The individual and the community a productive tension in american history from the colonial era to 1860

The Individual and the Community: A Productive Tension in American History from the Colonial Era to 1860 In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philos

The Individual and the Community:

A Productive Tension in American History from

the Colonial Era to 1860

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of American Studies

Copyright by Quan T Hoang

2008

Acknowledgement

I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the generous support, advice, and constructive feedback from my committee members I want to express my special thanks and gratitude to Dr Michael Frisch, my dissertation advisor, for his steadfast support,

encouragement, and belief in the value of my project over the last two years I was especially fortunate to have had the opportunity to work under his guidance over the last 6 years I am indebted to him for helping me formulate first the idea and then the outline of the dissertation The enormous amount of time he spent talking to me, urging me to aim for greater depth and scope, straightening out my thoughts and clarifying my methodology, but otherwise letting me freely exercise my creativity, was especially valuable to the completion of this dissertation, bringing clarity and unity to the project as a whole

I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr Kari Winter for her sustained support and assistance throughout my entire time in the program Her thorough reading of my early drafts and her invaluable critical feedback helped lead me to many important insights, especially the importance of providing opportunity and room for dissent in a community, from the critical perspective of which I managed to give shape and organization to the first and most challenging chapter on New England towns Her excellent editing skills also helped improved the clarity and lucidity in much of my prose Dr Carl Nightingale’s valuable feedback, challenging though it was, broadened my thoughts and helped me see new ways to improve the academic merit of my dissertation Working as a teaching assistant with him for one semester in World Civilization was also a memorable and rewarding experience that I will not likely forget

I owe special thanks to the Fulbright Program for sponsoring the two years of my master

program Without their sponsorship, I would never have been able to come to Buffalo and take the first step in my graduate education The American Research Fellowship from the University

of Buffalo and the four-year teaching assistantship from the Department of American Studies were indispensible to my continued pursuit and completion of the doctoral program Many professors and staff members in the department were also supportive and encouraging to me during the dissertation process, making my living here in Buffalo bearable and memorable I want to thank especially Dr Ruth Meyerowitz, Dr Donald Grinde, and Betsy Thornton for their assistance, support, and kindness that were most crucial in keeping up my spirits and keeping me going

My great gratitude and thanks to my parents, sisters, and brother who provided me with numerous acts of love, support, and encouragement that have been indispensible to my

persistence with and final completion of the dissertation My friends Ula, Nahirana, Patricia, Sami, Imen, Ayesha, Waseela, EunHyoung, Sunanda, Cait, and Katie did more for me with their precious friendships than I could ever hope to reciprocate The special undergraduate students in

my recitations, while an unfailing source of distraction and, at times, nuisance, provided me with the necessary human interaction and kept my two feet on the ground

Abstract

As a central, defining axis of American history and historiography, the

individual-community dichotomy has polarized discussions about the nature of American society and produced endless dead-end debates Interpreted from within this binary framework, many important issues in American history are simply different variations on the theme of

America being either individualistic or communalistic

Through a critical reading of the historiography and a critical examination of the individual-community framework within which American historiographers have

represented, wrestled with, or come to understand their history, this dissertation argues that

it is the interplay between the two forces of individualism and community, connected and locked in an unstable tension as they are, that characterizes American history

To illustrate this method, this dissertation examines, in a series of case study essays, four particular topics, each originating in a particular period in American history and

historiography In each essay, I offer a critical survey of a well-developed discourse over a specific historical event from a particular historiographical vantage point, where sufficient historiographical mass had been achieved In these four essays, I aim to transcend the

individual-community divide and offer a synthesis by examining the tension and interaction between the individual and the community, as opposed to assuming an

analytical/interpretive position on or close to either end of the dichotomy

In the first chapter, I re-visit a series of community studies that were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in the New England region and re-view them, not through the binary framework of the individual versus the community to prove or disprove any particular

thesis, as was done when these works were published, but through the lens of the tension

between individual freedom and community cohesion In the second chapter, I examine the debate over whether Benjamin Franklin should be characterized as an icon of self-reliance

and individualism or altruistic virtue By analyzing Franklin’s Autobiography and his other

writings, I demonstrate how the complexity of Franklin’s character comes from his superb skills in blending private interests in public projects

In the third chapter, I examine the intellectual history of the American Revolution, using as primary sources major historiographical works that place the origins of the

American Revolution in classical republicanism or an emerging economic liberalism I then apply the resulting synthesis of the two to the question of whether the U.S Constitution received any influence from the Iroquois political structures and ideals The last chapter examines the political economy of the United States from after 1776 to the eve of the Civil War By re-viewing the historiographical works that emerged in the two decades after the New Deal to justify government interference in the economy, I examine the complex

relationship, supportive at one point and antagonistic at another, between the government and the private enterprise during the national period

In short, to overcome the conceptual weaknesses of the binary framework that pitted the individual against the community, this dissertation attempts a more integrated and

synthetic conceptual framework that emphasizes the creative tension and interaction

between the individual and the community Employing this conceptual framework, it aims

to present both American history and the story of how Americans have wrestled with this history through the primary source lens of American historiography

Introduction

American history has been written and rewritten, interpreted and re-interpreted in different ways

by successive generations of historians, each in light of the prevailing ideas, assumptions, and problems of their own age History, in this manner, becomes a source of wisdom for historians to turn to in an effort to understand and, in some hopeful manner, provide guidance to

contemporary issues Yet, despite their different ideologies and methodologies, at the heart of many versions of history and interpretations they produce lie an unmistakable individual-

community dichotomy New England, for example, is historiographically portrayed either as home to cohesive communities marked by traditional hierarchy and a strong vision of

community,1 or alternatively, the birthplace of individualistic and egalitarian values, with firm

emphasis on the spirit of individualistic self-reliance and an aversion to official control and authority.2 Similarly, in various interpretations of American democracy, there exists a tendency

to see colonial America as fundamentally defined by an individual-community dichotomy The origin of American democracy, in these “either/or” terms, is explained either as an offshoot of the love of liberty and the spirit of independence and individualism,3 or a product of the

congregation and town meeting in the New England communities.4

Unfortunately, the usual either/or approach, deeply-rooted in American intellectual history and historiography, that sees individualism and community in the form of binary

1

For example, see John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England: Or, The Puritan Theocracy in Its Relations to Civil

and Religious Liberty (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), 176

