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A
Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe to bring the Past Alive. It's the mid-1600s in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, about a half day's journey from Boston. We've been riding in this cart for hours, following a narrow dirt track through woodlands and marsh. The horses are winded, never mind the riders, but they're ahead. Finally, we see the village in the noonday sun. Dedham is a planned Puritan community. The buildings are modest but well sited and well constructed. Simple proper lines, timber framed houses clustered closely together, congregated, if you will, around the town green where at the center of the community physically, civically and spiritually, is the meeting house, the largest structure of all. Around town, members of the community move about men, women, children, dressed in the simplest rural garments, some with black coats, broad hats. A number of women wear broad white collars. Among them all, we are kindly if somberly greeted. Not many visitors are seen so far out in this rough country passing empty stocks, we're reminded of the strict laws that keep a clean morality front and center in this community. All in all, it is an ordinary day in an extraordinary place, in a village carved from the wilderness, where lives and livelihoods are led and where souls may be purified. Hi, I'm Don Wildman and this is American History. Hit. Mention of the Puritans often conjures ideas of dark clothing, strict rules, witch trials. But how true is this singular idea? In this episode, I'm going to be joined by historian Laurie Rogers Stokes to find out who the Puritans were, what did they believe in, and just what life would have been like for these early colonists. Hi Laurie. Welcome to American History. Hit. How are you?
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B
I'm good, thanks. Glad to be here.
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A
I love this kind of conversation because these terms of history that are so stereotypical, Puritan people use it all the time, but they don't really know what this means. So I'm excited about figuring this out. Simple question. What do we mean by a Puritan?
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B
That word is such a great place to start because it's a word they never used, these people we call Puritans. It was a taunt that was used against them in England. And it's a word that, you know, as so often happens, some insult Word that's very located in a specific moment in time that no one remembers. The context round has lasted. But basically the short answer is they were English people who were trying to reform the Church of England, the Anglican Church, starting in the reign of Elizabeth I, really, and continuing right up through the middle of the 17th century. And so that's the nutshell of who they were.
- [03:37]
A
They meant to purify. And that was the Church of England, the Anglican Church. The idea was to do that, was not to have to leave England, but for some reason that does not work out as well as they hope. And so settling a foreign land becomes a priority for them. English Protestant movement is going on. Very important to understand that this is all happening over the 15, 1600s. It really sets this whole thing up. What are their ideals of religion? Simpler. Worship, a piety of behavior. Right?
- [04:06]
B
Yes. They are nothing without understanding, you know, their religious experience. In England, they were Protestants, which was for a long time. Well, it wasn't illegal by the time they were really acting, but it was treason to challenge the practices of the Anglican Church because the monarch was head of that church. And what they wanted to do was completely separate the civil government from religious practice. And they did want it to be much more of the traditional, what we recognize as Protestant, based on individual spiritual seeking, individual Bible reading, learned ministers who would preach, you know, things that were immediately applicable to your own life. And they wanted to just have it be very ground up. You know, everything about religion in Europe was very top down, from the King to the archbishop down to you. They wanted to totally reverse that. Every congregation rules itself, makes its own decisions. And just to locate that in people's authentic experience rather than. Let's open our books to page 16 because it's April 2nd. Then we have to read this part.
- [05:16]
A
Yes. The more organic aspect of religion in our lives, trying to revive that which a lot of people were trying to do back then. But you've mentioned something already that's so important, the separation of religion from government. I mean, what had really taken place over the centuries, certainly from the Catholic Church onward, was this sort of autocracy from government that as people became more enlightened, so to speak, they became more attuned to individual rights. All of this is what contributes to this Protestant movement. So that's important to understand that the Puritans prioritize the separation of religion and government. That's going to play a very important part. The Pilgrims on the Mayflower were Puritan, Right.
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B
They were separatists. So while the Puritans Were trying to reform the Anglican church and stay within it. The separatists had separated, they'd given up. They said, we're founding our own church. That will have nothing to do with it. And there was a lot of bad blood between the two groups when they got to this place.
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A
Right. But similar outlook on life, Right?
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B
Yes.
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A
Yes. Okay. And this contributes to what becomes the Great Migration. 1629 to 1643, to be exact. Thousands and thousands, something like 20,000 Puritans end up leaving England for Massachusetts. Why Massachusetts exactly? Remind me.
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B
Massachusetts was the first place that. That first Winthrop fleet landed in 1630. It was five ships, a lot of people. So that became like that shawmut Boston area was like the center from which people radiated out. And because it was first it established so many civil and religious practices that people loved, wanted to be part of. That's where you went. If you wanted to leave a corrupted system in England and walk right into one, that was better, Rather than having to build it up from scratch on your own.
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A
With a really nice harbor, as a matter of fact, and a big cape right there, it was a good place to land. And straight across, full of cod. Yeah, lots of cod. Of course, this is about money as well, about staking your life in this new land. It's both religious, primarily religious, I suppose, spiritually anyway. But this is an enormous investment opportunity for them as well. I want to understand from this conversation eventually the. The mercantile aspect of puritanism and. And how they went about structuring that. This migration is the largest exodus from England in its entire history. This is a major bunch of people that leave at a time when it's really hard to leave. You know, we can't forget that you can only put so many people onto a ship. Is that a good indication of how passionate they were about this, about building a new civilization?
