“Methinks I see the destiny of America
embodied in the first Puritan who landed
on those shores, just as the human race
was represented by the first man.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America65
Like most children of my generation, and past and present ones too, I learned very little in school about the Pilgrims. Between their arrival and the American Revolution there was virtually a blank slate except for the usual stories—the fabled landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620, the first Thanksgiving, and the community’s propensity for godliness and hard work, as if the two were synonymous. Even in high school I hardly knew the difference between the original Mayflower Pilgrims and the Great Migration of Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony that began a decade later.
In college I made the common error of confusing Puritanism with Victorianism. My cartoonish image of Puritans was of little men dressed in black with funny hats and even grimmer women in high collar dresses and frumpy white bonnets. I blamed them for much that was uptight and repressed in American culture. Little did I know that richer members of the community wore colorful and fashionable clothes. Or that the Puritans were very much into sex. Within marriage both men and women were entitled to sexual pleasure, and in some colonies male impotence was legal ground for divorce. Some historians argue that women were better off as Puritans than later on.66
These false impressions of the Puritans aren’t for lack of historical evidence to the contrary. Puritan luminaries kept diaries and wrote histories, like William Bradford’s journal Of Plymouth Plantation and the later epic penned by Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702. Local records of land transactions and judicial proceedings also shed interesting light on the period. One of my ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a young man named George Soule who was a servant to senior Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow and probably the teacher of his children. George later became a free man and was given land in Duxbury, north of Plymouth, in the 1630s. Family lore has it that George was an exemplary man with an exemplary family, but in writing this book, I discovered local records reveal a more complicated picture. George’s son Nathaniel was whipped for “lying with an Indian woman” and was ordered “to pay ten bushels of Indian corn to the said woman towards the keeping of her child.” His daughter Elizabeth was punished twice for committing fornication.67
That the Puritans were men and women on a religious mission is widely known, but what exactly was that mission and how does it continue to affect us today? Puritanism evolved in the context of the Protestant Reformation that roiled Europe from the early 16th into the 17th century. The Reformation was inspired by theologians like the German Martin Luther and the Frenchman John Calvin who attacked Catholic religious doctrine and the Vatican’s worldly power. In England the Reformation led to a long period of social and political upheaval. The Church of England’s first break from Rome came when the Pope refused to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Protestant Anne Boleyn. But under the reign of Mary Tudor from 1553–58, the Church again accepted Papal authority. The next split came in the reign of Mary’s successor, Queen Elizabeth, but the extent to which the Church was truly reformed remained a bone of contention. The Puritan movement rose to resist continuing Catholic influences in the Church. The Puritans opposed the special vestments and privileges of the Anglican clergy, looked down on their rituals and rites, and rejected manmade images of God and Christ.
For the Puritans, God’s relationship with man was marked by two covenants, the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. In the first, God promised eternal happiness to Adam and Eve if they submitted absolutely to his will. When they broke that covenant, man became guilty of original sin. After the Fall, individual salvation was only possible through the Covenant of Grace by which God redeemed the faithful elect.68
At the core of Puritan theology was a profoundly troubling quandary. Drawing on Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the Puritans believed that God determined before you were born whether you were going to be saved or not, but you wouldn’t know for sure until you passed into the afterlife. In other words, you might do everything in your power to live as a member of the elect, but would you die as one? Would all your good works be good enough to win a place in heaven? Even the most devout Puritans were plagued with self-doubt, guilt, and anxiety—future hallmarks of the America syndrome.69 No rosaries or confessionals for them, no discount passes through the gates of paradise. “Seldom has there been a spiritual discipline where so much effort was put into recognizing the worthlessness of one’s own efforts,” observes historian George Marsden.70
The religion drew converts, however, thanks in part to the way its messages were spread. Better educated than many Anglican clergy, and less bound to dry dogma, many Puritan ministers were skillful sermonizers who used the pulpit as a public stage. Whether they employed a plain, logical style of preaching, applying lessons from the Bible to the lives of the congregants, or a more flamboyant, evangelical style, they knew how to reach people. The pulpit also served as a major means of communicating news and providing moral and practical guidance.71 The Puritans carried this narrative mastery to the New World, where their words would flourish in fresh soil.
The English Puritans split between those who believed it was possible to reform the Anglican Church and those who didn’t. The latter, known as the Separatists, broke off all relations not only with the Anglicans but other Protestant denominations as well. Their isolationism led to persecution, and many went into exile in the Netherlands. While they were allowed to practice their religion there, local trade guilds were closed to them. Frustrated by their lack of economic mobility, and wanting to live as Englishmen, a Puritan congregation in the city of Leiden resolved to find greener pastures. After securing financing from London merchant adventurers, 35 members of the Leiden congregation, along with assorted relatives, friends, and non-Separatists with desirable skills, set off for the “New World” on the Mayflower in early September 1620.72
So it was that the first Pilgrims to cross the sea to settle in Massachusetts were members of a small extremist sect driven from Europe because of their own intolerance. Hardly standard bearers of religious freedom, they were more like a utopian community wanting to live apart by its own set of rules. While the Pilgrims loom large in the public imagination—tourists flock to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower replica and to nearby Plimoth Plantation where actors and actresses with Old English accents skillfully play their parts—the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay began in earnest only a decade later, in rather different circumstances.
