Covenanted, communal, congregational

I had thought I was done with my personal "1620 project," an effort to learn something about my ancestors who colonized Plymouth, Massachusetts, four hundred years ago. I found accounts of that society incomprehensible from my 20th century vantage point. Knowing I couldn't understand, I was ready to let this effort go.

But I haven't, because the historian of Christianity I trust most, Diarmaid MacCulloch, offered a blurb for a little book about the Plymouth community, promising a new slant on "one of the great founding narratives of American life." This proved true for me; Francis J. Bremer has made the concerns and intentions of those settlers far more accessible in One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England. 

Starting from the first gatherings of the little groups that later became the Plymouth settlement in old England, following them to the Netherlands where they came to fear their idiosyncratic communal religious practice might be interfered with, Bremer outlines the community's evolution as it took off for and survived in a new world. He passes on his understanding of what they cared about, their deepest commitments.

... this book focuses on the religious lives and ideas of the men and women who gathered to pursue a deeper understanding of God’s will ... The story of One Small Candle focuses on a world in which the boundary between the spiritual and the material did not exist. It was a world in which people might feel the direct inspiration of God’s spirit, but also sense the presence of the devil. Rather than dismiss the puritans’ awareness of the supernatural, we need to understand what that experience meant in the lives of men and women in early modern England and New England.

Yes, they seem strange. But in their own time, they also can seem relatively open-minded. Their original leader was one John Robinson whose puritanism seems to have been distinct from the combative Calvinist persuasion that dominated among English reformers in those years, ending in temporary overthrow of the established church, regicide, and the Civil War of 1642-51. Robinson was at one with the more Presbyterian Calvinists in rejecting the authority of bishops and the pope and also what he saw as the false gods of religious images and clerical vestments. But he enjoined on his flock:

... “for things left dark in Scripture, they must be unto us [a] matter of humiliation in our natural blindness, and of more earnest meditation and prayer with all good conscience.” He sought to learn through interaction with other churches and individuals, including those who were not separatist. In Amsterdam and then in Leiden, the members of the congregation came into contact with representatives of various different faiths, including Dutch Reformed, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian and Dutch Lutherans, and Dutch Mennonites.

Robinson did not in the end join the community's exodus to Massachusetts; in fact, the Plymouth settlement was without any clerical leader recognized in England until 1629. Instead, they took from their faith practice a communal form of both church and state governance.

One of the reasons they were scorned by people of more "orthodox" Christian practice, both from the English state church and more rigid Calvinist puritans, was their affirmation of what they called "prophesying."

Prophesying as such became a critical means by which the laity helped shape the understanding of fellow believers. It could take the form of an individual preaching “by way of prophesying” to a gathered congregation, as many laity would do in England and later in New England, particularly when a Christian group lacked the services of a clergyman. The term was also used to describe sessions in which various members of a religious community meeting privately would share their understanding of an issue before them in a form of inspired dialogue.

There is even evidence that this community was sometimes willing to listen to women in these sessions. They also differed from the more "orthodox" in holding that marriage no business of their church; it was an entirely civil practice. They seem to have had objections to capital punishment for offenses. This all seems more like what some later Quakers professed than our picture of New England puritans and indeed the Plymouth community were slightly suspicious outliers even in relation to the later Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Alone with each other on the edge of a new world, they extended the form of religious governance they had learned in England to civil governance. In England and the Netherlands, they had formed themselves as a covenanted community, bound to each other by their understanding of how they were to approach God. 

The congregation was a community of individuals committed to following what they perceived as a godly path and forged through a series of hardships in England and on their journey to Leiden. In addition to their espousal of Calvinist theological positions, this entailed upholding a social outlook that demanded that each individual make what sacrifices were necessary for the common good, and “such was the true piety, the humble zeal, and fervent Loue, of this people (while they thus lived together) towards God and his ways, and the singleheartedness and sincere affection one towards another, that they came as near the primitive pattern of the first Churches as any other church of these later times have done.” Indeed, what most offended Robinson and the church leaders was individuals who were “cleaving to themselves and retired from the common good.”

These proved serviceable values in unfamiliar New England. Stubbornness, yes; individualism, no. On landing on the cold beaches of the new world ...

the male passengers signed a document whereby they “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation . . . , and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought mete and convenient for the general good of the colony.”

From these beginnings we inherit both Congregationalist Protestantism and some suggestion of the possibility of a democratic society. There was a lot worse floating around in 1600s Europe.

Bremer provides an approachable account of their belief system and its implications. Other writers are more informative on the attitudes that made them (literally) an invading plague for region's original inhabitants and on their uneasy relationship to both England and Boston.

