Why?
We'd heard tell of some of the New Haven Colony being end of the worlders so we were particularly interested when Pomfret explained the Puritan's fear of Arminianism and "became convinced that God's wrath would descend upon the nation" (159 FOUNDING). The nation was originally England for many of the colonists until they came across the pond and encountered a similar fight amongst men.
Believing in the free agency of man and possessing a disbelief in the absolute sovereignty of God in man's affairs was EARTHSHATTERING. Hence, both the argument itself and its implications put the Puritans into a bit of a frenzied mindset! Instead of weighing responsibility into the factor along with free and even considering such blasphemy anything but EVIL, the Puritans went into pure defense mode. Henceforth they would need to ward off not only savages and corrupt civil/military authorities, but men who had snuck around in God's kingdom and embraced religion enough to USE faith-based concepts AGAINST God. The Puritans felt, wholeheartedly, that SOMEBODY had twisted up religious theory into a dangerous and un-Godly philosophy that might, seriously, make God so angry that God was going to come down from on high and straighten things out!
While the Puritans themselves had some minor issues with the structure of church and some differences of opinion about doctrine and practice, Arminianism might as well have been the very same serpent that tempted Eve into eating from the forbidden tree! Surely this much being fooled made some people irredeemable and it made Believers unsafe in the company of men so misled.
The chance to get to some place that wasn't in the line of thunderbolts that would surely be hurled down from the heavens by an angry God grew into a forced pre-love of new place. This came out in the notion that God had, in fact, selected New England as the chosen land. It must be so; God wasn't banishing the faithful and good people from their homeland, God was giving them a chance to get out before God did all those things in the Bible that God can and does do to whole populations of people disobeying God.
Since the Devil could sway one woman of a couple in the first human generation, or possess a human with unclean spirits, or trick some apostles into moments of doubt, then it stood to reason that those same evil forces COULD forsake contemporary groups of people. EVIL might be the very force at work should a majority of stockholders prohibit the faithful from getting away from England AND setting up their own fortress of faith in the new place. Allowing God's purpose (the salvation of a few who could sequester the known and true way of life in the new place) to be thwarted would be a calamity. So efforts made to complete the mission and, hopefully, propagate the new world with the righteous instead of the wicked were not revolutionary in the sense that we tend to use revolutionary to mean a flipping of control from one set of hands to another, the mission was DIRE and, for the Puritans undertaking this charge, transformative.
To take both the earthly title (company's charter) and their physical/spiritual selves (and families) to the new place was rejecting the possibility that the old world could either suffocate them or take over their realm once they got there.
Of course, it was very neighbor-oriented, those initial meetings and planning stages of the new life, people didn't have internets or even phones, and Pomfret locates these initial stirrings amongst the hearts of those faithful in the East Angluia region of England. But because it is human nature to talk to each other about like-minded concerns and because human beings talk about things in terms of religious AND political frameworks, word was spread through what was later cited as religious movement. Some thoughts written by the reverend John White ended up as publicity for the view that God's wrath and an impending calamity was at hand. Of course, anything written down or shared orally is testimony to something, and with the added authority of religious leader stamp on the thoughts, "General Observations for the Plantation of New England," the weight of what was being discussed took on proportion. But it was more general religious principle talk than it was denominational description, and, this was critical because other pioneering preachers and flocks had been rejected in terms of economic and political support (even permission to break away) when they'd been the minority denomination-ally in the architectural groups developing society at that time.
On a spectrum between the corrupt and wicked able to exhibit authority in the world, and, EXTREMELY disturbing libertine philosophy, Puritans were dead-center. And determined not to be either spokespeople or victims of ANY cosmology or society structure that they didn't trust. This helped them develop a somewhat specified path of civilization which came to be called in popular talk "the New England Way." Yep, direct parent of the New Haven Way which we'd heard about in relation to some relatives just a couple decades later. Just about every single idea ever uttered has a family tree of its own which we can sometimes trace back through a particular field of thought and sometimes see where it scattered and took hold like seeds throughout the more general soil.
One of the most important aspects of historical research has always been to look back without judging. To just see what was as what it was. It's a challenge and it's not unlike having an opinion about a value or a tenet but not imposing one's belief on anybody else. Thinking objectively is what modern people have called seeing but not judging and it doesn't seem to come easily or naturally, it seems more like a skill. As such, of course, it can be neglected or developed.
On our colonists who set sail for Salem Pomfret goes about as far away from objectivity as he can in historian mode in deeming the people "a hardheaded and dogmatic lot" who were "tenacious of purpose" and "regarded themselves as chosen by God to create a purer church and a City of God in the wilderness." And these descriptive clues do explain some of the coloring of those early Puritans who did have coloring of their own. There's a tendency to let those early folks exist in our modern minds as distant and in the shadows of centerstage lighting, so an impression of them might be dark and lacking vibrancy. But that impression isn't the whole story! And by examining the different threads that make up whole story we surpass impression.
In addition to understanding the Puritans as a people bound to a cosmology entwined with an active God, we have here the opportunity to see something else. It's hard to articulate except in the facts of what happened, and yet the implications of the facts developed into results and those results are something that got handed down as tradition.
Going back to 1629 we find in England men having both secretive discussions and open-air debates about how to evolve company into state. This stuff is fulcrum! And it's interesting to analyze the details of what happened. Before 1629 attempts at settling the New World had been more tied to the Crown expanding and to pure commercialism than to religious purpose. But I'm not sure that innovation justifies the movement of a particular persuasion within a more diverse group in setting the stage so they couldn't lose the argument. What do I mean by that?
