Debating—and Creating—Authority: The Failure of a Constitutional Ideal in Massachusetts Bay, 1629–1649

Abstract

In recent decades, studies of Puritan New England have focused on issues ranging from religious sensibility and doctrine to popular culture and the gendering of hierarchies. Oddly absent has been sustained attention to the nature of political authority. This lacuna is addressed by Elizabeth Dale's new study. Combining intellectual and political history, Dale examines the shifting theoretical basis of political authority in Massachusetts during its first two decades. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was “founded as a theocracy” where “all human authority derived from God” (p. 1). Yet precisely how, and to whom, that authority devolved was a matter of dispute. John Winthrop “wanted authority placed in the hands of a few political leaders” (p. 13), while Thomas Hooker thought the magistrates should be “subject to the advice of the religious leaders” (p. 15). Further complicating matters were the “mystical alternatives” of John Cotton and Thomas Shepard, who stressed the inscrutability of God's word and will, the former maintaining that “saints, ministers, and magistrates alike could never claim that they were uniquely capable of interpreting God's will” (p. 17), although the latter acknowledged that “the elect had a greater capacity to understand than others” (p. 19). This ambiguity within the theocratic ideal afforded ample opportunity for the expression of “an antiauthoritarian streak in Massachusetts Bay Puritanism” that reached “into the ranks of the colonial leadership” (p. 43). The crisis of authority came to a head in the trials of Anne Hutchinson, revealing that “some limits had to be established” to the authority to “interpret divine will” (p. 79). Those limits were established in the 1640s as human authority came to supplant divine edict. With the establishment of a legal code in 1648 and the adoption of the Cambridge Platform, “a new oligarchic polity replaced the theocratic ideal” (p. 118), one “led by a few men who created their own authority and established the limits on their almost unlimited power” (p. 1).