Erikson

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay

Background

• The Puritans were a homogeneous group re religious doctrine

• The doctrine emphasized an intimate experience of grace with profound distrust of the apparatus, authority and mediation of the church.

• The Scriptures provided a complete guide to living.

• God had chosen a spiritual elite to “represent Him on earth and to join him in Heaven.”

• People learned of their membership in this elite through a deep personal conversion experience, which gave them special responsibility and competence to rule others.

Contradictions in Puritan beliefs

• Medieval in their sense of doom, desperate piety and preoccupation with sin, but renounced the pageantry, festivity and style that offset or softened the terror of that view of the world (which characterized the middle ages).

• Extreme pride and humility; we are worthless creatures of this world, but we have at the same time a special privilege and obligation to convert the heathen, punish the sinful, etc., acting in His name.

• Constant shift between conviction and uncertainty—you are never completely sure that you are saved so you are constantly searching yourself for experiences that reassure you that you are; at the same time this uncertainty made the Puritan all the more sure of the things he did know.

• Summed up on p.53: “a respect for individual freedom and a need for external discipline, a sense of personal privacy and a system of public accountability, a reliance on self-assertion and a belief in erratic fate.” The dilemma was how to bring these things together.

Law and Authority

• The intention was to base law entirely on Biblical authority; the problem was that what seemed clear from the pulpit was difficult to apply in court as a basis of judging ordinary civil and criminal cases—– difficult to know what penalties were appropriate for a

particular offense—capital punishment for attempted murder, is it adultery when an English settler is found with an Indian woman?

• When the law in question is considered divine, the only available experts to settle these questions were the ministers.

• Using the Bible as a legal code created two sources of friction– The use of clerical opinion in legal cases was contrary to the

spirit of English law– Many people in the colony became apprehensive that so many

discretionary powers were held by the leading clique

• The Puritans face a challenge in establishing their identity: “by accepting the Bible as their spiritual parentage, England as their political parentage, and a trading company as their economic parentage” they were attempting to combine quite disparate and often contradictory elements.

“It is natural that they would seek new frames of reference to help them remember who they were and just as natural that they would begin to look with increasing apprehension at the activities of the Devil. One of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not.” 64

The Shapes of the Devil

Looking at three serious crime waves in 17thc Massachusetts; three different attempts by the people of the Bay to clarify their position in the world as a whole, to redefine the boundaries which set New England apart as a new experiment in living.

• Whenever a community is confronted by a significant relocation of boundaries, a shift in its territorial position, it is likely to experience a change in the kinds of behavior handled by its various agencies of social control.

• Relocation of boundaries can be caused by:– Realignment of power within the group– New adversaries outside the group

• The crisis will be reflected in altered patterns of deviation and will be perceived by the people as a “crime wave.”

• Crime waves dramatize the issues at stake when a given boundary becomes blurred.

• The encounters between the new deviants and the older agents of control provide a forum in which the issues can be articulated more clearly

Qualifications of the general hypothesis

• What a crime wave does and does not mean:– Crime wave means that community begins to censure

forms of behavior that have been present in the group for some time but have never attracted any particular attention before

– And that certain people in the group who have already acquired a disposition to act deviantly move into the breach and begin to test the boundary

– “Crime wave” refers to a rash of publicity, moment of excitement and alarm, a feeling that something must be done. It may or may not mean an actual increase in the volume of deviance

• A boundary crisis does not necessarily mean that a new set of boundaries has attraction or even that some important change has taken place within the basic structure of a community.

• Ordinarily it means that a different sector of the community’s traditional boundary network has moved into focus and needs to be more carefully defined. (later examples; separating democracy and fascism and then, democracy and communism)

The Antinomian Controversy

• The source of the controversy lay in the contradiction noted before between the strains of Puritan theology that emphasized spiritual individualism (only the individual knows if he has been saved and individuals are expected to “police their own hearts and control their own impulses”) and the need for government in the new colony.

• The Puritans had been transformed from an opposition party in England to a ruling elite in the new world.

• A new theology emerging in the colony—the individual’s relationship to God needed to be screened by some intermediate level of authority.

• The people of the Bay were constructing much the same kind of control apparatus they had fought against in England.

• The clergy had an important role to play in deciding who was “saved” and thereby qualified to be in charge of the commonwealth.

