Wayward Puritans a study in the sociology of deviance

252 Pages·19.067 MB·English

by  K. Erikson

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WAYWARD
PURITANS
1' >lF /)i\M.V(.A
KAI ERIKSON
T.

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Wayward Puritans
John Wiley 8c Sons, Inc. New York London Sydney
. .
Wayward
Puritans
A
Study in the Sociohgy ofDeviance
KAI ERIKSON
T.
Copyright© 1966 by JohnWUey 6- Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduction ortranslation ofany part ofthis work beyond that
permitted by Sections 107 or 108ofthe 1976 UnitedStatesCopy-
right Actwithoutthepermissionofthecopyrightownerisunlaw-
ful. Requests for permission or further information should be
addressedtothePermissionsDepartment,JohnWiley&Sons,Inc.
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-16140
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 471 24427 9
Preface
IN EARLY 1630, when the first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts
Bay were still making their way across the Atlantic, Governor
John Winthrop delivered a thoughtful sermon to his fellow pas-
sengers. "We must consider," he warned them,
that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon
us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have
[undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us,
iwe shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.^
The travelers whoheardthesewords on the decks oftheflag-
ship Arabella could well appreciate the urgency in Winthrop's
voice. They were a chosen company of saints, carrying a com-
mission from God to cleanse the churches of Christ throughout
the world by restoring them to the purity and simplicity they
had known in the days of the Apostles. The impulse which
brought these early immigrants across four thousand miles of
ocean, then, was primarily one of revival, looking back all the
way to Biblical times for its basic models and sanctions. Win-
throp and his associates intended to build a new Israel in the
1John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity," Winthrop Papers
(Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), II, p. 295.
vi Preface
forests of Massachusetts, a Bible state of such compelling virtue
that it would reform all Christianity by example. And so the
members of the expedition began Hfe in America with the clear
understanding that they were making history.
The New England Puritans did "make history," and in a
most dramatic way. We honor them as founders of a new civi-
lization and celebrate their ocean voyage as if it had been the
first flourish of an emerging American spirit, but in doing so we
sometimes give them credit for a kind of success they did not in
the least want to achieve. For these remarkable pioneers never
meant to abandon England or retire by themselves into a world
of their own. They hoped to establish New England as the spir-
itual capital of Christendom, the headquarters of the Protestant
Reformation, and in this ambition they felt very much engaged
in the mainstream of European life. In many respects, the pas-
sengers on board the Arabella and her sister ships were traveling
to the outer edges of the known world in order to become more
closely and more meaningfully related to events taking place at
its center.
Eventually, of course, the New England Puritans lost contact
with Europe and turned their extraordinary energies to the land
which spread out before them in an unending plain. But it was
many years before they were able to regard the place they had
settled as a homeland or the lives they had lived as events in a
local history; and during this interval the people of the Bay were
almost suspended in time and place, gradually losing their old
identity as Englishmen but not yet aware of their new one as
Americans. The "eyes of all people" did not remain long on New
England, and throughout the first three generations of settlement,
the Puritans found themselves more and more remote from the
world they were trying to refashion.
Because of its relative isolation, Massachusetts Bay offers
an exceptional laboratory for social research. Somehow the
colony seems to stand out from its European background, sepa-
ratedfrom those broader currents of history which make the scale
Preface vii
of life in other parts of the seventeenth-century world appear
larger and more complex. We are not dealing with nations or
dynasties, here, but with small groups of men whose names we
remember and whose lives we know something about, and so
the history of the Bay has a fineness of texture and detail which
is missing elsewhere. Moreover, the period is richly documented.
It is unusual for a community- this small to have become the focus
of so much attention, but the subsequent history of the Bay made
it a natural object of scholarly interest and the Puritans them-
selves played a leading role in the process by keeping useful
records of the holy experiment in which they were engaged.
Although they would scarcely have approved of the approach
taken in this study, or any other like it, the Puritans were always ^
aware that their colony might one day serve as a test case for -
theories about societ\'.
The purpose of the following study is to use the Pmitan
community as a setting in which to examine several ideas about
deviant beha\ior. In this sense the subject matter of the book
is primarily sociological, even though the data found in most of
its pages are historical; and since this kind of interdisciplinary
effort often raises a number of methodological issues, we might
pause for a moment to consider how the two fields are related.
According to an honored tradition of scholarship, sociologists
are people who study the general outlines of society, the "laws"
governing social Hfe, while historians are people who study those
special moments in the past which have shaped the character
of a given age or tempered the course of future events. Now
this distinction betvveen the "general" interests of the sociologist
and the "particular" interests of the historian has been in vogue
for many years and has furnished both fields with a convenient
set of credentials. But when it is used to characterize a given
piece of research, the distinction seems to lose much of its the-
oretical crispness. After all, human events themselves are neither
general nor particular until some student arranges them to fit the
logic of his own approach, and in this day of interdisciplinary
viii Preface
thinking it is no simple matter to say how the interests of the
sociologist diflFer from those of the historian. Few sociologists
who enjoy looking for data in the records of the past would want
topretend that they aremoved by different enthusiasms or drawn
to different conceptual problems than the historian, and it seems
evident that a similar blurring of boundaries is taking place in
the older of the two fields as well.
Yet there is one respect in which the following study should
be viewed as sociological rather than historical. The data pre-
sented here have not been gathered in order to throw new light
on the Puritan community in New England but to add something
to our understanding of deviant behavior in general, and thus
the Puritan experience in America has been treated in these
pages as an example of human life everywhere. Whether or not
the approach taken here is plausible from a historical point of
view will eventually depend on the extent to which it helps ex-
plain the behavior of other peoples at other moments in time,
and not just the particular subjects of this study.
Beyond this distinction, little attempt has been made in the
study to draw a formal line between sociology and history. Some
chapters, like the one which opens the study, deal almost exclu-
sively with sociological matters, while others are chiefly devoted
to a straightforward kind of historical reporting. All of the chap-
ters, however, lie in a border area which can and probably
should be claimed by both fields, and it should be a sufficient
introduction to point out that the study was written by a sociol-
ogist in the interests of pursuing a sociological idea.
Accordingly, the book begins with a discussion of sociologi-
cal theory and moves from there into historical analysis. Chapter
1 suggests that deviant forms of behavior are often a valuable
resource in society, providing a kind of scope and dimension
which is necessary to all social life. Chapter 2 follows with some
backgroimd material on the Puritan settlers and the colony they
built on the edge of the wilderness. From that point to the end
of the study, three different themes extracted from the introduc-