While New England’s comfort generally increased in the Cromwell years, Rhode Island suffered from a lagging economy, political divisions and even issues with religious dissidents who worked to destabilize the already unstable colony. Plymouth’s prosperity also waned as trade came to dominate the New England economy.
And in the United Colonies, the issue of infant baptism continued to create problems. In response to the limits of Church-membership exclusivity (including but not limited to infant baptism), younger people were either losing interest in religion or turning to more radical Puritan sects, like the Baptists. Baptists, who advocated for no infant baptism at all, rather than simply limited infant baptism, grew more numerous and popular throughout New England. Their ideology evened the social/political playing field as well as providing a simple solution to religious questions.
In response to these trends in New England religious life, United Colony Churches (with some exceptions) adopted the Half-Way Covenant.
Full Text
Under Oliver Cromwell, New England’s history wasn’t marked by the types of dramatic events which took place elsewhere, but like in other colonies the time did mark an irreversible turning point for the region.
Introduction
Part of this change, in fact a lot of it, was economic. By the time of Cromwell’s death, New England had emerged as the American trading center. Thanks to trade with Barbados, towns like Salem were skyrocketing in affluence, but Plymouth and Providence were starting to fall behind. Plymouth, especially, didn’t have any quality harbors. Waters around the colony were too shallow, and the only good trading location within its borders was on a Poconoquet Reservation near the town of Sowams. So they were stuck, unable to participate in the industry that was becoming New England’s economic foundation.
And these economic shifts were happening right at the time that the earliest generation of New England leadership was dying. Both Plymouth and later Massachusetts and its offshoots had moved to the New World as cohesive communities with pre-existing leadership, and the region had quickly severed a lot of its English ties. This meant this generational turnover was a bigger deal there than it had been in most other colonies, where leadership fundamentally came from England and where there was a revolving door of leaders of varying quality and popularity. Compounding matters was the fact that this generational turnover was happening at the exact same time as massive political destabilization was happening in England, and new economic forces were emerging in America.
Massachusetts had lost Winthrop and Cotton, and in Plymouth, Brewster had died in 1645, Standish in 1656, Winslow of course in 1656 and then Bradford in 1657. Massasoit died in 1657, too, after stepping down and leaving the leadership of his tribe to his son, Wamsutta, who soon renamed himself Alexander. In their last years, both Massasoit and Bradford both expressed discomfort at the way things were going. Massasoit said he hoped, but only that he hoped, that there might be peace after he died, and Bradford saw greed and land hunger as having replaced religious devotion, and predicted that such motivations would lead to the ruin of New England.
And Roger Williams also agreed. He equated English land hunger to Spanish gold hunger. And, in 1653, it was in part thanks to that land hunger that he was still in England, trying to reverse Coddington’s usurpation. Coddington had, if you remember, gone to England and been named governor for life of Rhode Island and Providence, with the power to name his successor, by Warwick’s Parliamentary Committee. Williams had been pushed out of any sort of position of influence, so he’d gone to England to try to reverse the decision.
Williams was by no means an affluent person. He’s gone down as one of the more famous figures of American Colonial history, but at the time he was a controversial outcast who had founded New England’s most impoverished community, a place you only really went to be free. So in England, he’d lived at Henry Vane’s house, and made some money here and there by giving MPs’ children private language lessons. When he wasn’t advocating for his patent, he was advocating for his ideals, most famously in a pamphlet debate with John Cotton. He also became close with John Milton, and got to know Cromwell at least a little bit.
But, in 1654, it was time for Williams to return to England, thanks, indirectly, to Cromwell’s ascent to Lord Protector. First, Henry Vane was out of politics and would soon be in prison. He’d done what he could to protest Cromwell’s seizing power, but after it happened, Vane left politics completely. He was no more interested in a Puritan source of arbitrary power than he was in a Royal one.
Even more important for Williams, though, was the fact that news came from Rhode Island that someone there had tried to imitate Cromwell’s actions within the colony, leading to a small rebellion there.
Williams’s faction and Coddington’s faction had continued vying for control of the colony while Williams was in England. Ultimately, in October 1653, Williams’s faction had voted to simply separate Providence and the colony’s mainland area from Rhode Island. Coddington could have Rhode Island for now, but they were going to do their own thing in Providence and Warwick. To lead this new colony, they chose none other than Samuel Gorton.
