A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (8 page)

Other Puritans, though certainly not all of them Separatists, saw opportunities to establish their own settlements. They had particular incentives to do so after the ascension to the throne of England of Charles I in 1625. He was determined to restore Catholicism and eradicate religious dissidents. By that time, the Puritans had emerged as a powerful merchant group in English society, with their economic power translating into seats in Parliament. Charles reacted by dissolving Parliament in 1629. Meanwhile, a group of Dorchester businessmen had provided the perfect vehicle for the Puritans to undertake an experiment in the New World.

In 1623 the Dorchester group established a small fishing post at Cape Ann, near present-day Gloucester, Massachusetts. After the colony proved a dismal economic failure, the few settlers who had lived at Cape Ann moved inland to Salem, and a new patent, granted in 1628, provided incentives for a new group of emigrants, including John Endicott, to settle in Salem. Ultimately, the New England Company, as it was called, obtained a royal charter in 1629. Stockholders in the company elected a General Court, which chose the governor and his eighteen assistants. Those prominent in founding the company saw the Salem and Cape Ann areas as opportunities for establishing Christian missions.

The 1629 charter did not require the company’s headquarters to be in London, as the Virginia Company’s had. Several Puritans, including John Winthrop, expressed their willingness to move to the trading colony if they could also move the colony’s administration to Massachusetts. Stockholders unwilling to move to the New World resigned, and the Puritans gained control of the company, whereupon they chose John Winthrop as the governor.
⁶²
Called the Moses of the great Puritan exodus, Winthrop was Cambridge educated and, because he was an attorney, relatively wealthy. He was also deeply committed to the Puritan variant of Christianity. Winthrop suffered from the Puritan dilemma, in that he knew that all things came from God, and therefore had to be good. Therefore all things were made for man to enjoy, except that man could not enjoy things too much lest he risk putting material things above God. In short, Puritans had to be “in the world but not of it.”

Puritans, far from wearing drab clothes and avoiding pleasure, enjoyed all things. Winthrop himself loved pipe smoking and shooting. Moreover, Puritan ministers “were the leaders in every field of intellectual advance in New England.”
⁶³
Their moral codes in many ways were not far from modern standards.
⁶⁴

A substantial number of settlers joined Winthrop, with eleven ships leaving for Massachusetts that year. When the Puritans finally arrived, Winthrop delivered a sermon before the colonists disembarked. It resounded with many of the sentiments of the Plymouth Pilgrims: “Wee must Consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop wanted the Puritans to see themselves as examples and, somewhat typical of his day, made dire predictions of their fate if they failed to live up to God’s standard.

The Massachusetts Bay colony benefited from changes in the religious situation in England, where a new policy of forcing Puritans to comply with Anglican ceremonies was in effect. Many Puritans decided to leave England rather than tolerate such persecution, and they emigrated to Massachusetts in what was called the Great Migration, pulled by reports of “a store of blessings.”
⁶⁵
This constant arrival of new groups of relatively prosperous colonists kept the colony well funded and its labor force full (unlike the southern colonies). By 1640, the population of Massachusetts Bay and its inland settlements numbered more than ten thousand.

Puritan migrants brought with them an antipathy and distrust of the Stuart monarchy (and governmental power in general) that would have great impact in both the long and short term. Government in the colony, as elsewhere in most of English America, assumed a democratic bent. Originally, the General Court, created as Massachusetts Bay’s first governing body, was limited to freemen, but after 1629, when only the Puritan stockholders remained, that meant Puritan male church members. Clergymen were not allowed to hold public office, but through the voting of the church members, the clergy gained exceptional influence. A Puritan hierarchy ran the administrative posts, and although non-Puritan immigrant freemen obtained property and other rights, only the church members received voting privileges. In 1632, however, the increasing pressure of additional settlers forced changes in the minority-run General Court. The right to elect the governor and deputy governor was expanded to all freemen, turning the governor and his assistants into a colonial parliament.
⁶⁶