But since reading Bremer, I can move beyond feeling my ancestors were just repulsive. I'm glad I didn't let go my 1620 project without learning a little more.

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My 1620 project: Those Massachusetts Pilgrims
Those Plymouth puritans
Raised up by the wind in colonized Massachusetts
Enslaved people among the godly

Enslaved people among the godly

We sometimes think of slavery in the pre-emancipation U.S. republic as not only the "peculiar institution" of the southern states, but something foreign to the northern part of the Union. Not so, according to Western Washington professor Jared Ross Hardesty's Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. This slim book provides a solid, workmanlike survey of slavery's features, development, and eventual dispatch among my Massachusetts ancestors.

Puritan colonists were escaping what they experienced as an inadequately godly home country. They sought purity. Their peculiar form of slavery began in that context. For the English men and -women who settled New England, slavery was something both foreign and familiar. While they would not have encountered many enslaved Africans in England before sojourning across the Atlantic, they would have been aware of various forms of captivity and bondage from around the globe. As such, the first generation of New Englanders had a relatively ambivalent relationship with slavery. On the one hand, slavery was always on the table and a tool of colonization. There was, however, a deep-seated fear about the presence of so many enslaved "strangers" present in their colonial experiment in the North American wilderness. ...

The settlers' point of reference was the Bible -- a Bible whose own witness on bondage was ambivalent, including both liberation in the Exodus and the strictures of the book of Leviticus. Hardesty asserts that New Englanders associated both imported people of African descent and the Native Americans with the Biblical "children of Ham," descendants of Noah who God had cursed. In consequence of this impure ancestry, it was proper they should be servants of the godly. Enslaved people were thought of as savage and pagan -- and thus inferior to Englishmen -- but this was not the "scientific" racism of skin color developed by European societies of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

There were never huge numbers of enslaved persons in New England. This was a land of small farms and bustling towns where artisans thrived. But the port cities -- especially those of Newport and Providence, Rhode Island -- were central to the slave trade in English-speaking America. New Englanders conquered the Native people of their area and shipped the captives to the West Indies. The West Indies traded Africans who had been stolen from West Africa and enslaved on Caribbean plantations. Some enslaved people who ended up in New England were born in Jamaica and on other islands. 

New Englanders valued slaves for their labor.

Whether African or Indian, perceived to be part of the community or not, enslaved men and women were in New England to work. By 1700, slaves could be found working in nearly every sector of the New England economy. They provided labor on farms across the region, helping to clear forests, build fences, and plant crops. In that sense, they were both tools of imperialism and victims of it. Likewise, as the port cities of New England established commercial connections across the Atlantic world, and their economies became ever more complex, bondsmen and -women found themselves at work providing supplemental and skilled labor. As the seventeenth century progressed, an observer would have found increasing numbers of slaves working in shipyards, brick kilns, and artisanal workshops of places like Boston, Salem, New London, Hartford, Newport, and Providence. Meanwhile, as the region's wealth increased through commerce, many leading families purchased enslaved women to work in their kitchens, provide household labor such as sewing and weaving, and help raise children.

In the usually legalistic environment of the colonies, the status of these bound foreigners long remained not fully articulated. Colonial laws "both permitted and prohibited slavery." Hardesty concludes that, without completely defining the practice even among the colonizers themselves, New England slavery can be characterized as "equivocal, racialized, and legal."

This was a newly founded society that believed absolutely in god-given hierarchies whose preservation determined the good life. Even though these colonists had rather bravely ventured across a daunting ocean into an unknown land, they thought their settlements only thrived when their inhabitants obeyed the dictates of properly constituted authority. People were born into roles and were to stay in their places. So when they took up slavery, they folded the enslaved people into their accustomed pattern, much like dependent children and other servants. 

In this world structured by ties of dependency, slavery made sense. Laws and institutions supporting bondage were already in place and able to accommodate another form of oppression. The men and women trafficked to the region would have encountered colonies and peoples inculcated in this culture. New England colonists integrated slaves into their patriarchal families. As legal dependents in New England households, enslaved men and women were subject to the same authority and disciplinary regimen as other bound laborers. Like families, authorities envisioned slaves as part of the social hierarchy, although their blackness confined them to the bottom of the "great chain."

For enslaved men and women, patriarchal slavery was double-edged sword. On the one hand, they were are the bottom of the social hierarchy, yet the bottom was still a place in society. As such, they access to many of New England's institutions such as the region's many churches and the legal system. Likewise, they could use the language of dependence to leverage concessions from both masters and society at large.