In many ways, the story of American apocalypse begins with the sense of impending doom in 1620s England. It was a decade of plague, bad harvests, economic troubles, and escalating religious tensions. In 1625 the accession to the throne of Charles I and his French Catholic queen threatened to lead to a Catholic revival, while in continental Europe the bloody Thirty Years’ War pitted Protestants and Catholics against each other. Under Charles, even the non-Separatist Puritans began to suffer greater persecution, including threats of imprisonment. The impetus to leave England intensified.
That push—along with the pull of the New World—was often cast in the language of the Book of Revelation. Not only Puritans but many of their contemporaries believed that England had a special role in God’s providential design. Its reformed church would help light the way to the new millennium after the “Beast of Catholicism” and the “forces of the Antichrist” were finally defeated. As that possibility came to seem more remote, hopes turned to the New World. While the Puritans still expected the millennium to arrive someday in England, they wanted to prove by their own example that on the shores of New England another world was possible.73 After securing funding and a royal charter from the newly created Massachusetts Bay Company, wealthy lawyer John Winthrop and other Puritan associates set off across the Atlantic in 1630 on the ship Arbella. In the words of eminent historian Perry Miller,
[t]he Bay Company was not a battered remnant of suffering Separatists thrown up on a rocky shore; it was an organized task force of Christians, executing a flank attack on the corruptions of Christendom. These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them.74
Aboard the Arbella, Winthrop delivered his famous sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he reflected on the rules and values that should guide the new colony. While exhorting his fellow passengers to form a strong community of believers who would aid and support each other, he made it clear from his opening sentence that not all people were created equal. God almighty in his infinite wisdom had made the condition of mankind such that “in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” Winthrop set very high stakes for the mission’s success. Joined in a special covenant with God, this new plantation in New England would be like “a citty upon a hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.” If the Puritans breached the covenant, through “carnall intencions” or seeking worldly greatness for themselves and their posterity, God would surely visit his wrath upon them. They wouldn’t be the only ones to suffer his revenge; their fall would “be made a story and a by-word through the world,” which God’s enemies would use to “speake evil” about His ways. The Puritans’ sins would “shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants,” whose prayers would turn to curses against them.75
In Winthrop’s sermon we see some of the earliest roots of the America syndrome: a notion of community rightfully divided between rich and poor, yet bound together through a covenant with God; ambiguity about worldly success, as the accumulation of wealth and power is part of God’s design but also can be sinful and self-serving; and above all, the vision of “the city on the hill.” The failure to climb those lofty heights would bring punishment not only to the Puritans themselves but to Christians everywhere. This peculiar hubris—we’re so important that our sins have tragic consequences for the entire world—instills, along with a fear of God, an overblown sense of self.
Prior to departure, Winthrop voiced another key element in the America syndrome: the belief that divine mission justifies Occupation. Land the Puritans wanted, and land they would get. Providentially, Winthrop wrote, God had already “consumed the natives with a miraculous plague whereby the greater part of the country is left void of inhabitants.” Once in the New World, he wrote back to his wife in England that with smallpox “God hathe hereby cleared our title to this place.”76 The depopulation was real. Historians now estimate that a viral hepatitis epidemic, starting in 1616 through European contact, killed up to 90 percent of the Native population in coastal New England, and that 17 years later a smallpox epidemic claimed the lives of between one-third and one-half of those who remained.77 Winthrop read these tragedies as opportunity. Other Puritans professed more sympathy, believing that they could help the poor Indians at the same time as they colonized their land. The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony features a noble savage with a bow in one hand, an arrow pointed down in the other, with the caption “Come over and help us.”78
Come over they did. In the 1630s some 21,000 people made the journey from England to New England, many of them motivated at least in part by religious fervor.79 While the area around Boston was the epicenter of the Great Migration, the immigrants soon spread outwards, forming the sister colonies of Connecticut and New Haven. While governance differed from colony to colony, the Puritans knit church and state tightly together. In Massachusetts and New Haven, only church members had the right to vote; Connecticut gave the franchise to non-church members who took an oath of loyalty. Becoming a member of the church wasn’t an easy feat—joining the community of visible saints required proof of personal conversion and sufficient piety. Members and non-members alike were expected to attend religious services.
