Dissension at Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of a Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion

Abstract

T O determine the authorship of a Puritan writing and the circumstances of its composition is, in some instances, to perform a merely antiquarian task. In other cases, however, the findings can give important added meaning to what, at first reading, may appear to be mere conventional statement. New findings can, for example, illuminate with an unexpected particularity tensions within an evolving Puritan order such as are recorded in A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion. Written many years since, according to its title page, the pamphlet-length Discourse issued from the press at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1663. By that time its reasoning was as archaic as the abortive project it was intended to guide: a full-blown Puritan theocracy, to be formed within the territory of New Netherlands by men from New Haven colony disgruntled at their chartered absorption by Connecticut.1 But at the date of the Discourse's composition-fixed at 1638 or 1639 in this account-the position expounded in it was publicly championed by a majority of Puritans, as evidenced by laws of a numerically dominant Massachusetts. The author of the Discourse, concerned that church and commonwealth not be confounded, insisted, nevertheless, on their close coordination in the New England setting. Free burgesses-the sharers of civil authority, whether in a town or a colony-atlarge-must be drawn exclusively from the ranks of church members. This thesis the author advanced in elaborate fashion within the traditional forms: separation of the question from