Puritan Theocracy

Puritanism found its truest expression, not in England, but in New England. The Bible Commonwealth envisaged by Ames, Baynes, Bradshaw and others was never established in the mother country. It was not so much the opposition of the King and the bishops which thwarted the Puritan leaders as the fact that a large part of the people, perhaps a decided majority, were not in sympathy with the reform movement,. Even in their hour of triumph, when the monarchy had been overthrown by Cromwell's Ironsides, the Puritan leaders found themselves powerless to set up the government by the elect of which they had so long dreamed. The very suggestion, when made in the famous Barebones Parliament, led to the dissolution of that body and the proclaiming of the Protectorate. As for Oliver Cromwell, stern Independent though he was, his ideals were far from squaring with those of a Cotton or a Norton.

So it is to New England we must turn if we are to study the true Puritan State with all its distinctive features - congregations whose autonomy was derived from a covenant with God, a civil government in which only Church members participated, an educational system designed to buttress the orthodox religion, a rigid code of morals, the suppression of heresy. In fact, New England may be considered a laboratory of Puritan civilization.

The founders of the Massachusetts Bible State confidently expected it to endure forever. To them it was no social and religious experiment, but the carrying out of God's commands. Yet they had been in America but five or six years and were still struggling to clear the forests, lay out their meager crops and build their houses,, when alarming witnesses appear a few decades late the ministers were bewailing the general decline of godliness, were searching their souls for the cause of the general "decay," were warning the people that God had a controversy with them. Before the end of the seventeenth century it was apparent to all who had eyes to see that the Puritan experiment had failed.

The reforming synod of 1679, despite their earnest debates, their fasting and their prayers, threw little light upon the causes of decline. There had been heresy in the colony, they pointed out, swearing and drinking to excess had become common, the Sabbath day had been broken, love of God, parents had been lax with their children, Christian education was being neglected. But they failed to see that these things were symptoms rather than causes. Had they looked deeper they would have found behind them all human nature itself - man's natural desire to acquire the good things of this world, and his instinctive dislike of restraint, whether of his personal conduct or his freedom of thought or his conscience, or his right to have a voice in the conduct of the state.

There is no reason to doubt the sincere belief of Winthrop and Cotton and Shepard that their Bible State was shaped according to God's direction and that in consequence it was as near perfect as man could make it, a civil and religious Utopia. To those who complained that this structure was undemocratic they replied that it was intended to be so. But they would have been indignant had one stigmatized it as a tyranny. Yet in some respects a tyranny it was, a tyranny over men's minds, a restriction upon one's right to think, imposed by sermons, laws against heresy and the control of education and the press. In early Massachusetts one disagreed with the minister at one's peril.

The ministers and magistrates would have been even more indignant at the accusation that the structure of Church and State was designed with the end of bestowing upon them special privilege and power. Certainly such a charge would have been unjust.  Nonetheless special privilege and power it did give them. And though the ministers spoke of themselves as "God's poor servants," they valued their influence to the full and battled fiercely to retain it. In reading the election sermons one cannot escape the impression that a Norton or an Oakes or a Torrey took deep satisfaction in the privilege of scolding Magistrates and Deputies, of instructing them as to their duties and telling them what not to do. And in his won community the minister, even though perhaps a loving shepherd to his flock, demanded obedience as well as affection.

But the power of the few over the many, whether exercised by an aristocracy or a plutocracy or a theocracy, always is vulnerable to attack. If it is based on wealth, wealth may be confiscated; it is based on military strength, arms may overcome arms; if it is based on ascendancy over men's minds, reason may overthrow it. When the Puritans left England they fled form the things which seemed to them to threatened their souls, from a hostile King, from the bishops, from Church ceremonials, from lax morals, from disobedience ton God's "ordinances"; but they could not flee from human nature, they cold not flee from themselves., Upon landing on the shores of Massachusetts Bay the might fall on their knees to ask God to bless their great venture, but it was they themselves who brought the germs of failure.

As we have seen, economic conditions in New England - the expansion of foreign trade, the growth of fisheries, the shift form the agricultural village to the farm
tended to undermine the Puritan State. It is doubtful whether any other place on the American continent would have been more favorable. Had the Puritans planted themselves on the bans of the Potomac they would almost certainly have established the plantation economy so unfavorable to religion, and have sacrificed the autonomy they valued so highly for a binding trade with England. Had they landed on the Delaware they would have found conditions there, too, far from ideal. It was on the Delaware that Penn tried his Holy Experiment, and , it will be remembered, the Holy Experiment failed. As for new Jersey, a Puritan community based upon the ideals of Ames, Cotton and Davenport was actually established there in 1666, but before five decades have passed it lay in ruins.

Even had Winthrop and the other leaders of the Great Exodus led their followers into the very heart of the American continent to establish their Zion on the banks of the Ohio or the Mississippi, the results would not have been greatly different. Though there they might have found the complete isolation they so highly valued, though no heresies form without might have filtered in, though they might have enjoyed complete political and economic independence, though the supernatural might not have grown dim before the glaring light of rationalism, the experiment would certainly have failed. It probably would have endured longer than in New England, but its ultimate fate would have been just as certain.

The temple of American Puritanism fell because it was built, had to be built, on the sands of human nature. When the pillars of the structure - political autonomy, the close alliance of Church and State, the control of education, orthodoxy, the stern code of morals, isolation - on after another began to sag, it was not so much the pillars themselves as the sand which caused the trouble. It was from beneath that cam the succession of shocks which threatened the whole structure - the Roger Williams heresy, the Anne Hutchinson heresy, the Child petition, the Halfway Covenant, the demand for a wider franchise, the liberalizing of Harvard, the defeat of the clergy and magistrates in the witchcraft prosecutions, the growing laxness in morals.

