A History of the American People

conducted by men chosen by all the full members of the congregation. These were the freemen,
and they were recruited in batches on account of their Godly behaviour.' Thus in May 1631 Winthrop added 118 men to the freeman ranks. More were added from time to time as he and the congregational elders saw fit. In effect, he ran a dictatorship. He summoned his General Court only once a year, not four times as the company's charter stipulated. Everyone, not just the freemen, had to swear an oath of loyalty to his government. He was quite ruthless in dealing with any kind of dissent or (as he saw it) antisocial behavior. In August 1630, in the first weeks of the settlement, he burned down the house of Thomas Morton of Boston for erecting a maypole and revelling.' Morton was kept in the stocks until he could be shipped home in the returning fleet.
The following June, Philip Radcliffe was whipped and had both his ears cut off for, in the words
of Winthrop's Journal, most foul, scandalous invectives against our church and government.' Sir Christopher Gardiner was banished for bigamy and papism. Again,Thomas Knower was sett in
the bilbowes for threatening the Court that, if hee should be punished, hee would have it tryed in
England whether hee were lawfully punished or not.
However, Winthrop was not the only man in New England who had a lust for authority and a
divine mandate to exercise it. The new American colonies were full of such people. James I
pettishly but understandably remarked that they were `a seminary for a fractious parliament.'
Men with strong religious beliefs tend to form into two broad categories, and constitute churches
accordingly. One category, among whom the archtetypal church is the Roman Catholic, desire
the certitude and tranquility of hierarchical order. They are prepared to entrust religious truth to a
professional clergy, organized in a broadbased triangle of parish priests, with an episcopal
superstructure and a pontifical apex. The price paid for this kind of orthodox order is clericalism-
and the anticlericalism it provokes. There was never any chance of this kind of religious system
establishing itself in America. If there was one characteristic which distinguished it from the
startwhich made it quite unlike any part of Europe and constituted its uniqueness -in fact-it was
the absence of any kind of clericalism. Clergymen there were, and often very good ones, who
enjoyed the esteem and respect of their congregations by virtue of their piety and preachfulness.
But whatever nuance of Protestantism they served, and including Catholic priests when they in
due course arrived, none of them enjoyed a special status, in law or anything else, by virtue of
their clerical rank. Clergy spoke with authority from their altars and pulpits, but their power
ended at the churchyard gate; and even within it congregations exercised close supervision of
what their minister did, or did not, do. They appointed; they removed. In a sense, the clergy were
the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a
democratic element from the start-albeit that such electoral colleges were limited to the
outwardly godly.
Hence Americans never belonged to the religious category who seek certainty of doctrine
through clerical hierarchy: during the whole of the colonial period, for instance, not a single
Anglican bishop was ever appointed to rule flocks there. What most Americans did belong to
was the second category: those who believe that knowledge of God comes direct to them through
the study of Holy Writ. They read the Bible for themselves, assiduously, daily. Virtually every
humble cabin in Massachusetts colony had its own Bible. Adults read it alone, silently. It was
also read aloud among families, as well as in church, during Sunday morning service, which
lasted from eight till twelve (there was more Bible-reading in the afternoon). Many families had
a regular course of Bible-reading which meant that they covered the entire text of the Old
Testament in the course of each year. Every striking episode was familiar to them, and its
meaning and significance earnestly discussed; many they knew by heart. The language and lilt of