The covenant of grace versus the covenant of works

• The ministers were not arguing that one could earn salvation by conformity, but that outer conformity was a convenient way to prove salvation—thus moving closer to the notion of the covenant of works

• (The works/grace controversy was at the root of the Protestant Reformation—Luther’s objection to the Catholic Church)

Anne Hutchinson represented the individualist side of the debate—those who believed in the “covenant of grace”

• One’s salvation was a private matter between God and the individual.

• There was no need for the church to impose discipline, nor could the church really decide who belonged to the community of saints.

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• She directly challenged the new theology by asserting that certain key members of the clergy were not in a state of grace and therefore not fit to hold their positions of leadership and authority.

• She did not want to give the ministers the authority they needed to use the covenant of grace as a political instrument

• For this she and her sympathizers were banished from the community.

“The court did know why Mrs. Hutchinson had to be banished, but it did not know how to express that feeling in any language then known in New England. The settlers were experiencing a shift in ideological focus, a change in community boundaries, but they had no vocabulary to explain to themselves or anyone else what the nature of these changes were. The purpose of the trial was to invent that language, to find a name for the nameless offense which Mrs. Hutchinson had committed.”

The Quaker Invasion

Similar at first glance to the Antinomian controversy; both were saying the men should engineer their own relations with God and need not submit their religious experiences to the review of any church official

However the two crime waves were very different.• The Antinomians threatened the political outlines

of the New England Way by denying that the ministers of the Bay were competent to deal with the mysterious workings of grace

• Quakers challenged the very notion of an orthodox community by pressing for religious tolerance as a basic civil right.

• The response to the Quakers seemed way out of proportion to their threat, but maybe it wasn’t, seen from the point of view of what was going on in the Bay at the time.

• The first generation of leaders was gone and the second (which encountered the Quakers) were caretakers of the legacy of the first.

• They were more rigid than their predecessors. As Erikson put it, New England at that time was “most assuredly not a place which encouraged freedom of religion.”

• It was a time when they are facing a serious problem of identity – They were out of step with the rest of the

English-speaking world which was moving toward more toleration

– Protecting the legacy of the first generation leaders for that moment, at least, was almost the only identity they could claim.

The orthodoxy and rigidity of the leadership is…”the kind of behavior often associated with people who are no longer sure of their own place in the world, people who need to protect their old customs and ways all the more narrowly because they seem to have a difficult time remembering quite who they are.” 114

• The Quakers were not organized, did not seem to know one another well, or plan their activities with much sense of tactics

• The crime wave was set into motion because the community became concerned about the behavior of some of its members

• Once the feeling of alarm had been expressed, people swarmed to the battle line which had been drawn.

• There were arrests, book burnings, even executions until Charles I intervened and prohibited any more executions of Quakers.

• The persecution of Quakers did not really end then, but the intensity of the struggle steadily diminished

As soon as the Quakers saw that their adversaries were no longer allowed to execute them, they gradually lost interest in their opposition, “suggesting to what extent a forceful definition of deviance may attract potential offenders. Somehow the whole contest was less attractive to both sides once its rules became more civilized.”

Note the evidence here from a diary of a citizen of the Bay who noted that the Quakers only seemed to enjoy the process of stirring up trouble when they ran a better chance of getting hurt.

In other places where they had more freedom like Rhode Island, this insurgency did not occur.

• He compares the policies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to show the relationship between deviant behavior and the boundaries of the community.

• The Quaker movement was nourished by the cruelties of its enemies and could not easily survive once that opposition had been withdrawn

Note also that he observes, “It was exactly because the New England Puritans shared so many features in common with the Quakers that they had to publicize the few crucial differences as noisily as they could.” 126

One of the most interesting aspects of the Quaker crisis was that no one seemed very concerned to describe what the Quakers were talking about in theological terms. In this sense it is quite different from the Antinomian controversy.

Erikson is showing how small tokens and insignia can come to mean a great deal when a community begins to label its deviant members. – Using “thee” and “thou” in conversations– wearing hats in the presence of magistrates

• Puritan authorities seemed to be more concerned about outer forms of Quaker unrest than with its inner motives

• Their real case against the Quakers was that they did not show any outward respect for the spirit of Puritan discipline or contribute to the ritual observances of community life

• In so doing they asked for a kind of subjective freedom which the colony was in no position to confer

The Quakers’ behavior suggested a conscious lack of respect for the New England concept of authority—in living apart they ignored a fundamental responsibility by failing to share in the “collective conscience” of the group. This was fundamental blasphemy.

• He also notes that the Antinomian crisis resulted in a victory for the Puritan community, but the Quaker crisis resulted in defeat.