The Cambridge agreement in which twelve men of the larger group of interest decided strategy amongst themselves to attain their special purpose went beyond the standard practice of securing permission to acquire rights. And the rights being sought were for a particular subdivision of the larger currents of society.
Because the subgroup of men feared a possible future hostile majority among stockholders, these men went to great lengths to remove any possibility of the denial of the rights being sought. So they kept their ulterior motives to themselves and they used secrecy as response to the potential discussion. Response as in, no further discussion necessary. Or, no discussion possible since we're not telling you the whole truth here.
It's not difficult to justify these tactics for the colonials or to see how the colonials felt justified in outsmarting the system (which they did--legally). Religious persecutions and a hideous landscape in which religion and politics were an entangling death trap throughout the ages forced the people to play a different hand of cards than usual. However, a personal mission is a personal mission and the Puritans disguised their personal mission in the cloak of business as usual all the while they were plotting an escape from the card game. And THEY justified their actions by claiming that God himself supported their decisions and decision-making. They added an element of absolute-ism to their actions.
There was plenty of popular sentiment that broke through the dam with the Puritans as well. The few men committed to carrying out this innovation--of breaking away to have their own type of lifestyle--had opened floodgates with the concept. That initial tide has been called the Great Puritan Migration and like a later-in-time relative, the Great Awakening, religious-based theorists secured the right and there was a wider interpretation of that claim/grant for the people as the right to...
Pomfret points out another challenge to pinpointing our specific relatives in those first days of life in the new-to-them place. Not satisfied with Salem the Puritan leaders chose a new site almost before they were off the boat!
Which is where they had their first top secret executive meeting as well. With the physical manifestation of the spiritually ranked "elect"--the charter--in hand and a continued tight-lipped policy in effect, the next meeting of the governor and his assistants took place in Charlestown, America in August of 1630. The administration provided for a minister, a surgeon, and a beadle to wait upon the governor. And to get trade started, the executives decided to erect within the company a "subordinate body of men" (some in England, some in America) who would have the duties of managing the transportation and sale of goods. In this we find the rudimentary actions of men implementing some form to the still relatively new theories of mercantilism. At the end of seven years, according to their business plan, this group of middle management would endeavor to return to subscribers the amounts that they had invested. This arrangement, Pomfret tells us, resembled that of the 8 men at Plymouth who managed the joint stock of trading goods. The joint-stock assets of the Massachusetts Bay Company were to remain in England as a trading fund DISTINCT from common stock which consisted of assets in the colony such as land, buildings, and livestock.
Enough disconnect was in place to lend a hand to the distance between members of the same organization and Pomfret says, "The trading company dwindled and there is no record of it after 1638" (163 FOUNDING).
The company proper in England seems to have dissipated while in America the executive branch of Massachusetts Bay Company was becoming the corporate government. Those in New England had nothing to do with the trading venture and assumed no responsibility for its debts. The business operations were so "feeble," little is known of them. It was more assumption and rumor that the trading company hoped to purchase furs from the Indians and sell commodities furnished by the settlers than actual production in the payment of dividends to subscribers. And by 1638 "it had become a self-governing corporation in America whose main purpose was to erect a Puritan state" (163 Pomfret).
It's hard to look back and picture the early American Puritans in a pocket of assembly in Salem, because, they were also a mobile lot--as soon as they re-found their feet from the wavey feelings rocking their sea-journey worlds. Endecott had chosen Charlestown for his private residence site but the water supply there was inadequate to support the hundreds of people with similar dreams of building love nests and family corrals. And the newcomers as a democracy of never-been-to-the-area, carrying their dunnage on their backs, boisterous, and needing to get busy crowd could not agree on ONE location. Some were sick with fever and scurvy, some were overwhelmed with the feelings of unfamiliarity, some crossed over to Shawmut (later Boston) and some pushed on to Mystic (eventually Medford). A bunch found their way to Roxbury and Dorchester. And Pomfret tells us in a footnote that subsequent work in the field of historical research proves that the original settlers in most of the eventual towns were at first squatters on top of being refugees. We can imagine the stress. Most everybody was relatively on his/her own with no legal land titles until they made purchases from the Indians or received grants from the colonial governments and various authorities.
We're still trying to apply a date range to the maps tool on GOOGLE, but that's not a working innovation yet, so we might have to go on more of a virtual map hunt to take that kind of look at the colonial's situation.
We're also keeping our eyes open for some books mentioned in Pomfret, like...
Williston Walker's THE CREEDS AND PLATFORMS OF CONGREGATIONALISM (Boston, 1960)
Dunn, Richard S. PURITANS AND YANKEES: THE WINTHROP DYNASTY OF NEW ENGLAND, 1630-1717 (NJ, 1962)
Morison's BUILDERS OF THE BAY COLONY sounds accessible by title-judging, of course, that's how it is we're not getting too much into Trevelyan's THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION as edited by Richard B. Morris...The title attracted, but there's not much alluring in the writing style. It's more like Spengler than Smith which is important, to get Ivory Tower bundles of knowledge into the research, but for the purposes of making this blog something that our family wants to interact with and in the interest of time some works deserve a good annotation in the bibliography but not to inserted as a bunch more stuff to read. Trevelyan's THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION seems like an indispensable reference book so hopefully it's not out-of-print and so not available to the 21st century people all over the world building resource centers and libraries that offer a plethora of voice on every matter great and small.
Off to comb the folders of past Quilt for chunks of material that needs to be hauled into our latest effort!
