Buccaneers,
Bigots, Slavers and Drug Traders
As the 17th
century unfolded the eastern coast of North America became settled
by a bizarre incongruity of theocratic colonies and the enclaves
of pirates and slave traders. It gave birth to a uniquely American
formula of violent criminality cheek by jowl with puritanical
righteousness. In time the two extremes of dysfunctional
human behaviour would feed off each other. The criminal, after
a life of villainy, might find his salvation in religious rectitude
and mortification. The theocratic tyrant, with access to wealth,
power and women, would succumb to the blandishments of a carnal
existence. Thus piety laced with corruption are as American as
apple pie and turkey.
Jesus
makes all things Bright and Beautiful
In the New World,
ever adaptable Christianity morphed into new varieties of pious
fraud.
For the intrepid pilgrim it stiffened his spirit and
described his role as the new Israelite in
a second Land of Canaan, the native Americans scripted in as the
lost tribes of Israel and therefore not without hope of redemption.
For the Puritans who followed, it gave the reassuring certainty
of patriarchal authoritarianism and the redemptory value
of a life of toil and self-denial. Theirs was the joy of building
a New Jerusalem in a heathen land. For the adventurers and the
avaricious who arrived in ever increasing numbers it preserved
group identity and sanitized every act of inhumanity and greed,
for their triumph and conquest was Divine Will made manifest.
It was all part of God's plan, material success confirming His
approval. For the weaker minds and the gentler spirits overwhelmed
by the travails and brutality of unrestrained "enterprise" it
offered the reassuring embrace of a guru who, in return, asked
only for a little cash. And for the African slaves, imported by
the hundreds of thousands to the plantations of hell, it offered
consolation in their life of suffering, at one with Jesus, and
the vain hope
of a future kingdom in which they would "lay down their burden".
Hallelujah.
No Honour Among Thieves
Between 1539-1542 conquistador Hernando
De Soto conducted an "entrada" ("entrance") through
the southeast region of north America as far as the Carolinas.
His three-year invasion – with an army of around six hundred adventurers and accompanied by priests making baptisms
along the way – devastated the native peoples primarily through
disease and war. 'Living off the land', the Spanish seized foodstuffs,
enslaved 'bearers' and burned the towns of all who demurred.
Lands half the size of Europe felt the consequence of his rampage
and
increased their vulnerability to later invasions from Spain's
enemies.
About the same
time as De Soto was raiding the southeast a compatriot, Francisco
Coronado, tracked a small army through the southwest and
reluctantly recognized that the Pueblo communities of the upper
Rio Grande were too poor to conquer. The Spanish, disheartened
that they had not found the "seven golden cities of Cibola",
concluded that the more northerly latitudes of the vast continent
were of little value in their grande scheme of conquest
and they concentrated on the rapacious exploitation of central
and South America. Spain's most northern settlement remained San
Agustin in Florida, a fortress/port designed to protect the
annual treasure fleet from irritating predators, lying in wait
in bays around the Caribbean. For 300 years San Agustin remained
simply an isolated military outpost.
Hit
and Run: Buccaneers
"From
the earliest days of colonization, Virginia was a centre of
piracy and pillage, a base to raid Spanish commerce and plunder
French settlements on the coast of Maine – and to exterminate
the "devil worshippers" and "cruel beasts" whose
generosity had enabled the colonists to survive." – Chomsky, p21.
Other European
powers viewed the vast Spanish empire with unrestrained envy. In
the late 16th and early 17th century, Dutch and English adventurers
copied the French example and began working the periphery of the
Spanish/Portuguese empire, sneaking in to make illegal
trades where a settlement was strong, raiding and pillaging where
resistance was weak. Spain's limited interest in the northern continent
provided an opportunity for the other maritime states to establish
their own permanent toe-holds in North America and thus make piracy
more efficient.
Even the colony
of New Providence, established in 1629 by a sect of Puritans, succumbed
to the seductive allure of thievery:
"Despite the
strict religious principles of the colony's founders, the island
had, within five years, become a base for pirates." – Hart,
p6.
