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Albion’s Seed

AMERICA
A CULTURAL HISTORY

VOLUME I: ALBION’S SEED
VOLUME II: AMERICAN PLANTATIONS

ALBION’S SEED

FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA

BY
DAVID HACKETT FISCHER

Oxford University Press

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Copyright © 1989 by David Hackett Fischer

First published in 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1991

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-
Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America/
David Hackett Fischer.
p. cm. (America, a cultural history; v. 1)
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-506905-1

1. United States—Civilization—To 1783.
2. United States—Civilization—English influences.
I. Title. II. Series: Fischer, David Hackett, 1935-
America, a cultural history, v. 1.
E169.1.F539 vol. 1 [E162] 973 s-dc20 [973] 89-16069 CIP

23 25 27 29 30 28 26 24

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For Robert and Patricia Blake

PREFACE

An Idea of Cultural History

History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies … The converse is also true: cultural schemes are historically ordered.

—Marshall Sahlins, 1985

THIS BOOK is the first in a series, which will hopefully comprise a cultural history of the United States. It is cultural in an anthropological rather than an aesthetic sense—a history of American folkways as they have changed through time.

Each volume (five are now in draft) centers on a major problem in American historiography. The first volume, Albion’s Seed, is about the problem of cultural origins. The second volume, American Plantations, studies the problem of culture and environment in the colonial era. The third volume examines the coming of independence as a cultural movement. Volume four takes up the problem of cultural change in the early republic, and volume five is about the Civil War as a cultural conflict. Other volumes will follow if the author is allowed to complete them.

This project has grown from an intellectual event that happened in the 1960s—a revolution in the writing of history, very much like the thought-revolutions described in Thomas Kuhn’s essays on the history of science, and Michael Foucault’s studies of social thought. Three generations ago, there was an established “paradigm” or “episteme” of historical knowledge. A writer had only to call his book a history in order to announce what sort of work it was, for history books were very much the same. History was about the past. It was a narrative discipline—a story-telling art. The stories that it told were about the organization of power and authority. Not all historians wrote political history, but most were interested in the politics of the subjects they studied. Labor historians wrote about labor leaders; historians of eduction studied school systems and the men who ran them; historians of women wrote about suffrage leaders and reform elites. Large masses of less eminent people also passed through the history books, or loitered in the wings like armies of anonymous extras on a Hippodrome stage. But the leading actors were small and highly individuated power-elites.

Historians studied these people through documentary sources. The results were organized as narratives and presented in the form of testimony—sometimes with specific citations, but for the most part historians testified to their readers, “I have steeped myself in the sources, and here is what I believe to have happened,” and they were believed, for this was a time when scholars were gentlemen, and a gentleman was as good as his word.

All of this activity created a coherent and plausible idea of history, which was at once a body of knowledge about the past and also a way of knowing it. Its masters were the great “narrative” historians such as Macaulay, Michelet, Ranke and Parkman. The last of this breed in America were Allan Nevins and Samuel Eliot Morison, who are both in their graves.

Early in the twentieth century, this paradigm of history began to come apart. Its ethical framework disintegrated. Suddenly, there were many new interests and problems that no longer seemed to fit. Anomalies were found; young scholars were promoted primarily for finding them. For two generations, historians became hunters after the anomalous fact. Each of their successes was a blow against the old synthesis, which was soon reduced to something like a ruin.

Some scholars struggled to repair it. Others attempted to replace it with a new synthesis. In the United States, the work of Turner, Beard, Parrington, Hofstadter, Boorstin and Hartz might be understood as a series of highly tentative paradigm sketches. But nobody could put the pieces together again. This was the period (1935-60) when historical relativism came into fashion, and every convention of the American Historical Association became an organized expression of professional Angst.

Then, in the decade of the 1960s, something new began to happen. Young scholars in Europe and America were inspired by the French school of the Annales to invent a new kind of history which differed from the old paradigm in all of the characteristics mentioned above. This new history was not really about the past at all, but about change—with past and present in a mutual perspective. It was not a story-telling but a problem-solving discipline. Its problematiques were about change and continuity in the acts and thoughts of ordinary people—people in the midst of others; people in society. The goal of this new social history was nothing less than an histoire totale of the human experience. To that end, the new historians drew upon many types of evidence: documents, statistics, physical artifacts, iconographic materials and much more. They also presented their findings in a new way—not as testimony but as argument. An historian was required not only to make true statements but also to demonstrate their truthfulness by rigorous methods of logic and empiricism. This epistemic revolution was the most radical innovation of the new history. It was also the most difficult for older scholars to understand.

In its early years, the new social history claimed to be not merely a new subdiscipline of history but the discipline itself in a new form. It promised to become a major synthesizing discipline in the human sciences—even the synthesizing discipline. Unhappily, these high goals were not reached. The new social history succeeded in building an institutional base, and also in exploring many new fields of knowledge. But in Fernand Braudel’s words, it was overwhelmed by its own success. Instead of becoming a synthesizing discipline, it disintegrated into many special fields—women’s history, labor history, environmental history, the history of aging, the history of child abuse, and even gay history—in which the work became increasingly shrill and polemical. Moreover, too many important subjects were excluded from the new history—politics, events, individuals, even ideas—and too many problems were diminished by materialist explanations and “modernization models.” By the 1980s the new social history had lost much of its intellectual momentum, and most of its conceptual range. It had also lost touch with the larger purposes that had called it into being.

From this mixed record of success and failure, a question inevitably arises. What comes after the new history? How can we continue to move forward? How might we strengthen the weakened hand of synthesis in an analytic discipline? What larger intellectual and cultural purposes might an historian seek to serve?

To those questions, this series offers an answer in its organizing idea of cultural history. Briefly, it seeks to find a way forward by combining several elements which the old and new histories have tended to keep apart. In terms of substance, it is about both elites and ordinary people, about individual choices and collective experiences, about exceptional events and normative patterns, about vernacular culture and high culture, about the problem of society and the problem of the state. To those ends, it tries to keep alive the idea of histoire totale by employing a concept of culture as a coherent and comprehensive whole.

In causal terms, this inquiry searches for a way beyond reductive materialist models (of both the left and the right) which are presently in fashion among historians in the United States and Britain, where materialism became a cultural mania during the Reagan and Thatcher years. Without denying the importance of material factors in history, one might assert that they are only a part of a larger whole, and that claims for their priority are rarely grounded in empirical fact. This inquiry seeks to place them in their proper context.

In terms of epistemology, this work tries to find a way forward in yet another way. The old history was idealist in its epistemic assumptions. Its major findings were offered as “interpretations” which tended to be discovered by intuition and supported by testimony. The new social history aspired to empiricism, but the epistemic revolution was incomplete—and something of the old interpretative sweep was lost in the process. This work tries to combine the interpretative thrust of the old history with the empiricism of the new—interpretative sails and empirical anchors, so to speak.

In its temporal aspect, this inquiry seeks a new answer to an old problem about the relationship between the past and the present. Many working historians think of the past as fundamentally separate from the present—the antiquarian solution. Others study the past as prologue to the present—the presentist solution. This work is organized around a third idea—that every period of the past, when understood in its own terms, is immediate to the present. This “immediatist” solution cannot be discussed at length here; it must be defined ostensively by the work itself, and especially by the conclusion. Suffice to say that the temporal problem in this volume is to explore the immediacy of the earliest period of American history without presentism, and at the same time to understand the cultures of early America in their own terms without antiquarianism.

An immediatist idea of a relationship between the past and present might also support a more spacious relationship between history and other fields of knowledge. The old history was conceived as an autonomous discipline. The new history was more interdisciplinary—but its efforts consisted mainly of borrowings from other fields. This work is meant to suggest that major problems in many disciplines are insoluble without the application of historical knowledge. A case in point is the problem of wealth distribution; this work will argue, for example, that the distribution of wealth is determined not merely by timeless economic laws but by the interplay of cultural values and individual purposes which are rooted in the past.

Such an approach to the relationship between past and present might also help to enlarge historical inquiry in its ethical dimension. This work, for example, tries to apply new empirical methods and findings to old problems about the history of freedom in the world. It suggests that the problem of liberty cannot be discussed intelligently without a discrimination of libertarianisms which must be made in historical terms. Empirical knowledge of the past is not merely useful but necessary to an understanding of our moral choices in the present.

Finally, in terms of rhetoric, a problem has arisen from the empirical requirements of the new history, which have destroyed the possibility of simple story-telling in original scholarship without changing the narrative nature of the writing that historians do. This series seeks to combine story-telling and problem-solving in a “braided narrative” of more complex construction.

In all of those many ways, this idea of cultural history rests upon an assumption that the old and the new history are not two disciplines but one. The progress of historical knowledge is best served by their creative integration.

Old Headington, Oxford

Wayland, Massachusetts

D.H.F.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Drawings
by Jennifer Brody

Maps
by Andrew Mudryk

Tables

Albion’s Seed

INTRODUCTION

The Determinants of a Voluntary Society

Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

—Paul Gauguin, 1897

IN BOSTON’S MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, not far from the place where English Puritans splashed ashore in 1630, there is a decidedly unpuritanical painting of bare-breasted Polynesian women by Paul Gauguin. The painting is set on a wooded riverbank. In the background is the ocean, and the shadowy outline of a distant land. The canvas is crowded with brooding figures in every condition of life—old and young, dark and fair. They are seen in a forest of symbols, as if part of a dream. In the corner, the artist has added an inscription: “D’ou venons nous? Qui sommes nous? Ou allons nous?”

That painting haunts the mind of this historian. He wonders how a Polynesian allegory found its way to a Puritan town which itself was set on a wooded riverbank, with the ocean in the background and the shadow of another land in the far distance. He observes the crowd of museumgoers who gather before the painting. They are Americans in every condition of life, young and old, dark and fair. Suddenly the great questions leap to life. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

The answers to these questions grow more puzzling the more one thinks about them. We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles … but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.”¹

We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable. The search for the origins of this system is the central problem in American history. It is also the subject of this book.

The Question Framed

The organizing question here is about what might be called the determinants of a voluntary society. The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.

Much has been written on this subject—more than anyone can possibly read. But a very large outpouring of books and articles contains a remarkably small number of seminal ideas. Most historians have tried to explain the determinants of a voluntary society in one of three ways: by reference to the European culture that was transmitted to America, or to the American environment itself, or to something in the process of transmission.

During the nineteenth century the first of these explanations was very much in fashion. Historians believed that the American system had evolved from what one scholar called “Teutonic germs” of free institutions, which were supposedly carried from the forests of Germany to Britain and then to America. This idea was taken up by a generation of historians who tended to be Anglo-Saxon in their origins, Atlantic in their attitudes and Whiggish in their politics. Most had been trained in the idealist and institutional traditions of the German historical school.²

For a time this Teutonic thesis became very popular—in Boston and Baltimore. But in Kansas and Wisconsin it was unkindly called the “germ theory” of American history and laughed into oblivion. In the early twentieth century it yielded to the Turner thesis, which looked to the American environment and especially to the western frontier as a way of explaining the growth of free institutions in America. This idea appealed to scholars who were middle western in their origins, progressive in their politics, and materialist in their philosophy.³

In the mid-twentieth century the Turner thesis also passed out of fashion. Yet another generation of American historians became deeply interested in processes of immigration and ethnic pluralism as determinants of a voluntary society. This third approach was specially attractive to scholars who were not themselves of Anglo-Saxon stock. Many were central European in their origin, urban in their residence, and Jewish in their religion. This pluralistic “migration model” is presently the conventional interpretation.⁴

Other explanations have also been put forward from time to time, but three ideas have held the field: the germ theory, the frontier thesis, and the migration model.

This book returns to the first of those explanations, within the framework of the second and third. It argues a modified “germ thesis” about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. The argument is complex, and for the sake of clarity might be summarized in advance. It runs more or less as follows.

The Argument Stated

During the very long period from 1629 to 1775, the present area of the United States was settled by at least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts during a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640. The second was the migration of a small Royalist elite and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1642-75). The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a flow of English-speaking people from the borders of North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry mostly during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World.

By the year 1775 these four cultures were fully established in British America. They spoke distinctive dialects of English, built their houses in diverse ways, and had different methods of doing much of the ordinary business of life. Most important for the political history of the United States, they also had four different conceptions of order, power and freedom which became the cornerstones of a voluntary society in British America.

Today less than 20 percent of the American population have any British ancestors at all. But in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.⁵ Strong echoes of four British folkways may still be heard in the major dialects of American speech, in the regional patterns of American life, in the complex dynamics of American politics, and in the continuing conflict between four different ideas of freedom in the United States. The interplay of four “freedom ways” has created an expansive pluralism which is more libertarian than any unitary culture alone could be. That is the central thesis of this book: the legacy of four British folkways in early America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today.

The Problem of Folkways

Before we study this subject in detail, several conceptual problems require attention. All are embedded in the word “folkways.” This term was coined by American sociologist William Graham Sumner to describe habitual “usages, manners, customs, mores and morals” which he believed to be practiced more or less unconsciously in every culture. Sumner thought that folkways arose from biological instincts. “Men begin with acts,” he wrote, “not with thoughts.”⁶

In this work “folkway” will have a different meaning. It is defined here as the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts. It is not primarily biological or instinctual in its origins, as Sumner believed, but social and intellectual. Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense—though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact—the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

A folkway should not be thought of in Sumner’s sense as something ancient and primitive which has been inherited from the distant past. Folkways are often highly persistent, but they are never static. Even where they have acquired the status of a tradition they are not necessarily very old. Folkways are constantly in process of creation, even in our own time.⁷

Folkways in this normative sense exist in advanced civilizations as well as in primitive societies. They are functioning systems of high complexity which have actually grown stronger rather than weaker in the modern world. In any given culture, they always include the following things:

—Speech ways, conventional patterns of written and spoken language: pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar.

—Building ways, prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another.

—Family ways, the structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality.

—Marriage ways, ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce.

—Gender ways, customs that regulate social relations between men and women.

—Sex ways, conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance.

—Child-rearing ways, ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture.

—Naming ways, onomastic customs including favored forenames and the descent of names within the family.

—Age ways, attitudes toward age, experiences of aging, and age relationships.

—Death ways, attitudes toward death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices.

—Religious ways, patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture.

—Magic ways, normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural.

—Learning ways, attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education.

—Food ways, patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting.

—Dress ways, customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment.

—Sport ways, attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport.

—Work ways, work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work.

—Time ways, attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life.

—Wealth ways, attitudes toward wealth and patterns of its distribution.

—Rank ways, the rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and relations between different ranks.

—Social ways, conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation.

—Order ways, ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly.

—Power ways, attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation.

—Freedom ways, prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions.

Every major culture in the modern world has its own distinctive customs in these many areas. Their persistent power might be illustrated by an example. Consider the case of wealth distribution. Most social scientists believe that the distribution of wealth is determined primarily by material conditions. For Marxists the prime mover is thought to be the means of production; for Keynesians it is the process of economic growth; for disciples of Adam Smith it is the market mechanism. But to study this subject in a comparative way is to discover that the distribution of wealth has varied from one culture to another in ways that cannot possibly be explained by material processes alone. Another powerful determinant is the inherited structure of values and customs which might be called the “wealth ways” of a culture.

These wealth ways are communicated from one generation to the next by many interlocking mechanisms—child-rearing processes, institutional structures, cultural ethics, and codes of law—which create ethical imperatives of great power in advanced societies as well as primitive cultures. Indeed, the more advanced a society becomes in material terms, the stronger is the determinant power of its folkways, for modern technologies act as amplifiers, and modern institutions as stabilizers, and modern elites as organizers of these complex cultural processes.⁸

The purpose of this book is to examine those processes at work in what is now the United States, where at least four British folk cultures were introduced at an early date. Their variety makes them unusually accessible for study, as William Graham Sumner himself was one of the first to observe. He found his leading example of folkways not in primitive tribes but in the regional culture of New England. Sumner wrote:

The mores of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an illustration be seen, both of the persistency of the spirit of mores, and their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have extended to a large immigrant population, and have won control over them. They have also been carried to the new states by emigrants, and their perpetuation there is an often-noticed phenomenon.⁹

The same historical pattern appears in the American south. However different that region may be from New England, it also has preserved its own distinctive folkways through many generations. Something similar also happened in the American midlands, and in the American west. Throughout all four of these broad areas we find the same processes of cultural persistence, variability and adaptability that William Graham Sumner observed in New England. Even as the ethnic composition of these various regions of the United States has changed profoundly, regional cultures themselves have persisted, and are still very powerful even in our own time. All of them derive from folkways that were planted in the American colonies more than two centuries ago.

If these folkways are to be understood truly, they must be described empirically—that is, by reference to evidence which can be verified or falsified. In this work, descriptive examples are presented in the text for illustrative purposes, and empirical indicators are summarized in the notes.¹⁰ Not all of these folkways can be treated empirically, but the work of many scholars has produced a broad range of historical evidence for each of the four major cultures in British America. Let us begin with Puritan New England, which was founded by the first great migration, and take up the others in chronological order.

EAST ANGLIA TO MASSACHUSETTS

The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-1641

You talk of New England; I truly believe

Old England’s grown new and doth us deceive.

I’ll ask you a question or two, by your leave:

And is not old England grown new?

New fashions in houses, new fashions at table,

The old servants discharged, the new are more able;

And every old custome is but an old fable!

And is not old England grown new? …

Then talk you no more of New England!

New England is where old England did stand,

New furnished, new fashioned, new womaned, new manned

And is not old England grown new?

—Anonymous verse, c. 1630¹

ON A BLUSTERY MARCH MORNING in the year 1630, a great ship was riding restlessly at anchor in the Solent, near the Isle of Wight. As the tide began to ebb, running outward past the Needles toward the open sea, a landsman watching idly from the shore might have seen a cloud of white smoke billow from the ship’s side. A few seconds later, he would have heard the sharp report of a cannon, echoing across the anchorage. Another cannon answered from the shore, and on board the ship the flag of England fluttered up its halyard—the scarlet cross of Saint George showing bravely on its field of white. Gray sails blossomed below the great ship’s yards, and slowly she began to move toward the sea. The landsman might have observed that she lay deep in the water, and that her decks were crowded with passengers. He would have noticed her distinctive figurehead—a great prophetic eagle projecting from her bow. And he might have made out her name, gleaming in newly painted letters on her hull. She was the ship Arbella, outward bound with families and freight for the new colony of Massachusetts Bay.²

Arbella was no ordinary emigrant vessel. She carried twenty-eight great guns and was the “admiral” or flagship of an entire fleet of English ships that sailed for Massachusetts in the same year. The men and women who embarked in her were also far from being ordinary passengers. Traveling in the comfort of a cabin was Lady Arbella Fiennes, sister of the Earl of Lincoln, in whose honor the ship had received her name. Also on board was her husband, Isaac Johnson, a rich landowner in the county of Rutland; her brother Charles Fiennes; and her friend the future poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet, who had grown up in the household of the Earl of Lincoln. Other berths were occupied by the Earl’s high stewards Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Dudley; by an English gentleman called Sir Richard Saltonstall; and by a Suffolk lawyer named John Winthrop who was destined to become the leader of the colony.³

Most of Arbella’s passengers were families of lesser rank, but very few of them came from the bottom of English society. Their dress and demeanor marked them as yeomen and artisans of middling status. Their gravity of manner and austerity of appearance also said much about their religion and moral character.

Below decks, the great ship was a veritable ark. Its main hold teemed with horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, cats and dunghill fowl. Every nautical nook and cranny was crowded with provisions. In the cabin were chests of treasure which would have made a rich haul for the Dunkirkers who preyed upon Protestant shipping in the English Channel.⁴

The ship Arbella was one of seventeen vessels that sailed to Massachusetts in the year 1630. She led a great migration which for size and wealth and organization was without precedent in

These Puritan leaders personified the spiritual striving that brought the Bay colonists to America. John Winthrop (center front) was a pious East Anglian lawyer who became governor of Massachusetts. His son John Winthrop, Jr. (center rear) was governor of Connecticut, entrepreneur, and scientist, much respected for what Cotton Mather called his “Christian qualities … studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” Sir Harry Vane (right rear) was briefly governor of Massachusetts at the age of 24. He was reprimanded for long hair and elegant dress, but was so rigorous in his Puritanism that he believed only the thrice-born to be truly saved. Sir Richard Saltonstall (right front) founded Watertown and colonized Connecticut, but dissented on toleration and returned to England. William Pynchon (left front) founded Springfield and wrote a book on atonement that was ordered burned in Boston. Hugh Peter (left rear) was minister in Salem, a founder of Harvard and an English Parliamentary leader who was executed in 1660. The original portraits are in the Am. Antiq. Soc., Essex Institute, Mass. Hist. Soc., Queens College (Cambridge) and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

England’s colonization of North America. Within a period of eleven years, some 80,000 English men, women and children swarmed outward from their island home. This exodus was not a movement of attraction. The great migration was a great flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at home. It continued from 1629 to 1640, precisely the period that Whig historians called the “eleven years’ tyranny,” when Charles I tried to rule England without a Parliament, and Archbishop William Laud purged the Anglican church of its Puritan members. These eleven years were also an era of economic depression, epidemic disease, and so many sufferings that to John Winthrop it seemed as if the land itself had grown “weary of her Inhabitants, so as man which is most precious of all the Creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth they tread upon.”⁵

In this time of troubles there were many reasons for leaving England, and many places to go. Perhaps 20,000 English people moved to Ireland. Others in equal number left for the Netherlands and the Rhineland. Another 20,000 sailed to the West Indian islands of Barbados, Nevis, St. Kitts, and the forgotten Puritan colony of Old Providence Island (now a haven for drug-smugglers off the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua). A fourth contingent chose to settle in Massachusetts, and contributed far beyond its numbers to the culture of North America.⁶

The seventeen vessels that sailed to Massachusetts in 1630 were the vanguard of nearly 200 ships altogether, each carrying about a hundred English souls. A leader of the colony reckoned that there were about 21,000 emigrants in all. This exodus continued from 1630 to the year 1641. While it went on, the North Atlantic Ocean was a busy place. In the year 1638, one immigrant sighted no fewer than thirteen other vessels in midpassage between England and Massachusetts.⁷

After the year 1640, New England’s great migration ended as abruptly as it began. The westward flow of population across the Atlantic suddenly stopped and ran in reverse, as many Massachusetts Puritans sailed home to serve in the Civil War. Migration to New England did not resume on a large scale for many years—not until Irish Catholics began to arrive nearly two centuries later.⁸

The emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the great migration became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population. They multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800, six million by 1900, and more than sixteen million by 1988—all descended from 21,000 English emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629 to 1640.

The children of the great migration moved rapidly beyond the borders of Massachusetts. They occupied much of southern New England, eastern New Jersey and northern New York. In the nineteenth century, their descendants migrated east to Maine and Nova Scotia, north to Canada, and west to the Pacific. Along the way, they founded the future cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Paul, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Salt Lake City. Today, throughout this vast area, most families of Yankee descent trace their American beginnings to an English ancestor who came ashore in Massachusetts Bay within five years of the year 1635.

Religious Origins of the Great Migration

For these English Puritans, the new colony of Massachusetts had a meaning that is not easily translated into the secular terms of our materialist world. “A letter from New England,” wrote Joshua Scottow, “ … was venerated as a Sacred Script, or as the writing of some Holy Prophet. ‘Twas carried many miles, where divers came to hear it.”¹

The great migration developed in this spirit—above all as a religious movement of English Christians who meant to build a new Zion in America. When most of these emigrants explained their motives for coming to the New World, religion was mentioned not merely as their leading purpose. It was their only purpose.²

This religious impulse took many different forms—evangelical, communal, familial and personal. The Massachusetts Bay Company officially proclaimed the purpose of converting the natives. Its great seal featured an Indian with arms beckoning, and five English words flowing from his mouth: “Come over and help us.” However bizarre this image may seem to us, it had genuine meaning for the builders of the Bay Colony.³

A very different religious motive was expressed by many leaders of the Colony, who often declared their collective intention to build a “Bible Commonwealth” which might serve as a model for mankind. The classical example was John Winthrop’s exhortation which many generations of New England schoolchildren have been made to memorize: “We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the

Ninety Puritan ministers came to New England in the Great Migration. They were a close-knit cultural elite, strong in their spiritual purposes, and highly respected for intellect and character. John Cotton (front center) was a leading theologian of the Congregational middle way and minister in Boston, a leader much loved for his piety and wisdom. Richard Mather (front left) became minister in Dorchester, and architect of the Cambridge Platform (New England’s system of church discipline). John Eliot (left rear) served as minister in Roxbury and Indian missionary who founded the “praying town” of Natick and translated the Bible into Algonkian. Peter Bulkeley (right rear) was minister in Concord, and a gentleman of old family and large fortune which he devoted to God’s work in America. John Davenport (front right) was a Londoner who founded New Haven, the most conservative and purse-proud colony in New England. Their portraits are owned by the American Antiquarian Society, Peter Bulkeley Brainerd, the Connecticut Historical Society, Harvard University and the Huntington Library.

eyes of all people are upon us. … we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”⁴

But most emigrants did not think in these terms. They were not much interested in converting heathen America, and had little hope of reforming Christian Europe. Mainly they were concerned about the spiritual condition of their own families and especially their children. Lucy Downing, the Puritan wife of a London lawyer, wrote to her brother in New England on the eve of her own sailing:

If we see God withdrawing His ordinances from us here, and enlarging His presence to you there, I should then hope for comfort in the hazards of the sea with our little ones shrieking about us … in such a case I should [more] willingly venture my children’s bodies and my own for them, than their souls.⁵

Many others embarked upon entirely personal errands. A tailor named John Dane explained that he “bent myself to come to New England, thinking that I should be more free here than there from temptations.” His parents did not approve, but agreed to settle the question by consulting the Bible. Dane wrote afterwards:

To return to the way and manner of my coming: … My father and mother showed themselves unwilling. I sat close by a table where there lay a Bible. I hastily took up the Bible, and told my father if, where I opened the Bible, there I met with anything either to encourage or discourage, that should settle me. I, opening of it, not knowing no more than the child in the womb, the first I cast my eyes on was: “Come out from among them, touch no unclean thing, and I will be your God and you shall be my people.” My father and mother never more opposed me, but furthered me in the thing, and hastened after me as soon as they could.

John Dane and his family did not emigrate to escape persecution. Even that motive, which we call “religious” in our secular age, was more worldly than his own thinking. He never wrote in grand phrases about a “city on a hill,” and showed no interest in saving any soul except his own. John Dane’s purpose in coming to New England was to find a place where he could serve God’s will and be free of temptation. The New World promised to be a place where he would “touch no unclean thing.” In that respect, he was typical of the Puritan migration.⁶

Most immigrants to Massachusetts shared this highly personal sense of spiritual striving. Their Puritanism was not primarily a formal creed or reasoned doctrine. In Alan Simpson’s phrase it was the “stretched passion” of a people who “suffered and yearned and strived with an unbelievable intensity.”⁷

That “stretched passion” was shared by the great majority of immigrant families to Massachusetts. This truth has been challenged by materialist historians in the twentieth century, but strong evidence appears in the fact that most adult settlers, in most Massachusetts towns, joined a Congregational church during the first generation. This was not easy to do. After 1635, a candidate had to stand before a highly skeptical group of elders, and satisfy them in three respects: adherence to Calvinist doctrines, achievement of a godly life, and demonstrable experience of spiritual conversion.⁸

These requirements were very rigorous—more so than in the Calvinist churches of Europe. Even so, a majority of adults in most Massachusetts towns were willing and able to meet them. In the town of Dedham, for example, 48 people joined the church by 1640–25 women and 23 men, out of 35 families in the town. Most families included at least one church member; many had two. By 1648, Dedham’s church members included about 70 percent of male taxpayers and an even larger proportion of women.⁹ That pattern was typical of country towns in Massachusetts. In Sudbury, 80 were admitted out of 50 or 60 families. In Watertown, 250 were in “church fellowship” out of 160 families. In Rowley, we are told that “a high percentage of men” joined the church—and probably a higher percentage of women—despite local requirements that were even more stringent than in the Colony as whole.¹⁰

Church membership was not as widespread in seaport towns such as Salem or Marblehead. But even in Salem more than 50 percent of taxable men joined the church in the mid-seventeenth century. Those who did not belong were mostly young men without property.¹¹

This pattern of church membership reveals a vital truth about New England’s great migration. It tells us that the religious purposes of the colony were not confined to a small “Puritan oligarchy,” as some historians still believe, and that the builders of the Bay Colony did not come over to “catch fish,” as materialists continue to insist. The spiritual purposes of the colony were fully shared by most men and women in Massachusetts. Here was a fact of high importance for the history of their region.¹²

The religious beliefs of these Puritans were highly developed before they came to America. Revisionist historians notwithstanding, these people were staunch Calvinists. Their spiritual leader John Cotton declared, “I have read the fathers and the schoolmen, and Calvin too; but I find that he that has Calvin, has them all.” Many other ministers agreed.¹³

Without attempting to describe their complex Calvinist beliefs in a rounded way, a few major doctrines might be mentioned briefly, for they became vitally important to the culture of New

England. These Puritan ideas might be summarized in five words: depravity, covenant, election, grace, and love.¹⁴

First was the idea of depravity which to Calvinists meant the total corruption of “natural man” as a consequence of Adam’s original sin. The Puritans believed that evil was a palpable presence in the world, and that the universe was a scene of cosmic struggle between darkness and light. They lived in an age of atrocities without equal until the twentieth century. But no evil ever surprised them or threatened to undermine their faith. One historian remarks that “it is impossible to conceive of a disillusioned Puritan.” They believed as an article of faith that there was no horror which mortal man was incapable of committing. The dark thread of this doctrine ran through the fabric of New England’s culture for many generations.¹⁵

The second idea was that of the covenant. The Puritans founded this belief on the book of Genesis, where God made an agreement with Abraham, offering salvation with no preconditions but many obligations. This idea of a covenant had been not prominent in the thinking of Luther or Calvin, but it became a principle of high importance to English Puritans. They thought of their relationship with God (and one another) as a web of contracts. As we shall see, the covenant became a metaphor of profound importance in their thought.¹⁶

A third idea was the Calvinist doctrine of election—which held that only a chosen few were admitted to the covenant. One of Calvinism’s Five Points was the doctrine of limited atonement, which taught that Christ died only for the elect—not for all humanity. The iron of this Calvinistic creed entered deep into the soul of New England.

A fourth idea was grace, a “motion of the heart” which was God’s gift to the elect, and the instrument of their salvation. Much Puritan theology, and most of the Five Points of Calvinism, were an attempt to define the properties of grace, which was held to be unconditional, irresistible and inexorable. They thought that it came to each of them directly, and once given would never be taken away. Grace was not merely an idea but an emotion, which has been defined as a feeling of “ecstatic intimacy with the divine.” It gave the Puritans a soaring sense of spiritual freedom which they called “soul liberty.”¹⁷

A fifth idea, often lost in our image of Puritanism, was love. Their theology made no sense without divine love, for they believed that natural man was so unworthy that salvation came only from God’s infinite love and mercy. Further, the Puritans believed that they were bound to love one another in a Godly way. One leader told them that they should “look upon themselves, as being bound up in one Bundle of Love; and count themselves obliged, in very close and Strong Bonds, to be serviceable to one another.” This Puritan love was a version of the Christian caritas in which people were asked to “lovingly give, as well as lovingly take, admonitions.” It was a vital principle in their thought.¹⁸

These ideas created many tensions in Puritan minds. The idea of the covenant bound Puritans to their worldly obligations; the gift of grace released them from every bond but one. The doctrine of depravity filled their world with darkness; the principle of election brought a gleam of light. Puritan theology became a set of insoluble logic problems about how to reconcile human responsibility with God’s omnipotence, how to find enlightenment in a universe of darkness, how to live virtuously in a world of evil, and how to reconcile the liberty of a believing Christian with the absolute authority of the word.

For many generations these problems were compressed like coiled springs into the culture of New England. Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

Social Origins of the Puritan Migration

The builders of the Bay Colony thought of themselves as a twice-chosen people: once by God, and again by the General Court of Massachusetts. Other English plantations eagerly welcomed any two-legged animal who could be dragged on board an emigrant ship. But Massachusetts chose its colonists with care. Not everyone was allowed to settle there. In doubtful cases, the founders of the colony actually demanded written proof of good character. This may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation.¹

Further, after these immigrants arrived, the social chaff was speedily separated from Abraham’s seed. Those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies or sent back to England. This complex process of cultural winnowing created a very special population.²

To a remarkable degree, the founders of Massachusetts traveled in families—more so than any major ethnic group in American history. In one contingent of 700 who sailed from Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) and Sandwich (Kent), 94 percent consisted of family groups. Among another group of 680 emigrants, at least 88 percent traveled with relatives, and 73 percent arrived as members of complete nuclear families. These proportions were the highest in the history of American immigration.³

The nuclear families that moved to Massachusetts were in many instances related to one another before they left England. A ballad of the great migration commemorated these ties:

Stay not among the Wicked,

Lest that with them you perish,

But let us to New-England go,

And the Pagan people cherish …

For Company I fear not,

There goes my cousin Hannah,

And Reuben so persuades to go

My Cousin Joyce, Susanna.

With Abigail and Faith,

And Ruth, no doubt, comes after;

And Sarah kind, will not stay behind;

My cousin Constance daughter.⁴

From the start, this exceptionally high level of family integration set Massachusetts apart from other American colonies.

Equally extraordinary was the pattern of age distribution. America’s immigrants have typically been young people in their teens and twenties. A distribution which is “age-normal” in demographic terms is decidedly exceptional among immigrant populations. But more than 40 percent of immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony were mature men and women over twenty-five, and nearly half were children under sixteen. Only a few migrants were past the age of sixty, but in every other way the distribution of ages was remarkably similar to England’s population in general.⁵

Also unusual was the distribution of sexes, which differed very much from most colonial populations. The gender ratio of European migrants to Virginia was four men for every woman. In New Spain it was ten men for every woman; in Brazil, one hundred men for every Portuguese woman. Only a small minority of immigrants in those colonies could hope to live in households such as they had left behind in Europe. But in the Puritan migration to Massachusetts, the gender ratio was approximately 150 males for every 100 females. From an early date, normal family life was not the exception but the rule. As early as 1635, the Congregational churches of New England had more female than male members. Our stereotypical image of the Puritan is a man; but the test of church membership tells us that most Puritans were women. One historian infers from the gender ratio that “many Puritans brought their wives along”; it would be statistically more correct to say that many Puritans led their husbands to America.⁶

In terms of social rank, most emigrants to Massachusetts came from the middling strata of English society. Only a few were of the aristocracy. Two sisters and a brother of the Earl of Lincoln settled in Massachusetts, but all were gone within a few years. The gentry were rather more numerous; as many as 11 percent of male heads of households in the Winthrop fleet were identified as gentlemen.⁷ Many New England towns attracted a few “armigerous” families whose coats of arms were on record at the College of Heralds in London. This elite, as we shall see, contributed much to the culture of Massachusetts, but comparatively little to its population.⁸

The great majority were yeomen, husbandmen, artisans, craftsmen, merchants and traders—the sturdy middle class of England. They were not poor. A case in point was Benjamin Cooper, an emigrant who died on the way to America in the Ship Mary Anne (1637). He had modestly described himself as “husbandman” in the passenger list. But when his estate was settled he was found to be worth £1,278. This was a large fortune in that era, much above the usual idea of a “husbandman’s” condition.⁹

Remarkably few of these migrants came from the bottom of English society, to the surprise of some immigrants themselves. “It is strange the meaner people should be so backward [in emigrating],” wrote Richard Saltonstall in 1632. But so they were. On three occupational lists, less than 5 percent were identified as laborers—a smaller proportion than in other colonies.¹⁰ Only a small minority came as servants—less than 25 percent, compared with 75 percent in Virginia. Most New England servants arrived as members of household, rather than as part of a labor draft as in the Chesapeake.¹¹

The leaders of the great migration actively discouraged servants and emigrants of humble means. Thomas Dudley, for example, urged the Countess of Lincoln to recruit “honest men” and “godly men” who were “endowed with grace and furnished with means.” But he insisted that “they must not be of the poorer sort.” When John Winthrop’s son asked permission to send a servant named Pease, the governor replied: “people must come well provided, and not too many at once. Pease may come if he will, and such other as you shall think fit, but not many and let those be good, and but few servants and those useful ones.”¹²

As a result of this policy, nearly three-quarters of adult Massachusetts immigrants paid their own passage—no small sum in 1630. The cost of outfitting and moving a family of six across the ocean was reckoned at £50 for the poorest accommodation, or £60 to £80 for those who wished a few minimal comforts. A typical English yeoman had an annual income of perhaps £40 to £60. A husbandman counted himself lucky to earn a gross income of £20 a year, of which only about £3 or £4 cleared his expenses. Most ordinary families in England could not afford to come to Massachusetts.¹³

The social status of these people also appeared in their high levels of literacy. Two-thirds of New England’s adult male immigrants

Dr. John Clark was a Puritan physician in the Great Migration. Trained in England as a specialist in “cutting for the stone,” he sailed to Massachusetts in 1638 and became more generally employed as a physician, surgeon, apothecary, merchant, landowner, distiller, inventor, magistrate in Essex County, and representative in the General Court. His left hand holds a crown saw which was used to trepan skulls, an operation he may have been the first to perform in New England. Behind the skull is a Hey’s saw, another tool of his trade. Clark’s wealth was subtly displayed by a small finger ring which was painted with actual gold dust. His Puritan faith appears in his physiognomy, dress and demeanor. This drawing follows a portrait (1664), the earliest dated in New England, which hangs in the Countway Library of the Harvard Medical School.

were able to sign their own names. In old England before 1640, only about one-third could do so. By this very rough “signature-mark test,” literacy was nearly twice as common in Massachusetts as in the mother country.¹⁴

These colonists were also extraordinary in their occupations. A solid majority (between 50 and 60%) had been engaged in some skilled craft or trade before leaving England. Less than one-third had been employed primarily in agriculture—a small proportion for a seventeenth-century population. The ballads of the great migration remarked upon this fact:

Tom Taylor is prepared,

And th’ Smith as black as a coal;

Ralph Cobler too with us will go.

For he regards his soul;

The Weaver, honest Simon …

Professeth to come after.

That lyrical impression was solidly founded in statistical fact.¹⁵

This was mainly an urban migration. Approximately one-third of the founders of Massachusetts came from small market towns in England. Another third came from large towns—a much greater proportion than in the English population as a whole. Less than 30 percent had lived in manorial villages, and a very small proportion had dwelled on separate farms.¹⁶

In summary, by comparison with other emigrant groups in American history, the great migration to Massachusetts was a remarkably homogeneous movement of English Puritans who came from the middle ranks of their society, and traveled in family groups. The heads of these families tended to be exceptionally literate, highly skilled, and heavily urban in their English origins. They were a people of substance, character, and deep personal piety. The special quality of New England’s regional culture would owe much to these facts.

Regional Origins of the Puritan Migration

Another important fact about the founders of Massachusetts was their region of origin in the mother country. When one examines the ship lists in these terms, the first impression is one of extreme diversity. One “sample” of 2,885 emigrants to New England came from no fewer than 1,194 English parishes. Every county was represented except Westmorland in the far north and Mon-mouth on the border of Wales.¹

But closer study shows that some counties contributed more than others, and that one region in particular accounted for a majority of the founders of Massachusetts. It lay in the east of England. We may take its geographic center to be the market town of Haverhill, very near the point where the three counties of Suffolk, Essex and Cambridge come together. A circle drawn around the town of Haverhill with a radius of sixty miles will circumscribe the area from which most New England families came.² That great circle (or semicircle, for much of it crosses the North Sea) reached east to Great Yarmouth on the coast of Norfolk, north to Boston in eastern Lincolnshire, west to Bedford and Hertfordshire, and south to the coast of East Kent. This area of approximately 7,000 square miles (about 8% of the land area of Britain today) roughly included the region that was defined in 1643 as the Eastern Association—Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire—plus parts of Bedfordshire and Kent.

Approximately 60 percent of immigrants to Massachusetts came from these nine eastern counties. Three of the largest contingents were from Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk. Also important was part of east Lincolnshire which lay near the English town of Boston, and a triangle of Kentish territory bounded by the towns of Dover, Sandwich and Canterbury. These areas were the core of the Puritan migration.³

On the periphery of New England’s primary recruiting ground lay the great city of London. Less than 10 percent of emigrants to Massachusetts came from the metropolis. London was an important meeting place and shipping point for the builders of the Bay Colony, but it was not their English home. Those who had lived in the capital tended not to be native Londoners, but transplanted East Anglians to whom London seemed a foreign place, more alien even than the American wilderness. An example was Lucy Winthrop Downing, a Puritan lady who had moved from East Anglia to London because of her husband’s business. In 1637, Lucy Downing was expecting the birth of a child. She wrote her brother in New England that she wanted to have her baby in Massachusetts rather than in London. “I confess could a wish transport me to you,” she declared, “I think, as big as I am, I should rather bring an Indian than a Cockney into the world.”⁴

The Puritan migration also drew from other parts of England, but often it did so through East Anglian connections. Throughout England, there were scattered parishes where charismatic ministers led their congregations to Massachusetts. But these leaders were themselves often East Anglians. A case in point was the parish of Rowley in Yorkshire, whence the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers brought a large part of his congregation to Massachusetts, where they founded another community called Rowley in the New World. Rogers was himself an East Anglian, born at Wethersfield in Essex, educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and for twelve years a chaplain at Hatfield Broad Oak. He had moved to Yorkshire as a Puritan missionary, “in the hope that his more lively ministry might be particularly successful in awakening those drowsy corners of the north.”⁵

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the eastern counties in the peopling of New England. A large minority (40%) came from the remaining thirty-four counties of England. An important secondary center of migration existed in the west country, very near the area where the counties of Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire came together.⁶ But many of these West Country Puritans did not long remain in the Bay Colony. They tended to move west to Connecticut, or south to Nantucket, or north to Maine. Diversity of regional origins became a major factor in the founding of other New England colonies.⁷

The concentration of Puritans from East Anglia, and from the county of Suffolk, was especially great in the Winthrop Fleet of 1630.⁸ In the New World, their hegemony became very strong in the present boundaries of Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Middlesex counties in Massachusetts. This area became the heartland of its region; its communities are called “seed towns” in New England because so many other communities were founded from them. Most families in these seed towns came from the east of England. The majority was highly concentrated in its regional origin while the minority was widely scattered. As a consequence, the East Anglian core of New England’s population had a cultural importance greater even than its numbers would suggest.⁹

Regional Origins: Names on the New Land

The same pattern of regional origins also appeared in English place names that were given to the new settlements of Massachusetts. The first counties in the Bay Colony were called Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk and Middlesex. Three out of four received East Anglian names.

Town names showed a similar tendency. A few Massachusetts communities were named after natural features (Marblehead, Watertown). Others expressed the social ideals of their founders. Salem took its name from the Hebrew word for peace—Shalom. The first town in the interior was named Concord. The town of Dedham wanted to call itself Contentment, but that idea caused such rancor in the General Court that it had to be given up. Only one town in Massachusetts (Charlestown) was named for any member of the royal family during the first generation—a striking exception to the monarchical rule in most British colonies

throughout the world, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.¹

Every other Massachusetts town founded before 1660 was named after an English community. Of thirty-five such names, at least eighteen (57%) were drawn from East Anglia and twenty-two (63%) from seven eastern counties. Most were named after English towns within sixty miles of the village of Haverhill.²

As the Puritans moved beyond the borders of New England to other colonies, their place names continued to come from the east of England. When they settled Long Island, they named their county Suffolk. In the Connecticut Valley, their first county was called Hartford. When they founded a colony in New Jersey, the most important town was called the New Ark of the Covenant (now the modern city of Newark) and the county was named Essex. In general, the proportion of eastern and East Anglian place names in Massachusetts and its affiliated colonies was 60 percent—exactly the same as in genealogies and ship lists.³

Origins of the Massachusetts Elite

This predominance of England’s eastern counties was even stronger among the Puritan elite. Of 129 university-trained ministers and magistrates in the great migration, 56 percent had lived in the seven eastern counties of Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Kent before sailing to America. Only 9 percent were Londoners. The rest had been widely scattered through many parts of England.¹

This statistic refers only to their last known addresses in England. Many more had some other connection with the eastern counties, and with East Anglia in particular. Altogether, 78 percent of New England’s college-trained ministers and magistrates had been born, bred, schooled, married, or employed for long periods in seven eastern counties.²

This little elite was destined to play a large role in the history of New England. Its strength developed in no small degree from its solidarity. Many of its members had known one another before coming to America. They had gone to the same schools. Nearly half had studied in three Cambridge Colleges—Emmanuel, Magdalen and Trinity. Approximately 30 percent had attended Emmanuel alone. They intermarried with such frequency that one historian describes the leading Puritan families of East Anglia as a “prosopographer’s dream.”³

Several of these genealogical connections were especially important in the history of New England. One centered on the county of Suffolk and included the families of Winthrop, Downing, Rainborough, Tyndal and Fones. A second connection had its base in Emmanuel College and united a large number of eminent Puritan divines, including Samuel Stone, Thomas Hooker,

Thomas Shepard, John Wilson and Roger Newton, all of whom came to New England. These men had known each other at Cambridge. Most had held livings in East Anglia and had been removed for their Puritan beliefs. They were often related by marriage or other ties of kinship.⁴

A third group had its seat in the household of the Earl of Lincoln. It included two of the Earl’s sisters and a younger brother, all of whom came to Massachusetts. Also in this connection were Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet, stewards of the Earl of Lincoln; and Thomas Leverett and Richard Bellingham, alderman and recorder of the town of Boston in Lincolnshire.

A fourth connection had its home in the parish of Alford, Lincolnshire. This was a small settlement six miles from the sea, in the “fat marsh” country that ran many miles across east Lincolnshire from the Humber to the Wash. Alford sent three families who loomed large in the history of Massachusetts: the Hutchinsons (an armigerous family of county gentry), the Storres or Storys (prosperous yeomen), and the Marburys (a clerical family). These three groups were linked to many other families in the surrounding countryside, including the Coddingtons, Wentworths, Quincys and Rishworths, who would also play prominent parts in New England and Old Providence Island.

The spiritual leader of this flock was the Reverend John Cotton, vicar of Boston’s St. Botolph’s church—the largest parish church in England. Its tremendous tower called Boston Stump, 272 feet high, served mariners as a seamark, and the Puritans as a spiritual beacon. On Sundays the Marburys and Hutchinsons traveled twenty miles through the Lincoln fens toward Boston Stump where they heard John Cotton preach from the beautiful pulpit that still stands in the church.⁵

In Massachusetts, these various Puritan connections were soon united in a single cousinage. Genealogists have remarked upon “the vast number of unions between the members of the families of Puritan ministers.” One commented that “it seemed to be a law of social ethics that the sons of ministers should marry the daughters of ministers.” Mathers, Cottons, Stoddards, Eliots,

The East-Anglian Puritan Elite of Massachusetts
The Winthrop-Downing-Dudley-Endecott-Bradstreet-Cotton-Mather Connection

I. Descendants of Adam Winthrop (1548-1623)

II. Descendants of Thomas Dudley (1576-1653)

III. Descendants of Simon Bradstreet

IV. Descendants of Sarah Story

Note: In these and subsequent charts not all children are included.

