The Puritans' "Errand into the Wilderness" Reconsidered

Abstract

IN his 1952 essay Errand into the Wilderness Perry Miller single-handedly fashioned the thesis that the founders of Massachusetts were an organized task force bent upon a world-saving mission. They had voyaged to America to create a model of Christian reformation which all England and Europe were to imitate.1 Before Miller's exposition, the idea of an exemplary Puritan mission was unknown. Early twentiethcentury accounts of the Great Migration by Edward Channing, Herbert Osgood, Charles M. Andrews, and Charles and Mary Beard betray no trace of the concept. It played no part in the work of Kenneth Murdock, Samuel Eliot Morison, Herbert W. Schneider, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, or other puritanists at work around mid-century. The rapid adoption of the thesis by subsequent students of early America thus marks a notable watershed in recent scholarship. Yet, as Sacvan Bercovitch has observed, Miller's essay has become influential in the wrong way. Its eloquent argument has provoked passive acceptance rather than reexamination of the documentary basis.2 Because scholars seldom have understood the errand as Miller intended,