When the American Puritan colonies were founded in the mid-seventeenth century, American Puritanism was a minor offshoot of English Protestantism. It grew in cultural importance retrospectively, however, as New England prospered and played a major role in the formation of the United States. American Puritan writing thence became one of the founding literatures of the new nation. The Puritan colonies had been the most literate, organised and economically successful of all the early English-speaking colonies, and their legacy was emphasized by the influential nineteenth-century New England writers, including Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow. But as revisionist scholars remind us, the Puritans were only one culture among many which inhabited in colonial times the territory of the future United States, and there are political reasons behind the rise to prominence of this white, English-speaking, Protestant and patriarchal community as traditional “forefathers” of the modern nation. Moreover, although American Puritan writing has been adopted into the national literature of the United States, it began in a transatlantic context, as an English colonial and creole literature, culturally suspended between the Old World and the New.
Who were the Puritans?
Puritans were zealous members of the Church of England who were dissatisfied with the religious compromises made by Elizabeth I after the European Reformation. They sought further Calvinist reforms of the Anglican church, particularly the abolition of ritual aspects they considered idolatrous. Over time these aspects for abolition included priestly vestments, bishops, and the Book of Common Prayer. The name “puritan” originated as a term of abuse: English Puritans were not an organised denomination, but a loose coalition of reformers. In the reign of Charles I, the powerful bishop William Laud persecuted so-called Nonconformists by enforcing the prayer book and its ceremonies, and teaching the Arminian doctrine of freewill as opposed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Religious conflict ensued, culminating in the Civil Wars of 1642-51. There followed a period of Puritan dominance before the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the re-establishment of the episcopalian Church of England as a state church.
During the 1620s and 1630s, when persecution peaked, certain Nonconformist groups emigrated and founded colonies in the Caribbean and on the north-eastern seaboard of America, an area known as “New England”. The Plymouth Brethren led by William Bradford founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. Unlike the later Puritan colonists, these “Pilgrims” were Separatists who had left the Church of England and lived in exile in Holland. Plymouth was later absorbed by the far larger Massachusetts Bay Colony, the main destination of up to 20,000 migrants who crossed from England in the Great Migration between about 1629 and 1642. The largest single group arrived in eleven ships in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop and financed by the Massachusetts Bay Company. In what was from the start an economic as much as a religious venture, these colonists founded Boston and twenty-three neighbouring towns. Although many returned to help the Puritan cause in England between 1642 and 1660, another wave of transatlantic migration followed during the Restoration.
Puritan colonists came predominantly from the middling classes, reflecting a key social and economic dynamic of Puritanism. Because Puritan preachers encouraged personal Bible study, emphasised the individual's relationship with God, and criticised the church hierarchy, the movement attracted adherents from England's growing class of small business people, especially artisans and small-scale farmers, who were literate and used to running their own affairs. Moreover, whereas in Virginia the typical migrant was a young man seeking his fortune, family groups predominated among New England settlers. These ready-made communities helped to create a relatively stable society, which gradually prospered, and which invested in education and fostered a certain kind of literary culture.
Literary Culture
New England produced by far the most writing of all the early English-speaking American colonies. Indeed, by 1638 the Bay Colony had a university, Harvard College, and a printing press. Although imported books predominated in the colonial market, the press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published some unique texts designed to meet local needs, including a new edition of the church Psalter (1640), a Bible in Algonquin (1663), and a long poem about the last judgement, The Day of Doom (1662) by the minister Michael Wigglesworth. This turned out to be seventeenth-century New England's best-selling publication. As in England in the same period, however, the sermon was the predominant literary genre, even though only a fraction of those heard found their way into print.