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B
Yes. You know, that was the debate in England, like, should we really leave England to be destroyed by God for failing to worship him properly? It was a huge move. People considered it very seriously. It could bankrupt you. You had to sell everything just to get the money to provision your passage over on a ship. So they were really driven at that point by fear that if they stayed in England, where true religion was not practiced, they would be punished. And by that excitement, like, we know what we want to do, we have a plan. We could just go to this place and do it.
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A
That's cool. Yeah. They are primarily middle class farmers, tradesmen, mostly from the east of England. Am I right? Why that area?
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B
Yeah, this mostly East Anglia. With a subset from Kent. Most of them were not actually farmers. Some of them, like John Winthrop, who's probably the most famous, were landholders. Like, they were, like, yeoman landholders, but they weren't out there plowing the fields, which would be a big problem for them when they finally went to New England. Yeah, they were mostly tradespeople, professional people, lawyers, teachers, that sort of thing. So they were people educated enough to read, because nothing was more important than reading the Bible.
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A
Right. And what's also unique about this is that they're traveling in families. I mean, yes, you have to understand this is a really difficult thing to do, to get on a boat and go across the ocean at this time, for sure. So this is the world of, you know, sailors and mariners. You know, those were the people who did this sort of thing. Fishermen, but not family groups. And this is the beginning of that whole idea of taking your entire life with your little children, having children at sea sometimes, and moving them across to a complete wilderness as far as they were concerned.
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B
Yes. And that is actually one strong proof that their motivation was not primarily financial. Because if you want to just go make money, you just send men who are going to do work and colonize and cut down timber and find gold and make money. You don't bring little kids who have to be cared for. So they were never coming back. Like, we're leaving forever. We're going to found a completely new commonwealth. Don't tell anyone in England. And so we have to have our families.
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A
Wow. What do you mean by don't tell anybody in England? What was that mentality?
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B
Well, they had a really unique charter that said, look, do whatever you want. England was in such turmoil at that time, politically, they couldn't oversee it. They said, do whatever you want as long as you don't make any laws repugnant to the law of England. Now, there was no written legal code in England, so they did whatever they wanted. But they made sure to look like they were still extremely loyal. Like, oh, we're not setting up our own country with our own rules that are different than yours. Absolutely not.
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A
Well, the audience is getting this audio, but I can see you on my zoom here, and I saw you wince when I said money making, because that. What I meant was this corporation that they end up creating, which is really different from the other colonies. It ends up being a very unique society in New England because of this relationship, this unique relationship with England and. And this ability to do what they want and create this whole sort of world unto themselves, which ends up being a big problem in the 18th century when, you know, things start to get abhorrent to people with taxes and so forth. But anyway, that's down the road. But that's what I meant about how do they eventually see themselves differently that way? Speaking of see themselves, just the visual. When I think of Puritans, I think of dark clothing, you know, white collars, the whole. It's kind of a Dutch thing, isn't it? They look like these old Dutch paintings.
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B
Yeah, they kind of do. No group, perhaps, well, aside from indigenous people, has suffered as much from 19th century illustration as the Puritans. They actually dress like anyone else in Europe would have dressed at that time. Dark colors were cheaper. It's cheaper to dye something indigo than to have red and yellow and green and blue. It was just more expensive. But if you look at all the laws that they passed about trying to tone down, like, don't be wearing so much lace. Don't be. Think always have a case where someone had their lace out drying and someone stole it. Don't have to have, you know, 12 different suits in 12 different colors. You know, so they. They liked all those things as much as anybody else. And I think it's just that image that they were so stern. And once you read, like, don't have 12 different suits and 12 colors, you think, oh, they hated color.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then the myth gets born.
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A
Well, the idea is that there's some sort of strict code of behavior. That's the. That's the stereotype of this sort of thing. I mean, having grown up in the Quaker world, I know that, you know, you were told simplicity matters, and. And you're not supposed to dress in anything. Not anything, but keep it simple, you know? But the idea was to simplify your life, not to deliver this sort of draconian, you know, code of. Of behavior. And I think that's what you're saying here, right there. It was recommended is what you're saying.
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B
Yeah, it's like your first focus should be on your spiritual seeking, and you do what you have to do. You're raising your kids, you're farming. You're, you know, you're doing all these other things, and you don't have to dress. They did not believe that the way you looked represented your spiritual state. Like, oh, I have to look dour because I'm serious about God. But it's just like, if you have five seconds to spare, you'd be thinking about your spiritual journey rather than, should I get another suit?
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A
How interesting. And of course, it was very class driven. Right. I mean, if you could afford rich velvets and things like that, you probably went out and got them if you wanted to. It wasn't against the law to do that. But. But because people aren't that rich, they're mostly, you know, working on smaller wages, they're doing plainer clothing, and that kind of moved down the way in New England. Where did they live? I mean, obviously Boston. But did they stretch out around that region a lot as Puritans, or was that later on as. As things became more varied?
