Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies

Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies BY BABETTE M. LEVY Preface NE of the pleasant by-products of doing research O work is the realization of how generously help has been given when it was needed. The author owes much to many people who proved their interest in this attempt to see America's past a little more clearly. The Institute of Early American History and Culture gave two grants that enabled me to devote a sabbatical leave and a summer to direct searching of colony and church records. Librarians and archivists have been cooperative beyond the call of regular duty. Not a few scholars have read the study in whole or part to give me the benefit of their knowledge and judgment. I must mention among them Professor Josephine W, Bennett of the Hunter College English Department; Miss Madge McLain, formerly of the Hunter College Classics Department; the late Dr. William W. Rockwell, Librarian Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, whose vast scholarship and his willingness to share it will remain with all who knew him as long as they have memories; Professor Matthew Spinka of the Hartford Theological Sem- inary; and my mother, who did not allow illness to keep her from listening attentively and critically as I read to her chapter after chapter. All students who are interested 7O AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY in problems concerning the early churches along the Atlantic seaboard and the occupants of their pulpits are indebted to the labors of Dr. Frederick Lewis Weis and his invaluable compendiums on the clergymen and parishes of the various colonies. Much of my debt is not quite so concrete. I feel, never- theless, that this study of earnest men sincerely seeking God is my offering to the memory of my parents, Henry and Elizabeth C. Levy, and of their only son, Henry Coll Levy, who by lifelong example taught me the value of truth and the meaning of integrity. BABETTE M. LEVY Hunter College March, 1960 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Seventeenth-century Puritanism in England and in the Southern and Island Colonies 73 II. Virginia: Puritanism Witliin and Witliout the Church 1. Under the Virginia Company 92 2. The development within the Established Church . 113 3. The development of Congregationalism and Presbyterianlsm 122 4. The Society of Friends 149 III. Bermuda: Nonconformity "Safe from the Storms' and Prelates' Rage" 164 IV. Maryland : Puritanism Unhampered by an Established Church 2OI V. The Carolinas: Puritanism Under a Policy of Broadest Toleration 242 VI. The West Indies and Bahamas: Puritanism in Conflict with Tropical Island Life 278 VII. Southern Puritanism and Its Successor, Methodism . 308 Bibliography 326 Chapter I SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PURITANISM IN ENGLAND AND IN THE SOUTHERN AND ISLAND COLONIES URING the seventeenth century, the period of Eng- D land's greatest colonial enterprise, Puritanism was always an important force that more or less dominated the thought of many Englishmen, whether they stayed to face the strife at home or endured the hardships of emigration. How strong religious influences were in the early history of New England has become common knowledge. Less recognized is the effect that Puritanism had on the development of the other colonies, the southern and island settlements. That there was this strong factor in these colonies is not to be doubted, but local conditions and circumstances often confused the picture. The Englishmen that sought refuge or opportunity in these warmer areas were of many opinions and tenets, some content with the Church of England, some shifting as far to the left as the Society of Friends, many somewhat uncertainly between the two extremes. Nor did these colonists stay fast in their beliefs as they were per- suaded in one direction or another. No one church retained a commanding position, as was so often true in New Eng- land towns. The power and prestige of the various religious factions shifted throughout the period. By and large, Puritanism in the southern and island colonies lacked literary expression. The dearth of sermonic and polemic writing was not primarily due to the weakness of the dissenting party, although the more cautious and conservative element in the latter must often have been willing not to excite active antipathy. The authorities in the various plantations saw no reason for allowing the 74 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, establishment of printing presses, which would merely serve to air the all too frequent dissatisfaction of settlers. This prohibition was the more easily maintained because of the lack of large towns. Consequently, any move by Puritans to find this means of making their infiuence felt would have been bitterly and probably successfully opposed. Puritan pamphlets that found their way into print had to do so by way of England, Holland, or Massachusetts. In the later years of the century, for instance, the Massachusetts presses were open to Bermuda dissenting ministers, whose religious ideas at the time were surprisingly akin to New England concepts of theology and church polity. Earlier in the century, however, Bermuda nonconformists, torn between Presbyterianism and Independency, had sought English publication for their disputes. Convenience or lack of convenience in the matter of printing obviously was not the only reason for the contrast between the many voices of New England Congregational- ism and the comparative muteness of southern and island nonconformity. New England's more outstanding ministers, many of them even before their emigration to the New World the best-known preachers of their day, were merely carrying on a tradition when they automatically thought of their sermons and disputes in terms of publication. Most (but by no means all) of the ministers who chose to emigrate to the colonies in which they had little hope of being other than barely accepted servants of God, were not men of prominence, in the habit of having their pulpit oratory quickly find its way into print. Then, too, no matter how many Puritans there were in any colony, they varied so in their beliefs that each particular sect or group was in the minority; hence no printed book could have the enthusiastic reception that greeted ministerial outpourings in the northern colonies where comparative unanimity of i960.] PURITANISM IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES 75 opinion reigned. These southern and island ministers, often leading strenuous lives in an attempt to cover many churches and to care for widely distributed parishioners, had to be content with the effect of their oral preaching and teaching. Obviously, this want of worldly fame, this lack of publications, has no bearing upon the question of the ardor and sincerity of their Calvinism. Nor is the obscurity of many of the southern and island ministers any adverse refiection upon the Puritan spirit of a goodly number of settlers in colonies that are rarely thought of as having been developed under Puritan infiuences. The records, scanty as they are, indicate clearly that nominal conformists and outright nonconformists composed a strong minority in Virginia, Barbados, and Jamaica, and a scarcely disputed majority in Bermuda, Maryland, and the Carolinas during practically all of the century in which colonial foundations were being laid. Nor do numbers tell the whole tale, for both Calvinists and Quakers were men of vigor in whom the reforming, protesting spirit never died. In a century of frequent dispute on religion, politics, and colonial economy, the Puritan faction, minority or majority, made itself felt, as colonizing companies and proprietors as well as local authorities soon discovered. Considered in its most general aspects, Puritanism is the belief in the close personal relationship of man and God. For many men of the seventeenth century this mystical union of man and his Creator took the more particular form of a Covenant, sealed with the Blood of Christ. The duties and obligations involved in this partnership became more definite as man considered God's immense and undeserved favor in choosing him to be of the Elect, destined to share the greatest glory for eternity. No matter what level the bond between God and man was placed upon, whether it remained purely spiritual or was worded in the concrete 76 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, terms of everyday life, the result of this way of thinking was that many men devoted themselves to religion and ethical problems. Otherworldly concerns loomed as far more important than this world's difficulties, although the latter had to be resolved so that man—or at least regenerate man— could fulfill his great destiny. The conviction that man and God could approach each other as two members of a pact also carried with it certain negative ideas. Ceremony ceased to be an expression of man's worship, but became a block that separated man from God. Therefore, Puritans were not only bitterly anti- Catholic but also unyielding in their opposition to whatever parts of the Church of England ritual and organization seemed to be relics of what to them was a corrupt church, the "whore of Rome" in the familiar seventeenth-century anti-Catholic phrase. And as is the way with hate and fear, the violent objections to Catholicism (or to the abuses to which they considered Catholicism lent itself) often in- fluenced Puritans when they thought they were approaching their problems through pure faith and disinterested reason. With little or no realization, except on the part of scholars, of how close much of their basic thinking was to scholastic philosophy, the average Puritan was blinded to all other considerations by the fear that a concept or practice was "papist." The most bitter recrimination made by conservative nonconformists against the Quakers was that the latter were Jesuits in disguise, and in this attack is revealed a dread that all too often motivated the minds of seventeenth- century Puritans.

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