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I0

Major Problems in American Colonial History

repeated so frequently and told with such force and literary grace that it has become deeply ingrained in the American historical imagination. To offer a viable altemative to a narrative that has endured for so long and assumed such a mythic status, it may be useful to account for the declension narrative's power and tenacity, and perhaps to locate within its foundations a new way of seeing the puritan past. The myth-making impulse that produced the declension narrative began with the

founding generation, for whom this particular story line served a vital purpose. william Bradford, governor of the plymouth colony and author of New England,s first Puritan history, consciously borrowed old restament metaphors to lend a sense of cosmic significance to the Pilgrims' experience of persecution. The opening chapters of his history of Plymouth Plantation provide a clear and powerf'ul narrative of his community's origins in England, exile in the Netherlands, and escape to the freedom

low colonist made with his growing sense that the spiritual fervor he had once enjoyed as part of a latter-day apostolic community had seriously declined. In the end, he lamented the dispersal of the population through the countryside in search of richer pasture lands, a movement which left the "poor church" of plymouth ,,like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children.,, Bradford's disappointment with the progress of a colony begun with such great hopes was a natural perspective for the founding generation to assume. Bradford ald his fellow colonists frequently likened themselves to God's chosen people, the ancient Israelites. worldliness and decay, the worship of false idols, the dispersal of the population, captivity, exile, and destruction-such was the fate of the children of Israel after they had reached their promised land, and such were the available metaphorical constructs that shaped New England puritans' historical vision of themselves. Given Bradford's intense identification with Moses and the Exodus mythos in his description of the Pilgrims' escape from European bondage, it would have been remarkable if his account of the latter days of their New English Canaan had not taken on an elegiac tone. The part of the prophet lamenting the decline of his people was, in effect, scripted for Bradford already. But this rhetorical strategy served an important function for Bradford, reminding later generations of their religious heritage and encouraging continued commitment to the founders, faith. The image of a New England soul lost in the colony's material progress created a compelling framework for understanding the region's early history. Bradford,s successors among the Puritan clergy did their work thoroughly; their jeremiads made a lasting impression on the way their congregations understood themselves and their own experience. This peculiar form of historical thinking entered the consciousness of ordinary people and framed how they thought about themselves. In this sense, declension can be said to be neither right nor wrong as a way to understand New England's history. It is simply there, an artifact of the conceptual lives of early New Englanders, no more nor less important than the form of their town goveffments or the average size of their families. Yet more than most artifacts of the past, this Puritan tendency to see history as declension has led subsequent scholars

of the New world. Yet once his people had arrived in their promised land, his story lost its direction and Bradford was reduced to a mere keeper of annals, bewildered by a flood of events that lacked the meaning , clanty and promise he had , once seen for the future of his colony. Gradually, Bradford began to associate the material gains his fel-

New England: The Settlement of Puritan Colonies

111

to look for similar patterns in constructing a story, to follow Bradford's Puritan

script. Even historians unsympathetic to the souls of the Puritans, who decry Puritan "theocracy" as an oppressive evil happily overcome by the free spirit of commerce, tend to make the same assumptions and tell the same story, if only to celebrate what Bradford lamented. Like any powerful narrative, the declension model creates meaning by privileging some aspects of past experience while concealing others. William Bradford's viewpoint has encouraged later historians to ask whether the number of communicants in a particular Puritan church decreased over time, but has steered historians

away from considering the remarkable numerical proliferation of churches across the countryside, the enduring popular devotion to the unusual form of church polity that Bradford helped to create. Most other European colonists of North America had great difficulty in maintaining any level of commitment to churches as institutions, and failed to create them in numbers sufficient to replicate European patterns' In this iight, it becomes difficult to see how New Englanders could manage this singular achievement if the dispersal of New England's population really led, as Bradford insisted, to "the ruin . . . of the churches of God there." . . .

