themselves to be every bit as committed to purifying the Church of England, if not more so.17 A capacious definition of puritan religiosity that includes a wide spectrum of behavior encompasses such regional variations.
The puritan Atlantic becomes a less useful organizing concept after England tightened its control of its American colonies and brought them into closer order. By 1723, the law and social practice were increasingly codifying hierarchies of race and servitude, and New England merchants had sharply increased their participation in carrying the human cargo of the slave trade. New England was economically dependent on the slave trade long before New England ship captains carried enslaved Africans in large numbers. After the English Civil War cut off the flood of migrants to New England in the 1640s—and with them their money and support of the local staples market—a large portion of New England’s economy rested on the demand of British slave colonies in the Caribbean for those staples.18 Bermuda’s turn to maritime activity and shipbuilding, which began after the dissolution of the governing Somers Islands Company in 1684, was fully established by 1720, a shift whose success depended on the labor of enslaved Bermudians at sea and on shore.19 In Rhode Island, planters in the Narragansett region turned to enslaved African labor even as they institutionalized their exploitation of Narragansetts’ labor through hereditary pauperdom, in which children inherited the debt obligations and indentured servitude of their parents.20 However, economic considerations were not the only cause of change. Relations among the colonies shifted as England tried to strengthen each colony’s connection to the metropole, while changes within puritanism meant that ministers no longer dictated specific behaviors to be enforced or punished by magistrates.
England’s closer attention to its empire also meant that legal structures in the colonies moved closer to common law practices, a shift that marked more uneven power relations between men and women. While the puritan vision of godly rules meted out harsh punishments to women who stepped outside the bounds of proper behavior, it also punished men for sexual and moral lapses and reduced their power over their wives, thus coming close to a single standard for sexual and moral conduct. Between 1690 and 1723, however, most puritan ministers’ view of the proper relationship between godly order and civil authority shifted so that ministers were no longer directing the civil authorities about which behaviors to punish. Legal reforms of the 1690s, which brought common law and specifically trained lawyers more forcefully into colonial courts, also weakened the influence of a distinct ethos on governmental and legal structures.21 These reforms were an outgrowth of Charles II’s earlier push toward greater centralization, which, although it succeeded to varying extents from place to place, had been aimed at all the English colonies.22
Geographic Boundedness
The colonies included in this study shared a key spatial characteristic: all faced early and intense difficulties with their topographical and geographical boundedness. The ocean constrained the physical expansion of the mainland colonies along one border (east for Massachusetts, south for Rhode Island), while other polities, Native and European, impeded them on the others. Massachusetts had to contend with Nipmucs, the Pocumtucks and other tribes in the Connecticut River Valley area, Massachusetts and Wampanoags along the coast, as well as Penacooks, Pequots, and Mahicans. To the north and east, Abenakis and Haudenosaunees (Iroquois), as well as the French, undercut the Bay colony’s ambitions of geographical growth in what is now Maine and at times seemed to threaten its survival. Rhode Island faced Wampanoags in the northeastern part of the colony, Narragansetts and Niantics farther south, and the Pequot survivors of the 1637 Pequot War with the English, who joined Mohegan communities based primarily in Connecticut but whose territory also comprised the southwest corner of Rhode Island.23 Rhode Island and Massachusetts could only encompass more territory in direct conflict with the charter claims of Connecticut, New York, and Plymouth.24 The charter granted to Rhode Island and Providence Plantations by Charles II in 1663 overlapped with Connecticut’s 1662 charter to the west and Plymouth’s and Massachusetts’s borders to the east.25 The lands granted in these charters were often more imaginative exercises than an indication of what the English could actually control of Algonquian homelands, but they still gesture toward the multiple levels of contestation over place even within the English space of New England.
As an uninhabited archipelago, a mere twenty-one square miles of land that lies in the Atlantic 648 miles (563 nautical miles) from the nearest land (what is now Cape Hatteras on the coast of North Carolina), Bermuda differed from the mainland colonies.26 A preexisting topography separated New England from Bermuda, which had no established human sense of place. All inhabitants of the island colony were newcomers who simultaneously established its conceptual and physical landscapes. The island-born constituted a majority of the inhabitants by the mid-seventeenth century, an unusual demographic situation that offered an earlier hospitable environment for combinations of indigenous, English, and African beliefs and practices than in other colonies where the constant influx of African-born people and established indigenous communities renewed knowledge about cultural and religious practices. Bermudians of color were mostly insiders rather than outsiders to Christianity, a familiarity that white Bermudians largely recognized because they had grown up alongside one another and lived together in the same households. A similar shift away from African-born individuals did not happen in British mainland North American colonies until the beginning of the nineteenth century.27
In New England, even when the puritan Atlantic was at its strongest, it was a thin overlay on top of what for time out of mind had been, and remained, fundamentally Native space. The English colonized and laid claim to land that its original inhabitants had already adapted for human habitation and shaped through ritual practice. Archaeological research has uncovered human-made stone mounds and caverns devoid of the detritus that accumulates from habitation but that were built over a long period of time, indicating repeated and extended human engagement with the sites for purposes besides daily living. These mounds and caverns were organized around landscape features marking astronomically significant events such as the winter and summer solstices and the rising and setting of the Pleiades, a cluster of stars. One such stone feature complex is near what later became the “praying Indian” town of Hassanamisco and appears to have been constructed around 1,300 years ago. It lies near the source of almost all the major rivers that flow into what is now Rhode Island and the eastern half of Massachusetts and remained under direct Native control until 1715.28
The northeastern coast was contested space, not only in terms of competition over land and other resources, but also in how Europeans and Natives thought of resources and how they defined what it meant to share space. Although southern Algonquians varied in particular burial rituals, preferred family forms, governmental structures, and dialects and languages, they shared an idea of the space of the Northeast as a “common pot” on which all depended for sustenance, and in which those who could take control of more owed assistance to those who were weaker and so had less. The common pot was not a conflict-free paradise: those who had less owed allegiance and acquiescence to a lower place in the social hierarchy to those who had more. The English had a more exclusionary view in which the privilege of the powerful was to cordon off space and to exclude others from it and its resources. Puritans attempted to mold the northeastern coastal region to their experiences and expectations in order to make their own place. But Natives often turned colonial institutions to their own use to subvert attempted European control and reshaping of space, for instance by using writing to assert their own understanding of proper land use. Southern Algonquians perceived their multiple communities as strongly linked to homelands, to connections along waterways and through kin relationships.29
Natives in Northeast America cultivated relationships with kin and allied tribes, as well as made their own appeals to European monarchs, based on their understandings of connection between peoples and places. Native political topographies functioned quite differently and took little notice of differences among the English like those between Baptist and puritan. While their homelands did not match up with English-drawn colonial boundaries, Algonquians contending with southern New England demonstrated an astute understanding of the rivalries between English colonies as well as those between European