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B
Oh, that was absolutely the Puritans. It was. It's amazing how quickly it radiated out. I think by like five years in 1635, there were eight towns outside of Boston. Because when they got here, they were astounded by what they perceived as unlimited natural resources. They could not believe it. They had come from such a culture of scarcity in England that, you know, everybody. And because of things we'll get into later, with the setup of the corporation, everybody got multiple parcels of land. You had some salt marsh, some woodlot, some farms, some homestead, some meadow. And if you've got, as you said, 30,000 people coming in who each get multiple hundreds of acres of land, you can found a town like Dedham outside Boston. And the next year, people are saying, we've run out of land. We need to found another town. So the expansion was rapid.
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A
Right. And each family gets its own house. That's incredible. They don't have to live on top of each other like they do in Europe. It's unbelievable. They followed the path. We still have them today. The meeting house in the middle, which functions both as a church and a governing a town council area. Right. And then the houses, et cetera. That New England tradition begins with the Puritans.
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B
Yes. To get permission from the General Court, which was their legislature, to found a town, you had to prove that you had enough families to move into it and really settle it. And you had to promise that you would build one big building in the center, that would be the meeting house and the place where your town government would meet and maybe where the school was. So you had to guarantee you would do those things.
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A
How did that meeting house reflect the priorities of the. How is that an expression of what they believed in?
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B
What's. I think the major and most interesting thing is they would never have called it a church. To them, a church was people who were gathered together and the building you were in was meaningless. Now, they had come from Europe, where the most important thing was to beautify and Decorate your church building. From cathedral to local parish church. It had to be beautiful and special and it was sacred. It's where God lived. They had the complete. Like, we don't care what building it is. It could be someone's barn. The place is not sacred. What happens in the place when we come together is sacred. So they didn't care that there was no dedicated building to meet in. And this, again, was such a huge change from what they had.
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A
But it's ironic, since you say separation of church and state, that they're doing both things in the same building.
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B
Well, not at the same time.
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A
That's right. Interesting. Speaking of government, how were they governed? How did they set that system up? And what was the relationship with the Crown?
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B
Immediately, they began to put this in place. The speed at which they worked was astounding. As I say, the big Winthrop fleet landed in 1630 in the summer. By the next year, they had already put a lot of this in place. They wanted representative government. They said, we have all agreed to come here because we have the same goals, and so we have to all have an equal say. And one of the first things they did in 1630 was the Massachusetts Bay Company said, land ownership is no longer about being a shareholder, a stakeholder in the company. We're throwing it open to everybody. And since everyone's a landowner, everyone can vote and everyone's going to vote for their magistrates. So these would be like. It was kind of the combo of the legislature and the judicial system at the time. And every, you know, this quickly evolved. By 1634, you have the system that would remain in place to this day of each town has its own town government with popularly elected reps. Each town votes for two reps to go to Boston to the General Court. The legislature, it's all representative from the ground up. And again, they could say to England, like, look, we have to do it this way because we don't have the established structures that you have in England with centuries old courts and marriages, aristocracy. We have to let communications, we have to let everybody do it themselves. And again, England at that point was like, just send your taxes time to think about it.
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A
Yeah, they're bound by a social covenant, right? I mean, the Mayflower Compact in Plymouth is the fundamental agreement. But over time, this begins to fracture, like all systems do. Right. We have this assumed order of things, but there are people who violate that order and start to get, you know, the cracks start to show. I'm talking about Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, those kinds of groups over what period of Time, does that start to happen?
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B
Those were both very early. You know, the Anne Hutchinson Crisis was in 1636. Roger Williams was an ongoing issue for a while. But really they are exceptions that prove the rule. Because these were people who did not appreciate that system that I just described. Like, no, not everybody should have a say. They wanted more of a hierarchy. Actually. Roger Williams went on an incredible journey from like, kind of average guy to someone who completely removed himself from society and thought everyone in the world except him and his wife was sinful. To the Roger Williams we know today of, like, beginnings of religious tolerance, et cetera. So he special case.
- [19:26]
A
I want to start understanding how this is not the cliche that we think of. It is how this Puritan religion expresses itself through individual lives. How much are they expected to abide by the rules? I know you've already said there, it's more slippery than that, but I want to understand. Church attendance is mandatory, I imagine, mandatory. If you didn't, you would get in trouble, right? To miss regularly, you would be fined. How much of that was the reality? Because from what I'm hearing from you, there's a much more upbeat feeling to this society than we tend to feel
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B
it is more upbeat. I will preface it by saying the story of human nature is that people are able to do really good things for their group, for people who look like them. So when I say all these positive things about the Puritans, they're real. They didn't apply it to anybody else, including indigenous people, the people they enslaved, et cetera. But if we're focusing on the Puritans, this is where they had one principle that went into the civil government and into religion, which is we are. You know, the society was very homogenous. 99.9% of the people there were on board. Because you didn't go to New England if you weren't on board with the Puritan way. Everybody knew that's how it was like, we're all here for the same reason. We're all trying to get the same things done, and so we can give the individual a lot of liberty because we know that we're all, as you said, their word was covenant. We're all in a covenant together. So what they did was set up rules for church and for state. And yeah, they enforced them, but they were also extremely flexible. So, yes, meeting house worship attendance was mandatory. You had to attend worship services. And again, most people were on board with that three times a week. And if you, you know, just as if you broke a civil law if you were doing something disruptive religiously, you would be interviewed by the church, which was a subset of the congregation, and it was like the governing body of the congregation. And this was a group of people voluntarily brought together. You weren't forced to do this, but they took a tremendous amount of time to try to mediate difficulties. This is the thing. You could definitely get in trouble for breaking the rules, but it was not like straight to jail. Weeks, months, years of working with you and working with you to figure out, why are you doing this disruptive thing? What is the real problem? How can we get you to see that you're hurting everybody as well as yourself? How can we get everybody else to forgive you if you do repent? So they were all about healing that body. It was not like excommunicated, hanged, whatever it may be. It was important to them that they were one unit. And if you have a limb of the body that's diseased, you have to heal it. You don't just cut it off.
