From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

Abstract

WHEN Bernard Bailyn entered graduate school in 1946, studies of New England dominated the field of early American history, many of them produced by Harvard-trained scholars. Two of his teachers, Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin, wrote their own—albeit very different—dissertations on Boston.1 Harvard students knew there were practical advantages in choosing a New England topic, since they could find abundant manuscript materials in nearby archives and Widener Library contained nearly any published work they might need.2 Thus Bailyn's decision to focus his own dissertation on New England hardly seems surprising.Yet the long-range consequences of his choice were anything but predictable. Bailyn's later prize-winning scholarship on the Revolution and immigration has overshadowed The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, the book based on his dissertation.3 This comparative neglect is unfortunate, for New England Merchants was also transformative, both in its influence on Bailyn's career and its impact on a reconceptualization of the early American field. It was Bailyn's entry point into a colonial American past that would engage his imagination for the next seven decades. Here he introduced many of the themes he would continue to develop in his better-known publications, including the significance of social history, connections between ideas and social developments, and New England's place within an Atlantic world. Bailyn insisted that all the seemingly disparate topics he explored—from merchants to Revolutionary ideology to immigration—were connected, although the links might have been clearer in retrospect than at the time. Together they represented “successive expressions of my search for understanding something of the origins of the world we know” across the span of his career.4In addition, with its exploration of transatlantic commercial networks, New England Merchants offered a glimpse at a dynamic colonial world extending far beyond the Bay Colony and its neighbors. Although initially Bailyn could not have foreseen or necessarily intended this outcome, with his first and subsequent books he contributed to the gradual diminution of New England's historiographical dominance. His creative imagination and enthusiastic support of the work of younger scholars helped make possible an ongoing scholarly enterprise that envisions a more expansive early American drama, placing New England in an ensemble cast, not the starring role.Bailyn, who majored in English at Williams College and studied “all things German” as part of his military service, did not arrive in postwar Cambridge intent on becoming an early Americanist. His scholarly agenda was more ambitious. He wanted to explore such grand themes as the transition from the early modern to the modern world, connections between ideas and reality, and historical ties between Europe and America. It was only when he had to fit these expansive goals into a workable academic program that he turned to colonial history “for administrative purposes.” A dissertation on seventeenth-century New England—“the one pure case of the influence of Protestant ideology on capitalist development”—touched on each of his core interests.5 He began by steeping himself in theoretical works, including those by Max Weber and R.H. Tawney. However, as he later explained, a dismissive gesture from Oscar Handlin freed him to turn away from abstract discussions to delve into the actual workings of society and economy.6Perhaps because Bailyn was not drawn to New England history for its own sake and thus not necessarily interested in following scholarly trends in the field, he did not join other scholars who dissected the region's distinctive religious culture. He chose instead to explore different, although related, themes in social history—“the obvious direction” to pursue.7 During the time when he was a graduate student, it likely seemed that little new could be said about puritanism itself. In 1953, the year Bailyn received his doctorate, Perry Miller published the second volume of his magisterial The New England Mind, extending his analysis of the puritan intellectual inheritance he regarded as central to the region's—indeed to America's—history. Bailyn later expressed admiration for Miller's ability “to conceive of a hitherto unglimpsed world” that other scholars had barely imagined. Nevertheless, from the time the book appeared, he believed that Miller's vision failed to capture crucial features of New England's colonial experience.8Bailyn outlined his reservations in a review of this second volume—an audacious move by a young scholar embarking on a career that would not lack for boldness. While he praised Miller's portrayal of a slowly disintegrating puritan hegemony, Bailyn argued that a reliance on theological and literary sources prevented Miller from explaining fully why it happened. To be sure, from these materials, Miller had “extemporized a social history subtler than any yet written,” essential to understanding this transformation, but his improvisation was a poor substitute for “a detailed, sophisticated history of colonial society.” Furthermore, although Miller admitted that “merchants and men of business” contributed to the decline of orthodoxy, such individuals scarcely appeared in his account.9They did, however, figure prominently in the dissertation Bailyn had just written and that would be published two years later. In it, Bailyn explained that almost from the beginning the task of reconciling New England's religious mission with its need for a functioning economy posed critical problems. The colonists’ hopes that they would find easily extracted resources and a pliant Native American population willing to trade on English terms quickly faded. By the 1640s, New England teetered on the brink of disaster. The outbreak of the English Civil War slowed to a trickle the influx of