Watertown, though initially led by the Yorkshireman Sir Richard Saltonstall, his family, and his clients, was even more completely an East Anglian town than Ipswich. Almost all of its original people were derived from a thirty-five-mile-wide band from northern Essex to southern Suffolk, an area long since given over to enclosure and commercial farming. Since the town proved to be a staging area for incoming migrants of other backgrounds, all of them seeking land of their own, and since the General Court might well seek to create new towns out of existing grants, Watertown’s allocation of 23,456 acres was threatened with subdivision. Resisting this danger to their interests, the founding proprietors in the course of six years granted over four-fifths of the entire township to themselves, thus closing off the possibility of having to share land in later divisions with ambitious newcomers of different views. The resulting family parcels were large, an average of 124 acres, and the proprietors quickly began the development of their handsome grants.
But if they controlled the land they could not control the inflow of migrants. By the late 1630s competitive claims by new arrivals were increasing, some by immigrants from open-field regions. Arguments arose between the establishment and the newcomers, tempers flared, and the protesters’ numbers grew. When the proprietors held firm and denied the claimants satisfaction, the latter formed a founding group of their own and petitioned the General Court for a separate town where they could work out their own way of life. The result was the town of Sudbury, thirteen miles to the west, and there the potential for bitter discord between different lifestyles and different generations was fully realized.12
Sudbury’s arrangements, by “joint consent,” reflected those of the conservative open-field village of Sudbury, Suffolk. The size of each proprietor’s holdings in each category—town lots, meadowland, arable—was determined by a scale of age, rank, and wealth, with grazing rights in the commons in the same proportion. Thus, typically, John Goodnow, an immigrant from the open-field village of Donhead St. Andrew, on the Wiltshire-Dorset borderland, had grants totalling ninety-one acres, but divided into eleven plots ranging in size from four and a half to twenty acres. He would travel eleven miles to collect the hay from his various meadow allotments.
For fifteen years—a time of initial land clearing and experimental crop regulation—the cooperative, interwoven open-field system held firm. There was general participation in the town meeting, from which flowed annual regulations determining grazing rights, the selection of fields for plowing and fallow, the types and location of fences, and the officials to supervise all of this work. And the townsmen conceded to the social hierarchy that was built into the system, according special deference to the authority of the town’s preacher, Edmund Brown, a Cambridge graduate with fourteen years of experience in the church of Sudbury, Suffolk, and a man with a sharp eye for personal advantages in the life here below.
By the late 1640s, with the town’s farmland expanding and the population growing, tremors of discontent were heard. There had always been a minority of East Anglian commercial farmers and enterprising tradesmen in the community, and now the founders’ sons were reaching maturity. Many of them had no provision of land nor any prospect of it. When in 1649 the town acquired a new strip of land, 6,400 acres, the entire land policy came into question. Should the new plot be divided equally or follow the previous distribution system? The town split sharply on the question, with the younger generation and their sponsors favoring not only an equal division of the land but the building of an expensive new meetinghouse to accommodate the entire town in its increasingly contentious meetings. The two issues ignited passions; the town meetings were packed and acrimonious, with charges flying back and forth. Would access to the use of the undivided common land follow the formula of the original rankings, hence exclude the noisy protesters who were turning more and more toward a system of equal rights and enclosed farms? The struggle came to a head in an uproarious town meeting in which the town’s “peace and comfort” were thoroughly “despoiled.”
A spokesman for the protesters declared that the selectmen’s position was sheer “oppression”; that when oppressed, the poor will certainly “cry out”; and prophetically, that “if you persecute us in one city, wee must fly to another.” When a vote was taken on access to the commons, it was claimed that some of the votes, especially those of absentees who had contributed to the town’s original expenses, were illegal, and that the conservative pastor, who had his own material interests to protect, had meddled too much in the process, thus dishonoring God and the ministry and hindering “the conversion and building up of souls.” Ignoring the preacher’s threat to return to England, the “expansionist” party in the town meeting purged the board of selectmen of the conservatives and voted to divide the new plot of land in equal lots, thus turning away from the long-established open-field system toward individual, competitive farming. The Reverend Brown, “with great violence,” led the opposition to change and sought the support of an outside committee appointed by the General Court to look into the controversy. At the same time a self-appointed investigating committee of neighboring clergy met, despite the refusal of the town to cooperate with it. Undeterred, it issued a ten-point report charging the head of the “expansionists,” John Ruddock, with nine violations of the fifth and ninth commandments, and with having committed “a great sin” in expunging a selectmen’s order that had been reversed.
If Ruddock was disturbed by these charges there is no record of it; nor did he respond to Goodnow’s declaration that “right or wrong” the old system would prevail, and that “if we can have it no other way, we will have it by club law.” It did not come to physical violence, but the split was irrevocable, and the result was predictable. Ruddock and twelve others petitioned the General Court for their own township, supporting their appeal by reference to God’s blessing in having increased the number of children to be provided for. With such an endorsement—and also with help from allies in the General Court—they succeeded. The new town, Marlborough, eight miles to the west, proved to be an “East Anglian suburb” of Sudbury, in which all the constraints of Sudbury’s open-field system were cast off.13
THIS COMMUNITY GENEALOGY—Watertown begetting Sudbury begetting Marlborough—is an example of a process at work in the European resettlement of New England. Everywhere in the open countryside there were conflicts stemming from differences in background cultures. And everywhere generational phasing was crucial. Where the initial settlers were young, as in Rowley, the earlier English practices were likely to persist; where the founders were older, the transition was often quicker, as successors soon took control and fell more readily into the emerging pattern of scattered independent family farms.