For historians of colonial New England, the question of where to begin the story has typically posed few problems. The tendency has always been to begin at the "beginning," with Plymouth Colony in 1620, with Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and with sufficient backward glances at English history to set a context for New World developments. Yet by commencing this story with the triumphs of the founding generation, set against the background of the Puritan revolution in England, a powerful mythology of New England's origins shapes the way in which all subse-. quent events are understood. The migration to the New World and the early establishment of New England's religious and social institutions have become definitive standards for the meaning of American Puritanism, against which all changes in New England's religious culture after the Cambridge Platform of 1648 are measured, judged, and usually condemned as decline. Given the Puritans' obsession with "primitive" models of ecclesiastical purity, the tendency of succeeding generations to revere their ancestors' original accomplishments should come aS no Surprise. But there are excellent reasons to challenge the assumption that the first generation's churches were a noflnative standard for evaluating the subsequent history of orthodoxy in New England. First, the evolution of the Puritan movement over many decades in England and America defies the possibility of defining a single nolmative moment. English Puritanism before the Great Migration went through many phases' shaped by its internal logic of development and by the influence of external conditions. In the early seventeenth century, the more militant political aspects of Puritan reform temporarily subsided; the movement went "underground" and because more of a cultural "persuasion" than a drive for ecclesiastical reform. Yet by the 1630s, the policies of Charles I and Archbishop Laud had forced conforming Puritans into political opposition again. The timing of the migration to New England with these mounting political pressures served to "radicalize" many members of the founding generation and profoundly altered their understanding of religious belief and its institutional
underpinnings. . . .

IL2

Major Problems in American Cotonial Historv

The self-selecting nature of the migrating group created an unusual population in New England's first generation, providing yet another reason not to think of this period as normative. The great mass of ungodly people, with whom English puritans had been engaged in ongoing cultural warfare in England, were left behind. The godly in New England were further distinguished by the fervor they shared in their common enterprise, for the migration experience aroused utopian hopes along with daunting anxieties over the tasks of building a new society, lest they ..be made a story and a by-word through the world, . . . and shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good tand whether we are goeing." The heightened hopes and fears of this period shaped the emotional lives of the first generation in distinctive ways, but these were not definitive characteristics of the Puritan movement as a whole, nor were they experiences that subseqdent generations could possibly have
shared.

. . . First-generation colonists enjoyed the freedom to develop their Bible commonwealths without fear of opposition and formed a strong sense of themselves as a distinct and independent people, a development that would have been impossible under closer imperial supervision. The direct consequence of these unusual circumstances was a radicalization of the Puritan movement in its transplanted form, . . . If the notion of early New England as a "laboratory" for the development of a Puritan society has any value, it is in this sense that the conditions offered to New England's settlers were ideally suited to the flourishing of the puritan movement,s most utopian impulses, a rarefied atmosphere where many of the harsh conditions of the "real world" of English society were filtered out. . . . In moving to a new world, they expected to find new feelings of closeness to God aad to enjoy his ordinances in a pure form unattainable in the comrpted Church of England. As Thomas Shepard said to his Cambridge, Massachusetts, congregation in the 1630s, "there is no place in all the world where there is such expectation to find the Lord as here." However, the Puritan movement encompassed much more than a desire to enjoy God's ordinances in pristine purity. The staunch insistence of the Massachusetts founders that they were not separatists and had no intention of abandoning the church of England points to the abiding sense of responsibility to the world that was part of the Puritan reforming impulse. In a later serrnon, Thomas Shepard warned his cambridge congregation not to "fall a-dreaming" here in New England, and to oppose the utopian "delusion of men's brains" and "swarm of strange opinions" that were the product of a society where "we have ordinances to the full, sermons too long, and lectures too many, and private meetings too frequent." Shepard was not opposed to New England's pure ordinances and overabundant "means,,,but he realized that "golden dreams of grace" were as dangerous to the course of salvation as "drunken dreams of the world." In Shepard's eyes, the unique circumstances of the first decade of settlement made utopian delusions a greater temptation than worldly corruptions. A full generation of experience was necessary before the most fervent puritan colonists would awaken from their golden dreams to realize that the New world was as much a spiritual wilderness as the England they had left behind. what