emigrants bringing the capital on which the region's nascent economy depended. Now it was up to merchants to salvage the puritan experiment. They found markets for whatever products colonists had to sell—from fish to barrel staves to livestock—mainly in the Caribbean. Drawing on kinship ties, men of business established commercial relationships with counterparts in various Atlantic ports through which raw materials, imported manufactures, and investment flowed, keeping New England's economy afloat.Prosperity, however, came at a spiritual cost. Commerce required regular interaction with outsiders who did not always approve of the puritan order that ministers and magistrates had painstakingly constructed. Merchants’ economic activities in England often embroiled them in political disputes that, even during Oliver Cromwell's rule over a puritan commonwealth, threatened to interfere with New England leaders’ preference for isolation from worldly distractions. Within the region, merchants wielded considerable influence over their neighbors by determining prices and controlling the supply of credit in an economy chronically short of currency. How to contain these vital yet potentially destabilizing contributions to New England's survival presented leaders with a formidable challenge.Those leaders urged all puritans, of whatever occupation, diligently to pursue their calling, but in the case of merchants, identifying the boundary between industry and avarice proved especially difficult. Ministers and magistrates resorted to exhortation and the courts to curb any signs of acquisitiveness that placed individual profit above the public good. Men of business who were devout puritans struggled to balance the conflicting demands of religious ideals and economic realities, knowing their salvation was at stake. No one wrestled more strenuously with this endless tug-of-war between the interests of self and society than the Boston merchant Robert Keayne.Rising from modest origins as a butcher's son, Keayne prospered as a London tradesman even as he nurtured a profound devotion to puritanism. In 1635, he crossed the Atlantic to join his spiritual mentor, the Reverend John Cotton, in Boston, a town that welcomed Keayne's entrepreneurial talents as much as his religious fervor. But within four years he fell afoul of the leaders in his adopted home, accused of overcharging customers. The court fined him, his church censured him, and Keayne never got over the public embarrassment. Other disputes with his neighbors followed, exacerbated by Keayne's testy personality and his presumed willingness to subordinate the responsibilities of piety to the lure of profit.10Keayne seldom appears in Miller's second volume of The New England Mind (and is not mentioned in the first). The few brief references portray him as his enemies did—as a greedy man whom the clergy rightly “whipped … into line” for his commercial transgressions.11 Bailyn, however, maintained a career-long fascination with the irascible Keayne, featuring him in his very first and last published works, and others in between. He regarded the beleaguered businessman as a far more important figure than Miller's perfunctory treatment suggested precisely because his misfortunes exposed “the actual influence of Calvinist thought in its New England Puritan form upon the life of trade.” Elucidating the connection between religion and capitalism had been Bailyn's goal at the outset of his dissertation research, and he discovered that the sermons and court records Miller consulted were less useful in this endeavor than an extraordinary account written by Keayne himself.12This was the merchant's Last Will and Testament, which went far beyond the usual purpose of allocating bequests. In a document that ultimately ran to 50,000 words and took six months to compose, Keayne sought to justify his actions to his contemporary critics and posterity. He vigorously defended the genuineness of his Christian piety and the righteousness of his business practices. Yet his agonized explanations spoke to the impossible demands placed upon the puritan merchant, whose industry earned praise while its successful generation of profit invited accusations of avarice. If they acceded to the curbs on commercial activity demanded by church and state—such as adhering to the notion of a just price—merchants could not effectively engage in the entrepreneurial activity that brought prosperity to their communities as well as themselves. Although Keayne could never admit it, the merchant's dilemma convinced Bailyn, who published an edited version of this singular document, that capitalism's rise necessarily “involved not the perpetuation but the destruction of this Puritan balance” between faith and commerce—a key turning-point in the transition from the early modern to the modern world.13There was no documented equivalent to Keayne (who died in 1656) as the seventeenth century progressed. Strict orthodoxy gave way to a more tolerant religious environment less censorious of merchants’ economic behavior. A new generation of entrepreneurs, some New England-born and some newcomers—many of whom were Anglicans—took advantage of the region's commercial opportunities without suffering the spiritual angst that plagued at least some of their forebears. