Puritan dominance in the New World lasted until the early 18th century. That era can be broken down into three parts: the generation of
John Cotton and
Richard Mather (1630–62) from the founding to the Restoration, years of virtual independence and nearly autonomous development; the generation of
Increase Mather (1662–89) from the Restoration and the Halfway Covenant to the Glorious Revolution, years of struggle with the British crown; and the generation of
Cotton Mather (1689–1728) from the overthrow of
Edmund Andros (in which Cotton Mather played a part) and the new charter, mediated by Increase Mather, to the death of Cotton Mather.
Religion '' by
George Henry Boughton (1867) Once in New England, the Puritans
established Congregational churches that subscribed to
Reformed theology. The
Savoy Declaration, a modification of the
Westminster Confession of Faith, was adopted as a confessional statement by the churches in Massachusetts in 1680 and the churches of Connecticut in 1708. The
Cambridge Platform describes
Congregationalist polity as practiced by Puritans in the 17th century. Every congregation was founded upon a
church covenant, a written agreement signed by all members in which they agreed to uphold congregational principles, to be guided by
sola scriptura in their decision making, and to submit to
church discipline. The right of each congregation to elect its own officers and manage its own affairs was upheld. For church offices, Puritans imitated the model developed in
Calvinist Geneva. There were two major offices:
elder (or presbyter) and
deacon. Initially, there were two types of elders.
Ministers, whose responsibilities included
preaching and administering the
sacraments, were referred to as teaching elders. Large churches would have two ministers, one to serve as
pastor and the other to serve as teacher. Prominent
laymen would be elected for life as ruling elders and could preach. The essential Puritan belief was that people are
saved by
grace alone and not by any
merit from doing
good works. At the same time, Puritans also believed that men and women "could labor to make themselves
appropriate vessels of saving grace" [emphasis in original]. They could accomplish this through Bible reading, prayer, and doing good works. This doctrine was called
preparationism, and nearly all Puritans were preparationists to some extent. The process of
conversion was described in different ways, but most ministers agreed that there were three essential stages. The first stage was humiliation or sorrow for having sinned against
God. The second stage was
justification or
adoption characterized by a sense of having been forgiven and accepted by God through
Christ's mercy. The third stage was
sanctification, the ability to live a holy life out of gladness toward God. Puritans believed churches should be composed of "visible saints" or the
elect. To ensure that only
regenerated persons were admitted as full members, New England churches required prospective members to provide a
conversion narrative describing their personal conversion experience. All settlers were required to attend church services and were subject to church discipline. The Lord's Supper, however, was reserved to full members only. Puritans practiced
infant baptism, but only church members in
full communion could present their children for baptism. Members' children were considered
part of the church and covenant by birth and were entitled to baptism. Nevertheless, these children would not enjoy the full privileges of church membership until they provided a public account of conversion.
Church services were held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, and there was usually a mid-week service. The ruling elders and deacons sat facing the congregation on a raised seat. Men and women sat on opposite sides of the meeting house, and children sat in their own section under the oversight of a
tithingman, who corrected unruly children (or sleeping adults) with a long staff. The pastor opened the service with prayer for about 15 minutes, the teacher then read and explained the selected Bible passage, and a ruling elder then led in singing a
Psalm, usually from the
Bay Psalm Book. The pastor then preached for an hour or more, and the teacher ended the service with prayer and benediction. In churches with only one minister, the morning sermon was devoted to the argument (interpreting the biblical text and justifying that interpretation) and the afternoon sermon to its application (the lessons that could be drawn from the text for the individual or for the collective community).