Press, 1995), 264

4

See, for example, Willis Mason West, The Story of American Democracy, Political and Industrial (New York:

Allyn and Bacon, 1922), 126

oppositions, rendering mutually exclusive individual rights and well-being and those of the community, fails to appreciate the productive tension between individualism and community that lies at the heart of American society and history Quite early on in American history, Tocqueville

noted this tension and placed it at the center of his book Democracy in America, referring to it as

the tension between the ideals of freedom and equality, but American historians, for the most part, tend to privilege one or the other as more fundamental, more quintessential to their society American political culture, seen from within this dualistic approach, is either “the lengthened shadow of John Locke,”5 or some version of “classical republicanism.” There is no room in their

accounts for Locke to dialogue and coexist with classical republican thinkers

Seeing reality in binary terms, many historians tend to perceive the relationship between individual freedom and community cohesion as one dimensional, that is, if one increases, the other must necessarily decrease The development of American society thus follows a linear model, in which traditional hierarchy lies at one end of the continuum and modern individualism

at the other The job of historians becomes one of “trac[ing] the gradual but ineluctable process

by which cohesive communities of structured inequalities gave way to ‘typical American

individualism, optimism, and enterprise.’”6 For historians who disagree with this model, their

historiographical works, still grounded in this single dimension of individuation, swing the pendulum back to the other extreme by asserting America as essentially always individualistic and liberal Thus, “either America is born modern or America becomes modern.”7 The logic of

the dichotomy dictates that the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth between the two

extremes If it is ever held still for a moment in the middle––such as when historians encounter the puzzling anomaly of the Puritans who were simultaneously individualist and collectivist––it

becomes “a midway point in a linear transition from traditional communitarianism to modern individualism.”8

Through a series of historical and historiographical essays, this dissertation aims to

transcend this either/or paradigm by exploring the dialectical relationship between the individual and the community that can be traced through American history and historiography from the seventeenth century to the pre-Civil War era Instead of accepting the individual and the

community as part of a dichotomous pair of terms that lie at opposite ends and that one,

therefore, is compelled to choose between one or the other, my work intends to examine the space in between the binary pairs, the tension and interaction between the two that eventually determine the form and shape of American society and culture The history of the United States, through these essays, will emerge not as a monolithic ideology of individualism but a result of the push-and-pull process between the two forces of individual freedom and communal cohesion

Avoiding the individualism-communitarianism dichotomy that seizes on one side of the picture at the expense of the other, my work offers a synthesis of the two by demonstrating a productive tension between the individual and the community that is central to the development

of American society and history By drawing on historiographical work that has been published over the last several decades in the field of American history and re-viewing them through the lens of the tension between the individual and the community, my dissertation argues that the two forces of individualism and community are connected and locked in an unstable tension and, through an examination of the various forms the United States––society, government, and the individual––has worked out to resolve this tension, more coherence could be achieved in

understanding the country’s history The primary sources for my work, as a result of this goal, are the historiographical works themselves––except in the case of Benjamin Franklin where I use

his writings as the primary source for my understanding of the ways Franklin masterfully

navigated his life through the treacherous terrain of self- and public-interest

The four chapters in this dissertation, each having its center of historiographical gravity

in a different time period, approach the issue of the tension between the individual and the

community from four different perspectives The first chapter “Colonial New England Towns: The Struggle for a New Social Order and New Community” examines the social history of New England towns during the colonial period by examining the historiographical works published during the period from the 1960s to 1970s when new statistical methods and a shift in emphasis from the life and experiences of the elite to those of the working people made New England a popular topic of research A significant number of community studies emerged during this

period, providing rich information on diverse aspects of colonial town life Through these

historiographical works, one finds a lively debate about the nature of community and society in New England One group of historians found many New England towns to be an example of close-knit, cohesive and hierarchical communities Another group, smaller in size and fewer in number of publications, challenged this view with their findings of individualistic pursuit of self-interest in some New England towns from the very beginning of their settlement

Avoiding the binary framework that defines the works of the two groups, I argue that

“community” is not a fixed and timeless concept but the result of an open-ended process of ongoing interaction between individual freedom and communal integration In this process, the meaning of “community” is questioned, challenged, and subjected to new interpretation and change Communal cohesion in colonial New England, for example, is achieved through

coercion and repression In refusing to tolerate coercion, the oppressed individuals did not

simply become individualistic, as a linear narrative would describe it In striving for freedom and

independence, they challenged the legitimacy of a static, repressive status quo and demanded a new social order and a new meaning of community To understand the process of social

transformation in New England, therefore, I argue, we need to examine the tension between the desire for individual freedom and the need for communal cohesion

When rapid growth in population and/or the existence of a market economy transformed the social fabric and undermined the hierarchical structures of social relationship, conflict

between the outlying farmers and the town authority who wished to preserve the town order did not simply represent a conflict over economic interest, as many believe On the contrary, the underlying causes of the tension also stemmed from political and social discontent In

challenging and then breaking with the old town, these individuals escaped the prevailing social strictures and achieved greater individual freedom African Americans’ struggle for freedom and women’s struggle for equality illustrate the cause and consequences of this type of conflict In colonial New England towns, the tension between the individual and the community––

presumably inherent in all societies, though more latent in some than others––was resolved through the expansion of territory, the creation of new towns or villages and new occupational structures, and the relaxation of social prescriptions so as to produce better and more just social conditions

The second chapter “Benjamin Franklin: A Genius at Fusing Public and Private Interests” focuses on one key individual response to social changes by examining the methods and

philosophical rationale “the father of utilitarianism” and the “paradigmatic American

philanthropist”9 employed to resolve tensions within himself between self- and public-interest

Unlike the debate on the New England towns, which has its center of historiographical gravity in

9

Amy A Kass, Giving Well, Doing Good: Readings for Thoughtful Philanthropists (US: Indiana University Press,

2008), 399

the 1960s through 1980s, Franklin’s character has been a constant topic of debate since the nineteenth century Depending on the contemporary climate of opinions or the social and

intellectual concerns of the time, scholarly opinions about him have kept changing from being favorable to unfavorable Selective reading of his writings is responsible for many distorted, one-sided images of him But most challenging to the scholars and historians trying to understand him is the versatility and the colossal dimensions of Franklin’s thought, leading to many diverse, and not infrequently, conflicting interpretations of Franklin’s life and values

