Conclusion
²œ
Assessing theocracy in early Massachusetts, and by extension in New England, is so difficult that even in the light of the evidence we have gathered we cannot say either that the colonies were theocracies, nor that they were not theocracies. As most historians have claimed indeed, clergymen in New England were legally barred from holding civil office. Therefore, the commonwealth could not be actually ruled by a priesthood, and consequently Massachusetts could not technically be a theocracy.
However, can we say that the ministers were confined to their pulpit and the magistrates to their bench and councils, which would mean that Church and State were firmly separate? In spite of the official restriction on clergymen, it must be admitted that these men played a very important advisory part. Every time the magistrates were not sure about an issue, every time they needed a confirmation that their decision would not go against the will of God, every time a question divided two groups, the leading ministers - Cotton, Shepard, Peter and their peers - were called and asked for their opinions. As ministers, they were learned in matters of theology, and their interpretation was thought to be more reliable than the magistrates', though the latter tended to see themselves as competent amateur theologians, as was best exemplified by John Winthrop.
Similarly, ministers were officially asked to draft legal codifications when these could no longer be avoided, and men like Cotton and Ward did not refuse: Cotton's code was refused by the deputies only because it would give life-terms to the magistrates and that the deputies were opposed to this too aristocratic clause. Though rejected in Massachusetts, Cotton's Moses His Judicialls, whose title clearly revealed the contents, was applied in New Haven. It was Nathaniel Ward's project that was revised and finally accepted in Massachusetts. Moreover, ministers participated in these activities because they had been invited to do so by the civil magistrates.
Why then were ministers invited to draft legislation and to advise the civil rulers of the commonwealths? As often, the answer must be looked for in the Special Commission. Since the settlers believed they had been sent by God across the Atlantic to establish His laws as the law of the land, who apart from the civil amateur theologians were more qualified and reliable when it came to interpret the Scriptures into actual laws but the ministers themselves? We must not forget that the very foundation upon which the society of Massachusetts was built was the Special Commission. By extension, this was also valid in Connecticut and in New Haven. It was not so in Plymouth, but we have seen that Plymouth was under the influence of Massachusetts, so indirectly the Special Commission under which Massachusetts was also extended into Plymouth. Even Rhode Island, in a way, can be considered to have been founded because of the Special Commission, since its origin was the opposite reaction to it. The Special Commission, because of the absolute character of God, and because of John Winthrop's literal construction, was itself an absolute concept. In theory, no departure from the word of God, however minor, could be tolerated. This explained, beyond the practices widespread throughout contemporary Europe, why the Congregational Church was the one and only accepted and established church. No dissenting view was tolerated, also because religious dissent was believed to jeopardize the foundations of the State.
Since Congregationalism was so firmly established as a State religion, its other principles were enforced. As a consequence, the aristocratic frame of mind of the elite was reflected in the restriction of the electorate to the visible saints, to full members of the church, who alone were qualified enough to build New Jerusalem. Here it definitely cannot be denied that Church and State were inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, church attendance and church support were made compulsory by the State. Sabbath breach and religious dissent were punished by civil courts, and so were sins, which under the judicial system of New England became crimes - the English ecclesiastical courts having been merged into a civil system of courts. Therefore, the distinction between crime and sins as it existed, however obscurely, in England, was totally erased in New England. The English system made a difference between illegal activities to be punished by church courts, and those to be dealt with by quarter sessions and assizes. Since the General Court vaguely established by the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was a mixture of these last two courts, and that the rulers of Massachusetts also punished therein sins traditionally reserved for church courts, the difference did no longer exist.
Some of these sins, like adultery, would be punishable by death and no longer by public penance because that was what the Mosaic Code prescribed. Indeed the whole list of capital crimes was supported by Scriptural references - however inaccurately sometimes - and entries like "cursing or smiting one's parents" were added, whereas they were absent from English law. Similarly, practices such as the two-witnesses rule, or the forty-lashes limitation were directly drawn from the Old Testament.
However, other practices that seem typically Puritan like holy watching were imported from England, and even though the Body of Liberties of 1641 was mostly written by Reverend Ward, it was strongly inspired by its author's knowledge of Common Law. In spite of their importance, the capital laws made up only one out of ninety-five articles. And what was valid in theory was seldom put into practice: only one couple of adulterers were put to death in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The magistrates had felt bound to reproduce the articles contained in the Bible, but when it came to enforcing them, their original literalism was often superseded by Christian charity.
Almost blind literalism was at the very core of the doctrine of the Special Commission as expressed by Winthrop in the example of Saul and the destruction of Amaleck. Why then were felons hanged and not stoned to death as Scriptures prescribed? Why were the dietary laws, which occupy so much space in the Pentateuch, not enforced? The "errand into the wilderness" was doomed from the very beginning since Winthrop advocated both literalism and charity. Charity meant leniency, which meant departing from the rigid rules of the Old Testament, of Moses' "Judicialls", in the name of Christian love and forgiveness. In its turn, this made Massachusetts less theocratic than it should have been. The models followed were thus both English, because of the standard fixed in the Charters and of the principles of Common Law enforced in New England, and Scriptural, through the ideal of the Special Commission and the attempt at making laws not contrary to the laws of God, and also in view of the restriction of the electorate to a State-established religious community.