• By reacting to the Quakers so harshly, the notion of toleration quietly moved into the vacuum left behind them and became a lasting part of the New England heritage.

• The shift away from theocratic discipline and toward toleration marked a new tendency of the settlers to search inside themselves for the meaningful landmarks they needed to identify the boundaries of the New England Way.

• On the one hand this produced the independence and integrity, the shrewd practicality that soon became the hallmark of the Yankee character.

• On the other hand, it gave the community a more individualistic focus in its search for new frames of reference—and perhaps it makes a certain kind of sense that people who begin to see discipline as a matter of inner reliance will also begin to see deviance as a matter of inner possession.

The Witches of Salem Village

• Political uncertainty due to the King’s interest in Massachusetts affairs; the future of their charter in doubt

• Angry dissension among “the saints”—land disputes, personal feuds, etc., lots of bickering

• It was an atmosphere of commercial competition, political contention, and personal bad feeling.

• The political structure of the first generation and the spiritual consensus of the second were disappearing.

Outbreaks of witchcraft mania have generally taken place in societies which are experiencing a shift of religious focus—societies confronting a relocation of boundaries.

• End of the Puritan experiment in 1692• Sense of mission which had sustained them no longer

existed in any recognizable form, thus people of the Bay were left with few stable points of reference to help them remember who they were.– No longer part of an international movement—they had lost their

contacts with the rest of the world– The original settlers measured themselves on a yardstick that no

longer had the same sharp relevance (the children of God had become replaced by the shrewd, practical, self-reliant Yankee)

– The wilderness that surrounded the original colony and held the settlers together no longer existed; they invented a new one in the middle of the community itself.

Stabilities and Instabilities in Puritan Crime Rates

This chapter investigates the second theme—that the volume of deviance is likely to remain relatively constant over time.

• Why this is likely to be the case– The amount of deviance which is processed

depends on the capacities of a society’s social control system

– The amount of resources a society devotes to social control tends to remain fairly stable over time

– The people involved in controlling deviance tend to see their job as keeping it within certain bounds rather than eliminating it altogether.

– We may resort to emergency measures when the volume of deviance threatens to grow beyond some level that we’ve learned to consider “normal” but we don’t react with the same alarm when it remains within those bounds

– Hypothetically, if control agents could effectively eliminate or reduce the amount of deviance that society considers most serious, they would then turn their attention to dealing with some other form which previously they hadn’t enough resources to handle

• Note the shift in the kinds of data he uses here

• His results?

Puritanism and Deviancy

• The Puritans took the medieval position that the law is a permanent set of standards written into the design of the universe and wholly unmoved by changes in the human condition.

• This occurred when England was beginning to recognize that the law is a product of human experience.

• This Puritan position derived from their theology of predestination

“Deviant persons often supply an important service to society by patrolling the outer edges of group space and providing a contrast which gives the rest of the community some sense of their own territorial identity.”

Every society handles these matters differently; has its own mechanisms for naming people to deviant positions and its own mechanisms for regulating the human traffic moving back and forth from its boundaries. 196

Each society is exercising a cultural option when it does this; the way this is done has a profound effect on both

• the forms of deviance a society experiences

• the kinds of people who come to exhibit it.

• Erikson is exploring two main points here:– The Puritans developed a deployment pattern

which was uniquely suited to the theological climate in which they lived

– The main outlines of that pattern are still reflected in many of our modern attitudes toward deviation

The New England deployment pattern

• The Puritans saw deviant behavior as the special property of a particular class of people who were more or less frozen into deviant attitudes

• They generally thought it was best to handle the problem by locking these people into fairly permanent deviant roles; – they assumed that people do not change as they

mature or are exposed to different life experiences, – so they saw little promise in the idea that people

might reform or overcome any personal deviant leanings.

• The Puritan system acted to stabilize the volume of deviation but it made very little allowance for people to move back and forth from the community’s boundaries.

• Like us, the Puritans treated deviance as though it was a person’s occupation or calling

• We still do this without the theological underpinnings of Puritanism; – We are still apt to visualize deviant behavior as the

product of a deep-seated characterological strain in the person who enacts it rather than as a product of the situation in which it took place

– We are still apt to treat the person as if his whole being was somehow implicated in what is often no more than a passing deviant episode.

– The logic which invites us to view juvenile offenders as apprentice criminals say a good deal more about the structure of our society than about the psychological inclinations of the young people involved.