Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America

by Helena Wall

Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America. Although this close relationship and its consequences for private life bred many tensions and conflicts, the premises and conditions of that interdependent association persisted even into the nineteenth century. Wall sketches the subsequent changes and outlines the new arrangements of family and community life as the colonies moved toward the formation of a new nation.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 1990

Reviews

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main problem I had with this book is that, while in the author's Preface Helena Wall writes that the primary purpose of her study is to investigate the change from what one may call “community values” in the early colonial period to individualism as the eighteenth-century progressed, she only really addressing the question in the Afterword, 25 pages with the subtitle Transformations. The bulk of the book, 125 pages, uses mainly court records to describe family and community life, problems and squabbles in the seventeenth-century with a disproportionate amount coming from the Dutch communities around New York.

It is very interesting and often amusing, in an anecdotal way, to discover how life was lived in communities isolated from the Old World and one feels sometimes making up the rules as they go along. Cases of business malpractice, domestic violence, personal abuse, drunkenness, adultery, child abuse are all brought to light – though slavery very rarely raises any problems – and creates a view of early American life which, for our times, may appear overly authoritarian and certainly totally patriarchal.

A problem is, when using court records, the lives of all those citizens who lived law-abiding lives, quietly, soberly and honestly, silently disappear. Which is in the majority, the rule-breakers or those who chose conformity? Was it the rule-breakers who pushed American society towards the overruling urge of individual rights and freedom? In the Afterword the author suggests a form of societal evolution was at work. It was not simply down to the growing influx of immigrants from a variety of national backgrounds. The author doesn't mention it but I will. It could be the key to such evolution. Forget about the right to bear arms or the right to vote. Who first had the idea of fitting a lock on the inside of a toilet door and when? The answer could hold the decisive clue to the insistence on an individual existence.