Williamses, Edwardses, Chaunceys, Bulkeleys and Wigglesworths all came to be related to one another within a generation.⁶

A case in point was the web that formed between the Mather and Cotton families. The founders of these two houses in America, John Cotton and Richard Mather, both married the same woman, Sarah Story. John Cotton’s daughter Maria Cotton became the wife of Richard Mather’s son Increase Mather. A child of that union was the eminent minister Cotton Mather. By these various connections, John Cotton was simultaneously Cotton Mather’s natural grandfather on the mother’s side, and his step-grandfather on his father’s side. At the same time, Richard Mather was both Cotton Mather’s paternal grandfather, and his maternal step-grandfather. To compound the confusion, Cotton Mather married Ann Lake Cotton Mather, who was both his cousin and also his nephew’s widow.

The matriarch of this family, Sarah Story Cotton Mather, might be taken as the genealogical center of New England’s elite. By the mid-eighteenth century many leading families in eastern Massachusetts were related to her by linear or collateral descent.⁷ Important marriages joined the Mather-Cotton dynasty to the Dudleys, Bradstreets, Winthrops, Sewalls and other leading families in Massachusetts. So dense was this web that Samuel Sewall, in his diary and letterbook, addressed as cousin at least forty-eight people with thirty-eight family names. This was the cousinage that governed Massachusetts. It went to the same schools, visited constantly with one another, joined in the same working associations, and dominated the public life of the Bay Colony for many generations.⁸

The ministers who belonged to this cousinage were forbidden to hold political office. But in every other way their power was very great. When a stranger made the mistake of asking the Reverend Phillips of Andover if he were “the parson who serves here,” he was abruptly told, “I am, sir, the parson who rules here.”⁹

This elite maintained its regional hegemony well into the nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe testified from the experience of her own generation that “In those days of New England, the minister and his wife were considered the temporal and spiritual superiors of everybody in the parish.”¹⁰ The moral ascendancy of this elite was very great. Its role in forming the folkways of New England was even greater.

The East of England before the Great Migration

The parts of eastern England from which these Puritans came—East Anglia, eastern Lincolnshire, eastern Cambridge and the northeastern fringe of Kent—are not recognized as a single region today. But in the seventeenth century they shared many qualities in common. In physical terms, all of these territories tended to be flat, open country, with long vistas and unbroken views of the sky. Some parts of this land were highly fertile. Other parts were so very poor that Charles I once suggested that the soil of Norfolk should be divided to make highways in the other counties of England.¹

Despite its poor resources, methods of farming were more advanced in the eastern counties than elsewhere in England. The agricultural revolution came early to East Anglia, as also it did to the Netherlands; “replenishing crops” were used as early as the mid-seventeenth century.² The great reformer Arthur Young observed as he traveled through the eastern counties that England’s best farmers lived on its worst soil. Agriculture in this region was mostly a regime of mixed farming, which supplied food for urban markets and wool for a local textile industry.³

Cambridge: The Emmanuel Connection

Note: Other Emmanuel men who came to New England (with dates of matriculation in the college) included Nathaniel Ward (1596); Thomas Hooker (1604); Samuel Stone; John Harvard (1627); Samuel Dudley (1626); George Alcock who married the sister of Thomas Hooker; Thomas Allen who married the widow of John Harvard; Wm. Blackstone (1614); Simon Bradstreet (1618); Edmund Browne (1624); Ezekiel Cheever (1633); John Cotton (1606); Giles Firmin (1629) who married a daughter of Nathaniel Ward; Isaac Johnson (1616); William Mildmay (1640); William Pelham (1615); William Perkins (1624); John Phillips (1600) who married a sister of William Ames; Peter Prudden (1620); Nathaniel Rogers (1614); Richard Sadler (1636); Richard Saltonstall Jr.; Nicholas Street (MA 1636); Zechariah Symmes (1617); William Walton (1621); John Ward son of Nathaniel Ward (1622); Samuel Whiting (1613) whose second wife was sister to Oliver St. John and cousin to Peter Bulkeley and John Wilson.

Lincolnshire: The Fiennes-Clinton Connection

Note: The Fiennes-Clinton Family was also connected to the Pelham Family. John Humphrey’s first wife was a Pelham; William Pelham sailed in Arbella. Penelope Pelham aged 16 also sailed to Massachusetts in 1635. Also connected to this family was Thomas Dudley, a close friend and steward to the Earl of Lincoln, and Simon Bradstreet, also steward to the Earl of Lincoln and Dudley’s son-in-law.

Sources: A. M. Cook, Boston (Boston, Lincolnshire, 1948); H. A. Doubleday et al., The Complete Peerage (London, 1929); and genealogical materials in LINCRO.

Alford, Lincolnshire: The Wentworth-Marbury-Storre-Hutchinson-Oliver Connection

Source: Genealogical materials in LINCRO.

Today, East Anglia seems very rural by comparison with other English regions. But in the early seventeenth century, it was the most densely settled and highly urbanized part of England, and had been so for many centuries. Norwich was England’s second largest city in 1630—a dynamic center whose population had trebled in the preceding fifty years. There were also many small seaports and market towns. In 1600, no fewer than 130 little ports of entry existed on the coast of Essex alone.⁴

Many inhabitants of East Anglia were artisans and skilled craftsmen. In 1630, half the adult population of Essex was employed in the cloth trade. Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and Kent were also major textile centers, specializing in the manufacture of light woolens favored in southern Europe, and also in luxurious “Suffolk shortcloths,” which were worn by the rulers of the Western world. This trade had been deeply depressed by wars with Spain (1625-30) and France (1627-29) and by a general depression of commerce in this period. As a result, unemployment and poverty were major problems in East Anglia on the eve of the great migration. In 1629, unemployed weavers besieged the courts at Braintree and Sudbury in search of work. Their suffering was deepened by a severe “scarcity and dearth of corn” in that year.⁵

Local scarcities were made worse by the wretched state of overland communications. Even short trips were so dangerous that the D’Ewes family left an infant with a wet nurse rather than expose it to the danger of even a single day’s journey.⁶ Travel by land was slow and painful; but travel by water was cheap and easy. The sea linked East Anglia, Kent and Lincolnshire with each other, and also with the Netherlands, in a cultural nexus of great importance in the seventeenth century.⁷ East Anglia was invigorated by Dutch trade, Dutch immigrants, Dutch architecture, Dutch religion and Dutch culture. The culture of New England,

as we shall see, owed much to this Dutch connection, as did the folkways of East Anglia itself.⁸

At the same time, the sea also exposed East Anglia to many hazards. For more than a thousand years, sea raiders had fallen upon the English coast, and the memory of their depredations was very much alive in 1630. In that year, at least two towns in Essex and the village of Linton in Cambridge still had nailed to their church doors the human skins of marauding Danes who had been flayed alive by their intended victims.⁹ Raiders from the sea had attacked East Anglia as recently as 1626 and 1627 when the dreaded “Dunkirkers” came ashore—killing, looting and raping as so many other sea people had done before.¹⁰

Through the centuries, some of these many waves of raiders had remained to settle there, particularly the people known as Angles, and later those called Danes in East Anglia and Jutes (from Jutland) in Kent. It was in part the culture of these people that gave East Anglia and Kent their special character. As early as the sixth century, both East Kent and East Anglia were very different from Wessex, Mercia and the north of England in their comparatively large numbers of freemen, and small numbers of servi and villani. Also, in the words of historian K. P. Witney, they were special in “the greatly superior status enjoyed by the ordinary freemen.”¹¹

The eastern counties were also distinctive in their political character. Many rebellions against arbitrary power had occurred there—Jack Straw’s Rising in Suffolk, Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, John Ball’s Insurrection in Kent, and Robert Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk, where the leader sat under an oak called the “tree of reformation” while the terrified gentry were tried before a makeshift jury of their former victims. The Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381

was heavily concentrated in nine eastern counties. So also was Clarence’s Rising in 1477 and Buckingham’s Revolt in 1483.¹²

This region also became a major center of resistance to Charles I after 1625. When the Civil War began in 1642, Parliamentary forces found their greatest strength in the counties called the Eastern Association—the same area from which Massachusetts was settled.¹³

The religious life of this region also differed from other parts of England. It had been marked by dissent for centuries before Martin Luther. During the early fifteenth century, the movement called Lollardy found many of its followers in East Anglia. After its suppression, the underground cells of Lollards who met to study the scriptures were exceptionally numerous in eastern counties from Lincoln and Norfolk to Kent.¹⁴

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century also flourished in East Anglia, more than elsewhere in England. The Marian martyrs—men and women executed for their Protestant faith in the reign of the Queen Mary—came mostly from this region. Of 273 Protestants who were burned at the stake for heresy during the counter reformation of the Catholic Queen (1553-58), no fewer than 225 (82%) came from nine eastern counties.¹⁵ In the era of Elizabeth I, nearly half of Puritan ministers came from the East Anglian counties of Essex, Suffolk and

Norfolk. If other eastern counties were included, the proportion rose to 75 percent.¹⁶

People of every religious party agreed that Puritanism was specially strong in the eastern counties. The Puritan leader John Hampden said of Essex that it was “the place of the most life of religion in the land.” The Puritans’ great enemy, Archbiship William Laud, complained that East Anglia was the throbbing heart of heresy in England.¹⁷

Within East Anglia, the Puritan movement was strongest in the small towns whence so many migrants left for Massachusetts. Of Colchester (Essex) one Puritan leader said that “the town, for the earnest profession of the gospel, became like unto a city upon a hill, and as a candle upon a candle stick.” That passage from St. Matthew, however inappropriate it may have been to the topography of East Anglia, was often used by Puritans to describe the spiritual condition of this region. When John Winthrop described his intended settlement in Massachusetts as “a city upon a hill,” he employed a gospel phrase that had become a cliché in the communities of eastern England.¹⁸

The Puritanism of eastern England was not all of a piece. Several distinct varieties of religious dissent developed there, each with its own base. A special strain of religious radicalism which

put heavy stress upon the spirit (Antinomianism) flourished among Puritans in eastern Lincolnshire. The more conservative and highly rationalist variant of Calvinism (Arminianism) found many adherents in London, Middlesex and Hertfordshire. In between were men and women from the counties of Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk who adopted a Puritan “middle way.” Their faith became the official religion of Massachusetts for two centuries.¹⁹

East Anglia was also exceptional in its educational and cultural attainments. In the seventeenth century, rates of literacy were higher there than in other English regions. When Havelock Ellis undertook to measure the geography of intellectual distinction in English history, he found that a larger proportion of scholars, scientists and artists came from East Anglia than from any other part of England.²⁰

Many cultural stereotypes attached to the people of eastern England. East Anglian historian R. W. Ketton-Cremer writes, “The Norfolk man, gentle or simple, tended to be dour, stubborn, fond of argument and litigation, strongly Puritan in his religious views. The type was far from universal … but it was a type to which the majority of all classes to some degree conformed.”²¹ These images added yet another dimension to regional identity in the seventeenth century.

A “New Paradise” for Puritans: Massachusetts Bay

As these Puritans from the east of England sailed slowly across the western sea, every family among them was ordered by the Massachusetts Bay Company to keep a journal, which became a running record of their hopes and apprehensions for the New World. Francis Higginson’s advance party sailed in the ships Talbot and Lion’s Whelp. Their first sight of America was not encouraging. In the month of June 1629, when England was all in bloom, these weary travelers reached the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. Suddenly the wind turned bitter cold, and they passed an enormous iceberg hard aground in forty fathoms of frigid water, with the green Atlantic surf roaring against it. It seemed to be “a mountain of ice, shining as white as snow, like to a great rock or cliff,” towering above their little ships. In great fear they sailed onward through a foggy night, while drift ice scraped dangerously against fragile hulls, and the ships’ drums beat mournfully in the darkness.

A few days later the weather moderated and spirits revived. As these weary travelers approached New England, the ocean teemed with “infinite multitudes” of mackerel and “great whales puffing up water.” The surface of the sea was covered with what Francis Higginson took to be brilliant yellow flowers. Rounding Cape Ann into Massachusetts Bay, they saw “every island full of gay woods and high trees,” and the Higginsons suddenly felt very good about their new home:

What with fine woods and green trees by land, and these yellow flowers painting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England, whence we saw such forerunning signals of fertility.¹

Not many people would have seen that stormy, cold and rock-bound coast as a “new paradise.” But the Puritans looked upon the world through very special lenses. “Geography,” wrote Cotton Mather, “must now find work for a Christianography.”²

The New England location of this Bible Commonwealth was not an accident; its site was carefully chosen by the Puritans with an eye to their special requirements. It proved to be a perfect

choice for a Calvinist utopia. Even the defects of the place were blessings in disguise for the builders of the Bay colony.

The first and most important environmental fact about New England is that it was cold—much colder in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than today. The Puritans arrived in a period of the earth’s history which climatologists call the “little ice age.” Ocean temperatures off the coast of New England were three degrees centigrade colder in the eighteenth century than the mid-twentieth. In the coldest years of the seventeenth century, the water temperature off New England approached that near southern Labrador today.³ The Puritans complained of “piercing cold,” and salt rivers frozen solid through the winter. One wrote that many lost the use of fingers and feet, and “some have had their overgrown beards so frozen together that they could not get their strong-water bottles into their mouths.”⁴

But after the first few years, this cold climate proved to be a blessing. It created an exceptionally healthy environment for settlers from northern Europe. Insect-born diseases such as malaria and yellow fever were less dangerous than in southern settlements. Water-borne infections including typhoid fever and dysentery were much diminished by the cold temperatures of Massachusetts Bay. Summer diseases such as enteritis, which were the great killers of children in the seventeenth century, tended to be comparatively mild in the Puritan colonies. These New England advantages were only relative; terrible epidemics would develop throughout this region. But average rates of mortality in Massachusetts fell far below most other places in the Western world.⁵

At the same time, the cold climate also had other cultural consequences. It proved to be exceptionally dangerous to immigrants from tropical Africa, who suffered severely from pulmonary infections in New England winters. Black death rates in colonial Massachusetts were twice as high as whites’—a pattern very different from Virginia where mortality rates for the two races were not so far apart, and still more different from South Carolina where white death rates were higher than those of blacks. So high was mortality among African immigrants in New England that race slavery was not viable on a large scale, despite many attempts to introduce it. Slavery was not impossible in this region, but the human and material costs were higher than many wished to pay. A labor system which was fundamentally hostile to the Puritan ethos of New England was kept at bay partly by the climate.⁶

The climate also had its impact on the growing season, which was shorter in the seventeenth century than today. There were only about five months between killing frosts. This period, from late May to early October, was two months shorter than in tidewater Virginia. Family farms flourished in New England, but large-scale staple agriculture was not as profitable as in warmer climes.

Another environmental factor was the land. New England’s terrain was immensely varied, with pockets of highly fertile soil. “At Charles River,” wrote Francis Higginson, “is as fat black earth as can be seen anywhere.” Concord, Sudbury and Dedham also had excellent soil, as did many other towns in Essex and Middlesex County. But most of the land was very poor—thin sandy scrub on the south shore of Massachusetts, and stony loams to the north. Much of the coast consisted of rocky shoals or marshes, and the rivers were not navigable for more than a few miles into the interior. By comparison with the Chesapeake estuary, there were comparatively few points of access for ocean shipping. Both of these factors—the distribution of pockets of good soil and the configuration of the coastline—encouraged settlement in nucleated towns.⁷

The climate of New England was wet and stormy—with forty inches of precipitation a year, compared with twenty-five inches in East Anglia. The weather in the seventeenth century was even more variable than in the twentieth. It was kept in constant turmoil by the continuing collision of warm dry air from the west, cold dry air from the north, cold wet air from the east, and warm wet air from the south. When these air masses met above New England, the meteorological effects were apt to be spectacular. The countryside was lashed by violent blizzards, drenched by thunderstorms, raked by tornadoes, and attacked by dangerous three-day nor’easters which churned the coastal waters of New England into a seaman’s hell.⁸

But there were no dry and rainy seasons in New England. The average distribution of precipitation through the year was remarkably even; no month averaged more than four inches of moisture or less than three. As a consequence, the water supply in New England was abundant and stable, with little need for hydraulic projects or public regulation.⁹

Cool temperatures and a variable climate created an immensely stimulating environment for an active population. European travelers repeatedly observed with astonishment the energy of the inhabitants. One visitor noted that New England children seem normally to move at a full run. Another remarked that their elders invented the rocking chair so they could keep moving even while sitting still. These impressions have been empirically confirmed by the new science of biometeorology which measures the animating effect of variability in atmospheric pressure and ozone levels. It finds that the New England climate was in fact immensely stimulating to human enterprise.¹⁰

Altogether, the environment of Massachusetts proved to be perfectly suited for a Puritan experiment. The climate was rigorous but healthy and invigorating. The land was challenging but rewarding. For historian Arnold Toynbee, New England was the classical example of a “hard country” which stimulated its inhabitants to high achievements through a process of “challenge and response.” The vitality of this regional culture owed much to its physical setting.¹¹

The Colonial Mood: Anxiety and Nostalgia in Massachusetts Bay

The main body of the Winthrop fleet reached New England in the month of June 1630. After the euphoria of arrival wore off, moods rapidly began to change. “Salem, where we landed, pleased us not,” Dudley wrote. Most of the new settlers moved south to Charlestown, where they made a camp of “cloth tents” and small huts near the water’s edge. Many were weak with scurvy after their long sea voyage. Fevers spread swiftly through the unhealthy camp, and people began to die. The Bay Colony knew nothing like the “starving time” of Jamestown or Plymouth, but every day there were several dead colonists to bury.

“The first beginning of this work seemed very dolorous,” Isaac Johnson remembered, “ … almost in every family, lamentation, mourning and woe was heard.” When the immigrant ships left for home, nearly one hundred settlers decided to return with them, and the remainder watched with sinking hearts as the topsails disappeared beyond the horizon. A melancholy spirit settled over the colony, as it did in every new settlement. Many colonists felt desperately homesick, and regretted what Isaac Johnson called their “voluntary banishment” from the “mother country.” Something of this colonial mood persisted for many years.¹

This aching sense of physical separation from the European homeland became a cultural factor of high importance in colonial settlements.² The effect of distance created feelings of nostalgia, anxiety and loss. The prevailing cultural mood became profoundly conservative—a spirit reinforced by emigration from England, by the rigors of the Atlantic passage, and by the sense of distance from the Old World. “For my own part,” wrote Lucy Winthrop Downing, “changes were ever irksome to me, and the sea much more.”³

In the early records of the Bay Colony, the adjectives “new” and “novel” were pejorative terms. In 1639, for example, a special “day of humiliation” was called in Massachusetts on account of “novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered.” In this catalogue of depravity, it is interesting to observe that “novelty” led the list.⁴ Dissenters were severely punished for “innovation.” Roger Williams was banished for opinions that were condemned not merely as dangerous, but “new and dangerous.” Thomas Makepeace was warned by the General Court that “because of his novile disposition … we were weary of him unless he reform.”⁵

As that statement implies, reform was regarded in Massachusetts mainly as a process of recovery and preservation. Reformation meant going backward rather than forward, on the assumption that error was novel and truth was ancient in the world. The Protestant Reformation meant a reversion to primitive Christianity. In politics, reform was a return to the ancient constitution. In society, it meant a revival of ancestral ways.

These ideas were deepened by feelings of nostalgia for the “mother country,” as the Puritans called England. The passengers who sailed in the Arbella wrote from shipboard “we … cannot part from our native country … without much sadness of heart, and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation, we have received in her bosom, and sucked it from her breasts.”⁶ For many years, the people of Massachusetts called themselves “the English.” Nearly two centuries would pass before they could think of themselves as American.⁷

These attitudes grew even stronger among the children and grandchildren of these migrants—reinforced by a mood of cultural anxiety which developed in most colonies, no matter whether English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese. In all of these settlements there was an abiding fear of what Cotton Mather called “Criolian degeneracy.” Change of any sort seemed to be cultural disintegration. In consequence, the founders of Massachusetts and their descendants for many generations tended to cling to the cultural baggage which they had carried out of England.⁸

This mood of cultural conservatism created a curious paradox in colonial history. New settlements tended to remain remarkably old-fashioned in their folkways. They missed the new fads and customs that appeared in the mother country after they were planted. They tended also to preserve cultural dynamics that existed in the hour of their birth. It was as if they were caught in a twist of time, and held in its coils while the rest of the world moved beyond them.

A case in point was the history of language in new colonies. Much recent scholarship has repeatedly rediscovered the same pattern of linguistic conservatism in colonial cultures. The language of Iceland is an archaic form of Norwegian. The patois of Quebec preserves much of old French. The speech called Afrikaans is in many ways an antique Dutch dialect. The Spanish of Mexico and Peru retain many old-fashioned Castilian expressions. None of these colonial languages have been static or frozen. All of them diverged from the homeland by complex processes of change in their new environments. But the continuities were also very strong. A classical example was the language of Massachusetts.⁹

Massachusetts Speech Ways:
Yankee Twang and Norfolk Whine

In remote corners of East Anglia today, country folk still speak in a harsh, high-pitched, nasal accent unkindly called the “Norfolk whine.” This dialect is the survivor of a family of accents that were heard throughout the east of England in the seventeenth century, from the fens of east Lincolnshire to the coast of Kent.¹

In the Puritan great migration, these English speech ways were carried to Massachusetts, where they mixed with one another and merged with other elements. During the seventeenth century, they spread rapidly throughout New England, and became the basis of a new regional accent called the Yankee twang.²

This developing New England dialect was distinctive in its vocabulary, idiom and grammar.³ But mainly it was known for the way that it sounded its words. The people of Massachusetts, like the fictional Yankee whom James Fenimore Cooper named

Remarkable Pettibone, became “provarbal for pronounsation” throughout the English-speaking world.⁴

This Yankee accent also tended to be exceptionally harsh and high-pitched. The early American orthographer John Pickering described it as “a sort of nasal twang.” The English traveler John Lambert agreed that it was “a nasal twang.” It had, as James Russell Lowell observed, a “partiality for nasals.”

New Englanders omitted h after w, so that whale became wale, and added an extra e before ou, so that now became a nasal neow. Soft vowels became hard and metallic, as insine for ensign. The rhyme-schemes of New England poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tell us that glare was pronounced glar; hair was har; air was ar; and war rhymed with star. Other common pronunciations were hev for have, yistidy for yesterday, ginral for general, dafter or darter for daughter, drownd for drown, gownd for gown, Americur for America and kiver for cover. Peace officers were addressed as cunstibles. The town of Charlestown was Charlton. Governor Winthrop’s name was sometimes spelled as it was sounded—Wyntropp. The minister John Eliot was known as Eli’t.⁵

Yankee speech owed much of its distinctive character to its pronunciation of the letter r. Postvocalic r’s tended to disappear altogether, so that Harvard became Haa-v’d (with the a pronounced as in happen). This speech-habit came from East Anglia and may still be heard in the English counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent. At the same time, other r’s were added. Follow was pronounced foller, and asked became arst—a spelling which often appeared in town meeting records during the seventeenth century. Precisely the same sounds still exist today in remote parts of East Anglia.⁶

The Yankee twang did not develop in a perfectly uniform way throughout New England. In Boston it was spoken at a speed which made it incomprehensible even to others of the same region. Yale President Timothy Dwight complained of Bostonians that “the rapidity of their pronunciation contracts frequently two short syllables into one, and thus renders the language, in itself too rough, still rougher by a violent junction of consonants. …

Thus Sweden, Britain, garden and vessel are extensively pronounced Swed’n, Brit’n, gard’n, vess’l. By this contraction, also, the harshness of the language is increased.”⁷

Many country towns in New England also developed individual speech ways. Even neighboring communities differed in their pronunciation—a fact which tells us much about the intensity of life within them. A case in point were two little villages founded by New Englanders on eastern Long Island. In 1798 a local gentleman noted that the speech of an Easthampton man might be distinguished from that of a Southampton man, “as well as a native of Kent might be distinguished from a Yorkshireman.”⁸ But these local customs were variations on a regional pattern which existed throughout New England.

The character of this pattern derived in large measure from the influence of an East Anglian elite who became ministers and magistrates in the Puritan colonies. One bizarre indicator of their influence was a layer of Latinate complexity that came to be grafted upon the language of New England. An early example (1647) appeared in the prose of Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward: “If the whole conclave of Hell,” he wrote, “can so compromise, exadverse, and diametricall contradictions, as to compolitize such a multimonstrous maufrey of heteroclytes and quicquidlibets quietly; I trust I may say with all humble reverence, they can do more than the Senate of Heaven.”⁹

The people of Massachusetts were constantly bombarded with this pedantry. Every Sunday they sat with bowed heads while showers of polysyllables rained down upon them from the pulpit. Inspired by this show of Cambridge learning, the country people of New England studded their speech with quasi-classical folk-coinages of their own invention such as rambunctious, absquatulate, splendiferous, and many other words ending in ize, ous, ulate, ical, iction, acious, iferous, and ticate. Language of this sort became a distinguishing mark of New England speech, especially in the neighborhood of Boston. Late in the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight wrote that “The Boston style is a phrase proverbially used throughout a considerable part of this country to denote a florid, pompous manner of writing, and has been thought by persons at a distance to be the predominant style of this region.”¹⁰

Today, these regional speech ways are growing fainter on both sides of the Atlantic. The Norfolk whine has retreated to the remote northern coast of East Anglia. The old Yankee twang survives mainly in the hill towns of interior New England. But throughout these larger regions, a trained ear can still detect the old accents in more muted forms. The postvocalic r still tends to disappear in rural East Anglia, and traces of Yankee speech may yet be heard in every part of America where the children of the Puritan great migration pitched their homes.

Massachusetts Building Ways:
East Anglian and Kentish Origins of New England Houses

The same pattern of persistence and change also appeared in the vernacular architecture of New England. By an early date in the seventeenth century, a distinctive building style developed in Massachusetts Bay. It was not invented in the New World, but adapted from customs and fashions that had prevailed in eastern England during the period of the great migration.¹

This architecture could be recognized in part by its choice of building materials. Through nearly four centuries, New England houses have been made of wood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when hardwoods were abundant, they were given frames of oak, sills of hackmatack, floor of white pine and outer skins of cedar. As these species slowly disappeared, cheaper softwoods became more common. But wood itself remained the dominant building material in Massachusetts from the seventeenth century to our own time—more so than in any other American region.

This preference for wood was not merely a reflexive response to the North American forest. It was an old folk custom that had been carried from the east of England, where even today timber-framed houses are more common than elsewhere in the British Isles. Historian R. J. Brown, in a survey of English domestic architecture, finds that the county of Essex “probably contains more timber-framed buildings than any other.”² Wood-sheathing and particularly wooden clapboards are also found more frequently in East Anglia, Kent and East Sussex than elsewhere in England, just as they are more common in New England than in other parts of the United States.³

Techniques of building also showed similar patterns. House carpentry in Massachusetts was much like that of eastern England in the many complex details of post-and-beam construction—such as the design of windbraces, the placing of pegs, the shape of mortise and tenon joints, and the design of crownposts, rafters, purlins and scantling.⁴

The interior plans of buildings in Massachusetts also resembled those of eastern England. One common design for a farmhouse in southern New England was a simple rectangle of two stories, with a central chimney stack and a steep “twelve pitch” roof. A one-story lean-to was often added to the back for the kitchen, and by 1680 was built as an integral part of the house. To cover it the back roof was carried down in a straight line, creating the classic “salt-box” silhouette that gave this house its name.⁵

The salt-box house was not a New England invention. It had been common throughout Kent and East Anglia before the great migration. A case in point was a seventeenth-century wood-framed house at Parsonage Lane, Darenth, Kent, which was exactly like a New England salt-box in every respect—two stories in front and one in back, a central chimney stack, a kitchen lean-to behind, creating the classical salt-box silhouette. The interior was divided in two large chambers on the ground floor, and smaller rooms upstairs. It was not a large structure—only twenty-six feet square. But it made a comfortable home for an artisan or husbandman. Not many of these wooden salt-box houses survive in old England today. Most have fallen victim to damp, decay, and changing fashion. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century they were common in the eastern counties, and were carried to New England with comparatively very little change.⁶

Another New England style was the Cape Cod box—a small structure of one and one-half stories. This house also had developed in eastern England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as cottagers “chambered over” their wood-framed houses by adding separate sleeping quarters above. It was

Whitman House, Farmington, Connecticut, 1664

Parsonage Lane Cottage Darenth, Kent

Moulthorp House East Haven, Connecticut

The Salt Box House was not invented in New England. In the early seventeenth century, it was an established form of vernacular architecture in East Anglia and Kent. An example was this cottage (now pulled down) which stood in Parsonage Lane, Darenth, Kent. Its plan and elevation were similar in every important way to a New England Salt Box House. Timber framing and wood sheathing were commonplace in southeastern England, and rare in other British regions. Sources for these sketches include Morrison, Early American Architecture, 57; AC LXXVII, 92-93; Chalkin, Kent, 237; drawing by J. Frederick Kelley in Dow, Everyday Life in Massachusetts, 24f.

in common use throughout New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was revived in the twentieth. The “cape” as it is called today remains very popular, long after it was abandoned in England.⁷

A more pretentious New England plan was the stretched box, a wooden rectangle much like the salt box, with additions to the sides instead of the rear. The result was an imposing facade of exceptional breadth, and more room for the complex households of the rich. In eastern England and Massachusetts the stretched box became the house of prosperous yeomen and lesser gentry.⁸

Yet a fourth design was the gabled box. An example was the Downing-Bradstreet house in Salem, with three front gables, and double windows and two massive chimney stacks. These were the most opulent private houses in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and resembled the homes of lesser gentry in East Anglia.⁹ They were often enlarged by the addition of gables and wings without regard to symmetry—a custom which was also common in East Anglia, where we find that “complex roof-gable shapes” were more common than in other parts of England.¹⁰

A distinctive characteristic of these larger houses was a projecting second story (which in England is called the first story). The front of this second floor extended a foot or two beyond the first floor in a design called a “jetty” in the seventeenth century. This fashion had been specially popular in the villages and towns of East Anglia. It was much used in New England for a century after settlement.¹¹

Site plans in Massachusetts also showed an architectural kinship to East Anglia. Houses in the Bay Colony were customarily

The Corwin House, Salem, Essex County

Church Hall, Boxted, Essex, circa 1600

The Gabled Box was the most opulent of New England’s early house-types. These complex framed structures had multiple bays and wings, and often a rambling ell in the rear. One example was the Corwin House in Salem, here reproduced from an old drawing. Its central porch was two stories high, flanked by large gables projecting to the front and sides. A massive central chimney stack heated many rooms, and the roof-peaks bore large ornaments at each gable end. Many of these houses were built in Boston, Salem, Ipswich and Saugus. They closely resembled large houses in the east of England. Sources for these sketches include a drawing by Samuel Bartol in the Essex Institute, and a photograph in Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts, 13.

built facing south. They stood so close to the road that carts rumbled by only a few feet from the door. This tendency in New England has sometimes been explained as a response to the environment—a way of reducing the labor of “breaking out” in snowy winters. But precisely the same pattern may still be seen on the old roads and byways of East Anglia.¹²

The building ways of Massachusetts were never static. In the eighteenth century major changes would be made in fenestration, as casement windows yielded to small guillotine sash windows and later to large double-hung windows. During the nineteenth century, the framing of houses was revolutionized by a shift from hardwood posts and beams to a “balloon frame” of light softwood studs and joists. The proportions of the house were enlarged, and other changes were introduced in the interior, by a subdivision of rooms for greater privacy. Aesthetic tastes in New England houses were also transformed by Palladian forms in the eighteenth century, and by the Greek Revival in the nineteenth. But behind these changes in taste, there was an underlying continuity in building materials, methods, plans, styles and sites. For three centuries, domestic architecture in Massachusetts preserved a special character that derived from the culture of eastern England.

Massachusetts Family Ways:
The Puritan Idea of the Covenanted Family

The builders of the Bay Colony also created special forms of family life which were as distinctive as their speech and architecture. The Puritans were deeply self-conscious in their familial acts. They wrote at length about the family, in a literature of prescription which was remarkably consistent with actual conditions in their households.¹

The people of Massachusetts thought of the family not as an end in itself, but as an instrument of their highest religious purposes.

The Puritan writer Jonathan Mitchell declared, “a Christian may and ought to desire many things as means, but God alone as his end.”² This was their way of thinking about the family in particular, which was also described as “the root whence church and commonwealth cometh.”³

Concern for the family in this culture was also given a special intensity by an attitude which historian Edmund Morgan calls “Puritan tribalism,” that is, the Hebraic idea that the founders of New England were God’s chosen people. The Puritans were encouraged by their ministers to think of themselves as “the saints,” and to believe that grace descended to their children. John Cotton explained this process in explicitly genealogical terms: “The Covenant of God is, I will be thy God, and the God of thy seed after thee” he wrote.⁴ The Puritan minister William Stoughton went even farther. He prophesied, “ …the books that shall be opened at the last day will contain Genealogies among them. There shall be brought forth a Register of the Genealogies of New-England’s sons and daughters.’”⁵

This obsession with family and genealogy became an enduring part of New England’s culture. Two centuries after the great migration, Harriet Beecher Stowe observed:

among the peculiarly English ideas which the Colonists brought to Massachusetts, which all the wear and tear of democracy have not been able to obliterate, was that of family. Family feeling, family pride, family hope and fear and desire, were, in my early day, strongly-marked traits. Genealogy was a thing at the tip of every person’s tongue, and in every person’s mind. … “Of a very respectable family,” was a sentence so often repeated at the old fireside that its influence went in part to make up my character.⁶

New England’s interest in genealogy was not the same as that of high-born families in England or Virginia. It was not a pride in rank and quarterings, but a moral and religious idea that developed directly from the Puritan principles of the founders.

Puritan ideas also had an impact on New England’s family ways in yet another way. The builders of the Bay Colony cast their idea of the family in terms of the covenant theology which was so central to their faith. They believed that God’s covenant with each individual Christian was enlarged into another sort of contract which they called the family covenant. John Cotton explained, “God hath made a covenant with parents and householders,” which bound them not only on their own account, but also in regard to “wives, and children, and servants, and kindred, and acquaintances, and all that are under our reach, either by way of subordination, or coordination.”⁷

Thus, the covenanted family became a complex web of mutual obligations between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants. The clarity of this contractual idea, the rigor of its enforcement and especially the urgency of its spiritual purpose, set New England Puritans apart from other people—even from other Calvinists—in the Western world.⁸

Like most of their contemporaries, the Puritans thought of the family as a concentric set of nuclear and extended rings. But within that conventional idea, they gave special importance to the innermost nuclear ring. Strong quantitative evidence of this attitude appeared in their uniquely nuclear naming customs. As we shall see below, the Puritans of Massachusetts gave high priority to the descent of names from parents to children within the nuclear family. This naming strategy was unique to the Puritans, and very different from other cultures in British America.⁹

Similar tendencies also appeared in customs of inheritance, which were more nuclear in New England than in other American colonies during the seventeenth century. One study of 168 wills in Newbury, Massachusetts, for example, found that only 6.5 percent left bequests to a niece or nephew, and 3.0 percent to other kin. None whatever bequeathed property to a cousin—a pattern different from the Chesapeake colonies.¹⁰

The same nuclear pattern also appeared in the composition of households. By comparison with other colonies, households throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut included large numbers of children, small numbers of servants and high proportions of intact marital unions. In Waltham, Massachusetts, for example, completed marriages formed in the 1730s produced 9.7 children on the average. These Waltham families were the largest that demographic historians have found anywhere in the Western world, except for a few Christian communes which regarded reproduction as a form of worship. But they were not unique. In many other New England towns fertility rates rose nearly as high, and the number of children was larger than French demographer Louis Henry defined as the biological maximum in a normal population.¹¹

The number of servants in New England, however, was very small—less than one per family. At any given time, most households in this region had no servants at all—a pattern very different from the Chesapeake and Delaware colonies. In short, the New England household more closely coincided with the nuclear unit, and the nuclear family was larger and stronger than elsewhere in the Western world.

The strength of the nuclear unit was merely one of many special features of New England families. Another was a strong sense of collective responsibility for maintaining its individual integrity. The people of the Bay Colony worked through many institutions to preserve what they called “family order” and “family government” within each nuclear unit. Other cultures also shared these concerns, but once again Puritan New England did things in its own way, with a special intensity of purpose. The selectmen and constables of each town were required by law to inspect families on a regular basis. Where “good order” broke down within a household, their task was to restore it. In nuclear families that were persistently “disorderly”—a word that covered a multitude of misdeeds—the selectmen were required to remove the children and servants and place them in other homes. Thus, in 1675, Robert Styles of Dorchester was presented for many sins, and ordered to “put forth his children, or otherwise the selectmen are hereby empowered to do it, according to law.”¹²

In the second generation, responsibility for inspecting families passed from selectmen to special town officers called tithingmen. A statute in 1675 ordered that each tithingman “shall take charge of ten or Twelve families of his Neighborhood, and shall diligently inspect them.” This office did not exist in Anglican Virginia or Quaker Pennsylvania. But it was not a New England innovation. Tithingmen had long existed as parish functionaries in East Anglia and other parts of England. Here again an old English custom was taken over by the Puritans and given a new intensity of purpose.¹³

So important was the idea of a covenanted family in Massachusetts that everyone was compelled by law to live in family groups. As early as 1629 the Governor and Deputies of the colony ordered that:

For the better accommodation of businesses, we have divided the servants belonging to the Company into several families, as we desire and intend they should live together. … Our earnest desire is, that you take special care, in settling these families, that the chief in the family (at least some of them) be grounded in religion; whereby morning and evening family duties may be duly performed, and a watchful eye held over all in each family … that so disorders may be prevented, and ill weeds nipped before they take too great a head.

The provinces of Connecticut and Plymouth also forbade any single person to “live of himself.”¹⁴

These laws were enforced. In 1668 the court of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, systematically searched its towns for single persons and placed them in families.¹⁵ In 1672 the Essex County Court noted:

Being informed that John Littleale of Haverhill lay in a house by himself contrary to the law of the country, whereby he is subject to much sin and iniquity, which ordinarily are the companions and consequences of a solitary life, it was ordered … he remove and settle himself in some orderly family in the town, and be subject to the orderly rules of family government.

One stubborn loner, John Littleale, was given six weeks to comply, on pain of being sent to “settle himself in the House of Correction.¹⁶

This custom was not invented in New England. It had long been practiced in East Anglia. From as early as 1562 to the midseventeenth century, The High Constables’ Sessions and Quarter Courts of Essex County in England had taken similar action against “single men,” “bachelors,” and “masterless men.” The Puritans took over this custom and endowed it with the spiritual intensity of their faith.¹⁷

Family order was an hierarchical idea to the people of the Bay Colony. In that belief they were typical of their age. But the structure of that hierarchy had a special cast in their thinking. In Puritan New England, the family hierarchy had more to do with age, and less with gender and rank, than in other English-speaking cultures. The evidence appears not only in prescriptive literature, but also in the ordering of daily functions such as eating and sleeping. Families in Massachusetts did not dine together. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discovered that in New England “servants and children … sat down to eat after their master and mistress.” This, as we shall discover, differed from table customs in other Anglo-American cultures.¹⁸

The same hierarchy of ages also appeared in sleeping arrangements. Adults and heads of families slept on the ground floor in rooms called the parlor or principal chamber. Children commonly slept in upstairs, in lofts or low rooms. Architectural historians find that this arrangement was typical of East Anglia, but not of other regions in England. “In East Anglia,” writes Abbott Cummings, “the sleeping arrangements for adults were confined almost entirely to the ground floor.” Cummings discovered that in the west of England, adults and children slept in upstairs chambers, but “by the early seventeenth century, in southeastern England at least, the parlor had become the principal ground floor sleeping room and this continues to be its chief function in Massachusetts as reflected in inventories for houses with a plan of two or more rooms … the ground floor parlor remained the master bedroom for the head of the family into the eighteenth and even in some cases into the nineteenth century in some rural areas.”¹⁹

This hierarchy of age within the family was written into the laws of Massachusetts, which in 1648 required the death penalty as a punishment for stubborn or rebellious sons over the age of sixteen who refused to obey either their father or mother. The same punishment was also provided for children who struck or cursed their parents. No child was ever executed under this law, but several were fined or whipped by the courts for being rude or abusive to their parents. Some of these errant “children” were in their forties, and their parents were of advanced age.²⁰

At the same time, other laws ordered that younger children who were “rude, stubborn and unruly” and could not be kept in subjection by their parents, should be removed and placed under a master who would “force them to submit to government.”²¹

The intensity of these Puritan beliefs in the covenanted family as an instrument of larger purposes, and in the instrumental family as primarily a nuclear unit, and also in the nuclear family as a hierarchy of age all distinguished the family customs of New England from other cultures in British America. The Puritans also developed these ideas in elaborate detail, with regard to relations between husband and wife, children and elders, marriage and divorce, sex and death.

Massachusetts Marriage Ways:
The Puritan Idea of Marriage as a Contract

Marriage customs in Massachusetts were not what one might expect to find in a new country. Despite the vast abundance of land, young people did not rush to tie the knot. By comparison with other colonies, age at first marriage was remarkably advanced. After the first few years of settlement, men tended to marry at the age of 26, and women at about 23. These patterns persisted in the Puritan colonies for nearly a century.¹

Another anomaly appeared in the proportion of young people who never married at all. In most societies where age at marriage is advanced, the proportion never marrying tends to be high. This pattern did not appear in New England. Marriage was delayed ten years beyond puberty but nearly everyone married—94 percent of women, and 98 percent of New England men.²

This pattern which seems natural to us today was very different from western Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. In that rigid and rank-bound society, many young men and women were never able to marry at any age. As many as 27 percent of England’s adult population reached maturity without marrying.³

From the start, things were different in the Puritan colonies. In the town of Rowley, Massachusetts, historian Patricia O’Malley concludes from close research that “almost every child who reached adulthood” in the seventeenth century found a marriage partner. In the first generation, there was only one old bachelor in the town.⁴ The marriage imperative was strong in this culture. Women who did not find a partner by the age of thirty were called “thornbacks” in Massachusetts—as they had been in England. Worse, Puritans suspected that failure to marry was a sign of God’s ill favor. There was a New England proverb that “women dying maids lead apes in hell.”⁵

Behind these demographic patterns was a cultural idea of marriage that was unique to the Puritan colonies. The Church of England had taught that matrimony was a sacred union that must be solemnized by a priest. Anglicans also insisted that after the sacred knot was firmly tied, it could never be “put asunder” by mortal hands. Exceptions were allowed for monarchs and great lords, but for ordinary English men and women there was virtually no possibility of divorce in the seventeenth century.⁶

The Puritans of New England rejected all of these Anglican ideas. They believed that marriage was not a religious ceremony but a civil contract. They required that this covenant must be

“agreed” or “executed” (not “performed” or “solemnized”) before a magistrate, and not a minister. They also insisted that if the terms of the marriage covenant were broken, then the union could be ended by divorce. These attitudes became the basis of regional marriage customs throughout New England. But they were not invented in America, or even in England. William Bradford noted that they were established “according to the laudable custom of the low countries,” with which East Anglian Congregationalists were in close communication.⁷ They were also briefly introduced in England by Oliver Cromwell’s Civil Marriage Act of 1653.⁸

The Puritans required in most cases that both parents and children must give their free consent to marriage. Massachusetts courts fined children for an offense called “self-marriage,” which meant marrying without the consent of parents or magistrates. But parents were forbidden to withhold their approval arbitrarily; in some cases, children successfully sued fathers and mothers for refusing permission to marry.⁹

The process of a covenanted marriage began with complex rituals of courtship that were strictly regulated by law and custom. Diaries kept by Samuel Sewall in Massachusetts and Ralph Josselin in East Anglia described these rituals in very much the same way. By and large, Puritan parents did not arrange the marriages of their children. Suitors carefully sought the consent of parents before beginning a courtship, and sent small presents to ease the way. A suitor of Samuel Sewall’s daughter Judith sent the mother “a present of oranges and a shattuck [a grapefruit, a rare treat in Boston], and to my daughter Judith a Stone-Ring and a Fan.”¹⁰

Puritan males made awkward suitors. When Samuel Sewall was courting Katherine Brattle Winthrop, she asked him to help her “draw off” her glove. He bluntly refused, and made a clumsy joke that “twas great odds between handling a dead goat and a living lady.” This specimen of Puritan savoir faire suggests something of the hostility in this culture to the arts of courtship that flourished in cavalier circles.¹¹

But in their bluff and awkward way, the Puritans cherished true love, and insisted that it was a prerequisite of a happy marriage.¹² The Puritans used the expression “falling in love.” They believed that love should normally precede marriage. Their courtship rituals were designed to promote this order of events. East Anglian Puritan Mary Josselin refused a suitor partly on the ground that he was “not loving,” and her father acquiesced, even though he strongly favored the match:

Mary quitted Mr. Rhea [Rev. Ambrose Rhea, rector of Wakes Colne, Essex]. Her exceptions were his age, being 14 years older, she might be left a widow with children. She checked at his estate being not suitable to her portion … [and] he seemed to her not loving. It was no small grief to me, but I could not desire it, when she said it would make both their lives miserable.¹³

Customs of courtship in New England were carefully designed to allow young people privacy enough to discover if they loved one another, at the same time that parents maintained close supervision. This was the purpose of “bundling,” a European custom which became widespread in New England. The courting couple were put to bed together, “tarrying” all night with a “bundling board” between them. Sometimes the young woman’s legs were bound together in a “bundling stocking” which fitted her body like a glove.¹⁴

Another regional custom was the “courting stick,” a hollow pole six or eight feet long, with an earpiece at one end and a mouthpiece at the other. The courting couple whispered quietly

The apparatus of courtship in New England had a double purpose—to combine close supervision by elders with free choice by the young. To that end, New Englanders invented the courting stick, a tube six or eight feet long with an open bell at each end. A New England antiquarian wrote more than a century ago, “in the presence of the entire family, lovers seated formally on either side of the great fireplace carried on this chilly telephonic love-making. One of these batons of propriety still is preserved in Long Meadow, Massachusetts.”

