2. THE COLONIES MATURE
CULTURAL-POLITICAL STRESSLate 1600s to Mid-1700s
CONTENTS
 The "Glorious Revolution" (1688-1689) and its impact on the colonies
 The colonies' ever-evolving intellectual-spiritual character
"Enlightenment" impacts Western civilization in Europe and in America
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America - The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 89-98.
A Timeline of Major Events during this period
| 1680s |
Both England and America struggle to define exactly what they are as societies
1685 James, Duke of York, (and crypto-Catholic) assumes the English throne as James II
1688
Parliament rises up against James (beginning the "Glorious
Revolution"); Dutch Protestant cousin William of
Orange leads the military effort (1688-1689)
1688-1697 King William's War erupts between the French and English, involving Indians on both sides (the fierce Iroquois
as English allies; the Wabanaki Confederation as French allies)
1689 Parliament calls William to the throne to co-rule with his wife (James's Protestant daughter) Mary
The co-monarchs accept the Whig-dominated Parliament's Declaration of Rights
The philosopher John Locke writes the Two Treatises of Government justifying this action in terms of the
"natural rights" of Englishmen and the implicit "social contract"
between ruler and ruled - which the King had violated; (Jefferson
will draw heavily from Locke's work in his drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776)
|
| 1690s |
French
and Indian problems grow; the Puritan experiment is dying out in New England;
"Enlightenment" comes to the colonies
1691 Massachusetts is forced to become a royal colony
1692 The Salem witch hysteria breaks out; 24 people put to death as witches or die in prison (1692)
1693 Boston authorities bring the event to a halt
The College of William and Mary is founded in (Williamsburg) Virginia as the colonies' 2nd college
1696 Deist John Toland publishes Christianity Not Mysterious
1699 Jamestown burns again; Virginia's capital is moved to Middle Plantation (renamed "Williamsburg")
|
THE "GLORIOUS REVOLUTION" (1688-1689)
AND
ITS IMPACT ON THE COLONIES
|
Events in England
James II did not long rule England (only
three years: 1685-1688). His autocratic and Catholic ways once again
stirred the wrath of a very independent-minded Parliament quick to
protect its rights and powers against an ambitious king. What finally
set off an armed conflict between King and Parliament was when in
mid-1688 a son was born to James, thus effectively ending the
possibility of the throne upon James's death passing to his Protestant
daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange,
Stadtholder of the Netherlands – who was also her cousin and a grandson
of Charles I.
Religious tensions had been running high
throughout Europe, principally because in 1685 French King Louis XIV
had revoked the Edict of Nantes, a nearly century-old guarantee that
Protestants (Calvinist Huguenots) would have the freedom of worship in
France. Much of Protestant Europe was up in arms about this revoking of
the Edict of Nantes, reactively forming something of a Grand Alliance
under William of Orange's leadership.
When in the spring of 1688 English King James
concluded a naval agreement with France, suspicions mounted quickly in
England that this was the prelude to a formal pro-Catholic
English-French military alliance. A group of English leaders agreed
with William of Orange that it was time to act. Soon a coalition was
formed against James II and Louis XIV, which oddly enough included, at
least indirectly, the very Catholic Holy Roman (Austrian) Emperor and
the Pope!1 The French king took the first action – which then led to full-scale war.
Now it was the turn of William to act. He quickly
gathered a huge Dutch naval invasion force – to which James responded
rather feebly. With William's landing in England, noblemen began
declaring themselves as Whigs for William. James began to lose courage
quickly, fearing even the loyalty of his own Tory army. Defeat in small
skirmishes and growing anti-royalist or Whig rioting in England's
cities decided him to flee to France in mid-December. But he was caught
before he could complete his escape and was returned to London.
However, William did not want the responsibility of taking personal
action against his uncle (also his wife's father). Clearly, the best
strategy was to allow James to again escape to France. And so at the
end of December James slipped off to France to live in exile as a guest
of Louis XIV.