Sermons
Sermons can seem like dry reading now, but, for Puritans, preaching was “prophesying”, a means of conveying God's voice into the world. Puritans preferred sermons in the “plain style”, which simply “opened scripture”, that is, explained its message, instead of dazzling hearers with wit and erudition. Puritan sermons often followed the same pattern: a brief Scriptural text, a presentation of the doctrines derived from it, a list of anticipated objections each with its rebuttal, and an explanation of how the listeners should apply the doctrines to their lives. Beyond this outline, sermon styles varied enormously, from the meditative, repetitive style of John Cotton, to the more colloquial, image-filled prose of his contemporary Thomas Hooker, excerpted below:
There is great ods betwixt the knowledge of a Traveller, that in his own person hath taken a view of many Coasts, past through many Countries, and hath there taken up his abode some time, and by Experience hath been an Eye-witness of the extream cold, and scorching heats, hath surveyed the glory and beauty of the one, the barrenness and meanness of the other; he hath been in the Wars, and seen the ruin and desolation wrought there; and another that sits by his fire side and happily reads the story of these in a Book [. . .]. The like difference is there in the right discerning of sin.
Later in the period, preachers like Benjamin Coleman developed an urbane style while Cotton Mather wrote with characteristic grandiloquence. As is illustrated by the successes of the later Puritans -- such Jonathan Edwards during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s -- the paradox in Puritan preaching is that men who believed everyone was predestined to heaven or to hell, nevertheless deployed powerful persuasive techniques to urge people to close with Christ. This apparent contradiction is explained by the doctrine of signs, for if a Puritan was manifestly saintly in his or her conduct, this might be seen as a reassuring sign of his or her predestination to election by God.
In addition to their theological content, sermons illustrate the formation and evolution of colonial Puritan identity. Much has changed, for instance, between the image of a “city on the hill” in John Winthrop's 1630 lay sermon on the flagship Arbella and Samuel Danforth's “errand into the wilderness” in his election day sermon of 1670. Winthrop presents the settlers as the chosen few, an advance guard of the European Reformation, with the “eyes of the world” upon them. He tells the colonists they are entering into a “covenant” with God, like that between God and the Israelites, and that God is giving them this new land on the condition that they stay faithful. American Puritans came to believe that although individuals still needed to find salvation, their colony as a whole had a “federal covenant” with God that it had to live up to. Therefore, whereas Sunday preaching focused on individual salvation, sermons on civic occasions like fast days or election days addressed the colony's collective relationship with God.
The Jeremiad
By the second and third generations New England had experienced many crises, including schisms, famines, wars against Indians, and the loss of the colony's charter. Puritans interpreted these crises as signs of God's displeasure at their unfaithfulness; sermons like Danforth's condemned such religious “declension” using the rhetorical form of the jeremiad. In a jeremiad, the preacher blames the hearers for bringing the righteous punishment of God upon the colony, and contrasts the failings of the present generation with the idealised strengths of the first settlers. The preacher promises that if they change their ways, God will bless the colony and its glory will return. By enabling it to survive setbacks, jeremiads reinforced the colony's communal religious identity. They also contributed to the mythologising of the early Puritans. Other literary genres besides sermons that used the jeremiad form include captivity narratives, histories and funeral elegies. Public funeral elegies, read at memorial services for leading men, were particularly well suited to the jeremiad. For example, in his 1677 elegy on the death of the minister Thomas Shepard, Jr., Urian Oakes, at that time president of Harvard College, accused New England of murdering its prophets with its sins, and turned mourning into a test of repentance:
New England! know thy Heart-plague: feel this blow;
A blow that sorely wounds both Head and heart,
A blow that reaches All, both high and low,
A blow that may be felt in every part.
Mourn that this Great Man's faln in Israel:
Lest it be said, with him New-England fell!
Providential Histories
According to the providential perspective held by Puritans, deaths and all other events were signs to be interpreted. Their histories and diaries were not designed therefore as records of mere incidents, but as accounts of God's providences, his blessings and chastisements. They are, consequently, highly moralised, containing anecdotes such as that of a blaspheming sailor who falls overboard and drowns, in Bradford's history of Plymouth Plantation, and, in John Winthrop's journal, of a Puritan mouse who nibbles away the Anglican prayer book bound into a Bible. Edward Johnson subtitled his 1654 history Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England and Cotton Mather called his 1702 epic, Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Great Works of Christ in America. Such histories depict the events of the settlement, the formation of communities, dealings with Indians, political developments and decisions, but they place everything within the interpretive framework of God's relationship with the colony. The leaders whose biographies form a significant part, especially of Magnalia and Nathaniel Morton's New Englands Memoriall (1669), are often characterised as “types” of Old Testament leaders such as Moses or Nehemiah.