Other folk inventions were the bed board, bundling stocking and bundling apron. A courting couple were securely “bundled” together in a bed with a wooden board between them. Sometimes the young woman’s legs were securely fastened together in a bundling stocking, or wrapped in a bundling apron which left the upper body exposed. An old New England ballad tells us:

But she is modest, also chaste

While only bare from neck to waist,

And he of boasted freedom sings,

Of all above her apron strings.

to one another through this tube, while members of the family remained in the room nearby.¹⁵

Bundling boards and courting sticks were not merely pieces of amusing social trivia. These two ingenious folk-inventions were instruments of an important cultural purpose. They were designed to reconcile two requirements of New England courtship—the free consent of the young, and strict supervision by their elders. Both of these elements were thought necessary to a covenanted marriage.

After the courtship was complete, the ritual of the wedding in Massachusetts began with a betrothal ceremony which was called the “precontract” in Plymouth and the “contraction” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Cotton Mather explained: “There was maintained a solemnity called a Contraction a little before the consummation of a marriage was allowed of. A Pastor was usually employed and a sermon was preached on this occasion.”¹⁶ This custom was also called the “walking out,” or the “coming out.” It was a great event in a small New England town. The intended bride was commonly invited to choose the text for the minister’s sermon with all the care and attention that a young woman in the twentieth century would select her bridesmaids’ matching dresses and shoes.

Betrothed couples were also required to post their “banns” (a public announcement) at the meeting house on at least three lecture days. Those who failed to do so risked punishment for “disorderly marriage.” If no impediment was found, the wedding was arranged, commonly for a date in November which was the favorite season in Puritan New England.¹⁷

The wedding was performed at home by a magistrate in a simple civil ceremony. There were no holy vows or wedding rings—which the Puritans disapproved. A single question was addressed to the bride and groom; when they freely answered in the affirmative, the event was over.¹⁸ The couple were required to register their marriage in a civil book kept by the town clerk. Then a small celebration followed—not a great feast, but a modest wedding dinner with bridal cakes and a cup of sack posset. The sober settlers of Massachusetts did not approve of wild wedding parties.

The clergy condemned extravagant display as “vain marriage.” The most important part of the dinner was the singing of a psalm. Dancing was sternly forbidden; so also were excessive dining and drinking.

On the wedding night, the bride dressed in a special gown, and was put to bed by friends who accompanied the couple into the chamber, and then gave them a joyous charivari with much banging and bell-ringing outside the chamber. This custom was commonly kept throughout Christian Europe—both the “chambering” and the charivari. But the marriage ways of Massachusetts in their totality were a unique amalgam of Puritan ideas and East Anglian practices. As we shall see, they differed in many important ways from other regional folkways in British America.

Divorce customs also differed from other English-speaking cultures. The Puritans recognized many grounds for divorce that were consistent with their conception of marriage. The statutes of Connecticut allowed divorce for adultery, fraudulent contract, wilful desertion and total neglect for three years, and “providential absence” for seven years. Massachusetts granted divorces in the seventeenth century for adultery, desertion, cruelty, and “failure to provide.”¹⁹ Physical violence was also recognized as a ground for divorce. Husbands and wives were forbidden to strike one another in Massachusetts; there was no such thing as “moderate correction” in the laws of this colony. The courts often intervened in cases of wife-beating, and sometimes of husband-beating too.²⁰

These various grounds for divorce also defined the idea of marriage in Massachusetts. It was to be a close and companionate relationship, a union of love and harmony, an act of sexual fulfillment, and an institution with a firm economic base. All of these requirements were part of the Puritan idea of the marriage convenant, which could be dissolved if any of its major terms were not kept. These Puritan marriage ways were unique to New England in the seventeenth century.

Massachusetts Gender Ways:
The Puritan Idea of a Covenant Between Unequals

Within Massachusetts marriages, conjugal relations rested upon an assumption of inequality between the sexes. This conventional idea was routinely asserted by men and acknowledged by women—even women of high estate. The New England gentlewoman Anne Bradstreet eloquently expressed this idea in her poetry:

Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are,

Men have precedency and still excel,

It is but vain, unjustly to wage war;

Men can do best, and women know it well;

Preheminence in each and all is yours,

Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.¹

A similar attitude was expressed by that spirited Puritan lady Lucy Winthrop Downing, who wrote to her brother John Winthrop, “I am but a wife and therefore it is sufficient for me to follow my husband.”²

This idea of gender inequality, however, was modified in important ways by the religious faith of the founders. The Puritans deeply believed that women and men were equally capable of joining the church, receiving grace and entering the kingdom of heaven. Further, many women took an active role in the Congregational churches of Massachusetts. Ordination was denied to them; women were not allowed to become ministers in a formal sense, and were explicitly forbidden to preach to men. But Puritan women ministered to others of their sex, and were admitted to church membership more often than their husbands. The Christian ideal of spiritual equality between the sexes was specially powerful in the seventeenth century, when the fires of faith burned so brightly in the Calvinist colonies.³

In the culture of New England, these two contrary ideas of equality in “the soul’s vocation” and inequality in other spheres were combined in structures of delicate complexity. Puritan minister Samuel Willard wrote on the subject of relations between husbands and wives, “ … of all the orders which are unequals, these do come nearest to an Equality, and in several respects they stand upon an even ground. These two do make a pair, which infers so far a parity.”⁴

The Puritans often quoted the Pauline expression that the husband was “the head of the wife.” Sermons and advice-books (all written by men) uniformly urged that a woman was duty-bound to submit to her husband, and counseled obedience and resignation in that respect. Ministers also preached that the husband ruled with God-given authority, and even represented divine sovereignty in the family. This idea was summarized in one of Milton’s mighty lines: “He for God only; She for God in Him.”⁵

On the other hand, the laws of Massachusetts gave women many protections. Every woman without exception was equally entitled to the physical protection of the law. Her husband could not beat her, or even verbally abuse her—a rule that was sternly enforced. There was also an elastic clause that forbade husbands to command their wives to do anything contrary to the law of God. Further, the common law of New England recognized that women both single and married could own property, and execute contracts.⁶

Normally, Puritan moralists preached that husbands and wives should not have separate property. They were expected to work together for the common welfare of the family. There was no clear idea of “separate spheres” in this culture. Depositions filed in the court of Essex County, Massachusetts, during the late seventeenth century describe women routinely doing heavy field labor, carrying sacks of grain to the mill, cutting firewood, tending swine, and castrating steers. One minister wrote that a woman “in her husband’s absence, is wife and deputy-husband.”⁷

A Puritan writer also argued that “tho the Husband be the head of the wife, yet she is the head of the family.”⁸ Custom as well as law in the Bay Colony required husbands to treat their wives not only with decency, but respect. When a man in Essex County told his spouse that “she was none of his wife, she was but a servant,” the neighbors brought a criminal complaint against him, and though the wife herself refused to support the prosecution, he was heavily fined by the court.⁹

Puritan moralists on the family universally routinely agreed that husbands and wives should love one another and live in harmony together. In these beliefs, they were no different from most people in the Western world. But Puritanism was a form of social striving which labored obsessively to close the gap between ideals and actuality. Surviving letters between husbands and wives in Massachusetts commonly described a world in which both partners worked very hard at perfecting their relationship, in a mutual effort to achieve love and harmony within the household.

There was also a darker side of family life. The court records of Massachusetts contained cases of unhappy families in the Bay Colony. But this evidence points two ways. When outward signs of trouble appeared, the entire neighborhood was apt to swing into action; then the churches intervened; and finally the courts.

It did not take much of a domestic disturbance to set this social machinery in motion. A sudden quarrel between husband and wife could end in a criminal indictment. The object of these proceedings was not punishment or retribution, but the restoration of good relations within the family. The Puritans had a very low tolerance of domestic discord, and high expectations for peace and harmony.¹⁰

It is also important to note that these disciplinary proceedings tended to be remarkably even-handed as to the treatment of husbands and wives. A comparative study of adultery in New England and the Chesapeake finds that men and women convicted of this offense commonly received similar punishments in Massachusetts. But in Maryland courts, women were punished much more severely than men.¹¹

The Puritans also expected that important family decisions would be taken by the husband and wife together. Agreements for the sending out of children referred to both the husband’s and the wife’s consent. Business ventures were often undertaken jointly. Men and women were not equals in these relationships, but they were partners in the conduct of their affairs.¹²

Between husbands and wives, the culture of New England sought to create a covenant of unequals which was cemented by a spiritual communion of love, harmony, caring, forbearance and mutual respect. The ideal was captured in an immortal verse of Anne Bradstreet, addressed to her “dear and loving husband.” The first lines of her poem are most often quoted, but the last lines are the key to this covenanted relationship:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me ye women if you can. …

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.¹³

Massachusetts Sex Ways:
Puritan Ideas of Flesh and the Spirit

Sex among the Puritans was very far from being puritanical in the popular sense. Copulation was not a taboo subject in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, as it later became in the nineteenth. It was discussed so openly that the writings of the Puritans required heavy editing before they were thought fit to print even in the mid-twentieth century.¹ But sex in Massachusetts was distinctly puritanical in another meaning. The sexual attitudes and acts of the Bay colonists were closely linked to religious beliefs. Where controlled regional comparisons can be made by a quantitative method, we find that their sexual behavior was distinctly different from the non-Puritan colonies. At the same time, Massachusetts sex ways were remarkably similar to prevailing customs in East Anglia, as distinct from other parts of England.

The Puritans never encouraged sexual asceticism. They did not value chastity in the Roman Catholic sense as highly as other Christians did. The Boston minister Samuel Willard explicitly condemned “the Popist conceit of the excellency of virginity.” John Cotton wrote that “women are creatures without which there is no comfortable living for man: it is true of them what to be said of governments, that bad ones are better than none.”²

Puritans also commonly believed that an intimate sexual bond between husbands and wives was an important and even a necessary part of marriage. Correspondence between Puritan husbands and wives often expressed their love for one another in strong sensual terms. John Winthrop and his wife Margaret wrote often in this way: “My dearly beloved wife,” he began, “ … my heart is at home, and specially with thee my best beloved … with the sweetest kisses and pure embracings of my kindest affection I rest thine. …”³

Sexual relations within marriage were protected by the Puritans from the prying eyes of others, and surrounded with as much privacy as was possible in that culture. A court in New England indicted a man because “he could not keep from boys and servants, secret passages betwixt him and his wife about the marriage bed.”⁴

Sex outside of marriage, however, was regarded very differently. The Puritans followed the teachings of the Old Testament in believing that adultery was a sin of the deepest dye. They defined an adulterous act in the conventional way as extramarital sex involving a married woman (not necessarily a married man), but punished both partners with high severity. Their criminal codes made adultery a capital crime, and at least three people were actually hanged for it in the Puritan colonies.

When cases of adultery occurred, it was not uncommon for entire communities to band together and punish the transgressors.⁵ In the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, for example, a married woman named Sarah Roe had an affair with a neighbor named Joseph Leigh while her mariner-husband was away at sea. Several townsmen warned them to stop. When they persisted, no fewer than thirty-five Ipswich neighbors went to court against them and gave testimony that communicated a deep sense of moral outrage. In this case, adultery could not be proved according to New England’s stringent rules for capital crime, which required two eye-witnesses to the actual offense. But the erring couple were found guilty of “unlawful familiarity” and severely punished. Joseph Leigh was ordered to be heavily whipped and fined five pounds, and Sarah Roe was sent to the House of Correction for a month, with orders that she was to appear in Ipswich meetinghouse on lecture day bearing a sign, “For My baudish

Carnage,” written in “fair capital letters.” In this case as in so many others, the moral code of Puritan Massachusetts was not imposed by a small elite upon an unwilling people; it rose from customs and beliefs that were broadly shared throughout the Puritan colonies.⁶

In cases of fornication the rules were also very strict. For an act of coitus with an unwed woman, the criminal laws of Puritan Massachusetts decreed that a man could be jailed, whipped, fined, disfranchised and forced to marry his partner. Even in betrothed couples, sexual intercourse before marriage was regarded as a pollution which had to be purged before they could take its place in society and—most important—before their children could be baptized. In both courts and churches, the Puritans created an elaborate public ritual by which fornicators were cleansed of their sin, so that they could be speedily admitted to full moral fellowship.

In New England, unlike other parts of British America, men and women were punished in an exceptionally even-handed way for sexual transgressions. Where differences appeared in penalties for fornication, males suffered more severely than females in New England. The custom of the Chesapeake colonies was the reverse.⁷

These rules were obeyed. In Massachusetts during the seventeenth century, rates of prenuptial pregnancy were among the lowest in the Western world. In the towns of Hingham, Sudbury and Concord, the proportion of brides who were pregnant on their wedding day approached zero in the period from 1650 to 1680. This pattern was not universal in New England. Premarital pregnancy was more common in seaports on the social periphery of the region and in the pluralist settlements of Rhode Island. Everywhere it tended to increase during the late seventeenth century. But by comparison with other colonies it remained exceptionally low in most parts of New England during the first fifty years of settlement.⁸

Bastardy was also very rare in the Puritan colonies. Few cases occurred in the first generation, and were punished with great rigor. As time passed, rates of illegitimacy tended to rise throughout New England, but always remained lower than in other parts of British America.⁹

This New England pattern, which differed very much from other colonies, was similar to East Anglia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historian Peter Laslett and his colleagues find that the eastern counties in general, and the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk in particular, had the lowest rates of illegitimacy in England.¹⁰

The sexual discipline of the Puritan colonies was not achieved by Christian asceticism. Relationships between men and women were highly charged with sexual tension in this culture. It was assumed by the courts that if healthy adult men and women were alone together, they would probably be engaged in a sexual relationship. Married men and women were generally forbidden to meet privately with others of the opposite sex, unless related. Unmarried people were carefully watched by the community, and offenders were publicly denounced. When one wayward Puritan attempted to seduce a woman in 1650, she told him, “I will make you a shame to all New England.” Undeterred, he forced himself upon her, even though her child lay beside her in the bed. Afterwards, she told him, “Put your finger but a little in the fire [and] you will not be able to endure it, but I must suffer eternally.”¹¹

Puritan attitudes were almost maniacally hostile to what they regarded as unnatural sex. More than other religious groups, they had a genuine horror of sexual perversion. Masturbation was made a capital crime in the colony of New Haven. Bestiality was punished by death, and that sentence was sometimes executed in circumstances so bizarre as to tell us much about the sex ways of New England. One such case in New Haven involved a one-eyed servant named George Spencer, who had often been on the wrong side of the law, and was suspected of many depravities by his neighbors. When a sow gave birth to a deformed pig which also had one eye, the unfortunate man was accused of bestiality. Under great pressure, he confessed, recanted, confessed again, and recanted once more. The laws of New England made conviction difficult: bestiality was a capital crime and required two witnesses for conviction. But so relentless were the magistrates that the deformed piglet was admitted as one witness, and the recanted confession was accepted as another. George Spencer was hanged for bestiality.

That case was not unique in the sexual history of New Haven. When a second deformed pig was born in that troubled town, another unfortunate eccentric was also accused of bestiality by his neighbors. Even though he could not be convicted under the two-witness rule, he was imprisoned longer than anybody else in the history of the colony. When yet a third defective piglet was born with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head, the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor. The people of New Haven seem to have been perfectly obsessed by fear of unnatural sex. When a dog belonging to Nicholas Bayly was observed trying to copulate with a sow, neighbors urged that it be killed. Mrs. Bayly refused and incautiously made a joke of it, saying of her dog, “if he had not a bitch, he must have something.” The magistrates of New Haven were not amused. Merely for making light of bestiality, the Baylys were banished from the town.¹²

Two people were also hanged for bestiality in Massachusetts, and even jests on that subject were punished ferociously in the Bay Colony. Bestiality was also a capital crime in other English jurisdictions, but New England’s intensity of concern was something special.¹³

This hostility to unnatural sex had a demographic consequence of high importance. Puritan moralists condemned as unnatural any attempt to prevent conception within marriage. This was not a common attitude in world history. Most primitive cultures have practiced some form of contraception, often with high success. Iroquois squaws made diaphragms of birchbark; African slaves used pessaries of elephant dung to prevent pregnancy. European women employed beeswax disks, cabbage leaves, spermicides of lead, whitewash and tar. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, coitus interruptus and the use of sheepgut condoms became widespread in Europe.¹⁴

But the Puritans would have none of these unnatural practices.

They found a clear rule in Genesis 38, where Onan “spilled his seed upon the ground” in an effort to prevent conception and the Lord slew him. In Massachusetts, seed-spilling in general was known as the “hideous sin of Onanism.” A Puritan could not practice coitus interruptus and keep his faith. Every demographic test of contraception within marriage yields negative results in Puritan Massachusetts.¹⁵ The burden of this taboo rested heavily upon families throughout New England. One minister wrote wearily in his diary, “ … uxor praegnans est; sic semper uxoribus.”¹⁶ Samuel Sewall, at the age of 49, recorded the birth of his fourteenth child, and added a prayer, “It may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing.” So she did, but only by reaching the age of menopause.¹⁷

This general pattern of sexual attitudes—strong encouragement of sexual love and sensual bonds within marriage, strict punishment of fornication and adultery, a maniacal horror of unnatural sex, and rigid taboos against contraception within marriage—was in its totality unique to New England. By and large, this culture was not a system of sexual tyranny and repression. The sex ways of Massachusetts rested upon an intensity of moral and religious purpose which marked so many aspects of this culture.

Massachusetts Child-naming Ways: Puritan Onomastics

“The naming of children,” writes historian Daniel Scott Smith, “is culturally never a trivial act.” This was specially so among the Puritans. One of their ministers declared, “ … a good name is as a thread tyed about the finger, to make us mindful of the errand we came into the world to do for our master.”¹

The Puritan families of Massachusetts named their newborn infants in ways that differed very much from other English-speaking people. The most striking feature of their onomastic customs was their strong taste for biblical names. In seventeenth-century Boston, 90 percent of all first names were taken from the Bible; in Concord, 91 percent; in Hingham, 95 percent. That proportion was nearly twice as great as in non-Puritan colonies.²

Few biblical names failed to be bestowed upon one New England baby or another. Some parents cultivated a spirit of scriptural uniqueness. One unfortunate child was named Maher-shalalhasbaz, the longest name in the bible. Another, the son of Bostonian Samuel Pond, was baptized Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin Pond. There is evidence that parents sometimes shut their eyes, opened the good book and pointed to a word at random, with results such as Notwithstanding Griswold and Maybe Barnes.³

But onomastic eccentricities of that sort were rare in New England. A remarkably small number of biblical names accounted for a very large proportion of choices. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a whole during the seventeenth century, more than 50 percent of all girls were named Mary, Elizabeth or Sarah.⁴ These biblical namesakes were carefully selected for the moral qualities which they personified. Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to the Puritans as humble, devoted, thoughtful, sensitive and serious. Elizabeth was the faithful wife of Zecharias and mother of John the Baptist. Sarah was the wife of Abraham, mother of Isaac and “mother of nations.” Also very popular was Rebecca, wife of Isaac and mother of two nations, who appears in the Bible with a pitcher perched upon her shoulder. The few female prophets—

Anne, Hannah, Deborah and Huldah—were often honored in New England. So was Abigail, who bravely defended her husband against a monarch’s wrath, and Rachel who stood up for her husband even against her own father. Many a daughter of New England was named for Ruth, industrious and obedient, who gleaned the field and beat out her gleanings and lay down her head at the foot of her husband Boaz.⁵ Most feminine namesakes were firmly anchored in a domestic role. At the same time they were also notable for intellect, courage, integrity and strength of character. The feminist movement has trained us to think disjunctively of these qualities; but in early New England they were one.

For boys, the leading namesake was John, the most Christlike of the apostles, the disciple whom Jesus loved for his goodness of spirit. Another favored namesake was Joseph, not the father of Jesus but the first Joseph, whom the Puritans specially respected for strength of character. Other favorites were Samuel the upright judge, and Josiah the just ruler. The names of many great patriarchs and lawgivers were rarely used. Among 1,000 families in Concord, the name Moses was uncommon and Adam was virtually unknown. Few children were named Abraham or Solomon. A surprising omission was Paul, despite the fact that New England Puritanism lay squarely within the Pauline tradition of Christianity.⁶

Other common Christian names did not appear in Massachusetts. Puritan children were not named Jesus, or Angel or Emmanuel or Christopher, all of which were taboo among English Calvinists. A minister explained the reason: “Emmanuel is too bold,” wrote Thomas Adams. “The name is properly to Christ, and therefore not to be communicated to any creature.” Adams also thought it “not fit for Christian humility to call a man Gabriel or Michael, giving the names of angels to the sons of mortality.” The archangels were common namesakes in Anglican families of Virginia, but Puritan parents carefully matched biblical names to their mortal condition in the great chain of being.⁷

With equal care, Puritan parents also chose scriptural names which seemed suitable to their social rank. On New England muster rolls, the name of Hezekiah the king of Judah appeared ten times as often for officers as for enlisted men. Amos, the name of a simple herdsman, was generally more common among the rank and file.⁸

Onomastic customs of Massachusetts were also unique in another way—the descent of names within the family. Children in Calvinist families were not named after godparents; this was a “Popish” practice which Puritans detested. In Massachusetts, two-thirds of first-born sons and daughters were given the forenames of their parents. This nuclear naming strategy persisted through many generations in Massachusetts. As we shall see, it was very different from other cultures in British America.⁹

Still another onomastic custom in Massachusetts was the use of necronyms. When a child died, its name was usually given to the next-born baby of the same sex. A case in point was the Concord family of Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell who married in 1732 and had five children named Ephraim, Samuel, John, Elizabeth and Isaac. In 1740, the “throat Distemper” came to Concord, and the Hartwells watched helplessly as all their children died within a single month. But the parents survived and nine more children were born; their names were Elizabeth, Samuel, Abigail, Ephraim, John, Mary, Sarah, Isaac and Jonas. The name of every dead child was used again. The Hartwells were exceptional only in the scale of their suffering. When New England families lost a child, its name was used again in 80 percent of all cases where another baby of the same sex was born. Necronyms were a normal part of New England’s naming system and of other cultures in the seventeenth century.¹⁰

Massachusetts onomastics were the product of what has been called a “Puritan naming revolution,” in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It is interesting that this revolution took different forms in various parts of England, and that once again it was the East Anglian pattern that came to Massachusetts, rather than naming customs from the south or west or north of England.¹¹

A great many English Puritans lived in Sussex, for example, but only about 1 percent of New England’s immigrants came from that county. Sussex Puritans made heavy use of hortatory names such as Be-courteous Cole (in the Parish of Pevensey), Safely-on-high Snat (Uckfield), Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White (Ewhurst), Small-hope Biggs (Rye), Humiliation Scratcher (Westham), Kill-sin Pemble (also Westham), and Mortifie Hicks (Hailsham). A classic example was an unfortunate young woman named ffly fornication Bull, of Hailsham, Sussex, who was made pregnant in the shop of a yeoman improbably called Goodman Woodman. So popular were these hortatory names among Sussex Puritans that in the parish of Warbleton, for example, more than 43 percent of children received them in the period between 1570 and 1600.¹²

In East Anglia, on the other hand, hortatory names were uncommon among Puritan families—less than 4 percent of children were given them. Massachusetts followed the East Anglian rather than the Sussex pattern; its onomastic customs were both religious and regional in their origins.¹³

Massachusetts Child-rearing Ways:
Breaking of Will

Puritan conventions of child-naming were closely related to customs of child rearing in New England—a business of high importance in this culture. “Remember … the children,” Puritan minister John Wilson told his New England congregation, “you came hither for your children.” In their concern for the young, the builders of the Bay Colony brought to America a special set of child-rearing customs which were shaped by Puritan ideas and East Anglian experiences.¹

Behind these practices lay an explicit assumption, deeply rooted in Calvinist theology, about the natural depravity of the newborn child. The Puritans believed that in consequence of Adam’s sin, all infants were born ignorant and empty of all good things, and that small children were naturally disposed to do evil in the world. This Calvinist dogma appeared in Puritan sermons and child-rearing books, and also in New England autobiographies, which commonly remembered childhood not with the nostalgia of modern memoirs but with persistent feelings of pain and guilt. The same attitude suffused the high literature of New England, as in Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Four Ages of Man,” which makes Childhood speak these words:

Ah me! conceiv’d in sin, and born in sorrow,

A nothing, here to day, but gone tomorrow.

Whose mean beginning, blushing cann’t reveal,

But night and darkness, must with shame conceal. …

With tears into this world I did arrive;

My mother still did waste, as I did thrive:

Who yet with love, and all alacrity,

Spending was willing, to be spent for me.

With wayward cries, I did disturb her rest;

Who sought still to appease me, with her breast.

With weary armes, she danced, and Bye, Bye, sung,

When wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong.

When infancy was passed, my childishness,

Did act all folly, that it could expresse …

From birth stained, with Adam’s sinful fact

Fron thence I ‘gan to sin as soon as act.

A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid:

A serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid.

A lying tongue as soon as it could speak,

And fifth commandment do daily break.²

This dual idea of the depravity of infants and the perversity of their natural will led Puritans to the conclusion that the first and most urgent purpose of child rearing was what they called the

“breaking of the will.” This was a determined effort to destroy a spirit of autonomy in a small child—a purpose which lay near the center of child rearing in Massachusetts.³

The idea of “will-breaking” was not invented in New England. It also appeared among Puritan clergy in the east of England, and among Calvinist writers from the Netherlands to Hungary. One of the classical texts was written by English Puritan John Robinson, a Cambridge scholar who had preached in the East Anglian metropolis of Norwich before moving to the Netherlands where he became minister to the Pilgrims. On the subject of child rearing, he declared:

Children … are a blessing great but dangerous. … how great and many are their spiritual dangers, both for nourishing and increasing the corruption which they bring into the world with them. … parents must provide carefully … that children’s wills and willfulness be restrained and repressed. … Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own, but in their parents’ keeping. Neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will,” or “I will not.” And, [if] will be suffered at first to sway in them in small and lawful things, they will hardly after be restrained in great and ill matters.⁴

This process of will-breaking was achieved in Puritan households by strict and rigorous supervision. Fathers took an active and even a leading part. The Puritan diaries of Samuel Sewall in New England and Ralph Josselin in East Anglia, both described their busy child-rearing roles. The care of infants was mainly in the hands of the mother, but Sewall and Josselin both taught their youngsters to read and write, instructed them in religion, and took sons and daughters on day-trips. They made the major decisions about naming their children, schooling, discipline and the decision to send their children into other homes. Sewall and Josselin helped their children to make the major decisions about work and marriage. A close relationship continued to the end of life.

The Sewall and Josselin diaries suggest that the tone of these relationships was normally warm and affectionate. Both fathers expressed deep concern about the welfare and happiness of their

Will-breaking was mainly a form of mental discipline, but when all else failed New England parents did not hesitate to use physical constraints. Restless children were rolled into small squirming human balls with their knees tied firmly beneath their chins, and booted back and forth across the floor by their elders. Other youngsters were dangled by their heels out of windows, or forced to kneel on sharp sticks, or made to sit precariously for long periods on a one-legged stool called the unipod, or compelled to wear a painful cleft stick on the tip of the nose. Partners in juvenile crime were yoked together in miniature versions of an oxbow. Small malefactors were made to wear shame-signs that proclaimed their offenses: “Lying Ananias,” or “Bite-Finger-Baby.” Large children were caned or whipped; little ones were slapped with ferules, and tiny infants were tapped sharply on the skull with hard ceramic thimbles. Another common punishment was a wooden bit called the whispering stick, firmly set between the teeth and fastened by a cord behind the neck. To the front was added a shame-paper that read, “he whispers.” Several of these devices have survived, and are sketched here from old photographs.

children, and wrote of them with love and tenderness. Both subscribed to the Puritan epigram, “better whipped than damned,” but they disliked corporal punishment and used it only in extreme circumstances (commonly when a child threatened danger to itself or others), and much preferred to lead their children by precept, example, reward and exhortation.⁵

Both of these Puritan fathers, New Englander Samuel Sewall and East Anglian Ralph Josselin, trained their children to regard elders with what one English Puritan called “filial awe and reverence,” in which love and fear were mixed. Children were required to stand and bow when their parents approached. They were forbidden to show that “fondness and familiarity [which] breeds and causeth contempt and irreverence.” This ritual display of deference was another method of curbing the will.⁶

An important part of child-rearing in Massachusetts was the custom called “sending out.” Parents routinely sent away their youngsters to be raised in other homes, sometimes at the same time that they took in children of the same age from other families.⁷ This folkway often had a practical purpose—to place a child close to a school, to prepare it for a calling, to remove it from a pestered place, or to put it in an intact family after the loss of a parent. At the same time, sending out also had another purpose—a child was thought to learn better manners and behavior in another home.⁸

Sending out was customary in Puritan families of all ranks—high and low, rich and poor, urban and rural. The diary of Samuel Sewall recorded the sending out of all his children in much detail. Sewall’s purposes varied. One sickly youngster was put into the home of a famous healer. Another studious child was sent away to school. Two girls were dispatched to housewives to learn sewing and knitting. The eldest son was apprenticed to several tradesmen in Boston until he found his calling. The children were consulted in the choice of a home, but they were compelled to go, often much against their will. Sewall recorded the unhappiness of his daughter Hannah when she was sent away to Salem.

When her father carried her away to new home, the thirteen-year-old child wept bitterly, begging not be be abandoned. “Much adoe to pacify my dear my dear daughter, she weeping and pleading to go with me,” the father wrote. A similar scene occurred when Samuel Sewall junior was sent to learn a trade in Boston. His father recorded that “Sam was weeping and much discomposed and loth to go.” But Sam went.⁹

The age at which Sewall’s children were sent away from home varied with the cause. Those who were “put out” for their health tended to go at an exceptionally early age. But most departures occurred near the age of puberty. A twentieth-century scholar observes that “It is surely more than a coincidence that it was exactly at this age that they all left home to be subjected to outside discipline and freed from the incestuous dangers of crowded living.” Whether or not this modern reading is correct, there were undoubtedly deeper motives than the rationale itself.

These were not casual arrangements. The terms were settled with great care between households.¹⁰ The custom of sending out was much the same among Puritans in East Anglia and Massachusetts, and very different from child-rearing ways in other regions of British America.¹¹

Massachusetts Age Ways:
The Puritan Idea of the Elder-Saint

From childhood to the grave, the Puritans of Massachusetts had strong views on every stage of life. This was specially the case in regard to old age, and age-relations in general. On these subjects, the customs of New England were shaped by Puritan beliefs.

In the twentieth century, Americans share an exceptionally strong bias toward youth. We fear the process of aging, and despise old age. Further, our system of social rank is so centered on wealth that other criteria of status such as age operate only when they can be translated into materialist terms. So dominant is our materialistic ranking system today that other customs are not merely unfamiliar; they are inconceivable.¹

The people of seventeenth-century New England lived in another world. They carefully cultivated an attitude of respect for the old, and ranked people in proportion to their age. “These two qualities go together, the ancient and the honorable,” wrote Cotton Mather. “If any man is favored with long life,” wrote Increase Mather, “it is God who has lengthened his days.”²

The moral posture which young people were taught to assume before their elders was unlike that of any other social relationship.

It was summarized in a word now lost from common usage: veneration, which came from the Latin deponent verb veneror, venerari, “to regard with religious awe and reverence.” Veneration took on a special meaning among the Puritans, who more than others made a cult of age. The Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement—that Jesus died only for the elect—created a difficult problem. How could election be known?

Old age, in short, was a sign. The Puritans had need of signs. They argued that elderly people had “a peculiar acquaintance with the Lord Jesus.” Further, their cosmology taught that everything in the world happened according to God’s purpose. They believed that the small numbers of godly men and women who lived to old age were the saving remnant of the race.³

Every Puritan moralist who wrote upon this subject agreed that old age was a sign of grace. This belief was powerfully joined to a demographic reality. In Massachusetts, there were not very many older people. The proportion of men and women over sixty-five in that population was not more than 2 percent, compared with more than 12 percent in 1988. This was mainly because rates of fertility were high, and the number of children was relatively large. But mortality also made a difference in another way: the chances of living a biblical span of seventy years were approximately 20 percent at birth, compared with 80 percent today. The odds of reaching the age of seventy were highly unfavorable—in fact, four to one against. This demographic fact deepened a theological perception.⁴

Respect for age was not merely an ideal. It became a living reality in New England. Evidence appears in the assumptions that writers tacitly made about the ways in which people normally behaved in this culture. A case in point was the following passage by New England clergyman Job Orton:

One is sometimes ready to wish that the aged who have the most wisdom and experience, had most strength; but while we have old heads to contrive and advise, and young hands to work, it comes to much the same. Besides, had the aged the strength of youth, they would be more ready to despise the young than they now are.⁵

Orton assumed in this extraordinary passage that “old heads” did effectively control “young hands.” Further, he also assumed that the major problem was not that young people would despise their elders, but that elders would despise the young. This evidence is most interesting for the truth that it betrays about Puritan assumptions which were so different from our own.

Evidence of these attitudes also appeared in census tracts and depositions. When people report their ages today they are apt to bend the truth, and make themselves a little younger than they actually are. The result is a tendency called “age-heaping,” by people who prefer to be 39 rather than 40; similar distortions are caused by others who claim to be 49, 59, 69 and even 79. In early New England the pattern of age-bias was very different. On balance, people of advanced age tended to make themselves older rather than younger than they actually were—the opposite of the modern bias.⁶

This attitude of respect for age was also woven into the fabric of New England’s institutions. It appeared in the custom of “seating the meeting.” Throughout rural Massachusetts, older men and women were given the places of highest “dignity” and the entire population was distributed according to its age. Women of advanced age shared this honor equally with men.⁷ Elderly women in general were respectfully addressed as “Gran’mam,” and older men were greeted as “Grandsire” throughout this region.⁸

The same attitudes also appeared in patterns of officeholding. The higher the office, the older the incumbent was likely to be. In Plymouth Colony, for example, five out of six governors served into old age: four died in office at advanced ages; the last was seventy-three when Plymouth was annexed by Massachusetts. The same was true of assistants who “rarely left their posts of

The iconography of old age in New England appears in this portrait of Mistress Anne Pollard of Boston (1621-1725), “Aetatis Suae 100 & 3 Months.” This much-venerated lady was born at Saffron Walden (Essex) and emigrated at the age of nine. Long afterward she claimed to be the first female in the Great Migration to land on Boston’s shore. Later she married Boston innkeeper William Pollard (ca. 1643), bore him 12 children, and survived to a great age, much revered in New England. When she died in 1725 at the age of 104 she was buried with the body of a great-grandchild cradled in her arms. The two corpses were carried to the grave by six of Boston’s elders including diarist Samuel Sewall, who noted that the ages of the bearers “join’d together, made 445.”

This icon of Anne Pollard was painted in April 1721. She wears a sad brown dress, white cap and bonnet, a graceful bib and lace cuffs, and holds a small book in her right hand. The artist has elongated her features and made heavy use of light and shadow to bring out the arched brow, long nose and firm chin. There is nothing frail or weak about this old woman. Her image combines the strength, resolve, seriousness, dignity, virtue and gravitas that Puritans expected from elders. This sketch follows a painting in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

their own accord, nor were they often voted out of office by their constituents. Usually their tenure was ended by death, which in some instances was very long delayed.”⁹

Yet another sign was the tendency of New England to turn to older people in time of crisis. A classical example was William Goffe (c. 1607-79), a Puritan soldier and “Regicide” who sentenced Charles I to death. After the Restoration, Goffe fled to New England, and found refuge first in New Haven and later in Hadley, Massachusetts, where he lived in hiding, unknown to most people of that frontier town. In 1675, an Indian war began, and the townspeople repaired to their meetinghouse—all but Goffe himself who remained in hiding. As he watched from a window, he saw an Indian war party stealing upon the town. Goffe left his place of concealment and ran to the meetinghouse, where his sudden appearance caused panic among the people:

“I will lead,” the old man said. “Follow me!” The people instantly obeyed him. They had an old cannon, but knew not how to use it. Goffe trained it upon the Indians and his first shot crashed against a chimney above their heads, and sent them fleeing through a shower of brick and mortar. He rallied the townsmen, and ordered them in pursuit. When they returned he had vanished as miraculously as he had arrived. Later, it was written that “His venerable form, silvery locks, mysterious appearance and sudden disappearance, with the disposition of the pious in those days to recognize in any strange event a special providence, led the inhabitants to regard their deliverer as an angel, who after fulfilling the purpose of his missions, had rescended to heaven. They very likely never knew who he was.”¹⁰

This episode became a folk legend in New England. It was the basis for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, “The Grey Champion,” in which another old man with venerable appearance and silvery locks appeared as if by miracle to lead New England against Sir Edmund Andros in the Glorious Revolution. There were many “grey champions” in New England’s history and more in its collective imagination—Captain Samuel Whittemore who fought at Lexington at the age of 78; Deacon Josiah Haynes led his townsmen to Concord at the age of 80 and Congressman John Quincy Adams who stood as firm as New England granite against the

“slave power” at the age of 81. The idea of the “grey champion” became a cliché in New England culture.¹¹

John Adams used another New England cliché when he wrote that “none were fit for Legislators and magistrates but ‘sad men,’ … aged men who had been tossed and buffeted by the vicissitudes of Life, forced upon profound reflection by grief and disappointments, and taught to command their passions.”¹² In this context, “sad” preserved its old English meaning of “grave, serious, wise, discreet, settled, steadfast and firm”—qualities which the people of New England associated with old age.¹³

When Harvard sought a president in 1672, Richard Saltonstall insisted that old age was a requirement for that office, and youth or even middle age a disqualification. He argued:

First, Paul the aged, or Paul at the age of 60, or 70 years, is not only as good, but in some respects much better, than Paul not so old by ten or twenty years. Aged persons eminently righteous, by virtue of the promise [in] Psalm the 92:14, shall certainly yield more, better, sweeter and fairer fruit, than they did, or could have done, when they were not so old. …

Secondly, the scripture giveth great and weighty caution concerning youth or younger men.¹⁴

These principles were also incorporated in the institution of Christian eldership, which became a formal part of the New England Way. “Reverend Elders” were the official guardians of religion and morality in the Bay Colony. Difficult questions were specifically referred to them by the General Court. In 1641, for example, the legislature resolved that “it is desired that the elders would make a catechism for the instruction of youth in the grounds of religion.”¹⁵

Respect for age rested upon a solid material base. The system of land-holding in New England was purposely used to maintain a proper attitude of subordination in the young. Puritan elders tended to retain land for an unusually prolonged period. Sons who married at twenty-five or twenty-six sometimes did not receive land of their own until well into their thirties, and continued in a state of dependency upon their aged parents.¹⁶

This system of age relations also had its underside. Exceptions to the principle of veneration were made for older people who violated the moral precepts of this culture. Many of those who did so were not despised but feared; in Essex County, perhaps as many as one out of four women over the age of forty-five was accused of witchcraft in 1692.¹⁷

Most elderly people were treated with respect in New England, no matter whether rich or poor, male or female, weak or strong. But sometimes they were not much loved. Veneration was a cold emotion, closer to awe than to affection. The control which elders maintained over the young created strong resentments. “Love rather descends than ascends,” wrote John Robinson.¹⁸ A case in point was Timothy Cutler (1684-1765), the rector of Yale College. He was said to be “haughty and overbearing in his manner; and to a stranger, in the pulpit, appeared as a man fraught with pride. He never could win the rising generation, because he found it so difficult to be condescending, nor had he intimates of his own age and flock. But people of every denomination looked upon him with a kind of veneration, and his extensive learning excited esteem and respect where there was nothing to move or hold the affections of the heart.”¹⁹

Within the family, there was also an ambivalence of another sort. One pair of Puritan parents instructed their daughter how to regard her “good Grandmother”:

Deny your self very far to please her. Consider [that] her relation, age, [and] goodness all call for honor and respect from you. Her weakness of body and infirmities of old age call for patience and pity from you. Consider if you should live to be old you may stand in need of the same from others. It is certainly your duty next to pleasing God and your husband.²⁰

The idea of “honor and respect, patience and pity” for age was not in itself unique to New England. As we shall discover, it also was very strong in other cultures of British America before 1750. But among the people of the Bay Colony, the Puritan idea of veneration and the Calvinist image of the “elder-saint” gave it a special form and meaning.

Massachusetts Death Ways:
The Puritan Idea of Instrumental Fatalism

Ideas of old age were closely linked to attitudes toward death in Massachusetts. The same theological problems which caused Puritans to think of old age as a Calvinist sign also led to a way of thinking about death which had an exceptional intensity even by the macabre standards of their age. “Men fear death,” wrote Francis Bacon of his contemporaries, “as children fear to go into the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.”¹

The Puritans had many tales to tell upon the subject of death and dying. In that process, they created death-fears and also death-hopes of extraordinary power. This was so, notwithstanding the fact that New England proved to be unusually healthy for colonists from northern Europe. The first years were difficult, but the Bay Colony suffered nothing like the “starving time” that afflicted Jamestown and Plymouth. Rates of mortality in New England remained moderately low by comparison with other places.²

Even so, the mid-seventeenth century was a very grim period in Europe, Asia and America. This was the only era after the

Black Death when the population of the Western world actually declined.³ New England, fortunate as it may have been in a comparative way, was not exempt from the general suffering. The death rate in Massachusetts was approximately 25 per thousand in the seventeenth century: lower than in western Europe, and much below Virginia. But it was three times higher than in our own time. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, mortality rates tended to rise in Massachusetts, reaching levels above 30 per thousand in the 1730s and 1740s, when epidemic disease ravaged the region.⁴

Throughout this period, the death rate in New England was also highly unstable. As the country became more densely settled, epidemics of smallpox, measles and diphtheria struck with increasing frequency and force.⁵ Despite the comparative advantages of their environment, the builders of the Bay Colony shared with most other people in the seventeenth century the same dark foreboding of danger and insecurity. Journals and letters in this period were filled with stories of sudden deaths. “Mr. Creswell, was suddenly seized of an illness, which carried him off in a few minutes,” wrote a diarist in 1728. Epidemics struck families and even entire communities with the same appalling force.⁶

The Puritans of Massachusetts shared this feeling of insecurity in an exaggerated degree because of their theology. Their Calvinist faith was one of the most harsh and painful creeds that believing Christians have ever inflicted upon themselves. One New Englander described this dark philosophy as a “bitter pill in a chestnut burr.” The fabled “Five Points” of New England’s Calvinist orthodoxy insisted that the natural condition of humanity was total depravity, that salvation was beyond mortal striving, that grace was predestined only for a few, that most mortals were condemned to suffer eternal damnation, and no earthly effort could save them.

The people of Massachusetts were trained by their ministers never to be entirely confident of their own salvation. From childhood, they were taught to believe that a sense of certainty about salvation was one of the surest signs that one was not saved. “This was the constant message of Puritan preachers,” writes historian Edmund Morgan, “in order to be sure one must be unsure.” This attitude of cultivated insecurity, coming on top of the dangers of life itself, created a brooding darkness that hovered over the collective consciousness of New England for two centuries.⁷

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in the twilight of this culture, understood these feelings very well. “The underlying foundation of life … in New England,” she wrote, “was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy, which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an inconceivable misfortune.”⁸

This way of thinking led New Englanders to adopt some of more lugubrious deathlore which human ingenuity has invented. One of these customs was an exceptionally brutal method of preparing the young for death. Puritan parents compelled their youngsters to stare death in the face. Children were forced to read some of the most gruesome verses in the Bible until they dissolved in tears of terror and despair. They were lectured at length about the sudden deaths of other children, which happened to young Samuel Sewall until “he burst out in a bitter cry and said he was afraid he should die.” They were dragged screaming and twisting to the edge of an open grave and made to stare into the void and to reflect upon their own mortality. They were also taught always to doubt if they had been elected to grace, and never to feel entirely confident of salvation. Young Elizabeth Sewall repeatedly suffered torments of salvation-angst; at the age of fifteen she came to her father early in the morning and told him that she was “afraid to go to hell, was like Spira, not Elected.” All of this left a permanent mark upon Puritan personalities, and set them apart from other Christians in their own time.⁹

Another curious death custom in Puritan New England was an adult ritual which Cotton Mather called “daily dying.” This was a set of spiritual calisthenics, designed to warm the Calvinist soul. “A prudent man,” wrote Cotton Mather, “will die daily; and this is one thing in our doing too: tis to live daily under the power of such impressions, as we shall have upon us, when we come to die.” The diaries of individual Puritans tell us that “daily dying” became a living reality in ordinary lives.¹⁰

Yet a third death custom appeared in the responses of Puritans to the deaths of others. When a relative or friend or child died, the Puritans seized upon their grief, and nourished it, and tried to turn it to a constructive spiritual purpose. An English Puritan who lost his daughter when she was barely twelve, wrote in his diary:

May I never forget the afflicting stroke

Remember where I was and what I was doing when she was seized.

Remember the vows and promises then made.

Remember her patient suffering of grievous pain.

Remember her dying looks and parting sigh.

God grant the impressions made may never wear off.

Puritans never insulated themselves from the pain of death. They drove themselves toward the opposite extreme, and even prayed that their grief would “never wear off.”¹¹

Yet another custom was a cultivated bleakness of burial practices throughout New England. The Puritans had little interest in the physical remains of the dead. They did not approve of embalming, elaborate funerals, or extravagant tombs. “Burials now among the reformed in England,” wrote one unsympathetic observer at the time of the great migration, “are in a manner prophane, in many places the dead being thrown into the ground like dogs, and not a word said.”¹² In early New England, corpses were hurried into the ground with little ceremony. Burials often occurred late in the day, very near to sunset. The grave was marked by a simple granite rock, or a rough wooden paling.¹³ The funeral itself was a separate occasion—a sermon in which the minister made a point of not exaggerating the virtues of the dead. One New Englander attacked the hypocrisy of those “who in preaching Funeral Sermons, by misrepresenting the dead, have dangerously misled the living.”

As time passed, burial and funeral customs grew more elaborate. The mourners wore small tokens of remembrance—black scarves, ribbons, cloaks and gloves. The coffin became a piece of fine cabinet work, covered with a pall or shroud. But the people of New England were uncomfortable with this display, and a series of laws repeatedly sought “to retrench the extraordinary expence at Funerals.”¹⁴

Outward displays of grief were generally discouraged. Mourners were expected to maintain an outward appearance of disciplined calm which struck others as cold, callous and emotionless. In fact it was not so. But Massachusetts mourning customs made a striking contrast with the paroxysms of weeping and wailing and self-destruction that occurred in other cultures.

After the funeral, food and drink were served. Then suddenly the restraints were removed on one of the few occasions when New Englanders drank to excess. Entire communities became intoxicated. Even little children went reeling and staggering through the bleak burying grounds. There are descriptions of infants so intoxicated that they slipped into the yawning grave.

Altogether, Puritan death ways encouraged a manic combination of hope and fear about the “dying time” that became a central part of life. These attitudes included a sense of fatalism about the coming of death. In the seventeenth century all the world was fatalistic; but it was not all fatalistic in the same way. Every culture taught that vital events were beyond human control. The Puritans shared this cosmic sense of inexorability. But their uncertainty about the outcome of salvation encouraged a spirit of restless striving for assurance which set the fatalism of Puritan New England apart from other cultures.

