ROOTS OF AMERICAN CULTURE: 17TH CENTURY
An Examination of the Chaotic Cultural History of Early Colonial America
The history of North America during the period of European contact and colonization has seen considerable re-evaluation in recent decades. Rather than simply a story of English pilgrimage made up of religious separatists seeking the freedom to practice their faith as they saw fit, and the succeeding generations which followed and gave birth to the political founding of the United States, historians have sought to complicate and nuance understanding of this history by providing a broader and richer context. This newer approach, which incorporates the histories of native peoples as well as other branches of European exploration and colonialization—including that of the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French—offers a more comprehensive understanding of the era. An examination of the crosscurrents of the respective politics and cultural aspects of these different groups thus add to an appreciation of their individual and shared histories.
Alan Taylor, current chair of the Department of History at the University of Virginia, has argued for historians to avoid the old historical trap of “American Exceptionalism” and has offered instead for a combination of an Atlantic history as well as a continental history of North America. In terms of the importance of a continental history, especially one that respects the agency of Native American peoples, Taylor argues in his Colonial America (2012) for a history that emphasizes native peoples’ “ability to adapt to newcomers and to compel concessions from them.” This is crucial, as it avoids the long-held approach of casting American Indians as passive participants in their own history. Furthermore, an appreciation of the long history of American Indians—thousands of years before European contact—is also important for examining their history as something beyond obstacles to European expansion in the “New World.” As Taylor observes, by 1492 “the native peoples from North American spoke at least 375 languages” and that trade “connected these peoples over long distances. At sites in the Midwest or Great Basin, archaeologists find marine shells from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; on the coasts they uncover copper from the Great Lakes and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains.” By analyzing the colonization of different European powers, a more comprehensive Atlantic view of history is also possible. Appreciating the longue durée of American Indian history prior to European contact, and by studying their innovations and civilizations in the process, it is also possible to achieve a deeper level of continental history as well. These two approaches (Atlantic and Continental) can operate simultaneously. Indeed, one informs the other. This is especially true in regard to European preconceptions of the New World as both a paradise as well as a site for colonial opportunities.
Among the most immediate and tragic ramifications of European colonization in the Americas was the immense loss of Native American life due to European-originating diseases. Taylor notes that from the point of colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the West Indies in 1493, the Native American population dwindled to ten percent of what it had been by 1700. This means that, according to Taylor, “the Americas held about fifty to a hundred million people in 1492, betraying the idea of the Americas as ‘virgin land.’” Thus the low population of American Indians that soon followed—caused by the influx of Europeans with foreign viruses—itself reinforced the myth that the land had been saved for European discovery and dominance. As native populations decreased over the next two centuries, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English peoples were able to rationalize their colonization as part of the natural order.
It would be a mistake however, to address European/Native American relationships as monolithic and uniform. People hailing from different European regions interacted with American Indians in a variety of ways. These differences were informed by the varying motivations of their respective governments, including commercial interests, religious missions, and more. As colonization developed, these relationships continued to (d)evolve. From slaves the Spanish took from around the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and from Venezuela to Florida, they learned about the Aztec empire in central Mexico. The act of conquering, then, led to further hegemonies. The Spanish rationalized the vanquishing of the Aztecs by noting their practice of human sacrifice. Other American Indians who had been historically subjugated by the Aztecs were more than happy to assist the Spanish in defeating them. Thus began a long history of Native American tribes seeing an alliance with Europeans as a means of avenging other Indian enemies. In the West Indies, central Mexico, and elsewhere, the Spanish were particularly brutal against the native populations.
The French took a notably different approach. They chose to place considerable focus upon the northern latitudes of North America in order to avoid competition and conflict with the Spanish as well as to exploit the abundant fish and fur in the region. They saw the St. Lawrence River and its access to the Great Lakes country, with its abundance of thick furs, as a promising area to establish extensive trade with northern Indian peoples. Because their relationship with Native Americans was built on trade, they sought a more harmonious and reciprocal relationship with them. This relationship with Indian populations, however, meant that messy, entangled alliances with certain native peoples against other native peoples became the reality.
The Dutch, who established trading posts on the Hudson River and established New Amsterdam as the commercial capital of New Netherland, had little hesitation in selling guns to the nearby Iroquois who soon enough killed hundreds of their Huron enemies. The Dutch, who were the leaders of commerce in the seventeenth century, were unlike the other European powers colonizing the Americas at this time. They operated under a republican model of government. The combination of their republicanism, religious toleration, naval power, colonial trade, and manufacturing gave their citizens the highest standard of living in Europe.