But of course
the line between villainy and patriotic heroics was finely drawn.
Until late in the seventeenth century colonial governors issued "Letters
of Marque" which gave a veneer of legality to attacks
upon vessels and outposts of other nations. As so-called "privateers" adventurous
mariners could make a legal killing (and kill legally) on the "pirate
round" to the Eastern Sea (the Indian Ocean), where they
could plunder or capture Moslem, Mogul or French ships with the
King's blessing.
Piracy
in a frock coat
Henry Morgan was
one villain who made a successful career move from pirate to colonial
despot. After a number of years of hugely profitable raiding in
the Caribbean he was knighted and made Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica.
In the early
years of the 18th century more than a dozen "privateers" operated
out of New York alone. One was Edward Teach, the notorious "Blackbeard".
When Teach was ejected from the colony by a new, unaccommodating
British overlord the buccaneer merely relocated to North Carolina
where he became a buddy of the governor Charles Eden. Eden's impoverished
colony, lacking viable exports of its own, welcomed the commercial
activity which came from piracy and himself pocketed a share of
plundered loot. Blackbeard, with a fleet of four ships and 400
crew, raided as far north as Virginia and as far south as Honduras.
Another New York
crime boss was the Dutchman Frederick Philipse, pirate
entrepreneur, member of the Governor's council and patron of the
church.
"The demand
for the exotic goods that the pirates brought home grew so
great that New England shipyards did a thriving business building
and fitting out vessels for piracy ... One New York merchant,
Frederick Philipse, actually did run piracy like a business
and made so much money that he became the richest man in
colonial New York." – Butting, p73.
Philipse amassed
for himself a vast 90,000 acre estate along the Hudson River. A
proper colonial "gentlemen" he franchised out the rough
end of the business, preferring to supply and fit-out pirate
vessels,
import slaves and receive stolen goods. Philipse built himself
a manorial hall at Yonkers which in later times would become City
Hall.
When blatant
support for piracy brought on the unwelcome attentions of the British
navy the pirate fraternity decamped to an island hideaway – New
Providence in the Bahamas, a riotous pirate shantytown but
even then, pirate services were sought as "privateers" to
circumvent the British Navigation Acts.
Staking
a claim: Plantations
"Malaria came
with Caribbean mosquitoes, like the rats, in the first ships.
Plague and yellow fever came with the later ships; so, apparently,
did jail-fever." – Brogan, p22.
In 1578 an aristocratic
liegeman of the English queen, Sir Humphrey Gilbert (knighted
for brutally imposing English "plantations" in Ireland)
received "Letters
Patent" from Elizabeth authorizing the planting of an English
colony in America. Five years later Gilbert came ashore on Newfoundland and
promptly claimed possession. Unfortunately for him he drowned on
the return voyage but his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh (another
veteran of brutality in Ireland) continued the family's colonizing
ambitions with a new "patent". This royal licence grabbed
nothing less than the whole of North America above Florida. Having
claimed 2000 miles of real estate for the British crown Raleigh
wisely called this vast territory Virginia in
deference to the Tudor queen. But
for all the grandiosity of the claim the attempt to establish a
settlement at Roanoke (in what is now North Carolina)
between 1584 and 1586 proved a complete fiasco.
A decade later
and the assault on the new continent had a little more success.
Humphrey Gilbert's son Raleigh Gilbert followed his father
into the plantation business when in 1606 he was one of several
aristocrats who secured a new "Letters Patent" from King
James I. This grant anticipated two colonial enterprises – the London
Colony and the Plymouth Colony.
Having reconnoitred
the coast at
a safe distance from the Spanish fortress at San Agustin,
the London Colony's three vessels entered Chesapeake Bay in May,
1607. The one hundred or so adventurers honoured the king by naming
their settlement Jamestown.