This special fatalism of the Puritans was carefully recorded in their diaries and autobiographies. A case in point was the New England minister Thomas Shepard. Every day for him was a spiritual trial with a different verdict. On February 16, 1641, for example, he was convinced that he was saved:

February 15. I was in prayer, and in the beginning of it that promise came in, Seek me, and you shall live … my heart made choice of God alone, and he was a sweet portion to me.

The next day, Shepard’s mood suddenly changed.

February 16. I saw my heart was not prepared to die because I had not studied to wean my heart from the world. … Oh Lord, help me … a perishing thing.

There were no diary entries for a week. Then, Shepard’s spirits lifted:

February 23. On bed I considered how sweetly the Lord was sometimes with me, and so how I should preserve that spirit and go forward …

But that same night he was overtaken by despair:

February 23. At night after lecture I saw my vileness … the Lord made me see nothing but shame to belong to me.

A similar rhythm appeared in the thoughts of many Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. Historian Alan Simpson has described the spiritual career of the English Puritan Thomas Goodwin:

At six, young Thomas was warned by a servant that, if he did not repent of his sins, Hell awaited him. At seven, he had learned to weep for them and to look for the signs of grace. At twelve he thought he had more grace than anyone else in his village. At thirteen, he went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge … oscillating between hope and despair. For the real experience had not yet come. … It came to him of course through the medium of a sermon: the normal means employed by God to hammer the hardened heart. The text was, “Defer not thy repentence. …” Always before, when he wept for his sins, he had kept some feeling of human merit. Now he knows he has none, that the natural man, even when seemingly a good man, is only a beautiful abomination, for the natural man has had no merit since Adam’s disobedience, and Hell is his just destination. Then, in the midst of his horror, comes the act of mercy: the voice that says to the dead soul “Arise and live.” Goodwin compares himself to a traitor whom a king has pardoned and then raised to the position of friend and favorite. But if the favorite has tremendous privileges, he also has tremendous duties. His life must be an endless war against the sin which dishonors his sovereign …,¹⁵

These feelings were widely shared among the Puritans. Simpson writes, “ … there is almost no famous Puritan who has not left some account of this experience, even though it is only a few haunted lines written to a cousin in the midst of his travail.”¹⁶ These wild swings of hope and despair colored Puritan attitudes toward life and death itself. They created the paradox of a Puritan fatalism which quickened the pulse of life itself and became an important part of the “New England Way.”

Massachusetts Religious Ways:
The Puritan Meeting and Lecture Style

When the builders of the Bay Colony spoke of the “New England Way,” what they usually meant was their religion. We have already studied this subject in several of its aspects—its origins in East Anglia, its role in the great migration and its tenets of belief. Here we shall examine the ritual of worship as a religious folkway in Congregational New England.

Many different forms of Christian ritual flourished in British America—the liturgical style of Anglican churches; the evangelical style of Presbyterian field meetings; the communal style of Baptist fellowships; the spiritual style of the Society of Friends. The people of New England adopted still another form of worship which might be called the meeting and lecture style. It was fully developed in Massachusetts by the mid-seventeenth century, and persisted throughout the Puritan colonies for many generations.

This New England Way was distinguished by its exceptional austerity. “Everything was stripped bare,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, “all poetic forms, all the draperies and accessories of religious ritual, have been rigidly and unsparingly retrenched.” It claimed to be a religion without ritual, but in fact it replaced one set of rituals with another.¹

Like every other form of worship, the New England Way created its own unique physical setting in the architecture of its Congregational meetinghouse. More than 200 of these buildings were constructed in the Puritan colonies before 1700. They were very different from the white neo-classical picture-postcard churches of a later period. Seventeenth-century meetinghouses tended to be compact squarish buildings, with a steep four-sided roof rising to support a central “turret.” They were constructed on the model of secular buildings in East Anglia such as courthouses and markets.²

The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill. The

Lord by his grace fetch us up.”³ Most meetinghouses faced due south; like so many domestic buildings in New England, they were “sun-line structures,” carefully planned so as to be “square with the sun at noon.”⁴

From the outside, these buildings made a grim appearance. The walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.

The interiors were very plain. The Puritan meetinghouse was fundamentally a lecture room, intended for the hearing of the word. Its design was the same as Calvinist meetinghouses throughout western Europe. There was never an altar in Congregational New England; only a simple table which usually stood on the north wall rather than the east as in an Anglican church. Beside the table, a steep stairway or ladder rose to a high tub pulpit which dominated the room. Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained … as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers.”⁵

Above the pulpit a sounding board leaned ominously outward over the minister’s head. In front of him was a lectern and a large wooden hourglass. Beneath the pulpit was the elders’ seat, facing outward. The congregation sat before the pulpit, on rows of backless benches, later to be replaced by pews. Men were seated on one side of an aisle and women on the other, all carefully arranged in order of age, wealth and reputation. Most meetings had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.

There was no heat in these buildings, partly because the earliest meetinghouses also served as powder magazines, and fires threatened to blow the entire congregation to smithereens. They were bitter cold in winter. Many tales were told of frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like

Meetinghouses in seventeenth-century New England were very different from the later white-painted Greek Revival temples that live in the national memory. The only survivor is Hingham’s Old Ship Meeting House, its windows and proportions much altered by passing generations. Early meetinghouses were rude square buildings, with unpainted wooden sides, a hipped roof and sometimes a central spire. They closely followed the conventions of secular buildings such as markets and town halls in East Anglia. Their austerity made a striking contrast with liturgical complexities of Anglican church architecture.

a field of crickets. It was a point of honor for the minister never to shorten a service merely because his audience was frozen. But sometimes the entire congregation would begin to stamp its feet to restore circulation until the biblical rebuke came crashing down upon them: “STAND STILL and consider the wonderous work of God.” Later generations built “nooning houses” or “sab-baday houses” near the church where the congregation could thaw out after the morning sermon and prepare for the long afternoon sermon to come. But unheated meetings remained a regional folkway for two hundred years.

The ritual of worship in these buildings had nothing to do with the lights and incense of Anglican devotionalism, or with the spontaneous movements of the spirit among Radical Protestant sects. Puritan worship centered on the Bible, the lecture and the relentless hearing of the word.

On Lord’s days and lecture days at nine o’clock in the morning the town was summoned by the sound of a bell, or the rasping cry of a conch shell, or often in the seventeenth century the rattle of a drum. The congregation arrived in orderly family groups, husbands and wives walking side by side, followed by children, servants and dogs. By a law of 1640, the men were required to carry arms to meeting, and sentries were posted at the doors. These precautions were repeated whenever danger threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.

After the townsfolk entered the meetinghouse and took their seats, the minister and his family made a grand entrance. In the mid-seventeenth century he usually dressed in a black flowing cape and black skullcap. The entire congregation rose respectfully to its feet until he had climbed into the pulpit. “Our fathers were no man worshippers,” wrote Harriet Stowe, “but they regarded the minister as an ambassador from the great Sovereign of the universe.” Many Calvinist tracts in the seventeenth century described their clergy in precisely these terms, as ambassadors from Christ.⁶

An important part of every service was a ritual of purification. Members of the congregation who had committed various sins were compelled to rise and “take shame upon themselves.” Often they wore signs that proclaimed their misdeeds, as in Essex County where Elizabeth Julett was ordered to appear on lecture day with “a paper to be pinned upon her forehead with this inscription in capital letters: A SLANDERER OF MR. ZEROBABEL ENDECOTT.”⁷ Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.

The major part of the service was the sermon. Church-going New Englanders normally heard two sermons every Sunday—one in the morning and another in the afternoon, each two hours long (or longer). Sometimes a third short sermon was added in the nooning house. It was not uncommon for a congregation to sit through five or six hours of instruction every Sunday. These sermons were very austere. In stained-glass words, as well as stained-glass windows, Puritans saw only an impediment to light. The style of preaching was a relentless cultivation of the plain style. John Cotton set the model. At Cambridge in England he startled his listeners by preaching in a “plain and profitable way, by raising of doctrines, with propounding the reasons and uses of the same.” His auditors were so shocked that they “sat down in great discontent, pulling their hats over their eyes, to express their dislike of the sermon.”⁸ But this was the style that caught on in New England—the “text-and-context” sermon. It began with a powerful and usually puzzling scrap of Scripture which was relentlessly analyzed and ramified in a prolonged discussion called “the finding out.” The plain style was carefully cultivated throughout. Of Increase Mather it was said that he “concealed every other art, that he might pursue and practice the art of being intelligible.”⁹

A modern reader might imagine that these sermons were very dull and dreary. Popular historians in the twentieth century have painted an image of bored and sleepy congregations nodding in their seats. Nothing could be more mistaken. Puritan listeners sat on the edge of their benches through these long sermons. It was said of Thomas Shepard’s church that he “scarce ever preached a sermon, but some or other of his congregation … cried out in agony, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” Many Puritan sermons were an answer to this great question.¹⁰

Another important part of the service was the prayer, which was nothing like the liturgical rites of the Roman and Anglican churches. In Congregational New England, there was no kneeling or genuflection. In the first generation there was not even a bowing of heads or the closing of eyes. A Puritan prayed on his feet, standing upright and looking God in the eye. These prayers were original compositions, usually delivered by the minister at very great length. Cotton Mather recorded that at his ordination service he “prayed about an hour and a quarter, and preached … about an hour and three quarters.” Samuel Sewall recorded prayers of several hours’ duration. These addresses tended to be closely argued statements of great density, in which Puritans reasoned as relentlessly with their maker as they did with one another.¹¹

In the first generation, the ritual of Puritan worship sometimes had another part which was called “the prophesying.” This was a moment when members of the congregation other than the minister rose to “expound and apply” passages from the Bible, sometimes with much emotion. Prophesying had long occurred in the more radical Protestant sects, and was permitted for a time in some New England churches. It seems to have been practiced with comparative restraint in Massachusetts, but prophesying was regarded with grave suspicion by ministers and magistrates. After the disorders of the Antinomian crisis, it was suppressed.¹²

At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was

The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.” Beneath the pulpit was the elder bench, on which the lay leaders of the church sat facing the congregation, sternly monitoring every move during the long sermons and prayers. Here was a symbol of the Christian watch-care that came to be so highly developed in this culture.

called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”¹³

Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.”¹⁴

Every part of the religious ritual of Congregational New England was thus centered on the word of God—the design of the meetinghouse; the enforcement of Mosaic law; the structure of the sermon; the pattern of Puritan prayer; the form of psalmody. This communal harkening to the word of God was the primary purpose of Puritan worship.

Worship also had another meaning in this culture. Harriet Stowe explained that it was the only moment in the week when the entire town gathered together. “Nobody thought of staying away,—and for that matter, nobody wanted to stay away. … our weekly life was simple, monotonous and laborious; and the chance of seeing the whole neighborhood together in their best clothes … appealed to the idlest and most unspiritual. … the meeting on Sunday united in those days, as nearly as possible, the whole population of a town.” She recalled her unhappiness when forced by illness to stay home. “How ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant psalm-singing, the solemn tones of the long prayer, and then to the monotone of the sermon, and then again to the closing echoes of the last hymn.”¹⁵

This ritual of worship became a powerful instrument of cultural continuity in New England for two hundred years. Stowe remembered that “rude and primitive as our meeting-houses were, this weekly union of all classes in them was a most powerful and efficient mode of civilization. The man and woman cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of the community in a united act of worship.”¹⁶

There was also a deeper sort of union in these rituals, which were an act of cultural communion that joined the past to the present, the living to the dead. Every Sunday, for many generations, the people of Congregational New England returned to the first purposes of their regional culture and reenacted its founding impulse. The persistence of that culture owed much to the power of these religious rituals.

Massachusetts Magic Ways:
The Puritan Obsession with Witchcraft

The Puritan founders of Massachusetts, like most of their Christian contemporaries, lived in a world of wonders. They believed that unicorns lived in the hills beyond the Hudson, that mermaids swam in waters off Cape Ann, and that tritons played in Casco Bay. “There are many stranger things in the world than are to be seen between London and Staines,” wrote John Josselyn of supernatural wonders in New England.¹

In sharing these beliefs, the English Puritans were not very different from others of their generation.² But they also carried to New England several forms of magical obsession which, though not unique, were very special in their intensity. One of these beliefs might be called providential magic, for it was closely linked to the Puritans’ faith in the all-powerful rule of God’s Providence. Even more than most people in their time, they searched constantly for clues to God’s purposes in the world. It was this impulse which led so many English Puritans to study nature with that extraordinary intensity which played a central part in the birth of modern science. It also expressed itself in a continuing obsession with any “wonder” that might possibly be a sign of what they called “God’s remarkable Providences in the world,” or “remarkables” for short.³

Many such wonders presented themselves to the people of New England. Their diaries tell us that heads without bodies would sometimes appear before them. Animals would appear to change their shapes; dishes would suddenly dance upon the table; doors and windows would mysteriously fly open and shut. They heard God and the Devil speak to them through the mouths of children. Dark warnings were detected in the whisper of the wind and the babbling of streams. Heavenly messages of high significance were thought to be written in clouds that scudded across the ever-changing New England sky.⁴

The founders of Massachusetts were not alone in these beliefs. In the seventeenth century, most people searched the world for supernatural signs. But there was a special intensity to Puritan searching. The leaders of the Bay Colony kept meticulous records of signs and portents. The diaries of leading magistrates John Winthrop and Samuel Sewall were much the same in this respect as those of the merchant John Hull, the minister Cotton Mather and the shoemaker John Dane. Elaborate instructions were given for providential record keeping, and hundreds of diaries were compiled in New England, as running records of God’s “remarkables.” The great scholars of New England gave close attention to these questions in treatises where history, religion, science and magic all became one.⁵

One example (among many) of this official concern was a church register kept by Roxbury’s minister John Eliot. He wrote:

1644 A strange providence of God fell out at Boston, where a piece of iron in a dung-cart was smote into the head and brains of the daughter of Jacob Eliot, deacon of the church, and brought forth some of the brains. And after more of the brains came forth. And yet the Lord cured the child, the brains lying next the skin in that place.

Soon after that one William Curtis of Roxbury was cast off from a cart of logs onto the ground with such violence that his head and one side of his face were bruised, blood gushed out of his ear, his brain was shaken he was senseless diverse days; yet by degrees through God’s mercy he recovered his senses, yet his cheek drawn awry and paralytic; but in a quarter of a year he was pretty well recovered to the wonder of all men.

1645 Toward the end of the first month, called March, there happened (by God’s providence) a very dreadful fire in Roxbury street. None knoweth how it was kindled, but being a fierce wind it suddenly prevailed … in this fire were many strange preservations of God’s providence to the neighbors and town; for the wind at first stood to carry the fire to other houses but suddenly turned.⁶

John Eliot had no conception of what we would call an accident. There were no random events in Puritan thinking. Everything was thought to happen for a purpose.

At the same time that the Puritans searched constantly for signs of God’s Providence, they also were deeply concerned about other forms of magic that threatened to usurp God’s powers. Black magic was sternly suppressed in Massachusetts. Even white magic was regarded as a form of blasphemy. In 1637, for example, Jane Hawkins was punished for selling oil of mandrakes in Boston as a magic potion. Many other magicians and sorcerers were treated in the same fashion.

Most of all, the practice of black magic was regarded with obsessive fear and hatred by Puritans. The biblical injunction weighed more heavily upon them than upon others of their age: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” A great many people were formally accused of witchcraft in New England—at least 344 individuals altogether. Of that number, 35 were actually executed, and another person who refused to testify was pressed to death with heavy stones. These terrible events happened much more frequently in New England than in other colonies. More than 95 percent of all formal accusations and more than 90 percent of executions for witchcraft in British America occurred in the Puritan colonies.⁷

In England, every quantitative study has found that recorded cases of witchcraft were most frequent in the eastern counties from which New England was settled. The American historian John Demos concludes, “ … interestingly, the figures look most nearly equivalent when New England is matched with the [old English] county of Essex alone. Essex was beyond doubt a center of witch-hunting within the mother country; and Essex supplied a disproportionately large complement of settlers for the new colonies across the sea. The linkage is suggestive, to say the least.” When weighted by population, the annual frequency of witchcraft indictments in Essex County, England (5.42 indictments per 100,000 population from 1560-1680), was very similar to that in New England (6.69 per 100,000 from 1630 to 1700).⁸

Spirit Stones were erected in New England by a people who lived in daily dread of the Devil’s work. To keep evil forces at bay, special signs were carved on boundary markers, thresholds and doorposts. Four spirit stones survive today. They were erected on a property later called Witchstone Farm, in Essex County, Massachusetts. The stone shown here is a little more than 50 inches high and bears a crude figure in a posture of defiance, surrounded by various magical signs and charms. These stones have been attributed to Richard Dummer (1598-1679), who led a group of West Country Puritans from Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire to the New England town called Newbury. But the oldest of them bears the date 1636, before he arrived in the colony. The original is now in the Smithsonian Museum.

Here again, we find a striking similarity between East Anglia and Massachusetts. Despite arguments to the contrary by loyal sons of the Puritans in the twentieth century, there is strong and compelling evidence that New England was indeed, in the words of Cotton Mather, “a country … extraordinarily alarum’d by the wrath of the Devil.” In the mother country, George Gifford described the country of Essex as “one of the worst in England” for witchcraft. Here again, the Puritan colonies resembled the English region from whence they sprang.⁹

Massachusetts Learning Ways:
The Puritan Ethic of Learning

More than most Christians, the founders of Massachusetts were people of the book. Their faith was founded entirely on the Bible. John Cotton wrote that the “scriptures of God do contain a short upoluposis, or platform, not only of theology, but also of other sacred sciences … ethics, economics, politics, church government, prophesy, academy.” In the language of a later age, the Puritans were biblical fundamentalists who believed that every authentic word of Scripture was literal truth, and every command was binding upon them. On even the most mundane social questions, they searched the Scriptures for guidance. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony the standard size of a barrel of beer was set according to a rule in the book of Deuteronomy.¹

This religious attitude was closely linked to a social fact of some importance. By the standards of the seventeenth century, a very large proportion of adults in the Bay Colony were able to read and write. In 1660, approximately two-thirds of New England men and more than one-third of women were able to sign their wills. By 1760, these rates of “signature-mark” literacy had risen above 84 percent for men and 50 percent for women.²

These estimates, it should be understood, refer not to literacy itself, but to the proportion of men and women who were able to sign their names. More people in the seventeenth century could read than write: as many as half of those who could not scrawl their own names may have been able to make out a few words.³ The signature-mark test was only a rough indicator of literacy. Even so, it shows beyond doubt that literacy was higher in New England than in any other part of British America.⁴

Here we find another similarity between Massachusetts and East Anglia, where rates of literacy were higher than any other part of rural England. This was particularly the case in the county of Suffolk, where during the period of the great migration most people were able to write their own names. Approximately 55 percent could sign their names in that county, compared with 30 percent in England as a whole. The rate of literacy in Suffolk was higher than any rural county in England for which comparable evidence survives (22 counties in all). The next highest literacy rate in rural England was in the neighboring county of Essex.⁵

Within East Anglia, rates of literacy were even higher among that part of the population which moved to Massachusetts. One study in the county of Essex estimated that as many as 85 percent of people with Puritan leanings could sign their names to documents.⁶ In economic and social terms, the middling ranks of East

Anglian yeomen, tradesmen and skilled artisans who came to Massachusetts in large numbers were mostly able to write their names by 1640. So also were most men who lived in the commercial towns of East Anglia.⁷

The zeal for learning and literacy in New England was not invented in America. The proportion of men and women in the Bay Colony who could sign their own names was almost exactly the same as yeomen and their wives in eastern England. This pattern had existed among East Anglian Puritans of middling rank for at least half a century before the great migration.⁸

The culture of this English region encouraged literacy in many ways. Its towns, its commercial economy, its connections with the Netherlands, and especially its predilection for Puritanism, all created conditions more favorable to literacy than those in other parts of England.⁹

In New England, this special concern for literacy was expressed in a unique set of laws and institutions, within a few years of the great migration. As early as 1642, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required that all children should be trained to read by their parents or masters. This law was copied by all the Puritan colonies: Connecticut in 1650, New Haven in 1655 and Plymouth in 1671.¹⁰

In 1647, this first act was followed by another Massachusetts statute called the “Old Deluder Law” after its immortal preamble, which began:

It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures, as in former times keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these later times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the Original might be clouded with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting in our endeavors.¹¹

The Old Deluder Law compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school which offered instruction in Latin and Greek, “the masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” This statute did not demand compulsory school attendance. But it did require compulsory maintenance of “public schools,” as the Puritans began to call them in the seventeenth century. These laws were enforced. A system of town-supported schools developed rapidly throughout Massachusetts. As a result, children in Massachusetts received more than twice as many years of schooling as did youngsters in Virginia.¹²

The Puritans also actively supported higher learning in New England. Before the War of American Independence they founded four colleges—nearly as many as all other mainland colonies combined. These institutions existed primarily to train ministers and magistrates, but they had a broad base of support. In Massachusetts, every family was asked to contribute a peck of grain each year to the college at Cambridge. A great many did so—twenty-five heads of households in the town of Wenham, twenty-three in Woburn, thirty-three in York, Maine, and forty-two in Concord. Some of these donors were themselves illiterate. Altogether, many hundreds of families throughout New England freely gave this gift of “College Corn,” and in the process formed a firm sense of kinship with the institution.¹³

Every cultural region of British America gave some encouragement to formal learning. But New England, as we shall see, was unique in its strong support for both common schools and higher learning. This concern was reinforced by the colonial mood. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the first to perceive that the Puritans lived in fear of losing their cultural heritage in the New World—a process which one of them called “Criolian degeneracy.” In part because of this fear, levels of schooling and school support were consistently higher in New England than in the mother country.¹⁴

One consequence of New England’s support of learning was an exceptionally high level of intellectual achievement in this region: by far the highest in British America. During the late nineteenth century, Henry Cabot Lodge did a study of intellectual distinction by region in the United States. Lodge, of course, had an ethnic axe to grind, but the quantitative result of his inquiries had a truth value independent of the motives that inspired them. He found that by most empirical tests of intellectual eminence, New England led all other parts of British America from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.¹⁵

At about the same time that Lodge did this research, the English scholar Havelock Ellis made a study of intellectual achievement in his own country, and also found strong differences between regions. The eastern counties of England and East Anglia most of all accounted for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific and intellectual achievement than any other part of England. Here was yet another striking parallel between the two kindred cultures of East Anglia and New England through many generations.¹⁶

Massachusetts Food Ways:
Origins of New England’s “Canonical Dish”

The culture of New England was both a moral and a material order. It defined not only what people thought and felt, but also what they owned and even ate. A case in point was this region’s food ways, which emerged as the combined product of Puritan ideals, East Anglian tastes and American conditions.

The founders of Massachusetts introduced a characteristic attitude toward food which combined Puritan ideals and English tastes. The leading historian of this subject finds a strong culinary conservatism in the first generation. “Seventeenth century New

England,” writes Sarah McMahon, “was intent on maintaining the traditional English fare.”¹

New England’s food ways also owed much to the Christian asceticism of its founders, who were among the earliest Americans to associate plain cooking with piety, and vegetables with virtue. “Let no man make a jest at pumpkins,” wrote Edward Johnson, “for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people.”²

The private diaries of the Puritans commonly expressed a settled hostility to sensual indulgence at table. John Winthrop, after a trip to London, scourged himself for overeating:

I grew drowsy and dull in every good duty; it made me marvel at myself when I remembered my former alacrity; I prayed and I wept, yet still I grew more discouraged. God being merciful unto me, hereby to revive me, at length I fell to prayer and fasting, whereto the flesh was as unwilling as the bear at the stake, yet it pleased God that hereby I recovered life and comfort, and then I found plainly that not keeping a strict watch over my appetite, but feeding more liberally than was meet … the flesh waxed wanton, and would no longer wear the yoke, but began to grow jolly and slothful. …

I find by oft and repeated experience, that when I hold under the flesh by temperate diet, and not suffering the mind or outward senses to have everything that they desire, and wean it from the love of the world, I ever then pray without weariness, or ordinary wandering of heart, and am far more fit and cheerful in the duties of my calling.³

This passage revealed many things about John Winthrop’s attitudes toward food. He thought of eating as “feeding,” fasting as a form of “revival,” appetite as “a bear at the stake,” and the “outward senses” as a source of spiritual danger. These attitudes comprised a gastronomic Puritanism which persisted in New England long after the Five Points had been forgotten.

The Puritans of Massachusetts created one of the more austere food ways in the Western world. For three centuries, New England families gave thanks to their Calvinist God for cold baked beans and stale brown bread, while lobsters abounded in the waters of Massachusetts Bay and succulent gamebirds orbited slowly overhead. Rarely does history supply so strong a proof of the power of faith.

An important staple of this diet was “pease porridge,” which gradually developed into what Lucy Larcom called “the canonical dish of our Forefathers”: New England baked beans. Field peas were among the first crops introduced to Massachusetts. As early as the summer of 1629, one colonist reported that “the governor hath store of green pease growing in his garden as good as ever I eat in England.”⁴

Peas were boiled or baked, and eaten hot or cold three times a day. Sarah McMahon found that “the winter vegetable supply in seventeenth-century households consisted almost entirely of dried peas. … Pease porridge was traditional cold-weather fare for New Englanders of all classes.” In the eighteenth century, “pease” yielded to “pea beans” (a change more of nomenclature than of the crops themselves). But in its fundamentals, New England’s canonical dish remained the same for three centuries.⁵

Another staple of New England diet was rough brown bread, which the first generation made from a coarse mix of wheat flour and cornmeal. After a disease called wheat rust became a major problem in the 1660s, this mixture was replaced by rye flour and cornmeal—the immortal “rye n’ injun” which nourished New Englanders for many generations. This combination produced a crust so hard that it could be used in place of a spoon to scoop up the beans. Wheat flour alone was reserved for special occasions, and ornamental uses such as the top layer of pies—hence the New-England folk expression, “upper crust.”

Another favorite dish was the New England boiled dinner: meat and vegetables submerged in plain water and boiled relentlessly without seasonings of any kind. This was not a common cooking method in other parts of Anglo-America. During the early nineteenth century, a Yankee girl who found herself living among southerners wrote with some astonishment: “They think that a boiled dish as we boil it is not fit to eat; it is true they boil their food, but each separate. It won’t do to boil cabbage or turnips or beets, carrots and parsnips with their meat.”⁶

The common table beverage in Massachusetts was dark English beer during the seventeenth century, and fermented apple cider in the eighteenth. There were also fruits and vegetables in season. But the staples remained much the same throughout the year. Sarah McMahon concludes that “old practices were adjusted to new conditions to produce adequate supplies of the traditional staples without fundamentally changing the diet through the whole first century.”⁷

Yankee food ways provided a healthy diet which was unusually rich in protein, strong in fiber, abundant in its carbohydrates, restrained in its animal fats and balanced in most nutrients except vitamins C and D in winter. The celebrated longevity of New England natives owed something to their eating habits, as well as to the life-giving climate.

But in aesthetic terms, New England’s cuisine was extraordinarily impoverished, particularly by contrast with the cornucopia of culinary riches in the region. The coastal waters of New England teemed with mussels, oysters, lobsters and clams. The rivers were choked with salmon and shad. Wild fowl flourished in abundance. Native delicacies such as glasswort sprouted along the seashore and fiddleheads carpeted the woodlands.

The Puritans showed little interest in these delights except when driven by hunger to consume them. Shellfish was regarded with grave suspicion. Shad roe, a gourmet’s delight, was used as fertilizer. In the first year, John Winthrop complained when he was compelled to eat oysters and wild duck instead of the staples of old England. “My dear wife,” he wrote, “we are here in a paradise, though we have not beef and mutton.”⁸

The sense of sameness in New England food ways was deepened by its dining habits. On Yankee tables, every dish arrived at the same time “all piled together … without regard to French doctrine of courses.” Cooking and eating were all of a piece among these straight-forward folk.⁹

New England’s food ways derived not only from the religion of its founders, but also from their region of origin in the mother country. Modern studies have discovered that methods of cooking differ even today from one British region to another. The most detailed inquiry finds three distant culinary regimes of food preparation, marked by a special taste for frying in the south and west, for boiling in the north, and for baking in East Anglia. All methods of cooking, of course, exist in every region. But the balance is distinctly different from one part of England to another—so much so that even in the twentieth century British merchants vary their inventories of kitchen equipment according to region.¹⁰

The East Anglian taste for baking became an important part of culinary customs in New England, and leavened the general austerity of its regional diet. Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that the “old brick oven was a true Puritan institution, and backed up the devotional habits of good housewives, by the capital care which he took of whatever was committed to his capacious bosom.”¹¹ These brick ovens were amongst the first structures built in Massachusetts.¹² Housewives too poor to own them used baking kettles and primitive reflector ovens.

New England baking took many forms. The ritual Thanksgiving dinner came mainly from the oven—baked Turkey, baked squash, baked beans, baked bread and baked pies in vast profusion. The pie, in particular, became a Yankee folk art. Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel Oldtown Folks celebrated the social history of the New England pie:

The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies,—pies with top crusts, and pies without,—pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.

The oven became New England’s cornucopia. As it poured forth its profusion of cakes and pies, it became a living presence in a

New England household. Mrs. Stowe waxed romantic about her oven:

In the corner of the great kitchen, during all these days, the jolly old oven roared and crackled in great volcanic billows of flame, snapping and gurgling as if the old fellow entered with joyful sympathy into the frolic of the hour; and then, his great heart being once warmed up, he brooded over successive generations of pies and cakes, which went in raw and came out cooked, till butteries and dressers and shelves and pantries were literally crowded with jostling abundance.

So vast was the production of Mrs. Stowe’s oven that her Natick parsonage had a special “pie-room” where frozen baked goods were kept through cold New England winters. She remembered:

a great cold northern chamber, where the sun never shone, and where in winter the snow sifted in at the window-cracks, and ice and frost reigned with undisputed sway, was fitted up to be the storehouse of these surplus treasures. There, frozen solid, and thus well preserved in their icy fetters, they formed a great repository for all the winter months; and the pies baked at Thanksgiving often came out fresh and good with the violets of April.¹³

The austerity of New England’s food ways was softened by its abundance of baked goods. Even so, this culture made a virtue of sensual restraint. For a very long time it preserved a spirit of self-denial which was appropriate to a region that Samuel Adams described as a “Christian Sparta.” Even in the nineteenth century, the austerity of New England food ways appeared in the image of Brother Jonathan who stares out at us from his earliest photographs with gaunt body, sallow skin, hollow cheeks, burning eyes and shrunken mouth. To his distrusting cousins, the stereotypical Yankee had a lean and hungry look.

Massachusetts Dress Ways:
The Puritan Taste for Simple Clothes and “Sadd” Colors

The typical New England Jonathan—and Abigail as well—were also known by their habits of dress. The founders of Massachusetts had strong views on this subject. For them, clothing was not a matter of cultural indifference. By and large, they believed that costume should not be a form of sensual display. This did not mean that the Puritans wore the black suits and gray dresses of historical legend. With a few exceptions, they avoided black—not because it was too plain for their tastes, but because it was not plain enough. Even this strong color was thought to be pretentious in the general population. It was reserved for ruling elders and the governing elite.¹

The Bay people cultivated a style of dress which drew its inspiration from the customary folk costume of East Anglia in the seventeenth century. The taste of New England ran not to black or gray, but to “sadd colors” as they were called in the seventeenth century. A list of these “sadd colors” in 1638 included “liver color, de Boys, tawney, russet, purple, French green, ginger lyne, deer colour, orange.” Other sad colors were called “gridolin” from the French gris de lin (“flax blossom”). Still others were called puce, folding color, Kendall green, Lincoln green, barry, milly and tuly.

Specially favored was russet, and a color called philly mort from the French feuille morte (“dead leaf”). One country gentleman from the east of England, Oliver Cromwell, made these “sad colors” into a badge of virtue when he celebrated his “plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows.”

Sad colors were brought in Massachusetts in the first years of settlement, and their popularity has persisted even to our own time. In a region where nature adorns herself each year in flaming red and orange and yellow, the plain folk of Massachusetts dressed in shades of feuille morte.

New England dress ways were also special in the cut of clothing. The Massachusetts Bay Company specified an outfit for men of ordinary rank which included:

4 pair shoes

2 pair Irish stockings

1 pair knit stockings

1 pair Norwich garters

4 shirts

2 suits of doublet and hose, of leather, lined with oil skin leather, the hose and doublet with hooks and eyes.

1 suit of Hampshire kerseys; the hose lined with skins, the doublet with linen

3 plain falling bands

1 waistcoat of green cotton bound with red tape

1 leather girdle

1 Monmouth cap

1 black hat lined at the brim with leather

5 red knot caps

2 dozen hooks and eyes

1 pair of leather gloves, calfskin or sheepskin²

This outfit included the legendary black felt steeple hat, but was otherwise very different from the stereotypical image of the Puritan. It was a remarkably full wardrobe, much superior in quality and cost to the clothing that most Englishmen wore in 1630. The common costume of English laborers and cottagers ran to cheaper fabrics such as frieze, tow and canvas, rather than to these materials.

Leaders and elders in the Bay Colony dressed differently from ordinary people. For godly men and women of “good age” or high rank, black was thought to be suitable. A surviving portrait (ca. 1629) of John Winthrop shows him in a suit of black velvet with slashed sleeves, a starched neck ruff and delicate lace cuffs. In his hand he carried gossamer gloves so thin as to be transparent. Their fragility was meant to show that their wearer did not have to work with his hands. John Winthrop’s costume differed in its restraint from the opulent display of Stuart courtiers and Virginia cavaliers, but it was unmistakably the dress of a gentleman.

To discourage excessive display, the Bay Colony passed strict sumptuary laws. Statutes of this sort existed in most American colonies and European states. But the earliest Massachusetts sumptuary laws were very different—they applied not merely to the common people, but to “ordinary wearing” by everyone. One such statute in 1634 forbade men and women of every rank to wear “new fashions, or long hair, or anything of the like nature.”

Steeple hats and “sadd colors” were typical of Puritan dress ways. Both men and women in New England did actually wear the broad-brimmed steeple hats of legend, historical revisionists notwithstanding. One such hat survives today in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth. It belonged to Constance Hopkins, who arrived in the Mayflower. Most steeple hats were made of wool felt. In Britain the best were called “beaver hats” and were handsomely blocked. The Massachusetts General Court in 1634 forbade everyone in the colony (not merely the poor) to wear beaver hats and hatbands as “superfluous and unnecessary,” on pain of a fine (two shillings sixpence). But it also urged every male immigrant to bring a black wool felt steeple hat.

Full-length cloaks were also common in New England for both women and men. This one belonged to Richard Smith in Rhode Island (ca. 1659) and is owned by the Rhode Island Historical Society. The fabric is camlet, an untwilled wool closely interwoven with hair; it is lined with a twilled wool called drugget. Its color was “sad green,” one of a range of modest and restrained hues which were much favored in New England.

It ordered that “no person, either man or women,” could wear “slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve, and another in the back.” Also forbidden were “ordinary wearing” of silver, gold, and silk laces, girdles, hatbands, and “immoderate great sleeves … great rayles, long wings, etc.” These prohibitions applied to everybody in the colony.³

The sumptuary laws of Massachusetts also forbade the manufacture and sale of fancy clothing. A statute in 1636 ordered that “no person, after one month, shall make or sell any bone lace, or other lace. … neither shall any tailor set any lace upon any garment.”⁴ The court decreed that “no garment shall be made with short sleeves, whereby the nakedness of the arm may be discovered.”⁵

Later in the seventeenth century, the sumptuary laws of Massachusetts became more conscious of rank. In 1651, the General Court complained that “intolerable excess and bravery hath crept in upon us, and especially amongst people of mean condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandal of our profession, the consumption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our poverty.” The selectmen of every town were ordered to judge whether the dress of men and women exceeded their “ranks and abilities.” Costly dress was restricted to those whose estates were worth more than 200 pounds, and also to families of magistrates. But subsequent statutes returned to general prohibitions.⁶

The austerity of New England’s dress ways also appeared in other customs. Through the seventeenth century this culture maintained an intense hostility to wigs. When a Puritan clergyman named Josiah Willard cut off his natural hair and put on a wig, he was visited by a magistrate who told him that “God seems to have ordained our hair as a test, to see whether we can bring our minds to be content to be at his finding: or whether we would be our own carvers.” Attitudes changed in the eighteenth century, when wigs of white or grey (grizzled as if by age) became acceptable. But long youthful curls were strictly condemned in the seventeenth century.⁷

The women of Puritan New England made less use of cosmetics than most affluent females in the English-speaking world, except the Quakers. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison observes that his ancestors “loved bright-colored paint on ships and houses—but not on women.”⁸ Cosmetic aids of every kind were condemned not merely as extravagance but as an act of blasphemy. Even false teeth were uncommon, and Josselyn described New England females in 1684 as “pitifully tooth-shaken,” a condition not much improved by the Puritans’ favorite toothpaste—a suitably strenuous mix of brimstone, butter and gunpowder.⁹

Washing was uncommon amongst these people. Charles Francis Adams recalled that there were no baths in the town of Quincy for two hundred years. But much use was made of scented powders and leaves. Houses were hung with bouquets of herbs. Perfumed leaves were heated over the fire, to mask the ripe aroma of the inhabitants.

There were many exceptions to these general patterns. The dress ways of New England were tempered by the stubborn individuality of its population. Most wills and inventories included a few articles of private extravagance. The will of Jane Humphrey (Dorchester, 1668) listed “my best red kersey petticoat,” which was worn beneath outgarments of “sad grey.” There was a taste for aprons with “small lace at the bottom” and pocket handkerchiefs with a “little lace” on the edge.

Puritan women were not nearly as austere as Quakers would later become. They normally wore modest lace caps and bright sleeve-ribbons which made a cheery contrast with the “sadd colors” of their skirts and bodices. But these indulgences were monitored by elders who struggled to enforce a rule of restraint. Even Mary Downing, the niece of Governor Winthrop himself, was reprimanded for wearing a little lace, and “crosse clothes.” She wrote to her father:

I wrote my mother for lace not out of any prodigal or proud mind, but only for some crosse clothes, which is the most allowable and commendable dressings here … the elders with others entreated me to leave them off, for they gave great offense.¹⁰

These small excesses made all the more striking the comparative austerity of New England dress ways from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.¹¹

After the great migration, the people of New England fought a two hundred years’ war to preserve the values of their culture. Young men and women strained against the sartorial limits that elders imposed upon them. From time to time the magistrates cracked down. At Northampton in 1676, thirty-six young ladies received criminal indictments for “overdress chiefly in hoods.” One of them, a spirited young woman named Hannah Lyman, defiantly appeared before the court wearing the silken hood for which she had been indicted. The magistrate was not amused; Hannah Lyman found herself in serious trouble not only for “wearing silk,” but for “wearing silk in a flaunting manner, in an offensive way, not only before but when she stood presented.”¹² Legal evidence of this sort always points two ways. It shows that some New Englanders rebelled against their culture, while others labored to preserve it. It also tells us that even as challenges and changes occurred in the dress ways of this region, elements of continuity remained very strong.

Fashions of dress were never static in this society, but changed as rapidly in Massachusetts as in other parts of the Western world. Doublet and hose yielded to smallclothes, and smallclothes to pantaloons, and pantaloons to sack suits. But through all these changes, the dress ways of Massachusetts have preserved strong continuities. A female traveler wrote in the eighteenth century:

They are generally very plain in their dress throughout all the colony, as I saw, and follow one another in their modes, that you may know where they belong, especially the women, meet them where you will.¹³

Even in the twentieth century, the descendants of the Puritans still wear suits of slate-grey and philly-mort. In Boston’s Back Bay and Beacon Hill, Brahmin ladies still dress in sad colors, and their battered hats appear to have arrived in the hold of the Arbella.

Sad colors also survive in the official culture of New England. In the older universities of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, scholars and athletes do not appear in colors such as Princeton’s gaudy orange or Oxford’s brilliant blues and reds. The color of Harvard is a dreary off-purple euphemistically called crimson. Brown University’s idea of high color is dark brown, trimmed with black. On ceremonial occasions, the president of that institution wears a mud-colored garment which is approximately the color of used coffee grounds. Dartmouth prefers a gloomy forest-green. All of these shades were on the official list of “sadd colours” in 1638; and are still in vogue today.

In the New England dialect, it is interesting to discover that clothes have been called “duds” for three centuries. This was an old English term of contempt for dress. A scarecrow, in his castoff rags was sometimes called a “dudman.” The language of dress in New England was a vocabulary of deprecation. That pejorative attitude still survives in the culture of this region.

Massachusetts Sport Ways:
The Puritan Idea of “Lawful Recreation”

On the subject of sport, Puritan attitudes were typically complex and carefully reasoned. Many sports were condemned in the Bay Colony, but others were permitted, and a few were actually required. Increase Mather wrote, “For a Christian to use recreation is very lawful, and in some cases a great duty.”¹ John Winthrop explained the reason in his diary:

When I had some time abstained from such worldly delights as my heart most desire … I grew into a great dullness and discontent: which being at last perceived, I examined by heart, and finding it needful to recreate my mind with some outward recreation, I yielded unto it, and by a moderate exercise herein was much refreshed.

But here grew the mischief: I perceiving that God and mine own conscience did allow me so to do in my need, I afterwards took occasion from the benefit of Christian liberty to pretend need of recreation when there was none, and so by degrees I ensnared my heart so far in worldly delights as I cooled the graces of the spirit by them. Whereby I perceive that in all outward comforts, although God allow us the use of the things themselves, yet it must be in sobriety, and our hearts must be kept free, for he is jealous of our love.²

For John Winthrop, as for other New England Puritans, “outward recreation” was not merely permissible but “needful” as long as it was done in “sobriety” and good restraint. Moderate exercise was thought to be necessary for the refreshment of the spirit. The Puritans believed that sport was not merely a matter of idle play. For them, even games became a serious business, which they approached with their usual high degree of purpose and organization.³

The military units of Massachusetts were not merely encouraged to engage in regular sports, but actually required to do so. As early as 1639 the militia companies of Massachusetts sponsored formal athletic competitions and physical exercises on their training days. This practice persisted through the seventeenth century.⁴ The faculty of Harvard College also required students to engage in “lawful recreations,” and after 1655, a special period of the day was set aside for games.⁵ In 1696, when two undergraduates were drowned in a skating accident on Fresh Pond, President Increase Mather consoled their parents with the thought that “although death found them using recreations (which students need for their health’s sake) they were lawful recreations.”⁶

In seventeenth-century New England, Puritan ministers and magistrates actively encouraged “lawful recreations,” and also sternly suppressed sports which they believed to be “unwarrantable” in one way or another. Sports on Sunday were rigorously punished. The clergyman Thomas Shepard, in a sermon long famous in New England, painted an image of Satan “with a ball at his foot,” ready “to kick and carry God’s precious sabbaths out of the world.” This was a complaint not against sport itself, but against sport on Sunday.⁷

The builders of the Bay Colony also specially disliked games that were associated with gambling and drinking. The General Court of Massachusetts often legislated against “unlawful games as cards, dice, etc.,” and county courts fined tavernkeepers who permitted these pastimes.⁸ Shuffle-board was banned; the Essex County court punished a wayward saint for “his misuse of time shuffle-boarding.”⁹ Gambling was forbidden even in homes. The General Court decreed in 1631 that “all persons whatsoever that have cards, dice or tables in their houses shall make away with them before the next Court, under pain of punishment.”¹⁰

Horse racing was actively discouraged. In the town of Ipswich it was ordered that anyone “convicted of running races upon horses or jades in the streets of Ipswich, or for abetting and encouraging others of laying wagers on any side should pay 40 shillings,” an exceptionally heavy fine. Horses were raced even so; by the eighteenth century, purses were openly advertised in the Boston gazettes. But this was the invasion of an alien spirit.¹¹

At the same time that these entertainments were discouraged, other forms of lawful recreation flourished. Within the first few years, a distinctive set of games developed in Massachusetts, from the interaction of Puritan ideals and English customs. Chief among them were two amusements. One of them came to be known as the Boston game; the other was variously called the New England game, the Massachusetts game, town ball or round ball. We know them today as American football and baseball, respectively.

The Boston game or American football was descended from a large family of English folk games which involved the kicking of a ball. In many English neighborhoods, a game of football was an annual event on Christmas, or New Year’s Day, or Shrove Tuesday or Easter Monday, often with a handsome leather ball spedaily made for the occasion by the village cobbler. At Derby, for example, a football match was played every year between the parishes of All Saints and St. Peters. The ball was ceremoniously put in play at the town hall. In the old settlement of Chester-Le-Street, it was “up-streeters” against “down-streeters,” each trying to move the ball to the opposite ends of the town. These great games were played by entire communities—old and young, rich and poor, male and female. For one local contest, the men stripped away their coats and waistcoats, whilst the women took off their dresses and even petticoats. Many a kick and blow were exchanged before the match was done.¹²

These rough village games of old England were brought to Massachusetts, where they tended to be regulated by local officials and played in a more orderly manner. In the town of Rowley, one English visitor witnessed a game of football which surprised him by its restraint: “There was that day a great game of football,” he wrote, “to be played with their feet, which I thought was very odd; but it was upon a broad sandy shore, free from stones, which made it more easy. Neither were they so apt to trip up one another’s heels and quarrel, as I have seen ‘em in England.”¹³

Football became a controversial question in New England. Many moralists did not hold it in high repute. William Bentley observed in his diary that “the bruising of shins has rendered it rather disgraceful to [illeg] of better education.” But in the eighteenth century, it gradually came to be associated with people of better education. An engraving of Yale College in 1807 showed students in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats playing football on New Haven Common, while an elder who closely resembled college president Timothy Dwight looked on with an air of disapproval.¹⁴

Classical American football slowly took shape in New England during the eighteenth century as an elaborately rationalized and rule-bound version of an old English folk sport. Football contests between schools were common by the early nineteenth century in eastern Massachusetts, where teams from academies and town schools played each other on a regular basis. A marble monument on Boston Common quietly commemorates the “first football organization in America,” which played there long before the intercollegiate contest between Princeton and Rutgers.