The purpose of elections for local officials was to build consensus rather than to build democracy. Members of the Puritan aristocracy were returned again and again to public office. The accepted hierarchy between rich and poor was mirrored by that between the rulers and the ruled. While the Puritans established some important divisions between church and state, giving civil institutions authority over secular matters, for example, in practice the boundaries were porous.80
Exclusion lay in store for those who dared to challenge the basic precepts of this theocracy. In 1636 the dissident Roger Williams, who had the audacity to argue that the Indians, not the Puritans, owned the land, and who believed in a bright line between civil and religious authority, was banished to what would become the liberal colony of Rhode Island. Several years later, charismatic religious thinker Anne Hutchinson met a similar fate. Theologically sophisticated, Hutchinson reinterpreted the Covenant of Grace in a way that made individual salvation possible through direct revelation and an immediate relationship with God.
At first Hutchinson enjoyed good standing in the Boston community—she was a skilled midwife, married to a prosperous merchant. But as she expounded her ideas, first in small gatherings of women, and later at larger religious meetings, she encountered increasing hostility from the Puritan hierarchy. They resented not only her religious ideas, but also her power to mobilize other women. To add insult to injury, she had male supporters, too. “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject,” charged Reverend Hugh Peter at her church trial. She was called an “American Jesabel.”81 Like Williams, she was banished with a small group of supporters to Rhode Island. Presaging the coming witch craze, Hutchinson’s heresies were blamed for the births of deformed fetuses, including one of her own.82
More secular developments also rattled the orthodoxy. Relations with the Indians involved a complicated game of playing one tribe against another. When diplomacy, trading, bribery, and swindling didn’t work, violence was the response. In 1636 war broke out between the colonists and the Pequot tribe of eastern Connecticut. The Pequot War—which Winthrop termed a “just war”—is best remembered for the massacre of hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children by English soldiers and allied warriors from the Narragansett tribe near Mystic, Connecticut. Survivors were sold into slavery, with some shipped as far away as Bermuda.83 Across the ocean in England, the Civil War would soon break out, ushering in the intense military conflicts of the 1640s.
The death of original leaders, such as John Winthrop in 1649, marked the end of the first Great Migration era. The clergy worried that the sense of religious mission that inspired the first settlers was dying out. Church membership was declining as the pursuit of economic growth and territorial expansion increasingly drove the colonial enterprise and other Protestant denominations entered New England. In response, many Puritan churches began to adopt the Half-Way Covenant which allowed the children of any baptized individual to be baptized whether or not either of their parents had been admitted to full communion in the congregation. While there was much controversy over the measure, it ultimately gained sway.84 On its own, however, it wasn’t enough to alleviate the pervasive sense of insecurity.
Many of the occupants of the city on the hill started to develop a stronger fortress mentality, markedly bleak and apocalyptic. The Book of Revelation’s forecast of bloody wars, disasters, and persecutions seized the public imagination.85 Presaging the market success of modern-day apocalyptic bestsellers like the Left Behind series, the epic poem The Day of Doom, written by Harvard-educated minister Michael Wigglesworth in 1662, attracted a huge readership. Literary demerits notwithstanding, it was the best-selling book in the colonies for almost a century until it was surpassed by Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth, a collection of corny aphorisms about the benefits of frugality and hard work.
In The Day of Doom, sinners awake to all manner of natural disasters: “The Mountains smoak, the Hills are shook, the Earth is rent and torn . . .” Judgment Day awaits them:
With dismal chains, and strongest reins,
like Prisoners of Hell,
They’re held in place before Christ’s face,
till He their Doom shall tell.
These void of tears, but fill’d with fears,
and dreadful expectation
Of endless pains, and scalding flames,
stand waiting for Damnation.86
Generations of Puritan schoolchildren were made to recite The Day of Doom, perhaps as a way to scare them into compliance with authority. In the poem, wicked (“flagitious”) children suffer the endless pains and scalding flames along with their parents.
Far more eloquent than The Day of Doom were the jeremiads delivered over this period by some of the great Puritan masters of the form. They laid the foundation of a literary and political tradition that is central to the America syndrome. The term “jeremiad” is derived from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who chastised the Jews in exile for their sins, exhorting them to repent. Despite the errors of their ways, Jeremiah held firm in his belief that the House of Israel had a special covenant with God, that the Jews were His chosen people, and that their exile from Jerusalem and captivity in Babylon would ultimately end in a second paradise.