In August of
the same year a ship of Raleigh Gilbert's Plymouth or Popham colony
arrived in what is now the state of Maine. Here the would-be settlers
built a fort named for St George on a wooded peninsula
by the Kennebec River. But unprepared as they were for the harsh
winter and with Gilbert himself abandoning the adventure to claim
his inheritance in England the disillusioned survivors returned
home with him.
In any event,
the
French had beaten the English to the Americas and had established
an early
presence along the Mississippi and the St Lawrence rivers. This
led the English (and the Dutch) to settle at other favourable harbours
along the Atlantic seaboard and on the smaller islands of the Caribbean.
Of the two, the Caribbean, with its immediate potential for hugely
profitable sugar crops, supplemented by inter-island pillage, was
the more important. Bermuda was settled in 1609, St Kitts and the
Lesser Antilles between 1624-1628.
Jamestown
1607 – "Civilisation" arrives
" Drunken,
gluttonous loiterers ... poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving
men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil
a commonwealth than begin one."
– Captain Smith describes his colonists (Brogan, p23)
The Jamestown
colony was almost as short-lived as Popham. Hit hard by disease
and starvation, only the timely arrival of relief ships stopped
surviving settlers abandoning the colony in the spring of 1610. They
were ordered back. Even so, its poor location on swampy malarial
land meant the colony was doomed without the support of local Indians.
The Algonquians, however, were curious
about the newcomers, at first holding and then releasing the leader
of a foraging party, a mercenary adventurer named Captain John
Smith, dominant member of the colony's seven-man council. Smith
gave the Indians two cannon (symbolic, perhaps, of what was to
come) and obtained maize in return. A near-fatal accident put Smith
himself
on a ship
back to England.
The colony – almost
all male – could barely be held together even by harsh
military discipline. Some colonists
melted into the wilderness and joined the natives, many no doubt
seeking female companionship and a full belly. To deter such desertion
in 1610 the Governor made living with the Indians a capital offence:
"Some he appointed
to be hanged, some burned, some broken upon wheels, others to be
staked and some shot to death ... all these extremes and cruel
tortures he used and inflicted upon them to terrify the rest from
attempting the like." (Jones, p124).
Death rates in
the colony were appalling. In the winter
of
1610 a man was burned for eating his wife:
"There was
one of the companie who mortally hated his wife, and therefore
secretly killed her, then cut her in pieces and hid her in
diuers parts of his house: when the woman was missing, the
man suspected, his house searched, and parts of her
mangled
body were discouered, to excuse himselfe he said that his wife
died, that he hid her to satisfie his hunger, and that he fed
daily vpon her.
Vpon this, his house was againe searched, where
they found a good quantitie of meale, oatemeale, beanes and
pease. Hee therevpon was araigned, confessed the murder, and
was burned for his horrible villany."
– Peter Force,
Tracts and Other Papers, 1836
With the colony
unable to feed itself, still less show a profit, find gold or a
passage to the South Seas, the London company (renamed
the Virginia Company) found itself in difficulties. To
encourage reluctant settlers it abandoned its own monopoly of land
and offered "headrights" of
50 acres to every colonist. But by then Indian resentment of the
grasping, delinquent intruders burst out into an attack on Jamestown
which left a third of the interlopers dead. For a time, the company
kept itself afloat by lottery but then collapsed in 1624. At that
point the King stepped in and Virginia became a Crown
Colony. Rents thereafter accrued to the king, with
a proportion set aside for the "recruitment and support of
clergy." With the state's direct involvement the native Indians
could now be taught the true meaning of "Christian civilization".
"We,
who hitherto have had possession of no more ground than their
waste ... shall now enjoy their cultivated places."
– A Jamestown
colonist gloats over success in Indian war of 1622 (Times Atlas
of Archaeology, p234)
Drug
Money Saves the Day: Narconomics
"It
was true that, given the fertility of the land, they might
grow enough to feed and clothe themselves; but if subsistence
farming was to be the destiny of Virginians, there was no sense
in having come so far; it was available at home." – (Brogan,
p26)
From their inception the
English settlements in the Americas were the haunts of desperate
and determined fortune hunters. Not for them the grinding monotony
of growing crops and a hand-to-mouth existence. Driven by avarice,
to which "liberty" was merely an adjunct, each sought
to better his fellows in a race for earthly riches. After
all, the Pizarro brothers had shown the world that personal empires
could be snatched in the Americas. The vast, "virginal" northern
continent beckoned and taunted. Clearly gold was not simply waiting
to be picked from the ground.