Another rule-bound version of an English folk sport was called town ball, the Massachusetts game or the New England game. It was played with a bat, a ball and four bases on a field sixty feet square, by eight to twenty players, each of whom kept his own individual tally. The New England game was also descended from a family of English traditional games, of which perhaps the nearest equivalent was called bittle-battle. Its rules were remarkably similar to modern baseball. Bittle-battle was played with four bases (each about a foot square) 48 feet apart. The pitcher stood 24 feet from home base, and each batter was out if the ball was caught, or if it touched a base before the batter reached it. The game of bittle-battle was played in southeastern England, particularly in Kent. It was brought to Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century, and became so common that by the eighteenth century it bore the name of the region.¹⁵

The New England game became very popular in schools and towns throughout Massachusetts. A children’s book published in Worcester, Massachusetts, included an illustration of this diversion as early as 1787.¹⁶ It was also widely played in New England colleges during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A classical description came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who played it as a Harvard undergraduate in 1829.¹⁷

Gradually, the New England game spread beyond the region of its origin into New York and northern New Jersey, and began to be called baseball in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was played by soldiers at Valley Forge in 1778, and the diary of a Princeton undergraduate mentioned a sport called “baste ball” in 1786.¹⁸ A variant called the New York game was played by Yankee emigrants in that state during the 1820s. Thurlow Weed belonged to a baseball club with fifty members at Rochester in 1825.¹⁹ In yet another community of transplanted Yankees, Abner Doubleday appears to have codified one of many sets of rules before 1840.²⁰

During the first two centuries of American history, ball games were not common in the southern colonies. What is now the American national game was originally a New England folk sport. It still preserves a combination of order and action, reason and emotion, individuality and collective effort which was characteristic of Puritan culture.²¹

Massachusetts Work Ways:
Puritan and East Anglian Economies

As it was with play, so also with work. The economic history of Massachusetts was not the inexorable product of its material environment. The history of neighboring colonies shows that the ecology of this region was consistent with many different types of economic development. The Dutch in New Netherlands and the French in Quebec created extractive economies which dealt heavily in products of the forest and the sea—timber, furs, and fish. The builders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony also engaged in these activities, but mainly they constructed a different sort of economic system which reflected their East Anglian origins and Puritan purposes.

From the start, the economy of Massachusetts was remarkably similar to that of eastern England. Some interior New England towns resembled the wood-pasture villages of Suffolk and Norfolk. Others on the coast were more like the small outports of Essex and Kent. The strength of these continuities appeared most clearly in a regional exception. The town of Rowley in Massachusetts was founded by an untypical group of English Puritans who came from the East Riding of Yorkshire, and had been drawn into the great migration by the charisma of their East Anglian minister. Their home in the north of England had been a center for the manufacture of coarse linen and hemp textiles by a work force that consisted largely of children. The new settlement of Rowley, Massachusetts, rapidly developed the same sort of industry that had existed in Rowley, Yorkshire. John Winthrop noted in 1643 that the American community’s production of hemp and flax “exceeded all other towns” in New England. Edward Johnson wrote of the Rowley colonists that they “were the first people that set upon the making of cloth in this western world, for which end they built a fulling mill, and caused their little-ones to be very diligent in spinning cotton wool, many of them having been clothiers in England.” About the year 1660, Samuel Maverick described the inhabitants of Rowley as a “very laborious people … making cloth and rugs of cotton wool and also sheep’s wool.”¹

Other exceptions which prove the rule were the fishing ports of Gloucester and Marblehead, which also differed from most Massachusetts towns in the English origins of their founders. A large part of their population came from the Channel Islands, and particularly from the island of Jersey. Many had been fishermen in the Old World, and they continued their ancestral occupation in the New. When a Puritan minister came to Marblehead, and gave his congregation the usual East Anglian Puritanism, a grizzled fisherman rebuked him, “You think you are preaching to the people of the Bay. Our main end was to catch fish.”²

Catching fish was not the main purpose of most Bay colonists, in either a literal or a symbolic sense. Despite the gilded cod that hangs on the wall of the Massachusetts State House, the fisheries did not become the foundation of their economy. Eighty percent of the communities in Massachusetts were farm towns, and a large majority of adult males were engaged in agriculture.³

The pattern of farming was in many ways very similar to the wood-pasture communities of East Anglia—a regime of mixed husbandry which combined field crops and farm animals. Most New England towns kept commons for pasture and meadow. Several towns had open fields for tillage as well. But after a transitional period, crops were raised in enclosed fields cultivated by individual families.

The technology of farming was much the same as in England, despite many environmental differences. “The country is very rocky and hilly and some good champion,” one colonist wrote from Watertown in 1631. The Puritans specially prized “champion,” which was their word for flat, open land without trees or hills. They found it in Dedham, Watertown, Sudbury and Concord—pockets of rich alluvial soil that are still farmed profitably today.⁴ From the start, the Puritans worked their American land with English ploughs—a method unlike the hoe husbandry that prevailed in other parts of British America. As early as 1634, John Winthrop wrote home, “ … our ploughs go on with good success, we are like to have 20 at work next year.”⁵

Within a few years of the first settlement, their family farms were producing a surplus and selling it in the market. The size of these transactions was not great by later standards, but large enough to encourage even small farmers to think of their activity in commercial terms. When they came together on Sunday, they talked first of God and then of prices. By 1645, the Connecticut Valley towns were shipping thousands of bushels of grain to market. Cattle were driven to Boston in such number that the town in 1648 petitioned the General Court for permission to have two fairs a year, one for cattle alone.⁶ These markets were closely regulated by rules very similar to those that had prevailed in East Anglian communities. Exports were forbidden in times of scarcity. Unfair market practices such as forestalling and regrating were strictly forbidden. Prices and wages were fixed in difficult periods.

The New England swing plow with its wooden moldboard is a familiar folk artifact, which stands beside the statue of the Minuteman. Folklorist Henry Glassie notes that it was “based on a pattern introduced from Holland into East Anglia probably in the late sixteenth century, and which flourished after 1730 in Scotland and the eastern counties of England. The swing plow was traditional in eighteenth-century New England.” This sketch follows a drawing by Henry Glassie.

Massachusetts markets were largely local. Mostly they consisted of one farmer selling to another. But external trade also developed so rapidly that by 1638 more than a hundred vessels engaged in foreign trade from Massachusetts. The West Indies provided a market for grain, meat, fish, butter and many other products. As early as 1647, according to Edward Johnson:

In a very little space, every thing in the country proved a staple-commodity, wheat, rye, oats, peas, barley, beef, pork, fish, butter, cheese, timber, mast, tar, soap, plankboard, frames of houses, clabboard and pipestaves … they have not only fed their Elder Sisters, Virginia, Barbados and many of the Summer Islands that were preferred before her for their fruitfulness, but also the Grandmother of us all, even the fertile isle of Great Britain, beside Portugal hath had many a mouthful of bread and fish from us, in exchange of their Madeira liquor and also Spain, nor could it be imagined, that this wilderness should turn a mart for merchants in so short a space.⁷

At an early date in the seventeenth century, returns from the carrying trade sustained the prosperity of small towns from Portsmouth to Plymouth. An economic historian observes that “New Englanders became the Dutch of England’s empire.” They did so in more senses than one. The structure of New England’s carrying trade was similar in its structure and social function to that which developed on the borders of the North Sea, both in the Netherlands and in the East of England. The combination of mixed agriculture, small villages, and a high level of commercial activity were much the same in East Anglia and Massachusetts. So also was the combination of interior farming villages, and very small seaports that sprang up as thickly in New England as in the Thames estuary and the seacoast of East Anglian coast.⁸

In Massachusetts, this economic system was fully developed by the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, for many generations it changed mainly by becoming more elaborately the same. Historian Bernard Bailyn concludes that “the character of the economic system as it emerged in this period remained essentially the same until just before the American Revolution.”⁹

Even more persistent than the material structure of New

England’s economy was its ethic of work, which the founders of the Bay Colony introduced at an early date. This work ethic was a complex thing. It rested upon an idea that every Christian had two callings—a general calling and a special calling. The first was a Christian’s duty to live a godly life in the world. The second was mainly his vocation. The Puritans did not think that success in one’s calling was an instrument of salvation, but they believed that it was a way of serving God in the world.

The Puritans did not glorify “capitalist enterprise”—two words which they would not have approved or even understood. They condemned the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, as one rich Puritan merchant named Robert Keayne learned the hard way. Keayne was a Berkshire butcher’s boy who became a rich merchant tailor in London, worth “2000 or 3000 pounds in good estate.” He brought this capital to Boston, became a member of the Church, married into the ministerial elite and built a flourishing import business. For a time, he may have been Boston’s richest merchant, and its fourth largest landowner. But he also gained a reputation for “corrupt practice.” John Winthrop noted that “he was wealthy and sold dearer than most other tradesmen.” In 1639, when angry customers complained of being overcharged for a bridle and a bag of nails, Keayne was formally charged in General Court with oppression, for having taken “above six-pence in the shilling profit; in some above eight-pence; and in some small things above two for one.” The magistrates imposed a fine of £100—one of the heaviest in the history of the colony. But many thought the penalty too light, and the deputies voted a fine of £200. Keayne himself wrote that some wished “corporal punishment was added to it, such as … standing openly on a market day with a bridle in his mouth, or at least around his neck.”¹⁰

Boston’s Congregational church also made its own investigation of this affair, and found Robert Keayne guilty of “selling his wares at excessive rates.” John Cotton denounced him from the pulpit. Keayne was threatened with excommunication until he came weeping before the congregation and “did with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart.”¹¹ Thereafter, this once proud Puritan merchant was a shattered man. He gave away large sums in an effort to clear his name, began to drink heavily, lost his public office, and wrote an obsessive defense of his conduct in his last will and testament which became an apologia of 158 pages.¹²

John Cotton was moved by this event to proclaim a code of business ethics for New England. These rules were very strict, and went far beyond medieval ideas of just price. John Winthrop entered them in his Journal:

Some false principles are these: 1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can. 2. If a man lose by casualty at sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest; 3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, etc., and though the commodity be fallen, etc. 4. That, as a man may take advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may take advantage of another’s ignorance or necessity. 5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompense of one as of another.

The rules for trading are these: 1. a man may not sell above the current price. … 2. when a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another. 3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, or, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another. … but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity and not the person. 4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham, the land is worth thus much.¹³

John Cotton forbade merchants to raise prices even to cover their own losses, which they were expected to accept as a judgment upon their sins and not pass on to the consumer. The fact that Boston merchants remained in business tells us that their conduct fell short of John Cotton’s ideal. Even so, the Puritan ethic was very far from the spirit of capitalism. For a man such as Robert

Keayne, who tried to be a good Puritan and a good capitalist at the same time, the conflict ended by destroying him.

Altogether, the economy of early New England was neither a system of village communism nor nascent capitalism. It was an old-fashioned system of agricultural production, domestic industry and commercial exchange which bore the impress of East Anglian customs and Calvinist beliefs. At its heart was a Puritan ethic which persisted for many generations.¹⁴

Massachusetts Time Ways:
The Puritan Idea of “Improving the Time”

In most cultures, attitudes toward work are closely connected to conceptions of time. The people of the Bay Colony were no exception. For a Puritan, time was heavily invested with sacred meaning. Fundamentally, it was “God’s Time” as Samuel Sewall called it: “God’s Time is the best time, God’s way the best way.”¹

A central idea in this culture was that of “improving the time,” in the seventeenth-century sense of “turning a thing to good account.” Time-wasting in the Bay Colony was a criminal offense. As early as 1633 the General Court decreed:

No person, householder or other, shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the court shall think meet to inflict; and for this end it is ordered, that the constables of every place-shall use special diligence to take knowledge of offenders in this kind, especially of common coasters, unprofitable fowlers and tobacco takers, and to present the same.

A year later, the Court fined two men the heavy sum of twenty shillings each for “misspending their time.”²

The Puritan magistrate Samuel Sewall was infuriated by the wasting of time, and still more by its profanation. When he observed two men playing “idle tricks” on April Fools’ Day he angrily upbraided them:

In the morning I dehorted Sam. Hirst and Grindal Rawson from playing Idle Tricks because ‘twas the first of April. They were the greatest fools that did so. New England men came hither to avoid anniversary days, the keeping of them, such as the 25th of December. How displeasing it must be to God, the giver of our Time, to keep anniversary days to play the fool with ourselves and others.³

Puritan writers showed an obsession with time. Their diaries were temporal inventories of high complexity. Birthdays rarely passed in Puritan lives without solemn reflections on the use of time. “I have now lived fifty years much longer than I once expected, blessed be to God,” one wrote in 1729, “but oh what abundant cause to be ashamed that I have lived to so little purpose.”⁴ The turn of each year was marked in the same way. An English Puritan wrote in his diary on one New Year’s Eve, “This is the last day of the year and I am sensible a great deal of it hath been lost and misspent.”⁵

The daily rhythm of life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was meant to make the best use of every passing moment. The New England day normally began at the crack of dawn. The country-folk of New England, wrote Mrs. Stowe, “were used to rising at daybreak,” to make the best use of every daylight moment.⁶ The Puritans also tried to reduce the time for sleep. Increase Mather resolved, “I am not willing to allow myself above seven hours in four and twenty for sleep; but would spend the rest of my time in attending to the duties of my personal or general calling.”⁷

For the founders of Massachusetts, “improving the time” was primarily a spiritual idea. Their descendants later turned the same impulse to secular and materialist ends. The classical example was Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. In an essay called Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748) Franklin wrote:

Remember that TIME is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.⁸

The sayings of Poor Richard, which began to appear in 1733, expressed this idea in many aphorisms:

Sloth and Silence are a Fool’s Virtues.

He that wastes idly a Groat’s worth of his Time per Day, one Day with another, wastes the Privilege of using £100 each Day.

If you have time, don’t wait for time.

Since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.

Up, Sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.

Have you somewhat to do to-morrow; do it today.

Who gives promptly, gives twice.

He that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night.

Idleness is the greatest Prodigality.

Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.

Time enough, always proves little enough.

Lost time is never found again.

Procrastination is the thief of time.⁹

Other cultures in Anglo-America showed nothing quite like this obsession with “improving the time,” which for more than three centuries became an important part of folkways in New England.

The Puritans in England and America also undertook the improvement of time in another sense—seeking better methods of measuring its passage. This impulse caused the English Puritan Ralph Thoresby to invent an alarm clock. In his diary on 1 November 1680, he made following entry:

Thinking to have got up by 6 was mistaken, and rose so early that I had read a chapter before it chimed four. Spent most of the time in reading my dear father’s diary, and after in writing some things, desiring to redeem my time from sleep I entered into a Resolution that if it might any ways conduce to the glory of God … for upon a serious consideration that I usually (now in winter especially) sleep away so much precious time which might be redeemed to the ends aforesaid, and then considering the capital brevity of our lives, to which a few years will put a period even to the longest, and perhaps a few weeks or days or perhaps minutes to mine in particular, considering these things I resolved in the strength of God to redeem more time, particularly to retrench my sleeping time, and getting an Alarm put to the clock and that set at my beds-

head to arise every morning by five and first to dedicate the morning (as in duty obliged) to the service of God, by reading a chapter in an old Bible I have with annotations and then after prayer. … ¹⁰

A similar impulse in a more secular form led Benjamin Franklin a century later to invent the idea of daylight saving time. While American minister to France, Franklin was shocked that the people of Paris lost many hours of light by sleeping until midday, and then burned candles far into the night. He tried to enlighten his French friends in an essay called An Economical Project which proposed what we call daylight saving time.¹¹

Another Puritan idea about time appeared in their notion of “numbering the days.” This phrase had many meanings. It meant that time was precious and limited. It also betrayed a quantitative idea of time. Historian Bernard Bailyn observes of the Puritan merchant Robert Keayne:

the word that expresses best the most basic activity of Keayne’s mind is calculation. The veil through which he saw the world was not so much colored as calibrated. It was quantity that engaged his imagination.¹²

This calculating spirit often appeared in the temporal attitudes of seventeenth-century New England. In diaries and sermons, time usually meant clock time and calendar time. The stages of life were also quantified; old age, for example, was defined as life after sixty. Puritan diaries normally timed events to the nearest hour, or to horological periods such as “between twelve and one,” or “one-quarter after one.” Minutes were rarely mentioned. New England clocks and watches in the seventeenth century often did not have minute hands. This culture had little need for that degree of temporal refinement. It was a world without our idea of punctuality. In the seventeenth century, “punctual” meant “pertaining to a point.” Nevertheless, this world was firmly governed by the discipline of calendars and clocks.¹³

Clocks were costly in the seventeenth century. New Englanders improvised by turning their houses into timepieces. Massachusetts homes were often “sunline houses,” which faced due south on a noon sighting. The facade of the house was made into a giant sundial, with hours carved into the facing-boards around the door. By that means, a New England family could tell the hour even in the absence of a mechanical clock on the mantel.

Other forms of time-keeping were also part of this culture. The diurnal rhythm of light and dark was exceptionally important to the Puritans. The coming of darkness, which they called the “candle-lighting,” divided each period of twenty-four hours into profoundly different parts. Night was dangerous, threatening and hostile. As the shadows grew longer, New England travelers hurried on the highway, trying desperately to reach their destinations before dark. Samuel Sewall was once overtaken by darkness while on the road to Salem. He kicked his horse into the gallop, racing frantically against the night until the animal stumbled in the dark and “fell upon his nose”; Sewall was lucky to escape with his life. His diary described other moments of danger, fear and even panic when night fell in New England.¹⁴ To the Puritans, the night seemed not only dangerous but evil. The town bells sounded a curfew every night—and still do so in the author’s Middlesex village 350 years after its founding. To be abroad after curfew without permission was to risk punishment for a crime called “nightwalking.” Altogether, the diurnal rhythms of darkness and light were very pronounced in the time ways of Puritan New England.¹⁵

Also exceptionally strong in this society was the weekly rhythm defined by the Sabbath. Before coming to America, English Puritans began to observe the Sabbath with extreme rigor—a custom that was kept in Massachusetts from the start. The Puritans followed the Old Testament in reckoning the Sabbath from sundown on Saturday or even earlier. John Winthrop’s Sabbath began as early as three o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Historian Win ton Solberg observes that “New England was in all likelihood the only region in Christendom where this custom prevailed.”¹⁶

Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord’s Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other New Englanders were punished for picking strawberries, playing quoits, marking fish, smoking a pipe, and sailing a boat on the Lord’s Day. At New London, a courting couple named John Lewis and Sarah Chapman were brought to trial in 1670 merely for “sitting together on the Lord’s Day under an apple tree.”¹⁷

Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins!¹⁸ Altogether, the Puritans created a sabbatical rhythm of unique intensity in the time ways of their culture.¹⁹

If daily and weekly movements were unusually strong in New England, other common rhythms were exceptionally weak or even absent altogether. The Puritans made a point of abolishing the calendar of Christian feasts and saints’ days. The celebration of Christmas was forbidden in Massachusetts on pain of a five-shilling fine. In England, the Puritan Parliament prohibited the observance of Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, saints’ days and holy days.

These Puritan principles made a difference in the rhythm of life. The timing of marriage, for example, differed in New England from other British colonies. In Massachusetts, it was no longer regulated by Anglican prohibitions against matrimony during the period from Ash Wednesday to Easter and also in the period before Christmas. New Englanders kept old East Anglian customs without those Episcopal restrictions.²⁰

In place of the liturgical calendar, New Englanders created their own annual rhythm of regional festivals, including Election Day, Commencement Day, Thanksgiving, and Training Day. Election Day was a spring event, held on a Wednesday in April, when the charter of Massachusetts required that members of the Bay Company should meet to elect their officers. Gradually this day became a Puritan holiday which was celebrated with sermons and a ritual meal of “election cake” and “election beer.”²¹ Commencement Day, normally a weekday in July, was an academic ceremony which by 1680 had become a “Puritan midsummer’s holiday” when ministers and magistrates assembled at Cambridge to share a dinner, wine and “commencement cake.” There was also a great gathering of hucksters and vast crowds of country people on this occasion.²² Training days happened at various dates from early spring to late summer, when the militia assembled to practice their martial arts. John Winthrop described a training day on 15 September 1641, when 1,200 New England soldiers came together on Boston common. The governor noted with satisfaction that “there was no man drunk, though there was plenty of wine and strong beer in the town, not an oath sworn, no quarrel, nor any hurt done.”²³

A fourth Puritan festival was Thanksgiving, which by 1676 had became an annual event, held on a Thursday in November or December. In earlier years, days of Thanksgiving were appointed ad hoc for special occasions by civil authorities. The first Thanksgiving in the Bay Colony happened on 22 February 1630/31, after provision ships arrived just in time to prevent starvation.²⁴ Approximately twenty-two special days of Thanksgiving were held in the first half-century of the Bay Colony. After New England survived King Philip’s War, Thanksgivings began to occur regularly in November. The appointed day was Thursday, which had been lecture day in the churches of Boston and Ipswich. Special days of Thanksgiving continued, but by the late 1670s this event had become an autumn ritual, in which a fast was followed by a family dinner and another fast. The main event was a sermon which reminded New Englanders of their founding purposes. Sabbath rules were enforced on these days; Yankee farmers were prosecuted for ploughing on Thanksgiving.²⁵

Gradually Thanksgiving also became a domestic festival when families gathered together and renewed the covenant which was so important to their culture. In the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that Thanksgiving in her family reached its climax after the dinner was done:

When all was over, my grandfather rose at the head of the table, and a fine venerable picture he made as he stood there, his silver hair flowing in curls down each side of his clear, calm face, while in conformity to the old Puritan custom, he called their attention to a recital of the mercies of God in his dealings with their family.

It was a sort of family history, going over and touching upon the various events which had happened. He spoke of my father’s death, and gave a tribute to his memory, and closed all with the application of a time-honored text, expressing the hope that as years passed by we might “so number our days” as to apply our hearts unto wisdom.²⁶

The time ways of seventeenth-century New England were distinguished not only by the strength of these regional rituals, but also by weakness of natural rhythms which were very pronounced in other cultures. An example was a fascinating phenomenon which demographic historians call the “conception cycle.” Throughout the Western world in the seventeenth century, a large proportion of babies were conceived in the spring. There was a “rutting time” for humans as well as animals—a season of intense sexual activity which was defined by annual cycles of work, nutrition and inherited custom. In Europe twice as many conceptions occurred in the peak month of April as in the summer months during the seventeenth century. This conception cycle also appeared in the baptismal records of New England, but it was fainter than in most parts of the Western world. Conceptions were distributed more evenly throughout the year than was the case in Europe or other American colonies. Sexual behavior in New England was “deseasonalized” in an unusual degree for a seventeenth-century population.²⁷

In sum, the time ways of New England embodied Puritan values in many ways. Seasonal rhythms such as the conception cycle were comparatively weak; diurnal and sabbatical rhythms were exceptionally strong. The liturgical calendar of Christian holidays was replaced by festivals which commemorated the founding purposes of New England. Ideas of “improving the time” and “numbering the days” gave a special cast to temporal thinking. Some of these customs appeared elsewhere, but all of them together were unique to New England.

Massachusetts Wealth Ways:
Puritan Ideas of the Material Order

As it was with time and work, so also with wealth. The distribution of wealth in Massachusetts was determined not by material processes alone, but mainly by the cultural values and historical experiences of the founders. The builders of the Bay Colony deliberately apportioned the productive assets of their province so as to maintain the social distinctions which they thought proper in a

Bible Commonwealth. Leaders of the community were given larger shares of land; so were those who had held more property in England, and families with many children and servants. Distinctions of social rank were carefully respected, but gross disparities were uncommon. In most cases, town proprietors were men of middling status—yeomen and husbandmen who tended to be neither very rich nor very poor. They distributed the land in such a way as to multiply their own class. There was no small elite of great landlords in most Massachusetts towns during the seventeenth century.

The typical size of land grants in the Bay Colony might be observed in the town of Billerica, where 115 men received land by 1651. The median holding was 60 acres; the mean, 96 acres. Similar patterns appeared in most towns. In the town of Springfield, for example, the largest holding (William Pynchon’s) was 237 acres; the smallest, six; the median, near 60. These two towns had very different reputations—Billerica for comparative equality, Springfield for dominance by a single family. But in both communities the distribution of land was much the same. No family was enormously rich; few were entirely landless. Tenancy was uncommon, and in some towns entirely unknown.¹

When the proprietors of Wallingford, Connecticut, distributed their lands, they divided the population into three parts. Every “high rank man” received 400 acres; every “middle rank man” was given approximately 300 acres, and men of “lower rank” were assigned 200 acres. Other towns distributed their lands on different principles. The town of Dedham, on the other hand, divided its lands by a more complex method which took into account “rank, quality, deserts and usefulness either in the church or commonwealth.”

These rules varied in detail from one New England town to another. By and large, the more radical the religious principles of any particular town, the more egalitarian its distribution of lands was apt to be. A case in point was the Separatist settlement which is now the city of Providence, Rhode Island. Its founder,

Roger Williams, insisted that he should receive “only unto myself, one single share, equal unto any of the rest of that number. In the intent of Roger Williams, the first division of lands at Providence had a Gini ratio of zero, or perfect equality.²

Other towns diverged in the opposite direction. One of the most inegalitarian and materialist communities in the region was New Haven, which was settled by purse-proud London merchants. From the start, its wealth was heavily concentrated in a few hands.

Differences in wealth distribution derived not only from the religious beliefs of the founders, but also from their English regional origins. Historian David Grayson Allen discovered that the size of the average land holdings in the English community of Rowley, Yorkshire, was almost exactly reproduced in the American settlement called Rowley. He also found that the town of Hingham, Massachusetts, replicated the pattern of wealth distribution that had existed in the town of Hingham, East Anglia. Landholdings tended to be larger in New England, but relative sizes remained much the same.³

These various English patterns—eastern and northern—were not identical. Landholdings tended to be more egalitarian in East Anglia than in the north or west. Massachusetts towns settled by East Anglians tended to be more equal than those founded by Puritans from other parts of England. Two of the most sharply stratified rural communities in Massachusetts were Rowley, which was founded by a small group of Yorkshire families, and New-bury, which had a large contingent from England’s West Country. The builders of the Bay Colony generally followed the model of East Anglian communities, with a few important modifications.⁴

The overall pattern of wealth distribution in New England was much more equal than in the region of East Anglia as a whole. Outside the towns, there were no great landholders in Massachusetts whose possessions were even remotely comparable to those of the Crown, or the Duke of Norfolk, or other manorial lords who had owned a very large proportion of the manors in the eastern counties of England in the sixteenth century. The large landless proletariat of East Anglia had no counterpart in New England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. But the distribution of wealth in Massachusetts towns was similar to patterns among freeholders and leaseholders within East Anglian villages.⁵

These cultural factors were not the only determinants of wealth distribution in Massachusetts. Other factors were also involved. Inland farming towns in New England tended to be more equal than coastal commercial communities. Thus, the Massachusetts village of Newtown (now Cambridge) was more equal than Boston; Watertown was more equal than Newtown; Sudbury was more equal than Watertown; and Marlborough was more equal than Sudbury. All of these towns were located on a line that ran due west from Boston.⁶

These material differences, however, existed within a narrow range. Studies of wealth-distribution have been completed for more than twenty-five Massachusetts towns from 1630 to 1750, and also for at least three counties. In most of these places, throughout that period, the top tenth of wealthholders held only 20 to 30 percent of taxable property, and about 30 to 40 percent of estates in probate. This pattern of wealth distribution was egalitarian by comparison with other colonies. With a few urban exceptions such as Salem and Boston, it was typical of New England—and very different from other parts of British America.⁷

What is specially interesting in this pattern was its cause. The distribution of wealth in Massachusetts was not determined solely by the organization of the means of production, except in a tautological sense. Neither was it exclusively a function of market relations. It was created largely by a system of value which the founders of Massachusetts drew from their Puritan ideals and East Anglian experiences.

Another major determinant of wealth distribution was the system of inheritance. On this subject, the Bay Colonists had formed strong views while still in England. In 1624, a Puritan list of “grievances groaning for reformation,” drafted in the hand of John Winthrop, included an angry indictment of English inheritance practices in general, and an attack upon primogeniture in particular. “It is against all equity that one [son] should be a gentleman to have all, and the rest as beggars to have nothing,” he wrote, “it breedeth often times much strife and contention betwixt the elder brother and the rest of the children.”⁸

The Bay Colonists found a model that pleased them better in the book of Deuteronomy, which prescribed that a father should honor “the first born [son], by giving him a double portion of all that he hath.”⁹ This rule had great weight with English Puritans who found in it a “middle way” of the sort which was so congenial to their thinking. The English Puritan William Gouge argued that “houses and families by this means are upheld and continued from age to age,” while justice was done to all of the other children.¹⁰

In Massachusetts this biblical rule was combined with carefully selected East Anglian customs, which had been very mixed.¹¹ Some communities and individuals in eastern England observed the rule of primogeniture.¹² Others kept a custom called borough English, in which the homestead sometimes went to the youngest son. Many practiced some form of partible descent, which was so common in the eastern counties that small “morcellements” of land became a serious social problem. Some testators even subdivided a single home among their children. In 1585, for example, Margaret Browne of Colchester (Essex) divided one house into five legacies:

To my son John the hallhouse with the entry coming and going in and from the same; to my son Richard and Joan his wife the chamber over the parlour in which he now dwelleth for the term of their lives; to Anne my daughter now wife of John Glascock of St. Osyth the kitchen and to her heirs for ever; to my son Oliver and his heirs for ever the parlor in which he now dwelleth; to my daughter Katherine now wife of Robert Symon of Colchester weaver the shop with the little buttery in the entry and to his heirs forever. … My garden and backside to be also equally divided between my said five children. …¹³

The founders of Massachusetts drew selectively upon these various English precedents. At an early date, they totally abolished death heriots, reliefs, primer seizins, escheats, licenses, fines and forfeitures which had weighed heavily upon them. They also abandoned primogeniture and entail. In cases of intestacy, Massachusetts courts at first often ordered estates to be divided more or less equally among children of both sexes. Males commonly received land and females were given “moveables” or personal property. In 1648, Massachusetts formally enacted the biblical rule that gave a double portion to the eldest son. This law made no mention of daughters, but in Massachusetts courts children of both sexes shared more equally than in England.¹⁴

These rules applied only in cases of intestacy. But most property holders in Massachusetts left a will, in which they usually divided their land among their sons, and left a large share of personal property to daughters. In Watertown, for example, one study has found that no two wills were the same in the distribution of property, but every testator with more than one child practiced some form of partible inheritance. One-third gave a double portion to the first-born son. About half left the homestead or house furnishings to the youngest son, a highly practical arrangement which became widely popular in New England. Many testators assigned a life interest in their estates to their widows, with residual rights for the children. These partible customs restrained the growth of inequality in New England.¹⁵

Material inequalities in Massachusetts existed within a comparatively narrow range, but they loomed large in the consciousness of small communities. At the top of this system of wealth distribution were families of lesser gentry. Their houses were commonly at the center of the town, just as small manor houses were in the center of many farming villages in East Anglia.

In the town of Windsor, Connecticut, for example, the Allyns were the leading family. Their two-story wooden house was not very grand by English standards, but it was the largest home in Windsor. It was also painted a vivid red at the time when most New England houses were not painted at all, but slowly weathered to a mottled brown. The Allyn house was the center of society in Windsor and also the seat of justice, where its builder the first Squire Allyn and then his son and grandson after him held court in the great room. So grand did the Allyn house appear that a small child, passing it for the first time, ran home to tell his parents that he had seen “Heaven, the big house where the angels lived.”

Even so, by comparison with other cultures, New England was remarkably egalitarian. As late as 1765, a British aristocrat named Lord Adam Gordon traveled widely in New England. He observed with an air of disapproval that “the levelling principle here, everywhere, operates strongly and takes the lead. Everybody has property, and everybody knows it.” He was correct both in the fact and the cause. The wealth ways of new England rose in large measure from a “levelling principle” which was embedded in its culture.¹⁶

Massachusetts Rank Ways:
A System of Truncated Orders

On board the ship Arbella, John Winthrop entertained his fellow passengers with a typical Puritan lay-sermon on the subject of social rank. “God Almighty,” Winthrop declared, “in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”¹

From the beginning, the colony of Massachusetts Bay did indeed make some New Englanders “high and eminent,” and others “mean and in subjection.” These distinctions derived from East Anglian ranking practices, but were modified in major ways by the builders of the Bay Colony. The system of stratification in eastern England, like that of Europe as a whole during the seventeenth century, was marked by inequality in high degree. At the top was the Crown, the Peerage, and the greater gentry, who held title to much of the farmland in the region, and even to some of its urban centers as well. The county of Norfolk, for example, was divided into approximately 1,500 manors in 1630. Of that number, a majority were owned by a few dozen great landowners.² The county of Essex in the year 1640 had approximately 1,100 manors, of which 780 were in private hands. Of that number, 64 were held by the Earl of Warwick alone. Ten families owned 222 Essex manors, and dominated the economic affairs of the county. Entire market towns were owned by single families; the community of Saffron Walden, for example, belonged to the Earl of Suffolk.³ In Kent the pattern was a little different. Here the Church of England was the largest landowner in the early seventeenth century. But close behind was a temporal peer, the Earl of Thanet, with vast estates that brought him a princely income. After him came twenty or thirty close-knit county families, who owned a very large part of the Kentish countryside.⁴

At the bottom of this social order were large numbers of desperately poor people: small leaseholders and landless laborers. Most adult males held fewer than five acres. A majority possessed no land at all. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the poor were increasing more rapidly than the population as a whole. In one farming village (Heydon, Essex) during the year 1568, half the householders had struggled to survive on four acres or less. By 1625, that proportion had risen above two-thirds. Similar tendencies appeared in many East Anglian villages. King, peers and gentry all grew richer, while a landless tenantry sank deeper into the slough of poverty and degradation.⁵

Even this wretched rural proletariat was not the very lowest stratum of East Anglian society. At the bottom was a large vagrant population of wandering poor who overran the larger towns and much of the countryside as well. On 1 December 1623, for example, the selectmen of the English town of Braintree hired an officer called the Beadle of the Beggars, whose job was “to gather up about dinner and supper time all the beggars at mens’ doors.”⁶ Chronic unemployment was a major problem throughout the region. In the year 1630, many poor men and women, “complaining for want of work,” were given make-work jobs by the towns. Women were set to spinning; men, to picking stone. Most towns looked after their own; their records show that elderly residents were often treated with decency, respect and compassion.⁷ Many East Anglian towns bought large quantities of coal from Newcastle, butter from local farmers, and bread from bakers to keep the “town-born” poor from perishing of hunger and cold.⁸

But the vagrant poor were treated with great brutality. Pregnant women were expelled so that their newborn babies would not become a charge upon the town. In the English town of Braintree again, the town records recorded that “notice is given to us of a wench entertained at John Beckwith’s dwelling that is supposed to have a great belly, which the constables have warning to look after, and to take order to remove.”⁹ In Essex, some of these vagrants were sent to the county gaol which was kept in the dark dungeons of Colchester castle. Others went to houses of correction and almshouses. The lucky ones found their way to “hospitals,” which were hostels for the poor. In the year 1630 when the ship Arbella sailed for America, these places were filled to overflowing—so much so in Essex that whenever one person was accepted, someone else had to be removed.¹⁰

Between these upper and lower ranks of East Anglian society, there were middling strata, from which came the founders of Massachusetts. This broad middle class included lesser gentry, yeomanry, prosperous farmers, artisans and tradesmen, all of whom were more numerous in the eastern counties than in other parts of England. Freeholders were a small minority in most parts of England. But there were many thousands of freeholders in Kent and large numbers in Essex and Suffolk.¹¹ They held their lands in fee simple. Even so, they were required to pay quitrents and feudal dues which could be very burdensome. These middling families also contributed the great bulk of the king’s revenues and the church’s tithes, as well as local poor rates. They were thus compelled to support the people who were both above and below them. This double burden lay heavily upon the stratum that sent so many people to New England.

The experience of social oppression in England caused the founders of Massachusetts to modify the ranking system in their society. After much discussion, they deliberately eliminated both the top and bottom strata of the East Anglian social order, and at the same time carefully preserved its middling distinctions. The result was a social revolution which happened not as the result of some “mysterious Atlantic sea change,” as one historian has called it, or as a product of the migration process itself, or as a reflexive response to the material environment. This revolution was a conscious act which rose from religious ideals and social purposes of the founders.

One of the critical decisions was made in the year 1636, when a group of Puritan noblemen considered moving to Massachusetts, and sought assurance that their hereditary powers would be protected in the New World. Their letter began with a “demand” that “the commonwealth should consist of two distinct ranks of men, whereof the one should be for them and their heirs, gentlemen of the country, the other for them and their heirs, freeholders.” The Puritan peers also asked that honor, power and authority should be made hereditary.

The letter caused consternation in Massachusetts. The magistrates and ministers of the Bay Colony debated the question at length, and commissioned John Cotton, minister of the first church in Boston, to draft a reply. The tone of their answer was conciliatory, and deferential in high degree. But its substance was negative. To “demand one,” the leaders of Massachusetts willingly granted “hereditary honor,” but “hereditary power” was firmly refused. The Bay colonists declared:

Two distinct ranks we readily acknowledge, from the light of nature and scripture; the one of them called Princes, or Nobles, or Elders (amongst whom Gentlemen have their place). … Hereditary honors both nature and scripture doth acknowledge (Eccles xix. 17) but hereditary authority and power standeth only by the civil laws of some commonwealths, and yet even amongst them, the authority of the father is nowhere communicated, together with his honors, unto all his posterity.

When God blesseth any branch of any noble or generous family, with the spirit and gifts fit for government, it would be taking God’s name in vain to put such a talent under a bushel, and a sin against the honor of the magistracy to neglect such in our public election.

But if God should not delight to furnish some of their posterity with gifts fit for the magistracy, we should expose them rather to reproach and prejudice, and the commonwealth with them, than exalt them to honor, if we should call them forth, when God doth not, to public authority.¹²

The Puritan peers decided to stay home.

Here was an event of no small importance in American history. The founders of Massachusetts, unlike the rulers of other European colonies, deliberately excluded an aristocracy from their ranking system.

At the same time, the leaders of Massachusetts also made a concerted and highly successful effort to discourage immigration from the bottom of English society. They prohibited the entry of convicted felons (many of whom had been punished for crimes of poverty) and placed heavy impediments in the path of the migrant poor. A series of poor laws were enacted in Massachusetts, with rules of settlement and “warning out” that were even more strict than in England.

Poverty persisted in New England, but it had a different meaning from other cultures. An inhabitant of Boston in 1726 defined the poor as those who “always liv’d from hand to mouth, i.e. depended on one day’s labor to supply the wants of another.”¹³

The poor in this sense were remarkably few in New England—a much smaller part of the population than in England or in other parts of British America. Social attitudes were mixed. Most towns made a genuine effort to look after their own poor, as indeed they required to do by law. But for the town poor, provisions went beyond the minimum. In Salem one man was ordered “to be set by the heels in the stocks for being uncharitable to a poor man in distress.”¹⁴

Even as the founders of Massachusetts sought to eliminate extremes of rank from their society, they were very far from being egalitarian. Most Massachusetts towns deliberately preserved inequalities of status and wealth within a narrow range. Practices varied in detail from one town to another. But most communities deliberately attempted to preserve the system of social ranks which had existed within the small villages of East Anglia. The King, peers, great gentry, landless laborers and wandering poor were all outsiders to those little communities. Most actual members belonged to three ranks—the lesser gentry, yeomanry and cottagers. These people lived, worked and worshipped together, in ways that were bound by ancient customs of stratification, which had existed from “tyme out of mind” in East Anglian communities.”

Social distinctions between English gentry, yeomen and laborers were reproduced in Massachusetts, and maintained for many generations. John Adams wrote, “Perhaps it may be said in America we have no distinctions of ranks … but have we not laborers, yeomen, gentlemen, esquires, honorable gentlemen, and excellent gentlemen?”¹⁵ By “honorable gentlemen” and “excellent gentlemen” John Adams referred to men who were addressed as “Your Honor,” and “Your Excellency.” These titles of address also continued in Massachusetts. The gentlefolk of the Bay Colony were addressed as “Mister” and “Mistress” just as in England. Yeomen and their wives were called Goodman and “Goodwife,” or “Goody” for short. Only landless laborers lacked titles. Legal proceedings of Massachusetts, like those of England, required that every plaintiff and defendant must be identified by social order, as “gentleman,” “yeoman,” or “laborer,” or else the case could be thrown out of court and new papers would have to be filed. The faculty of Harvard College ranked their students by the social order of their families. Seating committees of New England meetinghouses also used social order as one of several criteria for assigning seats.

By and large, these ranking systems were pluralistic in their definition. The seating committees of most New England towns normally used three criteria in the assignment of benches and pews—age, estate, and a third indicator that was variously called “reputation,” “place” or “usefulness.” Of these determinants, age was often (but not always) the most powerful. Seaport towns such as New Haven tended to give more weight to wealth. But most New England communities, if their seating lists are an accurate guide, were more respectful of age than estate. In any case, age, estate and reputation tended to be strongly correlated in Puritan New England. Together they defined a ranking system that persisted for many generations.¹⁶

In short, the ranking system of East Anglia was reproduced in Massachusetts with two decisive differences. First, the top and bottom strata were removed, and inequality persisted within a more narrow range. Second, the importance of material differences was qualified by age and moral standing, for which the Puritans entertained high respect.

There were strict rules of social deference in this society. People of lower rank were expected to bow and curtsy to their superiors, even when passing on a public road. Travelers as late as the early nineteenth century expressed astonishment at the sight of New England children who turned and bowed at the edge of the highway when their “betters” rode by. Most societies in the seventeenth century were deferential systems, but the rules of deference in New England were different from those in other parts of British America. The lines between masters and servants were not so sharply drawn. Servants and even slaves were always called “help,” a word that was brought from England in the seventeenth century. Madame Sarah Knight, when traveling in New England wrote that New Englanders were much too “indulgent” to servants and even slaves, “suffering too great familiarity, permitting them to sit at table and eat with them.” By comparison with the twentieth century, New England was indeed a deferential society, but in a very special way.¹⁷

The Massachusetts Comity:
Patterns of Migration, Settlement and Association

In the year 1656, the magistrates of Massachusetts heard a charge of fornication against a troubled young woman of humble rank, who was appropriately named Tryal Pore. She pleaded guilty to her indictment and told the court, “By this my sin I have not only done what I can to pull down judgment from the Lord on myself, but also upon the place where I live.”¹

Tryal Pore came from the underclass of the Bay Colony. Her prophetic name hinted at other troubles which her parents had known even before she was born. But for all of her misfortunes, she shared the Puritan purposes of the colony, and showed a strong sense of responsibility for “the place where I live.” That sense of belonging became the basis of a comity in Massachusetts which was similar in many respects to that of eastern England.

A modern study has found three types of settlement in East Anglia during the seventeenth century—villages, hamlets and dispersed farmsteads. The leading student of this subject observes that “no single settlement type assumed dominance,” but villages and hamlets were common, and isolated homesteads were comparatively rare. Houses were not scattered across the countryside, but grouped in small clusters close to the edges of major roads.

Similar settlement-patterns also appeared in Massachusetts at an early date, and persisted for three centuries—the familiar New England system of nucleated central villages, with small satellite hamlets and isolated farmsteads of “outliers” scattered along the country roads. From the start there were always a few stubborn loners, of whom the General Court complained that they “keep their families at their farms, being remote from any town.” But their numbers were comparatively small in Massachusetts. Towns and hamlets became normal units of settlement, as in the east of England.²

The builders of the Bay Colony actively encouraged close-built towns. A law in 1635 ordered that “no dwelling house shall be built above half a mile from the meeting house in any new plantation … without leave from the Court, except mill houses & farm houses of such as have their dwelling houses in some town.”³

Similar laws were also passed in many other colonies, but could not be enforced. In Massachusetts, the policy was made to work because the founders came from the most densely settled region of England, and two-thirds had lived in villages or towns before emigrating. They brought with them an East Anglian habit of settlement which they reproduced in the New World.

In this process of reproduction, changes were inevitably introduced. The New England town became a more formal institution, fixed in its conception, recognized in law, and continuously replicated across the New England countryside. Once again, the major tendency was not the reproduction of an English form but its creative adaptation to the conditions of a new environment.

Within a few years of settlement, the New England town had taken on the character which it retained for three centuries, complete with meetinghouses and schools, stocks and pillories, animal pounds and training fields, town commons and enclosed fields, nucleated centers and rural neighborhoods. Despite many individual differences, the first forty towns in Massachusetts possessed these attributes by 1650, as do most of the 1,600 New England towns that exist today.⁴

In the origin of these settlement patterns, East Anglian folkways played a major role. One may observe their importance in the history of the town of Salem, which was settled by two groups—a party of “old planters” who came from the West Country before 1628, and a contingent of East Anglians who arrived in the great migration during the 1630s. They brought with them two very different ideas of community. Historian Richard Gildrie writes:

The West Country and East Anglian conceptions of the ideal community tended to differ in material ways. Salem’s West Countrymen had originated in an area of dispersed and separate farms. … East Anglians tended to envision the ideal community as a compact village. … Until 1636 the great difficulty of clearing the wilderness kept the West Countrymen on the peninsula, but as soon as they could, they spread out over the township, building farms and hamlets in the pattern most familiar to them. East Anglians, however, tended to stay in the original village …,⁵

These communities gained a strong hold upon their individual members. One indicator of their social gravity was the rate of internal migration, which was very low in New England before 1780. In the town of Dedham, for example, only 9 percent of taxable inhabitants moved away during the entire decade of the 1690s. Even fewer (7%) moved out of town in the 1670s. In Hingham and Concord the pattern was much the same.⁶

Those studies refer not to the entire population, but mainly to mature male adults. Young people were more mobile, partly because of the custom of sending out children.⁷ Women also moved more often than men because patterns of settlement after marriage tended to be patrilocal.⁸ There were many other variations, but in New England as a whole rates of refined persistence were very high—in some older country towns, the highest that have been measured in any adult population throughout the Western world. This pattern continued from the mid-seventeenth century to the late eighteenth.⁹

These patterns of migration and settlement helped to create a special system of association in New England. The vital factors were the comparative immobility of the mature population and the density of town life in this region. A special language of belonging was carried to Massachusetts from the east of England. It appeared in words such as “townsman” and “town-born” which were common in East Anglia during the seventeenth century, and also became part of the social vocabulary of New England. On the night of the Boston massacre, for example, a cry went through the streets of the city, “Town-born, turn out!”

So strong was this sense of belonging that when danger threatened in Massachusetts, people turned instinctively toward their fellow townsmen. A small earthquake in Massachusetts, for example, caused “divers men … being at work in the fields, to cast down their working-tools and run with ghastly terrified looks to the next company they could meet withal.”¹⁰

The same feeling also led to strong resentments against outsiders. Rivalries between towns were so intense that they sometimes led to violence in the seventeenth century. One such clash occurred between the Connecticut towns of Stamford and Greenwich over disputed boundary lines. Another quarrel between New London and nearby towns over a meadow ended in a nasty fight when the farmers of these communities attacked each other with sharpened scythes. A conflict over land between the towns of Windsor and Enfield led to a pitched battle in which 100 men were said to be “fiercely engaged in resolute combat.” New England towns were units of passionate identity. Many took on a character and even a personality of their own, and have maintained it through many generations.¹¹

The tone and spirit of association within New England towns was very different from other communities. A British traveler observed of New Englanders that “the people are uncommonly stiff and formal.” Similar statements were made by many other visitors.¹²

The New England town, for all its solidarity against external threats, was not a unitary structure. The most important unit of daily association in Massachusetts was not the town itself but the neighborhood—a small cluster of houses, inhabited by families who were increasingly related to one another. From an early date in the seventeenth century, these rural neighborhoods appeared on the settlement maps of most New England towns. Urban neighborhoods also appeared at the nucleated centers of these communities. Even the isolated homesteads of “outlyers” tended to be bunched loosely together on a stretch of road, with long unbuilt distances round about.