For Puritans, types were more than metaphors, they were patterns in human history that witnessed to the constancy of God, whose hand guided the fate of the New England colony just as it had governed Old Testament history. Originally, typology was a method of Biblical interpretation, according to which events and figures had a prophetic meaning in addition to their practical existence; for instance Jesus referred to Jonah in the belly of the fish as a prophecy of his death and resurrection. To New England Puritans, whose focus was Bibliocentric, the whole world was (to quote poet Edward Taylor) “slickt up in types”. Besides being important in Puritan historiography, typology also lent itself to poetry and even scientific writing.
Poetry and Typology
American Puritans wrote a considerable amount of poetry: funeral elegies, devotional and didactic verses, acrostic love poetry, although much of it has only been published in book form in modern times. The major poets are Anne Bradstreet, whose first collection, The Tenth Muse, was published in London in 1650 (of whom more below), and the minister Edward Taylor. Taylor preserved his poetry unpublished in a 200-page manuscript. Despite the Puritan rejection of visual images, he created strange but stunning verbal imagery from sources as diverse as lapidaries, folk tales, children's games, cottage industries, compendia like Keach's Tropologia, and his own notes “Upon the Types of the Old Testament”. Typology authorised Taylor's use of sensuous and vivid imagery, as in this example from Meditation 1.29:
My Shattred Phancy stole away from mee,
(Wits run a Wooling over Edens Parke)
And in Gods Garden saw a golden Tree,
Whose Heart was All Divine, and gold its barke:
Whose glorious limbs and fruitfull branches strong
With Saints, and Angells bright are richly hung.
Thou! thou! my Deare-Deare Lord, art this rich Tree:
The Tree of Life within Gods Paradise.
I am a Withred Twig, dri'de, fit to bee
A Chat Cast in thy fire, writh off by Vice.
Yet if thy Milkwhite Gracious Hand will take mee,
And grafft mee in this golden stock, thou'lt make mee.
By expressing the failure of types and of language to capture the fullness of God's glory, Taylor's Meditations humble the poet, and through this via negativa, prepare him for communion.
The Book of Nature
Typology was combined with scientific observation in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Active in the mid eighteenth century, Edwards sought to integrate the faith of his Puritan forebears with Enlightenment thinking, including the philosophy of John Locke and the rigours of empirical science. Besides being an energetic minister, Edwards had a formidable intellect. His treatises, including Religious Affections (1746), Freedom of the Will (1754), and The Nature of True Virtue (1765) span the disciplines of theology, philosophy and psychology. Close observation of the natural world was another of Edwards's enthusiasms, bringing together his Enlightenment interest with a Puritan desire to interpret nature typologically, as in this example from his notes on “Images of Divine Things” (number 161):
Water in artificial waterworks rises no higher than the spring from whence it comes, unless by a super-added strength from some other cause. So nothing in man can rise higher than the principle from whence it comes. Nature can't be improved by men themselves so as to bring them to any qualification higher than natural principles more excellent in their kind than self-love, etc
For Edwards, the natural world was filled with messages encoded by God which science could help unlock but which could only be fully understood through the “super-added” gift of divine grace. American Romantic authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville later revived and adapted the Puritan tradition of interpreting the book of nature.
Journals and Autobiography
As the examples from Taylor and Edwards illustrate, writing was an important means of devotion for American Puritans. Many ministers and lay people wrote notes on sermons they had heard and recorded God's providences towards them in a commonplace book. Some of these journals are full of self-scrutiny and spiritual seeking, including those of the elder Thomas Shepard (d. 1649), Joseph Tompson, Michael Wigglesworth and Cotton Mather. The psychological depth of Puritan teaching is shown in the authors' analysis of their thoughts and feelings, their perception of their progress or backsliding, and their pious resolutions. More in the Pepysian mode, the diary kept by Samuel Sewall between 1673 and 1729 mixes reflections on concerns ranging from the spiritual afflictions of his daughter to the price of madeira. Untypically for a Puritan diary, Sewall's provides much insight into the daily life of a busy colonial magistrate.