Parliament quickly (February 1689) empowered
William and his wife Mary to rule as joint sovereigns – under the
authority of Parliament. William would rule as English King William III
until his death in 1702; Mary would co-rule as Queen Mary II until her
death in 1694. Parliament also passed a Bill of Rights (December 1689)
clarifying the rights and powers of Englishmen and their government.
England still had a monarchy (which it does even to this day) but it
was in fact under Parliament's unquestioned sovereignty. Thus to most
of those viewing those events, this was indeed a Glorious Revolution.
Events in the American Colonies
James had
been no less autocratic in his handling of the American colonies. Upon
his gaining the throne in 1685, he had abruptly canceled all the
charters, constitutions, and compacts of the Northern and Middle
American colonies. He intended to unite these colonies into a single
Dominion of New England, ruled from Boston by his royal governor,
Edmund Andros. Anti-James (or anti-Jacobite) hostility grew quickly in
the colonies.
With the outbreak in 1689 of fighting in England
between William and James, New York militia captain Jacob Leisler
deposed the royal governor and placed himself in control of a newly
democratic New York. When in 1691 the recently crowned William sent his
own royal governor to New York, Leisler was not willing to step down. A
small military showdown had Leisler and his circle arrested. Leisler
was tried and hanged as a traitor – and the Leisler Rebellion quickly
died down.
In Boston the reaction to the news of the war in
England was the same. Rebels took control of the city. Fearing for his
life, Governor Andros attempted to flee Boston, but was caught dressed
as a woman. He was then sent back to England for trial – but was
released upon arrival in England.
Ultimately William renewed all of the charters of
the New England colonies and things returned to normal. But the
colonists had demonstrated that they could be just as quick to defend
their political rights as the English Whigs. Indeed, the term "Whig"
would eventually be assigned to the colonials who in the later 1700s
would move America away from the tyranny of royal authority to an
independent American republic, and the term "Tories" to those who chose
to stay loyal to the English king.
The Matter of English or British Rule Heading into the 1700s
Over the next quarter of a century English royalty changed hands, from
the Stuart family to a family of distant cousins in Hanover, Germany.
When King William died childless in 1702, the
throne of England passed on to Anne, the sister of William's deceased
wife Mary. But the sickly Anne also had borne no heir of her own, and
when she also died childless in 1714, something of a crisis descended
upon the Kingdom of Great Britain (the name of the union since 1707 of
England and Scotland). There was no way that the British Parliament was
going to permit any of the very Catholic Stuarts still in exile on the
European continent to return to the throne, and the 1701 Act of
Settlement outlawed that possibility anyway. Thus at this point the
British had to perform a huge genealogical stretch to find a Protestant
kinsman to take the British throne.
Finally, the selection came to that of the distant
German (Hanoverian) kinsman, George of Brunswick L neburg, who as early
as 1710 had made it clear that he was the proper successor to the
British throne. And so he was. But his accession to the throne was the
signal for the Tory-supported Catholic Stuarts to spark a Jacobite
rebellion in Scotland, which was quickly put down – but handled
mercifully by the new king.
At this point British politics focused primarily
on foreign events, especially the dynastic conflicts among the various
royal families of continental Europe, conflicts that the American
colonies would be caught up in.
George's rule of Britain (1714-1727) was loosely
held. He spoke no English and left most domestic governmental matters
to his cabinet ministers, thus allowing English government to move more
closely to the notion of cabinet rule. At his death in 1717, his place
was taken by his son, George II (with whom he had personally maintained
only a cold and distant relationship), also not an able
English-speaker, who, like his father, continued the policy of leaving
domestic politics to his cabinet so that he could participate fully in
the game of foreign diplomacy and warfare.
1It
seems that at that point in this new age of post-Christian
Enlightenment, dynastic rivalries now played a much bigger role than
old religious loyalties, even for the Catholic Pope!
