local institutions such as courts and boroughs, keyed proper governance. In England, the full implications of these ideas were never realized. Hall repeatedly observes that Parliament, even when led by the most progressive reformers, the Levellers, did not successfully promote the mediating, consent-driven, participatory institutions that Puritans wanted. His case therefore is not that the American Puritans were radical democrats but that they were comparatively progressive—more reforming than their English contemporaries. The New World gave them space, as it were, to make godly politics a reality.
Hall’s account of this reformist program begins with the establishment of five colonial governments during the 1630s: Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island. In each case, Hall argues, Puritan leaders attempted to balance authority with liberty, reducing the possibilities for either tyranny or anarchy. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, to be sure, favored authority. Yet a series of political contests during the 1630s resulted in pragmatic compromises, encoded in the 1641 “Body of Liberties.” It gave the governor a veto over legislation but established annual elections for governor, magistrates, and deputies (representatives from the towns to the General Court). It asserted that people had fundamental, inviolable liberties and denied the right of the executive to dismiss the assembly. Hall reminds us how innovative these provisions were. New Englanders erased the institution of aristocracy, empowered the common voter, and denied claims to special privilege.
Just as remarkably, Hall shows, the governance of New England towns reflected “an everyday experience of majority rule and a broadly inclusive civil society.” The law restricted voting privileges to church members and property owners, but such requirements did not prohibit widespread participation and rule by consent at nearly every turn. Most residents received property. Although the town apportioned land according to social status and civic leadership, it gave special consideration to poor people and residents with large families. Townsmen looked the other way when non-church-members voted, explaining the relatively high level—above 50 percent—of suffrage. The town meeting elected selectmen but also created special committees to oversee their work. Residents deliberated how taxes would be assessed, property distributed, pastors’ salaries determined, and roads and fences maintained (the fences better to restrain wandering pigs). Every resident, church member or not, could speak at town meetings, as they could at church meetings and court sessions. Petitions that expressed grievances, letters, handwritten texts, books, and gossip about the latest sermon or town meeting circulated widely. Hall especially emphasizes how public speech rested on appeal to principles of moral fairness rather than legal right.
The church exhibited similarly reformist agendas. Puritan writers in England and America used anti-Catholic rhetoric chiefly to critique, as Hall puts it, “the power of vested interests,” and to “cast off every corrupt form of authority.” While the Puritans did not promote anything akin to open freedom of religious conscience in public affairs, they did eliminate structural and procedural hierarchies in their churches. Members of individual congregations elected pastors and determined policies such as poor relief. Churches created covenants that implied voluntary participation rather than coerced membership. Casting off the state-church, New Englanders abolished ecclesiastical courts, tithes, and public office-holding by clergy. Moral discipline in congregations tended to promote confession and reconciliation rather than exclusion or punishment.
As they did in church affairs, so New Englanders attempted to infuse civil law with principles of equity: notions of justice, compassion, fairness, and brotherly love. The key text for Hall is the 1649 Book of the General Laws and Liberties, the first printed code of laws in the New World. In itself, this publication reveals how the Puritans intended to create transparent, accessible, and amendable laws—subject to review and popular critique. Some of the statutes, such as the one that defined adultery as a capital crime, were severe; but these were rarely enforced. More important for Hall’s argument, New England’s legal systems reflected deeply democratic and ethical values. Unlike English practice, they established the right of self-representation (a knock against lawyers), instituted local courts so that cases could be tried in the context of neighborly oversight and opinion, required the selection of juries by vote, abolished torture, demanded full record keeping, excluded theft from the list of capital crimes, curtailed imprisonment for debt, impeded the confiscation of property, provided for partible inheritance, and allowed women to convey property. Puritans turned the courts into instruments for equity, where laws were applied pragmatically, flexibly, and, for the most part, compassionately.
A Reforming People is not a history of New England Puritanism as a whole. It reveals what the Puritans did in their attempt to create a reformed and participatory social order. It highlights the immense possibilities of a politics infused with ideas of consent and equity rather than with notions of liberty and right. In order to make this case, Hall focuses especially on the dispersal of authority, popular consent, and especially on the economic aspects of godly rule: the abolition of aristocratic privilege, distribution of land that accounted for people’s needs, poor relief, humane treatment of debtors, and the ideal of negotiation and compromise in cases of economic dispute. In such terms, godly rule promoted the common good far in excess of anything ever done in England.
To be sure, New England’s Puritan history suggests the limits of such a religiously shaped polity, as evidenced by the social status of unbelievers, religious dissenters, women, and witches. (The mistreatment of Indians and importation of slaves belongs to a later stage in New England’s history, when imperial politics and the decline of godly rule, rather than its apex, came into play.) The cost of a cohesive, equitable society fashioned out of Christian principles, we might conclude, amounted to an incomplete assertion of civil liberties. New England Puritans subordinated freedom of conscience and individual rights to the collective.
This marvelously documented, sometimes difficult-to-read but reliably smart book thus leads to big questions about the relationship between our different social and political priorities. How are we to pose the virtues of an economically humane order against our aspirations for individual freedoms and liberty? How do we inject moral imperatives into our political discourse without recourse to explicitly religious assumptions? Hall’s revisionist history of the Puritans shows that they valued equity over liberty. Our call is to ponder how to promote such a humane polity in a society long distanced from the premises of godly rule.
Mark Valeri is E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education. He is the author most recently of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan New England (Princeton Univ. Press).
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