New England: The Settlement of Puritan Colonies

i13

caused this awakening were developments that made New England into a matufe

society and brought an end to the "hothouse" environment that nurtured the first generation's radical florescence. First and foremost, the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 threatened the basic terms of the colonies' existence, as earlier neglect of colonial matters gave way to increasing crown supervision of the nascent empire. New Englanders were awale of the implications of this development from the very starl. The founders, lacking significant opposition from the English government, were free to mold their colonies according to their religious and cultural objectives. The real test of New England's ability to sustain these objectives came oniy when the orthodox colonies had to survive against the compromising power of the Restoration monarchy, with its opposition to Puritan religion and its hostility to decentralized self-rule anywhere within the crown's domain. The Anglican merchants and officials who began to appear in Boston reminded Puritans of their differences from mainstream English society and forced New Englanders to make accommodations to the world's demands-demands that had been easy to forget in the rarefied atmosphere of the first thirty years of settlement' In addition, after a generation of experimentation, New England society had developed institutions and practices that would persist for the next century' In the migration period, colonists had relied upon assistance from the native American population and had looked to the fur trade for income to pay for their import needs, tut these transitory patterns had given way to agricultural production and the fishing and trading enterprises that became the enduring staples of New England econo-i" tit". By the 1660s, the orthodox New England colonies had formed stable govelnments, had joined together in an alliance for mutual defense, and had created judicial systems connecting local affairs to colonial power centers. The pattem of settlement for new towns in the interior of New England had been established' and a population growing rapidly through natural increase began to fill up newly acquired iu"Ot. e system of schools was taking hold throughout the towns of Massachusetts, and Harvard College, while still a fledgling enterprise, was beginning to train homegrown ministers to replace the immigrant clergy of the first generation. Finally, the Cambridge Platform of 1648, a written standard of ecclesiastical structure and discipline for the churches of Massachusetts, signalled the institutional maturation of orthodox religious culture. Although the platform stopped short of resolving the problems of baptism and membership of future generations, it pointed toward th- Synod of 1662's "Halfway Covenant" as the next logical step in ihe development of the Puritan church as an institution that could persist through time. In effect, the Halfway Covenant acknowledged that New England's population could not forever be a self-selected body of saints already prepared to be incorporated in churches, as the majority of the migrants had been. Future American generations also had to be prepared for conversion, had to be kept within the "garden" of the churches and protected from the dangers of the "wilderness" without diminishing the purity of the church itself. By broadening the eligibility standards for baptism while reserving communion and full membership for those who had experienced saving grace, this is exactly what the Halfway Covenant did' The challenges faced by the second and subsequent generations in New England were the challenges of a mature society, not an immigrant company. These challenges, while different from those of the first generation, were met with

I14

Major Problems in American Colonial Historv

responses no less "Puritan" than the actions of the founders. But in looking for simple continuity or repetition of first-generation events in later years, historians writing within the declension framework have overlooked growth and change that were part of the Puritan tradition. In the 1630s, Thomas shepard had warned his congregation not to be deluded by "golden dreams of grace." Shepard's sermon can be