Now, Gorton of course governed in a controversial way, because he was fundamentally the same person who had been so unpopular in the rest of New England. He’d been kicked out of every other colony for his belligerent dedication to excruciatingly controversial religious beliefs, and even though it might seem like that would make him a standard bearer for a colony of outcasts, in reality it just made him an unpredictable and ineffective leader. If you want to learn more about him or refresh your memory, you can go back to the 18th and final episode of our Massachusetts Bay series, entitled Samuel Gorton’s Heresy.
But then, whether because of his influence or his ineffectiveness, a group of people from Providence decided to dismiss Coddington’s government by force, and this is where Cromwell’s influence comes in. In February 1654, Coddington’s government met at Coddington’s house, and halfway through the session, a Williams supporter named Captain Richard Morris burst in with a group of about 20 armed people. He’d read about Cromwell’s walking into Parliament surrounded by a military force, and dismissing it with the famous words “Gentlemen, go home,” so he decided to do the same thing. One of his supporters addressed each member of Coddington’s government personally, and after a moderately violent confrontation, the meeting did, indeed, disperse.
So, it’s worth taking a minute to note that Cromwell’s dissolution of Parliament had prompted Puritans in not one, but two colonies to try the same thing. And in both, the instability that resulted opened the way for the physically stronger group to take control. Coddington asked John Winthrop Jr. for help in reversing what had happened, and when Winthrop didn’t send anyone, he fled to Boston for refuge and safety, and the two parts of the colony were brought back together.
And then, in response to Gorton’s own unpopularity, residents of Warwick planned their own revolt. But, they couldn’t decide what to do, exactly, so they simply invited Massachusetts to come take over their town. Warwick was impoverished and virtually worthless, so it was definitely not worth the potential fallout to take them up on this offer and Massachusetts refused. This did end Gorton’s term as governor, though, because threw up his hands and left office, declaring “that such men are fittest for office in this place that can with most ease undergo the greatest load of ignominy and reproach,” and that he was “one that hath his full burden already.”
In Gorton’s place, John Smith was chosen. This was the same man who had participated in the Remonstrance of 1646, and he was a pretty decent leader. Under him, Providence became the first English colony to pass a law against black slavery. It read that “whereas there is a common course practised among Englishmen to buy negroes that they may have them for service or slaves forever,” it be ordered “that no black mankind, or white, may be forced to serve any man or his assigns for longer than ten years.” And, instead of continuing the conflict with Coddington’s Island faction, Smith’s government simply disengaged. He didn’t argue, but also didn’t compromise, and simply governed the mainland area of the colony.
But, it was during Smith’s term in office that news arrived of Williams’s impending arrival, and that he had been named governor from England. This rubbed Williams’s faction the wrong way, because they wanted liberties and freedoms, democracy, and that meant elected governors. So while they had no problem with the idea of Williams as governor, they absolutely had a problem with how he was being made governor. Williams, though, had left John Clark as his agent in England, and by July 1654, he was back in Providence, with a series of letters.
One told Massachusetts to allow him safe passage through Boston. One ordered the United Colonies to leave Rhode Island and Providence alone, and one addressed Providence directly. This one was from Henry Vane, and it rebuked the town for its contentiousness. Williams encouraged Providence to reunite with Rhode Island, and he was elected governor of the whole colony when that happened. Cromwell backed his legitimacy at every step of the way, but Williams himself was a good mediator and negotiator, and the reunification of the island was thanks to his influence, rather than Cromwell’s orders. Coddington also returned to Rhode Island at this point. He realized he wasn’t going to be governor while Cromwell was in office, but he also wasn’t in danger anymore, so he swore allegiance to Williams’s government and didn’t make trouble, even when others did.
And there were people who caused problems under Williams’s three year governorship, and this was not something that Williams was prepared to address effectively. He had some successes, like helping Massachusetts negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Narragansetts regarding some land, and passing various Puritan laws for proper behavior.
But the colony never fully unified under him. Like so many governors we’ve discussed, he was too mild, moderate and willing to listen, bend and compromise. And this only allowed factional bickering to continue during his entire time in office.
Within a year, that bickering had become problematic enough that his government ended up ordering that anyone who caused division within the colony would be sent back to England and tried by Cromwell. There’s a lot of good that can be said about Roger Williams, and you could make an argument that the best people tend to make the worst leaders. In fact, after my first year as a teacher, I probably have the world’s highest amount of sympathy for weak leaders. But strong leaders were necessary in the Colonial American wilderness, and Roger Williams wasn’t one.
