Freedom: Puritan and Cavalier

The subjects of how these four societies maintained law and order, their forms of local government, and their concepts of liberty, are closely interconnected.  They may also be significant in forming our concepts of liberty to this day.  It should be noted, all four cultures valued freedom highly.  Indeed, all may be said in some degree to have  migrated in search of freedom that they felt denied at home.  But they had very different concepts of freedom – some familiar to us, and some quite foreign.  Because this is a complex subject, I will split this post in two.

New England

Puritan New England had very low crime rates.  Furthermore, crimes of violence were especially rare, with property crimes more common and trivial offenses against “order” the most common of all.  How was this achieved?  Most today people would say, because of the Puritans’ severity with law breakers.  The harshness of their punishments – the pillory, the stocks, flogging and branding and so forth – are famous to this day.  But such severity is unlikely to be the explanation.  Barbaric as such punishments may seem to us, they were universal in 17^th Century Europe.  Virginia, contemporary England, and continental Europe all did much the same.  Even the gentle Quakers flogged and branded.  Indeed, in at least one respect, the Puritans were less severe than most of their contemporaries – they had fewer capital crimes.*  In another way, they were very strict.  Colonial New England might be considered an early example of the zero tolerance approach.  Just about everyone was prosecuted at some time for some minor offense such as breaking the Sabbath, idleness, lying, swearing, and the all-encompassing “exceeding the bounds of moderation.”  One colonist was prosecuted for presenting a petition on an insufficient size and grade of paper!  The penalties for these offenses were usually not too harsh – rarely more than a few shillings' fine – but warning was ever present.

So if severity of punishment does not explain the Puritans’ success in keeping crime down, what does?  For one thing, as discussed earlier, they lived in small, close-knit villages where everyone could keep an eye on everyone else and bring pressure to bear on deviants.  For another, the Puritans were selective in who they admitted, screening out people who did not share their basic outlook and values.  Their form of local government also played a role -- the famous New England town meeting.   Although Fischer emphasized that the concept originated in England, town meetings in England meant vastly different things in different towns.  In New England, town meetings were standardized.  The townsmen met, elected their officials, and enacted town ordinances.  (They also elected their representatives to the colonial legislature and instructed them on how to vote).  Every effort was made to achieve consensus.  Hence decisions were made by discussion, persuasion and adjustment of differences, together with strong pressure to conform.  The result was to greatly strengthen the moral authority of the law.  Who can object, after all, to being bound by rules enacted by one’s fellow townsmen, including oneself?  Law enforcement was the job of the village constable, also elected by the consensus of his fellow townsmen, which, again, greatly enhanced his moral authority.  The whole concept of a hostile or defiant attitude toward authority was foreign to New England because the people were the authority.  What they were hostile toward was any outside meddling.

Such a regime was possible only for a people whose concept of liberty was very different from our own.  Fischer describes it as “ordered liberty.”  It was the view that liberty was not the absence of constraints on the individual, but membership in a self-governing community that decided for itself what restraints to impose.   The New England authorities established many restraints on the individual.  They forbade people in frontier communities from moving without permission of the authorities.  They mandated Sabbath observance and church attendance.  One community forbade any bachelor from marrying until he killed six blackbirds and a crow.  Another forbade any farmer from slopping his pigs until two others confirmed what he was giving was unfit for human consumption.  Liberty, in short, belonged to the community, not the individual.  Individuals merely had “liberties,” something between our concept of rights and privileges.   These were not inalienable rights, but privileges the community granted and could withdraw at will.  In short, the Puritan concept of liberty has fallen by the wayside and is quite alien to our own.

Virginia

Rates of violence were higher in Virginia than in New England, but violence, like so much else, was rigidly hierarchical.  Violence by social superiors against inferiors was common.  Violence among social equals was intermediate.  But violence by social inferiors against social superiors was rare and subject to terrible retaliation.  The head of law enforcement in Virginia was the sheriff.  In New England, law enforcement was in the hands of the village constable, while the office of sheriff was abolished as what Fischer calls a “hated symbol of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege.”  Alas, he does not explain what a sheriff was, or what made him such a symbol, other than that the sheriff was necessarily a country gentlemen.  The same shortcoming applies to his description of many other offices as well.  The vestry was the administration of the parish, which managed church matters, as well as “much other secular business," such as administering the poor law.  Alas, once again, Fischer does not describe what else the vestry did, except to say it was less active in the life of the community than the town meeting and presumably subjected individuals to fewer constraints.   The other main form of local government was the court, and especially the county justice of the peace.  Unlike in New England, where these officials were elected by the town meeting, in Virginia they were appointed by the colonial legislature (the famous House of Burgesses).  In theory, the legislature could appoint whoever it pleased to office.  In practice, the local country gentry would decide who should hold which office and the legislature almost always respected their wishes.  The only elective offices were to the colonial legislature.  Elections took place about once every seven years.  But Fischer finds another interesting comparison between the colonies.  In New England, where the town meeting met once a year to elect officials and as many times between as necessary to manage the town business, turnout was low, except in times of crisis.  In Virginia, where elections were rare and special events, turnout was much higher.  Apparently people are more willing to participate when participation is not too demanding.

The Cavaliers cherished their freedom, but had little respect for the freedom of others (especially their servants and slaves).  Fisher calls their attitude one of “hegemonic liberty,” equating freedom with domination of others.  Although he does not put it that way, Cavaliers assumed that it was the inevitable nature of society for people at the top to oppress people at the bottom.  Liberty was being as high up in the social order as possible.  This is related to, but different from, the Puritan view of “liberties” granted as special exemptions from restraint.  Puritans, too, believed that a gentleman had more liberties than a person of lower order, much less a servant or slave.  But at the same time, Puritans also recognized other “liberties” as common to all, and some (fishing rights, for instance) that were granted by community, rather than by rank.  To Virginians, liberty was mostly a matter of who dominates whom.  This makes liberty a zero sum game – one person’s gain in liberty is necessarily someone else’s loss.  Suddenly I began to understand why southerners felt so threatened when anyone sought to undermine slavery.  If one’s view is enslave or be enslaved, then any threat to one’s ability to enslave is necessarily a threat of enslavement.  It explains the maddening view so often expressed by apologists for slavery – that it elevates all white people to an aristocracy.  If one views freedom in hegemonic terms then, yes, I suppose race slavery could be the most effective way to extend hegemonic liberty to the greatest number of people.   It also goes a long way to explaining why marriages were so often power struggles – marriage, too, could not be a partnership, but only a question of who dominates.

It is also true that the Cavaliers moved beyond this view.  After all, Jefferson, who wrote so eloquently about universal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence came from this culture.  It is an outlook that goes clearly against the one the United States adopted as its ideology in 1776 and since.  But traces remained, especially in race relations, which were conceived of as a zero sum game long after the zero sum view had been abandoned everywhere else.  It is an outlook that remains tempting to this day because it is a more natural outlook than the one that no one need dominate anyone, but that we should all be free together.

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*Of course, just because the death penalty is on the books for an offense does not necessarily mean that it is enforced.  But Fischer also compares the actual numbers of executions in Massachusetts to Virginia.  Virginia had a much higher rate.