The existence of neighborhoods was recognized by law in Massachusetts as early as 1633. One statute in that year declared that “no man shall give his swine any corn but such, as being viewed by two or three neighbors, shall be thought unfit for any man’s meat.”¹³ This was a continuation of practices in the east of England, where mundane questions were routinely settled by what was called the “laws of neighbouring men,” or the “custom of neighbours.”¹⁴

“Neighboring” was a verb in Massachusetts which described social acts of high complexity. The spirit of a New England neighborhood

“Towne marks” in Puritan Massachusetts were important symbols of belonging and were used for the branding of animals. In the southern colonies every planter had his own individual brand, but in Puritan Massachusetts animals were also marked by town. The General Court of Massachusetts formally agreed on these “towne marks” for horses, “to be set upon one of the near quarters.” These marks were (col. 1, left): Charlestown, Cambridge, Concord, Salem, Salisbury, Sudbury, Strawberry Bank (Portsmouth), Dorchester; (col. 2): Dedham, Dover, Boston, Braintree, Roxbury, Rowley, Reading, Watertown; (col. 3): Weymouth, Woburn, Northampton, Lynn, Ipswich, Newbury, Hingham, Hampton; (col. 4): Haverhill, Gloucester, Medford, Manchester, Andover, Hull, Springfield, Exeter. (Mass. Records, II [1647], 225)

was summarized in a proverb by a descendant of the great migration, Benjamin Franklin. “Love your neighbor,” said Poor Richard, “but don’t pull down your fence.” This Yankee proverb was not invented in New England. In England a century earlier, George Herbert had written, “Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedges.” Even as the granite “fences” of Massachusetts replaced the green hedgerows of England, customs of social “hedging” remained much the same. Here was yet another continuity from the Old World to the New.¹⁵

One might recognize a ring of modernity in this system, but in other ways, the comity of early New England was far removed from systems of association in our own time. This was specially the case in regard to social reputation, which was urgently important to the Puritans, as to most others of their age. The social cement of their world was a sense of belonging, and an intense fear of “shame,” which was the emotion felt when reputation was lost. Punishments were meant to promote a sense of shame. Fornicating couples were sometimes compelled to stand in white sheets before the congregation and confess their sins. Drunkards were forced to wear a great shame-letter D, “made of red cloth and set upon white, and to continue for a year.”¹⁶ Serious offenses were punished by excommunication, in which every member of the church was ordered “to forbear to eat and drink with him,” and life became an agony of isolation and shame.¹⁷

The opposite of shame was honor. Puritans had a very strong sense of honor—but one that was very different from what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has called the “primal honor” of the cavaliers who came to Virginia. When John Winthrop wrote of honor, which he often did, he meant mainly a condition of Christian sanctification. In 1643, Winthrop instructed his son, “ … esteem it the greatest honor to lie under the simplicity of Christ crucified.” When Cotton Mather celebrated the “honor” of New England’s founders, he meant a reputation for being “a studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified person, and one in whom the love of God was fervent and the love of man sincere.”¹⁸ These obsessions with honor and shame were not unique to New England, but the Puritans gave them a special meaning.

Massachusetts Order Ways:
The Puritan Idea of Order as Unity

Yet another component of this culture was its system of social order. In that regard, New England was characterized by a curious paradox. This was always the most orderly region in British America, but it was also very violent in its ordering acts. This typically Puritan paradox of private order and public violence was specially striking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For many generations, individual order coexisted with an institutional savagery that appeared in the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches and the crushing to death with heavy stones of an old man who refused to plead before the court.

These two tendencies, of individual order and institutional violence, were closely linked. Among the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, order was an obsession. The intensity of their concern—and its distance from our own time—appeared in a startling argument by Puritan minister John Norton, who insisted that it was “better an innocent and a good man should suffer than order; for that preserves the whole.”¹

The prevailing idea of order in Puritan Massachusetts was very different from our own conceptions. It did not primarily mean “a state of peace and serenity” as Webster’s Dictionary defines it, but rather a condition where everything was put in its proper place and held there by force if necessary. Order, for the Puritans, meant a condition of organic unity—the order that “preserves the whole” in John Norton’s definition—a oneness of the spirit that did not readily admit internal differences. The same idea often appeared in Puritan writings. John Winthrop spoke of order as “the preservation and good of the whole.”² The Puritan divine Solomon Stoddard explained that “a church is not a confused body of people; but they that are brought into order, and each must observe his proper station: it is compared to a natural body, wherein there are diverse organs appointed to their peculiar services.”³ The importance of unity became the leading theme of Puritan sermons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. “Union,” declared Jonathan Edwards, “is one of the most amiable things that pertains to human society; yea, it is one of the most beautiful and happy things on earth, which indeed makes earth most like heaven.”⁴

This idea of order as organic unity was deeply embedded in the cosmology of English Calvinism. But the ordering institutions of New England were drawn from a different source—mainly those that had existed in the towns of East Anglia. The builders of the Bay Colony chose very selectively from these English precedents. In the first generation, for example, they decided not to introduce the office of sheriff. That hated symbol of royal prerogative and aristocratic power was not welcome in early New England. Neither, at first, did they have any use for the peace-keeping officers of the Anglican church such as beadles and other parish policemen who were chosen by vestry and clergy to collect tithes and keep order. Through the first half of the seventeenth century, The Bay colonists did without these unpopular officials.

Puritan Massachusetts turned instead to the most communitarian of English peacekeepers—the village constable. This was an ancient office, derived from the borsholders, headboroughs, boroughheads and reeves who were elected by an English township or tithing, rather than being appointed by higher authority.⁵ In New England, the constable was an officer of the town, chosen by his neighbors. His duty was to serve processes, execute warrants, deliver writs, make arrests, and summon town meetings. He could also be called upon to collect taxes, organize elections, look after lost goods, recover stray animals, keep a record of newcomers to the town and arrest “such strange persons as do walk abroad in the night … and sleep in the day; or which do haunt any house, where is suspicion of bawdie.” He was also required to visit and inspect all the households in the town at least once in every three months, and each year to read all the laws pertaining to the Sabbath. When serious trouble threatened, the constable was not expected to deal with it himself, but to summon all the men of the town, who were required by law to support him. In New England, the community itself was the ultimate peacekeeper.

By and large, the system worked. Violent crime and disorder were comparatively uncommon in Massachusetts. Homicide rates in seventeenth-century New England were less than half those of the Chesapeake colonies.⁶ Assaults against persons were also less frequent in New England than in any other part of British America.⁷ In the Massachusetts county courts, crimes against property were more common than crimes against persons.⁸ But crimes against order were the most common of all. In Massachusetts towns, most adults were prosecuted at least once for criminal offenses against order—commonly small sabbath violations, minor cases of disturbing the peace, sexual offenses, idleness, lying, domestic disorder or drunkenness. Criminal proceedings for offenses of this sort were very common, but prosecutions for major crimes of theft and violence were comparatively rare.⁹

Comparatively low rates of violent crime persisted in New England for 300 years and more. Timothy Dwight observed that most people throughout this region never bothered to bar their houses, or to keep their valuables under lock and key, even in seaport towns.¹⁰ A lawyer in Beverly, Massachusetts, wrote in 1840 that “during a practice of nearly forty years, he had never known a native of Beverly convicted of any heinous crime.”¹¹ Harriet Beecher Stowe believed that New England in her generation was a place “where one could go to sleep at all hours of day or night with the house door wide open, without bolt or bar, yet without apprehension of any to molest or make afraid.”¹²

Violent crime which invaded the domestic peace of a Puritan household was punished with special rigor in New England. The Massachusetts laws against burglary were exceptionally severe, and court proceedings still more so. The people of this culture had a particular horror of violence which threatened the home.¹³

Mob violence was also comparatively uncommon in Puritan New England, except in seaport towns such as Salem, Marblehead and Boston. Savage riots sometimes occurred in those troubled communities. The worst happened at Marblehead in 1677. After several fishing crews had been taken by the Indians, a mob of fishermens’ wives seized two Indian captives and literally tore them limb from limb. A witness reported:

The women surrounded them … and laid violent hands upon the captives, some stoning us and me in the meantime, because we would protect them. … Then, with stones, billets of wood, and what else they might, they made an end of these indians. We were kept at such a distance that we could not see them till they were dead, and then found them with their heads off and gone, and their flesh in a manner pulled from their bones. And such was the tumultation these women made, that … they suffered neither constable nor mandrake, nor any other person to come near them, until they had finished their bloody purpose.¹⁴

Scenes such as this sometimes occurred on the edges of New England society. But in Middlesex County during the mid-seventeenth century only one riot occurred— the pulling down of a may pole. When riots did happen, they were regulated by custom in a curious way. John Adams in 1774 drew a distinction between “public mobs” which defended law and the constitution, and “private mobs” which took to the streets “in resentment of private wrongs.” Adams believed that “public mobs” were constitutional, and even a necessary instrument of order. But he added that “private mobs I do and will detest. …”¹⁵ By comparison with other colonies, there were very few public mobs and political rebellions in New England.¹⁶

But when “unconstitutional” disturbances occurred, the people of Massachusetts did not hesitate to suppress them with the utmost rigor. Penalties were arranged in a hierarchy of official violence. The most terrible punishment in Massachusetts was burning at the stake—the punishment for cases of petty treason which were defined as the killing of masters by servants. At least two people were burnt alive in Massachusetts. Both were black women: a slave named Maria who was found guilty in 1681 of setting fire to her master’s house in the town of Roxbury, and a slave called Phyllis who was burned in Cambridge for having poisoned her master with arsenic.¹⁷

The next most terrible punishment was death by hanging. The colony of Massachusetts recognized thirteen capital crimes in 1648: witchcraft, idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, rape, adultery, bestiality, sodomy, false witness with intent to take life, and a child of sixteen or older who was a “stubborn” or “rebellious” son, or who “smote” or “cursed” a parent. All of these laws were drawn from the Pentateuch except the punishment for rape.¹⁸

Next to hanging, in point of violence, were punishments by maiming—the slitting of the nostrils, the amputation of ears, the branding of the face or hands. All of these terrible penalties were administered by the Puritans in Massachusetts. Quakers, for example, were punished with special ferocity. Some were branded in the face and “burned very keep with a red-hot iron with H. for heresie.” Others had their ears cut off, faces scarred and nostrils slit open in a saturnalia of sadistic punishment.¹⁹

For less serious offenses, the penalty was whipping, unless one could pay a fine. These punishments were sometimes very severe. Four Quaker women were ordered to be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart’s tail and conveyed “from constable to constable,” through twelve New England towns, and to be whipped in every town. The women were flogged so terribly that the blood coursed down their naked backs and breasts, until the horrified townsmen of Salisbury rose against the constables and rescued them.²⁰ One male Quaker missionary was flogged nearly to death in Massachusetts, and Puritan minister John Norton made a joke of it: “He endeavored to beat the gospel ordinances black and blue, and it was but just to beat him black and blue.”²¹

Other offenses were punished by various forms of public humiliation—stocks and pillories in particular. Criminals were often required to wear on their clothing a letter of the law, in some contrasting color as a badge of shame—not only the immortal A for adultery, but B for blasphemy or burglary, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, F for forgery, R for roguery, S for sedition, T for Theft—an entire alphabet of humiliation. A man in Deerfield was required to wear “a capital I of two inches long, and proportionable bigness,” for the crime of incest.²²

Calvinist magistrates also invented other ingenious punishments to fit lesser crimes. A woman in Salem had her tongue put in a cleft stick for “reproaching the elders.” A dishonest baker was made to stand in the stocks with a lump of dough on his head. Robert Saltonstall, for having “parsimoniously presented a petition on so small and bad a piece of paper,” was fined five shillings. Imprisonment was also used as a punishment in New England. Convicts were sometimes confined in holes below ground. In the district of Maine, they were kept through the winter in solitary earth pits that measured nine and a half by four and a half by ten feet deep. Connecticut confined its prisoners in a copper mine.²³

Justice was swift in New England. The law required four days’ interval between sentencing and execution, but this provision was often honored in the breach. For example, two servants (one Scottish, the other French) murdered their master by “knocking him in the head as he was taking tobacco.” The crime was committed on 10 February 1675. The two men were hunted down by their neighbors, taken by hue and cry, tried and found guilty, and hanged on 13 February, only three days later.²⁴

These applications of official violence were not unique to New England. They also existed in other parts of British America. But the Puritans added their own special intensity of moral purpose to the general rigor of punishment that existed throughout the

Western world in the seventeenth century. The result was a regime that combined collective order and institutional violence in an exceptionally high degree.

Massachusetts Power Ways:
The Politics of Town Meeting Government

Within a few years of settlement, a unique system of government by town meetings and selectmen took form in Massachusetts. Many historians believe that these institutions were invented in the New World. Leading dictionaries identify the words town meeting and selectman as Americanisms.¹ Nothing could be farther from the case. New England town meetings were transplanted from East Anglia, where they had existed for many centuries before the great migration. In the Suffolk County Record Office at Ipswich, for example, one may find a musty leather-bound folio volume of great antiquity which contains the records of the parish of Framlingham—after which the Massachusetts town of Framingham took its name. On its cover, this volume bears a title which is written in an old hand: “Town Book.” In many East Anglian communities, the words “town” and “parish” were used interchangeably. In the great book of Framlingham, the expressions “general parish meeting” and “general town meeting” were synonyms.²

These East Anglian towns governed themselves through officers sometimes called “selectmen.” Some East Anglian selectmen were elected by all the people called “townsmen.” Others were self-perpetuating oligarchies. Always, selectmen were men of substance—prosperous yeomen and artisans for the most part.³ They were also men with grey heads, chosen for their maturity, wisdom and experience in local government. In some East Anglian communities, selectmen were called “ancients.”⁴

The selectmen disposed of routine business, but in many parishes of East Anglia, larger questions were dealt with by assemblies explicitly called “town meetings,” which brought together the “principal inhabitants” of the community. These East Anglian town meetings were diverse in their structure. No two of them were quite the same. But they commonly allowed a large number of townsmen to participate in local government.⁵

Another part of the New England polity was a set of fundamental documents that functioned very much like a written constitution. The East Anglian community of Dedham, for example, had a local constitution called “The Ancient Customs of the Town and Parish of Dedham, County of Essex, which is and hath been, tyme out of minde, of both the lordships there.”⁶ This document laid down the rules of inheritance, which in Dedham happened to favor the youngest son. It described the processes of law and self-government in that community, and included by-laws for building, farming, and animal keeping such as were commonly covered by manorial customals throughout England during the early decades of the seventeenth century. But the Dedham document was something different from manorial documents. It was a single set of laws that existed for all the manors in the “town.” Further, Dedham’s “ancient customs” were enforced not by a manorial lord but by all the landholders who lived in the town. “If any man offend in any of these lawes,” the document declared, “the tenants may set such fines on their heads as they shall thinke meet and convenient.”⁷

Every East Anglian town had its own customs; no two were ever exactly the same and most changed through time. The word town itself altered its meaning in this period—slowly beginning to be used in a new sense to describe small urban centers. East Anglia had many towns in this modern sense—more than any other part of England in the early seventeenth century. These places developed systems of self-government that were very different from more rural communities. An example was the market town of Brain tree, whose government was mainly in the hands of a local oligarchy called the “Four and Twenty,” who functioned much like the ruling elites of many market towns throughout Europe. But when major problems occurred, the “governors of the town” called general town meetings to decide the matter. In September 1625, for example, Braintree’s Four and Twenty summoned all the “chiefe inhabitants of the town” to meet in the Church and to “confer on some course to be taken to set the poor to work at this hard time.”⁸ In 1630, these institutions were still common throughout the eastern counties of England.

When the Puritans came to America, this ancient system of government by town meetings, selectmen and fundamental laws became the basis of local government in New England. In the year 1636, a statute of the Massachusetts General Court defined town governments in their classical form. Throughout the smaller communities of New England, these institutions have remained remarkably stable for many generations. The institutional building blocks were town meetings, town selectmen, town covenants and town records. Many differences of detail developed from one town to another. The nature of the relationship between selectmen and town meetings, for instance, was very unclear: some Massachusetts towns met more frequently than others; some selectmen were more powerful; some covenants were more formal. In consequence, a variety of town customs developed in New England. But they did so within a narrow range which was fixed by the laws of the colony within a few years of its beginning.

A distinctive pattern of participation in town meetings also developed at an early date in Massachusetts. It was normally characterized by very low levels of turnout—normally in the range of 10 to 30 percent of adult males. But when controversial questions came before the town, participation surged—sometimes approaching 100 percent.⁹

This pattern still exists in New England. The major issues today might be a tax-override or a middle school, rather than the choice of a new minister or the location of a meetinghouse. But the traditional pattern of very low participation, punctuated by sudden surges of very high turnout, has been characteristic of New England town government for three centuries—and very different as we shall see from voting patterns in other American regions.

New England town governments tended to become very active in the life of their communities. The inhabitants voted to tax themselves heavily by comparison with other parts of British America. On a per capita basis, levels of spending by local government in Massachusetts were two to four times higher than in many other colonies, though much below the cost of government in Europe. These relative patterns have also persisted for three centuries.¹⁰

Town meeting government in early New England was not really democratic in our majoritarian sense. The object was not rule by majority, but by consensus. The purpose of a town meeting was to achieve that consensual goal by discussion, persuasion and mutual adjustment of differences. The numbers of votes were rarely counted, but merely recorded as the “will of the town.” This system was unique to New England, and nearly universal within it. It was the combined product of East Anglian experiences, Puritan ideas, and the American environment.

Massachusetts Freedom Ways:
The Puritan Idea of Ordered Liberty

The public life of New England was also shaped by an idea of liberty which was peculiar to the Puritan colonies. To understand its nature, one might begin with the word itself. From the generation of John Winthrop (1558-1649) to that of Samuel Adams (1722-1803), the noun “liberty” was used throughout New England in at least four ways which ring strangely in a modern ear.

First, “liberty” often described something which belonged not to an individual but to an entire community. For two centuries, the founders and leaders of Massachusetts wrote of the “liberty of New England,” or the “liberty of Boston” or the “liberty of the Town.” This usage continued from the great migration to the War of Independence and even beyond. Samuel Adams, for example, wrote more often about the “liberty of America” than about the liberty of individual Americans.¹

This idea of collective liberty, or “publick liberty” as it was sometimes called, was thought to be consistent with close restraints upon individuals. In Massachusetts these individual restrictions were numerous, and often very confining. During the first generation, nobody could live in the colony without approval of the General Court. Settlers even of the highest rank were sent prisoners to England for expressing “divers dangerous opinions,” or merely because the Court judged them to be “persons unmeet to inhabit here.”² Others were not allowed to move within the colony except by special permission of the General Court. For a time, the inhabitants of Dedham, Sudbury and Concord were forbidden to move out of their towns, because the General Court believed that those frontier settlements were dangerously under-populated.³

This idea of collective liberty also was expressed in many bizarre obligations which New England towns collectively imposed upon their members. Eastham’s town meeting, for example, ordered that no single man could marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows. Every town book contained many such rules.⁴ The General Court also passed sweeping statutes which allowed the magistrates to suppress almost any act, by any means. One such law, for example, threatened that “if any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation, we shall punish him severely.” The definition of “exceeding the bounds of moderation” was left to the magistrate.⁵

New Englanders willingly accepted individual restraints, but insisted that they should be consistent with written laws which they called the “fundamentals of the commonwealth.”⁶ Further they demanded the liberty to impose these restraints upon themselves in their own way. This was what they meant by the “publick liberty” of New England. Interference by outsiders met fierce and implacable resistance. “Publick liberty” was not merely a “theoretick idea,” as many a brave British soldier learned. New Englanders were not a warrior people, but many times from 1635 to 1775, they showed themselves willing to defend their “publick liberty,” even to the death.

New Englanders also used the word “liberty” in a second way which is foreign to our own time. When it referred to individuals, it often became a plural noun—“liberties” rather than “liberty.” These plural liberties were understood as specific exemptions from a condition of prior restraint—an idea which had long existed in East Anglia and in many other parts of the western world. In the manor of Hengrave (Suffolk), for example, tenants were granted a specific “liberty” of fishing in the river Lark. Such a liberty was not universal or absolute; the river was closed to all other people. There were a great many of these liberties in East Anglian communities during the early seventeenth century. A person’s status was defined by the number and nature of liberties to which he was admitted.⁷

The idea of plural liberties as specific exemptions from a condition of prior constraint was carried to Massachusetts. The General Court, for example, enacted laws which extended “liberties and privileges of fishing and fowling” to certain inhabitants, and thereby denied them to everyone else. One person’s “liberty” in this sense became another’s restraint.⁸ In Massachusetts, as in England, a person’s rank was defined by the liberties that he possessed, and vice versa.

The laws of the Bay Colony granted some liberties to all men, others to all free men, and a few only to gentlemen. For example, a “true gentleman” and “any man equal to a gentleman,” was granted the liberty not to be punished by whipping “unless his crime be very shameful, and his course of life vicious and profligate.” Other men had a lesser liberty, not to be whipped more than forty stripes. Other liberties were assigned not to individuals at all, but to churches and towns and other social groups.⁹

This idea of liberty seems very narrow to modern Americans. We do not think of liberty as exemption from prior condition of restraint, but of restraint as an exemption from a prior condition of liberty. But the seventeenth-century idea of plural liberties, however restrictive and limited it may have been, was codified into “laws and liberties” which became what the founders called “the fundamentals of the Commonwealth.” The idea of written fundamental laws and liberties existed from the beginning of the Bay Colony.¹⁰ Some of these fundamental “liberties” were specifically extended to everyone. Thus the Massachusetts Body of Liberties in 1641 established that:

Every man whether inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free shall have liberty to come to any public Court, Council or Town meeting, and either by speech or writing to move any lawful, seasonable, and material question, or to present any necessary motion, complaint, petition, Bill or information, whereof that meeting hath proper cognizance, so it be done in convenient time, due order and respective manner. …

Every man that findeth himself unfit to plead his own cause in any court shall have Liberty to employ any man against whom the court doth not except, to help him. …¹¹

These plural liberties persisted in Massachusetts for many generations. They appeared in the writings of Samuel Adams and his generation, just as they had done in the world of John Winthrop.¹²

New England Puritans also used the word “liberty” in a third meaning, which became urgently important to the founders of Massachusetts. This was the idea of “soul liberty,” or “Christian liberty,” an idea of high complexity. Soul liberty was freedom to serve God in the world. It was freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other. It made Christian freedom into a form of obligation.

The founding generation in Massachusetts often wrote of “soul liberty,” “Christian liberty” or “liberty of conscience.” Many moved to the New World primarily in hopes of attaining it. What they meant was not a world of religious freedom in the modern sense, or even of religious toleration, but rather of freedom for the true faith. In their minds, this idea of religious liberty was thought to be consistent with the persecution of Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans and indeed virtually everyone except those within a very narrow spectrum of Calvinist orthodoxy. Soul liberty also was thought to be consistent with compulsory church attendance and rigorous Sabbath laws. Even the Indians were compelled to keep the Puritan Sabbath in Massachusetts. To the founders of that colony, soul freedom meant that they were free to persecute others in their own way. One New Englander wrote, “Solomon maketh it the joy of a Commonwealth when the righteous are in authority.”¹³ There was no freedom for “error” in Massachusetts. Even the saints themselves were kept on a short leash. In 1634, for example, Israel Stoughton wrote a book “which occasioned much trouble and offence to the court.” Stoughton was himself a deputy, and a staunch Puritan who later returned to England and became an officer in Rainborough’s regiment during the Civil War. His book suggested reforms in the government of the colony. The magistrates were so angered by criticism that they decreed not merely that the book should be suppressed, but also ordered that the manuscript should be burned. After heavy pressure from the authorities, the author himself was compelled to confess that he “did desire of the court that the said book might be burnt.”¹⁴ To others of different persuasions, the Puritans’ paradoxical idea of “soul freedom” became a cruel and bloody contradiction. But to the Puritans themselves “soul liberty” was a genuinely libertarian principle which held that a Christian community should be free to serve God in the world. Here was an idea in which the people of Massachusetts deeply believed, and the reason why their colony was founded in the first place.

The words “liberty” and also “freedom” were used in yet a fourth way by the builders of the Bay Colony. Sometimes, the people of Massachusetts employed the word “freedom” to describe a collective obligation of the “body politicke,” to protect individual members from the tyranny of circumstance. This was conceived not in terms of collective welfare or social equality but of individual liberty. It was precisely the same idea that a descendant

John Winthrop’s “Little Speech on Liberty,” delivered to the General Court on July 3, 1645, was the classic statement of Puritan ideas of ordered freedom. Winthrop distinguished between natural liberty “to do evil as well as good,” and civil or federal liberty, which “may also be termed moral,” he wrote, “in reference to the covenant between God and man. … It is a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard not only of your goods but of your lives if need be. … This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”

To others this argument was a contradiction in terms; but among the Puritans, ordered freedom was a genuine libertarian idea that flourished in this region for many centuries.

of the Massachusetts Puritans, Franklin Roosevelt, conceived as the Four Freedoms. That way of thinking was not his invention. It appeared in Massachusetts within a few years of its founding. The Massachusetts poor laws, however limited they may have been, recognized every individual should be guaranteed a freedom from want in the most fundamental sense. The General Court also explicitly recognized even a “freedom from fear.” Its language revealed a libertarian conception of social problems (and solutions) that was characteristic of English-speaking people as early as the seventeenth century.¹⁵

These four libertarian ideas—collective liberty, individual liberties, soul liberty and freedom from the tyranny of circumstance—all had a common denominator. They were aspects of a larger conception which might be called ordered liberty. This principle was deeply embedded in Puritan ideas and also in East Anglian realities. It came to be firmly established in Massachusetts even before the end of the great migration. For many years it continued to distinguish the culture of New England from other parts of British America. Even today, in much modified forms, it is still a living tradition in parts of the United States. But this principle of “ordered liberty” is also opposed by other libertarian ideas, which were planted in different parts of British America.

THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA

Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants, 1642-75

Virginia [was] the only city of refuge left in His Majesty’s Dominions, in those times, for distressed cavaliers.

—Ingram’s Proceedings, Virginia, 1676

The gentlemen called Cavaliers are greatly esteemed and respected, and are very courteous and honorable. They hold most of the offices in the country.

—Durand of Dauphine on Virginia, 1687

The people of fortune … are the pattern of all behaviour here.

—Philip Fithian on Virginia, 1773

IN THE WINTER OF 1641, just as the Puritan migration was coming to an end, a young Englishman boarded an emigrant ship for Virginia. He would have been received with high ceremony by the captain and crew, for he was no ordinary passenger. His appearance was that of a nobleman—short cloak, deep bands, great boots, belted sword, and long hair cascading in ringlets around his patrician face. His manners were those of a courtier, polished by years in the presence of the King. His speech was that of a scholar, full of Oxford learning; and he had the bearing of a soldier, knighted on the field of honor by Charles I. The name of this traveler was Sir William Berkeley. In his baggage, he carried the King’s commission as Royal Governor of Virginia.

This proud young cavalier was destined to rule the colony of Virginia for more than thirty years. In that period, he had a profound impact upon its development. At a critical moment, he bent the young sapling of its social system and made it grow in the direction that he wished. The cultural history of an American region is in many ways the long shadow of this extraordinary man.¹

Sir William Berkeley was born in 1606 to a powerful West Country family which had been seated since the eleventh century at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The massive battlements of this great building still loom high above the Vale of the Severn, where on a bright fall day one may see the Berkeley Hunt in its distinctive yellow riding coats quartering the countryside, as members of that ancient family have done for more than nine centuries.²

The future governor of Virginia belonged to a cadet branch of his family. It kept two houses: one high on a hill above the ancient wool town of Bruton, Somerset; the other in London where the future governor was born. He lived his youth in a broad belt of territory between London and Berkeley Castle—the region which was to become the cradle of Virginia’s culture.³

As a young man, Berkeley showed something of a scholar’s bent. He matriculated at The Queen’s College in Oxford, earned his degree at St. Edmund Hall and became a fellow of Merton College. After graduating, he took himself to London and became a literary figure of some consequence, publishing a highly polished “tragy comedy” called The Lost Lady in 1639. He was also introduced at court by his brother John Lord Berkeley, and made such an impression that the King appointed him Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary. In 1639, he was knighted in the field at Berwick, and two years later became Royal Governor of Virginia.⁴

In many ways, Berkeley was not an admirable character. He bullied those beneath him, and fawned on people above. He openly enriched himself from his offices, and set a sad example for peculation that long persisted in Virginia. In 1667, for example, he wrote directly to his superior, Lord Arlington, “Though ambition commonly leaves sober old age, covetousness does not. I shall therefore desire of your lordship to procure of His Majesty the customs of two hundred hogsheads of tobacco.”⁵

These were the vices of his age, and Berkeley had them in high degree. But he also had the virtues of candor, courage, fidelity to family and loyalty to a cause. His social values were as highly developed as those of the Puritans—though in a very different direction. And he cared deeply for Virginia. For thirty-five years, Berkeley devoted himself to the welfare of his colony with energy, intelligence, and effect.

When Sir William Berkeley reached Virginia in February 1642, it was a sickly settlement of barely 8,000 souls. The colony had earned an evil reputation “that none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives went there.” The quality of life in early Virginia was more like a modern military outpost or lumber camp than a permanent society. Its leaders were rough, violent, hard-drinking men. Berkeley’s predecessor, Governor John Harvey, had knocked out the teeth of a councilor with a cudgel, before being “thrust out” himself by the colonists in 1635. When Harvey returned with royal warrant to arrest his enemies, he was driven out again in 1639.⁶ The colony was in a state of chronic disorder. Its rulers were unable to govern, its social institutions were ill-defined, its economy was undeveloped, its politics were unstable, and its cultural identity was indistinct.⁷

In the thirty-five years of Sir William Berkeley’s tenure, Virginia was transformed. Its population increased fivefold from 8,000 to 40,000 inhabitants. It developed a coherent social order, a functioning economic system, and a strong sense of its own special folkways. Most important, it also acquired a governing elite which Berkeley described as “men of as good families as any subjects in England.”⁸

This social system did not spring spontaneously from the soil of the new world. No less than New England, the colony of Virginia was the conscious creation of human will and purpose. In that process, Sir William Berkeley played the leading role, laboring through his long years in office to build an ideal society which was the expression of his own values. More than any other individual, he framed Virginia’s political system—becoming, in Thomas Ludwell’s words, “the sole author of the most substantial

This portrait of Sir William Berkeley (by Peter Lely, 1661-62) was an image not merely of the man himself but also of the Royalist ideals that guided his actions in Virginia. The governor is dressed for war. He wears an officer’s half armor with a baton in hand and a sword hanging at his side. In the background the artist painted a cavalry charge, probably in the Western campaign of 1644, in which Berkeley fought for his King. This painting also reveals an identity with the King in yet another way. Berkeley stands in an unnatural pose with his right hand extended, left hand bent back above the hip, left leg extended forward and head turned sharply to the side. His posture imitated a favorite pose of Charles I which appears in Van Dyck’s Roi à la chasse, now in the Louvre. Even Berkeley’s facial expression mimicked that of his royal master. This is a portrait of the governor in middle age. His youth has faded, and his swollen face is ravaged by the chronic illness that afflicted many Virginians. In his cruel eyes we see a hint of the tyranny that lay ahead. But this is a likeness of Sir William Berkeley in the prime of his maturity, secure in his power, and firm in his determination to create in Virginia a Royalist utopia dominated by ideals of honor and hierarchy.

parts of it, either for laws, or other inferior institutions.”⁹ When the laws of Virginia were first published, the volume was dedicated to Sir William Berkeley, who was identified as himself “the author of the best of them.” Berkeley governed the colony through a pliant “long assembly” which he kept in office for fourteen years, refusing to call an election from 1662 to 1676. Its laws expressed the wishes of the governor; many were drafted by his own hand.¹⁰

Important as his role as a lawgiver may have been, Berkeley had his greatest impact upon Virginia in another way. More than any other person, he shaped the process of immigration to the colony during a critical period in its history. That process in turn defined its culture, and largely determined the main lines of change for many generations to come.

Sir William Berkeley and Virginia’s Elite

Of all Sir William Berkeley’s many projects as governor, the most important was his recruitment of a Royalist elite for Virginia. In the words of historian Philip Bruce, he “encouraged the cavaliers to come over in large numbers.” When they arrived, he promoted them to high office, granted them large estates and created the ruling oligarchy that ran the colony for many generations.¹

This cavalier migration continued throughout Berkeley’s tenure as governor (1642-76). Much of it occurred during the decade of the 1650s, when a Puritan oligarchy gained the upper hand in England and tried to impose its beliefs by force upon an unwilling people. Virginia’s Royalist immigrants were refugees from oppression, just as New England’s Puritans themselves had been. Many had fought for Charles I in England’s Civil War. Some continued to serve him until his armies were broken by Parliament and the King himself was killed in 1649. Others rallied to the future King Charles II, and in 1651 fought at his side on the field of Worcester, where they were beaten once again.

They suffered severely in this struggle. One Royalist wrote, “ … in our unnatural wars, most of the ancient gentry were either extinct or undone. The king’s side was almost all gentlemen, and of Parliament’s few … in the quarrel of the Two Roses there were not half as many gentlemen slain.”² So shattered was the Royalist cause that William Sancroft wrote, “ … when we meet, it is but to consult to what foreign plantation we shall fly.” Indeed, Henry Norwood later remembered that “a very considerable number … did fly from their native country, as from a place infected with the plague.”³

Most of these émigrés took refuge in Europe. But many were recruited by Sir William Berkeley. Some had been his kinsmen and friends before they came to America; others became his relations in the New World. They shared his Royalist politics, his Anglican faith, and his vision for the future of the colony.⁴

These “distressed cavaliers” founded what would later be called the first families of Virginia. But they were not chronologically the first to settle in the colony. Only a few had appeared during the first forty years of its history. Their great migration came later, and was nearly as concentrated in time as the exodus of the English Puritans had been. If most Yankee genealogies commenced within six years of 1635, the American beginnings of Virginia’s ruling families occurred within a decade of the year 1655.

The founder of the Carter family, for example, came over in 1649. His forebears had been very rich in England; his children became still richer in Virginia. The first Culpeper also arrived in 1649; as did the first Hammond, Honywood and Moryson. The first Digges migrated in 1650, together with the first Broadhurst, Chicheley, Custis, Page, Harrison, Isham, Skipwith and Landon. The first Northampton Randolph appeared circa 1651, and the first Mason in 1652. The first Madison was granted land in 1653, the first Corbin in 1654. The first Washington crossed the ocean in 1657; he was John Washington, the younger son of an Oxford-trained clergyman who had been removed from his living by the Puritans. The family seat was Sulgrave Manor, a few miles north of Oxford. Also in 1657 arrived Colonel William Ball, the ancestor of George Washington’s mother, and in 1659 the first Fairfax. Every year of that troubled decade brought a fresh crop of cavaliers to Virginia. Of seventy-two families in Virginia’s high elite whose dates of migration are known, two-thirds arrived between 1640 and 1669. A majority appeared between 1647 and 1660.⁵

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Sir William Berkeley continued his recruiting campaign. In 1663 he published a pamphlet addressed to the younger sons of England’s great families:

A small sum of money will enable a younger brother to erect a flourishing family in a new world; and add more strength, wealth and honor to his native country, than thousands did before, that dyed forgotten and unrewarded in an unjust war … men of as good families as any subjects in England have resided there, as the Percys, the Barkleys, the Wests, the Gages, the Throgmortons, Wyatts, Digges, Chichelys, Moldsworths, Morrisons, Kemps, and hundred others which I forbear to name, lest I should misherald them in this catalogue.⁶

Sir William Berkeley’s recruiting campaign was highly successful. Nearly all of Virginia’s ruling families were founded by younger sons of eminent English families during his governorship. Berkeley himself was a younger son with no hope of inheriting an estate in England. This “younger son syndrome,” as one historian has called it, became a factor of high importance in the culture of Virginia. The founders of Virginia’s first families tried to reconstruct from American materials a cultural system from which they had been excluded at home.⁷

Colonel Richard Lee was the younger son of an old Shropshire family. He emigrated to Virginia ca. 1640 and became Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Sir William Berkeley’s chief lieutenant. For long and loyal service, he received vast holdings of land and by 1663 owned at least seven plantations and many servants and slaves. Colonel Lee was immensely proud of his lineage. His Saxon family was as ancient as the Berkeley’s had been and looked down upon England’s Norman nobility as coarse and vulgar upstarts. He lived in high style. In 1655, agents of the Puritan Commonwealth seized Lee’s baggage and found “200 ounces of silver plate, all marked with his coat of arms.” Above his front door, Lee hung a wood carving of his arms, which still survives with one side broken and faint traces of its original paint. Worked into the design was a crescent, the heraldic mark of a second son which appeared on many escutcheons in Virginia. The Lee family became the archetype of Governor Berkeley’s armigerous elite.

The great majority of Virginia’s upper elite came from families in the upper ranks of English society. Of 152 Virginians who held top offices in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, at least sixteen were connected to aristocratic families, and 101 were the sons of baronets, knights and the rural gentry of England. Seven more came from armigerous urban families, with coats of arms at the college of heralds. Only eighteen were the sons of yeomen, traders, mariners, artisans, or “plebs.” None came to Virginia as laborers or indentured servants except possibly the first Adam Thoroughgood who was also the brother of a baronet. Only two were not British, and nine could not be identified.⁸

Some of these families had grown very rich before the Civil War. As early as the sixteenth century, they had made matrimonial alliances with mercantile families and also with others who prospered in the countryside. An example were the Spencers of Althorpe, a family of humble sheep graziers in the fifteenth century who rose so rapidly in the sixteenth century that by 1603 Sir Robert Spencer was reputed to have “the most money of any person

Anna Constable Lee, the beautiful wife of Colonel Richard Lee, raised five sons in Virginia. Those children produced a vast progeny of Lees who became the archetypical first gentlemen of Virginia. The carriers of this culture from one generation to the next were women such as Anna Lee. She was a “lady of quality” who came to Virginia in the household of Sir Francis Wyatt, perhaps as his ward. In the handsome features of her portrait, the artist has captured the cultural values that were shared by Virginians of both sexes. Her open expression implies an ideal of candor and an utter contempt for falsehood and deceit. Her erect carriage communicates a pride of rank and reputation that was called honor in a gentleman and virtue in a lady. The firm lines of her mouth and chin suggest independence of mind and strength of character. The costume creates a feeling of simple dignity and grace that requires no ornament for its embellishment. In her eyes one sees a hint of sadness and suffering—which may serve to remind us that the ideals of this culture were continuously tested by its environment, and toughened in the testing. Here was the ideal type of a first lady of Virginia.

in the kingdom.”⁹ Some of these Spencers settled in Virginia, as did the children of other great landed families. A few were able to bring capital to Virginia. Others in Oldmixon’s phrase were “men of good families and small fortunes,” whose pedigrees became their passports to Sir William Berkeley’s favor.

These younger sons, by reason of their birth order, were forced to leave the land. Many, perhaps most of them, entered commerce in London and Bristol. There they adopted mercantile and maritime occupations which brought them in contact with Virginia. John Washington followed this path, as did Nicholas Spencer and Thomas Chamberlain and many other progenitors of Virginia’s first families. But the roots of all these men were in the English countryside, and Virginia offered a chance to return to the rural life which they preferred. Even the minority of Virginia who had been city-born and city-bred shared this cultural attitude. The first William Byrd found “a private gentleman’s life in the country … (at this time) most eligible.”¹⁰

With very few exceptions, these immigrants were staunch Royalists. Many had served in the Civil War as military officers of company or field grade. Of those whose opinions are known, 98 percent supported the King in the Civil War. If they had gone to a university, they tended to choose Oxford—especially the colleges of Christ Church, Merton and Queens which had an association with the royal family. They were Anglican in their religion, and their faith was as important to them as it had been to the Puritans.¹¹

These families came from every part of England. But two-thirds (68%) had lived within a triangle of territory in the south and west of England, stretching from the Weald of Kent to Devon and north to Warwickshire. If emigrants from London are added to this regional group, its proportion rises from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. Comparatively few came from the north of England (8%), and fewer from East Anglia (7%). There were only a scattering from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and abroad.¹²

In England, most had lived within a day’s journey of London or Bristol. These cities, especially London, had been an important part of their world. One-third of them had lived in London before coming to America.¹³

In 1724 Hugh Jones wrote, “The habits, life, customs, computations, etc., of the Virginians are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home … for the most part [they] have contemptible notions of … country places in [other parts of] England and Scotland, whose language and manners are strange to them. … they live in the same manner, dress after the same fashion, and behave themselves exactly as the gentry in London.”¹⁴

In houses as ancient as the Berkeleys, younger sons and daughters married London merchants. In families as honorable as the Filmers, country cousins did their city business with traders and lawyers who were their kin.¹⁵ At the same time London merchants intermarried with the gentry of Essex and Kent: an example was the Byrd family, prosperous goldsmiths who were descended from landed gentry and who proudly possessed their own arms.¹⁶

After 1650 these families continued to intermarry on both sides of the Atlantic, and moved freely back and forth across the ocean. The result was a tightly integrated colonial elite which literally became a single cousinage by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Historian William Cabell Bruce compared the genealogies of these Virginia families to “a tangle of fishhooks, so closely interlocked that it is impossible to pick up one without drawing three or four after it.”¹⁷

One genealogical example was the Filmer-Horsmanden-Byrd-Beverley-Culpeper-Carter connection. The ancient Kentish family of Sir Edward Filmer produced several sons in the early seventeenth century. Among them was Sir Robert Filmer, author of the royalist treatise Patriarcha which became a favorite target for Locke and Sydney. This Patriarcha Filmer had a son named Samuel Filmer, who married his cousin Mary Horsmanden and moved to Virginia where he died in the dreaded “seasoning.” The young widow quickly remarried the prosperous planter William Byrd. She became the mother of William Byrd II, the mother-in-law of Robert Beverley and James Duke, and the grandmother of Thomas Chamberlayne, Charles Carter, Landon Carter and John Page. Within three generations most of Virginia’s first families were related to Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, whose genealogy might be titled Matriarcha.¹⁸

That same royalist lady was also related to leading families in other southern colonies. Her first cousin Frances Culpeper married no fewer than three colonial governors in a row: Samuel Stephens, governor of North Carolina; Philip Ludwell, governor of South Carolina; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia. Frances Culpeper was also the cousin of William Penn and Nathaniel Bacon who became her husband’s mortal foe.¹⁹

Virginia’s Royalist Elite
The Filmer-Byrd-Beverley-Carter-Culpeper-Berkeley Cousinage

Sources: Mildred Campbell Whitaker, Genealogy of the Campbell, Noble, Gorton, Shelton, Gilmour and Byrd Families (St. Louis, 1927); Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776 (2 vols., Charlottesville, 1977), II, 825-36; genealogical materials listed in Swem, Virginia Historical Index; William Berry, County Genealogies: Pedigrees of the Families in the County of Kent (London, 1830).

The Northampton Connection
The Isham-Washington-Spencer-Randolph-Jefferson-Bland-Beverley-Bolling-Eppes-Hackett Cousinage

Sources: “The Washington Memorials at Garsden,” WMQ V1 (1910), 482-85; VII (1911), 1-6, 337-43, 452-57, 529-36; Henry Isham Longden, Visitation of Northamptonshire HARLSP 87 (1935), 250-63; Henry Isham Longden, The History of the Washington Family (Northampton, 1927); Oswald Barron, Northamptonshire Families (London, 1906); Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 141-68.

This Filmer-Byrd-Culpeper-Berkeley connection, centered on the person of Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, was merely one of many alliances among Virginia’s ruling families. Another was a Northampton cousinage which formed mainly around the Isham family, and included the Randolphs, Washingtons, and Spencers of Althorp. All of these houses intermarried in Northamptonshire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁰ They were closely linked to the Filmer connection. For example, the Washingtons of Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire (from whom George Washington was descended), had at least three ties to the Filmers. One branch of the Washingtons settled in Kent near Sir Robert Filmer; in the beautiful little church next to the Filmers’ seat at East Sutton (now a school for wayward girls) one may still see an old window dedicated to Washingtons who intermarried with Filmers. Another cadet branch resided briefly in Essex when the Reverend Lawrence Washington of Sulgrave (sometime fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford) obtained a place there through the patronage of the Horsmanden family. The sons of this Royalist clergyman migrated to America after his living was taken away by the Puritans. Other Washingtons intermarried with the Fairfax and Culpeper families who lived at Leeds Castle in Kent, only a few miles from the Filmers’ estate in East Sutton.²¹

Still a third Virginia connection centered on the family of Sir William Berkeley in Gloucestershire and Somerset. In the old woolen town of Bruton, Somerset, the Berkeleys were related to the Ludwells and Pages, both old and eminent families who had held many high offices. Sir William Berkeley himself was also kin to the Carys who came from the neighboring town of Castle Cary three miles from Bruton, and intermarried with rich merchants in Bristol.

This Berkeley connection was also tied to the Northamptonshire group, and to the Kentish alliance. Sir William Berkeley’s family was related to the Washingtons of Northampton and to the Filmers of Kent. Berkeley himself was a cousin of Mary Horsmanden

Filmer Byrd, a kinsman of her father-in-law, Patriarcha Filmer, and a second cousin, once removed, of William Byrd. Many of these ties were cemented by cousin marriages, which were carefully planned to create a web of kinship as dense as that of the Roman patriciate. It is difficult to think of any ruling elite that has been more closely interrelated since the Ptolemies.