Over the centuries Jeremiah’s verses proved ripe for contemporary reinterpretation in parables of exile, suffering, sin, and redemption. Before the Puritans, Christian preachers in Europe typically used the jeremiad to warn their audiences of the dire straits in store if they didn’t repent and prepare themselves for the next world. On American shores, the jeremiad evolved beyond religious rhetoric to become, in the words of historian Sacvan Bercovitch, “a fusion of social and literary traditions that opened into an interactive network of art, economy, value system, and public ritual.”87
The typical structure of the Puritan jeremiad began with a Biblical story that elaborated the proper norms, followed by condemnations of the community for not living up to them. It ended on a higher note with a prophetic vision of all the good things to come, as the community could redeem itself because of its special covenant with God. The stick of guilt and fear was combined with the carrot of future righteousness and its rewards. Ultimately, the jeremiad offered an upbeat view of history, albeit history that would come to an end in Christ’s Second Coming.88
One of the most famous Puritan jeremiads was the Reverend Samuel Danforth’s 1670 election-day sermon, A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness. The “errand” referred at once to the Great Migration from a corrupted Europe to the purity of the American wilderness, the individual pilgrimage from sinner to saint, and the larger Christian passage from Old Testament to New, from Incarnation to Christ’s Second Coming. “We have . . . in great measure forgotten our errand,” Danforth chastised his audience, comparing their behavior to the folly of the Israelites. But there is hope, because in the end God will deliver: “the great Physician of Israel hath undertaken the cure . . . he will provide . . . we have the promise.”89
The fact that Danforth delivered this sermon on an election day is no coincidence. The Puritans themselves called jeremiads “political sermons.” They were typically occasional sermons, sanctioned by civil authorities, delivered in the course of major public events. Not only did jeremiads reinforce the close bonds between church and state, but they exercised a near monopoly on the shaping of public opinion. Civil magistrates carefully selected the men who would deliver them; afterwards, by order of the General Court, the sermons were published and distributed. Not so dissimilar to the role of mainstream media today, jeremiads contributed to a ritualized political consensus forged by the colony’s ruling elite.90
Indeed, one of the most important legacies of the Puritans was the transformation of the sermon into a dominant cultural currency. Of the 39,000 known works published in America prior to 1800, sermons were the largest single category, a trend that continued up to the end of the 19th century. “For much of American history, delivering sermons, listening to them, and discussing them were the principal intellectual activities for most people,” writes historian Edmund S. Morgan.91 This receptivity to sermonizing remains a core element of the America syndrome, blurring the boundary between religious and secular domains.
Increase Mather’s The Day of Trouble is Near, delivered in Boston in 1674, reiterated the jeremiad’s classic themes. In the sermon, Mather, one of the era’s most powerful clerics, chastised both parents and children for turning away from their religious mission toward the pursuit of worldly gains. But all would be set right when “the children of God learn to know more of God, and of themselves too” through the tribulations soon to visit them. “The Lord hath been whetting his glittering sword a long time [over New England]. The sky looketh red and lowring,” Mather warned. Because the Puritans, like the Israelites, were God’s chosen nation, they would survive the coming crucible. After all, in these “Ends of the Earth” the Lord “hath caused as it were a New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven.” While God would willingly destroy other wicked nations on Earth, Mather confidently predicted that “God is not willing to destroy us.”92 Mather’s sermon proved eerily prescient, for Trouble was indeed near.
King Philip’s War—a bloody conflict that scarcely gets a mention in today’s history books—began in 1675, a year after Mather’s jeremiad. Philip, whose non-English name was Metacom, was chief of the Wampanoag tribe. In the decades after the Pequot War, the colonists’ territorial expansion and appropriation of tribal lands by dubious means had seeded deep hatred among many Native Americans. Struggling to maintain their hold in New England, Philip and his allies began to prepare for war.
King Philip’s War was not a minor war. In per capita terms, it took more lives than any other war in American history. One-tenth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s 5,000 draft-age males were killed, wounded, or captured. The proportion was likely higher among Native Americans. Both sides waged a war of terror against civilians, slaughtering women and children. Half of all the white settlements in New England were burned to the ground; the reach of English settlement in Massachusetts shrank to within 17 miles of Boston. Maine was entirely cleared of white people. To the beleaguered colonists, every Indian was suspect. Christianized Indians were confined to isolated prison camps such as Deer Island off the coast of Boston, where half the prisoners died during the winter from cold, starvation, and disease.
Though it persisted to the north, the war drew to an end in southern New England with the killing of King Philip in August 1676. His corpse was dismembered and his body parts dispersed as trophies. To help pay the costs of war, the colonists sold captured Indians into slavery. That summer, 180 Indians were shipped from Boston to the plantations of the West Indies.93
While the violence and carnage of the war were deeply traumatizing, the religious interpretation placed upon it helped the colonists make a certain sense out of the senselessness. Harkening back to Mather, the colonists had learned to know more of God and themselves through this terrible trial. During the war, Puritan clergy held covenant renewal ceremonies calling on colonists to rededicate themselves to the community and to God through prayer.94
King Philip’s War marked a watershed in the evolution of the America syndrome. The insertion of that bloodletting into the jeremiad’s providential framework gave meaning and purpose to war, a logic that still impacts the national psyche today. War is God’s will, and while its depredations punish us, they also cleanse; they’re necessary for the spiritual purging and revitalization of the Chosen People. God condones the use of extreme violence if it serves divine ends.