By considering not only Franklin’s Autobiography but also as many of his writings as I

possibly can in the limited scope of a chapter, I try to overcome the simplistic interpretative framework that reduces a human being’s way of life to only two possible extremes on a wide-ranging spectrum If this reductionistic approach would only recognize Franklin as either a model citizen, a paragon of public and altruistic virtues or, conversely, an individual chiefly concerned with financial security and personal profit, my interpretative perspective allows for Franklin’s complex character to evolve and develop as he went through many different stages of life, first as a young and financially challenged apprentice and later as a successful business person who retired at the age of forty two to devote the rest of his life to serving others In this framework, I acknowledge the tension Franklin faced between self-interest (his youthful need for survival and his later yearning for material comfort) and public interest (the need for communal intimacy, sympathy, support, love, and affection) and argue that Franklin developed a worldview and a way of life that blended self- and public interest and eventually transcended the tension between the two altogether Here I place the influences that shaped Franklin into who he was in several external factors, especially his experiences during his formative years

A similar split, between those who see Franklin as a symbol of self-reliance and

independence and those who view him as nothing but a model of benevolence and altruism, also occurs in the historiographical interpretation of the American Revolution In a way, the debate over the nature of the American Revolution mirrors the debate over Franklin’s values, in which the conflict between Franklin the individualistic icon and Franklin the champion of public virtue metamorphosed into the conflict between Locke’s liberalism and classical republicanism The intellectual history of the American Revolution, achieving its historiographical momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, portrays the American Revolution either as a continuity of the Lockean liberal tradition or a radical break from the classical republican paradigm that informed it Historians on both sides of the debate butted heads with each other, trying to prove the validity of their thesis while denying a similar pleasure to their rivals But after the initial heat had cooled and their nerves had calmed down, a synthesis emerged, acknowledging both republicanism and

liberalism, and a few other political discourses, as the inspiration for the American Revolution and its most visionary product, the American Constitution

Using major historiographical works on the origin of the American Revolution as the primary source for my analysis in chapter three “Paradigmatic Pluralism and Synthesis in the American Revolution,” I try to produce a synthesis that incorporates both the classical republican ideals of the elite and the liberal virtues of the radical middle-class white men who, from their experiences of the new economic reality of the New World, grew increasingly confident about their future and their ability to govern themselves Operating from the grounds of classical

republican values, the colonial elite had intended to preserve the new republic as an organic entity in which the benevolent gentry dominated politics and social hierarchy was the norm But the unprecedented economic prosperity in the New World led to a rejection of natural inequality

and an acceptance of a more liberal social order that recognizes self-interest as the legitimate means to achieve autonomy and equality

The American Revolution culminated in the Constitution of 1787, which most

Constitutional scholars view as largely the product of radical European political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the ingenuity of the American Founders However, given the documentary evidence we have of the knowledge of leading colonial leaders like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington about the Iroquois system of government and the contact between the leaders of the two groups,10 there are reasonable

grounds to believe that when interstate conflicts threatened to produce chaos and even disunion, the Native Indian representative form of democracy and their emphasis on individual autonomy presented to the Founding Fathers an attractive working model of democracy and a healthy balance between individual liberty and the collective good of the community The adoption in

1787 of the American Constitution produced a Federal Government that is to the thirteen states what the Grand Council is to the Six Nations The creation of the Federal Government represents

a viable solution to the problem of state rivalry and the threat of disunion facing America

Independence heightened expectations of economic prosperity, and for the next one hundred years, America achieved significant economic success The adoption of the

Constitution, however, did not assign the federal government much political power This, and the hegemony of Locke’s liberalism in the academic world, for a long time have conditioned the way scholars perceived the role of the government as indifferent, if not outright obstructive, to the growth of the private enterprise Again, seeing the reality through a pair of binary oppositions, historians have traditionally conceived the relationship between the private business and the

10

Lesli J Favor, The Iroquois Constitution: A Primary Source Investigation of the Law of the Iroquois (New York:

Rosen Primary Source, 2003), 60-61

government as one of inherent antagonism and hostility Given the role of the good guy, the private enterprise’s success in producing and accumulating wealth for society is attributable to its own effort and the failure of the bad guy, i.e the government, to interfere and obstruct its assured success and efficiency Under this binary logic of good versus bad, the greater the role of

government in economic management, the more corruption and less efficiency the result The best government, the conservatives have repeatedly stated, is the one that governs least

The final chapter “The Role of the Government in the Economy” exposes the falsity of this binary position By drawing on the historiographical works that were done in the 1940s and 1950s to justify state activism during the Great Depression era, I argue that the relationship between the government and the private enterprise from 1776 to 1860 is historically a complex one It is not a one-dimensional relationship that exists only in the form of two polar positions, one characterized by absence of state activity and therefore beneficial to the private business, and the other marked by vigorous state action and therefore detrimental to the interest of the private enterprise Instead, I try to portray what seems to be a unique relationship, not found anywhere else, that is fluid and without clearly-marked boundary, but with ample room for dialogue and negotiation

During the period from 1776 to 1860, state governments everywhere, in an effort to improve the transportation network and promote trade and commerce, extended significant support and assistance to the private enterprise until the latter grew strong and competent enough

to challenge it Employing public money and public credit, state governments undertook many construction projects for roads, bridges, and railroads, and in the process provided a variety of services to the private enterprise The relationship between them changed and developed from initially a paternalistic one to that of a partnership, then of rivalry, and eventually of supervision

and guidance What is noteworthy about state involvement in economic matters during this period is that the public actually demanded and supported it until private transportation and railroad companies, employing professionals who had worked on the state-run projects, could demonstrate their efficiency and success in performing the same responsibilities Afterwards, state governments shifted their role to protecting and ensuring the safety of the public in an increasingly complex and volatile society

All in all, the four chapters demonstrate the potential of a synthetic paradigm in

understanding historical issues that defy the usual either/or approach By perceiving the

relationship between individual freedom and community welfare as one of symbiosis, rather than one of mutual exclusivity, I argue that this method produces a broader perspective on the

development of American society and achieves greater coherence in integrating different

interpretations of historical events into a narrative

In choosing to present the four topics in the chronological order in which they historically appeared, rather than the chronological order in which they were historiographically covered, I intend to give the emphasis to the logical development of these historical events and the ways in which American society evolved If the four topics had been historiographically ordered, the significance and meaning of these events would retreat to the background, bringing to the

foreground the social issues and concerns that had preoccupied twentieth-century historians and prompted them to embark on these historiographical journeys in the first place Though the latter sequencing of events would give greater priority to the social and political concerns of twentieth-century and highlight the relevance of past events to the present, it would somehow diminish the importance of historical events and distract our attention from the lessons the past can impart to

us It may be not a wise choice, for the past should be respected It is all we have to help us make sense of the present and build the future