 ... Unlike plantation colonies in the American South and Caribbean, the New England colonies did not create special slave courts or bar people of color from testifying in court. ... Legal personhood... came with two additional benefits for enslaved New Englanders, which further differentiated the region from other parts of the Americas. ... [M]asters did not have the right to the lives of their slaves, so masters could not kill their slaves. If an enslaver murdered his or her bondsman or  -woman, the enslaver faced criminal charges in the way one did for murdering a free person. Likewise, enslaved people could buy, sell, and own property. ...

How did slavery end in New England? In Hardesty's telling, essentially with the growth of ideas of equality among the owner population. In the time of the American revolution, slavery became untenable. The relative legal personhood of slaves, the fact that by the 1740s there was an ever more sizable group of literate Africans, often freed from bondage through their own skilled labor, made continuation of human slavery impossible. 

After the United States secured its independence in 1783, the new nation had to face the question of slavery. How could a nation dedicated to liberty and equality condone slavery? New Englanders had to confront this question with even greater concern. The region was the epicenter of revolutionary activity, and the hypocrisy of owning slaves was even more glaring. Disproportionately, enslaved men from New England served in the military. By the 1770s, the region was a hotbed of anti-slavery activity and New Englanders of color vociferously demanded their rights. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the two decades following the Declaration of Independence, New Englanders, black and white alike, systematically destroyed slavery.

The impulse for abolition came from above from revolutionary governments and below from the enslaved themselves.

The founding of a new nation -- however equivocally conceived in liberty -- changed possibilities for both whites and Blacks, both for both free men and enslaved people. Change does happen.

Afterthoughts: The post will likely conclude my personal 1620 project -- explorations in the history of my ancestors who arrived in Massachusetts 400 years ago. The little work I've done on this has been a good reminder to me that people in other times and places were very different from me and my contemporaries. And that I'll never really "get it." I find my puritan ancestors pretty repulsive. I'm not sure what that means -- perhaps nothing at all. Humans do our best; times and seasons come and go. Other 1620 posts:

My 1620 project: those Massachusetts Pilgrims

Those Plymouth puritans

Raised up by the wind in colonized Massachusetts

Raised up by the wind in colonized Massachusetts

When Puritan colonists descended on epidemic-decimated Massachusetts in the 1600s, they ostensibly believed it was their responsibility to evangelize the existing Native inhabitants. According to Michael P. Winship's Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America:

The English had always made pious, empty noise about the missionizing goals of their colonies. "Come over and help us," says the Native American on the 1629 seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Yet for already overworked New England ministers faced with what one called the "veriest ruins of mankind," it was easier to agree with the illustrious John Cotton about the Native Americans' place in God's plan for humanity. The Native Americans' mass conversion was to take place only after the mass conversion of the Jews. Since the Jews remained stubbornly Jewish, the Native Americans must remain, for the time being, Native American, and there was no point in putting energy into trying to convert them.

Somewhat surprisingly, some local Natives took it upon themselves to investigate the Englishmen's God. After all, that God seemed powerful while their Wampanoag spirits had allowed the epidemic.

Winship tells the story of a man named Waban who apparently had always felt a call to be a spiritual leader of some sort to his people, but never quite found his role until he decided to study the secrets of the English religion. He then led a community called by the Puritans the "Praying Indians" who attempted to adopt Puritan customs. They convinced at least some Puritan congregations of the authenticity of their acceptance of the Christ and were baptized -- a far from perfunctory rite in that colony. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts confirmed their title to their land and later the town of Natick was founded as a home for "Praying Indians." Conversion spread around Cape Cod and particularly offshore on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Though imported European illnesses continued to kill off members of the tribe for several generations, some Wampanoags found a way to make their peace with the white men's God.

Waban's acceptance of Christianity had one idiosyncrasy to it. He never adopted the practice, common among Praying Indians, of taking a Christian first name. Perhaps that was because he felt he did not need to, for his name was already charged with Christian significance. "Waban" meant "wind," and Eliot's first sermon to the Notamun Indians was on Ezekiel 37:1-4, which speaks of wind stirring dry bones.

Native Americans and English alike made the connection between the verse and Waban and his evangelizing activities. For Waban, his prophetic name meant that the coming of Christianity started before the arrival of Europeans. Other Native Americans recalled pre-contact dreams of the arrival of black-clothed missionaries, while still others were convinced that the missionaries were restoring wisdom the Native Americans had forgotten.

These newest of Native American stories, about how their God used the English to complete his bringing of this truth to them, meant nothing to most colonists. ...