Political tensions in Massachusetts reflected the close interrelationship Puritans felt between civil and religious life. Rigorous tests existed for admission to a Puritan church congregation: individuals had to show evidence of a changed life, relate in an interview process their conversion experience, and display knowledge of scripture. On the surface, this appeared to place extraordinary power in the hands of the authorities, giving them (if one was a believer) the final word on who was, and was not, saved. But in reality, church bodies proved extremely lenient in accepting members. After all, who could deny another’s face-to-face meeting with the Almighty? Local records showed a wide range of opinions on the answer.
⁶⁷
One solution, the “Halfway Covenant,” allowed third-generation Puritan children to be baptized if their parents were baptized.
⁶⁸

Before long, of course, many insincere or more worldly colonists had gained membership, and with the expansion of church membership, the right to participate in the polity soon spread, and by 1640 almost all families could count one adult male church member (and therefore a voter) in their number. The very fact that so many people came, however tangentially, under the rubric of local—but not centralized—church authority reinforced civic behavior with a Christian moral code, although increasingly the laity tended to be more spiritually conservative than the clergy.
⁶⁹

Local autonomy of churches was maintained through the congregational system of organization. Each church constituted the ultimate authority in scriptural doctrine. That occasionally led to unorthodox or even heretical positions developing, but usually the doctrinal agreement between Puritans on big issues was so widespread that few serious problems arose. When troublemakers did appear, as when Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, or when Anne Hutchinson challenged the hierarchy in 1636, Winthrop and the General Court usually dispatched them in short order.
⁷⁰
Moreover, the very toleration often (though certainly not universally) exhibited by the Puritans served to reinforce and confirm “the colonists in their belief that New England was a place apart, a bastion of consistency.”
⁷¹

There were limits to toleration, of course. In 1692, when several young Salem girls displayed physical “fits” and complained of being hexed by witches, Salem village was thrown into an uproar. A special court convened to try the witches. Although the girls initially accused only one as a witch (Tituba, a black slave woman), the accusations and charges multiplied, with 150 Salemites eventually standing accused. Finally, religious and secular leaders expressed objections, and the trials ceased as quickly as they had begun. Historians have subsequently ascribed the hysteria of the Salem witch trials to sexism, religious rigidity, and even the fungus of a local plant, but few have admitted that to the Puritans of Massachusetts, the devil and witchcraft were quite real, and physical manifestations of evil spirits were viewed as commonplace occurrences.

The Pequot War and the American Militia System

The Puritan’s religious views did not exempt them from conflict with the Indians, particularly the Pequot Indians of coastal New England. Puritan/Pequot interactions followed a cyclical pattern that would typify the next 250 years of Indian-white relations, in the process giving birth to the American militia system, a form of warfare quite unlike that found in Europe.

Initial contacts led to cross-acculturation and exchange, but struggles over land ensued, ending in extermination, extirpation, or assimilation of the Indians. Sparked by the murder of a trader, the Pequot War commenced in July of 1636. In the assault on the Pequot fort on the Mystic River in 1637, troops from Connecticut and Massachusetts, along with Mohican and Narragansett Indian allies, attacked and destroyed a stronghold surrounded by a wooden palisade, killing some four hundred Pequots in what was, to that time, one of the most stunning victories of English settlers over Indians ever witnessed.

One important result of the Pequot War was the Indians’ realization that, in the future, they would have to unify to fight the Englishmen. This would ultimately culminate in the 1675–76 war led by Metacomet—known in New England history as King Philip’s War—which resulted in a staggering defeat for northeastern coastal tribes. A far-reaching result of these conflicts was the creation of the New England militia system.