He was relying on Cromwell’s backing to suppress even the most overtly destructive of behavior, and when it came time to actually use that backing to stop a group of seven troublemakers, Williams completely failed to follow through on the plan. He didn’t appear in court on the day of their trial. So the group had to be acquitted, they weren’t sent to England, and the problems continued.
And then he repeated this mistake. He did the same thing at a trial for another person who was working to destabilize the colony’s government. This man’s name was William Harris and he was a member of the old Coddington faction. Sometime during Williams’s governorship, Harris had gone into the wilderness alone for a period of weeks or months, and he reemerged advocating principles of continental Anabaptism, especially those advocated by the German groups related to the Mennonites. Among other things, he was strongly advocating for the communal ownership of property. In 1656, after he had a small group of followers, he published a pamphlet comparing his group to the House of David, and the rest of Rhode Island leadership to the House of Saul. He was actively working to undermine Williams’s government, at a time when its stability was tenuous at best.
Williams arrested Harris for treason, open defiance against the charter, Cromwell, and the notion of government itself. He imprisoned him and ordered his property seized pending trial. But, when the court date came, he again was nowhere to be found. This time, the Court ordered Williams to appear, but even when he did, months later, his prosecution was so weak that the court was confused about whether Harris was a traitor, or simply contemptuous and seditious. They sent the case to England for judgment, but the ship carrying it sank, and the issue remained unresolved.
This debacle highlighted Williams’s weakness enough that he was replaced as governor by Benedict Arnold in the next election, in 1657. And, Arnold brought some stability to the colony. He had a more forceful personality while fundamentally adhering to Williams’s beliefs and ideas. He politely rejected United Colony “requests” that Rhode Island persecute Quakers so that they couldn’t continue crossing the border and disturbing other colonies. And that drove the wedge between the United Colonies and Rhode Island even deeper.
And that’s because, well, we’ve talked about Quakers, but if even Rhode Island was having issues with non-Quaker religious dissidents and radicals, you know that the rest of New England was. In fact, in the United Colonies, that was the central issue of the Cromwell years.
We started this episode discussing the dying leadership of early New England history, and the consequences of that went beyond the borders of the Plymouth colony. In the rest of New England, it wasn’t quite as dramatically visible, but there was a new generation in charge, and that generation was falling heavily away from the Church.
And in those places the debate over religion, as well as how to save it, continued to revolve around the issue of baptism. It had been general New England policy to forbid the baptism of babies born to non-Church members. Everyone in New England attended Church, but to be a member, you had to prove your salvation in the eyes of the congregation and pastor. Like we discussed before, limiting membership had been meant to enable Churches to keep their religious character along with their democratic principles, and it had done that.
To baptize a kid, though, had become intertwined with approval of their parents, so stricter Congregational Puritans only wanted to baptize the children of the people whose salvation had, in their eyes, been proven. Lenient Churches in Plymouth and Connecticut, and the Presbyterians of Hingham, rejected this exclusivity, but Massachusetts and New Haven especially had been emphatic that failure to uphold standards for baptism would lead to the downfall of the Church. Davenport was the standard bearer of this ideology, and in his words “Christ doth not allow the Churches to provide for a succession by setting up a mere membership of adult persons that are visibly unfit for Church communion in all ordinances. Such irregular bringing of men into membership will unavoidably bring in the corrupting of religion, which will end in apostasy.”
The problem was that people wanted to get their kids baptized. It was a religious society, and leaving a baby unbaptized was a deeply uncomfortable notion. If this was an important issue to Davenport, it was a far, far more important one to parents.
Anabaptism, not continental, but the British-style Baptist movement, was getting much more popular in response to these restrictions. These ideas were extremely radical by the standards of the time, so Massachusetts had passed a law banishing all Baptists years before. Unlike with Quakers, though, their goal had simply been to limit the disturbance and encourage people to keep the colony’s religious life as quiet as possible, regardless of what they believed. There was no death penalty, no fining, imprisonment or whipping, just banishment. We’re not going to seek you out, but stay quiet or go.
One of the first cases of an accused Baptist was a man named Henry Dunster, who had refused to baptize his fourth child in 1653. The colony had first tried to gently convince him he was wrong, but he refused to agree with their reasoning. Then, they asked him to simply conform outwardly, so he could keep his Harvard position, and he responded by calling their requests hypocritical and resigning. Another Baptist wrote a book, which was publicly burned on Boston Common, and he was threatened until he returned to England. And again, when Henry Vane protested his treatment, Endicott and Dudley responded that the man should simply have kept quiet and continued his outward conformity, regardless of what he actually believed.