How, then, to make one's fortune?
Some English
adventurers who had found the climate of Barbados and the Lesser
Antilles debilitating and the islands already crowded with
settlers relocated to Virginia, taking with them knowledge of "plantation
agriculture".
The region was not suitable for sugar but in the humid savannah
and
along
riverbanks
was a plant which grew in luxuriant profusion. It possessed neither
nutritional value nor medicinal use, and might in other circumstances
have been regarded as a worthless weed (it was in fact called "sotweed").
But the natives had discovered that, like the opium poppy, the
marijuana and the coca plants, this big leaf perennial could be
chewed, perhaps mixed with lime, as a flavoursome relaxant. Indeed,
native shamans had discovered that in sufficient quantity, the
plant could be used to induce "mystical experiences" or
at least a very vivid delusional state which could be interpreted
as a mystical experience. Unwittingly, they were ingesting an acrid
smoke which contained carcinogens and powerful addictive agents, but
who was to know that?
In any event
the tobacco plant could be grown by anyone and – joy
of joy – sold at a profit to a Europe newly taken by
a fashionable novelty of smoking. Even the worthless sandy soil
of the Appalachian
piedmont became profitable. To be sure, the noxious plant exhausted
even the best soil within seven years but – hell – there
was limitless land and the natives surely were not making profitable
use of it.
From a mere 20,000
pounds of production in 1619, Virginia was exporting one and a
half million pounds by 1639. A vast acreage was set to the cultivation
of a plant which essentially was not only useless but actually
lethal. The colonists grew almost nothing else.
With an eye to
such easy wealth, a rival colony, ostensibly a refuge for oppressed
Catholics, set down roots north of the Potomac in 1632 – Maryland.
This plantation was a concession granted to a crony of the king,
Sir George Calvert (Baron Baltimore) – a convert to Catholicism
who had tried to broker a marriage between the king's son Charles
and the daughter of Philip III of Spain. The colony's charter envisaged
a feudal structure of manorial estates. The second Lord Baltimore,
Cecil, governed Maryland as an absentee landlord from his domain
in England. With the ascendancy of Puritan fundamentalists
in England – Charles I was executed on 30th
January, 1649 and the monarchy abolished a week later – Cecil
found it prudent in April that year to issue to the colony "An
Act Concerning Religion" extending toleration to both
Catholics and Protestants alike. Even so, violent clashes between
Jesuits and Puritan ministers continued for a generation in the
troubled colony.
By 1650 there
were 50,000 English in North America, for the first time equalling
the number of English colonists in the Caribbean.
Theocracy
in the New World
The
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
"The
Netherlands provided the Separatists with a good home – too
good. They feared that their distinct identity was threatened,
and that their children were becoming Dutch." – (Divine,
et al, p26)
The dissenters
who planted their colonies on the shores of North America were
not believers of religious freedom per se but rather believers
in freedom for their own
particular interpretation of the divine. All rival
sects were minions of the Devil and ought to burn in hell. If one
sect could have imposed its favoured doctrines upon all others
it would have – but it could not.
In 1620 the London
Virginia company was in difficulty and struggling to despatch colonists
to an untamed wilderness. Thus when approached by a motley bunch
of English Separatists, self-exiled to Leiden
in the Netherlands, it willingly granted the brethren a license
to settle on its allotted real estate. The Separatists were not "escaping
persecution" but rather, after a decade of exile, the seductive
allure of assimilation into a tolerant society which threatened
their
notions
of Christian
purity. As chance would have it, the Pilgrims got
lost and their ship came ashore not in Virginia but four hundred
miles further north near Cape Cod. They named their settlement
New Plymouth.