But the process was irregular, jolted by disputes and confusions. It would be three generations before the pattern of individual, enclosed farms fully evolved. Anomalies in fact survived into the eighteenth century—vestiges of fading memories and peculiar circumstances. But the normalization into a world of independent family farms was irresistible, driven by the universal passion for privately held and independently worked land, despite the inherited constraints that worked against it.14
2
But another divisive force was at work as well—a force so powerful that it threatened to destroy New England’s fragile, still-forming community life. In the region’s open countryside, Puritanism’s turbulent inner core of radical potentialities, which had been constrained in the struggle for survival in England, burst out toward what for some was ultimate perfection, for others anarchic degradation.
No more in New England than in old England was there a well-defined original Puritan “orthodoxy,” an accepted configuration of Puritan thought and church polity from which deviation could be measured and by which dissent might be controlled. If in New England there were to be a Puritan orthodoxy against which dissent could be defined, it would have to be constructed and fought for against competing strains. And in fact there never would be an u
ncontested orthodoxy. From the start and for the three decades that followed, New England was a scene of conflicting enthusiasms, a hothouse of holy rage, as Puritanism’s inner force, in Edmund Morgan’s phrase, “hurl[ed] itself outward to its ultimate limits.” The struggles were fierce and unending. Not a year went by in the lifetime of Winthrop’s generation when the moderate majority was not under assault by radical dissenters, perfectionists of one sort or another who fought against the compromises of an emerging orthodoxy. By the time New England’s delicately balanced moderate Congregationalism was established, it could no longer exclude all other strains, and its inner contradictions were leading to its own declension.15
How far the ultimate limits of Puritanism could stray from respectable religion and ordinary civility, how close to the abyss of chaos a society in which religion was the source of morality and order, could be seen in the elemental fears of the colony’s leaders. Though there were differences among them on precise points of doctrine and church organization, they shared the fear that the fierce passion for spiritual satisfaction and the irrepressible antiauthoritarianism that lay at the heart of Puritanism might erupt into wild, destructive excesses: of “Familism,” antipedobaptism, “Fifth Monarchy” anarchy, radical spiritism, and a pervasive antinomianism that would lead God-besotted enthusiasts to all kinds of “phanatic doctrines and practises.” Though they could not have anticipated how in England these impulses would soon produce the Leveller, Ranter, and Digger movements and the radical sectarianism that would threaten to turn English society upside down, they were haunted by the common memory of the devastation of Münster a century earlier, when tens of thousands of Anabaptist zealots, led by a Dutch tailor who claimed authority direct from God, had instituted rule by the saints, abolished property, and sanctioned polygamy—only to be slaughtered en masse by enraged armies encouraged by Luther himself. To mention Germany, or Münster, in the context of religious extremism and possible revelations from God was to conjure up scenes of social turmoil, ultimately carnage. The colony’s leaders were certain that the integument of civility that stretched over the turmoils of religious passions was thin and easily ruptured, and when that happened—when people’s passions erupted into civil strife—when as Winthrop put it, the sword of spirit turned into the sword of steel—the result was “always … tragicall and bloudy.” Practical men of affairs like Winthrop and Dudley, however devout, were determined somehow, while establishing a devotional community, to rein in such excesses before they became dangerous.16
But how could they? Where was the line between dangerous fanaticism and benevolent zeal? Once Puritanism was released from traditional ecclesiastical and social constraints, an inexorable logic took over that could sweep one through deepening stages of sectarian radicalism. The transition points in this surging process were subtle. To stop the logical flow from benign reform to chaotic excess that might lead to “German” devastation would take intellectual skills of a high order; and in the end, if dialectical power and persuasion failed to keep New England from degenerating into “a Colluvies [filth pit] of wild Opinionists,” responsible authorities would have to resort to force, despite the fact that, as England would soon discover, coercion brought with it the likelihood of civil war.17
Therefore, the colony’s moderate leaders argued: start at the beginning. Keep the dangerous zealots from entering the City on the Hill. But there was no way of identifying in advance the bearers of dangerous doctrines and prevent them from migrating to the Puritan refuge. Most of those who would soon be condemned as malignant sectarians—advocates of what Ezekiel Rogers called “Base Opinnions” and “Phrenticke dotages” whom God would undoubtedly “cause to be as doung on the earth”; people, Peter Bulkely wrote, with “itching eares, itching mindes, and itching tongues also, itching to be … venting novelties”—such dangerous dissidents differed at the start from the moderate Puritan mainstream only by their temperament, their emotional susceptibilities, or the intensity of their spiritual needs.18
It was into the controls of a nascent centrist system, still theoretically within the Church of England, that the cautious leadership of the early 1630s, both lay and clerical, sought to channel unbounded religious enthusiasms of all kinds. Their aim was to create autonomous, disciplined congregations of visible saints within the ostensible purview of the Church of England—groups of individuals who could convincingly testify to an experience of saving grace but who would nevertheless commit themselves in their piety to worship and behave according to the dictates of the clergy and accepted norms of conduct. But for some this was an illogical and indefensible compromise, and it came under attack even before it was fully formulated. In fact the ultimate definition of New England’s moderate Congregationalism was in part the product of efforts to deflect the forces of extremism and reinforce the system at its most vulnerable points. The major dissidents began by concentrating on specific fault lines within the emerging system, and then swept on to what were for many strange and disturbing conclusions.