read as a valuable corrective for modern scholars as well. Just as the purity and plenitude of worship in early New England churches pushed the first generation toward radical delusions of God's kingdom appearing on earth, so historians have been captivated by the remarkable success of New England as a utopian experiment and have taken the events and circumstances of the first generation as a noflnative standard for American Puritanism. Modem historians did not invent this tendency; the original myth-makers were those tike John Davenport who became rigidly committed to the first forms of church polity. To these founders and their immediate descendants, any change from the radical forms of the early New England way constituted declension from the true church, and they encouraged an almost slavish ancestor worship among subsequent generations. It is their rhetorical emphasis on loss and lamentation that subsequent historians have singled out as the dominant pattem of New England's religious development after the first generation. Yet their myth of origin obscures an equally important counter-narrative. If the Halfway covenant signalled an end to the "golden dreams of grace," it also marked the emergence of this religious culture's sense of responsibitity to the world, a development which paralleled the growing stability of New England society as a whole. By beginning a new narrative of New England puritanism in 1660, when the ..real world' returned to New England with a vengeance, we can remind ourselves that the Puritan movement was not a form of ascetic monasticism, a withdrawal from the world, but rather an attempt to change it, and we can begin to see the efforts of later Puritans in a new light, as an ongoing reformation. The Puritan notion of the exemplary life, a way of understanding the self and historical development that complements the mythology of origins, has also contributed to the power and tenacity of the declension model. puritans constantly modelled themselves and interpreted their personal experiences through comparisons to the lives of others. The imitation of Christ, of course, was central to Christian piety, but all Biblical figures, saintly or wicked, were available models against which Puritans could measure their own behavior and beliefs. . . . To model one's life on these exemplary figures . . . was to embrace declension as an organizing framework for one's own personal experience. It meant accepting a vision of contemporary history in which the pious individual was always engaged in a valiant but ultimately losing battle against a vain and wicked world. To internalize this biographical genre therefore made it easy to conflate the tife of the individual with the imagined evolution of society as a whole. . . . . . . But there are risks in conflating the fate of individuals with the development of societies or accepting a single family's perspective as the most valid view of an era. To return again to william Bradford, his personal interpretation of the dispersal of the Plymouth population was quite idiosyncratic. To him it meant the dissipation of the particular community of exiles that had been at the center of his own experience, but dispersal did not, in fact, lead to the "ruin of the churches of

New England: The Settlement of Puritan

Colonies

15

God" in New England, as Bradford had imagined it would. The economic resources that the settlers sought were eventually responsible for strengthening and expanding the Puritan churches of Plymouth Colony. Yet virtually every history of Plymouth ever written has taken Bradford's emotional reaction as a definitive statement of the character of Plymouth's development. The problem, in brief, is that Puritan biographies projected history as declension, Puritan histories tended to be biographical, and modem scholars have (perhaps unconsciously) relied on these sources for their plot structures when writing both biographies and general histories. . . . The assumption that commercial capitalism is antithetical to Puritan piety and destructive of its communal ideals pervades the town studies of the "new social history" and reinforces the declension nar:rative. The common tendency of New England town studies has been to assume that Puritan churches were best suited to the social conditions found in villages cut off from the world of the market, where subsistence agriculture was practiced and communal values associated with premodern economic forms predominated. Perhaps the most influential study to advance this position argues that New England's early Puritan towns were intended to be "closed corporate utopian peasant communities," covenanted to the task of mutual cooperation, resistant to change, and anti-commercial. In this formulation, the "peasant" mentality fosters both Puritan piety and economic backwardness, as though these were the religious and economic sides of the same cultural coin. Competition, conflict, and migration away from the original town center for economic gain are taken to be destructive of community and therefore indicators of Puritan declension, a historical analysis that repeats the pattern originally described by WilliamBradford....

Like the other major elements of the declension paradigm, the origins of these ideas about community can be found in the Puritans' own rhetoric and in the inner workings of the Puritan mind. John Winthrop's "Modell of Christian Charity" declared the imporlance of communal solidarity and denounced the evils of a selfishly
acquisitive spirit. The clergy frequently warned their congregations against the dangers of worldliness, and Puritans took to heart the parable of the rich fool, who "layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God" (Luke 12:21). But to assume, as many historians have done, that Puritanism therefore required pre-modern anti-capitalist village communalism in order to thrive is to miss a subtle but vital distinction. Worldliness was not merely the "laying up" of treasure, but the failure to spend it to sow the seeds of grace. Ideals of communal charity and freedom from worldliness were not prerequisite conditions for the existence of Puritanism, but challenges that the godly gladly took on, challenges that were in many ways made easier by the "treasure" that a thriving market economy produced. . . . Later generations of New England's historians celebrated their ancestors' communal cohesion and unworldly asceticism, but these qualities were not choices made by the founders, and they were not dictated by an opposition to money or markets. Communal cohesion, where it did exist in the first generation, was often a by-product of the experience of migration; in many cases, self-selecting communities organized by charismatic leaders were bound together by their common backgrounds and experiences. The homogeneity of these immigrant companies offers the illusion of aboriginal communal harmony in New England, hiding the fact that many of these Puritans were contentious troublemakers whose beliefs had created

