You Don't Have to Go Home, but You Can't Stay Here

Abstract

could not have been unknown to them” (p. 113). In her final chapter, “Deer Island and the Banishment of Indians,” Goodman continues to trace this paradox between Puritan laws and lawmaking. The removal of Native Americans to Deer Island during King Philip’s War 387 BAILEY / You Don’t Have to Go Home, but You Can’t Stay Here sees Puritans banishing a group of people from their jurisdiction while moving them to a body of land within their jurisdiction, effecting “a banishment that was unlike any other” (p. 117). Of course, the relationship of Native Americans to English law—be it royal law, equity law, canon law or common law—was decidedly different than that of any of the book’s earlier examples. But the Indians’ banishment changes that relationship. “Indeed,” asserts Goodman, “through their banishment to Deer Island the Indians gained recognition for the first time as persons within the terms of the English common law” (p. 119). Thus, the removal to Deer Island allowed Native Americans into the world of the Puritans in a way that not even conversion to Puritanism had done. By assigning Indians a specific home, New Englanders made certain they were not a part of their own English community. Goodman then wraps up her treatment of banishment by focusing briefly on the intersections of common law and the rhetoric of social exclusion in North America in the years following the Puritans, keeping her attention on the nonreligious grounds and justifications for the various evolutionary forms of banishment. Goodman’s study certainly contributes greatly to the ways in which scholars of history, literature, and religion ought both to think about and to approach the subject of banishment in colonial New England. Her reliance on and use of the theories of authors such as Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Edward Said, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Lacan, Clifford Geertz, David Delaney, and Giorgio Agamben among others, effectively links Banished and its subject to a much larger body of scholarship. Goodman, though, does not only rely on such theoretical scholars. She also makes able use of historians such as Anne Marie Plane, Jean O’Brien, Michael Zuckerman, and John Demos in making her appeal for a focus on the legal conceptions of banishment. One wonders, though, how some more recent historical works might have tempered even further her move away from the religious conceptions of such punishments. Though they both likely became available much too late in the writing process, one wonders how John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012) and Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012) might interact with Goodman’s conclusions about Roger Williams and his concerns for the proper relationship between church and state; or about the ways in which Native Americans potentially used their newfound Puritanism, or at least Christianity, to fashion a place for themselves in English society. On a more substantial level, recent scholarship by Michael Winship certainly provides an alternative reading of sorts to questions of banishment in early New England. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (2002) stresses the connections between the religious, the political, and the legal in the “antinomian controversy,” though little is made of hospitality as the linchpin of the event and the subsequent penalty REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2013 388 suffered by Hutchinson. This is not to say that Goodman is incorrect, but one wonders how she does not at least interact briefly with the contentions of Winship’s important study. If any one volume kept coming to mind all the way through my reading of Banished, though, it was Adrian Chastain Weimer’s Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (2011). In general, Weimer deals with the same period of time in early New England. With the exception of Thomas Morton, she also deals with many of the same historical subjects. Weimer, however, connects their martyrdom and their respective formations of colonial identities primarily to religious concerns and the quest for personal holiness. The shared heritage of martyrdom helped shape early New England as their home. In the end, I do not know that any of these volumes necessarily preclude the importance of the legal aspects on which Goodman concentrates, but they certainly complicate the dialogue such legal conceptions had with other primarily religious conceptions. Read alongside this body of literature, Nan Goodman’s much-needed legal study paints a clearer portrait of Puritan communities in early New England, which was home to a remarkably diverse group of peoples—whether they all liked it or not. Richard A. Bailey is an associate professor at Canisius College and the author of Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (2011).