The Puritans in America

There are two basic ways of looking at the British expatriates whose New England adventures form the core of what is remembered of America's pre-revolutionary founding.

One perspective, that of the Pilgrims as the steeple-crowned progenitors of our national founding myth, Thanksgiving, has lost a lot of ground in our culture, and for good cause: there's little that is historically or culturally accurate about this popular perception of these so-called "freedom men" (as the perennially twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan once referred to the Puritan John Winthrop) who knew they really had it made once they got their hungry mitts on what (according to Benjamin Franklin) should have been our national bird. This myth was begun innocently enough, in a way, by Abraham Lincoln as a way of boosting the nation's spirits in the midst of the Civil War, but the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, as myths are so often wont to do.

The second perspective, established, oddly enough, a few decades before the Civil War, has a more solid grounding in historical fact and is borne out, more or less, by the voluminous written legacy the Puritans left behind in the form or their sermons, journals, captivity narratives, letters, and histories. This is the notion of our pre-founding fathers as dour, grim-visaged killjoys who (counter to the Thanksgiving myth's claim that they came here seeking "religious freedom") were so narrowly and single-mindedly devoted to their retro-Old Testament God that any aberration in the theory or method of worship could be grounds for banishment. These are the Puritans (e.g., Cotton Mather) who referred to the burning of witches at the stake as "miracles," the Puritans (Mather again) who expressed delight when an earthquake struck Jamaica and killed lots of people there, those people being, from the Puritan perspective, iniquitous and therefore fully deserving of their own tragic demise. These people also branded Hester Prynne with a red-hot letter A on the front of her otherwise dun-colored smock for committing an offense that would, in a more sensible era, the narrator points out, be merely the subject of derision, not of legal action.

Or so the story goes. If Lincoln was the founder of the Thanksgiving myth, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the one who has done the most to popularize the opposite perspective. And though the 19th century Dark Romantic view of the Puritans can withstand a lot of scrutiny, it too needs to be qualified. A little bit, at least.

Think of all of the millions of American high school students (past and present) who have read The Scarlet Letter. Think of the millions more who were supposed to have read it and who, thanks to Cliff's Notes or SparkNotes, scraped by (just barely) on the unit test over the novel. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, greatly admired by students for its intricate prose style, which boasts such gems as this one, from the first chapter of the narrative proper: "Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand." This is, for Hawthorne, a short sentence, but it still manages to get its point across: even on a good day, these are clearly the most anal-retentive people in history. Hawthorne's narrator in The Scarlet Letter (who also happens to be named Nathaniel Hawthorne) takes every opportunity he can to point out how narrow-minded and somber these people are. Even the Puritan children are stiff and joyless, their insults hurled at Hester's daughter, Pearl, being marked by the stilted formality of children who aren't really children at all, having had anything that might resemble child-like joy sapped out of them by the dry stern-ness of their parental units. This Hawthornian perspective was in the 20th century the beneficiary of a supplemental booster thanks to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, read or supposedly read by a few million more students. The result is that there are more people who have read 19th and 20th century perspectives on the Puritans than there are people who have actually read the Puritan literature itself.

Clearly, the Hawthornian view does have much to go on: the banishments of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Englishmen's land grab and the near-genocide of the Pequot Indians, the witch trials, and pretty much every sour word Cotton Mather ever committed to paper. Of particular bearing to Hawthorne was the role that his own great-ancestor played in the witch trials -- and Hawthorne's own subsequnt feelings of inherited guilt. These things have to be balanced out, though, with a broader sense of historical context. Back in Europe, Protestants and Catholics were still killing each other at every convenient opportunity, and the violence there makes Williams' and Hutchinson's banishments seem progressive by comparison. As far as the witch trials, we can compare the dozens of witch executions in 17th century America with hundreds or even thousands in Europe. The land grab was brutal, but it was no different from what Europeans were doing in every other corner of the globe, so is it fair to single the Puritans out for the common crime of the era? Should we expect them to be any different from their contemporaries elsewhere? Perhaps we should, because they claimed to be creating a "city upon a hill" here--a model Christian community for all the world to follow, populated by practitioners of mercy and goodness. We would have to be pretty historically naive, though, to assume that they ought to have succeeded without spilling blood.

All of which is to say that the English who gradually came to dominate New England in the 17th century were pretty typical Europeans of their day. They were not Americans; the concept of an American identity did not exist yet and wouldn't really for another hundred years.

What good can we say of these people? Despite the fact that they were religious zealots, they were also rationalists. They were thinking people, and they were highly literate, and they brought the art of self-reflection to a new level. That's why we remember them (and not those Virginians to the south) as the founders of American culture: the Puritans wrote obsessively both of the otherworldliness of divine truth and of the minutiae of the everyday. Sometimes the two worlds intersected when Divine Providence saw fit to suffer a sign bespeaking the nature of His will. For a people who believed in predestination but had no other way of assessing what God had in store for them, these omens became the currency of their spiritual lives. Max Weber understood as much when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Many Puritan women, even, were educated, such as the most charming and sly Puritan writer of them all, Ann Bradstreet, America's founding poetess. As an exercise in comparison, consider Ann Bradstreet's "Contemplations" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature side-by-side. Doctrines aside, both documents make the same point about nature as evidence of God's greatness (Bradstreet) or of the greatness of the "Universal Being" (Emerson). For evidence of Bradstreet's aforementioned slyness and charm, see "The Prologue" or Bradstreet's poem dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.

The Puritans were also proto-democratic in their own way, although they would certainly not have identified themselves as such. They were sticklers for the rule of law, as all Englishmen not wearing a crown have tended to be. They were robust mercantilists. All that was necessary to add to the mix at that point was a healthy dash of Enlightenment-era belief in the inherent freedom of humankind, a tonic (or antidote, perhaps) to assuage the presumed guilt of original sin, and you could really go somewhere with that formula. As soon as the pendulum swings a little to the godless proto-scientific rationalist side, you have the necessary preconditions for the kind of ideas endorsed by the founding fathers of our political heritage. Much of American Enlightenment thought is reactionary to Puritan and Great Awakening theology, but there is also much in the American Enlightenment that draws on foundations established by the Puritans.

Though in many ways the bearers of a typically European worldview, the Puritans did have a couple of things that distinguished them, especially their willingness to risk life and fortune for the right to pursue their own collective (and narrowly defined) religious beliefs. And though they were not directly the founders of our nation politically, we are right to look to them as originators of so many qualities, good and bad, that still define America today.