The Puritans by Miller Perry; Johnson Thomas H.;

Author:Miller, Perry; Johnson, Thomas H.; [Perry Miller & Thomas H. Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

THE PURITANS

VOLUME II

Page of Samuel Sewall’s Diary. (For text, see p. 526.)

Chapter IV

MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND BEHAVIOR

WHEN John Josselyn, naturalist and traveler, returned to England in 1671, he wrote of the civil and ecclesiastical “great masters” whom he met in the Bay Colony that some of them were “damnable rich.” His objurgations went even farther:

. . . inexplicably covetous and proud, they receive your gifts but as an homage or tribute due to their transcendency, which is a fault their Clergie are also guilty of, whose living is upon the bounty of their hearers. . . . The chiefest objects of discipline, Religion, and morality they want, some are of a Linsie-woolsie disposition, of several professions in Religion, all like Aethiopians white in the Teeth, only full of ludification and injurious dealing, . . . and savagely factious amongst themselves. . . 1

Some forty years had elapsed since Governor Winthrop led his earnest followers to New England, and doubtless times had changed. The authority of the earlier magistrates, most of whom by Josselyn’s time had been “laid asleep in their beds of rest till the day of doom,” 2 was passing; even the clergy, alarmed at the defection from high seriousness which they believed was spreading among the coming generation, had cautioned them “alwayes to remember, that Originally they are a Plantation Religious, not a plantation of Trade.” 3 But a clergyman’s privilege of straight speaking and a traveler’s presumption in criticizing are two different things. Perhaps Josselyn was right, even if his censure went unheeded, for though sketched in pique his outline does not seriously misrepresent the composite Yankee.

Josselyn was one of the first among many observers of American manners who have found much to bewilder them and not a little to criticize. Colonizers as a rule do not combine high ideals with shrewd clearsightedness, self-discipline with passion. If the leaders among the second generation of New Englanders accepted Josselyn’s gifts as homage, they were but receiving a tribute due the u Plantation Religious”; if they were proud, then Josselyn had misjudged them in expecting servility.

Factiousness was indeed an infirmity to which early New Englanders were peculiarly prone. The relative isolation of each village group compelled its members to associate in vexatious yet unavoidable propinquity. The era when “Good fences make good neighbors” had not yet arrived, and the “commonage,” or unfenced village land, was shared. When horses and catde strayed, as they might do with exasperating ease, tempers flared, and only the greatest self-control prevented bitter contention, as the diary of Joseph Green vividly testifies (see p. 448). The colonists did not welcome lawyers as a class—wisely perhaps, for the issues which made the townsmen so “savagely factious amongst themselves” could be as equitably resolved by private agreement. Petty gossip and meanness, bickering and contentiousness were the “little foxes” all too often lurking in the Puritan vineyard. We encounter them in journals and diaries, and they were the texts for innumerable sermons and “lectures.” The godly were as much embroiled as the unregenerate.

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