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3. INDEPENDENCE – AND THE NEW REPUBLIC

THE COLONIES MATURE ... AND WANDER SPIRITUALLY

CONTENTS

Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (1676)

The move from indenture to slavery

The cooling and wandering of the Puritan spirit

Christian "Enlightenment"

The Salem witch-scare

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 69-72.
BACON'S REBELLION IN VIRGINIA (1676)

Soon after the Stuart Restoration in 1660, Virginia fell under the spell of a young English aristocrat, Nathaniel Bacon, a recent arrival to Virginia – who was ambitious and had plans of his own to take charge of the Virginia colony.  He cultivated the land hunger of landless Poor-White Anglos and the bitterness of Anglo frontiersmen who felt that Governor Berkeley was uninterested in the problems they faced from the fierce Indian wars on the frontier (Berkeley was known to try to keep the peace between the English and the Indians – rather than solve the matter by driving the Indians from their lands).

Then in 1676, in disobeying Berkeley directly by attacking friendly Indians whose land the Anglos wanted, Bacon was arrested and imprisoned, only to have Bacon's supporters break him free – and start a rebellion.  Bacon's militia burned Jamestown to the ground.  And then suddenly Bacon developed a fever and died, and the rebellion fell apart.

THE MOVE FROM INDENTURE TO SLAVERY

The fallout from this incident was that the Virginia aristocrats were so unnerved by the anger of the rebels that they now lost interest in indenture – and moved to use fully slave labor instead – mostly African.

Up until that time Africans had been brought to Virginia largely as indentured workers (like the English, Scots, Germans and others).  However, the much more passive Africans tended to stay on – and then their children after them – even generation after generation – because free life on the frontier seemed more dangerous than simply staying on with the masters of the plantations.  Thus step by step, Africans and their offspring found themselves locked into a state of total dependency on their masters – which ultimately became outright slavery.

At the same time, the business of the purchase, shipping and sale of African slaves (brought down to the African ports for sale by tribal enemies) was becoming quite extensive, making slavery in America an option in lieu of indenture.<

It should be noted that the sale of people as slaves was not a shocking practice at the time, reaching back to the dawn of history – and long practiced not only among Europeans (and Arabs) but also even among the Indian tribes – and as well as the tribes of Africa.  Actually, in Virginia slavery as an institution had been recognized as a permissible institution only in 1654.  In any case, after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, the move to slavery was more deliberate (fully defined in the Virginia Slave Code of 1705) on the part of the Virginia aristocracy, as slaves seemingly presented less danger of future rebellion – although not completely, for the fear of that too was always somewhere in the minds of the slave-owners.

THE COOLING AND WANDERING OF THE PURITAN SPIRIT

Meanwhile, up in New England, Puritan society was following a pattern well described in the Bible as having occurred regularly with the ancient Israelites: a fervently religious generation that looked to God for support in a great struggle for survival, being followed eventually by future generations that fell away from this affection, feeling that they themselves were in full control of their world and no longer in need of the protection or even the counsel of God.  This was proving to be exactly the case for Puritan New England as well.

Whereas Williams's Providence Colony and Hooker's Connecticut Colony had built their social orders on the idea that the realm of religion and the realm of politics were to be treated as separate items (mostly so as not to pollute the religious ideals with political corruption) the Massachusetts Colony had insisted that full religious standing as true believers was absolutely necessary to ensure that those who had political or civil responsibilities carried those out in a truly Christian fashion.  Thus civil rights and responsibilities were based on a person's ability to demonstrate to the community their full standing as Christians.

However younger generations of Puritans, who found life much less challenging, and thus the need for Puritan discipline not terribly necessary, just simply did not measure up to Puritan standards, both religious and civil, appearing even to be uninterested in achieving such a goal.  The colony by the 1660s was thus in a quandary about how to answer this situation of mounting spiritual indifference.  Thus the old Puritan leaders came out with the idea of a compromise of sorts, in which "partial" church membership could be offered to the rising generation, sort of an internship in which some civil responsibilities could be assigned to the individual pending the ability of that person to demonstrate sufficiently full Christian standing, sort of a "Halfway Covenant" with the community and with God.

But over time either the ability to give proof of such merit was just not forthcoming, or simply there was little interest in taking up the challenge coming from the members of the younger generation.  In short, the Puritan spirit was cooling and dying.  Massachusetts was, like Israel of old, going through a time of spiritual wandering.  The younger generation just did not "walk with God" the way the older Puritans had.

CHRISTIAN "ENLIGHTENMENT"

On top of that, towards the end of the 1600s and into the early 1700s, many of the leading intellectual voices in the "Christian" world itself (both back in England and there in the American colonies) were looking more to Human Enlightenment or Human Reason than to God to solve life's problems.  Also, Unitarianism, even Deism, was infecting the upper reaches of the English religious hierarchy.

Thus for instance, the very head of the English Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, portrayed Jesus not as the atoning sacrifice for sinners but instead as the great moral example that reasonable people would want to follow in order to achieve righteousness.  And others, such as the popular author, Matthew Tindal, in his book Christianity as Old as Creation, advised Christians not to put much stock in the Bible's stories of miracles and other non-scientific stories, and instead focus on developing the moral instincts that are to be found in all men, and ultimately in all religions.

THE SALEM WITCH-SCARE

This decline of the Puritan spirit did not mean that the colony had been delivered from all serious problems.  It is just that as the Puritan spirit had grown legalistic and stale, many of the less intellectually inclined New Englanders tended to look to more primitive religious instincts for spiritual relief, such as a belief in witches and warlocks.

At this point the rocky soil of New England had been overworked by New England's rapidly expanding population – and the deep and dark fear of another Indian attack had not yet left the hearts and minds of the New Englanders.  Thus it was very easy for nervous New Englanders to look to the works of the devil and demons as the logical explanation for the recent round of crises hitting the colony.

Very famous today is the Salem witch-scare of 1692-1693 – told as a rebuke to Puritanism, in an effort to show how degrading such religious superstition as Puritanism can be.  The only problem with this theory is that this tragic event resulted not from Puritanism – but from the very loss or lack of the original Puritan spirit.

It is indeed a very tragic mark on the social record of New England how the prank of a few schoolgirls turned the town hysterical in fear of witches everywhere – resulting in the execution or just death in prison of some twenty-four people breezily accused of this practice.

The event was finally brought to a halt when the Puritan authorities in Boston stepped in to stop the whole affair – an important detail usually left out of the modern anti-Puritan (or anti-Christian) narrative.  Also the larger context of the times is not mentioned – because much of the West, including enlightened France and newly emergent Sweden (which were hardly Puritan) were also caught up in the same witchcraft hysteria at the same time, and to an even greater extent.

This American horror resulted because the guidance of the Christian faith was being put aside for newer, more rational or "reasonable" thinking.  But Reason can go in any number of different directions.  Witchcraft had its own way of becoming a reasonable assumption about life, as it also seems so today in modern popular culture where interest in witches is considered cool or cute.



Go on to the next section:  The American "Great Awakening" of the Mid-1700s

  Miles H. Hodges