Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1) (VOLUME I)

by David Hackett Fischer

These Puritan ideas might be summarized in five words: depravity, covenant, election, grace, and love.14

These ideas created many tensions in Puritan minds. The idea of the covenant bound Puritans to their worldly obligations; the gift of grace released them from every bond but one. The doctrine of depravity filled their world with darkness; the principle of election brought a gleam of light. Puritan theology became a set of insoluble logic problems about how to reconcile human responsibility with God's omnipotence, how to find enlightenment in a universe of darkness, how to live virtuously in a world of evil, and how to reconcile the liberty of a believing Christian with the absolute authority of the word.

In summary, by comparison with other emigrant groups in American history, the great migration to Massachusetts was a remarkably homogeneous movement of English Puritans who came from the middle ranks of their society, and traveled in family groups. The heads of these families tended to be exceptionally literate, highly skilled, and heavily urban in their English origins. They were a people of substance, character, and deep personal piety. The special quality of New England's regional culture would owe much to these facts.

They intermarried with such frequency that one historian describes the leading Puritan families of East Anglia as a "prosopographer's dream."3

A case in point was the web that formed between the Mather and Cotton families. The founders of these two houses in America, John Cotton and Richard Mather, both married the same woman, Sarah Story. John Cotton's daughter Maria Cotton became the wife of Richard Mather's son Increase Mather. A child of that union was the eminent minister Cotton Mather. By these various connections, John Cotton was simultaneously Cotton Mather's natural grandfather on the mother's side, and his step-grandfather on his father's side. At the same time, Richard Mather was both Cotton Mather's paternal grandfather, and his maternal step-grandfather. To compound the confusion, Cotton Mather married Ann Lake Cotton Mather, who was both his cousin and also his nephew's widow.

There were no holy vows or wedding rings— which the Puritans disapproved. A single question was addressed to the bride and groom; when they freely answered in the affirmative, the event was over.18

Old age, in short, was a sign. The Puritans had need of signs. They argued that elderly people had "a peculiar acquaintance with the Lord Jesus." Further, their cosmology taught that everything in the world happened according to God's purpose. They believed that the small numbers of godly men and women who lived to old age were the saving remnant of the race.3

Most meetinghouses faced due south; like so many domestic buildings in New England, they were "sun-line structures," carefully planned so as to be "square with the sun at noon."4

The Puritan founders of Massachusetts, like most of their Christian contemporaries, lived in a world of wonders. They believed that unicorns lived in the hills beyond the Hudson, that mermaids swam in waters off Cape Ann, and that tritons played in Casco Bay.

Most of all, the practice of black magic was regarded with obsessive fear and hatred by Puritans. The biblical injunction weighed more heavily upon them than upon others of their age: "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live." A great many people were formally accused of witchcraft in New England—at least 344 individuals altogether. Of that number, 35 were actually executed, and another person who refused to testify was pressed to death with heavy stones. These terrible events happened much more frequently in New England than in other colonies. More than 95 percent of all formal accusations and more than 90 percent of executions for witchcraft in British America occurred in the Puritan colonies.7

More than most Christians, the founders of Massachusetts were people of the book. Their faith was founded entirely on the Bible. John Cotton wrote that the "scriptures of God do contain a short upoluposis, or platform, not only of theology, but also of other sacred sciences... ethics, economics, politics, church government, prophesy, academy." In the language of a later age, the Puritans were biblical fundamentalists who believed that every authentic word of Scripture was literal truth, and every command was binding upon them. On even the most mundane social questions, they searched the Scriptures for guidance. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony the standard size of a barrel of beer was set according to a rule in the book of Deuteronomy.1

Other offenses were punished by various forms of public humiliation—stocks and pillories in particular. Criminals were often required to wear on their clothing a letter of the law, in some contrasting color as a badge of shame—not only the immortal A for adultery, but B for blasphemy or burglary, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, F for forgery, R for roguery, S for sedition, T for Theft—an entire alphabet of humiliation. A man in Deerfield was required to wear "a capital I of two inches long, and proportionable bigness," for the crime of incest.22

In the thirty-five years of Sir William Berkeley's tenure, Virginia was transformed. Its population increased fivefold from 8,000 to 40,000 inhabitants. It developed a coherent social order, a functioning economic system, and a strong sense of its own special folkways. Most important, it also acquired a governing elite which Berkeley described as "men of as good families as any subjects in England."8

Historian William Cabell Bruce compared the genealogies of these Virginia families to "a tangle of fishhooks, so closely interlocked that it is impossible to pick up one without drawing three or four after it."17

Most of Jamestown's founders either died in their new homes or speedily returned to England.1