A case in point was the composition of Virginia’s Royal Council. In 1724, there were twelve members of this body; all without exception were related to one another by blood or marriage. Most were kin of Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd. They included Robert “King” Carter and his son John Carter, and their cousins William Byrd, Nathaniel Harrison, and Peter Beverley. The other councilors were John Robinson, who had married Katherine Beverley; Philip Ludwell II, who had married Hannah Harrison; James Blair, whose wife was Sarah Harrison; John Lewis, who had married the daughter of Augustine Warner and was tied to all the major connections; Mann Page, who was kin to Judith Wormeley; Edmund Jennings and Cole Digges, who were related by marriage and birth to many of these families.²²

This elite gained control of the Council during the mid-seventeenth century and retained it until the Revolution. As early as 1660, every seat on the Council was filled by members of five related connections. As late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660.²³

A seat on the Council was not an empty honor. This small body functioned as the governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the legislature and the colony’s supreme court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to twenty-five families who held two-thirds of the seats in that body from 1680 to 1775. These same families also controlled other offices of power and profit: secretary, treasurer, auditor general, receiver general, surveyor

Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, personified the special relationship that long persisted between the Berkeley family and Virginia. Lord Botetourt (1718-70) was “a gracious, amiable and bankrupt nobleman” who became one of Virginia’s most popular colonial governors. Appointed to that office in 1768, he conducted himself in the same vice-regal manner as his kinsman had done before him. Just as Sir William Berkeley copied the gestures of Charles I, so Lord Botetourt imitated George III, opening the Assembly much as the King opened Parliament, riding through Williamsburg in a state coach drawn by a matched team of cream-colored Hanoverian horses. When he spoke in public Botetourt mimicked the dress, manners, appearance and even the peculiar speech defects of George III. By 1768, the first gentlemen of Virginia like many old Royalist families in England had become outspoken Whigs. They disagreed with Lord Botetourt on constitutional questions, but they held him in high respect, liked him enormously and accepted him as one of themselves. When Lord Botetourt died suddenly of a tidewater fever in 1770, the Virginians erected a monument that survived the Revolution.

general, collectors and naval officers, and governors of William and Mary College.²⁴

In company with a larger group of lesser gentry, they also kept a firm grip on the economic life of the colony. In 1703 an official wrote, “ … in every river of this province there are men in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and industry have gotten very competent estates. Those gentlemen take care to supply the poorer sort with goods and necessaries, and are sure to keep them always in their debt, and consequently dependent on them. Out of this number are chosen His Majesty’s Council, the Assembly, the Justices, and Officers of Government.”²⁵

This small elite was destined to play a large role in the history of Virginia—not merely in its politics and economics, but also in its society and culture. The formation of southern folkways owed much to their example. An English immigrant who came in 1717 observed, “ … at the Capitol, at publick times, may be seen a great number of handsome, well-dressed, complete gentlemen.” He thought that they made “as fine an appearance … as I have seen anywhere.”²⁶ In 1773, a clear-sighted northern visitor to Virginia, Philip Fithian, observed that “the people of fortune … are the pattern of all behavior here.”²⁷

The more hierarchical a society becomes, the stronger is the cultural dominion of its elite. The hegemony of Virginia’s first families was exceptionally strong through the first century of that colony’s history. One English emigrant named George Fisher remembered being warned about their power:

John Randolph, in speaking of the disposition of the Virginians, very freely cautioned us against disobliging or offending any person of note in the Colony …; for says he, either by blood or marriage, we are almost all related, and so connected in our interests, that whoever of a stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole. Nor, right or wrong, do we forsake him, till by one means or other his ruin is accomplished.²⁸

This Virginia elite was firmly established during the governorship of Sir William Berkeley, and remained dominant for more than a century. Throughout this long period, English aristocrats who came to the New World instantly recognized a cultural kinship with the great planters of Virginia. In 1765, for example, Lord Adam Gordon, the first son of the second Duke of Gordon, observed that the “topping families” of Virginia had been founded by “younger brothers of good families of England.” He felt perfectly at home among them. “Upon the whole,” he wrote, “was it the case to live in America, this province in point of company and climate would be my choice.”²⁹

The social origins of Virginia’s “topping families” were better understood by Lord Adam Gordon than by many middle-class historians in the twentieth century, who have replaced the image of “topping families” and “complete gentlemen” with an idea of upwardly-mobile bourgeois entrepreneurs. But the legend of the Virginia cavalier was no mere romantic myth. In all of its major parts, it rested upon a solid foundation of historical fact.³⁰

Virginia’s Great Migration: Social Origins

The settlement of Virginia had actually begun more than a generation before the arrival of Sir William Berkeley and his elite. Its starting point was the founding of Jamestown (1607) by English colonists in the ship Susan Constant and her two small consorts Godspeed and Discovery. These immigrants succeeded in planting the first permanent English settlement in America. But there is today no Susan Constant Society comparable to that of the Mayflower descendants. Most of Jamestown’s founders either died in their new homes or speedily returned to England.¹

The population of Virginia began to grow rapidly at a later date—after the Puritan migration to New England. Many authorities now agree that English “immigration to the Chesapeake colonies was heavily concentrated in the third quarter of the seventeenth century.”² From 1645 to 1665, Virginians multiplied more than threefold and Marylanders increased elevenfold, while New Englanders merely doubled. Given the very high mortality rates in the Chesapeake colonies and low birth rates during the first generation, the number of immigrants to the Chesapeake was probably in the range of 40,000 to 50,000 during the period from 1645 to 1670.³

Virginia’s second great migration differed from the Puritan exodus to Massachusetts in many ways—in its English origins, in its American destination, and especially in its social composition. New England had drawn mostly from the middle of English society. Virginians came in greater numbers from both higher and lower ranks. In quantitative terms, Sir William Berkeley’s “distressed cavaliers” were only a small part of the total flow to the Chesapeake colonies. The great mass of Virginia’s immigrants were humble people of low rank. More than 75 percent came as indentured servants.⁴

One surviving English register of emigration contains the names of approximately 10,000 servants who sailed from Bristol to America between 1654 and 1678. Roughly half of these emigrants went to Virginia. The rest found their way to the West Indies—mainly the island of Barbados which was much favored during the 1650s, and the beautiful little island of Nevis which was preferred in the early 1660s. Scarcely any chose to make New England their home. The main stream flowed from the south and west of England to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake.⁵

Virginia’s servants were recruited mainly from the lower strata of English society, but not from the very lowest—“the bottom of the middle ranks,” one historian has written, “below their older and wealthier contemporaries, but above the poor laborers, vagrants and the destitute.” Unlike most emigrants to New England, their passage was paid by others.⁶ They tended to be more rural and agrarian than the founders of Massachusetts. Two-thirds of Virginia’s colonists were unskilled laborers, or “farmers” in the English sense—agrarian tenants who worked the land of others. Only about 30 percent were artisans (compared with nearly 60 percent in New England). Most were unable to read or write; rates of literacy in the Chesapeake Bay were much lower than in Massachusetts Bay.⁷

Patterns of gender were also very different from New England’s great migration. Altogether, females were outnumbered by males by more than four to one—in some periods, as much as six to one.⁸ Few women freely chose to settle in Virginia. Some were “trapanned” or “snared” and sent against their will, as an old folk ballad called “The Trappan’d Malden” tells us:

Give ear unto a Maid, that lately was betray’d,

And sent into Virginny, O:

In brief I shall declare, what I have suffer’d there,

When that I was weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

Five years served I, under Master Guy,

In the land of Virginny, O,

Which made me for to know sorrow, grief and woe,

When that I was weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

I have played my part both at Plow and Cart,

In the Land of Virginny, O;

Billets from the Wood upon my back they load,

When that I am weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …

Then let Maids beware, all by my ill-fare,

In the Land of Virginny, O;

Be sure to stay at home, for if you here do come,

You all will be weary, weary, weary, weary, O. …⁹

In 1643 a woman named Elizabeth Hamlin was sent to Newgate for “trapanning” girls in this manner. Another ballad tells the

Virginia’s immigrants in the late seventeenth century were mostly indentured servants whose families had been poor tenant farmers and country laborers. The last remnants of this class still survive today in remote rural villages of southern England. As recently as 1985, two tenant-laborers named Jack and Roy French were suddenly thrust into the national limelight by the death of their landlord. They lived in the Cotswold village of Great Tew (Oxfordshire), in old stone cottages without electricity or water, and were tenants of a local squire named Major Eustace Robb. The death of Major Robb caused a furious controversy in the West Oxfordshire District Council about the disposition of the cottages and occupants.

tale of an “honest weaver” who sold his wife to Virginia. This practice, bizarre as it may seem, actually occurred in England during the seventeenth century.¹⁰

Most of Virginia’s servant-immigrants were half-grown boys and young men. Three out of four were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Only 3 percent were under fifteen, and less than 1 percent was over thirty-five—a sharp contrast with Massachusetts.¹¹ More than a few of these youngsters were “spirited” or kidnapped to Virginia. Parliament in 1645 heard evidence of gangs who “in a most barbarous and wicked manner steal away many little children” for service in the Chesapeake colonies.¹² Others were “lagged” or transported after being arrested for petty crime or vagrancy. Another ballad tells the story of a London apprentice was who “lagg’d” by a “hard-hearted judge,” and “sold for a slave in Virginia”:

Come all you young fellows wherever you be,

Come listen awile and I will tell thee,

Concerning the hardships that we undergo,

When we get lagg’d to Virginia …

When I was apprentice in fair London town,

Many hours I served duly and truly,

Till buxom young lasses they led me astray,

My work I neglected more and more every day,

By that I got lagg’d to Virginia.

But now in Virginia I lay like a hog,

Our pillow at night is a brick or a log,

We dress and undress like some other sea hog,

How hard is my fate in Virginia.¹³

The character of Virginia’s great migration thus differed in almost every important way from the Puritan exodus to Massachusetts. From the start, immigrants to the Chesapeake colony were more highly stratified, more male-dominant, more rural, more agrarian, less highly skilled, and less literate. Many came from the south and west of England; few from East Anglia or the north. These patterns did not develop merely by chance. Virginia’s great migration was the product of policy and social planning. Its royalist elite succeeded in shaping the social history of an American region partly by regulating the process of migration.

Virginia’s Great Migration: Religious Origins

Religion was not as central to the origins of the Chesapeake colonies as it had been in New England. But the founders of Virginia shared the religious obsessions of their age, and they were sent upon their way with an abundance of spiritual exhortation. John Donne, the poet dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, called himself “an adventurer; if not to Virginia, then for Virginia”. He preached a sermon to departing planters, and told them:

Your principal end is not gain, nor glory, but to gain souls to the glory of God. This seals the great seal, this justifies itself, this authorises authority, and gives power to strength itself. … you shall have made this island, which is but the Suburbs of the old world, a Bridge, a Gallery to the new; to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the kingdom of heaven.¹

John Donne had mainly in mind the salvation of Indian souls. Others suggested that the founding of Virginia might also be a means of redeeming a few unregenerate Englishmen. The Reverend William Crashaw delivered another departure sermon for the Virginia Company, in which he declared:

As long as we have wise, courageous and discreet Governours, together with the preaching of God’s word, we much care not what the generality is of them that go in person, considering we find that the most disordered men that can be raked up out of the superflaitie, or, if you will, the very excrements of a full and swelling state, if they be removed … from the licentiousness and too much liberty of the states where they have lived, into a more base and barren soil, as every country is at first, and to a harder course of life, wanting pleasures, and subject to some pinching miseries, and to a strict form of government and severe discipline, do often become new men, even as it were cast in a new mold.²

This advice was addressed to one “discreet governor” in particular, Lord De la Warr, who did as he was urged. One of his first acts in the New World was to open a “pretty chapel” decorated every day with fresh flowers, complete with a chancel of Virginia cedar, a communion table of black walnut, and a font in the shape of an Indian canoe. Lord De la Warr required every Virginian to assemble for prayers twice a day “at the ringing of a bell.” Every Sunday all the settlers were compelled to attend two services conducted with high ceremony. The governor himself sat on a splendid green velvet throne, surrounded by “all the Councilors, Captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of Halberdiers in his Lordship’s Livery.”³

For more than a century, the religious life of Virginia developed along these lines. It was ceremonial, liturgical, hierarchical, ritualist—and very different from New England. Each individual was not expected to share the same opinions. But all were compelled to join in the same rituals. The gentry who came from southwestern England had long favored “an uniform government of the Church in all points.”⁴

During its first few decades, Virginia’s immigrants held many varieties of Protestant belief. A few laymen and clergy had puritanical leanings. The marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe was performed by Richard Buck, a staunch Puritan. But Virginia did not attract many of that persuasion. In 1613, one clergyman marveled that “so few of our English ministers that were so hot against the surplice and subscription, come hither, where neither are spoken of.”⁵

After Virginia became a royal colony, an ideal of Anglican conformity began to be more actively pursued. In 1632 the Assembly enacted seventeen laws which required “uniformity throughout this colony, both in substance and circumstance to the canons and constitutions of the Church of England.” Each minister was compelled to preach every Sabbath, to give communion three times a year, to “examine, catechise and instruct” all the children in his parish, and to “excel all others in puritie of life.” Parishioners were required to attend church on Sundays and holidays, or to pay a shilling for each absence. They also had to pay tithes, and were forbidden to “disparage” their ministers.⁶

After 1642 Governor William Berkeley added other laws which required “all nonconformists … to depart the colony with all conveniency.” Several small Puritan communities had been founded before he arrived, and nonconformist ministers had been sent to serve them. Berkeley scattered these settlements, and banished the Puritans from Virginia. More than 300 fled to Maryland, and others departed for New England. After the Civil War, the Protectorate was unable to break the Anglican establishment in Virginia. The Book of Common Prayer was specially permitted in the colony, as long as prayers to the King and Royal family were omitted.⁷

When Quakers began to appear the authorities moved quickly against them. A law in 1658 ordered all Quakers to be banished. Shipmasters who brought them were required to remove them in close confinement. One defiant female Friend was ordered to be whipped twenty strokes upon her bare back, and (more painful to a Quaker conscience) she was also required to confess her error upon bended knee. The whipping was remitted when she promised to conform. Quakers were also fined for failing to attend Anglican services and for refusing to pay tithes. In 1661 other laws punished Anglicans who were merely “loving to Quakers.”⁸

This persecution worked. Puritan congregations were virtually eliminated from Virginia, and Quakers were reduced to a few small meetings. By the end of the seventeenth century, religious belief was remarkably uniform in the colony. Robert Beverley reported in 1705 that dissenters were “very few,” with “not more than five conventicles amongst them, namely three small meetings of Quakers, and two of Presbyterians.”⁹

A religious survey of Virginia in 1724 showed that the Anglican establishment was strong and healthy throughout the colony—more so than in the mother country. Most clergy reported that their services were well attended every Sunday by most white adults in the parish, and that a larger proportion took holy communion than in England. Dissenters were reported to be few, and in some parishes nonexistent.¹⁰

Later in the eighteenth century, this pattern rapidly changed with the increase of Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. But through the Old Dominion’s first six generations Anglican orthodoxy was strong, and growing stronger. Here was a fact of high importance for the history of Virginia, for the culture of this colony, no less than Massachusetts, was shaped by its religion.

Virginia’s Great Migration: Regional Origins

Virginia’s immigrants came from every county of England, and from thousands of parishes. But a majority of Virginia’s indentured servants hailed from sixteen counties in the south and west of England—the same area that produced Virginia’s elite. A case in point was the population that settled in Virginia’s Isle of Wight County. A local historian found that “early Isle of Wight families seem to have come mostly from the southwest of England, that is the counties of Gloucester, Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire … their names appear to be more numerous in the west country than in any other part of England. After the west country, London and its surrounding counties seem to be next.”¹

Another example was the population of Berkeley Hundred in Virginia. Its historian found that “the majority … whether sponsors, tenants at labor or indentured servants, were … born and bred in Gloucester, where many of them were natives of the Berkeley vale, the Cotswold Edge, or the Winchcombe area.”²

In yet another group of 1,200 immigrants to all parts of Virginia, it was observed that “most of them [were] choice men, born and bred up to labor and husbandry. Out of Devonshire, about an hundred men, brought up to husbandry; out of Warwickshire and Staffordshire, above one hundred and ten; and out of Sussex about forty, all trained to ironworks; the rest dispersedly out of divers Shires of the realm.”³

These regional patterns changed a little during the mid-seventeenth century. One historian has reckoned that before 1650 as many as 80 or 90 percent of Virginia’s servants sailed from London, and the great majority came from “the southeastern part of the country, particularly London and the Home counties.” Roughly half (52%) of these servants who sailed from the River Thames identified their homes as London itself—mostly the suburbs. Only about 2 percent came from the inner city. The other half came mostly from counties to the west of London—Middlesex, Buckingham, Surrey, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. Few came from East Anglia.⁴ After 1650, Bristol became more important in Virginia’s servant trade. The great majority of emigrants from Bristol (87% in one sample) came from the west of England and South Wales. The most important place of origin was the Severn Valley.⁵

In the mid-seventeenth century, Virginia’s recruiting ground in England might have been encompassed by two great circles around the cities of London and Bristol, each with a radius of roughly sixty miles.⁶ To this rule, however, there were important exceptions. Comparatively few of Virginia’s immigrants came from East Anglia, though parts of that region lay very near to London. Even fewer came from Cornwall, though that county lay

within easy reach of Bristol.⁷ The people of Cornwall, many of whom still spoke Gaelic in the seventeenth century, were culturally distinct from other counties of southwestern England. This pattern shows that for Virginia’s indentured servants, the location of the seaport did not determine the region. It was more nearly the other way around—the region determined the seaport.⁸

The regional origins and social purposes of Virginia’s English immigrants also appeared in the names that they gave to the new land—an important piece of evidence, for it is independent of registers and shipping lists. Altogether, twenty-five counties were created in Virginia by the year 1703. Two kept their Indian names—Accomac and Nansemond. Eight other names reflected the Royalist politics of the Virginians: James City County, Charles City County, Elizabeth City County, Henrico, Prince George, Princess Anne, King William, and King and Queen County. All the rest bore the names of British counties and towns. Only two names came from the east of England, and only four from the north. The remainder (8 of 14, or 57%) were drawn from the same region in southwestern England which also dominated the shipping lists, servant registers and genealogies of the ruling elite. In southern Maryland and southern Delaware, county names also were drawn entirely from the south and west of England.⁹

A similar pattern also appeared in the names of Virginia’s parishes. Of 54 parishes founded before 1726, most were given the names of Christian saints or Indian places. But fourteen parishes were named after English communities. All of them without exception were in the south and west of England—the same triangle of territory between Bristol, Warwick and Kent.¹⁰

The Cradle of Virginia: The South of England

Virginia’s recruiting ground was a broad region in the south and west of England, running from the weald of Kent to Devon and north as far as Shropshire and Staffordshire. This area was not defined by its physical features. It did not share the same soil resources or a single topography or a dominant agricultural regime. Its regional character was formed not by any of these material factors, but by its culture and history.

The heart of this territory was Wessex, Hardy country. Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex included the counties of Wiltshire (“Mid Wessex”); Dorset (“South Wessex”); Somerset and Gloucestershire (“Outer Wessex”); Devon (“Lower Wessex”), Hampshire, West Sussex and Surrey (“Upper Wessex”), plus Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire (“North Wessex”).¹ This area sent large numbers of gentry and servants to the Chesapeake. The first families of Virginia even included the Turbervilles from Bere Regis (Hardy’s Kingsbere) who were the originals for Hardy’s fictional D’Urbervilles. In the court records of the Chesapeake colonies, one may also find the saga of many a tidewater Tess.² But Virginia’s recruiting ground was larger than Hardy’s modern literary Wessex. It more nearly resembled the ancient historical Wessex of Alfred and Athelred, which with its Mercian protectorate reached east as far as Canterbury, and north beyond Warwick and Northampton.

Through many centuries, this area developed its own distinctive culture. Its language and laws were those of the West Saxons, rather than the Danes who settled East Anglia, or the Norse who colonized the north country, or the Celts who held Cornwall and Wales. Its shires were divided into hundreds rather than wapentakes; its tax units were reckoned in hides instead of carucates; its weights and measures were old British rather than Scandinavian.³

The countryside of this region was divided into comparatively large manors—larger than in the east of England—and dominated by a small landholding class. The boundaries of its estates were very ancient. Historian J. H. Bettey writes that “the arrangement of the Wessex landscape and its administrative divisions and estate boundaries had already been in existence for many centuries before the Norman conquest.”⁴

During the early middle ages slavery had existed on a large scale throughout Mercia, Wessex and Sussex, and had lasted longer there than in other parts of England. Historian D.J.V. Fisher writes that “the fate of many of the natives was not extermination but slavery.”⁵ This was not merely domestic bondage,

but slavery on a larger scale. During the eighth and ninth centuries, the size of major slaveholdings in the south of England reached levels comparable to large plantations in the American South. When Bishop Wilfred acquired Selsey in Sussex, he emancipated 250 slaves on a single estate. Few plantations in the American South were so large even at their peak in the nineteenth century.⁶ Serfdom also had been exceptionally strong in this region. Painstaking analysis of the Domesday book by historical geographers has shown that the proportion of servi was larger in Wessex than in other parts of England.⁷

By the time of American colonization, both slavery and serfdom were long gone from this region. But other forms of social obligation remained very strong in the seventeenth century. A smaller part of the population were freeholders in the south and west of England than in East Anglia.⁸

The political character of southwestern England was consistent with its social history. This was the territory that remained loyal to King John in 1215. It rallied to Richard II in 1381, and generally stood by the Tudors in the mid-sixteenth century. Most of this region supported the Stuarts during the Civil War.⁹ With a few exceptions it was stony ground for Puritan proselytizers and dissenting denominations in the seventeenth century.¹⁰

In its religion this region leaned toward the orthodox side of the Anglican spectrum. Its churches and monasteries had nourished a rich tradition of liturgical Christianity for many centuries. In 1549, this region supported the Western Rebellion, a violent protest against Protestant innovations which spread through Hampshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Warwickshire, Somersetshire and Leicestershire.¹¹ In 1655 it was also the place of Penruddock’s Rebellion, the largest armed rising against Puritan rule in England. The leader of this movement, Col. John Penruddock, called himself “a free-born gentleman of England.” His lieutenants were drawn from the county gentry of Wessex. In the words of the Roundhead who ordered their execution, they were “many of good quality, many of ingenious education, some of better parts than myself.”¹²

In the early seventeenth century, the landscape of the south and west of England differed in its appearance from East Anglia. Much of it was a shaggy country, still very heavily wooded. The county of Somerset in 1623 was described as “a great part of it being forest and woodlands.” Berkshire was “covered far and wide with forests and woods.” Similar statements were also made about other counties in this part of England.¹³

A large part of this region were royal forests, some of enormous size—notably the Forest of Dean, Windsor Forest, and New Forest where two sons of William the Conqueror were killed. These vast tracts were governed by “forest law,” a judicial system of exceptional rigor.¹⁴

Much of the land was also kept as parks and chases for the sport of country gentlemen. For many centuries, deer parks had been more numerous in the south and west of England than in the north and east. The Domesday survey, for example, listed thirty-one deer parks in England—of which only three were in East Anglia and none were in the Midlands or the North. Most were in the south and west of England. In the sixteenth century, deer parks continued to be more common in Gloucestershire, Devonshire and Staffordshire than in other counties. They were comparatively rare in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire. As late as 1712, Northamptonshire was thought to have more deer parks than any county of England. The long continuity from the twelfth to the eighteenth century was very striking.¹⁵

Before 1700, the south and west was less densely settled than East Anglia. This was a cultural region without a capital. One of its modern historians writes that “the Wessex region has no natural center.”¹⁶ Between London and Bristol, there were no large towns and remarkably few little ones. In year 1600, for example, the entire county of Hampshire contained only two towns as large as 3,000 inhabitants—Winchester and Southampton, which were both about that size. Only six Hampshire villages were above 1,000 (Alton, Andover, Fareham, Basingstoke, Petersfield and Portsmouth). In Dorset, the largest town was Dorchester with only 1,500 souls; in the county of Sussex, only Chichester and Lewes had as many as 2,000 inhabitants.¹⁷

The population of the south and west was mostly scattered in manorial settlements. One local historian writes, “ … the classic manorial system of medieval England decayed only very slowly in Berkshire.”¹⁸ The same statement could be made of every county in the south and west. The countryside was dominated by the great estates of the gentry, with their environing clusters of small houses inhabited by tenants and subtenants.¹⁹

The economy of this region was organized primarily around the production and sale of agricultural staples—principally grain and wool. The mid-seventeenth century was a dark period for this region. Its economy was as deeply depressed in the 1640s and 1650s as that of East Anglia had been in the 1620s and 1630s.²⁰ From 1642 to 1666, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode freely through this troubled countryside. It suffered much from the violence of the Civil Wars, and labored severely under a cruel regime of martial law that was imposed by Parliament. The woolen trade was disrupted in this period; the old cloth towns of the west lost population and poverty rapidly increased. So also did epidemic disease, culminating in major epidemics of plague. Social anarchy became a serious problem. In 1644-45 the risings of the English Clubmen, who sought to restore order in their communities, corresponded almost exactly in their distribution with the region of emigration to the Chesapeake.²¹

There were many strong links between the character of the south and west of England and the culture of Virginia. Both regions were marked by deep and pervasive inequalities, by a staple agriculture and rural settlement patterns, by powerful oligarchies of large landowners with Royalist politics and an Anglican faith.

Even today, this historian who was born and raised in Maryland feels strangely at home when walking the country lanes of southwestern England. One finds much that seems familiar. Large brick manor houses are set back from the road behind hedges of privet or boxwood. Small farm cottages stand in isolation along the highways, surrounded by green rolling fields. Where two or three roads meet, there is apt to be a humble pub of the sort that seventeenth-century Englishmen called an “ordinary”—a word that long survived in Virginia.²² In summer the roadside is white with Queen Anne’s lace; and the air is heavy with the sweet smell of honeysuckle. The countryside is so shaggy and overgrown that the country roads sometimes become dark tunnels of dense foliage. As the traveler passes through these lanes, he has an eerie feeling that he has entered a tunnel through time. When he emerges into the light and the English landscape opens before him, this American from the Chesapeake Bay has a sense of coming home.

The Chesapeake Environment

English folkways were not the only determinant of Virginia’s culture. Another factor was the American environment. New England and Virginia were very different in their physical setting—more so than the distance between them would lead one to expect. Jamestown and Boston were separated by only five degrees of latitude (300 nautical miles). But they were much farther apart in their climate and geography.

The dominant feature of Virginia’s environment was the Chesapeake Bay, always known to natives as the Bay. In ecological terms the Bay is an estuary, where fresh and salt water meet in a marine environment of exceptional fertility. The light of the sun reaches down through warm and shallow waters, rich in nitrogen and phosphorous, to nourish large populations of bacteria and plankton. The sandy bottom of the Bay is choked with eelgrass, sea lettuce and wild celery which support a great chain of marine life, culminating in the striped bass and shellfish that are an epicure’s delight. For English colonists who settled on its shoreline, the teeming waters of the Bay held immense riches—and fatal dangers.

The surface of the Bay is a vast sheet of water, 200 miles long, 4 to 30 miles wide, and open throughout its length to oceangoing vessels. “No country can compare with it,” wrote Hugh Jones, for “number of navigable rivers, creeks and inlets.”¹ The Bay is fed by hundreds of streams and forty-eight navigable rivers, some of immense size. The James River is larger than London’s Thames; the Potomac is longer than the Seine. The Bay and its tributaries hold many dangers for unwary navigators—treacherous shoals, shifting sandbanks, coastlines that rise and fall without warning, disastrous worms which can devour a ship’s wooden bottom. But with care, a colonial captain could sail where he pleased in this vast waterway and find good anchorages for the largest vessel. Virginia planter Robert Beverley wrote that ocean-going ships could anchor directly “before that gentleman’s door where they find the best reception, or where ’tis most suitable to their Business.” Maryland’s Dr. Charles Carroll observed that “planters can deliver their own commodities at their own back doors.”

This fact led one visitor in the seventeenth century to predict that the Chesapeake would become “like the Netherlands, the richest place in all America.”²

This watery maze of rivers and streams created vast tracts of rich alluvial soil. The best land was quickly appropriated by Governor Berkeley’s Royalist elite for their large plantations. “Gentlemen and planters love to build near the water,” wrote Hugh Jones, “though it be not so healthy as the uplands and barrens.”³ When William Hugh Grove sailed into the York River in 1732, he observed that it was “thick seated with gentry on its banks … the prospect of river render them very pleasant [and] equal to the Thames from London to Richmond, supposing the towns omitted.”⁴

The “omission of towns” was encouraged by the structure of the Bay and its rivers. Their 6,000 miles of shoreline created an opportunity for dispersed settlement that did not exist in other environments. The people of the Bay were able to scatter themselves through a vast amphibious territory. Robert Beverley wrote that all the colonists on the Bay had “fallen into the same unhappy form of settlements, altogether upon country seats without towns.”⁵

The shape of the terrain differs on the two sides of the Bay. On the eastern shore it tends to be as flat as a billiard table. The western shore is a more varied and rolling countryside that falls to the water’s edge in gentle undulations. Captain John Smith accurately described it as a succession of “pleasant plain hills and fertile valleys, one prettily crossing another, and watered so conveniently with their sweet brooks and crystal springs, as if art itself had devised them.” When cleared and cultivated, the western shore took on a quiet, pastoral beauty that reminded homesick colonists of southern and western England.⁶

Between the rivers were ridges or “necks” that tended to be thin and barren land. Here poor whites pitched their small houses and scratched out a miserable living from the earth. Upland soil sold for as little as five shillings an acre in the eighteenth

century. The price of rich bottom land was five pounds an acre—twenty times as much.⁷

The best river land was immensely fertile, and there was a great deal of it—vast tracts of virgin soil, which natives and visitors alike uniformly praised for its “extreme fruitfulness.” It was farmed by primitive methods of husbandry, producing large yields until the late eighteenth century.

When Virginia was young, the tidewater was a lush, green country. “The whole country is a perfect forest,” wrote Hugh Jones in 1724, “except where the woods are cleared for plantations, and old fields, and where have been formerly Indian towns.” By the mid-eighteenth century more of the tidewater was cleared than today. The countryside around Williamsburg was described by the German traveller Johann Schoepf in 1784 as “a pleasant open plain.” But he characterized the colony in general as an “eternal woods,” broken by dense swamps and grassy uplands which the planters called “savannahs” or “barrens.”⁸

The Chesapeake woodlands were magnificent stands of ancient trees, soaring “thirty, forty, fifty, some even sixty or seventy feet high without a branch or limb.” There were towering tulip trees with gaudy yellow-orange flowers, and aromatic sweet gums with delicate star-shaped leaves, and majestic white oaks as much as five hundred years old. The variety of trees was astounding—as many as fifty varieties of oak alone. The swamps were dense with cypress and cedar; and the uplands were covered with sassafras and chinkapin.⁹ Wild fruit trees flourished in profusion; among them, many wild plums and cherries (“the most delicious cherry in the world,” wrote Robert Beverley); and persimmons which could be made into “an agreeable kind of beer.” The open fields were choked with currants, raspberries, and delicate wild strawberries “so plentiful that few persons take care to transplant them, but can find enough to fill their baskets.”¹⁰

To its first English colonists, the Chesapeake country appeared another Eden, demi-paradise. Captain John Smith thought that “heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.”¹¹ It would have been so, were it not for one terrible defect. To colonists from northern Europe, the Chesapeake proved to be desperately unhealthy. The best lands on the water’s edge became death traps in the summer and fall.

The climate of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century was nearly as warm as in the twentieth. Such was the pattern of circulation in the “little ice age” that temperatures were about the same as today throughout the southern colonies while New England was colder. “The natural temperature of the inhabited part of the country, is hot and moist,” observed Robert Beverley of Virginia. “The summer is as hot as Spain; the winter cold as in France or England,” wrote Captain John Smith. The scientific traveler Johann Schoepf observed in the eighteenth century that “the Fahrenheit thermometer often stands at 80-90-95 degrees.”¹²

This warm climate gave tidewater Virginia an asset in the length of its growing season, which was 210 days between heavy frosts—two months longer than in New England. But it also brought a liability in the relation between climate and disease. As the temperature rose, so did the death rate.

One part of the problem rose from the Bay itself. Fecal pollutants washed into swamps and stagnant pools. The estuary itself became an ideal breeding ground for typhoid fever and amoebic dysentery, trapping deadly organisms which ravaged the sickly population in the summer months. The “dying time” came mostly in the summer and early fall, when “fevers” took a heavy toll of young life. Every year this mortal season lasted much longer in Virginia than in New England.¹³

Another part of the problem was malaria. The tidewater was a perfect nursery for mosquitos. In the hot summers Robert Beverley wrote that “musketaes are a sort of vermin, of less danger [than others] but much more troublesome, because more frequent.”¹⁴ Malaria parasites were introduced at an early date by immigrants from Europe and Africa—first the comparatively mild Plasmodium vivax from southern England; then the more dangerous Plasmodium falciparum by which Africa had its revenge for the slave trade. P. vivax was a great debilitator; P. falciparum was a killer. Particularly at risk were pregnant women, infants, small children, new immigrants and the chronically ill.¹⁵

Malaria, typhoid, dysentery, enteritis and other diseases took a terrific toll in that part of tidewater Virginia where the soil was richest, and where gentlemen liked to build their seats. A French visitor observed that the sallow faces of people in tidewater Gloucester County, “looked so sickly that I judged the neighborhood to be unhealthy.” On higher ground in Rappahannock and Stafford counties, he remarked that complexions were “clear and lively.”¹⁶

The heat and humidity of the tidewater, and its endemic summer diseases had other social consequences. Travelers and natives both remarked on the “idleness,” “indolence” and “sluggishness” of the Virginians, as well as their irritability and quick tempers. Geographer Carville Earle has pointed out the similarity between this behavior and the symptoms of endemic diseases in the tidewater.¹⁷

The environment of the Chesapeake combined with the culture of Sir William Berkeley’s Royalist elite to create the folkways of Virginia. The rich resources of the region supported a strong agricultural regime. But heavy mortality among European colonists disrupted nuclear households and discouraged immigration from Europe. Virginia’s unique folkways emerged from the interplay of English culture and an American environment.

The Colonial Mood: Virginia and the Mother Country

From an early date in the seventeenth century, Virginians began to speak affectionately of their new colony as the “Old Dominion” or even the “Ancient Dominion.”¹ This curious phrase bespoke an attitude of mind that developed in many colonial environments.

Throughout the New World, colonists far from home formed a strong attachment for what seemed old and even ancient in their culture.

This colonial mood became especially strong in Virginia, where it was reinforced by the values of an English culture that tended to be profoundly conservative in every sense—elitist, hierarchical, and strenuously hostile to social change. The writings of Sir Robert Filmer, the political philosopher whose family was so closely connected with Virginia, expressed these attitudes with exceptional clarity and force. One modern student of his thought observes that Filmer “succeeds in justifying the status quo in every little, almost accidental detail. He tried to prove that the slightest change in anything that went to make up the world as he knew it could be disastrous.”²

Filmer was not alone in these opinions. Almost any Royalist diary or commonplace book revealed the same world view. The Hampshire gentleman Sir John Oglander warned others to “take heed of innovation, of bringing in any new device into our island.” Words such as “innovation,” “novelty” and “modern” were pejorative terms.³

This conservatism was deepened in Virginia by the mood of cultural nostalgia that developed in most new colonies. The Virginians long retained a sense of longing for the land they had left. Their children shared a common feeling of cultural loss that continued for many generations. As late as 1736, more than a century after settlement, William Byrd II wrote to an English correspondent, “Our lives are uniform without any great variety, till the season brings in the ships. Then we tear open the letters they bring us from our friends as eagerly as a greedy heir tears open a rich father’s will.” Byrd’s choice of metaphor was specially revealing. Six generations after settlement, Virginians still perceived the culture of England as a precious inheritance to be protected from change, and passed intact from one generation to the next.⁴

For a very long time, the Chesapeake colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen apart from England—cultural exiles in a distant land. They often referred to their nation as “the mother country,” in maternal terms which implied a warm, nurturing, affective relationship—a very different idea from the Roman “patria” or the German “fatherland.”

This consciousness of cultural exile created a curious melange of feelings: chief among them, an obsessive sense of colonial inferiority. In 1728, for example, Maryland’s Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert wrote to the Earl of Litchfield, “We are at best but a feeble miniature of England.”⁵ The New World seemed a forlorn and empty place to these people. Henry Chicheley wrote home from Virginia in 1674, “For news I suppose you expect none from this barren part of the world.”⁶ As late as 1726, William Byrd wrote in the same deprecatory spirit of Virginia as “this silent country.”⁷

This attitude did not merely exist among the colony’s small elite. It was also shared by colonists of other ranks—perhaps by indentured servants most of all. One servant ballad sang:

Old England, Old England, I shall never see you more,

If I do it’s ten thousand to twenty;

My bones are quite rotten, my feet are quite sore,

I’m parched with fever, and am at death’s door,

But if ever I live to see seven years more,

Then I’ll bid adieu to Virginia.⁸

Another side of this aching nostalgia for the “mother country” was a strenuous hostility to “strangers.” In 1738, for example, William Byrd II in 1738 wrote, “I have learnt by long experience to be upon my guard against all strangers not well recommended, so that they can cheat me of nothing but my civilities.”⁹ This attitude deepened into a positive hatred of “foreigners,” a category which included all people not English. The correspondence of the three William Byrds overflowed with virulent prejudices against

“foreigners.” They detested every nation except England and despised all races except their own. They were intensely anti-Semitic. “As clamorous and unreasoning as any Jew,” was a casual phrase that William Byrd II used without thinking. They also spoke ill of the French, Germans, Dutch, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Puritans, Quakers, and Dissenters of every stripe.

These were the traditional prejudices of English gentlemen. The Duke of Wurtemberg, while traveling in England, observed that “they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them.” The same attitudes were reinforced in Virginia by the colonial mood of anxiety, nostalgia, and cultural loss.¹⁰

Another symptom of the colonial malaise was a deep sense of uneasiness about present conditions and future events. These feelings grew steadily in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, reaching a flash point in Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and the bloody repression that followed. The rebel Bacon himself was Governor Berkeley’s kinsman and protégé. Both men came from the same rank and shared similar Royalist ideals. Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” was far from a democratic document; he complained that Virginia was not hierarchical enough, and that its institutions had been corrupted by “vile” men. Both leaders expressed deep fears of external enemies and internal subversion. Bacon’s Rebellion was a conflict that rose from a cultural mood that was widely shared in the colony.¹¹

These emotions deepened the determination of Virginia planters to cling to their inherited folkways, but the cultural results of this effort were not always as they intended. A tenacious conservatism sometimes becomes a powerful engine of change. So it would be in Virginia. In an effort to preserve a cultural hegemony, for example, the gentry of Virginia would develop a novel type of race slavery on a large scale—a radical innovation with profound consequences for the future. As we shall see in a subsequent volume, these new forms of slavery did not create the culture of the tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery.

In any case, the culture of Virginia gradually took on its distinctive character during the second half of the seventeenth century, from 1640 to 1690. One may observe its emergence in the laws and court records of that period, in the accounts of travelers before 1690, in the correspondence of the Virginians themselves during the late seventeenth century.¹² By that date, this region had acquired distinctive habits of speech, special styles of architecture, settled norms of family life, and many other customs which set it apart from other parts of the English-speaking world. But these folkways were not unique. In some respects they were similar to habits and customs throughout the south and west of England. Let us examine this pattern in more detail, beginning with the speech ways of Virginia.

Virginia Speech Ways:
English Origins of the Southern Accent

Before the American Revolution, travelers from the northern colonies had begun to express surprise at the speech ways of the Chesapeake provinces. A Pennsylvania lady, for example, found herself strangely attracted to a Maryland gentleman, “who has the softest voice, never pronounces the R at all.”¹

Even more startling to northern travelers was the dialect of Virginians. In 1773, a young Princetonian named Philip Fithian came south to teach at Nomini Hall, the great Carter plantation near Richmond. In his journal he described the language that he heard there:

The people here pronounce Shower “Sho-er.”—And what in New-Jersey we call a Vendue here they call a “sale”—All Taverns they call “Ordinarys”—When a horse is frolicsome and brisk, they say at once he is “gayly.” … I piddled at my Exegesis, but (as they say here in Virginia) I did a mighty little … ²

Fithian discovered that Virginia speech ways differed from those of his native New Jersey in many ways at once. Where a northerner said, “I am,” “You are,” “She isn’t,” “It doesn’t,” and “I haven’t,” a Virginia even of high rank preferred to say “I be,” “You be,” “She ain’t,” “It don’t,” and “I hain’t.”³ The people of the Chesapeake used “like” for “as if”—“He looks like he’s dead.” Boston’s James Russell Lowell noted with an air of disdain that this construction was “never found in New England.”⁴

The Virginia dialect also had its own vocabulary. Examples, recorded as early as the seventeenth century, include bide for stay, howdy for hello, afterclap for any unexpected event, shuck for husk, porely for unwell, drag for harrow, craw for throat, afeared for afraid, cater-cornered for crooked, tarry for stay, tote for carry, passel for pack, woebegone for wretched, call for cause (“no call to do it”), chomp for chew, fresh for flood, grit for courage, lick for beat, links for sausage, bimeby for by and by, belly-ache for pain in the stomach, andirons for firedogs, flapjack for pancake, bandanna for handkerchief, botch for blunder, favor for resemble, unbeknownst for unknown, allowed for admitted, pekid for unwell, moonshine for distilled liquor, shock for a sheaf of corn, mess of greens for a serving of vegetables, laid off for out of work, skillet for frying pan, traipse for walk, disremember for forget, right good for very good, get shut of for get rid of, mighty and monstrous for very, proud for happy or glad (as, “proud to know you”), yonder for distant, cross-grained for difficult, innards for insides, pretend for intend, angry for infected, book-learning for schooling, and jeans for cloth of a course twill weave (an old English corruption of Genoa, whence this fabric was imported). By the late eighteenth century these words had disappeared from polite usage in Britain. They are identified as archaic or provincial expressions in the Oxford English Dictionary. But they survived in Virginia for three centuries.

At the same time that these old words were preserved, new words were also created in the Chesapeake. Many terms were borrowed from the Indians and later from Africans. Novel expressions were necessary to describe the new Chesapeake environment, new techniques of tobacco farming, and the new institution of race slavery. This unique combination of continuity and change defined the vocabulary of an American region.⁵

The Virginia dialect was also distinctive in its pronunciation. In place of New England’s harsh, rapid, rasping, metallic whine, Virginia’s speech was a soft, slow, melodious drawl that came not from the nose but the throat. Virginians tended to add syllables where New Englanders subtracted them. Vowel sounds were prolonged, embellished and softened as in ha-alf for half, gyarden for garden, ke-er for care, holp for help, puriddy for pretty, fuust for first, Aah’m for I’m, doo for do, and the spectacular wah-a-tahmill-i-an for watermelon. A conversation in Virginia about a watermelon could occupy an afternoon.⁶

Consonants were also softened and prolonged, as in sebem for seven, chimbly for chimney, vahmint for vermin, holt for hold, mo’ for more, flo’ for floor, do’ for door, fo’ for four, dis for this, dat for that, dare for there, ax for ask, go-in’ for going, perserve for preserve, foller for follow, yaller for yellow, acrost for across, wunnerful for wonderful, mistis for mistress, and wid or wud for with. Redundancies were added, as in you all or y ‘awl for you.⁷

Proper nouns were pronounced in unexpected ways. The Carter family called itself Cy’ah-tah. Randolph was Randall in the tidewater, as it had been in the mother country. Armistead was pronounced Um’sta-ed; Berkeley remained Barkly as at home; and

Blount was Blunt. The family of Lincoln’s mad assassin John Wilkes Booth was called Bowthe. Botetourt was the rhythmic Boat’a‘tote, Chisman was Cheeseman, Dinwiddie was De-in-wood-y, Fantleroy was Fantilroy, Fauquier was Fawkeer, Gooch was Gouge, Hackett was Haa-yak-it, Heyward was Howahd, Langhorne was Langon, Napier was Napper, Sclater was Slaughter, Semple was Sarmple, James was Jems or Jims, Yeardley was Yardly, and the family of Virginia playright Robert Munford was known as Mumfud to his contemporaries. Some of these tidewater pronunciations bore no recognizable resemblance to the written word. Crenshaw improbably became Granger, and Enroughty was somehow transformed into Dahby. A Florentine adventurer named Taliaferro so twisted Virginia tongues by the Tuscan rhythms of his name that he and his many descendants were always called Toliver in the tidewater.⁸

These Virginia speech ways were not invented in America. They derived from a family of regional dialects that had been spoken throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century. Virtually all peculiarities of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation which have been noted as typical of Virginia were recorded in the English counties of Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Oxford, Gloucester, Warwick or Worcester.⁹

In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, an English antiquarian published the Song of Solomon in a Sussex dialect which sounded remarkably like the speech ways of both whites and blacks in tidewater Virginia:

De Song of songs, dat is Solomon’s,

Let him kiss me wud de kisses of his mouth;

for yer love is better dan wine

Cause of de smell of yer good intments, yer naum is lik intment tipped out; derefore de Maldens love ye …

Look not upan me, cause I be black, cause de sun has shouun upan me; my mother’s childun was mad wud me; dey maud me kipper of de vineyards; but my own vineyard I han’t kept …

My beloved spoke, an said to me: Git up, my love, my fair un, an come away …

Jest a liddle while ahter I passed by em, I foun him dat my soul loves …

This Sussex accent was reported to be “almost extinct” in 1860. In the twentieth century, dis and dat were rarely heard in any part of rural England, but they persisted among both poor whites and blacks in the American south.¹⁰

Thomas Hardy described the deliberate destruction of these dialects in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Elizabeth says in a Wessex drawl, “Bide where you be a minute, father!”