James II of England, Scotland and Ireland (1685-1688)
 Sir Edmund Andros – Governor
of New York - 1674-1681
 Charles Calvert – Third Lord
Baltimore
Governor (1661-1692) and Proprietor
(1675-1692) of the Maryland colony
Enoch Pratt Free Library,
Baltimore
 William of Orange – English King as William III
1689-1702
portrait
by Sir Godfrey Kneller
National Galleries of Scotland
THE
COLONIES' EVER-EVOLVING
INTELLECTUAL-SPIRITUAL
CHARACTER |
The Halfway Covenant
Meanwhile the Puritan colonies of New
England had settled in quite well. Life was very comfortable there now
as the 1600s continued. The first New England generations of
Separatists and Puritans, who had braved the dangers of founding new
colonies in the wilds of North America, were now followed by
generations quite familiar with security and prosperity, and thus began
to evidence the ancient pattern of the Biblical Israelites. These
following generations of Puritans were much less reliant on God for
their fortunes, much less spiritual, and much more materialistic in
their approach to life. Their lives evidenced little of the
spirituality, the mark of true Christian faith, that had been stressed
by their elders as essential to being received into full membership in
the church – and thus also in the Puritan political ranks.
A bit of a quandary thus emerged, concerning the
bringing into the Divine Covenant of infants of the true born-again
parents by way of infant baptism. What was to be done about the infants
of those later-generation parents who had themselves not yet given to
the community a demonstration of their own true conversion? Were their
children to be denied the right of the baptismal covenant because of
the parents' shortcomings?
In 1662 a compromise was put forth by the
community's pastors and elders: the younger generation of Puritans were
offered a new, less rigorous qualification for church membership. The
younger generation would be accepted into partial church
membership, a Halfway Covenant, where their children could be baptized,
although the unconverted parents would still not be allowed to
participate in the celebration of the Lord's Supper or to vote on
church business. The hope for these halfway convenanteers however was
that they (and subsequently their children) would allow themselves to
be guided and instructed by more mature full members, until such time
as they could finally demonstrate a readiness by way of the conversion
of their souls, one that qualified them for full membership.
But for many, such a time of readiness never came.
They either could not convince the more strict, older Puritans of the
authenticity of their conversion in the Christian faith – or they
simply just delayed and then lost interest in going through the
requirements of full church membership. Besides, there was a growing
trend (Maryland, Connecticut, and Rhode Island setting the early
example; the proprietary colonies of Charles II following up on this
idea after 1660) of separating political participation in colonial
government from the requirement of church membership. Thus the original
ideal of the Puritan societies, uniting both spiritual and political
activities as essential to true Christian life, began to lose its hold
on the newer generations. They did not at all walk with God the way
their elders had.
The Salem Witch Trials
Much attention has
been focused on the events of 1692 and early 1693 concerning the
accusations, trials and executions of witches in Salem (actually other
towns of Massachusetts as well). In not too subtle ways this event is
brought out as a general indictment against Puritanism in general – and
today's American Christianity (or at least Protestantism) which is so
clearly a direct offspring of the Puritan legacy. It also served
recently as a coded story (as per Arthur Miller's 1953 play The
Crucible) of encouragement to those being subject to the attacks in the
early 1950s of U.S. Senator McCarthy, who was orchestrating an
hysterical anti-Communist witch-hunt to cleanse America of the terrible
Communist political disease that affected the country, even in high
places (or especially in high places) – at least as McCarthy saw
things.
But what exactly did this event so long ago
actually mean? Was it typical of Puritanism in general? Or was it some
weird, deviant event in the otherwise honorable history of American
Puritanism?
Certainly Puritanism itself had lost much of its
original character by the late 1600s. Puritanism was being pulled in
several directions at once. A growing Secularist worldview among a new
breed of intellectuals was challenging Puritanism's old truth-claims.
The religion had also settled into a rather stale, legalistic format,
leading many people to seek some kind of spiritual relief by turning to
more primitive religious instincts, such as a belief in witches. A
sense of spiritual conspiracy or just plain old hysteria also played a
huge role in letting things move along toward terrible results.