Arrival in the
wrong spot immediately created discord and mutiny. On
the coastal fringe of a vast and frightening continent, the Good
Book – a
bright new revision, the Geneva Bible of 1598, which kitted
out Adam and Eve in suitably fetching apparel – gave reassurance
and inspiration. Its uplifting tales of sacrifice and redemption
gave certainty and law in a land that provided neither. Unfortunately
it gave little in the way of guidance for physical survival and
armed pilgrims upset the locals by scavenging corn from native
graves. In the event, the curious Wampanoags kept
the intruders alive in a step fatally reminiscent of events at Roanoke forty
years earlier.
The
Pure – Bigotry
in a bonnet
"The people
of England may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed,
as their good life and orderly conversations
may win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge
and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind, and
the Christian faith."
– King Charles I, Charter granted to the Massachusetts Bay
Company
The Separatists – extreme
Protestants who had forsaken the "Anglo-Catholicism" of
the Church of England – were not alone for long. When the
London company was dissolved and Virginia reorganised as a Crown
Colony the northern swath of the eastern seaboard – renamed New
England – was parcelled out to a new breed
of joint stock corporation, modelled on the Muscovy and Levant companies.
One such company was the Dorchester Company which in 1629
set up a seaport at the mouth of the Naumkeag River and named it
Salem (from Shalom, Hebrew for peace).
The following year the New England Company, reorganized
as the Massachusetts
Bay Company,
dispatched a major assault force of a thousand migrants,
many but not all zealots, unwilling to compromise with the "Catholic
rituals" enforced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Laud. Sensibly
the migrants were in family units,
bonded together to resist the temptations of the wilderness and heathen
licentiousness. The pure Christians styled themselves "saints",
those of questionable piety,
"strangers".
Barely had
they made landfall when the "company" metamorphosed
into a colonial government of Christian rectitude based
at Boston. The fiery spirit of zealotry was upon
the land. Within months, a colonist from Plymouth, John Billington,
was summarily hanged
on
a charge
of
murder,
though
in all
probability
condemned
for his blasphemy and forthright criticism
of the theocratic government. Within a few years the hanging
of witches would become a regular feature of the Promised Land.
Life under the American Taliban
"Right
liberty, Winthrop [first Governor of Massachusetts] carefully
explained, was liberty only to do God's will. All other forms
of liberty were
frowned
upon." – (Brogan p 44)
In
the brave new Christian colony of Massachusetts Bay government
and church were as one. The state existed only to further God's
purpose. New England's very existence was a covenant with God.
Thus heresy
was
a civil offence, as was profanity, blasphemy, idolatry,
adultery, sodomy, Sabbath-breaking – and of course, witchcraft.
A misjudged curse – "willful blaspheming the holy name
of God" – would merit a painful sojourn in the stocks.
The
small townships established across the New England landscape
clustered about their church/meeting halls, snuggled up to Jesus.
With a profane, carnal, wilderness all about them, theirs was
a citadel of God-fearing
self-control and restraint. Authority
came directly from God, not a king or a bishop, and was entrusted
to the Elders who interpreted His Holy Book and guided
self-governing communities of
the pure. A
minority of Puritans supported a limited
form of centralised leadership, Presbyterianism, but most favoured "each congregation an entire and independent body-politic
under Christ" – Congregationalism. Wary
of outsiders, the Congregational churches accepted
a member only if he could demonstrate that he was indeed among God's elect.
As believers
in "predestination"
the Puritans suffered the psychotic torment of never being really sure
that they had received the "gift of God's grace" and were forever
striving
for more diligent standards of biblical behaviour. A sumptuary
law of 1634 forbade "rich
apparel" – woollen or linen clothes trimmed with silver,
gold, silk, or lace. Another in 1651 expressed "utter
detestation"
that
men and women "of mean condition" should be wearing the garb
of gentlemen (those with "visible estates of £200"
or more). It charged the religious police with vigilance:
"The selectmen of every
town, or the major part of them, are hereby enabled and required,
from time to time to have regard
and
take notice
of the apparel of the inhabitants of their several towns respectively."