Church and state For Puritans, the people of society were bound together by a
social covenant (such as Plymouth's
Mayflower Compact, Connecticut's
Fundamental Orders, New Haven's
Fundamental Agreement, and Massachusetts' colonial charter). Having entered into such a covenant, eligible voters were responsible for choosing qualified men to govern and to obey such rulers, who ultimately received their authority from God and were responsible for using it to promote the common good. If the ruler was evil, however, the people were justified in opposing and rebelling against him. Such notions helped New Englanders justify their support for the Parliamentary cause in the
English Civil War of the 1640s, and later the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the
American Revolution of 1775. The Puritans also believed they were in a national
covenant with God. They believed they were chosen by God to help redeem the world by their total obedience to his will. If they were true to the covenant, they would be blessed; if not, they would fail. Within this worldview, it was the government's responsibility to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained. In the Puritan colonies, the Congregational church functioned as a
state religion. In Massachusetts, no new church could be established without the permission of the colony's existing Congregational churches and the government. Likewise, Connecticut allowed only one church per town or
parish, which had to be Congregational. All residents in Massachusetts and Connecticut were required to pay taxes for the support of the Congregational churches, even if they were religious dissenters. The franchise was limited to Congregational church members in Massachusetts and New Haven, but voting rights were more extensive in Connecticut and Plymouth. In Connecticut, church attendance on Sundays was mandatory (for both church members and non-members), and those who failed to attend were fined. There was a greater
separation of church and state in the Puritan commonwealths than existed anywhere in Europe at the time. In England, the king was head of both
church and state,
bishops sat in Parliament and the Privy Council, and church officials exercised many secular functions. In New England, secular matters were handled only by civil authorities, and those who held offices in the church were barred from holding positions in the civil government. When dealing with unorthodox persons, Puritans believed that the church, as a spiritual organization, was limited to "attempting to persuade the individual of his error, to warn him of the dangers he faced if he publicly persisted in it, and—as a last resort—to expel him from the spiritual society by
ex-communication." Citizens who lost church membership by excommunication retained the right to vote in civil affairs.
Religious intoleration The Puritans did not come to America to establish a
theocracy, but neither did they institute
religious freedom. Puritans believed that the state was obligated to protect society from heresy, and it was empowered to use corporal punishment, banishment, and execution. New England magistrates did not investigate private views, but they did take action against
public dissent from the religious establishment. Puritan sentiments were expressed by
Nathaniel Ward in
The Simple Cobbler of Agawam: "all
Familists,
Antinomians,
Anabaptists, and other
Enthusiasts shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come [shall have liberty] to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better."
Quakers The period 1658–1692 saw the
execution of Quakers and the imprisonment of
Baptists. Quakers were initially banished by colonial courts, but they often returned in defiance of authorities. Historian
Daniel Boorstin stated, "the Puritans had not sought out the Quakers in order to punish them; the Quakers had come in quest of punishment." Civil and religious restrictions were most strictly applied by the Puritans of Massachusetts which saw various banishments applied to dissenters to enforce conformity, including the
branding iron, the
whipping post, the
bilboes and the
hangman's noose. Notable individuals persecuted by the Puritans include
Anne Hutchinson who was banished to Rhode Island during the
Antinomian Controversy and
Quaker Mary Dyer who was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. Dyer was one of the four executed Quakers known as the
Boston martyrs. Executions ceased in 1661 when
King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism.
Jesuits In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting any
Jesuit Catholic priests from entering territory under Puritan jurisdiction. Any suspected person who could not clear himself was to be banished from the colony; a second offence carried a death penalty.
Family life in Salem, Massachusetts is a recreation of the original Puritan settlement. For Puritans, the family was the "locus of spiritual and civic development and protection", and marriage was the foundation of the family and, therefore, society. Unlike in England, where people were married by ministers in the church according to the
Book of Common Prayer, Puritans saw no biblical justification for church weddings or the exchange of wedding rings. While marriage held great religious significance for Puritans—they saw it as a covenant relationship freely entered into by both man and wife—the wedding was viewed as a private, contractual event officiated by a civil
magistrate either in the home of the magistrate or a member of the bridal party. Massachusetts ministers were not legally permitted to solemnize marriages until 1686 after the colony had been placed under royal control, but by 1726 it had become the accepted tradition. According to scholars Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis, some historians argue that Puritan child-rearing was repressive. Central to this argument is the views of
John Robinson, the Pilgrims' first pastor, who wrote in a 1625 treatise "Of Children and Their Education", "And surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down." Moran and Vinovskis, however, argue that Robinson's views were not representative of 17th-century Puritans. They write that Puritan parents "exercised an authoritative, not an authoritarian, mode of child-rearing" that aimed to cultivate godly affections and reason, with
corporal punishment used as a last resort.