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, merchants who supported the crown and empire grew in influence, turning the few remaining puritan traders into “archaic types” representing the past, not the future. By the eighteenth century, new cleavages opened up within the merchant community, separating those who enjoyed greater access to influential imperial patrons and local government positions from those who did not. At the end of the book, Bailyn hinted that these divisions would eventually contribute to divergent political allegiances on the eve of the Revolution.14The book's initial impact, however, derived from its discussion of seventeenth-century developments. Bailyn provided the detailed social and economic analysis Miller bypassed to explain how and why New England's survival depended upon puritanism's decline. Examining merchants collectively and as individuals, he constructed a narrative propelled not by impersonal historical forces but by human actors with all their virtues and foibles, enlarging the cast of characters crucial to New England's evolution. He demonstrated that colonial merchants did not constitute a unified social class with strict status distinctions; everyone from petty traders to wealthy businessmen with extensive international networks claimed membership in the group. Bailyn's social history, in sum, offered a fresh perspective in a field otherwise dominated by studies of religion and public institutions. He hinted at the significance of his own work in another bold review essay addressing the limitations of his scholarly predecessors. In it, Bailyn pointed out Charles M. Andrews's inability “to conceive of society as an organism, with functionally related parts, with coherent groupings”—in short, his failure to grasp the concept of social structure that lay at the heart of New England Merchants.15The book's contributions to New England history were manifest from the start. Its broader influence within the colonial field—and on Bailyn's scholarship as a whole—emerged only gradually as latent effects of what first seemed a narrowly focused work. In succeeding years, Bailyn returned to key ideas and methodological innovations from his first book, applying them to colonial contexts beyond early New England. The cumulative effect of his lifelong engagement with the implications of New England Merchants helped to extend the compass of early American history beyond what it had been when his career began.The first glimpse of that latent impact came in 1957. Invited to participate in a symposium commemorating the 350th anniversary of Jamestown's founding, Bailyn produced one of the most influential essays of his career. In “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” he adapted the prosopographical analysis developed for New England merchants to study Chesapeake planters and found striking continuities in their experiences. Colonial elites, wherever they lived, struggled to establish their authority. Leaders could not simply assume deference from those below them—if only because some elite figures had themselves once belonged to a lower social rank, and everyone knew it. Chesapeake planters and New England merchants resorted to the same expedients to counter challenges from ambitious newcomers, strengthening their own social and economic status through intermarriage and imperial patronage. From these two regional examples, Bailyn offered general observations about differing European and colonial structures of authority and their political consequences. In Europe's more stable hierarchical order, the same people exerted social and political authority, but this unity of leadership did not carry over to the colonies. There local conditions mainly determined social position while external factors, especially unpredictable imperial demands, shaped political authority. The result was the development nearly everywhere in the colonies of a “new political system” of competing factions, beset by “permanent conflict” at the highest governmental level.16Bailyn continued to explore this “permanent conflict” in a lecture series later published as The Origins of American Politics. Its focus was the endemic factionalism rooted in the peculiar characteristics of the colonial political scene. In most places, royal governors theoretically wielded strong legal authority, but in reality they lacked the local patronage and influence to do their jobs effectively. These conditions encouraged assemblies representing an “overgreat democracy” to thwart the executive at nearly every turn. When Bailyn revised the lectures for publication, he added a lengthy section reviewing the trajectory of “immoderate politics” in various colonies. New York was “almost the ideal type,” a place with “violently rocketing factionalism” beginning with Jacob Leisler's overthrow of the dominant Anglo-Dutch elite in 1689. He described a similarly contentious politics in Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Maryland, and, to a much lesser extent, Virginia.17What about the four New England colonies? Massachusetts alone fit the general pattern of dueling executives and assemblies. Connecticut and Rhode Island, as the only remaining charter colonies, lacked the royal governors whose claims of authority sparked conflict elsewhere. New Hampshire did have a royally appointed executive, but the northern colony turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Because of “a fortuitous conjunction of economic and political forces” that appeared nowhere else, Benning Wentworth avoided the local resistance afflicting other royal governors. He quashed legislative challenges by strategically placing cronies in the administration of a colony heavily reliant on the export of timber and naval stores. Thus, Bailyn's provocative portrait of a distinctively divisive style of politics—the crucial context for his work on revolutionary ideology—largely derived from an overview of conditions in places outside of New England. This work marked out the region as exceptional, but not quite in the way that those who emphasized its puritan “errand into the wilderness” meant.18To argue for a direct link between Bailyn's book on seventeenth-century merchants and his path-breaking works on eighteenth-century political culture and ideology may seem a stretch. Yet New England Merchants was where he initially explored the distinctive characteristics of colonial society and their connection to politics, both local and imperial. Here he first encountered the “family commercial system” with connecting points around the Atlantic, built by groups such as the Hutchinsons and lasting into the eighteenth