A History of the American People

Bostonian historians of the late 19th century were inclined to dismiss their forebears as horribly
uncivilized. Charles Francis Adams wrote: As a period it was singularly barren and almost inconceivably somber.'' On the contrary, argued the great Samuel Eliot Morison: the Puritan clergy and many leading layfolk were notable in their anxiety to educate and distinguished by their interest in science. They did everything possible to promote intellectual activity by founding schools and colleges. It is true they disliked individualism, a necessary ingredient in cultural creativity. Perry Miller, the historian of the Puritan mind, argued that they were communalists, who believed that government should interfere and direct and lead as much as it could, in all aspects of life. And when necessary it should discipline and coerce too. Puritans saw the individualist as a dangerous loner, meat for the Devil to feed on. As one of them, John Cotton, put it,Society in all sorts of humane affairs is better than solitariness. The Puritans
believed they had the right to impose their will on this communally organized society.
John Davenport of Connecticut summed up the entire Puritan theory of government thus:
Power of Civil rule, by men orderly chosen, is God's ordinance. It is from the Light and Law of Nature, because the Law of Nature is God's Law.' They did not accept that an individual had the right to assert himself, in religious or indeed in any matters. When in 1681 a congregation of Anabaptists published an attack on the government of Massachusetts Bay and appealed to what they called thetolerant spirit' of the first settlers there, Samuel Willard, minister to the Third
Church in Boston, wrote a pamphlet in reply, with a preface by Increase Mather, saying: I perceive they are mistaken in the design of our first Planters, whose business was not toleration but were professed enemies of it, and could leave the world professing they died no Libertines. Their business was to settle and (as much as in them lay) to secure Religion to Posterity, according to that way which they believed was of God. In this kind of would-be theocracy, it was difficult for cultural individualism to flourish. But the elites proposed-and the people disposed themselves otherwise. Sermons, tracts, and laws say one thing; town and church records often show that quite different things actually happened. The New England rank and file contained many individualists who would not be curbed by Puritan leaders. If there were enough of them, there followed a heated town-meeting, an unbridgeable difference, a split-and a move by one faction. A study shows that this is exactly what happened in Sudbury, Massachusetts, in the 1650s, leading to the founding of Marlboro, Massachusetts. The head of the conservative faction, Edmund Goodnow, put his case thus:Be it right or wrong,
we will have [our way] ... If we can have it no other way we will have it by club law.' To which
the leader of the younger generation, John How, replied: ‘If you oppress the poor, they will cry
out. And if you persecute us in one city, wee must fly to another.' And so they did."' The early
Americans were lucky people-they had the space for it.
Individualism did assert itself, therefore, even in Puritan New England. Indeed in a sense it
had to, for America was a do-it-yourself society. Potential settlers were warned they would have
to depend on their own skills. A London broadsheet of 1622 has survived entitled `The
Inconvenients that have happened to Some Persons which Have transported Themselves from
England to Virginia, without Provisions Necessary to Sustain Themselves.' It advised that
settlers should take arms, household implements, and a list of eighteen tools, recommended to be
carried in duplicate, from axes to saws and shovels, not excluding a grindstone. Early settlers
erected their own huts, and made their own furniture when necessary.
But it was not always necessary, even in the earliest decades. It is a notable fact that America,
from the start, had a powerful attraction for skilled men. The reason was clear. One of the
original Mayflower backers, Robert Cushman, wrote that England was a poor place for an honest