“We Solemnly enter into a Covenant with God, and one with another,” wrote the members of the Hassanamisco congregation in their founding agreement. How long could this aspiration of unity last? Image courtesy of Lori Rogers-Stokes.
In the third presentation of our 2021 fall series, The Common Good, independent scholar and author Lori Rogers-Stokes exposes the faultlines threatening the Puritan endeavour.
The Puritans’ great achievement was to establish the framework for a just society. They created the first coherent and remarkably fair code of law for English settlers, and built a proto-democracy that their descendants would be able to call upon and expand in the late 1700s to create the United States.
Ironically, achievement of that legal society was also the core of Puritan New England’s failure: a failure to honor the letter or the spirit of their own laws, and a literal failure to practice what they preached, even among themselves. Their congregational churches represented both the pinnacle of the Puritan vision in practice in America - and the antithesis of what their society came to prize most.
Puritan society in New England was torn apart by competition for what were perceived as infinite riches. Even as the churches worked to preserve communities based on reciprocal relationships of loving kindness, the socio-political world around them became more corrupted by land-grabbing, in-fighting, and war. Much is made of the fury that the Puritans directed against others – indigenous peoples, the Catholic French in Canada and Catholic Spanish to the south – and with good reason.
But competition for land drove New England Puritans to turn inwards, against each other, as they battled their brethren in the courts and on the ground to acquire ever more wealth. The churches could hold this in-fighting at bay for only so long before their very refusal to countenance the fight for wealth marginalized them in their own society. The chance of obtaining riches drew more and more Puritan settlers away from the goal of dedicating themselves to creating a godly community that rejected individual ambition.Join Lori Rogers-Stokes for an exploration of this fracture at the heart of Puritan society in New England and its disastrous consequences for the commonwealth they attempted to create.
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Lori Rogers-Stokes, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era New England manuscript church records available through digitization and transcription. She studies the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during which time forms of church and state were put in place that would shape American history for centuries to come. Lori is also the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She is currently working on a new book comparing the ideal of communal governance in the ideal Congregational church with the governance through kinship practiced by native peoples in New England.
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Dr. Francis J. Bremer is professor emeritus of history at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships for study and teaching at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England and at Trinity College in Dublin. He has published 19 books dealing with early American history, most recently One Small Candle: The Story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England (2020), and Of Plimoth Plantation by William Bradford: A New 400th Anniversary Edition, edited and introduced by Francis J. Bremer and Kenneth P. Minkema (2020). He is currently working on an edition of William Bradford’s “Dialogues,” Poetry, and other Writings with Kenneth Minkema and David Lupher. He is editing a Handbook of Puritanism along with Greg Salazar and Ann Hughes for Oxford University Press. He is also working on a study of the role of women in Puritanism in the Atlantic world.