- [22:24]
A
Right, exactly. Education, very important to the Puritans. Every person should be able to read the Bible themselves. Therefore, they needed to read. Very high literacy rate. Big priority in this. In this society.
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B
Yes. And people did read a lot. They read their Bible. They were passionate consumers of religious literature printed in England. They loved reading sermons and people's, you know, spiritual guides. And reading was a big part of their lives for men and for women, which is the unusual part.
- [22:55]
A
Yes, exactly. That's a really big deal. 1642, Massachusetts mandates that men, the heads of their households, teach their wives, children, and servants very important, fundamental reading and writing skills. I can't believe this was just for religious purposes. There must have been a bigger reason for this, and I'm saying egalitarian educational priorities. Right. It was good that people understood the
- [23:19]
B
world this way, because this goes back to their civil government. Everything they did had to be approved by the towns. So if the General Court in Boston wants to do something, they would copy it out, send it to the towns. It was read aloud, and people could read copies if they wanted, and then people would write their potential revisions, et cetera, and send it back. So they wanted to have, you know, a government that was not corrupt, and it was like a sunshine law. Everybody, you know, in their 1641 body of liberties, the first legal code written in the Western world, first modern legal code. They said everybody, every inhabitant of the colony, had the right to search and view all court records. So they wanted that openness. They wanted everybody to be able to see what was going on at all times.
- [24:06]
A
Literacy in England at the time, 30% Puritan, New England, 60%. Right. That's huge.
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B
It is huge. I think it must have grown higher very quickly. Not everyone could write, but just about everybody can read, as we know from the voluminous records, handwritten records they left. Yeah.
- [24:24]
A
And we're talking about this as if it's in a vacuum. I mean, the world is very different in these days. I mean, many of these things are shared by other people. There's just unique qualities to this particular system because it is so homogenous. They all sort of follow the same codes, by and large, and it works very efficiently in that regard because of that. So this is a unique moment in time shared with other movements like it. We've already mentioned women are more important than we think in the society. I mean, in terms of the. The view of women and their role in this society, it is still a male supremacist world, of course, because everything is. For hundreds of years after this, as a matter of fact, women could not participate in meetings or make decisions. Puritan ministers further male supremacy. So tell me about that.
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B
Yes, absolutely. It was a high patriarchal society. But again, their religion made it a little bit different when it came to, like, women had no legal personhood, that didn't change. But when it came to the spiritual, which, again, was so important to them, one of the first things I studied was the stories of religious seeking that women in Cambridge told in the 1630s to their minister. When you read them, you cannot tell in all but one or two cases of, like, the 46 cases we have, that it's a woman speaking. They don't talk about their sex or their gender, because when it came to religion, there was no sex or gender. It was just you and God. And it's amazing to me, I can't think of another place in the world that I know of where that would have happened in 1638, where someone could tell a version of their life story where you can't tell if they're male or female. When it came to spirituality, there was no difference. And people often get weirded out by how often men would call themselves the Bride of Christ. But just to bring it back, like Anne Hutchinson people, you'll constantly hear that she got in trouble for being a woman who led religious meetings. That's not true at all. That was everybody. You would have gotten in trouble for not doing that. Religion was the focus. Everyone held meetings, Everyone talked about their seeking. She got into very civil political trouble. So, yes, While there was no, you know, legal personhood really for women, though they do have rights assigned them in that body of Liberties from 1641. On the spiritual side, it was different.
- [26:49]
A
Laurie, did Puritans really have names like Patience, Silence, Fear, Prudence, Comfort, Hope Still, I mean, they have a unique lexicon of names, don't they?
- [27:01]
B
Well, it's the common myth. I have Never, in my 13 years of transcribing tens of thousands of pages of birth, baptism records, seen the name patients ever interesting. And names like Desire, Love, Fear, those were for boys and girls. They were either hopes like, I hope my child will have this, or they represented the moment in which they were born.
- [27:24]
A
Right, right, right.
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B
Hope still. Like, we had just lost a child, but God gave us hope still because we had another one. So all of the, like, harsh, angry names in all my. I only ever one time came across a name that seemed terrible, which was a little boy whose name was not a son.
- [27:43]
A
Oh, my God.
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B
I don't know what happened there.
- [27:46]
A
Passive aggressive.
- [27:47]
B
There were strong names. Like, I would take some of these names, like Resolved, Resolved, remember, you know, Reliance. I'd take the name Reliance. That sounds good to me.