While no there was no New England John Bunyan, many American Puritans wrote an autobiographical narrative, not least because a brief “relation” of one's spiritual progress had become required for full church membership by about 1640. Only full members, or visible saints, were permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper. Transcripts of these relations were preserved by ministers including Shepard Sr., Wigglesworth and Taylor, and several by “praying Indians” were published by the missionary John Eliot. All follow a similar pattern, according to the morphology of conversion taught by the ministers. Still, the details of the necessary stages of rebellion and humiliation vary, showing how lay people used Puritan teaching to interpret their experiences. Some people also wrote memoirs for posterity, highlighting lessons for the next generation. Thomas Shepard, for instance, described a drunken student escapade which caused him to hide in the fields out of shame. Anne Bradstreet mentioned the hardship of migration, interpreting it as a lesson about submitting to God: “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston.” Through autobiographical writing Puritans could thus “improve” even negative experiences by interpreting them spiritually.
Poetic Dialogues and Drama
Although American Puritans, like their English counterparts, rejected theatre as idolatrous, their accounts of religious experience were full of implicit drama, as, for example, Wigglesworth's Day of Doom:
Before his Throne a Trump is blown,
Proclaiming th'Day of Doom:
Forthwith he cries, Ye Dead arise,
And unto Judgment come.
No sooner said, but 'tis obey'd;
Sepulchers open'd are:
Dead Bodies all rise at his call,
and's mighty power declare.
Besides portraying the apocalypse in a rollicking ballad metre, Wigglesworth's poem contains long sermonic dialogues in which Christ “cashiers” the self-justifying arguments of the damned. Adapting the Christian tradition of automachia, Edward Taylor's poem series Gods Determinations Touching his Elect also contains colourful dialogues, between the Soul and Satan, the Soul and Christ, and the doubting soul and a faithful believer. Written at a time when church membership was in decline, Gods Determinations, though unpublished, seems designed to persuade hesitant believers to come forward.
Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650) also contains dialogic verses, including a portrayal of the Four Humours and the Four Elements as competitive sisters. Though less polyphonic in structure, Bradstreet's later, more personal verse is more conflicted, as for example, her elegies on the deaths of her grandchildren, with their tense voice hovering between rebellion and submission: “Cropt by th'Almighty's hand; yet is He good. [. . . ] With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust, / Let's say He's merciful as well as just.” Because of this equivocation, and because of the fine imagery and literary concerns of her poetry, Bradstreet has been considered a “worldly Puritan” by some modern critics. As the startling poem on the burning of her house illustrates, however, Bradstreet's Puritan faith involved her in a constant battle to spiritualise her earthly attachments into metaphors for religious goals:
Thou hast an house on high erect,
Framed by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent though this be fled.
Treatise debates and Trial Transcripts
Much of the conflict in American Puritan writing was inward, but the culture was also defined by external conflict. The colony's early years were plagued by religious division, including controversies over toleration and over allegations of Antinomianism, the belief that divine grace set one above the law. Believing their practices to be reasonable, and needing to reassure their English investors, American Puritan leaders wrote extensively in defence of the colony's religious and political systems. The treatise debate between John Cotton and Roger Williams on the issue of toleration, for example, is a fascinating Puritan discussion of the relationship between church and state, with the dramatic background of Williams having to flee for his life for advocating toleration. After sheltering with Indians, Williams founded Rhode Island. Though he is heralded by modern scholars for his progressive views, Williams' radical Puritanism is often overlooked: Williams believed that toleration and the complete separation of church and state were necessary because only a small minority of people were truly saved. Therefore, making all soldiers swear allegiance on the Bible, for example, would force many into blasphemous hypocrisy.
