Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (49 page)

If a godly state was to be founded in British America, it would not be on the Chesapeake, but further to the north. The Puritans brought with them from England to the northern settlements a clear vision of the kind of community they wished to see established, although a much less clear one of the character of the relationship between ministers and laity on which its success would depend. In conformity with Calvin's own teachings, a godly state postulated a system in which church and state were two equal but separate entities, although harmoniously conjoined in the common enterprise of serving God's purpose. The immigrants' unhappy experience of the consequences of mixing the spiritual with the temporal in the country they had left behind them only served to reinforce their determination to prevent the re-creation in America of the apparatus of ecclesiastical power within a church-state alliance, of the kind which had caused them such suffering at home. Ministers, therefore, were - at least in principle - to exercise no temporal power, and the church handed over to the state such functions as the regularizing of marriages and the probating of wills, which in England fell within its province. For its part, the civil government of Massachusetts would have a broad jurisdiction over religious and moral offences, but would exercise it independently of the churches, and would not interfere in the disciplining of church members, which was the responsibility of the churches themselves.132

Discipline was regarded as fundamental if the errand were not simply to dissolve in the wilderness, but how it was to be maintained was not entirely clear. Reproof and correction were powerful moral sanctions in churches where the evidence of saving grace was a requirement for membership; but excommunication involved no civil penalties, and merely added the excommunicated to the large numbers outside who for one reason or another were deemed unworthy of taking their place among the ranks of the saints.

In a system which thus relied essentially on self-imposed and collectively reinforced discipline, the spiritual leadership and moral authority of the ministry acquired particular importance. In early New England, congregations which had been through deep waters with their ministers had a natural tendency to look to them for guidance. As a result, they often came to dominate their churches, some of them acquiring in the process the arrogance of power.133 But what was their exact status and the extent of their authority? All of them were elected by their congregations, but at the heart of the Protestant tradition lay an unresolved dilemma as to how far a minister drew his authority from his congregation and how far he derived it from membership in a sacred order.134

This question became acute as the New England churches were caught up in vigorous internal debate about the criteria for church membership and about whether the ministry should devote its efforts to converting the unregenerate or to nurturing the spiritual growth of the members themselves.135 Discord rent the churches of Massachusetts and Connecticut as congregations accustomed to exercising their own authority in the running of their churches came into conflict with ministers who claimed that they were entitled to a unique position by virtue of the ministerial call. Any attempt by ministers to determine controversial questions in occasional ministerial meetings and synods was liable to lay them open to the charge that they were subverting the cherished ideal of congregational independence. The presence in New England of a vociferous Presbyterian minority added substance to the fears that the Congregational way could be replaced by the Presbyterian system of church government, with its hierarchy of presbyteries, synods and assembly above the congregations. 136

The doctrinal disagreements, the feuds and the quarrelling came against a backdrop of falling church membership, the result partly of the rise in New England's population and partly of the discouraging obstacles to membership imposed by the churches themselves. By 1650 half the adult male population of Boston was outside the church. 117 The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 was designed to remedy this disturbing situation by making church membership more accessible, but was rejected by congregations concerned that the new proposals would lead to a relaxation of the high standards that they themselves had met. As membership fell, and the churches increasingly turned in on themselves in their preoccupation with maintaining their denominational purity, the new generation of Harvard-trained ministers laid the blame for setbacks on the failings of their congregations, while themselves being uneasily conscious of the distance between their own spiritual stature and that of the heroic generation of ministers that was now passing away.138

If many ministers still retained their dominance over their congregations, the spiritual leadership of a whole society which they had once envisaged was slipping from their grasp. Too many of them could agree neither with each other nor with their congregations, while the world around them was visibly being transformed. On the one hand they were confronted by religious indifference among too many of the new immigrants, and on the other by the growing religious pluralism of the surrounding society. Not only had the Restoration of 1660 given the Church of England a new assertiveness, but the sects that had sprung to life and flourished in England during the Civil War period - notably the Quakers and the Baptists - had crossed the Atlantic to provide increasingly vigorous competition to the Anglican and Congregational churches alike.

The very character of settlement in British North America made it impossible in the long run for orthodoxy, whether of the Anglican or the Congregationalist variety, to hold the line against the encroachment of new sects and new beliefs. Already in the 1630s Roger Williams, following sharp disagreements with his colleagues, had removed from Massachusetts to found a settlement in Rhode Island that promised full liberty of conscience. This alone, he believed, could guarantee the true separation of church and state, in place of the equivocal form of separation that he deplored in the Bay Colony. North America provided ample space for religious initiatives of this kind, and each new colony had its own religious climate, which could well prove attractive to those who for one reason or another were dissatisfied with what they found on offer in their own place of settlement. A trickle of colonists from Massachusetts, for instance, began moving into the Connecticut River Valley in 1635-6 under the leadership of Thomas Hooker, who objected to the restrictiveness and rigidity of the approach to church membership that was being adopted by John Cotton of Boston and his fellow ministers.139 A generation later a further migration from Massachusetts occurred, this time of Presbyterians into neighbouring New Netherland/New York, where the Dutch Reformed Church offered them a system of church government more to their liking. '40