The Praying Indian community was further repressed in the wake of what the colonists called "King Phillip's War" in 1676 when some of the tribespeople rose up against the English interlopers.

But elements of a syncretistic piety survive to this day among the Wampanoags. On Martha's Vineyard Island, the tribe is an important component of a racially diverse population. In southern Massachusetts in the last few days, the Trump Administration Department of the Interior is trying to "disestablish" the Mashpec Wampanoags. Perhaps the tribe is suspected of wanting to compete with Trump in a casino business? ...I thought of Waban when we read from Ezekiel about the dry bones brought to life by wind in online church on Sunday morning....The illustration here is from Native American Netroots.

I took up Hot Protestants as part of my personal "1620 project" in which I'm trying to learn a little more about the story of my ancestors who were among those tough but otherwise unattractive settlers at Plymouth 400 years ago. A previous post:
Those Plymouth Puritans

Those Plymouth puritans

Less religiously zealous English commentators of the 16th century maintained that Puritans were "hot protestants." The Protestant Reformation and the emergence of a mercantile bourgeois class which formed a novel, post-feudal, power center turned the island kingdom upside down. The puritans, rigorous and cantankerous Calvinists, were undesirable troublemakers in the view of nearly everyone who didn't agree with them. Between the 1540s and the 1690s

... puritans executed a king, helped remove another one, founded a short-lived republic in England, and established quasi-republics in New England. Coming from all ranks of society, puritans reshaped England's religious culture, destroyed much of its great medieval artistic legacy, wrote creeds and catechisms with worldwide impact, and created a lasting body of religious literature.

... They were the most determined seekers of salvation and the most committed activists for the moral and spiritual reformation necessary to keep God's wrath off England for its many sins and for its failure raise itself to the pristine standards of the Bible. ...

The central institution for guidance in these great puritan struggles with outward and inward sin was, or should have been, the Church of England. ... Puritans supported the Church of England's religious tasks, as well as its religious monopoly. God had only one truth, and England should have only one monarch and one church that governed the country together in their different spheres. The Reformation had been about religious liberty only insofar as that meant the liberty of follow God's law correctly, as outlined in the Bible.

For puritans, the problem with the Church of England was that it was following God's law only erratically, which meant, in their eyes, that it did none of its tasks well. It lagged far behind the continental Reformed churches in purging itself of the government, worship, and the inadequate discipline of its Catholic past. Ever-growing hostility toward puritanism from authorities in church and state eventually pushed some puritans to take the drastic step of immigrating to New England.

... In New England, puritans could finish the business of puritans: fashioning governments and properly reformed Calvinist church establishments that would supervise a unified Christian community, and see to it that God's elect were shepherded to heaven ...

The enormous virtue of Michael P. Winship's Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America, for someone who received a mostly forgotten introduction to mythologized Massachusetts "Pilgrim fathers" in grade school, is that it places those puritans firmly in the context of English political and religious history of which they were but a small offshoot -- albeit one that fathered a worldwide evangelical style which completely overshadowed its Church of England roots. Those who took off across the ocean dodged the high drama and considerable misery of England's religious/civil war of the mid-17th century; they were simply not important in the life and death struggles that consumed the mother country. Consequently they were able to design their own inward looking communities with little hindrance. For many years, they didn't have to realize how far out of phase with England's evolving society and culture they had become. The Atlantic is a big ocean

Here's some of Winship's take on my Plymouth ancestors, the earliest of the puritan emigrants. Their little separatist congregation included apparently some of the hottest of the hot ones.

By the end of the 1610s, their hopes of fostering reformation in the Netherlands were growing dim. Making a living was hard and the Dutch did not meet their high standards of piety. They told themselves that these problems were what prevented English people from flocking to them and freeing themselves from the corruptions of the Church of England. If the separatists went to America and prospered, however, their countrymen would be keener to join them there. And so the decision was made to cross the Atlantic. ... When the time came to depart from the Netherlands in July 1620, the majority of the congregation got cold feet. ...

Their ship got lost on what became the coast of Massachusetts; they settled in an abandoned native village they found depopulated by a recent epidemic; around half of the settlers died in the ensuing winter, leaving only ten households. Moreover they had brought with them no pastor; their former leader who they hoped to import died in London in an outbreak of the plague. They made do with lay leadership from one William Bradford whose chronicle of the colony gave it its later prominence

By 1626, the future of the debt-laden, minister less plantation, its roughly 150 settlers, and the reformation it had hoped to foster appeared grim. Plymouth seemed destined to join the growing scrap heap of failed English North American colonies. "To look humanly on the state of things as they presented themselves at this time, it is a marvel it did not wholly discourage them," Bradford wrote later. That the plantation did survive was because it would shortly acquire a sympathetic, larger, and much better connected puritan neighbor to the north ...