THE FIRST TO CAUSE serious concern was Roger Williams, one of the most respected and learned but in some ways the most dangerous of all those who challenged New England’s emerging system. The ultimate source of Williams’s stubborn individualism, his utter refusal to compromise with what he saw as the truth, and the creative imagination that led him to anticipate a liberalism in human relations that would become publicly acceptable only generations later, had first appeared in the “godly terrorism” he had visited on the distraught Lady Barrington. By his mid-twenties he had clearly developed into a stubborn personality, assertive, self-confident, imaginative, and yet attractive to almost everyone who knew him (“a man lovely in his carriage”), though insensitive to the consequences of his actions as he followed out the logic of his principles wherever they might lead.
Williams’s spiky, uncompromising assertiveness (some in New England would call him “selfe-willed,” others “self-conceited, unquiet, turbulent, and uncharitable,” a man of “unmoveable stiffnesse” of spirit) became notorious almost from the moment he landed in Massachusetts. On his arrival early in 1631, he was quickly offered the leadership post of teacher in the Boston church, which he just as quickly declined. For however independent of the Church of England the Boston church was, and however reformed its worship, it was still officially and in principle “non-separating,” hence ostensibly Anglican. For Williams, “non-separating congregationalism” was the devil’s work—a dishonest dodge to have things both ways. The English Church had never, he believed, thrown off its quasi-papist past. It was still a “national” institution, comprehensive in its inclusion of sinners as well as saints. It had a bureaucratic hierarchy, the very opposite of the simple, independent, humble apostolic congregations of his yearnings. Its preachers were appointed by religious and secular authorities, not elected by autonomous worshippers. Its discipline lay in the hands of ecclesiastical courts he believed to be corrupt, not congregational communities. It forbade emotional prophesyings of lay preachers—the untutored voices of the authentically redeemed. Above all, it made no attempt to identify the visible church here below with God’s invisible church of the saved; and in addition, it glittered with the false gold of worldly wealth and power. Not only, Williams argued, should proper congregations of visible saints separate themselves from this contaminated institution, but they should publicly declare their separation from it and express remorse for ever having been associated with it.19
Winthrop and the church leaders were shocked by Williams’s extremism and fearful that his zeal would bring their fragile refuge to ruin. But they could not ignore the logic of his argument—its consistency, as opposed to the compromise they had made based on the convenience of the colony’s geographical removal; and they recognized therefore the likelihood that others, perhaps many others, would respond to Williams’s arguments and form a bloc of dissidents. They knew the dangers of separatism. They knew the grim fate of such zealots of Elizabethan separatism as Robert
Browne and his followers, whose spirit had lived on into their own time; and they knew too that “Brownist” separatism was the kind of disorder that opened one up to all sorts of other, malignant diseases. To be sure, the neighboring Pilgrims’ religious community was ostensibly separatist, but it had never been rigorously so, and for the Puritans it constituted no threat. Elsewhere, though, scattered throughout the region and in process of immigration, were others inclined to more rigorous separatist views. The largest group was in Salem, under the tutelage of the Rev. Samuel Skelton, and it was to Salem, therefore, that Williams moved once he had burned his bridges in Boston.
He had been called by the Salemites to consider appointment as the teacher in their church. Once there he immediately raised the question of separatism, but before any conclusion could be reached the General Court warned Salem of the danger Williams represented, and the appointment failed. Williams thereupon moved off to Plymouth, where his “strange opinions” and unwelcome “admonitions and reproofs” quickly led to his departure. In 1633, he returned to Salem and accepted appointment as assistant pastor, convinced that many there agreed with his views.20
In the two years that followed, Williams’s opinions grew into what the Massachusetts authorities considered a tangle of poisonous weeds. Stirring up a separatist revival among the East Anglians in that divided community, he challenged the validity of the colony’s charter, hence its right to the Indians’ land; he denied that civil authorities had any right to enforce the first four commandments; he denied the validity of loyalty oaths administered to unregenerate men by government since it involved the wicked in the works of God; he denied too the propriety of a man’s worshipping with an unregenerate wife; and following the dictum of Salem’s preacher Skelton, he insisted that women wear veils in public “under penalty of non-communion, urging the same as a matter of duty and absolute necessity.” And indeed, “through his and others’ influence, veils were worn here abundantly,” until Cotton, visiting Salem, declared the custom “not to be tolerated,” and Winthrop, when the issue got to Boston, “interposed and so brake it off.”21
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 53
