On the Puritan Dilemma

This was a nice easy read from the historian who was effectively the czar of Puritan history during the 1960s. It’s a biography of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, but Edmund Morgan uses the life of Winthrop to ask larger questions about the leadership of Massachusetts Bay and the decisions they faced. The greatest question, which Morgan calls the “Puritan Dilemma,” was one regarding the extent to which quasi-theocratic authorities must retreat from the world in order to create their “city upon a hill.” Given that scripture requires that people do not wholly retreat from the world, the Puritans (especially in New England) were forced to participate in a delicate balancing act regarding their role in secular life.

The greatest challenge that John Winthrop faced was that of “separatism.” Before reading Morgan’s Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, I thought that all Puritans were—by definition—separatists. Not so, although there was a strong impulse within congregational churches to separate from the Church of England’s structure. The earliest Puritans in Plymouth, for instance, were largely separatists, as was Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. However, John Winthrop, from his seat in Boston, refused to wholly reject the Church of England. He was more than willing to admit that the Church faced major issues, but he found it more useful to confront these issues through reform and gradual transformation than through secession.

Some other interesting things that I learned in this book:

• Most colonial charters gave a specific location for the seat of the colonial company to meet—the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s did not, and Puritans basically turned Massachusetts into a self-governing structure by moving the seat across the Atlantic, unlike virtually every other English colony.

• Anne Hutchinson was so, so witty. It is no wonder that Winthrop and other administrators in Massachusetts felt threatened by her (but also, she should have never been exiled—although I would never agree with her politico-religious views, her intellectual strength leaves much to be admired).

• Most of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony came out of Lincolnshire. This was sort of a “aha!” moment for me. Boston, England is not a very recognizable town to most of us outside of England, so I had wondered how the founders of the American city selected its name. Well, as residents of Lincolnshire, they were well acquainted with Boston.

• The Puritans were a much more dynamic people than both popular wisdom and popular culture has us realize. When I think “Puritans,” the imagery I see is more material that comes out of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), who wrote his work two centuries after the founding of Massachusetts Bay, or Arthur Miller (The Crucible), who wrote three centuries after, then anything historically rooted. My mind on the Puritans began to shift a bit after reading Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, which was written shortly before Hawthorne became prominent, but here Morgan has changed my mind further.

While not a comprehensive treatment of the Puritans, this is a good book for getting a sense of the period at hand.