With much of the script drawn from the biblical exodus of the Jews, the jeremiad speaks to a community, that, while existing in a special covenant with God, is fragile, persecuted, and unsettled—a community that needs protection from its enemies. Those enemies, in turn, are sent by God to test the community’s mettle. In the exodus parable, the community is defined by the existence of enemies. Who are we without the Other?
For the Puritans, the Indians proved the perfect enemy in a number of respects. “New Englanders commonly regarded Indians not simply as a military enemy, but as the agent of divine violence, the instrument by which God punished their sins and urged them back toward righteousness,” wrote scholars Andrew Murphy and Elizabeth Hanson. This wasn’t an arbitrary choice on God’s part, for “a crucial feature of New England’s punishment was that it was enacted by the people they had promised to convert, but had in fact led further into sin.”95
Initially, the Puritans had high hopes of converting the Indians, viewing them as distant kin, members of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. But as relations with the natives grew tense, they turned to another biblical parable, the story of the Amalekites who attacked the Jews during their exodus from Egypt. After the Jews ultimately prevailed, God commanded King Saul to finish off the Amalekites. “Now go and attack Amalek,” God instructed, “and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” God’s ultimate intention was to “blot out the remembrance of them.”96
The Amakelite comparison not only helped fuel colonial atrocities against the Indians during King Philip’s War, but also served as a license to genocide for years to come. In a 1689 discourse on “just war”, Cotton Mather, Increase’s equally prominent son, called for vengeance against the Amakelite Indian murderers “annoying this Israel in the Wilderness.” He exhorted, “Tho’ they Cry; Let there be none to Save them; But beat them small as the Dust before the Wind.”97 During the settlement of the Western frontier, the same trope was dusted off to justify extermination of the Indians. It was used to rationalize violence against Catholics and Mormons, too.
In the aftermath of King Philip’s War, Cotton Mather and a number of his clerical contemporaries grew more explicitly apocalyptic, even to the extent of speculating on the precise date of Christ’s return. In his epic Magnalia Christi Americana, Mather lauded the Puritans’ errand into the New England wilderness as the last conflict with the anti-Christ and the harbinger of the impending millennium. In an early sermon, he set the most likely date at 1697.98
The powerful ideological force field in which exodus, apocalypse, and war came together cast political violence as prophetic. Though they were the most numerous, Indians weren’t the Puritans’ only enemy. Members of dissenting religious sects faced violent persecution, too. Six Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and Catholic priests were threatened with execution. And then there were the enemies within the Puritan community itself—the wicked witches.
Most Americans have heard about the Salem witch trials. The Massachusetts city’s witch kitsch makes it a major attraction, pulling in 100 million tourist dollars each year. Salem has multiple witch museums—one boasts a dungeon for the full grisly experience, and a month of Haunted Happenings in October culminates in the Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball. The aim is to make witches titillating and fun, and to encourage visitors to take home a sack full of tacky souvenirs. In this rite of tourist consumption, historical memory is not served well.
The first documented hanging of a witch in New England occurred in Windsor, Connecticut in 1647. In the 1650s the number of prosecutions for witchcraft rose, with thirty-five people accused and seven executed. Witch panic spread, reaching its height at the beginning of the 1690s in Salem. By 1692 the Salem courts had put twenty people to death for witchcraft, based mainly on the allegations of hysterical young girls. Nineteen of the twenty were hanged, the other, a brave man named Giles Corey, was pressed to death with heavy stones because he refused to stand for trial. Another 156 were imprisoned, four of whom died in jail.
The tradition of witch persecution was imported from Europe, where between 50,000 and 100,000 victims were executed over the period 1580–1650. As in New England, most were women. “Witchcraft embodies, in each and every one of its otherwise disparate settings, a basic impulse of misogyny,” writes historian John Demos, “a fear, and a hatred, of women so generalized that it crosses all boundaries.”99 This fear and hatred typically centered on women’s sexuality, fertility, and healing powers, and combined with distrust of anyone considered deviant from community norms. In New England the majority of women accused of witchcraft were poor and middle-aged. Many came from troubled families and were barren or only had a few children. They were contentious and strong-willed in a society that viewed such traits as a source of unwanted “controversy.”
While these characteristics help to explain why certain women were targeted, they don’t shed light on the larger social context that fostered witch hunts in the first place. Hysteria needs fertile ground to take root and spread. In the case of Salem, historians have long debated the underlying causes of the panic. From a careful reading of public records, historian Mary Beth Norton concluded that fear of Indian violence played a major role. Many people involved in the trials had once lived on or had family connections to the Maine frontier where both sides, colonists and Indians, continued to fight a brutal war of terror against each other. The printed portrayals of witches and Indians were much the same in their Satanic imagery. Others have argued that economic tensions between town and country sparked the factionalism that led to neighbor accusing neighbor of hideous crimes.100 And in the 1970s a biologist even argued that the accusers’ hysterical hallucinations were caused by a poisonous fungus found in cereal grains.