The English set out to replace the Dutch as the dominant international trader in the world. They took New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves in the 1660s and, earlier in the century, established their own permanent post in the Chesapeake in Virginia. Like the Dutch, their interests were in exploiting the land and its resources and cementing an international trade outpost in North America. Also like the Dutch, they treated Indians as obstacles to be contended with rather than human beings to negotiate with like the French in the northern region. Seventy-five percent of the early English settlers in Virginia were indentured. This contributed to the growth of an aristocratic class quickly in the area. Once the commercial promise of tobacco was discovered, land and labor needed to be increased quickly. The result was Indian wars to secure more land and the introduction and exponential growth of African slave labor to cultivate the crop.
As colonial regions grew they inevitably found themselves in conflict with each other as well as with Native Americans. The decreasing use of indentured servants replaced with slaves added another level of conflict. France drove a wedge between Spain’s colonies in Florida and New Mexico when it established the French Louisiana territory. Their inclination to trade with Indians meant that the Spanish no longer held a monopoly on the selling of guns to Native Americans. The French would arm the Indians in return for fur pelts and slaves. After the Dutch lost what became New York to the English in the 1660s, the Spanish soon began losing power and influence on the east coast of North America, save for Spanish Florida. Soon enough, in the colony of Carolina, the English were paying Native Americans with guns to hunt down and return runaway slaves. All of these examples underscore the overlap and intersecting of the Atlantic and Continental histories of North America.
The English Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century are, of course, critical to understanding American history as well. Though theirs is not the whole story, their motivations, theology, social values, and experiences are indeed critical in grasping (especially) the cultural history of Massachusetts in this era. Though Puritanism achieved cultural and political dominance in England for a time, manifesting in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s and the so-called Puritan Revolution, it was quickly tempered during the Restoration and began receiving significant cultural criticism by English thinkers in the later seventeenth century.
Some of the most important religious thinkers who influenced the puritans, especially those who emigrated to Massachusetts, were in fact non-English theologians. John Calvin, for example, was a French theologian in Geneva whose arguments in favor of predestination are fundamental to Puritanism. The German, Martin Luther, who acted as the catalyst who popularized opposition to the Catholic Church and made possible various branches of Protestantism, including Puritanism, was also an essential contributor to the belief system of those English who traveled to New England. Similarly, the Scotsman John Knox and his Presbyterianism contributed to notions of right and resistance against state actors who violate one’s religious morality. This is not dissimilar to Puritan ideas regarding rights of conscience and specific separations between civil and religious authority. All of these strains of Protestantism (Lutheranism, Calvinism, Presbyterianism), to one degree or another, also influenced Puritan notions of eradicating the pomp and ceremony of Catholic rites and practice.
The Puritanism advocated by New Englanders was predominantly Congregationalist, which informed a strong belief in creating a viable religious community. Congregationalism is defined by its sense of autonomy between churches. This practice of self-rule within one’s church was fundamental to New England puritans and contributed to similar notions of self-governance in the political sphere. To ensure a general level of uniformity between the churches, ministers from the separate churches would regularly meet with each other, essentially as agents of their respectful communities. Church membership was done by voluntary choice of the church members rather than imposed through geographic location and affiliation.
Of extreme importance to the Puritans and something that informed their experiences and beliefs was the central role of the family. Obligation began first and foremost to one’s family and spread out to the congregation and broader community from there. Though gender roles were rigidly defined, the modern idea of puritans as sexually repressed, patriarchal societies is to some degree incorrect. As humorous as H.L. Mencken’s quote about puritans being a people who detested the idea of “somebody, somewhere, having a good time,” the historical evidence doesn’t support this. Though puritans condemned fornication and excessive drinking, they condemned anything done in excess. Furthermore, critical as they were of sex outside of marriage, they celebrated sex and love within the confines of marriage and much of what the western world today recognizes as romantic love was promoted and applauded by New England puritans in the seventeenth century.
