The Creation of The New England Way

Abstract

Abstract Few radical movements have enjoyed the auspicious conditions of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts. Far from the metropolitan authorities, the leaders of the settlement were able to inscribe their ideal holy commonwealth on the tabula rasa of the wilderness free from outside interference. Few issues, if any, so absorbed the attention of the colony’s leaders as the foundation and support of the polity structure of Massachusetts. The resulting political and ecclesiastic system proved remarkably stable and enduring. Established largely by fiat and precedent in the very first years, the New England Way served as the institutional skeleton of the Bay social body until the loss of the charter and the onset of the Andros regime in the 1680s. Despite their unquestioned importance, however, the interlocking institutions of church and state in Puritan Massachusetts defy simple analysis. Were the Bay churches the independent and lay-controlled congregations of a sect or part of an establishment dominated by the ministry? Was the General Court of Massachusetts a representative republic of the saints or, in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’s phrase, a Puritan oligarchy? Was the relation of church and state Erastian, as Ronald D. Cohen has claimed, or was it, as John Cotton argued, “the best form of Government in a Christian-Commonwealth,” namely “theocratie”? The obvious answer to each of these questions is both in one sense and neither in another. And while this answer bears some semblance of truth in registering the complexity of the Bay polity scheme, it utterly fails to offer the analytic clarity and coherence that are necessary for thorough historical understanding.