Certainly the times were right for conspiracy
theories and the hysteria which causes and also results from a sense of
the loss of order in life. Much cultural, social, economic and
political uncertainty was burdening the Massachusetts colony at that
time – especially as the colony became increasingly rationalistic in
its worldview and thus more expectant of things to follow an orderly
pattern (which their Puritan ancestors would not have expected).
On the other hand, for the less-enlightened, it
was reasonable in its own way for them to look to the works of the
devil and demons as an explanation for the recent Indian uprisings, and
the fact that the economy was sagging because the soil was becoming
overworked and was overburdened by a growing population it could no
longer support.
Also, at this time witchcraft or at least the
occult was not uncommon as a practice in Western society, raising the
wrath of conservative Christians. France, Sweden, Germany, and other
European countries had conducted numerous witchcraft trials over the
years since the 1400s, especially during the early 1600s. The height of
the Swedish scare in fact was only seventeen years before the Salem
events, and in Sweden resulted in numerous executions of those accused
of practicing witchcraft, in one instance seventy-one executions in one
day alone in 1675. In short, this was not something unique to just
Puritanism.
The witch event in America actually started off in
February of 1692 as an outbreak of very strange behavior of two girls
in Salem, Massachusetts, which then spread to a number of other girls.
At first, several older women, social outcasts of one variety or
another, were accused of dabbling in the occult (as many did at that
time), even of being witches, causing this strange behavior of the
girls.
This accusation led to others, finally exploding
into a general hysteria in the town of Salem. At trials in March and
April, people accused of witchcraft in turn accused others of
practicing witchcraft as well.
The witch hysteria meanwhile had been gathering
momentum, spreading to other villages in the area. But by the summer,
the colony's Puritan leaders were urging caution in the process, for
judges to be increasingly rigorous in demanding more exacting proof of
reputed behavior. Thus slowly the momentum to accuse others began to
slow down. Nonetheless executions of those already found guilty started
to take place in the late summer, at the same time that new trials were
resulting in people being found innocent of the charges of witchcraft.
Nonetheless, when the momentum finally died in
early 1693, by that time, 200 people had been accused of being witches,
nineteen people had been found guilty and put to death and five had
died in prison.
Within a few years after this event many of those
who had been responsible for the wild accusations were backtracking on
their earlier claims, even eventually coming to full repentance for
their actions. The authorities in fact even had moved to a willingness
to give financial restitution to those who had suffered either directly
or indirectly (descendants of those put to death) from the trials.
The Social-Cultural Legacy Left Behind by This Event
Nonetheless, this hysteria deeply undermined the integrity of the
Puritan experiment, giving rise to thoughts of more enlightened
individuals to move to a purely scientific (Secular-Rationalist)
approach to life. This move to a more Secular worldview would even
sweep up many leading voices in the church. And it certainly would
provide Secularists of any age – especially today's Secularists – all
the proof they needed to demonstrate that any kind of thought about
supernatural forces, including the existence or at least continuing
involvement of God, is not only foolish, it is downright dangerous.
And thus it is today that Puritanism has become a
slur word, and all of the very best of the Puritan legacy (middle-class
democracy) has been ignored and even despised. Secular Rationalism or
Humanism has taken the seat of cultural dominance in America today,
justifying itself by presenting this brief episode in the Puritan era
as the summary statement of all that Puritanism ever stood for, also
justifying its call to reject such religiosity at all costs.
The Mason children in their adult-like Puritan Sunday-best attire - 1670
Fine Arts Museums of San
FranciscoThe 1692 Salem Witch Trials – by Thomkins H. Matteson - 1853
Peabody-Essex Museum
Trial of George Jacobs of
Salem for witchcraft – August 5, 1692
by Thomkins H. Matteson – 1855
Peabody Essex
Museum
"ENLIGHTENMENT" IMPACTS WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE AND IN AMERICA |
John Locke – author of the Two Treatises on Government just prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 ... and An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in an attempt to make life more mechanical ... and thus more manageable (by people properly "enlightened" to those mechanical laws)
The Rise of a Robust Spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment
By
the early 1700s the European Enlightenment had indeed taken huge steps
in putting aside the Puritan religious culture - both in England and
America. Logic and a common-sense approach to life was moving rapidly
to replace the previous Christian piety of the early Puritans, and for
that matter throughout much of Christian America in general. Churches
found themselves fairly empty on a Sunday morning – and the pastors
complained much about the loss of Christian faith afflicting the
colonies.