century. These thematic strands intertwined in 1974 in a brilliant biography of an anguished descendant of that enterprising clan. Like Robert Keayne, Thomas Hutchinson engaged Bailyn's imagination as an emblematic figure caught in a whirl of events and expectations he never anticipated and could not control. In The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Bailyn showed how this wealthy merchant and Massachusetts governor struggled to comprehend how social and political fissures dating from the colony's early years had ramified by the Revolutionary Era, fracturing the foundation of the only world he had known, but where he no longer belonged.19A more straightforward connection between Bailyn's first book and his subsequent work relates to methodology and social history more generally. Soon after New England Merchants appeared, Bailyn experimented with using quantitative techniques to address remaining questions about the business community. He had discovered a well-preserved Massachusetts shipping register covering the years 1697 to 1714 and, vexed by the tedious chore of transcribing its information by hand, sought a more efficient means of analysis. In collaboration with his wife Lotte Lazarsfeld Bailyn, he resorted to “a great, grinding, clanking, clattering contraption” that read coded data from keypunched cards. “Nobody,” Bailyn later declared, “would recognize this now as a computer.” Primitive though the technology now appears, it made a difficult task much easier. The resulting study revealed the gradual process by which colonial Massachusetts's commercial economy achieved stability, reaffirming Bailyn's conclusion about its lack of a unified merchant class.20Bailyn was not the only historian turning to quantification at that time. Its utility attracted others seeking better ways to manage large amounts of information. Several of the most prominent practitioners in England established the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, the progress of which Bailyn avidly followed. Beginning in the 1960s, these scholars organized teams of volunteers to tabulate data from hundreds of parish registers, to be entered into computers of increasing sophistication. From close analysis of this vast amount of material emerged a remarkably comprehensive portrait of England's demographic history over the course of more than three centuries.21 Soon thereafter, members of the so-called “Chesapeake school” (including Lois Green Carr, one of Bailyn's graduate students) adopted quantitative methods to explore the evolution of society and economy in colonial Virginia and Maryland with greater precision than ever before.22 As for the study of New England, Philip Greven, another of Bailyn's graduate advisees, was among the first to apply these techniques to reconstruct shifting patterns in family structure and inheritance practices in a single Massachusetts town.23Bailyn himself returned to quantitative methodology in the 1970s, doubtless encouraged by the successful outcome of his first such endeavor and the accomplishments of other scholars in England and France as well as the United States. The principal value of quantitative methods lay in revealing “latent events—that is, events that contemporaries were not fully or clearly aware of,” such as shifting patterns of population growth or migration.24 These kinds of developments were central to his new social history project—a truly ambitious “large-scale narrative from the beginning of European colonization to the advent of the industrial revolution.” For one part of that multi-volume project, he examined closely another remarkable document that had attracted little sustained attention: a register of emigrants who left Britain for America between December 1773 and March 1776. There were nearly 10,000 names on the list, along with a wealth of personal information about these individuals—age, sex, family groups, occupation, place of origin, destination. Thorough analysis of such a mountain of data required computers and programs far more powerful than the primitive machinery he and Lotte Bailyn had once used. When published, Voyagers to the West presented readers with tables, graphs, and maps reflecting the results of prodigious research.25 Unlike some quantitative histories that accentuated the data itself, this study of late colonial immigration employed multiple forms of exposition, including narrative and visual representations, as well as statistics. As Bailyn later explained, “No one of them conveys the picture alone: I think the various approaches come together into a general picture.”26Where does New England fit in this “general picture”? It doesn't, really. Neither of the two intersecting streams of migrants described in Voyagers flowed into the region, which attracted less than one percent of those whose destinations are known.27 New England's densely settled countryside offered few enticements either to English indentured servants looking for work or family migrants from northern England and Scotland seeking farms. Instead, land-hungry New Englanders were themselves moving out of their own communities, joining newly arrived British immigrants flocking to such places as New York's Mohawk River Valley, Nova Scotia, and West Florida. The only part of New England that witnessed an influx of people—both internal migrants and newly arrived immigrants—was its northern frontier, evidence of the strenuous efforts of land speculators. Even so, this expansion of settlement was dwarfed by what was occurring in other colonies from New York to the Carolinas.28New England slipped even further toward the margins of this story in The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, Bailyn's brief overview of his larger project. Here he emphasized again that the region's demographic patterns were nothing if not anomalous. It was the only place where, after 1640, the population grew almost exclusively from natural increase rather than immigration, resulting in