David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History

For David D. Hall, Puritanism is “the Reformed tradition [i.e. International Calvinism] with a Scottish, English, or colonial accent.”¹ The term “Puritan” is a “nickname”, “introduced by English Catholics” in the “mid 1560’s”.²

The book aims to correct a number of errors that exist in the scholarship about (and popular conception of) the Puritans. American scholars have been especially confused, he writes, because they were less sensitive to complex pre-colonial church practices. They made both the particularizing mistake of assuming that a general Protestant practice was particularly Puritan, and the generalizing mistake of assuming that some Puritan’s idiosyncratic cultural practice actually represented the “Puritan mode” of such-and-such.³ The American scholars of the ‘70’s and 80’s incorrectly thought that “Puritan households were grimly repressive or unloving.”⁴

The joyless and disciplinarian conceptions of the Puritans were not limited to scholars:

The American version [of anti-puritanism] mainly dates from a schism in the early nineteenth century that divided Unitarians (today, Unitarian Universalists) from Congregationalists. As post-Calvinist Protestants, Unitarians justified their newfound independence by denouncing the intolerance of the seventeenth-century colonists and the cruelties of Calvinist theology. To them we owe the popular assumptions that the colonists persecuted large numbers of innocent people and burned witches at the stake. Neither happens to be true. On the British side as on the American, anti-puritanism included the assumption that Puritans were joyless except when it came to punishing others, an assumption translated by some social and cultural historians, or anyone constructing a scenario of repression versus liberation, into the thesis that the goal of the movement was to impose social discipline on those beneath them in rank or status. This too is an argument with major weaknesses.⁵

Also invalidated is “any strong version of the “[Max] Weber thesis,” the argument […] that a new version of asceticism (the “Protestant ethic”), driven by deep anxiety about the doctrine of predestination, abetted the rise of capitalism.”⁶

The goal of the Puritan movement was to become “the state-endorsed version of Christianity in England and Scotland” and thereby to use the power of the state “in behalf of true religion.”⁷ The Puritan movement became controversial because it “took a strong stand on the Bible as ‘law’ and insisted that the state churches in England and Scotland eliminate all aspects of Catholicism”.⁸

They were thus a reform movement within the reform movement. Starting as a loose coalition, the distinction between the Puritans and the Anglicans was made increasingly clear as the Puritans made their grievances known. The Puritans saw themselves clearing out the remaining idolatrous, Catholic practices of the church; in doing so, they argued against The Book of Common Prayer, against “holy days, private baptisms, the sign of the cross”, against “kneeling to receive Holy Communion”, against “church music other than psalmody”.⁹ Their aim was the removal of all “human invention” from Church practice.¹⁰

Obviously, the members of the established church did not consider this constructive criticism:

The most serious mistake we can make is to accept what was said about the reformers by nineteenth-century “Anglicans” (a word that did not exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) who regarded Puritanism as a sickness that threatened an otherwise healthy state church, a sickness signaled by its “sectarian” understanding of the church and “seditious” refusal to abide by the authority of church leaders and the monarchy.¹¹

The book, especially the fascinating fourth chapter on the “Practical Divinity”, helps us to put together a picture of the Puritans’ positive vision for church-making and, more importantly, for salvation. The vision comes from the answer they had for a simple question put to Paul and Silas:

But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were loosed. And the keeper of the prison, awaking from sleep and seeing the prison doors open, supposing the prisoners had fled, drew his sword and was about to kill himself. But Paul called with a loud voice, saying, “Do yourself no harm, for we are all here.”

Then he called for a light, ran in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. And he brought them out and said, ”Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”¹²

“Practical Divinity” aims to answer this question. The Puritans maintained a set of beliefs which were generally “aligned with Reformed practice and doctrine”. These included “the doctrine of free grace” (i.e. that “by (free) grace we are redeemed from our sinfulness, not, as Catholicism maintained, by some combination of grace and our own efforts”), the related-but-distinct “justification by faith” (i.e. that one is justified or made righteous by faith, and not by works or baptism), “original sin”, and “primacy of scripture.”¹³

To this was added the principle of predestination (or “election” as it was called later), for which they found some support from Saint Augustine, who had fought against “Pelagianism”, the claim that humans were free to act sinfully or not.¹⁴ This raised a second question with unfathomably high stakes: “Who were His true children?”

The orthodox answer to this question was straightforward: God knew, but otherwise His decisions remained a “mystery” to humankind. This assertion had several important consequences. For one, it ensured that the visible church (the church on earth) would always include “hypocrites” who, despite their outward righteousness, were not among the elect.¹⁵

The church will contain the elect, but it will contain pretenders (“hypocrites”), too. Only God will know who is who; there is no reliable, outward sign that one is saved. Does that mean the Puritan must really do nothing at all, even within their own soul?