At the same time, many prominent Americans, taking
their cues from the strong intellectual or philosophical trends arising
in Europe, were becoming more confident of their own intellectual
gifts, their own personal enlightenment, their own powers to fathom the
mysteries of the universe through personal study and, of course,
through the application of ever-expanding human logic. The old
spiritual affections of the early Puritans increasingly appeared to the
well-educated American as being nothing more than the result of mere
superstition. And the concept of God was slowly turning itself into
little more than the idea of the One who long ago set out the
self-operating fundamental principles of natural philosophy.
John Locke
Without a doubt the one
individual who would have the greatest impact on this Secular-Rational
trend in the English-speaking world was the English social and
psychological philosopher, John Locke. We have already mentioned
Locke's effort in 1670 to draft a constitution for the Carolina colony.
Despite the fact that Locke's Grand Model proved to be too utopian to
find practical application in the Carolina wilderness, he was hardly
slowed up in his efforts to bring a more rational approach to society
and its improvement or reform. Indeed, his further studies were
received with such acclaim among the community of intellectuals that
Locke left a deep and permanent mark on Western philosophy, in America
as well as in Europe.
In his Two Treatises of Government, written
in conjunction with the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy of James II in
the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, Locke in the Second Treatise
laid out clearly a very comprehensive worldview that was widely
accepted as brilliant and totally compelling, at least to the rising
class of enlightened intellectuals.
Locke based this worldview on the belief (a belief
held by most everyone in those days) in man's tendency to
self-preservation and self-promotion. But he also believed that man was
inherently reasonable and would freely submit to society – as he saw
personal or selfish advantage in doing so.
Locke contributed further to the growth of the Secular worldview in another field of endeavor: psychology. In his work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690), Locke treated human life as if it were simply another machine
in its operation. His studies of epistemology (why or how man comes to
know what he knows) had a tremendous impact on Western thinking about
the process of learning and enlightenment. To Locke's way of looking at
things, the human mind or brain at birth is simply an empty slate
(tabula rasa) upon which, as the child begins to encounter life, data
("sensations") from outside the individual are received by the senses
and transmitted to the brain. Locke understood that the mind also had,
by some kind of instinct, certain abilities through self-reflection to
manipulate this incoming data, by associating ideas into working
information. In an Aristotelian fashion, he saw man as able to
categorize and organize logically this information into the knowledge
he would need to thrive in life. It was all very mechanical, this
process of thinking and learning.
Locke's philosophy was well greeted by the English
Whigs who were looking for justification for bringing James II's
government under Parliamentary restraint. James, of course had based
his right to expect unquestioned obedience to his rule by his English
subjects because he had been appointed to his position as king by God
himself. And who would dare to question what God had willed for
England? This was of course the classic Divine Rights Theory of
kingship proclaimed widely throughout Europe at the time. But Puritans
had questioned this theory under James's father, Charles I, stating
that God had appointed to all of his faithful believers a degree of
personal sovereignty. The Bible itself supported this view, and how
could Scripture be questioned, even by kings?
But now Locke had come along and presented a view
of life as a natural matter, complete with its own natural laws. And
how could an intelligent person question such natural logic? This had
nothing to do with God, either good or bad. It was purely natural
philosophy (the grandfather of modern science).
With Locke's contribution to Secular thought, the
possibility of producing heaven on earth through enlightened human
understanding seemed to be beyond the question of any reasonable or
enlightened person. God was not a factor in any of this enterprise of
social reform. God was no longer needed. History belonged to man, and
the decisions he alone made.