Education , opened 1635, is the oldest public school in the United States. According to historian Bruce C. Daniels, the Puritans were "[o]ne of the most literate groups in the early modern world", with about 60 percent of New England able to read. At a time when the literacy rate in England was less than 30 percent, the Puritan leaders of colonial New England believed children should be educated for both religious and civil reasons, and they worked to achieve universal literacy. In 1642, Massachusetts required heads of households to teach their wives, children, and servants basic reading and writing so that they could read the Bible and understand colonial laws. In 1647, the government required all towns with 50 or more households to hire a teacher and towns of 100 or more households to hire a
grammar school instructor to prepare promising boys for college. Boys interested in the ministry were often sent to colleges such as
Harvard (founded in 1636) or
Yale (founded in 1707). The Puritans anticipated the educational theories of
John Locke and other
Enlightenment thinkers. Like Locke's
blank slate, Puritans believed that a child's mind was "an empty receptacle, one that had to be infused with the knowledge gained from careful instruction and education." The Puritans in the United States were great believers in education. They wanted their children to be able to read the Bible themselves, and interpret it themselves, rather than have to have a clergyman tell them what it says and means. This then leads to thinking for themselves, which is the basis of democracy. The Puritans, almost immediately after arriving in America in 1630, set up schools for their sons. They also set up what were called dame schools for their daughters and in other cases taught their daughters at home how to read. As a result, Americans were the most literate people in the world. By the time of the American Revolution, there were 40 newspapers in the United States (at a time when there were only two cities—New York and Philadelphia—with as many as 20,000 people in them). The Puritans set up a college (Harvard University) only six years after arriving in the United States. By the time of the Revolution, the United States had 10 colleges (while England had only two).
Recreation and leisure Puritans did not celebrate traditional holidays such as Christmas, Easter, or May Day. They also did not observe personal annual holidays, such as birthdays or anniversaries. They did, however, celebrate special occasions such as military victories, harvests,
ordinations, weddings, and births. These celebrations consisted of food and conversation. Beyond special occasions, the tavern was an important place for people to gather for fellowship on a regular basis.
Increase Mather wrote that dancing was "a natural expression of joy; so that there is no more sin in it than in laughter." Puritans generally discouraged mixed or "promiscuous" dancing between men and women, which according to Mather would lead to "unchaste touches and gesticulations. .. [that] have a palpable tendency to that which is evil." Some ministers, including
John Cotton, thought that mixed dancing was appropriate under special circumstances, but all agreed it was a practice not to be encouraged. Dancing was also discouraged at weddings or on holidays (especially dancing around a
maypole) and was illegal in taverns. Puritans had no theological objections to sports and games as long as they did not involve gambling (which eliminated activities such as billiards, shuffleboard, horse racing, bowling, and cards). They also opposed
blood sports, such as cockfighting, cudgel-fighting, and bear-baiting. Team sports, such as football, were problematic because "they encouraged idleness, produced injuries, and created bitter rivalries." Hunting and fishing were approved because they were productive. Other sports were encouraged for promoting civic virtue, such as competitions of marksmanship, running, and wrestling held within militia companies. Only a few activities were completely condemned by Puritans. They were most opposed to the theater. According to historian Bruce Daniels, plays were seen as "false recreations because they exhausted rather than relaxed the audience and actors" and also "wasted labor, led to wantonness and homosexuality, and invariably were represented by Puritans as a foreign—particularly French or Italian—disease of a similar enervating nature as syphilis." All forms of gambling were illegal. Not only were card-playing, dice throwing and other forms of gambling seen as contrary to the values of "family, work, and honesty", they were religiously offensive because gamblers implicitly asked God to intervene in trivial matters, violating the
Third Commandment against
taking the Lord's name in vain.
Slavery Slavery was legal in colonial New England; however, the slave population was less than three percent of the labor force. Most Puritan clergy accepted the existence of slavery since it was a practice
recognized in the Bible. They also acknowledged that all people—whether white, black or Native American—were persons with souls who might receive saving grace. For this reason, slaves and free black people were eligible for full church membership, though meetinghouses and burial grounds were racially segregated. The Puritan influence over society meant that slaves were treated better in New England than in the
Southern Colonies. In Massachusetts, the law gave slaves "all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel doth morally require". As a result, slaves received the same protections against mistreatment as white servants. Slave marriages were legally recognized, and slaves were entitled to a
trial by jury, even if accused of a crime by their master. In 1700, Massachusetts judge and Puritan
Samuel Sewall published "The Selling of Joseph," the first
antislavery tract written in America. In it, Sewall condemns slavery and the slave trade and refutes many of the era's typical justifications for slavery. The Puritan influence on slavery was still strong at the time of the American Revolution and beyond. In the decades leading up to the
American Civil War, abolitionists such as
Theodore Parker,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau and
Frederick Douglass repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slavery newspaper,
The Liberator, invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker, in urging New England Congressmen to support the abolition of slavery, writes "The son of the Puritan ... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right ..." == Controversies ==