That is, my ancestors needed a rescue and they got lucky. The Massachusetts Bay colony at what became Boston replaced Plymouth as the center of the Calvinist bridgehead in New England. Its leaders were far more sophisticated, and better funded and connected, refugees from the English monarch's effort to suppress the strong strain of Calvinism in the Church of England. Regicide and Civil War followed from Charles II's failure to manage his religiously fractious kingdom.

Meanwhile, the little Plymouth settlement became part of a "United Colonies of New England" compact in 1643, consisting of almost 50 towns. This put this faraway appendage of the embattled English state well on its way to founding its own community "propagating and preserving the truth and liberties of the gospel," and providing for its own defense and welfare. Once kings were re-established in England -- not really until after 1688 -- the Crown tried to resume control over its overseas protestant colonies. The strains of that effort prefigured the eruption of discontent less than 100 years later which led to these United States.

Professor Winship is an American historian, but his real apparent field of interest is Protestant reformation politics in early modern England. This is a fascinating book about the many ins and outs of Calvinist fortunes vis a vis various iterations of governments and the Church of England. I found it solid on the American colonial aspects of the story, but this is not the best part. Still I would recommend taking a look if the course of English speaking Calvinism interests you. The book is also fascinating on what happened when these New England puritans tried to evangelize the native American people among whom they had plopped their little godly polity. I'm planing another post on that story.

I took up Hot Protestants as part of my personal "1620 project" in which I'm trying to learn a little more about the story of my ancestors who were among those tough but otherwise unattractive settlers at Plymouth 400 years ago. A previous post in the series is here:
Those Massachusetts pilgrims

My 1620 project: those Massachusetts Pilgrims

This year is the 400th anniversary my ancestors' arrival on this continent. They were among the Puritan colonists at Plymouth, Mass. Family lore says we are descended from both Priscilla Alden and Miles Standish, the couple who were protagonists of unrequited love in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popular 1858 romantic poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. They married others and had large families. Massachusetts was a lightly populated, much inter-related place for many years.

The Plymouth settlement acquired a huge role in the U.S. national legend as the northern "founding" -- a source of much of our religious and colonial history. This is mostly myth, but these were nonetheless intriguing people. All I was ever told about Plymouth as the child of a mother somewhat proud of her ancestry was that "they must have been very brave." Indeed these Puritans must have been. They crossed the Atlantic on a leaky, overcrowded cargo ship, 102 passengers on deck with 30 crew members. They failed to find their intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson River, and put ashore of necessity on the coast of Massachusetts two months later. Only 50 survived the first winter.

It seems fitting to share one last tidbit from Diarmaid MacCulloch' The Reformation: A History about this unpromising colonial enterprise. He sets them in their place in the conflicted landscape of England on the eve of the Civil War over state and religion (1642-1651). He agrees they were stubborn -- and perhaps a little daft.

[There were] those who saw the early Stuart Church of England as too flawed to be truly God's Church. ...The godly made their venture far to the north up the Atlantic coast from [Anglican and royalist] Virginia, in an area of forests and deep sea inlets that was soon named New England. The first colony in this northern region, Plymouth, in what later became a part of Massachusetts, was founded in 1620 by self-conscious separatists who made no bones about their wish to separate completely from corrupt English religion. These "Pilgrim Fathers" had first migrated as a single congregation to the Netherlands, but now sought a more challenging and less restricting place to become a "civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation." For all its subsequent fame in American mythology, their settlement remained small and poor, for not many wished to join them; they had made their brave voyage in the years before the group around William Laud achieved power in England [repressing their beliefs in the name of the king]. Notably, for all their intense practice of piety, there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth's existence.

[Though unwarranted by actual history, a] rhetoric of covenant, chosen-ness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden, has come down into American political and religious consciousness ... the varied spectrum of American Protestantism has grafted onto its memories of Massachusetts the appearance of the obstinate individualism and separatism of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers [an ethos deplored by the later Massachusetts congregationalist colony at Boston led by Governor "City on a Hill" John Winthrop].

My determination to learn a little more about these people this year was one impetus for my long exploration of MacCulloch's opus. There's much to unpack. More will follow this year from more sources.

Previous posts in my The Reformation: A History series:
The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past
The subversive weapon of the Reformation: musical propaganda
Bishop Laud and his cats
On blaming capitalism on the Protestant Reformation
But how did Reformation-era people live?

The illustration is from an 1884 Plymouth tourist postcard.