“new social history” movement has been the broadening of perspective and the appearance of various forms of history––including the histories of the family, women, blacks, Chicanos, native Americans, radical social movements, and social conflict Convinced that the inhabitants of a nation form an extraordinarily complicated mosaic, new social historians, however, had little incentive to try to piece these histories together into a story that more adequately conveys the infinitely complex, dynamic texture of life Each element in the mosaic was thus viewed as having a separate history, and these separate elements constituted the realities while the whole is just “an artificial construction sustained by politicians and financiers.”11

Riding the wave of the new social history movement, the community studies in the 1960s and 1970s produced a profusion of information on various aspects of British-American colonial history With patience and imagination, social historians have attempted to reconstruct the

community life of British-America, bringing to light settler motivation, demography, family structure, community organization, local economy and social values What they have uncovered,

11

Laurence Veysey, “The ‘New’ Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing,” Reviews in

American History 7, no 1 (March 1979): 4-5

not inconsistent with the general trend in social history, is “not a single ‘American’ colonial experience, but an amazing variety of patterns.”12 The diversity of the textures of colonial life,

while valuable in broadening our knowledge of and enlightening us on colonial New England, has made any generalization about the nature of the whole colonial American society impossible and produced what historians Jack P Greene and J R Pole called “a severe case of intellectual indigestion.”13

Yet, despite the differences in methods and findings, whether on the pattern of land usage, local government structures, religious influence, rate of population growth, or degree of market involvement, these community studies all boil down to one major question: whether life

in early colonial British America was characterized by a sense of communal obligation and social responsibility or by individualistic pursuit of wealth and profit Conceived and then

conducted, or perceived and then interpreted, from within a binary framework of individualism versus communalism, these studies, it now becomes clear, captured at best only half of the

picture The life of a community as it emerged from these studies has only two possible

existences: either it was one of “abiding communalism or an irrepressible individualism.” If it could not fit into either of these modes, it was undergoing an “evolution, or devolution, of close communal modes into more modern individuality.”14

A more fruitful approach to understanding colonial New England, as I try to illustrate in this chapter, is to acknowledge the tension between the individual and the community as being omnipresent in every colonial society, and consequently, try to interpret social changes in terms

12

John M Murrin, “Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in North America,” in The New American

History, ed Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 13

British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, eds Jack P Greene and J.R Pole

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984): 7

14

Michael Zuckerman, “The Fabrication of Identity in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no 2

(April 1977): 183

of this tension “Peaceable kingdoms,” as Zuckerman described the Massachusetts towns in his study,15 are only possible at the cost of suppressing dissent, denying certain rights to certain

groups of people, by way of oppressing women and enslaving Africans, and remaining in social and economic isolation As is the usual pattern of human history, the tension between the

individual and the community in Zuckerman’s study is resolved through the use of force Any degree of social harmony or mutuality remains largely coercive Once these restraints or

suppressions of the individual’s yearning for freedom and fulfillment are removed, the result is not simply an emergence of what has been commonly described as a society of Yankees, “far more independent, aggressive, individualistic, and rootless than their Puritan fathers had been,”16

a description that confines a complex process of social transformation to a simplistic

evolutionary or devolutionary narrative

To overcome the weaknesses of the binary approach that see colonial communities as either communal or individualistic and their developments as a linear progression, I suggest we examine the tension between the individual and the community and describe colonial New

England towns and their developments along this line The tale of communal transformations, to

borrow Eric Foner’s language when he describes the conceptual framework for his book The Story of American Freedom, “is a tale of debates, disagreements, and struggles rather than a set

of timeless categories or an evolutionary narrative.”17

The different fragments of colonial New England, I argue, could be put together to form a picture with a certain degree of coherence, through the binocular lens of the tension between individual freedom and community cohesiveness However, by limiting my sources to the

historiographical works published in the 1960s and 1970s, many important pieces in this picture remain missing or obscure, such as the lives and struggle of Native Americans, women, and African American slaves For any examination of social tension and social changes in New England to produce an adequate story, it has to include these groups of people, not as props or minor characters but as major actors playing important roles in the unfolding of events More and more information and stories about these neglected groups have been given the light of print in the 1980s and 1990s, and if included in the analysis, I believe, could produce a broader picture of colonial New England life, and a broader understanding of the roles these people played in transforming their communities

* * *

In their presidential addresses to the American Historical Association in the early 1930s, Carl Becker and Charles Beard launched their critiques of the doctrine of historical objectivity Both were convinced that the goal of reconstructing a definitive and objective past was not just

unattainable in practice but also a vacuous ideal in principle Pointing to the conservatism

inherent in unadorned factualism, they both mocked the notion that a historian can approach the past without preconceptions.18 Becker compared that to “hoping to find something without

looking for it, expecting to obtain final answers to life’s riddle by resolutely refusing to ask questions” and derided that “it was surely the most romantic species of realism yet invented, the oddest attempt ever made to get something for nothing!”19

Beard, assuming a similar critical attitude towards the ideal of historical objectivity,

18

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge

[England]: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 254

believed that the process of deciding what was a fact depended on values; the selection of facts was not neutral but needed “an ‘a priori,’ and at least tacitly evaluative, frame of reference.”20

“Every student of history knows,” wrote Beard, “that his colleagues have been influenced in their selection and ordering of materials, by their biases, prejudices, beliefs, affections, general

upbringing and experience, particularly social and economic.” For Beard, the selection and organization of facts was an “act of faith … His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective decision, not

a purely objective discovery.”21 Rejecting the traditional norms of the historical profession and

challenging “the central tenet of academic professionalism which regards scholarly work as justifying, an end in itself,” Beard insisted that the historian has a responsibility to descend from the ivory tower and contribute to social needs by writing an interpretation of history that should

self-be measured not by whether it is correct or incorrect but by whether it is useful to the people who are trying to improve their world.22

In the immediate years before and after WWII, “claims that Becker and Beard’s

relativism legitimized Nazi and Soviet historical practice multiplied.” Totalitarianism, as

practiced by both the Nazis and Soviet, was identified with relativism, and with disdain for