an unusually high degree of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. By situating New England within a broader geographical context, Bailyn called into question assumptions about its historiographical preeminence more directly than ever before. The “famous Puritan exodus—which, to judge by the weight of subsequent scholarship, must have been a world-historical event,” was in fact, he insisted, “nothing remarkable.” Far more people left England and Scotland for other mainland colonies, the West Indies, and Ireland during the same decade when at most 20,000 passengers sailed to New England. That the region attracted religious refugees was also nothing special. Such movements of people were “commonplace,” often extensions of domestic migration patterns. And those puritan New Englanders were not as cohesive a group as once thought. There was no stable “orthodoxy,” as Miller and others had argued. At best, the first generation cobbled together a “socio-ecclesiastical program whose promoters gained a precarious ascendancy within a society boiling with ‘dissident’ beliefs and sects.”29 The decline of that precarious ascendancy, of course, could be attributed in good part to the enterprising activities of merchants.Some twenty-five years later, Bailyn published what turned out to be his final contribution to this enormous narrative project. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 reached back in time, covering the initial phase of colonization, although only on the mainland and not in the Caribbean. There were no tables or graphs in this new volume, for it lacked the same detailed statistical foundation featured in Voyagers. Bailyn did not deliberately abandon the quantitative methods that had proven so useful before. The problem was that “the data do not exist” for an intensive examination of demographic patterns for the earlier period. In this absence, Bailyn constructed a synthetic narrative that, where possible, incorporated the findings of secondary works with narrowly focused statistical analyses based on what fragmentary evidence survived.30Bailyn's mentor, Oscar Handlin, once wrote of his realization that “immigrants were American history.”31 In The Barbarous Years, together with Voyagers and Peopling of British North America, Bailyn in effect argued that immigrants were colonial history too—and not only those who participated in the so-called Great Migration. He had no desire to produce another account of “the emergence of specific English colonies” that would privilege New England or any other region. He would instead portray “the beginning of a general westward diaspora of the peoples of the British Isles” and (for the first time in his own scholarship) explore “their contacts—strange, varied, often bloody—with the indigenous Americans.” This migration was anything but an orderly transplantation of English civilization to a New World setting. The colonists were not in fact all English, but included a “mixed multitude” of peoples with various ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds and equally diverse reasons for migration. As they settled along a turbulent marchland, “their experiences were not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility.”32In a jarring departure from more sedate narratives of New England's puritan origins, Bailyn insisted that this general picture of disarray applied there no less than to other regions. To emphasize the point, Bailyn turned to New England's story only in the last third of Barbarous Years, after ten chapters establishing in vivid detail the chaotic and often bloody progress of colonization in the Chesapeake and New Netherland. The ensuing portrait bore little resemblance to the puritan society depicted by Perry Miller or even to the relatively calm world of New England's merchants that Bailyn had described at the start of his career.Developing themes he first outlined in Peopling of British North America, Bailyn argued that, important as religious goals were to the genesis of New England, they did not make the region exceptional. The pilgrims at Plymouth, for example, bore “striking similarities” to the faithful inhabitants of a little-known outpost established by Pieter Plockhoy a few decades later at Whorekill on the Delaware River. They shared Anglo-Dutch roots, along with a fervent desire to distance themselves from worldly corruption and recreate a pure Christian communalism in America. There were differences to be sure, especially in the way each utopian vision eventually disintegrated. But Plymouth and Whorekill were equally “products of the great churnings and burnings in radical Protestantism that account for population displacements throughout the Atlantic world.”33Those “churnings and burnings” had a mixed effect on New England. Religious fervor promoted unity of purpose on some occasions, particularly by inspiring groups of emigrants to uproot themselves from their English homes. Yet once they arrived in the New World, disputes over matters of faith frequently opened up painful divisions. Never a consistent body of beliefs, puritanism was instead “a cluster of doctrines” reflecting shifting trends within a broad transatlantic reform movement.34 Despite this mutability, New England officials were determined to construct a solid religious foundation for their society. They responded to perceived threats, whether from Antinomians in 1637 or Robert Child and the Remonstrants in 1646, with vigorous efforts at suppression that did not eliminate dissent. Controversies over religious matters erupted in New Netherland too, but its leaders accepted a level of toleration—if only grudgingly—that New England authorities regarded as the path to perdition. Limited acceptance of a measure of religious diversity would only emerge in New England after the Restoration.Virtually all New England colonists came from England, but this ethnic homogeneity did not guarantee peace. For they hailed from different regional subcultures