The Puritan—indeed, English—distrust of the mighty Stuart kings manifested itself in a fear of standing armies. Under the colonial militia system, much of the population armed itself and prepared to fight on short notice. All men aged sixteen to sixty served without pay in village militia companies; they brought their own weapons and supplies and met irregularly to train and drill. One advantage of the militia companies was that some of their members were crack shots: as an eighteenth-century American later wrote a British friend,

 

In this country…the great quantities of game, the many lands, and the great privileges of killing make the Americans the best marksmen in the world, and thousands support their families by the same, particularly the riflemen on the frontiers…. In marching through the woods one thousand of these riflemen would cut to pieces ten thousand of your best troops.
⁷²

 

But the American militia system also had many disadvantages. Insubordination was the inevitable result of trying to turn individualistic Americans into obedient soldiers. Militiamen did not want to fight anywhere but home. Some deserted in the middle of a campaign because of spring plowing or because their time was up. But the most serious shortcoming of the militia system was that it gave Americans a misguided impression that they did not need a large, well-trained standing army.

The American soldier was an amateur, an irregular combatant who despised the professional military. Even 140 years after the Pequot War, the Continental Congress still was suspicious that a professional military, “however necessary it may be, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people…. Standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican government.”
⁷³

Where muskets and powder could handle—or, at least, suppress—most of the difficulties with Indians, there were other, more complex issues raised by a rogue minister and an independent-minded woman. Taken together, the threats posed by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson may have presented as serious a menace to Massachusetts as the Pequots and other tribes put together.

Roger Williams and the Limits of Religious Toleration

The first serious challenge to the unity of state and religion in Massachusetts came from a Puritan dissident named Roger Williams. A man Bradford described as “godly and zealous,” Williams had moved to Salem, where he served as minister after 1635. Gradually he became more vocal in his opinion that church and state needed to be completely separated. Forced religion, he argued, “Stinks in God’s nostrils.” Williams had other unusual views, but his most dangerous notion was his interpretation of determining who was saved and thus worthy of taking communion with others who were sanctified. Williams demanded ever-increasing evidence of a person’s salvation before taking communion with him—eventually to the point where he distrusted the salvation of his own wife. At that point, Williams completed the circle: no one, he argued, could determine who was saved and who was damned.

Because church membership was so finely intertwined with political rights, this created thorny problems. Williams argued that since no one could determine salvation, all had to be treated (for civil purposes) as if they were children of God, ignoring New Testament teaching on subjecting repeat offenders who were nevertheless thought to be believers to disfellowship, so as not to destroy the church body with the individual’s unrepentant sin. Such a position struck at the authority of Winthrop, the General Court, and the entire basis of citizenship in Massachusetts, and the magistrates in Boston could not tolerate Williams’s open rebellion for long. Other congregations started to exert economic pressure on Salem, alienating Williams from his own church. After weakening Williams sufficiently, the General Court gave him six weeks to depart the colony. Winthrop urged him to “steer my course to Narragansett Bay and the Indians.”
⁷⁴

Unable to stay, and encouraged to leave, in 1636 Williams founded Providence, Rhode Island, which the orthodox Puritans derisively called “Rogues Island” or “the sewer of New England.”
⁷⁵
After eight years, he obtained a charter from England establishing Rhode Island as a colony. Church and state were separated there and all religions—at least all Christian religions—tolerated. Williams’s influence on religious toleration was nevertheless minimal, and his halo, “ill fitting.” Only a year after Williams relocated, another prominent dissident moved to Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson, a mother of fifteen, arrived in Boston in 1631 with her husband, William (“a man of mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by his wife,” deplored Winthrop). A follower of John Cotton, a local minister, Hutchinson gained influence as a Bible teacher, and she held prayer groups in her home. She embraced a potentially heretical religious position known as antinomianism, which held that there was no relationship between works and faith, and thus the saved had no obligation to follow church laws—only the moral judgment of the individual counted. Naturally, the colonial authorities saw in Hutchinson a threat to their authority, but in the broader picture she potentially opened the door to all sorts of civil mischief. In 1636, therefore, the General Court tried her for defaming the clergy—though not, as it might have, for a charge of heresy, which carried a penalty of death at the stake. A bright and clever woman, Hutchinson sparred with Winthrop and others until she all but confessed to hearing voices. The court evicted her from Massachusetts, and in 1637 she and some seventy-five supporters moved to Rhode Island. In 1643, Indians killed Hutchinson and most of her family.