“objective historical truth.” As such, Becker and Beard’s relativism was consequently severely denounced Their version of history emphasizing conflict and class was abandoned Leftist historians, targeted for their membership in the Communist Party, faced great difficulties in their efforts to get their work published, get an appointment or tenure “Counterprogressive” revision and refutation of the progressive historians’ work became the dominant tendency in postwar

Francis G Couvares, et al., introduction to Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, vol 2,

eds Francis G Couvares, et al (New York: Free Press, 2000), 10

America historical writing Consensus, as a consequence, became the key word for a new

interpretive framework for American history, focusing on unity and stability rather than conflict and division.23 Not denying the presence of conflict in American history, but feeling that beneath

the arguments existed a common set of assumptions and “a kind of mute organic consistency,” Richard Hofstadter called “for a reinterpretation of our political traditions which emphasizes the common climate of American opinion.”24

Louis Hartz, taking up Hofstadter’s call, produced, in The Liberal Tradition in America,

“the most elaborately worked-out argument for abiding American ideological consensus.”25

Pointing to the absence of a feudal structure, Hartz argued that America was, from the beginning,

“already Lockean in its social marrow: individual, ambitious, procapitalistic, in a word “liberal,” and did not need to “endure a democratic revolution” of the European sort to become a liberal society What was special about America, he stressed, was the Lockean mentality and the

predominance of “atomistic social freedom” in American society.26 Apart from the consensus

emphasis, an antirelativistic discourse also emerged, as part of the critical reaction against

Becker and Beard, advocating that the past should be studied for its own sake and historians should totally disengage themselves from twentieth-century assumptions and concerns.27

The traditional tenet of historical objectivity made its comeback during the postwar years under the influence of such social sciences as sociology and political science that were heavily committed to mathematical model building Those who promoted the incorporation of “social science concepts and methods into historiography stressed greater exactitude, the use of

University Press, 1986), 306

25

Novick, That Noble Dream, 333

26

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 35

nonevaluative language, and achieving results independent of the wishes or preferences of the investigator.”28 Employing more analytical, more objective methods, social historians launched a

barrage of “community study” projects in the 1960s that lasted until the late 1980s Their goal was not only to strive to attain greater “historical objectivity” in terms of approach and

methodology, but also to challenge the traditional historians in terms of subject matter

Traditional historians, they charged, had written descriptive, narrative history in narrow terms, focusing only on political events, revolution and wars, entirely from the perspective of the elite and prominent To portray the masses not as inarticulate and impotent with no control over events but as actors in their own right, these social historians aimed to write a history from the

“bottom up” by giving the stage centre to the long-neglected common people.29

To challenge the neoconservatives and their consensus school, by making history more

“scientific,” or achieving a higher level of objectivity, they resorted to statistics and insights from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, demography and anthropology This approach, they suggested, “would construct a radically new understanding of societies in the past as holistic systems of slowly-changing ‘structures.’” In place of the conspicuous but fleeting events, like wars and conflicts, they sought to establish the subtle but fundamental demographic, economic and cultural structures of the locale through a close examination of the experiences of persons, families and groups within particular communities, localities and regions That is, they shifted their focus from the elites to the masses and from ideology to social structure, believing that

28

Ibid., 385

29

Gerald N Grob and George Athan Billias, introduction to Interpretations of American History: Patterns and

Perspectives, vol 1, eds Gerald N Grob and George Athan Billias (New York: Free Press, 1992), 19, 20

social, political and economic events were inevitably related to changes in America’s social structure and could be traced back to that structure in an analytical way.30

For many reasons, British-American colonial history was “one of the most exciting and attractive areas of American historical study” after World War II “By the last half of the 1960s, the number of Ph.D’s in any given year in America considerably exceeded those for entire

decades between 1920 and 1950,” and the same was true of the quantity of publications.31 The

result was a veritable explosion of books and articles and a profusion of information about many different towns and aspects of colonial New England Though each author had hoped to produce

the work that is representative of colonial life in all New England towns and villages, the type of

data they employed seriously limited their narrative construction effort While each

historiographical work contributed a valuable insight into colonial town life and its social

changes, together, they seemed to produce a debate “remarkable more for vitality than for

coherence.”32

Not willing to tolerate this lack of coherence and this “intellectual indigestion,” some historians have suggested a model or an approach that they believe can help synthesize all the different studies into a coherent narrative Yet, the suggested model or paradigm of analysis, constructed from within a binary and linear framework, proves to be unhelpful in understanding colonial American life and fails to address the shortcomings in all the communities conducted during the historiographical height of colonial studies Failing that, they fail to transcend the dichotomous concepts that continuously disturbed and divided colonial American historians during the 1960s and 1970s––keeping the field in a dead end from which there is no escape from

ed Roger Parks (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), xxxviii; Grob and Billias, 19, 46

31

Greene and Pole, “Reconstructing British-American Colonial History: An Introduction,” 4, 5, 7

32

Alden T Vaughan, “Introduction,” in The Puritan tradition in America, 1620-1730, ed Alden T Vaughan

(Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xxxi

agonizing, dualistic debates over whether it would be more accurate to characterize colonial America as individualistic or communal, conflictual or consensual

Jack P Greene first suggested a three-stage model of social development for

understanding colonial New England as a whole, after carefully reviewing Philip J Greven’s

Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts, and Kenneth A Lockridge’s A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham,

Massachusetts, 1636-1736 In this model, the first generation founded a stable and closely

integrated community based on the successful establishment of strong patriarchal families, with the fathers deriving their authority largely from their control of the land The second generation developed a series of complex and overlapping extended family networks within the community and, with the generally benign conditions of life and the seeming plentifulness of land, produced large numbers of offspring

By the third generation, which came to maturity during the early eighteenth century, a colonial town had come to resemble many old world communities, as kinship ties became ever more intricate, the occupational structure became more highly specialized, land became less available, mortality rates rose, and there appeared an increased disparity of wealth Under the pressure of population growth and the decreasing availability of land, men moved away in

noticeable numbers in search of more land and opportunity elsewhere, contributing to a

significant loosening of family ties Confronted by the same problems, coupled with a decline in living standards, members of the fourth generation moved in even greater numbers, produced children at a sharply decelerated rate, and were considerably less tied to their families