The concept of human fallibility was central to puritan belief, as were the beliefs regarding grace and election. For puritans, humankind was infected with original sin, due to the fall of man as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin against God in the Garden of Eden. Because of this, all human beings are deserving of damnation and only those specifically chosen by God (a small group known as the elect) will be saved. They are saved by Christ’s grace and not through works. Salvation through works was specifically denounced by puritans as a false, Catholic doctrine. Good works were promoted greatly in puritan communities for their humbling effects, the productive quality labor manifests which betters the community, and skilled work was specifically celebrated as an expression of one’s God-given talents. Good works, however, were for these positive effects of humility and contributing to the benefits of one’s family and community. Good works were never to be done as a means of increasing one’s chances for God’s favor. Only by grace is one saved. Predestination thus disconnects good works from salvation. If it is pre-ordained that one is already saved (or not), then one knows to do good works because it is expected of them in the earthly realm to be a good person, citizen, and family member. Good works do nothing for ensuring access to the great beyond. Whether one is saved is unknown to all but God. The elect are thus known as the invisible church. The visible church was Catholicism, which Puritans viewed as a church only in the most material and earthbound sense. The visible church had as part of its identity shrines, idols, and rituals. The invisible church, however, was the elected body of those saved by the grace of God.
Puritans believed in the concept of divine intervention, including and especially in manifestations of tragedies. Because of this, jeremiad sermons became prominent—especially in the later seventeenth century—to account for the ills that had befallen their community. These sermons would generally assert that tragedies including disease and Indian attacks were the result of the community falling back into their sin nature and that they were thus deserving of God’s wrath. Jeremiads, then, were common in following great calamities. Preachers used the opportunity to remind church members that their miserable state was better than they even deserved.
There is some difficulty for many in modern times to resolve the puritan’s belief in predestination and the elect with concepts of divine intervention, miracles, and the wrath of God. Many today might see these views as oppositional, even contradictory. Puritans didn’t appear to see these two concepts to be mutually exclusive. Instead, they saw one as informing the other. This may be difficult for someone in the twenty-first century to comprehend, but for the seventeenth century New England believer, the two impressions were not out of sync.
In Francis Bremer’s book, Puritanism (2009), the historian addresses the difficulty for puritan leaders like John Winthrop to establish an ideal community made up of members of a religious sect who portrayed human beings as fallen. Bremer observes that Winthrop asserted that puritans “were required to sacrifice their individual aspirations for the common good, to live exemplary Christian lives, caring for one another and struggling alongside each other to create due forms of civil and spiritual life. If they maintained this commitment to God and to one another, God would reward them with peace and prosperity.” When Winthrop wrote his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” in 1630, he was seeking to unite puritan believers from various areas of England who had set out for America to ”be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop was seeking to bring an ideal society to a community of flawed beings by emphasizing that the eyes of God, peers and neighbors, and the world were on them. By underscoring the public act of faith and indeed to live one’s faith as a public act, it would reinforce Christian behavior as well as serve as a model for the world. Winthrop warns, however, that “if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other gods our pleasures, and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whether we pass over this vast sea to possess it.” Thus a combination of fear of God’s wrath for turning away from Him, and living as a positive model of Christian charity for the world, an ideal society made up of imperfect beings—according to Winthrop—could be achievable.
There was no small amount of tension and contradictions in the application of Congregational polity, also know as “The New England Way,” and the strict cultural and religiously conformist aims of New England puritans. After all, much of the New England Way was made up of axioms concerning the crucial role of voluntary association. It was the relatively loose, decentralized structure of Congregationalism and individual church autonomy that helped define the faith, yet those who openly questioned tenets of the faith or its established societal norms faced considerable consequences for doing so. By the end of the 1630s, for example, not even a decade following Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” Ann Hutchinson was banished and excommunicated from the faith for her views that the church was narrowly moralistic. Roger Williams was banished a few years prior for his belief that Native Americans needed to be properly compensated for their land and that magistrates should have no say in matters of religion. In the 1640s, Dr. Robert Child, a Presbyterian minister (along with several others), petitioned for greater civil freedoms for non-church members. The petition included grievances regarding tax impositions and lack of equal freedoms for Anglicans, Presbyterians, and other non-Puritans. The Child Petition was denounced by the Puritans. When Child audaciously appealed to the English Parliament for a recognition of freedoms, he and several others were imprisoned in New England. Child eventually fled back to England, but the moment was ill-timed, as it overlapped with the decline of Puritanism at home. The persecution of the Quakers in succeeding decades, including the hanging of martyrs such as Mary Dyer, who was executed for repeatedly violating the ban against Quakers entering the Massachusetts colony, further demonstrates the limits of seventeenth century puritan ideas of free association.
It would seem that an ideal Puritan society, even one which at least in theory valued voluntary association and a decentralized polity, could not permit dissent which would question the authority and guidance of the leadership. This defect may be what people today most identify with the New England Puritans: a staid rigidness and demand for conformity. Bremer asserts that this characterization is reductionist and casts the puritans more cartoonishly than is justified, despite the very real injustices they were indeed guilty of.