In bringing to the New World a society which was largely the product of sixteenth-century thought and defending it there against change in a changing world, the Puritans attempted the impossible. As the decades of the seventeenth century passed, men's minds expanded to keep pace with new scientific discoveries, with new ideals of human rights, with new conceptions of man's relation to God. The leaders of the old order in Massachusetts of the moon around the earth as to block theses changes. While thy were vainly trying to crystallize the Puritan spirit of the time of Winthrop and Cotton, the tide of a new civilization swept over and
past them.

But failure did not bring immediate destruction. Certain features of the Puritan State survived not only the loss of the charter, the Glorious Revolution, the advance of rationalism, the weakening of the moral code, but even the American Revolution and the creation of a Federal Union. When the nineteenth century dawned New England society was still undemocratic ; the clergy and the moneyed classes were still entrenched behind a barrier of statutes, patronage, election devices and traditions. In Massachusetts no atheist, no Jew no man of meager income could be Governor ; in Connecticut no Roman Catholic could be governor. To be eligible for the Upper House in Massachusetts one must have a freehold of _300 or personal property valued at _600 ; in New Hampshire, a freehold of _200. "We have lived in a State which exhibits to the world a democratic exterior, " one New Englander remarked, "but which actually practices all the arts of an organized aristocracy under the management of the old firm of Moses and Aaron."

It was this remnant of the Puritan oligarchy which Thomas Jefferson and his New England henchmen of the Democratic-Republican Party attacked so fiercely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In Connecticut Abraham Bishop denounced the old charter of Charles II, upon which the government based its authority. "Let us sweep it away for a Constitution based on the will of the people," he said. The reformers denounced the clergy as a pack of privileged reactionaries who strutted around with queues and cocked hats and prated about government by the wisest and best. The conservatives fought back with every available weapon. From one pulpit after another Jefferson was denounced as an atheist, a liar, an enemy of the Churches, a Jacobin. "Let us not destroy the fabric erected by our fathers," the clergy pleaded. "The issue is clearly between religion and infidelity, morality and sin, sound government and anarchy." But they pleaded in vain. Election after election went against them, and new and more liberal Constitutions replaced the old governments. The day after the final defeat of the Connecticut conservatives, Lyman Beecher found his father seated with his head drooping on his breast. "Father, what are you thinking of?" He asked. "I am thinking of the Church of god," was the answer.

Despite the failure of the Puritan experiment it is a widely accepted belief that it was largely instrumental in molding the character not only of modern New England, but of the entire United States. Plymouth is spoken of as the birthplace of the nation; the Puritans, it is claimed, came to America as the champions of religious freedom, they founded American democracy, they gave us the public school system, they lit the torch of learning to shine in every corner of the country, they contributed an element of stern morality.

Obviously this rests more upon fiction than reality. Plymouth was not the birth place of the nation, for the nation was founded neither upon the ideals and institutions of the Pilgrims nor of the Puritans who followed them to New England. In fact, the use of the world "birthplace" as a metaphor to explain the origin of the country is quite misleading. When the English colonized America they established not just one beachhead on the coast, but a half dozen or more. And it was form each of these beachheads that European civilization swept westward or northwestward or southwestward to create what later became the United States. The founders of St. Mary's, Charleston, and Philadelphia were as truly founders of this nation as those of Jamestown and Plymouth.

The belief that the Puritans came to the New World in the cause of religious freedom is, of course, completely erroneous. The battle for toleration in this country was won in the face of their bitter opposition. It would have seemed to Mary's dyer, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Leddra., as they went to their fate on the gallows, ironical indeed that three centuries later their executioners should win applause as champions of religious freedom.

Nor did American democracy have its origin in New England. American democracy was born in England, it was defended and enlarged in Westminster Hall and upon many an English battlefield, it was brought to America by the settlers and there given a new expression, a new growth under the influence of frontier conditions. There were noble men in England, as in other colonies, who fought the good fight for democracy, but they were rebels against the old Puritan order, not its defenders. An oligarchy of Church members has no more place in the American system than Locke's feudal system, or a slave-holding aristocracy, or a plutocracy based on big business, or a proletarian dictatorship.

As for the Puritan code of morals and the Puritan Sabbath observance, despite the many lapses in colonial New England itself they have left an imprint on life in many parts of the United States which has not yet been entirely erased. Blue-laws are often ignored, but they remain on the statute books. Yet it is in the South that blue-laws have the greatest vitality, and the Southern inheritance is Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist, not Congregationalist.

A better case can be made for the influence of the Massachusetts school system, which was the most efficient in the colonies, the first to receive support from public funds, the first to be capped by a college. Yet the chief indebtedness of the United States is not to the founders of the Puritan educational system but to the men who so reconstructed it as to make it fit the needs of a democratic society. It was only under the pressure of Jeffersonian ideals that New England, two centuries after its founding, accepted the vital principle that public education should not be affiliated with any religious sect and should make civic duty rather than religion its
chief objective.

But it is to the everlasting credit of the founders of New England that they lit and kept alive in infant America the fires of scholarship. The great importance they attached to learning, the readiness with which they accepted the findings of noted scientist, their own scientific strivings bore rich fruit for New England and the United States. The fact that eleven new Englanders were invited to join the royal Society of London during the colonial period testifies to the intellectual activity of the region.

No truthful historian will withhold from New England the credit de her for her part in the creation and molding of the nation. Her sons were among the most active in winning independence, they did their full share in shaping the Constitution, they were pioneers in opening western new York, northern Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes region, they gave the country its first American literature, they made noble contributions in the fields of invention, science, art, architecture. But most of the contributions were made after the fall of the Puritan oligarchy, and the men to whom the chief credit is due were not its supporters, but, on the contrary, those who rebelled against it.