- [27:56]
A
This was not unique to the Puritans. Again. I mean, lots of people back then used these kinds of names. Or was it a Puritan tradition?
- [28:03]
B
It was kind of unique to them. Bible names were not unique. Like, all Protestants in England were kind of using biblical names like Nehemiah and Jeremiah and stuff like that. But to have these, like, they're not virtue names. It's just like, names that represent a desire for the child or the moment the child was born in are pretty Puritan.
- [28:22]
A
Interesting. Let's talk about family life. Marriage is not conducted in the church. This keeps with what you were talking about. You don't do marriage in the church, but rather in a civil ceremony. I mean, maybe it's in that same building, like we say, but it could also be in a home. Right. I mean, it's very symbolic or representative of this attitude about separation of church and state.
- [28:44]
B
Yes. They only recognized two sacraments, not the seven of the Catholic Church, and that was baptism and communion. And they said, look, God didn't create marriage. Humans clearly created marriage. That's why you could have divorce. They did not believe that God commanded people to, you know, have marriage as we understand it. Like, to have legal laws around marriage is human. To have men and women together making families is religious. So all the rules about it and the ceremony itself were all civil.
- [29:13]
A
If there's ever a cliche Use of the word puritan has to do with sex. You are puritanical. If you're anti sex or whatever, you're uptight. Does that fit at all with this society? Were they puritanical about sexual.
- [29:28]
B
It does not. They would be so upset if they knew what we believed about them. They speak uncomfortably frankly about sexual pleasure. They believed that having sex was the closest you could get to the ecstasy of being in heaven with God.
- [29:43]
A
I feel the same way.
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B
They were all for it. And one easy way to end a marriage, to get divorced is if you said that someone wouldn't have sex with you.
- [29:53]
A
Wow.
- [29:54]
B
It was. You were supposed to be a good partner to your spouse. And this went for the men and the women. And the first step in being a good partner was to have a great sex life. And again, they get really detailed about this in their records. So it's.
- [30:11]
A
In what way? What do you mean? There's guides to sex?
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B
No, just like ministers and sermons talking about the ecstasy of sex.
- [30:18]
A
Oh, wow.
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B
Like. Oh, you know, if. If we wonder to ourselves, what will it be like when we're in heaven? Well, we have an example right here. It gets a little blue.
- [30:28]
A
They are actually equating the sensual experience of sex with the closeness to Christ.
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B
And again, that metaphor they so often used, that Christ was their groom. Men and women would say they were the brides of Christ and they wanted to lay on his bosom and. And be with him. Yes. They love sex. They're all having 12 kids, so you better love sex.
- [30:51]
A
Take anything away from this conversation. It is that. Because that is the biggest cliche of all. I mean, and you're saying it's completely wrong that I'm sure there were prudes in that group like everywhere. But. But in general, that was not part of the code, is that you have to be careful with yourself. I mean, it's. There's all those kinds of ideas with. With sex in different areas and different movements. But this is not that one.
- [31:13]
B
One of the reasons people think it is, because if you read the church records, you'll see a lot of fornication. Like these people had to confess their fornication. This was not a big deal. This is not the red letter of adultery. This just meant usually nine times out of ten that it was a fast day in New England where you weren't supposed to have sex because you weren't supposed to be enjoying life and people had sex anyway. And the constancy of these records, the ministers will group it on one page. Here's all the People who were having sex on the fast day when they
- [31:44]
A
weren't supposed to, but they don't necessarily oppose premarital sex the way many people do today. That was an okay thing.
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B
It wasn't quite okay, but again, it didn't get you into a lot of trouble religiously. That was more of a civil thing in your church. You know, if you got married and five months later you had a baby, you would just confess that fornication. I've covered many church records where a woman has given birth completely outside of marriage. It doesn't get her in trouble with her congregation and her church, but it was a civil problem because they didn't want people who were poor. Like, if you're having children, you have to be a family. So they would really put the pressure on the man. Like, you've got this woman pregnant, you have to support her.
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A
Right. Put a ring on it.
- [32:30]
B
Or even sometimes, like, they didn't actually get married, but he would support the child financially until she married someone else.
- [32:36]
A
Interesting. Wow. Dancing allowed. I mean, I guess music goes along with it. Illegal in taverns, however.
- [32:44]
B
Yes, it's so funny. They did enjoy music, of course, and they had taverns. The most grave. You think the sky is falling? Church records. I'll read. We'll start with, like we had to. After the service, the minister asked us to stay behind and face this dread problem of whether you should have music in church. Like when people were singing hymns, there should be musical accompaniment. That was a huge debate, but otherwise, yeah, people were dancing and singing.
- [33:12]
A
Laurie, 90% of what you're saying. I think I share this with the audience is a surprise to me today. I mean, really it is, because I was one of those that have carried. I mean, one of my benchmarks of the world is this gnarly, frowning puritan who just disapproves of everything fun in life. That is completely contrary to what you're telling me today.
- [33:31]
B
I think most of us. I didn't know all of this stuff before I started staying. I had the same impression. My folk belief is that they are kind of. A lot of Americans see them as the origin group, and we want to use them as a mark of how much we've progressed. It started with these terrible people, and it's just been a story of expanding liberty ever since. So they provide a useful strawman or fall guy for all the rest.