To do nothing, as though God did everything, was to misread what God intended by predestination. Summing up [English Puritan minister and philosopher] William Ames’s approach to the doctrine, the historian John Eusden has pointed out that, for Ames and others like him, “predestination is an invitation to begin one’s spiritual pilgrimage—with the implicit warning that the certainty of God’s decree shall not be known until one does begin.”¹⁶

If predestination determines one’s salvation, rather than works or faith, what might compel someone to behave themselves on earth? The answer to this is interesting and flavored much of Puritan spiritual practice:

[16th-century English Reformer and martyr John] Bradford extolled God’s “loving-kindness” and “gracious goodness” that enabled sinners to be redeemed, adding (in the context of assertions that the doctrine nurtured libertinism) that, since none of the elect would ever be repudiated, “God’s eternal and immutable decree bindeth not our hands… but rather provoketh us thereunto mightily.” Here, in a nutshell, was what a long line of ministers said in response to the possibility that the elect would be indifferent to the moral law. Even though God would never disenfranchise the elect, a premise known as the perseverance of the saints, His true children would always use their “liberty” to bear the “fruit of love, joy, peace, [and] longsuffering” (Gal. 5:13–22) made possible by this great gift.¹⁷

Having rejected “works” as required (at least in part) to be saved, Puritan theology rediscovers works not as necessary for salvation, but as proof of (and preparation for) it:¹⁸

Hence the phrasing of [16th-century English clergyman] Richard Greenham’s catechism when he turned to the topic of “works.” Spurning “good works” as inherently “imperfect” and of no merit in the larger economy of salvation, he reintroduced them as the consequence of saving faith and therefore valid evidence of “faith & election.”¹⁹

The locus of salvation is in inner life and only there could one find clues about whether one was elect or not. This leads the Puritans to a habit of self-examination and participation in various “spiritual exercises”.²⁰ John Bradford, mentioned above, “used ‘an ephemeris, or a journal’ to decipher ‘the signs of his smitten heart,’ a text that prompted him to pray for ‘mercy’ and the ‘grace to amend.’”²¹ A London artisan, Nehemiah Wallington, filled “fifty or so notebooks (an estimated twenty thousand pages of handwritten prose) […] with meditations, notes on sermons, examples of portents and providences, commentaries on the practical divinity, and extracts from his reading.”²² Regular self-examination and meditation, in private or together with others, formed a robust spiritual calendar:²³

Constancy of this kind mattered a great deal to Margaret Hoby (d. 1633), a woman of wealth and high rank who spent part of every day in prayer, making notes in her Bible, “examin[ing]” herself, and meditating, much of it done in “private,” although she also attended two services on Sunday and, some evenings, listened to others read aloud from the Book of Martyrs and the writings of Richard Greenham (a favorite), Perkins, and George Gifford. In her quest for constancy, she turned back to what she written [sic] in her journal some years earlier, hoping to “finde some profit” from a “Course” she was neglecting. When she could not attend a Sunday service or was away from home in London, she relied on sermon notes others had taken.²⁴

In The Puritans, then, the reader gets the image of the Puritans that is founded on, first, their specific doctrine and beliefs and, second, the spiritual practices that follow from those beliefs. The Puritan spiritual seriousness is seen animating primarily inward practices rather than the external, “puritanical” policing and persecution of others for which they developed such a bad reputation.

Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

Thomas Morton was an English colonist who first came to America in 1622.²⁵ He did not like America and America did not like him. More accurately, he did not like the Puritans and they did not like him. Peter C. Mancall’s book, The Trials of Thomas Morton, is the story of Morton’s unrelenting conflict with the Puritans, his establishment of the “Ma-re Mount” settlement, and his eventually successful efforts to publish a work called New English Canaan.

Morton’s troubles did not start in America. In England, he married a widow who had been his client as a lawyer and was accused, by her son, of doing it only to go after her property.²⁶ In England, he was also accused of having killed a man named “Wigge” with whom he was doing business.²⁷ He was not tried for it.

One can imagine why he was interested in the opportunity to move to America. When he got there, a settlement called Mount Wollaston at Wessaguset, Massachusetts, founded by Richard Wollaston, “fell under [his] control” after it was abandoned by its first inhabitants.²⁸ “‘In the end,’ [contemporary Pilgrim diarist William] Bradford reported, ‘they came to that misery that some starved and died with cold and hunger.’”

When he took it over in 1624, it was still called “Mount Wollaston”. Morton would change the name to “Ma-re Mount” because of “its Position near the Sea”.²⁹ A few years later, in 1628, the local Pilgrims came to understand that Morton had converted the settlement into a free-wheeling party village.

