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Repairing the Breach: Puritan Expansion, Commonwealth Formation, and the Origins of the United Colonies of New England, 1630–1643

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Repairing the Breach: Puritan Expansion, Commonwealth Formation, and the Origins of the United Colonies of New England, 1630–1643 ✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ By arrangement with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts the Editors of the New England Quarterly are pleased to publish the winning essay of the 2017 Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History Repairing the Breach: Puritan Expansion, Commonwealth Formation, and the Origins of the United Colonies of New England, 1630–1643 neal t. dugre EW Englishmen disrupted commonwealth formation in F North America more than Samuel Gorton, a mystical preacher who founded the plantation of Shawomet on Narra- gansett Bay in 1642. Gorton’s peculiar theology and knack for destabilizing civil order led to his banishment from nearly every New England plantation during his first five years in the region. Among scads of Puritan detractors, Gorton earned distinction for his perceptive critiques of how they built their colonies and for the dissemination of his views through the skillful I am grateful to Timothy Breen, Walter Woodward, Scott Sowerby, Caitlin Fitz, and the Front Range Group in Early American History for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Whitehill Prize committee—Fred Anderson, David Hall, and Mary Beth Norton— and the editors of The New England Quarterly. The New England Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 3 (September 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00684. 382 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00684 by guest on 30 September 2021 REPAIRING THE BREACH 383 manipulation of the London press.1 He wielded both talents to great effect in his 1646 pamphlet, Simplicities Defence Against Seven-Headed Policy. Like other critics, Gorton focused his ire on Massachusetts Bay.2 Yet Simplicities Defence departed from conventional diatribes against the colony’s churches and civil government by alerting readers to a new, more troubling source of Puritan civil power. The pamphlet’s title page reported that the Bay Colony and neighboring polities of Connecticut, Ply- mouth, and New Haven had lately coalesced into the “combate of the United Colonies.” They confederated, he claimed, “not onely against some of the Natives and Subjects, but against the Authority also of the Kingdome of England.” Joined together, the four colonies could extend their collective vision of a Puri- tan commonwealth “beyond the bounds of all their own juris- dictions.”3 Confederation promised to cement Puritan control over New England. Gorton’s warnings about inter-colony connections clash with prevailing understandings of how Puritan New England and early modern Atlantic polities developed. Historians study- ing those processes typically adhere to a paradigm of state 1Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984): 276–303; Carla Gar- dina Pestana, “Gorton, Samuel (bap. 1593, d. 1677),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed. (accessed August 11, 2011). On Gorton’s use of the London press, see Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 48–71. 2For a list of 1640s London pamphlets critical of New England, see Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 235–40. 3Samuel Gorton, Simplicity’s Defence Against Seven-Headed Policy, ed. William R. Staples, in Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI: Marshall, Brown and Company, 1835), 2:21, 23. “Simplicities” is the original spelling from the original pamphlet, but my citations are to a modern transcription which the editor entitled “Simplicity’s . ” I have kept the original spelling for references in the main text, but the revised spelling in the citations. Gorton’s characterization of confederation as a threat to royal sovereignty would have made sense to English audiences familiar with the pro-Catholic Confederate Assembly of Kilkenny which, although its members professed loyalty to the crown, grew out of the Irish uprising of 1641 just prior to the establishment of the United Colonies of New England. Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–1649 (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press for the Irish Committee for Historical Sciences, 2001). In quoted passages I have expanded contractions, but otherwise retained the original spelling. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00684 by guest on 30 September 2021 384 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY formation concerned with how colonies evolved into au- tonomous states or nations. This perspective assumes Europe’s American polities originated as well-defined “colonies,” and fo- cuses on the internal development of individual colonies as well as their relationship to the metropole.4 New England studies influenced by the state formation paradigm most often revolve around Massachusetts Bay and point to Puritanism as the key to that and neighbor colonies’ stability and power.5 Over the past several decades, historians have enriched this picture signifi- cantly by situating early New England colonies within a transat- lantic Puritan movement and the political context of England’s seventeenth-century revolution.6 Yet scholars have still not ade- quately explained how contemporaries preserved their tenuous commonwealth as the population of Massachusetts Bay grew, dispersed into the hinterland, and divided into new polities— changes contemporaries pointed to as perhaps the greatest threat facing their young plantations. In the decade before Samuel Gorton published Simplici- ties Defence, Puritan expansion beyond the confines of Mas- sachusetts Bay led settlers to revise their blueprint for a 4Elizabeth Mancke, “Polity Formation and Atlantic Political Narratives,” The Ox- ford Handbook of The Atlantic World, c.1450–c.1850, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 382–83. For a recent corrective, see Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King, & People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omo- hundro Institute, 2017). 5See for example Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans’ Great- est Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of American History 60 (1973): 5–22. 6David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2012); Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Car- olina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991). See also Mark Peterson, “Why They Mattered: The Return of Politics to Puritan New En- gland,” review of A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England, by David. D. Hall and Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill, by Michael P. Winship, Modern Intellectual History 10 (2013): 683–96; Nicholas Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism in Anglo-American Perspective,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78 (2015): 745–69, and “The Puritan Paradigm of En- glish Politics, 1558–1642,” The Historical Journal 53 (2010): 527–50; Daniel C. Beaver, “Politics in the Archives: Records, Property, and Plantation Politics in Massachusetts Bay, 1642–1650,” Journal of Early American History 1 (2011): 3–25. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00684 by guest on 30 September 2021 REPAIRING THE BREACH 385 commonwealth, an inward-looking polity deriving its stability and strength from reciprocity among fellow members of the body politic.7 The Puritan commonwealth established in Mas- sachusetts preserved that balance through a finely-tuned rela- tionship between church and state designed to protect citizens from the inevitable corruption of their rulers.8 As removals split the Massachusetts body politic, Puritan authorities gradually recognized the need for an expanded institutional infrastruc- ture that went beyond the familiar pillars of church and colony government. Just as Gorton feared, Puritans embraced inter- colonial confederation as a tool of commonwealth formation— a means to preserve the commonwealth already established in Massachusetts and foster a broader, regional commonwealth of similar polities known as the United Colonies of New England. Historians normally present New England’s confederation as a military alliance, not an exercise in polity formation.9 In part, this characterization displays the successful branding efforts of United Colonies agents. Edward Winslow, for instance, de- fended the United Colonies against Samuel Gorton and other critics by stressing the confederation’s utility in securing help- less colonists from hostile Indians.10 Our narrow view of the 7Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Rev- olution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34–39, 133–35, and passim. 8Winship, Godly Republicanism, 184–85, 226–29; Peterson, “Why They Mattered,” 692. 9Harry Ward offers a fuller analysis of the confederation and its operations than most scholars, but his
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