- [33:57]
A
Well, yeah, and I want to talk about that in a moment because that's the kind of. Of summary of all of this. But before we get there, the Crime and punishment, they're so famous for, obviously, the witch trials, but before that, I mean, how did they treat criminology, crime, violations of the code? These stocks that we hear about, you know, putting people in stocks, are all these true or not to the extreme that we. That we assume it's not true?
- [34:22]
B
To the extent that we assume this was a proto democracy. It was not complete democracy, but it was the origins of. I just have a few liberties pulled out here from 1641 that you couldn't file nuisance lawsuits. If you bring a claim against someone else and you're found to be at fault, it's dismissed. The jurors can be challenged. You have the right to a speedy trial. You can file an appeal. If you're found guilty, eventually you might face an actual punishment, but it took a long time. Every case had to have at least two eyewitnesses. So if you didn't have people there who could back you up about what you were saying, it was just thrown out. And so if you actually got a case to court, which would be unusual because if I had a disagreement with you first, the people in my church and congregation would try to resolve it. If they couldn't and it went to a civil court, they would do the same thing. Like you are saying that your neighbor is a witch. But we know that you two hate each other, and this is not a. You're just doing it because you hate them. And you. You know we're dismissing this, right? If eventually you got something proved in court, the most common punishments were whipping and a fine. If it was more serious, you might have your right to vote temporarily revoked. That was a big deal. And your estate might be held by someone else. Capital punishment was rare, and that's why the Salem witch trials stick out. They're the exception that proves the rule. If every one of the White Star liners had sunk, we wouldn't remember the Titanic. When there's only one, it stands out. And Salem was. Was an abrogation of everything the Puritans believed about justice.
- [36:00]
A
Wow. You're saying that was the aberration, not the. Not the norm.
- [36:03]
B
It really was. I mean, if you look at. If you say the Puritan era in New England was 1630-1692. In that time, I don't have the exact number, but maybe like, 40 witchcraft cases ever came to court. And I think the number of executions was, like, in the teens. I may have that slightly wrong, but if you look at Salem, even 19 people total, every norm of puritan religious and civil justice blown out of the water for reasons we're still trying to explain. You look in England, you know, the Witchfinder General In England had 400 people executed in one year in one town. 400 people. This makes Salem kind of pale in comparison.
- [36:48]
A
Yeah. I mean, to restate your statistic, I mean, from 1620 to 1692 is a period we're really talking about. 61 prosecutions in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. 16 convictions. Then Arthur Miller writes a very famous play, we Change Our Minds. Or I guess Nathaniel Hawthorne. The telling of the story has really been the story of it, isn't it? They investigated a leg. I mean, they did believe in witchcraft, just like all those Europeans did, right?
- [37:13]
B
They absolutely believed in witchcraft and witches and that Satan would be walking about trying to tempt people, but they very rarely believed that their actual person in their town was a witch. It's like a lot of people believe in ghosts, but not a lot of people believe that a place is actually haunted. It's kind of a. You know, you can keep two things in your mind at once. It's real. But what are the odds that somebody in Ipswich, Massachusetts is actually a witch?
- [37:41]
A
Interesting. It's like aliens. It's like UFOs. They thought they felt about that thing. Hester Prynne. Did they really make people. I mean, this is. That's a fictional character, but in real life. Did anyone ever wear a scarlet A?
- [37:53]
B
No, not that I have ever encountered. And that goes back to your question about the stocks. Usually punishments were not public like that. A whipping? Yes. If you're getting whipped, it's out in public. Everyone is going to see it. That's public. And obviously executions, if you're hanging someone, it's public. Otherwise, like, if I am convicted of adultery, which could in rare cases be a capital crime, but not usually, I'm not going to bear any signs of that. There were some civil punishments that involved, like clipping people's ears and branding. This is something they brought over from England. It's so hideous, you might have something branded, like if you were a thief, they might brand you. But that was the exception. That did not happen all the time.
- [38:40]
A
We did an episode on the Quakers. The Boston Martyrs are the famous quakers in the 1660s. And. And these are several people who come and. And say, we are bringing a new way. And the story is told that these authoritarian Puritans couldn't handle it and they eventually hang them. In fact, it was the third time they came to town that they ended up hanging these people, or at least a Few of them, they weren't that willing to do this. It just got to a point where they were, I guess the civil authorities felt pushed to do this. That being said, it wasn't really fair of them to do that, but it was.
- [39:12]
B
Well, again, it goes back to that thing like you don't come into New England if you're not Puritan. The one thing they did keep was from England was that Congregationalism, the religion of the Puritans, was the state supported religion. They thought that was the only accurate practice of worshiping God on the planet. Why would they let somebody else come in with a different idea? So those Quakers knew, they knew that they were risking their lives.
- [39:50]
A
The tone of this conversation, which I'm commenting on as a surprise, is that it wasn't as extreme as we always paint it to be. And that's really, I mean, it's almost like history needs a villain. American history needs a villain. And so the, the Puritans were that convenient villain to use as a way of life. And thinking that just is so unappealing. We need different ways of thinking. And at any given moment, such as writing the Scarlet Letter, there's a market for that.