“They fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life,” [William] Bradford wrote, “pouring out themselves into all profaneness.” Bradford claimed that Morton and his followers engaged in one noxious behavior after another. They gained wealth by trading with the Ninnimissinuok, which threatened the new agreement that Bradford and his partners had signed with the residents of the nascent colony. With their newfound wealth Morton and his companions purchased alcohol and drank “in great excess,” even in the mornings.³⁰

As would be later memorialized in the title to one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”, Morton also built an enormous maypole at the settlement. They

cavorted with the locals, “drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices.” To Bradford, it looked like the second coming of “the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.”³¹

At least according to Bradford, Morton sold arms to the Natives and taught them how to use them. At the time, doing this was still legal.³²

The consensus among the pilgrims came to be that Ma-re Mount was a threat to the entire white settlement in Plymouth. First, they decided to write him a letter to tell him to cut it off. That didn’t work; he told them he would defend the settlement if needed.³³

They marched on the settlement. Morton was armed but too drunk to put up a fight. He was captured and dropped on an island off of Portsmouth, New Hampshire without any supplies. He survived for a month with the help of the Natives until an English ship picked him up and brought him back to England.³⁴ He returned to America a year later and was exiled again a few years after that.³⁵ There, he continued work on getting his book, New English Canaan, published. Eventually it was published, in 1637 in Amsterdam.³⁶

New English Canaan is Thomas Morton’s account of life in early New England, written, he claimed falsely, “upon tenne yeares knowledge and experiment of the Country.”³⁷ The title page lists its three books:

The first Booke setting forth the originall of the Natives, their Manners and Customes, together with their tractable Nature and Love towards the English.

The second Booke setting forth the naturall Indowments of the Country, and what staple Commodities it yealdeth.

The third Booke setting forth, what people are planted there, their prosperity, what remarkable accidents have happened since the first planting of it, together with their Tenents and practise of their Church.³⁸

New English Canaan rankled the pilgrims for the same reason that it later, upon rediscovery, became the source of Morton as “a role model of political resistance in an age of anti-authoritarian rage.”³⁹ In the work, Morton laid out his criticism of the entire system of colonization then under way in New England:

Unlike expansionary plans predicated on the Christianizing pacification of Native Americans, Morton imagined a world based on indigenous values as well as English norms. He believed that the Pilgrims and Puritans, having exceeded their authority, should lose their charters. A contemporary reader of Morton’s book would likely come away with the idea that those loyal to the king and national church would be better stewards of the territory than the religious dissenters who had already laid their claims.⁴⁰

The last chapter of The Trials of Thomas Morton is a history of the book’s reception, which begins slowly because it was so difficult to find the book in the United States. It is a story that can almost entirely be told from the perspective of the Adams family.⁴¹ Over four generations they seemed to have warmed to Morton.

The first, John Adams (1735 - 1826), had sent his son, John Quincy Adams (1767 - 1848), to Prussia where he serendipitously bought “three books about early New England that had been bound together, a common strategy among book collectors”, one of which was New English Canaan.⁴² In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1812, the elder Adams explained that the existence of the work “has been known by tradition and I have enquired for it, more than half a Century: but have never been able to learn that any Copy of it ever was Seen in this Country.”⁴³ He had a low opinion of Morton (an “incendiary instrument of Spiritual and temporal domination”) and a particular interest in Morton’s history, in part because the site of the Morton settlement was on the Adams farm:

In his 132 page He gives us a History of the Ceremonies instituted by him in honor of this important Nomination. Several Songs wer composed to be Sung. A Pine Tree, Eighty feet long, was erected with a pair of Bucks Horns nailed on the Top. On May Day this mighty May Pole was drawn to its appointed Place on the Summit of the Hill by the help of Savages males and females, with Sound of Guns Drums, Pistols and other Instruments of Musick. A Barrel of excellent Beer was brewed, and a Case of Bottles, (of Brandy I Suppose) with other good Chear, and English Men and Indians Sannups and Squaws, danced and Sang and revelled round the Maypole till Bacchus and Venus, I Suppose, were Satiated. The Seperatists called it an Idol, the Calf of Horeb, Mount Dagon, threatening to make it a woeful mount and not a merry Mount.

It is whimsical that this Book, So long lost, Should be brought to me, for this Hill is in my Farm. There are curious Things in it, about the Indians and the Country. If you have any Inclination, I will Send you more of them.⁴⁴

A few years earlier, excerpts of the work and a synopsis appeared in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review:

The anonymous editor, who might have been John Quincy Adams, believed that the early English settlers “were the dupes of puritanick cant, sour, tasteless asceticks, bigoted in their sentiments, and sordid in their manners, desirous of anarchy at home, and practisers of intolerance abroad.” The editor recognized Morton as a sarcastic commentator who employed satire to puncture the sanctimonious, understanding as well that Morton at least saw the dangers of a place where religious fanaticism prevailed.⁴⁵

John Quincy’s son, Charles Francis Adams, marks the third generation of Adamses to read New English Canaan. In a diary, he called Morton a “man whose memory is well known in our family”.⁴⁶ The Adamses were warming to Morton: “It is a singular book, but displays much learning and satirical wit and feelings which may have become part of the soil, at least they agree much with mine.”⁴⁷

The fourth generation, Charles, Jr., chose to publish the book using the family edition:

In 1883, Charles Francis Adams Jr., a member of the fourth generation in his family to come into possession of the book, used his grandfather’s copy to produce a scholarly edition of Morton’s work, revealing that its author was rather more truthful and the colonies’ history more complicated than earlier critics had allowed. By the latter decades of the twentieth century, Morton had become an anti-hero—a back-to-nature idealist and a role model of political resistance in an age of anti-authoritarian rage.⁴⁸