lI6

Major Problems in American Colonial History

nrmoil in the Old England of their birth. Similarly first-generation asceticism was not a choice dictated by Puritan religious belief. English Puritans did, of course, abhor the decorative artwork and elaborate priestly vestments that the Church of England still retained. But what they hated was the idolatry, not the wealth and finery, that these Roman Catholic vestiges stood for. John Cotton did not forsake St. Botolph's, the largest non-cathedral church in England, for a log meetinghouse in Boston because he opposed grand buildings and preferred to shiver in the cold, but because he could no longer safely practice his brand of puritan ministry without molestation from ecclesiastical authorities. John Davenport did not instruct his congregation of pious merchants in London's commercial district to renounce their riches; nor did he leave them for New Haven because he preferred rustic simplicity. The asceticism of early Massachusetts puritans was not a conscious program of the colonists, but an artifact of the experience of all English colonizing enterprises, the unavoidable "stripping down" of European culture caused by transplantation. The first colonists were ascetics because they had no choice in the matter, and they were communitarians by default, but the mythology of origins and the privileging of the first generation has transformed early necessities into retrospective virtues.
The biographical genre of the exemplary Puritan life also reinforces the tendency to see the passage of time as a triumph of worldliness over piety. Demographic studies of church records have shown that conversion typically occurred at the time in life when people were leaving the protections of adolescence and assum-

while later life's spiritual pilgrimage was more isolated and subject to greater worldly constraints, even for the many graduates who went on to become ministers. The conventions of Puritan autobiography make the belief that prosperity and piety

ing the responsibilities of adulthood. For women, conversion often coincided roughly with the age of marriage or first childbearing; for men, formal economic responsibilities and the assumption of public office were as important as changes in family status. In either case, the most fervent spiritual experiences of a lifetime were associated with the moment when youth was left behind and engagement with the demands of the world commenced. It is no wonder, then, that at the end of a successful life in which properfy was accumulated, families were provided for, and civic duties were performed, the publicly active men who most commonly wrote autobiographies should look back and see their spiritual evolution as an early moment of grace followed by a lifeJong losing battle against worldliness. For highly educated men, the college experience contributed to this tendency as well, for in retrospect, college was a time to cultivate the mind and soul in communal cooperation,

were enemies all the more difficult to shake. . . . For several decades, critics of the declension model have been subtly suggesting the possibility that commercial development may have been beneficial to Puritan religion, and that later generations may well have retained the theological rigor and spiritual fervor of the founders. The time has come to begin by assuming the truth of these notions and asking not whether this was the case, btt how this process worked. when John cotton preached that "christ cannot be had for money, yet sometimes without expense of money he cannot be had," he may have been attempting to explicate the conffary demands for striving and passivity implicit in the conversion process, but he was also describing an obvious truth about the social reality of Puritan religious culture. . . .

New England: The Settlement of puritan

Colonies

II7

FURTHER

READING
Centurv

David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local lnw and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seyenteenth
(1982). England in the Seventeenth Century (19g7). Stephen-Foster, The Long A-r-gument: Engrish puritanism and the shaping of New England Culture, I 570-1 700 (1991). Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of puritan New Englancl (1995). Janice Knight, orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American puritanism (1994). John Frederick Martin, Profits in the wild.emess: Entrepreneurship and the Fou.nding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Centutl, e992j. !0m.u1!S Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (195g). Daniel vickers, Fanners and Fishermen: Two ceniuries of work in'Eisex County, Massachus etts, I 6 3 0_1 8 3 0 (1994).

David cressy, coming over: Migration and communication Between England and New