According to Locke, this tendency of man to pursue
what he understood as self-interest thus could be employed to form a
civil society, one able actually to achieve human goodness and
development, if properly directed. It simply needed the right
mechanical political and economic social instruments (or government) to
bring that about, designed and managed by those who were enlightened to
these mechanics. In short, government was in reality nothing more than
a machine, a mechanism – put together by the consent of those who
formed the civil society which this mechanism – by way of its officers – directed or governed.
Deism
Step by step a new worldview was
rising rapidly in Europe and America, one which stood halfway between
traditional Christianity and the rising world of scientific atheism
(which was not as widespread in America as it was in Europe at the
time). It was called Deism. Deism believed that God had wonderfully
assembled all creation in its present, perfect pattern of operation.
God was much like a watchmaker, crafting a perfect self-running
instrument. But now wound up, life operated entirely on its own,
according to its own natural laws, the iron laws of nature that
scientific inquiry was discovering with breathtaking rapidity. Natural
philosophers (researchers focused on learning about nature and its
ways) were beginning to see the earth (and the heavens) simply as
machinery – like the well-crafted watch – every item on earth operating
according to strict mechanical laws, laws easily discernible by any
logical mind. True, not all laws of nature had yet been discovered. But
they were out there, waiting simply for the scientific mind of some
natural philosopher to finally uncover them.
It was all very exciting, watching life seeming to
come under the total mastery of man – or at least under the mastery of
the Enlightened Ones of mankind.
Meanwhile, in such a universe running under its
own mechanics or laws of nature, God played no further role in the
day-to-day events in life. He was now in some kind of distant
retirement. It was up to man now to get along in life according to his
own knowledge of how the watch operated.
"Enlightened" Christianity Attempts to Reform Itself
This piece of logic was so compelling that by the early 1700s even
theologians and church officials began to call for a reform of
traditional Christian understanding of the Bible – to drop the idea of
original sin and to clean up the parts of Scripture that relied on
miracles to sell the important moral points that Christianity
engendered. Enlightened Christians would in fact perfect their faith by
getting rid of such superstitious material and focus purely on natural
religion, that is, the moral instruction found in Scripture. Jesus was
thus viewed by such Christians – John Tillotson, archbishop of
Canterbury, 1691-1694, being such an example – no longer as Savior of
sinful men but as moral instructor to those who wanted to perfect their
lives. Ah, once again Christianity was sliding into Unitarianism!
Even before the 1600s were out, there had been a
call within Christianity itself, notably from bishops in the Anglican
church, to reform itself, to make it more enlightened. Miracles such as
Jesus walking on water, or his raising the dead, or Joshua stopping the
course of the sun across the sky in order to gain sufficient daylight
time to fully defeat his enemies, etc., were raising all sorts of
arguments. Some sought to justify these miracles on rational grounds,
which by definition makes them no miracle at all, such as the Irishman
John Toland in his controversial book, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). Others, such as Matthew Tindal in his book, Christianity as Old as the Creation
(1731), called for Christianity to avoid such questionable or
superstitious matters and instead focus itself on the moral-ethical
teachings that abounded within Christianity – and for that matter
within all the religions of man which have arisen everywhere in the
world out of man's natural religious instinct. Thus to such enlightened
individuals as Tindal, excellent moral conduct was the supreme virtue
of any faith, a virtue and related intellectual discipline that was
placing in man's hands the responsibility of seeing heaven brought to
earth, as Jesus himself had talked of.
This was all very logical. But to the human
spirit, it was deadly. Little wonder that the church of the early 1700s
was losing steam.
John Tillotson – Archbishop of Canterbury (1691-1694)
He portrayed Jesus as not a savior of unworthy sinners, but instead as an instructor in good (rational) moral living ... the heart of Unitarianism (even Deism)
Go on to the next section: Colonial Society in the 1700s
 Miles
H. Hodges
|
| |