Narrowly focused
on "biblical truth" the Puritans were strict Calvinists,
censorious and neurotic about pleasure, particularly other peoples'. As
with all repressed communities of the godly, sexual transgressions were a particular
obsession. Adulterers were publicly whipped and
forced to wear a stigma on their clothing. Fornication and other
lascivious acts
risked a stay in the stocks or whipping. Sodomy, rape,
and buggery were all "capital
offences lyable to death". In 1642, one poor soul, who
was clearly addicted to animal love, a Thomas Graunger, was
found guilty of "buggery with a mare, a cowe, two goats,
diuers sheepe, two calues, and a turkey". He was hanged
and, in strict observance of Leviticus 20.15, the mare,
the cow and the rest of his menagerie of paramours killed and thrown
into a pit. In 1656 a sea captain named Kemble, returning home
after three years at sea, was convicted of "lewd and unseemly
behaviour" when he kissed his wife in public.
The Puritans, "grave,
serious and solemn", had no Christian love for the avaricious,
hedonistic planters in the south (Protestant ministers were driven
out in the 1640s). But early
attempts at communal economics ("in the manner of
the first Christians")
were soon abandoned in favour of a much more realistic selfishness
(“God helps
those who help themselves”) centred on a fiercely
patriarchal family structure. Church, kinship, family
was everything; non-conformists and single people were suspect.
Women had no property rights, divorce was almost impossible
and before Bible schools
were established children received instruction at home, minimizing
secular influences.
In this bastion
of faith in the Americas democracy was not on offer ("Ancient
Israel was no democracy").
In electing
the colony's governor and magistrates the franchise was restricted
to adult male members of the church. Even when
increasing numbers of "strangers" made
up the bulk of the population, the "saintly" Puritans
continued to dominate New England. Inevitably, in such a vast
land, religious intolerance
caused free spirits and dissenting
voices to abandon the
kingdom of Christian correctness
and find a haven elsewhere.
A glimmer of
light
"And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that
man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed." – 2 Thessalonians
3.14.
An early
challenge to the theocracy came in the form of Roger
Williams who arrived in Boston in February,
1631. Williams was an
independent
thinker and preacher, sympathetic towards the plight of the Indians
and always at odds with the dogmatic Puritans, particularly
over the fusion of church and state and infant baptism. To escape
deportation back to England he fled the colony to Narragansett
Bay
where
he
was befriended
by
natives and purchased from them land for a "Providence
Plantation."
The same area
became home to other victims of conscience, persecuted by the intolerant
brethren. The preacher John Wheelwright and
his sister, the charismatic Anne Hutchinson, and their followers
were among them.
Hutchinson
espoused
the "indwelling Holy Spirit" in every believer, a dangerously
subversive notion for a salaried clergy. On his Providence plantation
in 1638 Williams built what was to be the first Baptist church
in America. A Royal Charter was secured in 1643 and
Williams was himself governor of the tiny Rhode Island colony
between 1654-1658. Williams, not the Puritans, championed
the cause of religious liberty and free speech in America. Even
so, Williams himself denounced an early Quaker critic of slavery
as a "bundle of ignorance and boisterousness"
(Thomas, p456) and Newport, Rhode Island, became one of the
great slaving ports in North America.
Quaking
and Shaking
"You are my
friends, if you do whatsoever I command you." – John
15.14.
The "Friends",
"Children of the Light" or "Quakers" were the most libertarian
and fanatical of Protestant reformers, rejecting in toto formal
religion. Anathema to the original English Quaker, George Fox,
were priests in any
form of employ of the state ("hirelings"). Moved by his own "direct
revelation of the divine" – aren't they all –
he eschewed "steeplehouses" (churches) and relied on his charisma
alone to draw vast outdoor crowds. The hot gospelling, spirit-filled
hysteria attracted a following and alarmed the Puritan elite,
not least because the Friends refused any form of deference, oaths
or tithes.