- [40:14]
B
Yes, you do need a villain. You need that. You know, your founders are either saints or villains. And we have located all the saints of our founding in the revolution, which is so ironic because these are the great grandchildren of the Puritans and they applied everything they knew about representative government to creating, you know, the new United States. But yeah, you know, it's starting to be 400 years ago that this all happened. And you go through the 19th century where America, you know, in the era of good feelings in the 1820s and 30s, we're modern, we're young, we're industrial. You know, look how far we've come from our horrible beginnings with these terrible narrow minded people. Now that we're a young new nation, you know, we're totally different from them.
- [40:59]
A
Right, Interesting.
- [41:00]
B
Or the people who liked it, like religious zealots would say, oh, but you know, the Puritans should be our model because they were religious zealots like us. Yes.
- [41:09]
A
We have really skipped over a major topic here that I need to circle back to and their relationships with Native American tribes. How were the Puritans in this category? How did they view this relationship? How do they view these people? And, and what happened as a result?
- [41:23]
B
Well, it was all bad. This is where all the things you've heard are true. Except it's so strange. There's always some myth that's Totally wrong. And the myth around New England is that there wasn't as much slavery of indigenous people as black and African people, which is not true. Indigenous slavery was rampant. Now again, it goes back to what I said. They could do great things for the people within their blinders, for themselves. They didn't treat indigenous people so badly. This is the myth, because they were pagans. If you had asked Puritans, who are the worst pagans on earth, they would have said Catholics. Oh, they hated Catholics. It was simply, they got here, their scarcity mindset is blown up by the bounty they see. And they just want that land. And so they just take that land. And indigenous people who think they're sharing the land sign all those treaties. They went to great lengths to make sure there was a written build, a sale. And then they ignored the fact that when they eventually understood that the indigenous people didn't think of this as a sale, they ignored it. They had to have that land. They had to. They had to. And when they would be in wars with indigenous people, which were completely provoked by the land grabbing, they enslaved people. This is something they did not rethink. They rethought so much when they got here, not this. And they enslaved people and you know, they tried to wipe out the language and the culture. You know, many indigenous people chose to become Congregationalists. They became Congregationalists for reasons of their own that are valid. And this was allowed. And you could become a church member. This very high status thing if you were indigenous. But just like women could be, have high spiritual status but no legal status. Same thing for indigenous people.
- [43:11]
A
Yeah, the very violent attitudes and behavior in the wars that came from that fly in the face of the myth of Squanto and those who we learned when we were young who just loved helping the white people. But in fact it was a very destructive time. And 12 colonial towns went down in those wars. The deaths of some 3,000 indigenous people, that's a rough estimate. And 600 colonists. I mean, we're talking about the King Philip's war here in the mainstay, still
- [43:38]
B
the costliest war in US history. If we put us in quotes, we
- [43:42]
A
have a whole episode coming up on that in the near future. So we won't go too deeply into that. But it is fair to say that, you know, that which became a tradition, a sad tradition in American behavior really starts with the Puritans as far as how to deal with these so called savages and impose ourselves upon them and take their land and do all of that stuff really begins in New England and elsewhere, but it's really systemic in Massachusetts. Why does puritism decline in influence? I mean, it just. It does probably in the late 17th, early 18th century or so, there's the Great Awakenings begin to happen. Right.
- [44:20]
B
It's earlier than that. It's because of what you just mentioned. It's King Philip's War by this point in 1676, 77, when words getting back to England about how destructive this was, they said, you people cannot govern yourselves. This is the second war you've had. Indian war in quotes, we're stepping in. And so that charter I mentioned that was so special, that said do whatever you want got revoked in 1684. And it took a little while, and then we went through the Dominion. There were some things back and forth, but eventually, by 1692, a new era was in place where people no longer elected the governor. He was appointed by the English government. And so the status of, you know, saying, well, the Congregational Church remained supported by taxation. It did until like 1818, 1830, for a long time. But you had to allow other people in. So you had now an influx of people different than what I said before. Like, they weren't coming in because they were into Puritanism. You could come into the. This place in the 1690s and not be Puritan and influence the government and change it like that.
- [45:37]
A
You end up having these Anglicans and Baptists and the whole mix comes over, right?
- [45:42]
B
Yes. I mean, Congregationalism remained the religion of the region right up into, like, the time of Thoreau. Its dominance was not challenged in that way, but the society did change.
- [45:55]
A
Well, I mentioned the Great Awakening, which we have done our own episodes on in the past. It's really fascinating. By the 1740s, this sort of broader, stratified society begins to form and change everything and begins to. But New England holds on. I mean, that's why New England is New England today. Even so, there's a culture there that was very unique in those colonies in the time. And it wasn't based on money. It was based on a sort of spiritual and communal feeling about the place and how we. We operate together. And, boy, is that still there. It's a. It's amazing how it's stood the test of time.