Whatever the constellation of causes, without the collusion of the Puritan establishment it’s doubtful that so many innocent people would have been persecuted in Salem. Bypassing normal judicial procedures, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony set up a special court to hear the cases, to which he appointed prominent political and military leaders as judges. Guilty until proven innocent was the rule, and by accepting supernatural “evidence,” the judges left no way for the accused to prove their innocence. Only when members of the elite themselves started to be accused of witchcraft would the authorities bring the panic to a close.
As with King Philip’s War, the witch hunts were made to conform to the Puritans’ apocalyptic philosophy. Panic merged with prophecy. The master of the jeremiad, Cotton Mather, turned his attention to the witch hunts. He brought afflicted young girls into his house to exorcise their demons personally. In one case, a local cloth merchant critically reported, Mather rubbed a girl’s stomach while she lay in bed with her breasts uncovered.101 Psycho-sexual innuendoes aside, Mather threw considerable intellectual and professional weight behind the witch trials. On one notable occasion, he showed up on horseback at Salem’s Gallows Hill for the hanging of a Reverend Burroughs, a clergyman accused of being the ringleader of the witches. From the hanging platform, Burroughs gave an eloquent speech professing his innocence and generously forgiving his accusers. His words so moved the assembled crowd that some called for a halt to the execution. But Mather would have nothing of it. From atop his horse, he denounced Burroughs as guilty, arguing “that the Devil had often been transformed into an angel of light.” Burroughs was then hanged, and his body was stuffed into a hole in the rocks.102
Mather also devoted pen and paper to the matter. New England was so tormented by witches, he wrote, precisely because it was so pious. “Where will the Devil show the most malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?” Obsessed as he was with the coming apocalypse, Mather viewed the Devil’s sorcery as one part of the larger suite of calamities converging in the end times. His major work on witchcraft, The Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693, set out “to countermine the whole plot of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it.”103 At a time when others had begun to ask questions, the book was an extended defense of the trials.
Only later did Mather acknowledge that innocent people had been harmed in Salem and that their survivors might deserve some reparation. Yet he never apologized for his own role in the tragedy. Keeping faith with the jeremiad, he saw the witch craze as another divine test, “an inextricable storm from the invisible world.”104 The errors of the official response could be explained away as part of—not the cause of—that affliction. It was the “invisible world,” not the visible world of human agency, which was ultimately responsible for the grave miscarriage of justice. And so the perpetrators were assuaged of guilt, another core feature of the America syndrome.
No one was held accountable for the violence of slavery in New England either. To this day, many Americans don’t know that in 1641 Puritan Massachusetts became the first colony to officially endorse the ownership and sale of human beings as property. Governor John Winthrop put his pen to that law, ironically called “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties.” He himself owned slaves who worked on his large Ten Hills Farm on the outskirts of Boston, on the grounds of what is now Tufts University. In her study of the forgotten history of slavery in New England, C.S. Manegold reveals that successive generations of the Winthrop family, as well as that of the Royalls (whose money helped build Harvard Law School), made fortunes in the slave trade.
By the end of the 1600s, more than 1200 Native Americans and 200–400 Africans had been enslaved in New England. In 1765, the Massachusetts census showed almost 6000 black slaves. While slaves probably never composed more than 3 percent of New England’s population, captive labor sustained the livelihoods and lifestyles of the colonies’ better-off inhabitants. The involvement of many of New England’s respected merchants in the Atlantic slave trade, particularly their direct links to the slave economies of the West Indies, was vital to the colony’s economic growth.105 Puritan New England may have seen itself as a place apart in religious terms, but in economic terms it was well integrated into America’s burgeoning “peculiar institution.”
While the clergy interpreted the Indian wars as a spiritual test, the slave bounty they yielded was a more mundane source of labor and cash. The violence of slavery was considered so normal, so acceptable, that it didn’t need much in the way of religious justification or jeremiad-style hyperbole. The same was true for the enslaved Africans. This moral invisibility of slavery was fundamental to the functioning of the Puritans’ economy and society.
That history is still largely invisible. Even today, prominent politicians invoke Winthrop’s speech on the Arbella, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” to paint the Puritan errand as a beacon of light and of liberty.106 That men, women, and children were shackled to the gates of the shining city on the hill is excised from New England mythology. What gets left out of a story can be as important as what gets put in.
While violence was endemic, the apocalyptic fervor that sustained the Puritan mission wasn’t nourished by blood alone. The continued power of apocalyptic thinking in the American imagination owes much to preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, who lived from 1703 to 1758. In the words of historian Perry Miller, Edwards was America’s “greatest artist of the apocalypse,”107 a man of extraordinary talent and passion who wed stern Calvinist theology with wide-ranging interests in philosophy and science. He had a deep and almost mystical love of nature. Edwards believed in the imminence of apocalypse, but in nature he experienced the immanence of God’s grace. He was a revivalist, breathing new life into the Puritan mission, helping to prepare his people for the next stages of nation-building.