Attempts at reforms and compromises are less remembered. Among the most noteworthy was the Halfway Covenant of 1662, as it came to be known. Proclamations of conversion experiences were required for full church membership, but this practice grew less common with second generation New Englanders. Prior to the synod which established the Halfway Covenant, the baptism of one’s children could not be performed if one hadn’t espoused a conversion experience. To retain and increase church membership and influence, this new covenant allowed for partial (“Half”) membership and thus baptism privileges to those who had not declared a conversion experience could be performed. Instances such as this reveal that church leadership sought to negotiate its role in order to secure and expand its reach. Such attempts did little over all, however, to stem the reduction of the church’s power over time.
With controversies over church governance, as well as generational divisions regarding materialism, growing secularism in New England society, and the growth of other faiths in the region from the middle of the seventeenth century forward, a declensionwas noted by Increase and Cotton Mather late in the century. This declension was the lack of promise of later generations of Puritans to live up to the standard of John Winthrop’s vision as well as the dwindling influence they held in both England and New England. The English Civil Wars and the Restoration had drastically reframed Puritan political and religious influence in England. Puritanism was at its height as a social and governing force during the reign of Oliver Cromwell and the era of the Protectorate in the 1650s. With the Restoration, however, in 1660, with the recognition of Charles II as England’s king, Puritans lost a substantial measure of their power. Adding to this was Charles II’s toleration of Catholics and Dissenters, and his successor, James II’s outright Catholicism. The resulting Glorious Revolution in 1688 and 1689, which saw James II flee his throne and the Parliament welcoming William of Orange and his wife Mary to be the new Monarchs, did not usher in a return of strong Puritan authority. While the Glorious Revolution asserted the primary role of Parliament as England’s ruling body and firmly reestablished the kingdom’s strong Protestant position, Puritanism’s day in the sun had passed.
The diminishing puritan legacy in England and New England in the mid and late seventeenth century contributed to a return of jeremiads in America. Loss of faith, church leaders contended, must have been the reason for the church’s dwindling influence and for continued Indian warfare as well as the disastrous Salem Witch Trials in 1692. These jeremiads, like those earlier in the era, were intended to promote a strong return to faith and first principles. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, this was exceedingly difficult. The rising popularity of Deism (especially in England) and the emerging role of Enlightenment values in the eighteenth century marginalized the role of religion to make room for the role of science and empiricism. This declension, then, was not a phase but a harbinger of things to come. Not until the Great Awakening in the 1720s and 1740s would there be the kind of religious revival the puritans hoped for, and when it came it would be defined in many ways by its differences from the previous Puritanism rather than by its similarities. Though the Great Awakening arguably defined the next chapter of American Calvinism in New England and elsewhere, it was not altogether the same faith (nor did it occupy the same role) as the Congregationalism of the seventeenth century. The Puritan legacy of New England was primarily a phenomenon of the previous age. Its early decades provided expression of not just religious beliefs but philosophies regarding proper government. Events of the second half of the seventeenth century largely contributed to the negative reputation it has endured ever since and ultimately aided in its own decline.
There is, however, a more enduring puritan legacy—for better or for worse—which has been observed by scholars like Max Weber and Edmund Morgan. The so-called puritan work ethic has been posited as a precursor to American capitalism. Whether or not such a thesis is correct, it does provide for an opportunity to discuss the differences in how the English related to agriculture and the natural environment (as well as notions of property) from that of the American Indians in the American northeast. These differences express more fundamental distinctions between the native population and the English in regard to spirituality, social values, and culture. Divergent worldviews are demonstrated through the ways these groups approached the organizing of their societies, the treatment of their neighbors, opinions they held toward foreigners and enemies, and how they treated their immediate physical environment.
In the beginning of Alan Taylor’s Colonial America, he notes the different approach to map-making—and thus to some extent sense-making—between Native Americans and European settlers. He observes that on late seventeenth/early eighteenth century Indian maps, English and other European settlements are represented as “square and rectangle buildings in towns platted as grids: alien and unnatural forms [Native Americans, in this case the Catawba of the South Carolina region] thought were odd.” Taylor further recognizes that Indian maps represented their own villages as circles, “which underscored the natural cycle of seasons and lives. The well-rounded natives thought the newcomers as squares.” Beyond Taylor’s clever wordplay and despite his example explaining the phenomenon in Carolina, it is also relevant in highlighting the differences American Indians and English settlers in New England exhibited regarding the expression of their sense of self as well as how they related to their surroundings and resources. These maps also express a crucial truth regarding the larger Native American population in North America that has gone unseen in a lot of American history scholarship. Taylor remarks, “The self-assurance of the maps jar our conventional assumptions about colonial history, which casts Indians as primitive, marginal, and doomed. We do not expect to find natives acting as the self-confident teachers of colonists cast as rather obtuse, but redeemable, students.”