Throughout this long process, however, Greene believed that the family––and patriarchalism––

remained strong and functioned as a prime agency of stability within the community even as late

individualistic behavior and community divisiveness appeared within the first generation in Winthrop’s Boston, and why social cohesion and communal order in Zuckerman’s study

persisted well into late eighteenth century, up until the eve of the Revolution

The next attempt to improve the three-stage model and explain the anomalous behavior

of Rutmans’ Boston and Zuckerman’s Massachusetts, came, more than a decade and many more

studies later, from Rutman himself The surprising finding of his work, A Place in Time:

Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750, which he conducted jointly with his wife Anita Rutman,

may have been the reason why Darrett Rutman suggested, in a separate article, an approach to help overcome the differences among the studies and synthesize them into a coherent narrative When researching Middlesex County, Virginia, the Rutmans found it to be much different than any New England town While the first New Englanders enjoyed an improvement in life

expectancy by as much as twenty years, those who went to Virginia were more likely than not to die in their first year In a society where death was the most common fact of life and people spread widely and rapidly along the banks of tidewater rivers, the Rutmans hardly expected these people to form and sustain a closely knit community of the kind that developed in many New

33

Jack P Greene, “Autonomy and Stability: New England and the British Colonial Experience in Early Modern

America,” Journal of Social History 7, no 2 (1974): 183

England towns But contrary to their expectations, during the first century of its existence, the inhabitants of Middlesex formed a web of relationships that, despite all handicaps, bound them together into a community

Although it was a community filled with widows, widowers, stepmothers, stepfathers, and stepchildren, it was a community where, in the absence of living kin, friendship might count for much The fragile, transitory character of human relationships, instead of diminishing

dependence on neighbors, seems to have increased it even though neighbors might be much more widely separated than in New England High mortality on domestic relations in Middlesex, they found, may have produced a similar, positive effect Instead of withholding their affections from children who might so quickly be taken from them, “Middlesex parents seem to have exhibited a lively affection for their children and showed their concern for family continuity by naming children either after themselves or, more significantly, after their own parents.”34

Perhaps inspired by what he and his wife discovered, Rutman has put forward an

approach that he believes has the potential of overcoming the difficulties of deciding what makes

a place a community, thus breaking the long-standing deadlock on whether social historians can characterize life in colonial America as individualistic or communal in nature For example, he points out that although, on the surface, the differences among these community studies seem to suggest one cannot produce any valid generalization about early American towns, because

“[e]very place studied has its own particular history; no place is an exact duplicate of another,” this is not say that we cannot see through these differences and identify some crucial

characteristics that all early New England towns shared What made all those scholars, in their study of individual towns, differ from one another, according to Rutman, is the terminologies they use and their definition of what constitutes a “community,” leading them to “assess its

presence or absence in particular places by counting and measuring the easiest things to count and measure––persistence and continuity, for example, equality and inequality, dissension and peaceableness––and then interpreting the results according to what they think makes a place a community.”35

But once we turn our attention away from the terminologies and particularities “so

beloved by historians” and “consider all places as no more than potential social ‘fields’ …

occupied by people who may or may not be interacting with one another,” Rutman suggests, “the real differences between places and the interpretative differences between the authors describing those places tend to disappear.” Everywhere in Anglo-America we find the nuclear family to be the social cohesive unit Everywhere families formed relationships that were “multi-stranded in the sense that they dealt with same group of ‘others’ over and over again” and everywhere they formed neighborhood networks that were tight and close-knit In fact, a strong generalization could be made of the small communities of colonial America that their life was “lived ‘face-to-face’ and on a scale easily described … as small, intimate, and essentially cooperative”36 These

“communal” characteristics, when come under the impact of increasing scarcity of resources and population pressure, may disappear and give way to new forms of behavior, less communal and more individual-centered Thus, in Rutman’s view:

Every place proceeded from a period of jostling when relative strangers were attempting

to establish themselves vis-a-vis both the resources available (principally land) and each other, toward accommodation, a time of dense kinship and friendship ties, established modes of cooperation in the manipulation of resources, and of the orderly mobility of most of the young as they moved out from a family of origin into a regional agricultural economy (and occasionally beyond) in search of the means to establish themselves within their own families of procreation Historians of one place after the other … have caught glimpses of this shift Whole theses have been constructed from the glimpses What I am stressing here, however, is simply the trend itself Almost all of our small places followed

this course; hence any cross section of places at a given point in time will display them with varying degrees of what I have called “jostling” and “accommodation.”37

How rapidly or widely these places underwent the process of social stratification depends on the rate of growth and diversification, and the degree of economic integration into a larger

distributive system, i.e how far their economies had moved away from self-sufficiency towards being embedded or fully integrated into the larger society The overall trajectory of growth and development in these early American communities, in Rutman’s model, could briefly be

summarized as a movement (from land abundance) towards land scarcity and “with scarcity, mobility; toward complexity; toward integration into the larger society.”38

By introducing into his model the level of economic development and market

participation of a town or community as an additional variable, Rutman can overcome the

weakness in the three-stage model of Lockridge and Greven Applying this model to the two studies by Rutman (in 1965) and Zuckerman, we can understand why in Boston “the total

community [was] fragmented from almost the beginning,”39 by tracing the source of its

communal breakdown to both population pressure and the forces of commercialism As a growing, more diverse commercial capital rather than a small, self-contained cluster of farming families, Boston is an exception rather than a typical New England town Its integration in a larger network of trade provided ample opportunities for its inhabitants to pursue economic profit With the population becoming increasingly heterogeneous due to large numbers of

fast-immigrants arriving, Boston became less capable of absorbing the new inhabitants into its social and religious matrix The result is the frayed social cohesion and the early emergence and

acceptance of individualistic behavior among its heterogeneous population

When applied to Zuckerman’s work, the logic of the development of complexity and heterogeneity in a community in Rutman’s model corresponds to many criticisms Zuckerman’s work has received for its description of New England towns as cohesive and close-knit until late eighteenth century Reviewing Zuckerman’s work, Greene argues that the enduring consensus and relative social, economic and political equality in Zuckerman’s Massachusetts towns until

1776 was a result of their economic isolation “What Zuckerman seems to have described … is not the New England town but a particular and perhaps numerically dominant type of