The transfer of culture can also be felt beyond the spheres of law and justice. The whole population of New England imported perceptions of society that were not specific to England, for they were widespread throughout Western Europe. Indeed, the emigrants carried with them the extremely weighty tradition of natural aristocracy. Already omnipresent in Aristotelian philosophy, the idea that power and authority must be reserved to those who deserved them through their virtue and excellence (the Greek concept of arete) was pursued through Divine right monarchy, with a Christian justification. In the feudal system, the king, at the top of the social and political hierarchy, was appointed by God, and his vassals by the king, and thus indirectly by God. The basis of the medieval pyramidal society was land ownership; hence the men directly or indirectly chosen by God were worthy of possessing land, and were thus rewarded by the king for their allegiance.
English society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was still very strongly stratified, and successive Puritan reinterpretations of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination had given a metaphysical justification to the previous idea of a natural aristocracy. The Puritans believed that though everyone was sinful and damned because of Adam's apostasy, God had chosen a few men and women and had given them saving faith: they had been saved and thus had become visible saints. In terms of saving faith, society as envisioned by the Puritans was divided into the haves and the have-nots, and was therefore simpler than post-medieval English society. There was the better sort, naturally fit to rule and to own land, whose wealth was a sign of election and who because of this deserved more land and power, and there were the meaner sort, the damned, the sinners, who were fit to go to church and support it, who were naturally fit to obey and subject themselves to the decisions of their betters. Incidentally, as they were damned, they would not prosper and must accept their lowly social and economic status as the will of God.
This was the kind of society that John Winthrop described in the opening words of his Modell of Christian Charity, and such was the type of society that the rulers, the natural elite, would try to build in the wilderness, where everything remained to be built. This ideology of natural aristocracy was widespread and accepted amidst the different ranks of society, as can be witnessed in the pattern of recreating a ruling class or caste by always willingly returning the same men to office on the assumption that they showed signs of election, wisdom and excellence, and that they were naturally made for ruling.
Similarly, sumptuary
laws were passed that allowed only the rich to dress as they wanted to, and
forcing the poor to accept their social status, and to dress according to their
means. Poor people who bought expensive lace for instance went against God's
will and this would not be tolerated in a would-be godly society.
The difference of status could also be felt in the rendering of justice and in the penalties inflicted: for similar offenses the rich were more often fined and the poor more often whipped, but this did not mean that the magistrates were more lenient toward the rich since they were more severely whipped or fined than the poor. Indeed, the poor were sinners, so it was in their very nature to sin and be punished, whereas the rich were supposed to be among the chosen few, among the godly who were naturally entitled to claim their share of power and authority, so more was expected of them. Moreover, they were supposed to be models for the lower ranks to imitate and they were icons of respectability, so they should not be humiliated in order not to threaten this respectability.
In the eyes of the magistrates, the natural aristocracy of New England, the wisdom of the decision-makers should not be impaired: they called for total discretion in all affairs. Elections would just be a confirmation by the freemen that they were fit to rule, but then they must be left to decide according to their wisdom. They thought they did not represent the people but God's will; their relation with their electors would therefore not be representation but delegation. Yet this conception of power and representation was in conflict with that of the freemen. Though the latter recognized that their magistrates were naturally fit to rule, they wanted them to represent the people and their interests. As the magistrates clung to the doctrine of natural aristocracy and of total discretion, the freemen managed to get deputies to represent them and therefore to limit the powers of the governor and his assistants.
The history of Puritan Massachusetts was to be marked by a whole series of conflicts between the aristocratic magistrates and the anti-discretion freemen, over representation, the veto and a written legal codification for instance. So aristocracy was undeniably present, and must replace previous assumptions that Massachusetts was an oligarchy: an oligarchy has no metaphysical justification, and oligarchs rule selfishly for their own interests, whereas the rulers of Massachusetts were trying to rule for the general good. However, one must not oversimplify the struggle between magistrates and freemen as that of aristocracy versus democracy. Democracy as we know it did not exist in the seventeenth century. Yet the freemen's impulses can be called democratization to a certain extent, since they favored wider participation for themselves, and called discretion arbitrary rule. Their aim was also to establish the Special Commission but the means to this end were, according to them, different from those advocated by the magistrates. At local level, the freemen gained wider electorates, but one cannot really talk about democracy. At best it can be said that Massachusetts was becoming more democratic, or rather less undemocratic. Yet the idea of a natural aristocracy was not challenged and would not be for more than a century.
Progressively, near the end of the period herein studied, the Restoration in England and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 that put William and Mary on the throne brought tighter control by the Crown over the colonies. The religious monopoly over the franchise was abolished upon royal demand, and was replaced by economic - and therefore undemocratic - criteria. Finally when the Colony became a Royal Province in 1691, the process of Anglicization of New England could be felt more easily.
However, the belief in a natural aristocracy was still very lively at the time of the American Revolution and was still defended by John Adams as late as the 1810s. This doctrine can be described as antithetical with what is implied by democracy - equality or at least unrestricted suffrage, in the Greek meaning of the word. Since it was the founding principle of New England and continued unchallenged until well into the nineteenth century, and since, therefore, the consensus historians' assumption that America had always been democratic must be questioned, then some greater attention must be paid to the concept of natural aristocracy, at least in Massachusetts and New England, from its European medieval origins to its manifestations at least until the Young Republic. Everything has therefore not been written in the history of colonial New England.