Quakers made
their way to the New England colonies but were often apprehended
on arriving ships and sent away again. Those who made it into
the Puritan promised
land were castigated
as pariahs, stripped, whipped, branded,
and imprisoned for their impertinencies. But even cutting
off
ears did not silence the heretics and a Massachusetts' law of
1658 introduced capital punishment for Quakers.
"... for theire rebelljon, sedition, & presumptuous
obtruding themselves vpon us, notwithstanding theire being sentenced
to
banishment on pajne of death, as vnderminers of this government ..."
Inexorably,
the heresy hunt produced its martyrs. In October, 1659 two defiant
Quakers, William
Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, were hanged, three others sent
to Barbados as slaves, thirty-one brutally whipped tied to a cart.
A women, Mary
Dyer, a troublesome follower of Anne Hutchinson and convert to
Quakerism, was hanged in June 1660.
An English aristocrat
who, in his own paternalistic way, embraced the Quaker cause was
William Penn. In 1681 Penn used his connections with Charles II
to obtain a charter for a new inland colony where the Friends could
enjoy the "inner light" without fear of persecution.
In a breathtaking demonstration of his Quaker modesty Penn named
the vast track of land – 45,000 square miles (more than four
times the area of Massachusetts) – for himself: "Penn's
Woods", Pennsylvania! His experiment in enlightened philanthropy
(he would appoint the governor and rule through a council
of rich landowners) foundered just as surely as all the other holy
experiments of the promised land – and Penn himself landed
up in debtors prison.
Witches and Warlocks
"A
Christian ought always to think humbly of himself, and be full
of self-abasing reflection. By loathing of himself continually,
and being very sensible of what are his own loathsome circumstances,
a Christian does what is very pleasing to Heaven." – Cotton Mather, Diary (Hulse, p184)
In the austere,
joyless world of New England Puritanism hysteria was one of the
few outlets for pent-up emotion. One accusation
that had been levelled at Mary Dyer was that of being a witch (and "giving
birth to a hideous monster"). The
evangelism of the Quakers clearly vexed the brethren (the Friends quoted
freely from the Bible after all). Surely this was the work
of the Devil trying to confuse the Saints and destroy God's work? When
several girls began to experience "fits" and "distempers" it was
proof
positive that the demon king was among them. Perhaps the catalyst
was contaminated bread.*
Witchcraft
panic reached its climax in Salem in the summer of 1692.
156 people from twenty four villages were accused before special
courts. Nineteen victims were hanged and one crushed to death for
refusing to confess
to the practice of witchcraft.
Cotton Mather,
the Puritan leader and witch hunter at Salem, thought the plague
of witches had been due to the previous "devil-worshipping" Indians.
Mather, together with other hardline Harvard clerics, went on to
transform the Collegiate School of Connecticut into Yale
College and to write a book warning of witchcraft ("The
Wonders of the Invisible World").
From the humid
waterways of Pamlico Sound and Chesapeake Bay to the frosty shores
of Maine, Jesus Christ, the phantom saviour of Judaea, had marked
in blood his
entry into a New World.
Sources:
J. Spiller, et al, The United States 1763-2001 (Routledge,
2005)
Morrison, Commager, Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic (OUP,
1980)
Russell Bourne, Gods of War, Gods of Peace (Harcourt, 2002)
Douglas Butting, The Pirates (TimeLife, 1978)
Richard Hart, From Occupation to Independence (University of the
West Indies, 1998)
Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (Penguin, 1999)
Francis Dillon, A Place for Habitation (Hutchinson, 1973)
Phil Jones, Ralegh's Pirate Colony in America (Tempus, 2001)
Erroll Hulse, Who are the Puritans? (Evangelical Press, 2000)
James Walvin, The Quakers, Money and Morals (John Murray, 1997)
Susan Greenwood, The History of Early Witchcraft (Southwater, 2002)
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