Massachusetts town at a rather early and static stage of economic and social development.” Only two of the 16 towns on Zuckerman’s list, Green points out, “could possibly be considered as active centers of economic activity during the early eighteenth century The rest were rural farming and/or fishing villages which were relatively isolated from the main currents of

economic development and relatively unaffected by the pressures of growth and increasing diversity that swept through other parts of New England.”40

When looking at the data presented in Zuckerman’s appendix, James A Henretta called into question Zuckerman’s methodology and, as a corollary, his interpretation Zuckerman, he argues, placed too much stress “upon values and goals rather than upon behavior and events,” which prevented him from realizing that “the dispersion of settlement as a result of the growth of population caused an impressive increase in the number of political struggles in the town

meetingsas outlying groups of settlers sought to form new churches and new communities.” Land speculation and an increase in the extent of market economy, besides geographical

mobility, he discovers, also led to a significant rise in disputes and a decline in communal

cohesion and harmony around 1750s, more than two decades before the endpoint of 1776 that Zuckerman claimed “Because of Zuckerman's concern with values and with rhetoric,” Henretta

critiques, “he is blind to the changing nature of the social reality which was gradually emerging behind the facade of the traditional clichés.”41

Rutman’s model, emphasizing the availability of land in the face of population growth, the degree of economic integration, and the social diversification, thus, is quite useful in helping

us understand the process of social change, or relative stability, in New England towns It

captures quite well the general portrait of colonial New England in historiographical works in the two decades of 1960s and 1970s However, by assigning too much explanatory power to the market, when it emerges, in transforming social norms and weakening communal cohesion, Rutman’s model unwisely disregards the ways social and political structures, and cultural and religious values can shape individuals’ behavior and influence their reaction to the emergence of

an external market, both of which can either hurry or delay the onset of social differentiation and individualistic values In addition, the linear nature of his model misrepresents a complex

process of social change

In 1981, when Green and Pole organized a conference to address the issues of “signal loss of coherence” in colonial studies and the failure of colonial scholars to relate the findings from their studies of “smaller and smaller units” to the larger picture of British-American

development over the whole period, they invited mature scholars who had made significant contribution to the transformation of colonial British-American history to present their papers on

a particular topic “in its broadest possible dimensions, to cover both seventeenth and the

eighteenth century, both the island colonies and those on the continents, and all segments of the

population.” Specifically, these scholars were also asked to focus on “what general themes seem

to be emerging from research already published or under way that might help to structure studies

41

James A Henretta, “Review: The Morphology of New England Society in the Colonial Period,” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 2, no 2 (1971): 395-396

not just of the subject area … but in the field of British-American history as a whole.”42 Gary B

Nash’s contributory essay on “Social Development,” sketching a broad outline of the

characteristics of New England towns, both confirms the contribution of Rutman’s model and exposes its shortcomings

Nash argues that the New England town may be exceptional rather than typical of the early American experience In its transition to a market economy, “New England may have been the least dynamic region of the British mainland colonies In its reliance on free labor, mostly organized in family units, and in the depth of its attachment to communal values it was also atypical of the colonial experience.” The expulsion of dissidents, the cultural homogeneity of the population and the economic marginality of the region, which delayed commercial development and discouraged the inflow of migrants, all ensured that New England remained stable and its social development changed at an unimpressive pace Thus, “at the end of six generations of settlement social differentiation in the interior New England towns remained considerable less than most other places in the Europeanized New World; the economy remained relatively fixed; and individualistic, opportunistic behavior was not nearly so pronounced as was continued

attachment to family and community.”43

The development of social stratification, geographical mobility and quickening pace of commercial relations in the colonial New England region were arrested for much of the

seventeenth century, Nash argues, because the immigrants constructed a social system that

attached greater importance to family and community than material acquisition Restless

individualism, therefore, was held in check From the arrival of the Pilgrims to the beginnings of the American Revolution, he concludes, “no place in colonial America did the earliest forms of

42

Green and Pole, “Reconstructing British-American Colonial History: An Introduction,” 9

43

Gary B Nash, “Social Development,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early

Modern Era, eds Jack P Greene and J R Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 236, 237

social development––land use, social differentiation, labor force, mode of production, religious ideology, political institutions, legal codes, and moral discipline––remain so close to the

founding patterns as in the relatively cohesive, relatively insular, and relatively homogenous

communities of New England.44

However, despite much creative work that was done, making it seem that “the time has arrived to build new models of social development,” Nash argues that “this still may be

premature.” The weaknesses of those innovative community studies over the previous two

decades, Nash points out, is that they were “so male-centered and oblivious to black and native American peoples of colonial society that any new synthesis would necessarily be constructed with materials that present a skewed and incomplete picture of the social processes in the

prerevolutionary period.”45

The weaknesses Nash identifies in community studies are similar to those in Rutman’s model Zuckerman’s study, for example, has been criticized for ignoring evidence of conflict and dissent in eighteenth century Massachusetts, and underplaying the spread of religious pluralism, the increase of litigation in the county courts, the rising economic polarization, and social

stratification.46 Murrin, furthermore, pointed out how Zuckerman “makes no effort to analyze

even the limited conflict he does recognize beyond affirming that it retarded prosperity and growth.” But according to Murrin, the opposite thesis is far more plausible that growth

threatened harmony The five problem towns displaying conflicts, dissent and disharmony on Zuckerman’s list, Murrin discovers, had a population of over one thousand people The

remaining eleven towns on which Zuckerman relied for his argument of consensual harmony and

Richard S Dunn, “The Social History of Early New England,” American Quarterly 24, no 5 (1972): 673; John

M Murrin, “[Review Essay],” History and Theory 11, no 2 (1972): 247-257

peace were mostly small new towns and any findings reached about these communities, as a result, cannot be characteristic of all of New England towns.47

In critiquing other scholars for associating the concept of “community” with such issues

as “equality and inequality, dissension and peaceableness,” and instead, training his focus on

“the small places of early America” and “good neighborliness,” Rutman has deliberately blocked

a significant part of the picture from his sight Without acknowledging the importance of issues related to “equality and inequality, dissension and peaceableness,” Rutman fails to acknowledge that social development, “defined as changing social relations between different groups in

society … as between masters and slaves, men and women, parents and children, employers and employees,”48 most of the times, is the result of some form of dissatisfaction, tension, or

dissension, and the struggle that follows After all, did population growth in the face of land scarcity not produce tension between the haves and have-nots, prompting them to break away from the old town and create a new community elsewhere?

