New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London
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Clemson University TigerPrints Publications English 7-2009 Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London Jonathan Beecher Field Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/english_pubs Part of the American Studies Commons, European History Commons, and the United States History Commons errands into the metropolis UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 1 5/8/09 10:29:35 PM UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 2 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM R ee ncou n t eR s w i t h col on i a l i sm: new PeRsPectives on the ameRicas Dartmouth College Series Editors Marysa Navarro Donald E. Pease Ivy Schweitzer Silvia Spitta For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London Michelle Burnham, Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System Jennifer L. French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Writers Dan Moos, Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging Hershini Bhana Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture John J. Kucich, Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Ruth Mayer, Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, with an introduction by Donald E. Pease Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects Susana Rotker, The American Chronicles of José Martí: Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America Carlton Smith, Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, Inequality in Early America Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds., Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 3 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 4 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM errands into the metropolis ——— New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London jonathan beecher field DaRtmouth college PRess hanoveR, new hamPshiRe Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 5 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM Dartmouth College Press Published by University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766 www.upne.com © 2009 by Dartmouth College Press Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Field, Jonathan Beecher. Errands into the metropolis: New England dissidents in revolutionary London / Jonathan Beecher Field. p. cm.—(Reencounters with colonialism— new perspectives on the Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-58465-774-3 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn 978-1-58465-821-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Rhode Island—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2. Rhode Island—Politics and government—To 1775. 3. Dissenters, Religious—Rhode Island—History. 4. Dissenters, Religious—Political activity—England—History— 17th century. 5. Politics and literature—England—History— 17th century. 6. Discourse analysis—History—17th century. 7. Great Britain—Colonies—Administration—History— 17th century. 8. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History— 17th century. I. Title. F82.F54 2009 974.5'02—dc22 2009007661 University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For Daniel Field UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 7 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 8 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM London, England . consider yourselves . warned! —Public enemy UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 9 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 10 5/8/09 10:29:36 PM contents ——— acknowleDgments xiii intRoDuction 1 1. 50% Cotton Authorship, Authority, and the Atlantic 17 2. A Key for the Gate Roger Williams, Parliament, & Providence 26 3. “A Belcher-out of Errours” Samuel Gorton and the Atlantic Subject 48 4. Antinomians, Anabaptists, and Aquidneck Contesting Heresy in Interregnum London 72 5. Suffering and Subscribing Configurations of Authorship in the Quaker Atlantic 90 Conclusion “A Lively Experiment” 116 notes 129 inDex 149 UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 11 5/8/09 10:29:37 PM UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 12 5/8/09 10:29:37 PM acknowledgments ——— The opportunity to acknowledge the many debts I have accumulated in writing this book is one of the greatest joys that comes with finishing it. What is good in this book is largely the responsibility of the names that follow; its limitations and errors are my own. The greatest sorrow that attends finishing this book is not being able to share it with my father, to whom it is dedicated. Errands into the Metropolis began life as a dissertation in the Depart- ment of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to my advisor, Janice Knight, as well as Eric Slauter and W. Clark Gilpin of the Divinity School, who were an engaged, challenging, and above all, patient dissertation committee. I also thank Janel Mueller, Richard Strier, and Stephen Pincus for opening my eyes to Tudor and Stuart England. Among my classmates, I am especially grateful to Jon Aronoff, Elisabeth Ceppi, Laura Demanski, and Katie Skeen for their en- couragement and support. I owe a debt of thanks to Alice Schreyer for providing me employment during a lean year, and a much greater one for giving me an abiding awareness of the materiality of books. I had the opportunity to pursue much of the research for this project under the auspices of fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library and the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University. I am grateful to Norman Fiering and his staff at the JCB, especially Susan Newberry, Susan Danforth, and Richard Ring, as well as former JNBC director Joyce Botelho and her staff. At Brown, Jim Egan, Tom Gleason, Philip Gould, and Pat Herlihy helped make Providence a home away from home for an itinerant graduate student. Ed UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 13 5/8/09 10:29:37 PM xiv Acknowledgments Lefkowicz and Dan Siegel provided employment, friendship, and a con- tinuing bibliographic education. In Boston, a grant from the Massachusetts Historical Society allowed me to extend and refine my research. I join many scholars in thanking Peter Drummey, Bill Fowler, and Conrad Wright for their stewardship of this invaluable resource for scholars. I completed the dissertation in Bos- ton, which would have been impossible without the generous cooperation of the member libraries of the Boston Library Consortium, especially the O’Neill Library at Boston College. My colleagues at Clemson continue to make South Carolina a conge- nial place to pursue scholarship on colonial New England. I am grateful to Lee Morrissey for showing the way from Boston to Clemson. Catherine Paul and Susanna Ashton have been invaluable mentors and supporters. The support of grants from the Department of English, the College of Art, Architecture and the Humanities, and Clemson University research funds provided the time and space I needed to write this book. More generally, I thank colleagues and students alike for fostering the exciting intellectual environment in Clemson’s English department that makes our campus home worthy of its nickname. Outside of the English depart- ment, the support of Dr. and Ms. Revis-Wagner and their staff has been indispensable. Beyond Clemson, a number of scholars have been kind enough to read or to listen to portions and versions of Errands. I am grateful to Bernard Bailyn, Joyce Chaplin, Matt Cohen, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Jonathan Earle, Karen Kupperman, Ed Larkin, Lynn Rhoads, Dan Richter, Jason Shaffer, Laura Stevens, and Leslie Tuttle, as well as participants in various workshops at the John Carter Brown Library, the John Nicholas Brown Center, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society of Early Ameri- canists meetings, the University of Chicago early American workshop, the Georgia early American workshop, as well as the Atlantic Seminar at Har- vard and the Futures of American Studies seminar at Dartmouth. At Dartmouth/UPNE, Don Pease and Richard Pult have been a joy to work with. I am grateful to Michelle Burnham and Jordan Stein for their thoughtful responses to the manuscript for this book. Chris Onstad was generous enough to take a break from Achewood and create the cover. Belonging to a family of academics has almost always been an as- set during my work on this project. The support of aunts, uncles, and cousins, especially Jonathan Beecher, Merike Lapassar-Beecher, Mary and Ren Parker, and Mary and Rick Price, has meant a great deal to me. UPNE_Field_text_final.indd 14 5/8/09 10:29:37 PM Acknowledgments xv Closer to home, my brother Rick, his wife, Susie, and my mother, Holly, have provided more kinds of sustenance than I could begin to name.