- [46:29]
B
Yes, it really has, because, again, so much of it was proto democratic. And, you know, even during the Great Awakening, which was a challenge to traditional Congregationalism, it seemed chaotic to most people. Like, so you were rolling around on the floor screaming, and then what? Congregationalism was so enmeshed into their Sense of order in the world. We run our church, we choose our minister. We have our own, like, church mediation system. It was a whole system in place that mirrored that of the government they knew and loved. So it was very hard to challenge. Whereas other colonies that did not have this close connection, where the systems were so similar, didn't have that same experience. And they had a lot more flux than New England.
- [47:19]
A
How interesting. This is definitely a softer, gentler. It's. Don't hate your Puritan neighbor anymore. Because we have imposed a great deal and projected a great deal on this group of people for the convenience of, as we said, finding sort of a darker figure there that you can fight back against. That certainly becomes a very convenient symbol when you get to the point of the Crucible and Arthur Miller, who's totally looking for a way to tell the story of communism and blacklisting in America. Group think, yeah. And therefore, and all of what is happening in the 20th century, the Puritans become a really great American symbol for that. But it's a misappropriated one. Right? That's a misunderstood idea.
- [48:00]
B
It is. And, you know, we always use history for our own ends. And so, you know, nations like the US you go through phases where you're more secular and more religious and more secular. And they suffered in each turn, because when it got more secular, it's like, look at these people who were too religious. And when there'd be a focus on religion, if we come up even to our present day, like, oh, yes, the Puritans, they were a theocracy. They understood that Christians should rule by the Bible. Neither of these was really true. And so whichever side you're on, you can hate them.
- [48:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. Was there a moment when the Puritans decided to reform themselves? Was there, like, that realization that they needed to get with the modern world or the way the world was changing?
- [48:45]
B
Oh, they felt very modern. Look at the commonwealth they created. They had the first written legal code, the Western world. They were very interested in science. They felt like they had left the benighted world of Europe behind and that they were really blazing a new path here. So they would have thought that they were in the forefront.
- [49:06]
A
I think it's also important, Laurie, to understand their place in the world quite literally. I mean, they are in a very extreme land. It's very dangerous. And so part of that is circling your wagons and making sure everybody is safe and on the same page. And that takes a system of living and a certain code of behavior that contributed a lot to this. Right. I mean, they're the first ones as far as the Europeans are concerned. First group in New England that's really settling down and creating this new land in a strange place.
- [49:35]
B
And again, with their families there. It wasn't just like, we have to protect our gold mining operation. There was a lot to farms, houses, children, livestock. Like there was so much more to protect. And the first danger of this particular place for them was the climate. They had never experienced this kind of cold or heat. They'd also never seen the incredible fall leaf color change that doesn't happen in England. But dealing with the cold and the heat, you know, they couldn't plant everything that they had brought over. It didn't work. Livestock died. The place itself was challenging, especially because they absolutely would not adopt indigenous ways of farming. Out of the question. But, yeah, that was a challenge for. For quite a while. They were living, as we mentioned earlier, on Cape Cod, and they were importing fish from England because none of them had brought nets and fish hooks and things like that. So they had some suffering of their own making.
- [50:38]
A
Right. We're talking about a period of. About. This is about 1620 to 1690 is the height of this time period. A lot changes even within that time period. Right. I mean, everywhere in the world, but certainly in their understanding of things and. And their building of the society. Was it completely different from where it began as far as their outlook on religion and community? Had they evolved a lot over this time period?
- [51:04]
B
I think it's kind of a success of the opposite. Everything they put together quickly in the first four years worked. They were able to develop it and deepen it. Hey, our representative government does work. Our system of church discipline, what, it's working. We're expanding like crazy, and it's still working. It's still holding together. They felt very good about that. Like God, you know, has shown us that we are doing the right thing. Because they became rich and numerous and still felt like they were achieving their spiritual goals. So they were, you know, it was not broke for them and they did not want to fix it. Accept that as people's lived experience continued on, they would make changes to civil and religious. Like, we're having a new problem that we hadn't had before. Our system flexes to change and evolve and address it.
- [51:57]
A
Yeah. And so much of the reputation comes from these famous religious leaders, the Mathers, and those kinds who are again, portrayed as very stern individuals. Almost draconian when I think of them. That's how I think. Just because that's the stereotype they were also brilliant thinkers who were really figuring this out for their congregations and they
- [52:16]
B
were dedicated to the project. If there's anything Puritans hated, it was doing stuff for ritual's sake. This is how we've always done it. That had no place in their world. And they believed that they had the strength and the, you know, the go ahead from God to change and evolve as needed without losing the fundamentals. And yeah, most ministers, you know, when you read what they actually wrote, they, you know, they were not actually, they were not wealthy men in their society. And a lot of them were dead broke all the time. And it really was a service mentality they had. Like, this is what God has called me to do, and so I will do that.
- [52:55]
A
Laurie Rogers Stokes is a public historian and author, contributing editor to New England's Hidden Histories, a digital history project on Colonial era Congregational church records. She is the author of two books on the Puritans Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard's Church in Cambridge, 1638-49, subtitled Heroic Souls and Gathered into a Church Indigenous English Congregationalism in Woodland New England. Thank you very much, Laurie. Nice to meet you.
- [53:24]
B
Thank you. You too.
- [53:31]
A
Thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wild, so grateful for your support. Thanks so much.