The method of founding colonies through the grant of a royal charter provided obvious openings for minority faiths, as the Catholic proprietors of Maryland had demonstrated before the Civil War. In the 1670s the Quakers sought to take advantage of the proprietary system in East and West Jersey. They did so again, and to considerably greater effect, when William Penn secured a charter from Charles II for the founding of his new colony of Pennsylvania in 1681. There were many `holy experiments' on American soil, running from the millennial kingdom of the Franciscans in New Spain and the Jesuit missions in Paraguay to New England's `city on a hill' and the ideal communities that began to proliferate from the late seventeenth century onwards with the arrival in America of Protestant evangelical and pietist sects - Mennonites, Amish, Moravians and others. Pennsylvania, however, stands out for the breadth and practicality of its original conception, and the potential that it offered for creative change in the society that surrounded it. The tendency of `holy experiments' is to create closed systems as a result of their single-minded pursuit of a supreme ideal. Penn's holy experiment had the opposite effect of encouraging the development of an open and tolerant society. The result was an impact that would eventually be felt throughout the western world.141

In the eyes of William Penn and his fellow Quakers the `Inner Light' that guided them was not simply reserved for a select few but was to be found in everyone. This meant that the new colony, unlike Massachusetts, was designed from the start not only as a place of refuge for persecuted members of a single religious group but for all believers in God who wished to live together in harmony and fellowship. Liberty of conscience was to be its guiding light. The idealism, however, was accompanied by a strongly practical approach. In founding his colony, Penn could draw on his close connections with the world of the court and of business, and also on previous colonial experience through his proprietary interest in Quaker settlements in West Jersey. Although a strong partisan of liberty, he had somehow to devise a frame of government for his new colony that would balance the conflicting demands of liberty, order and his own interests as proprietor. This was something that the Fundamental Constitution prepared for Carolina by the Earl of Shaftesbury and John Locke in 1669 had failed to achieve, and it was a goal that he, too, would find frustratingly elusive.

Earlier attempts at colonization had made clear the need for substantial and continuing investment from the mother country during the early stages of settlement, and Penn's skilful promotional campaign netted six hundred investors.142 Both they and potential immigrants had to be assured that economic prospects for the future colony were sound. The 45,000 square miles of land so cavalierly signed away to him by Charles II under the flattering name of Pennsylvania proved to be ideal for attracting the kind of hard-working, self-reliant and godly settlers whom he saw as the mainstay of his colony. The fertile soil of the Delaware Valley and the Piedmont hills offered perfect opportunities for the farmers, who, as small landowners, would constitute the backbone of his agrarian utopia. They would also need an Atlantic port to export their produce and receive supplies from Britain. The excellent location of Philadelphia on the banks of the river Delaware promised easy trading connections with the West Indies and the wider Atlantic world.141

Drawing on his close relationship with the extended Quaker merchant community, Penn was able to launch his new colony in style, with the despatch over the course of 1682-3 of some fifty ships carrying four thousand settlers and ample supplies. He was concerned from the start to build up peaceful relations with the native Americans by negotiating land deals, in advance of any settlement, with the sparsely settled Delaware Indians, whom he described as `a Careless, Merry People yet in Property strict with us'.144 If planning alone could build a New Zion in America, then the one now being founded on the banks of the Delaware had a better chance of succeeding than any of its predecessors.

In the event, many of the high expectations, including those of Penn himself, were to be defrauded. The cumbersome Frame of Government that he drew up in 1682 failed to create the kind of well-ordered but free society which he had envisaged. Faced with a virtually unlimited expanse of rich and fertile land, Quakers succumbed as easily as less godly settlers elsewhere in North America to the fever of land hunger and land speculation. An elite of merchants and larger landowners emerged to block the founder's efforts to shape and control the development of the infant colony; and the anti-authoritarian attitudes inherent in the religious culture of the Society of Friends was hardly sympathetic to direction from above. As Penn discovered to his cost, it was not easy to be the proprietor of a colony in which access to the Inner Light was regarded as a universal birthright. Nor did political and social harmony follow automatically from the Society's practice of seeking consensus by way of long and scrupulous deliberation. There was feuding between Quakers and Anglicans, and bitter disagreement between the elite and those who discovered that, even in a society based on spiritual equality, socially at least some were more equal than others.145 Religiously, too, an already divided community was subjected to further splintering soon after a Scottish Quaker, George Keith, arrived from the jerseys in 1689 to become the head of Philadelphia's Latin School. By directly challenging the authority of travelling Quaker ministers, known as Public Friends, with his plans for stricter discipline and his insistence on the importance of the Scriptures to salvation, he plunged the Society into schism.146

Yet for all the turmoil in Pennsylvania's politics and religion in the 1680s and 1690s, the colony, if not exactly a New Zion, had at least the makings of an unusual and promising experiment. Penn had travelled through the Rhineland as a missionary in 1677, and his recruitment campaign in the early 1680s was directed not only to the British Isles but also to Holland and Germany. The Quaker network, extending to continental Europe, was to prove crucial for establishing the future direction of the colony. Leaving the continent through the port of Rotterdam, a group of Quakers and other religious dissenters from Germanspeaking territories established a settlement at Germantown in 1683. The signal had been given. Pennsylvania stood ready to welcome all those who wanted to escape the constraints of the Old World for the sake of a better life in the New, irrespective of their creed or nationality.

Although the name `Germantown' was symbolic of what the future held in store, Germans would not in fact begin immigrating in large numbers until the late 1720s, many of them attracted to Pennsylvania as much by its economic as its religious possibilities.147 From the start, however, Pennsylvania offered itself as a haven both for the economically aspiring and the religiously distressed. As the news spread back in Europe, a growing stream of immigrants, many of them arriving with their families, landed in Philadelphia to build for themselves new and better lives - British and Dutch Quakers, Huguenots expelled from the France of Louis XIV, Mennonites from Holland and the Rhineland, Lutherans and Calvinists from south-west Germany. As prospective settlers they looked forward to establishing their own independent family farms, which they would build up through hard work and mutual support. As God-fearing Protestants, they would enjoy, many of them for the first time, the right to worship as they wished, without fear of persecution.