But more importantly, Rutman, as well as others, overlooks how disputes over land, followed by the subdivision of the congregation and the erection of a new parish, not only had economic but also social and political ramifications, both of which played no small role in the transformative process of a community Economic issues everywhere are structured and defined within a matrix of social, cultural, and political values How economic issues are resolved

depends on how much the matrix can be stretched and altered to give room for new social,

political arrangements “Community,” therefore, is not unlike “freedom,” in that it is not “a fixed category or a predetermined concept” but “an essentially contested concept.”49

By examining social change, such as the weakening of communal norms and the

47

Murrin, “[Review Essay],” 253

48

Nash, “Social Development,” 234

appearance of individualistic behavior, or the relatively stable social conditions in colonial New England town through the lens of tension between the individual and the community, my

approach can broaden the picture and expand the scope of our understanding of social change––

by acknowledging the roles women, slaves, and, where applicable, Native Indians played in their struggle for a more just society and, in the process, contributing to social changes However, given the limited scope of this chapter, mainly concerned with the historiographical community studies in the 1960s and 1970s, I cannot include in my analysis the stories of women, African slaves, and Native Indians, who have been the central subjects of a major historiographical renaissance since the 1980s Even so, in re-viewing the community studies of the 1960s and 1970s through my particular lens and using them as my primary sources, as is my design for the rest of the chapter, I hope to demonstrate the possibility of constructing a new narrative form to describe the colonial New England towns, without using the binary approach that pigeonholes a town into two possible categories, one individualism and the other communalism This approach,

I argue, can produce greater coherence in understanding social change in colonial America because of, not despite, its diverse patterns of life, which is the cause of the binary method’s incoherence and the academicians’ intellectual indigestion

As one of the first works to question the old generalizations of the New England town,

Powell’s Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town looks at the agricultural town

of Sudbury, Massachusetts from 1638-1655, detailing how the background of the town founders and their experiences in local government and land usage back in England resulted in both their resorting to and deviating from English experiences For more than a decade after the formation

of the town, the inhabitants of Sudbury displayed great cooperation and group harmony,

everyone heeding the call for social responsibility In town meetings “joint consent” was easily

and commonly achieved when it came to voting for a solution or resolution to a particular

problem Quarrels among Sudbury residents were normally resolved through arbitration and discussion, or in the cases of deviations from social norms or failures to honor social

responsibility, group pressure was brought to bear on the deviant.50

The growth of population and the temptation of land expansion around 1655 triggered “a clash of the younger second generation against the restrictions imposed by the founders of the town” and eventually destroyed the communal cohesiveness by splitting them into two factions Tension between the two groups was only resolved and social harmony restored when the

dissident group was given a land grant and the opportunity to form a new town, Marlborough Applying Rutman’s model to Powell’s study, we would simply see the changes in Sudbury from community-based to personal interest-based behavior as a result of population pressure and the need for new land What we missed from such a reading is the fact that the group of landless young men and their leaders viewed their challenge to the authority and eventually their

separation from their community in more than just the simple terms of economic independence

What is at issue here is not only the means to livelihood but also the means to raise their social and economic status The ownership of land in those days, as Powell explains, could lead

to wealth, and from wealth, to social responsibility and respectability Even more significantly,

in successfully breaking away from Sudbury, “which had been unable to adjust to the change inherent in the reform of English institutions,” and forming a new town, the dissident groups won the right to express their “own concepts of political and economic organization” and to

“demand that principles of justice dominate the spirit of the new town.” In their new town, they could “choose those who might judge them,” and enact their vision of a just society, requiring

50

Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan

University Press, 1963), 100, 108, 110-111

“that any new citizen respect a significant spirit, which was becoming a deep faith––a respect for the orderly process of law, an alertness to social justice, and a desire to improve society by forming, ever and again, self-governing entities called New England towns.”51

To see the splintering of a community into two as caused by population growth and land scarcity, as Rutman’s model does, is to fail to recognize there is some human motive as equally important as, if not more than, economic needs Failing to look below the surface, we fail to recognize that the cause of “the crisis which the town had to face … lay deep within its own heart.”52 Economic survival is certainly important, but so are perceived social justice and

freedom The young men and their leaders were certainly driven to action by more than just economic pressure

Published two years after Powell’s Puritan Village, Darrett B Rutman’s Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649, while helping to add another piece to the New

England jigsaw, throws the three-stage model into confusion Unlike the agriculture-based town

of Sudbury in Massachusetts, where there was social harmony and cooperation for at least a decade after its settlement, “the total community” of Boston was “fragmented from almost the beginning.” The source of its communal breakdown, in Rutman’s argument, is population

pressure and the forces of commercialism Although Winthrop from the inception had

“envisioned a society in which men would subordinate themselves to their brothers’ and the community’s good,” within five years after settlement the seeds of discord and disunity had begun to sprout From 1635 to 1638, the numbers of newcomers to Boston rapidly increased, doubling its population, and, together with increasing demands for land from the sons of older settlers grown to manhood and servants freed of their service, putting a severe strain on its land

51

Ibid., xix, 137, chapters VIII & IX

resources As peripheral villages appeared around Boston––a safety valve to the population pressure and land scarcity––homogeneity gave way to heterogeneity, and concerns with material prosperity and personal aggrandizement clashed with the traditional emphasis on godliness, communal spirit, and morality.53

Boston’s geographical position as the hub of both the internal economy of the

commonwealth and of the overseas trade with England is identified as another factor that

contributed to the weakening of the town unity and the communal ideal of Winthrop Attracted

by the material opportunities available in Boston, the newcomers in the 1640s did not change the course of the town’s development but only hurried it From the beginning, a small number of men in Boston had sought pleasures in gaming, debauchery, drink and could only be held to decency by strict enforcement of the law When the town turned increasingly to trade and

commerce, the number increased and “men were generally failing in their duty to the

community, seeking their aggrandizement in the rich opportunities afforded by the land,

commerce, craft, and speculations, to the detriment of the community.”54

In addition, the church ambiguous attitude towards wealth, Rutman explains, also

“open[ed] the door to rampant individualism.” While “the subordination of the individual to the interest of the community was propounded from the pulpit and echoed in law,” wealth was not considered “antisocial or sinful.” Instead, viewing economic success as God’s reward to

diligence in one’s calling and an instrument to better society, the church may have even

encouraged it The result was that, by the end of first two decades, it was impossible to recognize

53

Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, viii, 21, 80, 85, 96, 140