On Puritan Family

Damn is this work dated—my copy was printed in 1944—but it is quite important. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of Puritan family life. First, Morgan talks about Puritan marriages; then he moves onto parental-child relations; the education of Puritan children; servitude and slavery; relations between the family, church, and state; and finally the dissolution of the Puritan experiment.

Much of the material in here was already familiar to me due to other works that I read. As a result, the two chapters where I really learned something were Morgan’s chapters on slavery/servitude and the dissolution of Puritan New England. In the chapter on slavery and servitude, Morgan dives into the forms and sub-forms of slavery. He starts by dividing Puritan servants into two categories: voluntary and involuntary servants. Voluntary servitude consisted of servants who became servants for financial reasons, to learn a trade (or apprenticeship), or indentured servitude—primarily by those who worked for a family for seven years in order to pay their passage to North America. Involuntary servitude was really slavery in some sense and was the result of an individual being “punished” for some transgression. Perhaps the most common transgression to be punished was being on the losing side of a war—as a result, many Native Americans were enslaved by the Puritans, many of whom were exchanged for African slaves in the West Indies. The Irish were actually enslaved by the English government during the years of Oliver Cromwell, and many were shipped to the Americas, but unlike the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans, the Irish generally were not enslaved for life. Other temporary, involuntary servitude was punishment for a crime (usually theft) or to pay off a debt. On the topic of involuntary servitude, Morgan actively seeks out a “bright side,” which really rubs me the wrong way—with slavery, in particular, there is no justification.

The concluding chapter is also really interesting. In it, Morgan makes the argument that the Puritan experiment failed because of the importance of the covenant at a familial level. Unlike the Catholic Church, which actively sought out converts among Native Americans and Africans, the Puritans had no interest in converting others to their faith. Within 50 years, the only real Puritans remaining were those who descended from the original migrants in the 1620s and 1630s, while many more migrants had moved into New England beyond the Puritans. Moreover, Native Americans and African slaves generally did not adopt the Puritan covenant. Through demographic shift, it was impossible for Puritan patriarchs to maintain their hold on the territory, and in the end, the Massachusetts Bay Charter was revoked by the English crown.

Really interesting and illuminating work, simply for those two chapters. The book, generally, is a surface-level treatment that has since been expanded upon. It was originally Morgan’s dissertation, which is really interesting because I often hear people complain about the decline of American education, but this work is actually far less rigorous than most present-day dissertations that I’ve read. Nevertheless, it’s a great introduction to the “domestic sphere” of Puritan life.