If the Indians saw the Europeans as squares, as Taylor puts it, The English New Englanders in the seventeenth century saw Native Americans as a people who failed to civilize. This trait, according the Puritans, was a byproduct of their un-Christian way of life. For Europeans, including the New English (as Taylor refers to them), Christianity and civilization were essentially synonymous. Savagery was emblematic of both distance from the one true Christian God and a conceding to the earth-bound power of the elements. Taylor asserts that “colonists saw Indians as their opposite: people who had surrendered to their worst instincts to live within the wild, instead of laboring hard to conquer and transcend nature.”
This difference in the concept and priority of labor was notable between the colonial and native peoples in New England. Northeastern Algonkians, for example, prized few material possessions and generally shared that which they had that could be considered personal property. Taylor observes that leisure and generosity meant more to their culture than did material accumulation or personal wealth. The Puritan colonists, on the other hand “lived and worked on fixed and substantial properties… Because they showed such little generosity to their poor and less to the Algonkians, the colonists struck the natives as mean and stingy, enslaved by their property and their longings for more.”
The subsistence culture of the Algonkians who subscribed to the notion of a Great Spirit, or Manitou, which lives in and throughout all things and connects all life and all of the world with each other, stood in stark contrast with the process of accumulation and concentration of natural resources practiced by the colonists of New England. For American Indians like the Algonkian, Manitou represented humankind’s harmonious and reciprocal relationship with the natural world. For European settlers such as the English Puritans in the northeastern settlements of North America, the natural world was one removed from the peaceful and congruent age of Eden, and thus was to be dominated through a Christian determination. This determination was one which sought to be spiritually removed from the earth and transcend the limits of the natural world by overcoming it through the extraction of resources and the exploits of labor. The views of leisure, labor, and property were as discordant as they were between Indians and colonists because their view of the world itself (including that of the spiritual world) were entirely different and, in significant ways, diametrically opposed.
These conflicting worldviews were expressed in complications related to trade, diplomacy, and war. For colonists, the only acceptable form of assimilation was for Indians to convert to Christianity and adopt European, specifically English, customs. As native populations dramatically decreased due to disease and encroachment, some Indians believed that engaging in trade, signing treaties, and adapting to some (though perhaps not all) English and European practices would allow them some semblance of cultural preservation and autonomy. This was not so and indeed created further inter-native divisions as those who resisted assimilation saw themselves at odds not merely with colonists but with Indians who had moved themselves to so-called Prayer Towns and had converted to Christianity and more European ways of life. Thus the difficulty of cultural preservation for native peoples was compounded by the combination of European influence and the splintering of Indian peoples between those who sought some forms of assimilation and a middle ground with those who resisted European practices and beliefs.
As wars continued to break out, Indians continued to find themselves in exceedingly precarious circumstances. Indians would align with the English against rival natives. Remnants of old bands would coalesce into new forms of Indian groups who struggled to hold on to their ancient way of life. Treaties made with the English to bring or preserve peace would foment anger by rival or dissenting Indians. Trade was engaged in by Native Americans not merely to acquire novel tools but also to acquire weapons to use against their native enemies. Thus the practice of trade itself, historically used as a form of diplomacy to bring peoples together for mutual self-interest, became a vehicle for increased schisms between Indians through violence and warfare.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, the early stages of a pan-Indian movement began to spread across regions of the North American continent. Wars which included Europeans and Indians on both sides of conflicts, however, continued for many more decades, as France and their Indian allies fought England and the people of the Five Nations of the Iroquois in the American theater of the Seven Years War in the middle of the eighteenth century. The cultural legacy of the American Indians, especially those on the eastern coast of North America and particularly those in the northeast, continued to diminish. This process continued west across the continent, through the Ohio Valley and eventually to the other side of the continent in the nineteenth century.
The legacy of the early English settlers, then, is inseparably intertwined with that of the Native Americans whom they encroached upon, warred with, learned from, and ultimately conquered. Though forced from their lands and compelled into assimilation, however, American Indians were not passive participants in their own story. Their story is also one of struggle, survival, resistance, and the fight to preserve their deep-rooted spiritual and cultural traditions.