In addition to apologetical treatises, Puritan controversies are also recorded in court transcripts. These documents give a vivid sense of the tensions at work and involve the modern reader in the process of judgment. They also give a written voice to men and women who were not in a position to write, such as Anne Hutchinson, who was accused of Antinomianism. Scapegoated in the 1636-37 controversy, Hutchinson and her family were banished and subsequently killed by Indians. Hutchinson's intelligence, her knowledge of scripture, and her ability to debate theology emerge powerfully from the court transcript, as does the threat she posed to the colonial patriarchy. Although they make similarly painful reading given the circumstances, the transcripts and petitions from the Salem witch trials of 1692 also give voices to the ordinary folk who testified, and indeed to the Puritan community leaders who were doing their best to be just, despite the tragic results: nineteen hanged, one pressed to death, and a community torn apart by fear and accusation. Needless to say, the Salem crisis, which was influenced by Cotton and Increase Mather's books on supernatural occurrences, provoked written responses, notably Robert Calef's attack on witchcraft beliefs, More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).
Puritans and Indians
The enemies in American Puritan writing were often other Puritans or inner demons, but in times of war they were the heathen Indians. Puritan soldiers, confident in their role as righteous warriors, wrote harrowing accounts of their own brutality, such as John Mason's description of burning a Pequot village (Mystic Fort) in 1637. By contrast, Roger Williams' unique Key into the Language of America (1643) presented sample catechistical dialogues with Narragansett Indians that reinforced their humanity, interspersed with poems that compared them favourably with the Massachusetts Puritans. John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew wrote fundraising pamphlets detailing their progress in converting Indians. However the 1675-78 conflict known as King Philip's War (after the English name taken by the leader, Metacom) damaged Puritan-Indian relations irreparably. With some exceptions, such as the writings of Daniel Gookin, subsequent portrayals of Indians in Puritan texts tended to be very negative, typified by the opening scenes of Mary Rowlandson's popular account of her captivity and restoration during the war, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682):
It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by His almighty power preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive.
Throughout the text, the Indians are blamed for their atrocities while their good deeds, such as keeping her alive, are attributed directly to God. Rowlandson drops the apocalyptic mode, however, and by the end of the narrative betrays an almost anthropological interest in the life of the tribe.
Captivity narratives were not unique to American Puritans; they were also written by English sailors captured by Moroccan corsairs, for example. But the genre dovetailed well with the conversion relation and providential history discussed above. Rowlandson's account contained the ingredients of a Puritan best-seller: sensationally graphic depictions of Indian violence, an exotic portrayal of cultural encounter, and a sermon packed with Scriptural references and framed by the moral of a woman's faith being purified through suffering. Although the text was probably edited by a minister (possibly Increase Mather), a raw, sometimes desperate, and often confused voice emerges. Rowlandson expresses a mixture of hatred for and complicity with the tribe who captured her. For instance, although she uses the poor food the fleeing tribe are forced to eat as a measure of their savagery, she, to her horror, eats it too. Ultimately, though, it is her ability to interpret her story in the light of Scripture that enables Rowlandson to reconstruct her Puritan self.
Conclusion
Writing like Rowlandson's narrative or Williams' Key that brings together the imported religious culture and the native inhabitants and environs of America is exciting but unusual. Whether out of nostalgia or an embattled frontier mentality, American Puritan writers preserved the culture they had imported from England, to the point even of being old-fashioned: Bradstreet's verse style was almost Elizabethan while Taylor's was Metaphysical. The urbane, Augustan styles fashionable in later seventeenth-century England were slower to flower in America, where the leaders cultivated filiopiety and warned the rising generations against growing trends of worldliness and religious laxity. However, as the warnings suggest, American-born colonists were already developing their own creole identity. Particular literary genres evolved because they were best fitted to the needs of the Puritan colony. Though New England produced little in the way of “belles lettres”, it abounded in functional writing in the form of jeremiads, autobiographical relations, captivity narratives, funeral elegies and providential histories. These often more “homespun” writings pose a healthy challenge to traditional literary criticism, inviting approaches that value a text's cultural and religious purpose as well as its aesthetic design.
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Citation: Morris, Amy M.E.. "American Puritan Writing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1684, accessed 21 November 2024.]