Edwards navigated conformity and individualism in a new American way. He showed how the true believer could stay on mission while wandering off the beaten track to commune solo with God in the great American outdoors. Locating spirit in nature is a theme that would resonate with later generations of American thinkers, men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. Edwards was a great artist of the apocalypse because he gave it an ecstatic American aesthetic—a ravishing Beauty to counterpoint the ravages of the Beast.
The son of Reverend Timothy Edwards, Jonathan grew up in the Connecticut River Valley town of Windsor, with an impeccable Puritan ancestry and upbringing. He entered Yale College just before his thirteenth birthday. After serving several years as a pastor in New York, he moved further up the Connecticut River to Northampton, Massachusetts to assist his maternal grandfather, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard. When Stoddard died in 1729, Edwards assumed his job as pastor of one of the largest churches in western Massachusetts. He and his wife Sarah had 11 children; one of their grandsons, Aaron Burr, would become third Vice President of the US. So distinguished was the Edwards’ lineage that it was held up as a shining example of inherited character and intelligence in early 1900s American eugenics circles.108
Edwards was a prodigious writer. He was also an eccentric. On long horseback rides into the western Massachusetts countryside, he pinned scraps of paper to his clothing to record insights he had along the way. Sometimes by the end of a journey his clothes were covered with these scraps. On returning home, he used this memory patchwork to write down his thoughts.109
One of Edwards’s earliest mystical experiences occurred when he was home from college on spring vacation and wandering in the fields. Looking up at the sky and clouds, God’s immanence came over him: “. . . in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together: it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness . . .” Years later he wrote in his spiritual autobiography that he saw God’s grace “in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature . . .” Sometimes he fell into hallucinatory raptures. Once, while walking in the woods, he had a glorious vision of Christ that lasted “about an hour; which kept me, the bigger part of the time, in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud.” He experienced such “an ardency of soul” as to feel “emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love . . .”110 Arguably, such raptures provided Edwards with momentary escape from the heavy weight of prophetic time. Indeed, the seductive appeal of apocalyptic thinking may depend, in part, on this entertainment of catharsis.
For Edwards, the brighter sides of nature inspired rapture, while its darker sides threatened rupture. Like others of his contemporaries, and many Americans today, he read destructive acts of nature as providential signs and apocalyptic portents. The large earthquake that shook New England in 1727 was interpreted this way. Nearing death, and after making many false predictions, Cotton Mather was convinced that the earthquake finally marked the apocalypse he had been anticipating. “This is it,” he is said to have pronounced. “Everything is now fulfilled. This is the end.”111 Better versed in science, Edwards understood that earthquakes could have natural causes, but he saw this one as God’s message to the young people of Northampton to mend their sinful and frolicking ways.112
During Edwards’s lifetime, declining church membership preoccupied the Puritans. The secular forces of economic growth they had helped set in motion pushed against the confines of rigid religious dogma and control. While Puritanism changed with the times—theologians now saw commercial profit as congruent with providential purpose113—the religion wasn’t attracting enough new adherents. Measures such as the Half-Way Covenant hadn’t brought about enough conversions, especially of younger people. Edwards’s grandfather and mentor, Solomon Stoddard, argued for opening baptism and communion to all Christians attending the church who led pious lives. In 1710 he scandalized more conservative clergy by claiming that preaching of the Word could bring about conversion, as long as the minister delivering the message was saved himself.114
Edwards followed in his grandfather’s footsteps. In 1734 his preaching inspired a major religious revival in Northampton, the beginning of what is called the Great Awakening. Men and women of all ages, genders, and social classes, and even “several Negroes” (Edwards’s words—he was a slave owner himself) were born again. Virtually the whole town was swept up in the revival, and Edwards pronounced Northampton an iconic city on the hill. His sermons communicated the egalitarian message that “sweet and joyful” divine knowledge wasn’t only the purview of learned men, but that people “of an ordinary degree of knowledge, are capable, without a long and subtle train of reasoning, to see the divine excellency of the things of religion . . .” All could gain spiritual wisdom “more excellent than all the knowledge of the greatest philosophers or statesmen.”115
The mystical man in the woods, besotted with God’s sweet glory, could also preach hellfire and brimstone along with the best of them. With his gift for rhetorical flourish, Edwards raised the jeremiad to new heights of emotional intensity, making him one of America’s first great revivalist preachers. His most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” repeatedly conjures terrifying visions of hell. Sinners hang by “a slender thread” above the “great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit,” with the flames of hell flashing around them. In a passage that foreshadows the “humans as burden on the Earth” sermonizing of apocalyptic environmentalists today, Edwards thundered:
Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of God, the Earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun don’t willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the Earth don’t willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air don’t willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of God’s enemies.