“Bide where you be,” he echoed sharply. “Good God, are you only fit to carry wash to a pig-trough, to use such words as those?” She reddened with shame and sadness. “I meant, ‘Stay where you are,’ Father,” she said in a low, humble voice. “I ought to have been more careful.”¹¹

Five generations of Wessex children learned to be “more careful,” just as Elizabeth did. But traces of these archaic speech ways still survive in the American south.¹²

Much of Virginia’s vocabulary (as well as its pronunciation) also appeared in word lists of Sussex speech, for example: atwixt, bandanna, bimebye, bide, dis and dat, wud for with, fambly, favor, flapjack, fust, his ’n, holp, holt, hotted up, innards, lay-off, leastways, such-

like, mess of greens, moonshine, passell, pekid, shock, skillet, traipse, and unbeknownst.¹³

The dialect of rural Sussex in the nineteenth century startled American travelers by its resemblence to Virginia speech. One visitor from the United States wrote of a Sussex countryman that “but for his misplaced h’s—and he dropped them all over the road in a most reckless and amazing manner—he might have been a Southern or Western American.”¹⁴

Sussex speech belonged to a family of regional dialects in the south and west of England. Every county had its own linguistic peculiarities; so also did many small villages. But students of language have observed that these local speech ways throughout the south and west of England were closely related to one another. Sir William Cope concluded from long research that “the language or dialect of the counties which formed the kingdom of Wessex has in many respects great similarity. And of these the people of the district formed by West Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire have many words in common.”¹⁵

This cluster of Wessex dialects bore a strong resemblance to Virginia speech ways. Hampshiremen, for example, used words such as chitterlings or chittlins for entrails, no-count for worthless, dawg for dog, passel for bunch, poke for thrust, and whopper (pronounced whoppah in Hampshire) for anything of large size. The people of that county also used the preterite instead of the participle in auxiliary verbs—“he was took bad,” or “he was drove to it”—much as in Virginia.¹⁶ Devon folk said ha’af for half, marster for master, keer for care, yaller for yellow, and a-go-in for going. Natives of Somerset had a way of saying bide, taters, porkers and holler.¹⁷ Wiltshire people used words such as craw, cross-grained, drag, handy, and purserve. In counties around Oxford, countrymen said holt, gyarden, sebem, vahmint, priddy and chimbly. All of these usages were carried to the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century.¹⁸

The Virginia dialect as it developed through the years was not merely a simple replication of Wessex speech. The transfer of language was a dynamic process of linguistic selection and recombination. Moreover, the speech ways of southern and western England were not monolithic, but comprised a complex family of local dialects. A Sussex countryman commonly dropped his h’s; but neighboring counties tended to sound that consonant clearly. Somerset folk had a way of turning s into z, and o into u, so that their county name became Zumerzet. This usage did not occur in other parts of southern England.¹⁹

Other linguistic differences existed even between English villages and even neighborhoods. A case in point was Berkeley Hundred in Gloucestershire, where an antiquarian wrote in the seventeenth century,

In this hundred of Berkeley are frequently used certain words, proverbs and phrases of speech which we hundreders conceive of as we do of certain market moneys, to be not only native but confined to the bounds and territories thereof; which if found in the mouths of foreigners we deem them as leapt over the wall, or as strayed from their proper pasture and dwelling place.²⁰

“Berkeley Hundreders” as he called them preserved many old Saxon words such as geboren for born and wenchen for girls. An initial ν was pronounced f in the Saxon way, so that venison became fenison; at the same time f became v, so that folks were volks. In the same fashion, a hard c became a g, as grabs for crabs. This and that became thicke and thucke, and a y was commonly inserted between words and especially names that ended and began with consonants, so that a name such as Bill Carter became Bill-y Carter in England’s Vale of Gloucester.²¹ Some of these Berkeley speech habits became part of the American southern accent—the nominal y between consonants, for example. But it is interesting to observe that most of Berkeley Hundred’s special speech ways did not survive in Virginia, despite the fact that so many inhabitants migrated there.

Here is an important clue to the dynamics of linguistic transmission, and to the complex process by which the Virginia accent was born. From a mixed family of dialects in southern and western England, local peculiarities tended to disappear and general characteristics survived. The dropped h of Sussex and the hard s Somerset did not take root in Virginia. But most countrymen throughout the south and west of England said Ah be for f am, and that usage became an important part of the Virginia accent. In this manner, a new speech way was manufactured out of old materials.

Other types of change also occurred. In the New World, English country accents tended to be overprinted with a layer of London uniformity—a common tendency in many parts of British America. “In general,” observed the German traveler Johann Schoepf, “the dialects of the English speech in the several American colonies are not as sharply distinct as those of the sundry districts and counties of England itself.”²² Differences between a southern drawl and a Yankee twang became more muted than those between the Wessex broad and the Norfolk whine, in part because they added a common element of London speech.²³

Another complexity appeared in the development of subregional dialects in America. Virginia speech ways rapidly created their own local variations in such number and variety that by the nineteenth century the birthplace of a native could be located within a few miles by subtle distinctions in the way that he sounded a and r. Other variations also developed between Virginians of different ranks; the speech ways of Virginia’s first families were closest to educated London speech.

Yet another layer of complexity was added later when African expressions began to enrich southern speech. Africanisms were adopted throughout the southern colonies, especially in the Carolina lowcountry. In Virginia the borrowings were not so numerous, but as early as 1783, a German traveler observed that “here and there a few negroisms have crept in, and the salmagundy of the English language has here been enriched even by words of African origin.” The major features of the Virginia accent, however, were established before African slaves could possibly have had much impact on language.²⁴

Altogether, the creation of this speech way was a cultural process of high complexity. On balance, one may conclude that the southern drawl developed in a new American environment from the dialects of southern and western England, just as the Yankee twang evolved from the speech ways of the East Anglia.

Virginia Building Ways:
English Origins of Chesapeake Houses

Similar patterns also appeared in the vernacular architecture of Virginia. During the governorship of Sir William Berkeley, a distinctive building style developed there. By the mid-seventeenth century, homes and barns had become so standard throughout the colony that when the Burgesses ordered a structure to be built in 1647, they merely insisted that its construction should be “according to the form of Virginia houses.” No further specifications were thought necessary.¹

Virginia’s building ways, like its speech ways, were not created de novo in the New World. They grew out of the vernacular architecture of southern England in a process that was guided by cultural purposes, environmental conditions and the inherited memory of an English past.²

The vernacular architecture of Virginia was a complex hierarchy of styles, plans, materials and techniques. Its highest expression was the “great house”—a handsome, brick-built structure, surrounded by outbuildings, gardens and fields. It tended to be one and a half or two storys high and perfectly symmetrical, with a great central passage, or “summer hall,” running through the house from front to back. The hall was flanked by large, lofty living spaces on the first floor, and small, low-ceilinged chambers below stairs. William Hugh Grove wrote in 1732, “The manner of building is much alike. They have a back staircase with a passage through the house in the middle which is the summer hall and draws the air; and two rooms on each hand.”³

Interior plans were designed for congregate living. Even the largest houses had comparatively few rooms. “They always contrive to have large rooms,” wrote Robert Beverley, “that they may be cool in the summer.”⁴ In the grandest houses, small private rooms called closets were constructed for the master and mistress of the house. But few Virginians had private spaces of their own in the mid-seventeenth century.⁵

The first great house in Virginia was Green Spring, a brick mansion built by Sir William Berkeley in 1646. The cost of its construction was supported by a special tax which the assembly levied with “an eye to the honor of the place.” No longer in existence, Green Spring stood on an estate of 1,000 acres near Jamestown. In its own time it was the largest house in Virginia, with an imposing facade one hundred feet in breadth. Its central block, 48 feet wide by 43 feet deep, was flanked by two symmetrical wings, each extending 26 feet. The interior consisted of six large rooms and a long central hall. Later an elevated loggia and curious double dormers were added—fashions which did not catch on. But the general plan of this building set the fashion to which plantation architecture conformed for two centuries.⁶

Green Spring, the home of Sir William Berkeley, was Virginia’s first great house. It set the example for plantation architecture in generations to come. Built in 1646 with the aid of a special appropriation by the colonial assembly, it was originally a large symmetrical brick structure, with a central entrance and great hall flanked by “public” spacious rooms on the main floor. In 1796, British architect Benjamin Latrobe visited Green Spring and sketched the house shortly before it was pulled down. “It is a brick building of great solidity, but no attempt at grandeur,” Latrobe wrote. “The lower story was covered with an arcade which is fallen down. The porch has some clumsy ornamental brickwork about it of the style of James the 1st.” This drawing shows the building without its arcade (a later addition) as perhaps it might have looked in the time of Berkeley himself. The source is Edward C. Carter, ed., The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (2 vols., New Haven, 1977), I, 181-82, 247, plate 21.

Much has been written of this architecture as an adaptation to the Chesapeake environment. Long halls open at both ends caught refreshing summer breezes. High ceilings retained cool morning temperatures throughout a summer day. Massive brick fireplaces and chimney stacks repelled the winter chill. Steeppitched slate roofs proved useful in heavy summer storms, and were more durable than in New England.

This was indeed an American architecture, but it was also English in its roots. In most respects Virginia’s plantation houses were exactly like middle-sized manors in south and west of England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One study of manorial architecture in this part of England found that the following general characteristics were typical of the genre: broad fronts of 70 to 100 feet; symmetrical plans; a first floor with a modest number of large rooms, generous proportions and high ceilings; a large central hall open at both ends; and a low “ground floor” with bed chambers. The great house was set far back from the road, with a cluster of small outbuildings for kitchens, stables, servants, and elaborate gardens in front. This description of manor houses in the south and west of England fits the great houses of Virginia exactly.⁷

The plans of these great country houses were highly symmetrical on both sides of the water, sometimes in surprising ways. The plan of the great plantation house at Shirley in Virginia, for example, looked at first sight to be a simple arrangement of boxes. It was in fact a complex mathematical structure, conceived with great care. Every dimension in the main block and wings was a multiple of the cabalistic Christian numbers of three and twelve. The design of Shirley became an act of architectural liturgy in this Anglican culture.⁸

The great hall running through the center of the house was not a Virginia invention. G. C. Tyack found that this feature was “universally popular” in larger country houses throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century.⁹

Large country houses were also set in much the same way in England and Virginia, surrounded by “gardens, stewponds, bowling-greens, terraces, and other natural concomitants of baronial residences.” Recalcitrant American shrubs and trees were ruthlessly cut and pruned into imitations of English flora. On very large and rich plantations even the land itself was laboriously rearranged by sweating servants until it provided English vistas to please nostalgic masters.¹⁰

Plantation buildings in Virginia were also similar to English country houses in their architectural details. Virginia planters, like West Country gentry, ornamented their houses with emblems of royalism. In the twentieth century, archeologists have found plaster fragments of royal arms and other monarchical motifs which were used as ceiling decorations.¹¹

In both England and Virginia, these structures were mainly designed not by professional architects but by local gentlemen. Their remarkable similarities were evidence that tastes were very much the same among the gentry on both sides of the Atlantic.¹²

There were also important differences between the country houses of England and America. Many changes were required by the American environment. Stone, for example, had been a common building material in a belt of territory that extended from Dorsetshire north across the Wiltshire Downs to the Cotswolds. During the seventeenth century, Virginians tried to build with a local yellow sandstone which seemed similar to Cotswold limestone. But in practice it proved too soft for general use, and nothing better was available. Thereafter, stone was generally abandoned in Virginia except for embellishments.¹³

The taste for stone survived, however, and found expression in curious ways. An example was Mount Vernon, the pretentious home of George Washington. Its exterior consisted of wooden weatherboards which were carved to resemble masonry and sprinkled with sand to give the look and feel of stone. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the dampness of Virginia’s climate, which caused wooden seams to show through their gritty camouflage. But when Mount Vernon was seen in a haze of nostalgia after a bottle or two of madeira, the woodwork turned to stone in the eyes of homesick Englishmen.

With stone unavailable and craftsmen in short supply, Virginians were forced to adapt English building customs to the material realities of the New World. But they did so in ways that showed a strong continuity of cultural purposes. For the best tidewater buildings, the preferred building material was brick, which had rapidly gained popularity in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Brick was used for foundation walls, cellar floors, building columns, curtain walls, and chimney stacks. Specially cut or moulded bricks were employed as window mullions, door frames, rounded cornices and corbelled parapets.

Brick building developed slowly in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Most houses even on large plantations continued to be made of wood for many years. But handsome brick of good quality was the ideal. It was made from local clay which fired to warm and beautiful colors that ranged from dark red to pale orange. The size of bricks in England was regulated by royal proclamation—precisely 9 by 4¼ by 2 inches in Elizabeth’s reign, and 9 by 4 by 2¼ inches under Charles I. Virginians generally conformed to these standards; the size of bricks in seventeenth-century Virginia houses tended to be the same as in England.¹⁴

Techniques of bricklaying in Virginia were also very English for many generations. During the period 1625-50, Flemish bond (alternating stretchers and headers in every course) had been especially popular in the south of England. It also came to be widely used in Virginia, together with English bond (alternate courses of headers and stretchers) and various Garden bonds (which increased the proportion of stretchers in various combinations). Other patterns peculiar to the north or east of England (Yorkshire bond, Monk’s bond) rarely appeared in the Chesapeake colonies.¹⁵

These great houses were of course few in number. Most houses in the Chesapeake were very modest. From an early date in the

Stratford, the ancestral home of the Lees, was one of many gentlemen’s houses built in the half-century after the death of Sir William Berkeley. Constructed about the year 1725 for Thomas Lee, Stratford was the birthplace of Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee and Robert E. Lee. It stands today in Westmoreland County, surrounded by outbuildings, and shaded by huge beech trees. The plan is H-shaped, with a large central hall flanked by “public” rooms few in number but large in scale. On the ground floor are smaller low-ceilinged bedrooms and workrooms which stay comfortably cool in the summer. The brick exterior is dominated by two massive chimney clusters. The architecture creates a feeling of austerity, solidity, integrity, seriousness and permanence—a suitable symbol of the family who lived there for two centuries. Grand houses of this sort were few in number before 1690, but many were constructed after that date. Their appearance changed in many superficial ways with the whirl of architectural fashion, but their structure and function remained the same for many generations.

seventeenth century smaller houses were also highly stylized in their design, and continued to be built in the same way for many years. They ran heavily to a single type called the hall and parlor house by architectural historians. These were humble structures of one or one and a half storys, divided into two large rooms. Exterior chimneys stood on one or both gable ends, and a corner staircase led to a sleeping loft which was sometimes lighted by gable windows.¹⁶

The French visitor Durand noted of the Virginians in 1687, “whatever their rank, and I know not why, they build only two rooms with some closets on the ground floor, and two rooms in the attic above. But they build several like this according to their means. They build also a separate kitchen, a separate house for the Christian slaves, one for the negro slaves, and several to dry the tobacco.”¹⁷ This design was carried from the southern and western counties of England, which contributed so heavily to the colonization of Virginia. The cultural continuities were as strong for smaller buildings as for larger ones.¹⁸

The typical size of a small farm house in Virginia was sixteen by twenty feet—a little smaller than in England. Furnishings were very sparse. Many Chesapeake houses lacked even beds in the mid-seventeenth century; families slept on piles of straw and leaves.¹⁹ Building materials were modest as well. In Virginia as in England, smaller houses were rarely built of brick. Eric Mercer writes of English vernacular architecture that “small brick houses were nowhere erected before the second half of the 17th century.” They remained uncommon for many years thereafter. Small Virginia houses were also constructed mostly of wood, but in a style very different from the prevailing East Anglian fashions of Massachusetts. They tended to be simple frame structures, one story high or a story and a half, with a steep pitched roof. Walls were sometimes strengthened by a technique in which clay filling was rammed between the studs, and protected from the damp by oak clapboards.²⁰

Methods of house carpentry were much simplified—more so than in Massachusetts. Virginians typically gave minimal attention to the foundations of their houses, which stood two or three feet above the ground on irregular posts or blocks. Walls were framed with as much simplicity as possible. Roofs were made of light collars and common rafters, which were mortised at the top and nailed at the bottom into ingenious false plates that allowed a great deal of play in the structures of these insecure buildings.²¹ These patterns reflected economic realities in Virginia, where lumber was cheap and labor was costly. In 1687, William Fitzhugh warned a correspondent that “labor is so intolerably dear, and workmen so idle,” that framing costs were at least a third higher than in London, “and near three times as long preparing.” Material conditions made a major difference in colonial building.²²

In the hierarchy of Virginia’s vernacular architecture, there was also a third level of housing which consisted of rough one-room shacks or shanties, made of whatever materials came to hand. By the end of the seventeenth century, many of these structures were made of “puncheons,” or timbers which had been crudely split. The quarters of servants and slaves were often puncheon houses. But they were not log cabins. Their plan and style followed the conventions of English architecture.²³

None of these architectural forms was static. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, building styles changed on both sides of the Atlantic. New tastes ran to neo-classical proportions, pediments, pillars, quoins, bands, and hipped roofs. But through all of these changing fashions, strong continuities persisted in Virginia architecture. In an environment where firewood remained comparatively abundant, massive fireplaces and broad chimney stacks remained in fashion. Brick continued to be the building material of choice, rather than stone or stucco which became more fashionable in rural England. The result was a strong and vibrant combination of austere neoclassical forms with

The Hall and Parlor House was typical of middling farmhouses in Virginia. It was commonly a small, simple building, more often built of wood than brick, with chimneys and fireplaces on the gable ends. Historian Dell Upton has found that half of all houses in Virginia inventories had only two rooms on the ground floor: often a hall and parlor, sometimes a hall and kitchen, or a kitchen and parlor, plus several small chambers above. This was the modal house type in Virginia for many generations. The average number of rooms remained constant at approximately five per house from 1646 to 1720.

vivid red walls, grey slates, and painted wooden trim. In all of these ways, the plantation architecture of Virginia was derived from the English rural forms but it became a unique provincial style, with its own distinct identity.

Virginia Family Ways:
The Anglican Idea of the Patriarchal Family

The family customs of the Virginians were as distinctive as their architecture and speech ways.¹ The gentry of southern and western England brought to this colony a sense of family which was as strong as that of Puritan Massachusetts. The political theory of Robert Filmer, for example, has been described as “above all things an exaltation of the family. It made the rules of domestic society into the principles of political science.”² The same attitude routinely appeared among the English gentry. An example was Sir John Oglander, a Royalist gentleman with Virginia connections who lived on the English Isle of Wight. It was observed of him that “family pride indeed was the ruling passion of his life.”³

Among Virginians and New Englanders, ideas of the family were similar in strength, but different in substance. Virginians gave more importance to the extended family and less to the nuclear family than did New Englanders. Clear differences of that sort appeared in quantitative evidence of naming practices and inheritance patterns. The language of familial relationships differed too. The word “family” tended to be a more comprehensive term in Virginia than in Massachusetts.⁴ Virginians addressed relatives of all sort as “coz” or “cousin,” in expressions that were heavy with affective meaning; but the term “brother” was used more loosely as a salutation for friends, neighbors, political allies, and even business acquaintances. It is interesting to observe that an extended kin-term tended to be more intimate than the language of a nuclear relationship. The reverse tended to be the case in Massachusetts.⁵

Individuals in Virginia were stereotyped by traits that were thought to be hereditary in their extended families. Anglican clergyman Jonathan Boucher believed that “family character both of body and mind may be traced thro’ many generations; as for instance every Fitzhugh has bad eyes; every Thornton hears badly; Winslows and Lees talk well; Carters are proud and imperious; and Taliaferros mean and avaricious; and Fowkeses cruel.” Virginians often pronounced these judgments upon one another. The result was a set of family reputations which acquired the social status of self-fulfilling prophecies.⁶

For most Virginians the unit of residence tended to be a more or less nuclear household, but the unit of association was the extended family, which often flocked together in the same rural neighborhoods. Jonathan Boucher noted that “certain districts are there known and spoken of … by there being inhabited by the Fitzhughs, the Randolphs, Washingtons, Carys, Grimeses or Thorntons.” These kin-neighborhoods developed gradually during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by continuing subdivision of estates.⁷

From an early date in the seventeenth century, extended families were also buried together in Virginia—a custom that was uncommon in Massachusetts. Hugh Jones noted, “ … it is customary to bury in gardens or orchards, where whole families lye interred together in a spot generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens.” This had also been the practice of country gentry in England for many centuries. In New England, extended family cemeteries rarely existed; people of every rank were normally interred in a common burying ground near the meetinghouse—and were not grouped by family until the late eighteenth century.⁸

Relations within Virginia’s extended families were not always harmonious. John Randolph, for example, looked with contempt upon many of his uncles and cousins. He wrote:

It was not necessary or even desirable that the descendants of these families should be learned or shining men, but they might have been better than mere Will Wimbles. Ah! I wish they were no worse than humble Will. But some are what I will not stain my paper with.⁹

The actual unit of residence in Virginia was not the extended family, but a more or less nuclear unit. Its physical constitution differed very much from those of Massachusetts. Many of these households (more than in New England) included servants, lodgers, and visitors, sometimes on a scale that did not exist in New England. The northern tutor Philip Fithian was astonished to learn from the wife of his employer, Mrs. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, that “this family one year with another consumes 27,000 pounds of pork and twenty beeves, 550 bushels of wheat, besides corn, four hogsheads of rum, and 150 gallons of brandy.”¹⁰ In winter, 28 large fires were kept burning constantly at Nomini Hall, and six oxen were needed every day to haul in the wood. The pattern of consumption was very similar to great country houses in the south and west of England. No household in Massachusetts operated on such a scale.¹¹

Chesapeake households also tended to include more step-relatives and wards, fewer children in the primary unit and also many more servants than in New England. This was largely because the southern colonies had higher rates of illness and death. Children died young, and marriages were cruelly shattered at an early age.¹²

In tidewater Virginia during the seventeenth century, most children—more than three-quarters in fact—lost at least one parent before reaching the age of eighteen. One consequence was to enlarge the importance of other kin; for when a nuclear family was broken in Virginia the extended family picked up the pieces. Another consequence was to change the structure of the household in a fundamental way. Historians Darrett and Anita Rutman observe that in “just about any” household one might find “orphans, half-brothers, stepbrothers and stepsisters, and wards running a gamut of ages. The father figure in the house might well be an uncle or a brother, the mother figure an aunt, elder sister, or simply the father’s ‘now-wife,’ to use the word frequently found in conveyances and wills.”¹³

Yet another consequence was to increase the emotional complexity of domestic life. The courts of the Chesapeake colonies heard many complaints of cruel step-parents, who often lived up to their reputation. The courts also dealt with bitter conflicts over step-children. In 1696, for example, one Thomas Price was presented to a county court “by the information of Hannah Price his wife for selling a child of the said Hannah which she had by another husband in the colony of Virginia.”¹⁴

There were also large numbers of servants in these households. Throughout tidewater Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, the number of servants in an average household was always much greater than in New England. As early as 1667, in Middlesex County, Virginia, male heads of households held as many as five servants and slaves on the average.¹⁵

On both sides of the Atlantic, these large households were very complex in their internal structure. Masters and house servants lived close together—often sleeping in the same room. “I called up my man, who lay in my room with me,” one English gentleman noted in his diary.¹⁶ Things were the same in Virginia, where masters, servants and visitors often shared the same room and sometimes even the same bed.¹⁷

The doors of these houses were rarely closed to strangers. A bed and a meal were offered to visitors of every rank, from the governor of the colony who was received as a royal personage to the most wretched beggar who was given a mat before the kitchen fire. There was a class of impoverished gentlemen in England and America who made “visiting” their profession. The Yankee tutor Philip Fithian met one of these threadbare gentry, who lived almost entirely upon the hospitality of others, and became a semi-permanent fixture in other men’s houses. Fithian wrote:

To day about twelve came to Mr. Carter’s Captain John Lee, a gentleman who seems to copy the character of Addison’s Will

Wimble. When I was on my way to this place I saw him up in the country at Stafford; he was then just sallying out for his winter’s Visit, & has got now so far as here, he stays, as I am told about eight, or ten weeks in the year at his own house, the remaining part he lives with his waiting man on his Friends.¹⁸

A gentleman of Virginia took pride in his hospitality, and gained honor by its display. Those who accepted his invitation tacitly agreed to place themselves under his protection and authority. This custom had long existed in England, but in the seventeenth century English country houses were rapidly closing their doors to all but invited guests, much to the regret of those who remembered the old way. In 1709, one gentleman wrote in his diary:

Died Sir Richard Brooke of Norton, Bart., an honest friendly gentleman whose hospitality justly gained him the prayers of the poor & applause of the rich … that good and ancient way of housekeeping has decayed to bring in new and more pernicious fashions.¹⁹

In Virginia the “good and ancient way” of open hospitality continued to flourish for a longer time. While it survived, a Virginia patriarch extended the word “family” to include all the people who slept under his roof—his nuclear family, visiting relatives, impecunious friends, tutors and clerks, servants and house slaves, and even total strangers who accepted his hospitality. When George Washington was at Valley Forge, he referred to his wife, servants, aides, staff and visitors as his “family,” for they had placed themselves under his fostering hand. Here was yet another clue to the meaning of “family” in Virginia. In the great houses of the Chesapeake, as in the works of Filmer, “family” was fundamentally a sphere of authority, in which everyone was placed under a patriarch’s protection.

These Virginia families tended to be more hierarchical than those of New England. Fathers and fathers-in-law were addressed not merely as “Sir” but “Worthy Sir.”²⁰ The head of the family thought of himself as a patriarch, a word that often occurred in their self-descriptions, but was not much used in Massachusetts.

William Byrd liked to compare himself with the biblical patriarchs. He wrote, “Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bondsmen & bond women and every sort of trade amongst my own servants so that I live in a kind of Independence of every one but Providence.”²¹ On another occasion, Byrd wrote, “Our comforts, like those of the good patriarchs are mostly domestique. …” Patriarchy was a word that came to be much used in Virginia, as it had been by English Royalists such as Filmer. It was rarely employed by the Puritans, and sometimes actually condemned.²²

This patriarchal idea also appeared in the law of the family. The courts of Virginia regarded the slaying of a father by his son, or the killing of a husband by his wife, or the murder of a master by his servant not as homicide but treason. The penalty was to be burnt to death—a sentence which was actually inflicted upon a woman who murdered her common-law husband in Maryland. Even these laws were thought to be insufficently severe by Robert Filmer, who wished to extend the law of petty treason to include adultery by the wife.²³

The laws of Virginia added a material base to the patriarchal idea by requiring the “masters of the several families” to “detain and keep within their hands and custody the crops and shares of all freemen within their families,” so as to ensure the payment of taxes.²⁴

The hard realities of life in the Chesapeake colonies tended to reinforce these ideals in unexpected ways, and to make the family ways of Virginia more extended and patriarchical than they might otherwise have become. Altogether, the family ways of Massachusetts and Virginia were two distinct cultural systems. Even as they shared important qualities in common, they rose from different English roots, and responded to different American environments.

Virginia Marriage Ways:
The Anglican Idea of Marriage as a Sacred Union

Marriage in Virginia was a social condition which everyone was expected to achieve. Bachelors and spinsters were condemned as unnatural and even dangerous to society. When William Byrd II was slow to remarry after the death of his wife, his female relatives urged him forward in no uncertain way. “At night,” he wrote, “the girls put a drawn sword and common prayer book open at the matrimony on my bed.”¹

Virginia and New England were alike in their ideas of universal marriage; both rejected the ideal of celibacy which was so strong in Catholic countries. But these two Protestant cultures of British America also differed in many ways as to their ideas of marriage, and their matrimonial institutions. In Massachusetts, as we have seen, marriage was thought to be a covenant which could be terminated when its terms were not fulfilled. In Virginia, matrimony was regarded as an indissoluble union—a sacred knot that could never be untied by mortal hands. Divorce in the modern sense did not exist. Only permanent separation and maintenance could be obtained, and even that release was rarely granted. In 1681 the Virginia lawyer William Fitzhugh wrote that his colony had allowed no divorces and only a single permanent separation during the previous sixty years. The sole exception was a decree given to the wife of Giles Brent after acts of physical cruelty so extreme that her life was thought in danger.²

Social rituals of matrimony reflected these ideas of marriage. Virginians followed the Church of England’s elaborate five-step process of espousal, publication of banns, religious ceremony, marriage feast, and sexual consummation. The clergy of Virginia were forbidden to conduct any marriage without the prior publication of banns. In order to marry, children under age were compelled to obtain the written permission of parents or guardians. Clandestine marriages were punished by imprisonment.³

The favored periods of marriage in Virginia were early November and late December after Christmas. In the Church of England, vows could not be exchanged during Lent (the forty weekdays from Ash Wednesday to Easter), or Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas), or the three weeks prior to the Feast of St. John. These customs were generally kept in the Chesapeake colonies.

The bride and groom in Virginia were often united in two ceremonies—both of which were condemned in Puritan New England. The first was a Christian ceremony, which was solemnized sometimes in a church or more often in the bride’s home, but always by a minister according to the laws of the Anglican Church and the Book of Common Prayer. The other ceremony was an ancient pagan practice in which the bride and groom were made to jump over a broomstick. This ritual had long been observed throughout Britain and much of western Europe, and especially in the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia. The custom of the broomstick marriage came to be widely practiced by white families throughout the southern colonies in addition to the Christian ceremony. For black slaves, it was the only type of marriage ceremony that was permitted, and rapidly acquired a special meaning in Afro-American culture.⁴

The marriage ceremony was followed by a feast, which among the great planters included a fancy ball and a house party that went on for days. Expensive gifts were given by the groom to his guests. At one marriage in Devon, six dozen guests received watches and silver ribbons as “favors.”⁵ Families of yeoman farmers celebrated on a smaller scale, but their customs were much the same. They appeared in Virginia during the mid-seventeenth century and persisted to the nineteenth and early twentieth. In the year 1686, the French traveler Durand was invited to a wedding feast in Gloucester County, Virginia:

There were at least a hundred guests, many of social standing & handsome, well-dressed ladies. Although it was November, we ate under the trees. The day was perfect. We were twenty-four at the first table. They served us so copiously with meats of all kinds that I am sure there would have been enough for a regiment of five hundred soldiers, even entirely made up of men from Languedoc. … It is the custom to take only one meal upon such occasions, at two o’clock in the afternoon. … they caroused all night long & when it was day … I did not see one who could stand straight.⁶

Before the marriage ceremony took place, espousal was also a complex social ritual which involved many people in addition to the intending couple. Amongst landed families, marriage was regarded as a union of properties as well as persons, and the destinies of entire families were at stake. One English gentleman advised another to “marry thy daughters betimes, lest they marry themselves.”⁷

Love was not thought to be a necessary precondition for these unions. Moralists insisted that love should follow marriage, but they did not believe that it would normally precede it. An English gentlemen recommended that one should “take a wife thou canst love.” He did not think in terms of marrying a woman whom one loved already. Love was not thought to be special or exclusive bond between two unique personalities—a romantic idea that did not develop until a later era. The prevailing male attitude in the seventeenth century was summarized by Sir John Oglander, who believed that “any woman may be won, and almost by any man … importunity and opportunity overcometh all women. Experientia docet [Experience teaches].”⁸

The parents had an active role in the marriage decision. Many Virginians owned an English marriage manual which commented, “Children are so much the goods, the possessions of their parents, that they cannot without a kind of theft, give away themselves without the allowance of those that have the right in them.” These ideas were carried into practice. Children who defied their parents were denied dowries and inheritance.⁹

Children were rarely made to marry against their will, but neither were they left to decide the question for themselves. Parents and guardians entered into complex negotiations to settle the size of the marriage portion or “dot” which a couple needed to make its way in the world. Written prenuptial agreements of high complexity were common not only among members of the gentry but also among yeomen and husbandmen.¹⁰ Many people were sometimes involved in these agreements. One English marriage agreement in the county of Hampshire (1676) was executed among five sets of parties—the bride, the bride’s relatives, the groom, the groom’s kinfolk, and the tenants of lands that were given to the couple. Agreements in Virginia were similar in every important way.¹¹

In both England and Virginia, many of these unions were cousin-marriages that had been arranged by elders. In England, for example, Francis Carew sent a letter to his kinsman Sir Nicholas Carew:

I have a daughter who for handsomeness, education, and competency of portion, shall be a wife for any Gentleman in England. If you propose to marry a young woman, I shall be willing to treat with you therein & shall wish good success thereto.¹²

The marriage of first cousins was condemned by New England Puritans as violating the law of consanguinity. But many an Anglican lady “changed her condition but not her name.”¹³ The same custom was common in Virginia, and fundamentally important to the cohesion of the tidewater elite. The culture of New England created a different set of matrimonial priorities.

One consequence of these customs appeared in the pattern of age at marriage. Male Virginians married at nearly the same age as in New England, twenty-five or twenty-six on the average. But brides in the Chesapeake colonies were much younger than in Puritan Massachusetts. Before 1700, most Virginia girls found a husband by the age of seventeen. Mean age at marriage was a little higher—eighteen to twenty—but below the Massachusetts average.¹⁴

Another consequence was a large difference in the ages of husbands and wives. In Virginia’s Middlesex County before 1670, grooms tended to be nearly ten years older than brides: 28.4 against 18.7. That disparity diminished to about five years in the mid-eighteenth century, but it remained much greater than in Massachusetts, where only a year or two separated the average ages of men and women at first marriage.¹⁵

Other inequalities appeared in the proportion of Virginians who married at all. Though the ideal was universal marriage, the reality was very different in seventeenth-century Virginia, because so few immigrants were females. Nearly all women were able to marry, but for men the pattern was very different. One study of estate-inventories in southern Maryland from 1658 to 1708 finds that one-quarter of men died without ever marrying. A man’s chances of finding a wife were a function of his social rank. Here was yet another system of inequality in this hierarchical society.¹⁶

The Virginia pattern developed within a culture where marriage was regarded as something to be arranged between families, something that did not require love as a precondition, something that could never be dissolved, and something that joined husband and wife in an organic and patriarchal hierarchy. Given such an idea of matrimony, it seemed right and fitting in this culture that a typical Virginia marriage in the seventeenth century should join a man of maturity to a miss in her teens. These Virginia customs were very different from the marriage ways of Massachusetts.

Virginia Gender Ways:
True-born Englishmen and Spirited “She-Britons”

On the subject of marital relations between husbands and wives, Virginia’s governor Sir William Berkeley set his colony a high example of marital felicity and domestic peace. His will testified to his love for his wife and to the happiness of their married life together. Governor Berkeley left all his property to his “dear and most virtuous wife,” declaring that “if God had blessed me with a far greater estate, I would have given it all to my most dearly beloved wife.”¹

The tone of this document captured the ideal of conjugal relations in both England and the Chesapeake—a devoted husband, a virtuous wife, and a loving life together. Many successful marriages came close to realizing these goals. Much domestic correspondence survives to tell us how deeply English-speaking men and women on both sides of the Atlantic valued a happy and loving marriage.

An outward expression of affection was also much encouraged in this culture. In the seventeenth century, husbands and wives addressed each other as “dearest heart,” “sweet spouse,” “my most sweet heart.” The language of love changed during the eighteenth century, but the custom remained the same.²

Domestic realities, unhappily, were often different. In every culture there are happy marriages and unhappy ones. But historians of the family have remarked upon the extent of marital discord among the gentry of Virginia and southern England. One leading historian, Julia Cherry Spruill, testified that her sources “reveal a surprisingly large amount of general domestic dissatisfaction” throughout the southern colonies—more than in New England. Much strife also occurred within marriages that were generally happy.³

A case in point was the successful but very stormy marriage between William Byrd II and Lucy Parke Byrd. In this relationship, which lasted ten years (1706-16), Byrd acted the role of the domestic patriarch. He disposed of his wife’s estate without consulting her, kept all his property in his own hands, and forbade her even to borrow a book from his library without permission. He also interfered in her domestic management, and infuriated her by dictating the smallest details of her appearance even to the shape of her eyebrows, which she was compelled to pluck according to his pleasure. At table one day, he and his male guests entirely consumed the best dish and left nothing for his wife to eat. She did not hide her outraged feelings.

Lucy Byrd, for her part, was the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke, a high-born Virginia gentleman who later became governor of the Leeward Islands. By all accounts she was an exceptionally beautiful, proud and headstrong lady, with strong passions, a stubborn will, and a mind of her own. She did not submit meekly

William Byrd II (1674-1744) of Westover came of an armigerous family of London goldsmiths who were connected by marriage to elites in counties near the English metropolis. These ties were reinforced by the marriage between Byrd’s parents, William Byrd I and Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd, which anchored the family firmly at the center of the Chesapeake elite. His secret diary, kept in shorthand for many years, is a major source for the cultural history of Virginia, and especially enlightening on the subject of gender, sex, marriage and domestic life. It records in elaborate detail the acts and prejudices of a Virginia patriarch throughout his mature life in both England and America.

Lucy Parke Byrd, beautiful, sensual, imperious and high-spirited, was the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke and the first wife of William Byrd II. Her domestic life is known in more intimate detail than that of any woman in early Virginia, mainly through the medium of her husband’s diary. That source describes a stormy union, but one that was also loving and supportive. It ended prematurely when Lucy Byrd died of smallpox in 1716. “How proud I was of her,” her grieving husband wrote, “and how severely am I punished for it. … All pronounced her an honor to Virginia.” This sketch follows an unfinished painting which was interrupted by her death.

to her husband’s rule. In consequence, Lucy Byrd and her husband quarreled frequently, as William Byrd confided in his secret shorthand diary:

[April 5, 1709] I was ill treated by my wife, at whom I was out of humor. …

[April 6] My wife and I disagreed about employing a gardener. … My wife and I continued very cool.

[April 7] I reproached my wife with ordering the old beef to be kept and the fresh beef used first, contrary to good management, on which she was pleased to be very angry … then my wife came and begged my pardon and we were friends again. …

[April 8] My wife and I had another foolish quarrel about my saying she listened on top of the stairs … she came soon after and begged my pardon.

[April 9] My wife and I had another scold about mending my shoes, but it was soon over by her submission.⁴

The most violent quarrels were about the house servants, whom Mrs. Byrd abused with a sadistic cruelty that shocked even her husband, who was no humanitarian. One domestic battle occurred when Lucy Byrd ordered a little slave girl named Jenny to be burned with a hot iron for a minor fault. On another occasion, William Byrd wrote:

I had a terrible quarrel with my wife concerning Jenny [whom] I took away from her when she was beating her with the tongs. She lifted up her hands to strike me but forbore to do it. She gave me abundance of bad words and endeavored to strangle herself, but I believe in jest only. However, after acting the mad woman for a long time she was passive again.⁵

These terrible scenes often ended as suddenly as they began, and within moments husband and wife became “good friends” again, strolling arm and arm in the garden, and talking so merrily together that in one such tête à tête with her husband Mrs. Byrd

“burst herself laughing—” splitting open the seams of her dress in high hilarity.⁶

Often a bitter quarrel ended in a bout of love-making. One furious battle began when Mrs. Byrd flogged a slave in the presence of a house guest—a major breach of etiquette in Virginia where slaves were supposed to be beaten after the guests had gone home. It ended in bed the next morning, when Byrd noted, “I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning to bring my wife into temper again and rogered her by way of reconciliation.”⁷

The rhythm of love-making in the Byrd household was less legato than staccato. For long periods, husband and wife abstained from sex with one another—sometimes because of pregnancy or childbirth; more commonly because one or the other was ill with malaria, dysentery, enteritis or some endemic Chesapeake complaint. But when both husband and wife were in good health, they made love frequently and spontaneously—once on top of a billiard table after an afternoon game. Sex seems to have been deeply satisfying to them both. Byrd noted once in his diary that “I gave my wife a flourish, in which she had a good deal of pleasure.”⁸

There were also moments of quiet affection, which they cherished best of all. When Byrd fell ill with malaria, his wife gave him his quinine bark, and “looked after me with a great deal of tenderness.”⁹ After a painful episode of dysentery, William Byrd recorded that his wife “anointed my bum with hot linseed oil,” and made him feel much better.¹⁰ When Mrs. Byrd fell seriously ill (as frequently she did), and when her son died and she suffered paroxysms of grief, her husband was constantly at her side. He wrote that “I comforted her as well as I could.” This was a stormy but happy marriage. It ended suddenly in 1716, when Lucy Byrd died of smallpox in London. William Byrd was shattered by her loss.¹¹

Every Virginia marriage had its own history, and no two were quite alike. But many of these chronicles were filled with strife—some much more so than the Byrds. These domestic conflicts were elaborately patterned. The trouble commonly arose from deep contradictions in the gender ways of Virginia. Perhaps the most common cause of trouble was money. Men were taught to believe that they were masters of their households. But women often possessed property of their own, and wished to make economic decisions independent of their husbands. An example was the disastrous marriage of Colonel John Custis of Arlington, one of the most powerful men in Virginia, and Frances Parke Custis, the daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke and the sister of Lucy Parke Byrd. The strife in this union seems to have arisen mainly from disputes over property. Mrs. Custis was a woman of wealth, which her husband had the right to manage as he wished. But he also had the duty to pass her property intact to her children. An elaborate marriage contract existed, but it became an invitation to struggle between husband and wife. So bitter was this strife that Col. Custis ordered that a record of his domestic misery should be carved upon his gravestone.¹²

For years, this unhappy couple refused to speak to one another, communicating only through their slaves. Long silences were punctuated by outbursts of rage so wild and violent as to border upon madness. After one such tempest, Col. Custis surprised his lady by inviting her to go driving with him. They rode in sullen silence through the Virginia countryside, until suddenly the colonel turned his carriage out of the road, and drove straight into Chesapeake Bay.

“Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” the lady asked, as the horses began to swim.

“To hell, Madam,” he replied.

“Drive on,” said she, “any place is better than Arlington.”¹³

Domestic conflicts over property were common in this culture. In Virginia, as in England, it was not unusual for husbands and wives to keep written cash accounts with one another. Colonel and Mrs. Custis bound themselves to do so by their marriage contract. So also did English gentlemen such as the Dorset Squire John Richards of Warmwell, who gave his wife an annual allowance, and often found himself in the humiliating position of having to borrow money back from her:

Altogether property appears to have been the leading source of marital discord in seventeenth-century Virginia—in conflicts that rose directly from contradictions in the gender ways of this culture.

A second source of marital strife was sex, on which there were cultural contradictions of another kind. Men were bound to fidelity by their marriage vows. But the unwritten customs of that culture created a different standard of behavior, as we shall see below. The diaries of the English gentleman John Richards and the Virginia patriarch William Byrd documented in melancholy detail the domestic conflicts that arose when both men engaged in sexual adventures. Richards, for example, had a liaison with a lady called M. in his diary. One day he wrote:

This evening A [his wife Alice] was angry as usual about M telling me that I loved her more than her, and that because of ill-treatment in this house she had often thought of killing herself.¹⁵

Richards’ diary became a running record of domestic strife between husband and wife. His wife Alice did not meekly accept her lot. She was “enraged to the last degree, and roared all the while,” forcing her husband to sleep in the dining room, and some nights even in the cellar. The journal which recorded these events was normally kept in English, but when things went wrong, Richards switched to French, and when they went very wrong he wrote in Italian.¹⁶

Another cause of domestic conflict rose from the politics of family life. Here again, the gender ways of this culture were contradictory. A wife was bound by her marriage vows to obey her husband. An apparently male essayist in the Virginia Gazette laid down rules of “matrimonial felicity” for the instruction of wives: “Never dispute with him … if any altercation or jars happen, don’t separate the bed, whereby the animosity will increase … read often the matrimonial service, and overlook not the important word OBEY.”¹⁷

But the unwritten customs of the culture encouraged women to demand more freedom and respect. In 1687, for example, a spirited lady named Sarah Harrison married Dr. James Blair, the future founder of William and Mary College. When the minister

Sarah Harrison disrupted her own wedding ceremony in 1687. When asked if she would love, cherish and obey her husband, she responded firmly, “No obey,” and persisted in that answer until her husband agreed to marry on her own terms. Few women in Virginia were prepared to go quite so far, but many had a strong sense of their English liberties, and a determination to defend them. At the same time, the men of Virginia were raised to a tradition of high patriarchy. The domestic results were often explosive.

recited the marriage vows, she startled the congregation by responding, “No obey!” Three times the vows were repeated. Three times Sarah Harrison answered with increasing firmness “NO OBEY,” until Dr. Blair finally agreed to take his chances and the wedding went forward without any promise of obedience. Their married life together proved to be deeply unhappy. Some years later, William Byrd noted in his diary:

Went to the Commissary’s, where … I was very much surprised to find Mrs. Blair drunk, which is growing pretty common with her, and her relations disguise it under the name of consolation.¹⁸

Few women were as outspoken as Sarah Harrison. But many resisted by other means. Yet most were compelled to obey their husbands, often much against their will, in matters which they cared deeply about. Thus William Byrd compelled his wife to send her sick baby Otway to her mother-in-law, who lived at a plantation which was thought to be more healthy. The wife replied,

I am very sorry you have limited Poor, sweet Otway, so that he has but a short time to stay with me. Poor dear babe … But Sir, your Orders must be obeyed whatever reluctance I find thereby.¹⁹

Here was a fertile source of domestic strife.

A particular cause of trouble was the use of physical violence and verbal abuse by husbands against wives, and sometimes by wives against husbands as well. Here again the customs of the country were inconsistent. Men were expected to exercise authority over their wives, and were encouraged by custom to use moderate “chastisement” from time to time. But wife-beating was thought to be dishonorable and was punished in both England and American by practices variously called “rough music,” the “charivari,” and “riding skimmington.” A Berkshire gentleman explained:

A custom almost universally prevails in villages and rural districts, whenever a quarrel takes place between a man and his wife and the husband resorts to violence against his wife, for the laborers and the idle inhabitants of the parish and neighborhood to assemble together with flags, horns, bells, pieces of iron and all kinds of sonorous instruments with which they resort to the house where the unfortunate couple resides and create all the noice and disturbance in their power, much to the chagrin of the unhappy husband and greatly to the annoyance of the quiet and orderly inhabitants. … This recreation among the country people is called “rough music.”

The sound of this “rough music” carried for miles across the countryside. Sometimes it continued every night for several weeks.²⁰

Precisely the same punishment was also used against wives who abused their husbands. In one such case, a Wiltshire mob punished both spouses by rough music, and then assaulted both the man and wife together. In this instance, the local gentry prevented the mob from ducking the woman, but by and large country gentlemen looked upon rough music with approval. At Montacute Hall, one of the great Wessex houses, Sir Edward Phelips ordered for the central decoration of the great hall a plaster relief of a “Skimmington ride.” This was not a device which arose spontaneously from rural communities; it was nourished by rural elites.²¹

Yet another tension in gender roles developed from ideas about love. Husbands and wives were expected to love one another—but not overmuch. Landon Carter complained of a Virginia lady who was “more fond of her husband perhaps than the politeness of the day allows for.”²² Even in happy marriages, the love that men felt for their wives was not a love between equals, and sometimes it seemed to be less a love for a person than for a valuable piece of property. One gentleman wrote when his wife died:

All grief will allow me to say of her is, that she was known to be a humble pious, virtuous, discreet woman, an ornament to her sex, and a crown to her husband. But woe is me the crown has fallen from my head.²³

A further source of conflict arose from a confusion of roles for women in Virginia. They were expected to be feminine, refined, delicate, gracious, modest, virtuous. At the same time, all but the most privileged of women were also expected to do farm work and even field labor as well as housewifery. Women of every estate were required to be resourceful but self-effacing. Sir John Oglander celebrated his “most careful, thriving wife, who wore no splendor, never wore a silk gowne, but for her credit when she went abroad in company and never to please herself.”²⁴

There were even theological disputes in Virginia on questions of gender. Some members of this culture shared a deeper sense of spiritual inequality between men and women than commonly existed in Massachusetts. At a rich planter’s table as late as 1773, the northern tutor Philip Fithian was startled to hear an argument on the question of whether women had souls. That ancient conundrum had long since been laid to rest among the Puritans. But it still remained a topic of debate in Virginia.²⁵

All of these conflicts had a common denominator. In this society of English-speaking people, the rights which Christian Englishmen claimed for themselves were a standing reproach to the status of women in their society. A free-born English gentleman was in many ways the unfittest of all males to argue his wife into a condition of dependency. By an early date in the eighteenth century some of the ladies of Virginia were thinking of themselves as “She-Britons,” and demanding a share of the rights that their husbands enjoyed. As early as 1736, the Virginia Gazette published an angry poem called “The Lady’s Complaint,” which captured the deepest contradiction in the genderways of Virginia:

They plainly can their Thoughts disclose,

Whilst ours must burn within:

We have got Tongues, and Eyes, in vain,

And Truth from us is sin. …

Then Equal Laws let Custom find,

And neither Sex oppress;

More Freedom give to Womankind,