Toward the sermon’s end, Edwards warned the assembled congregants that some of them might die and go to hell soon, even “before tomorrow morning.”116
While Edwards democratized the conversion experience and infused it with passion and beauty, he raised the stakes when it came to backsliding. For the ordinary mortal to sustain an inspirational spiritual state wasn’t easy. What happened when the catharsis was over and the inner light faded? Was one then damned to eternal hell? For many people prone to what was quaintly called melancholy back then, Edwards’s admonishments only sank them deeper into anxiety and depression. It didn’t help that he also preached that God’s wrath toward wicked men could express itself in inner torment. On June 1, 1735, Edwards’s own uncle, Joseph Hawley II, a successful merchant who suffered from mental illness, slit his throat. A rash of attempted suicides followed.117 The bloom was off the Northampton revival rose.
Yet the rose flourished elsewhere. The Great Awakening was heralded as the harbinger of a new millennium. In 1740, British preacher George Whitefield drew crowds of more than 20,000 to revival meetings in New England. Edwards brought him to Northampton, and he was entertained at Harvard and Yale. Other popular preachers followed as the region was swept up in a new wave of religious fervor. At home, though, Edwards encountered growing opposition from the community as he sought to impose stricter terms of church membership and moral behavior. In 1750 he was relieved of his duties, and moved further west to Stockbridge, where he ministered to an English congregation and a Christianized village of Indians. In 1758 he became president of Princeton University (then called the “College of New Jersey”).
Like Cotton Mather before him, in his last years Edwards grew ever more obsessed with charting the course of the coming apocalypse. He kept up with newspapers and jotted down current events—economic, political, and meteorological—that might have apocalyptic meaning. He divided Christian history into seven main periods, culminating in “the consummation at the end of the world . . .” Just before that end, he reasoned, wickedness would be at its greatest height.118 Edwards and many of his Puritan contemporaries viewed the onset of the French and Indian War in 1754 as part of God’s divine plan. As followers of the Puritans’ favorite anti-Christ, the Pope, the Catholic French were a perfect enemy. After the English victory in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Edwards wrote to a Scottish correspondent that “the late wonderful works of God in America” were accelerating the fulfillment of God’s plan.119 Once again, through war, America’s spiritual and imperial destinies were intertwined.
In 1902, by which time Calvinism was falling from favor, Mark Twain wrote of Edwards that he was “a resplendent intellect gone mad.”120 But was it really madness that made him teeter back and forth between the ecstasy of conversion and the crucible of hell? Although there may be madness in the apocalyptic method, that doesn’t mean those who employ it are crazy. On the contrary, Edwards applied his considerable intelligence to adapting the Puritan mission to changing times. He pushed its walls outward but not down, and allowed more people to fit in. In that sense he was the first real genius of the America syndrome.
Through revivalist conversion, Sacvan Bercovitch writes, Edwards expanded the Puritan concept of a chosen people, opening “the ranks of the American army of Christ to every white Protestant believer . . . He rendered the legend of the founding fathers the common property of all New World evangelicals.”121 The Puritan errand grew to become the American Way. Edwards also forged a new faith in the future, making scientific advance and economic growth part and parcel of God’s providential design for the coming millennium. As he blended the secular and the sacred, American commercial ingenuity became blessed indeed. His love of nature made room for beauty, too. Edwards updated the American apocalypse, preparing it for the next stage of the nation’s history, the American Revolution, which he didn’t live to see. One month after joining Princeton, he died from the side effects of a smallpox inoculation. But his ideas, and those of his Puritan contemporaries, have lived on.
So has their way of sermonizing. The jeremiad may have changed in content since Edwards, Danforth, and the other great Puritan preachers and politicians who employed it, but as a form of oratory, it never went out of date. President Barack Obama excelled at it. The jeremiad can be used for good or ill—Martin Luther King’s mastery of the form helped to galvanize the civil rights movement in the 1960s—but even the best practitioners reinforce American exceptionalism, regardless of their political persuasion. “The prophetic narratives of sinfulness and redemption from the right and left share certain traits,” writes scholar David Gutterman:
Both begin with a sometimes unspoken presumption about the special status of the United States. Both look at a contemporary crisis and attempt to reveal the meaning of the crisis by looking backward in order to trace specific historical sins (or causes). Both then explain the crisis as a justified or at least unsurprising response to American sinfulness. Both warn of inevitable horrible future events—unless the United States changes its ways. And finally both offer the promise of a utopian redemption if America is able to overcome and atone for its sins.122
The jeremiad serves to contain and confine political dissent by making the solution to American ills nothing short of the fulfillment of the nation’s promise.123 If only we would live up to our ideals, all would be set right.