The Baptists weren’t interested in this quiet acceptance of the status quo, though, and they started to actively agitate for their beliefs. They were only a tiny bit less radical than the Quakers, and some of their agitation looked similar. In particular, they made a point of wearing hats in Church, though they did it perfectly quietly and while otherwise behaving completely normally.
In the most famous of these protests, a group of Massachusetts Baptists and Rhode Islanders who had crossed the border to support them wore hats while quietly reading their Bibles in Church. They were arrested and taken to the General Court in Boston, imprisoned, sentenced to be fined, and ordered to be whipped if they failed to pay. Knowing this was illegal, Rhode Islanders feigned ignorance of the banning of Baptists and asked to see the law. And, when they saw it, they pointed out that only banishment was a legal punishment and challenged Endicott, who flew into a rage, telling them they deserved death, and saying they couldn’t possibly maintain their doctrines before Massachusetts ministers.
When one of the baptists responded that he’d actually like to debate some of their ministers, the colony refused. The pastor’s fine was paid against his will, and all but one of the others released with no consequences. The one man whose sentence still stood, Obadiah Holmes, responded to the news by saying “I bless God that I am counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus,” which prompted John Wilson to hit him out of pure rage, exclaiming “the curse of God go with thee!” And he made it his goal to show his dedication by accepting the punishment cheerfully.
A fellow Baptist offered to pay Holmes’s fine, and he refused, choosing instead to endure the illegal punishment. Before his whipping, he was offered wine to lessen the pain, which again he refused lest people think he’d been able to endure simply because of the drink. After his thirty lashes, he was so injured that he couldn’t lie down for days, and he could only rest on his hands and knees, but he never showed the slightest hint of pain. When the whipping was done, he simply turned to the nearest magistrate and said “you have struck me as with roses.”
And this stoicism caught people’s attention. Bostonians who watched were impressed and congratulated him, and two of those people were soon arrested for their own contempt of authority. Stories of his conduct spread throughout New England, helping the Baptist cause, and were celebrated in Rhode Island. He’d achieved what the Quakers had always tried, but had been too outwardly belligerent to do successfully. He’d stood for his beliefs against the harshness and hostility of New England society, and in so doing, he’d undermined that society and offered an attractive alternative, and inspired others to do the same.
So the Baptist movement was growing in popularity, but the other response to New England’s policy of limited baptism had simply been a religious falling away, an increase in apathy and focus on worldly things like commerce, trade, business, money. A decline in religious sentiment would be natural anyway. There was a new generation, who had grown up in the wilderness, away from England’s sinful Anglican establishment. The most devout of these people had returned to England to fight for Cromwell, and the ones who were left were just ordinary people trying to make their way in a theocracy that was the only government they’d ever really known. They’d inherited neither allegiance to the Crown, nor aversion to anything that wasn’t Puritan. Adding exclusivity to this mix, the limitation of baptism, only pushed people further away. The policy was intended to make them earn their way into society, but it was trying to make them earn their way into a society that they hadn’t necessarily bought into, and they simply didn’t bother.
And watching these twin movements, opposite reactions to the same issue, New England pastors started to embrace the idea of allowing wider infant baptism. They formulated the Half-Way Covenant, a compromise in which Churches would baptize the children of Baptized and generally reasonable parents, even if they weren’t Church-members. It was only adopted on a voluntary, Church-by-Church basis, though they did talk about a future Synod to solidify it as New England policy, and people like Davenport still rejected it. Another opponent of the Covenant, named Nicholas Street, lamented its adoption, saying that “New England Christians are of all Christians in the world the most miserable and foolish. We have suffered many things in vain, in leaving such a country for this, our estates, friends, comforts there, to enjoy God and Christ, and our consciences in the congregational way, in a low afflicted condition in the wilderness, for so many years together and now we must lose these things which we have wrought, and may return to our former state when we please, which the Lord preserve us from.” But, it was widely embraced and did have the effects that both its supporters and its opponents expected. Church membership and involvement grew, but new members brought their apathy into the Church, itself.
In England, at the same time, the Savoy Declaration of Faith was also passed. This was a statement of Congregationalist belief, a modification of the Westminster Assembly to eliminate any Presbyterian influence, and to explicitly emphasize the autonomy of each local Church. It was meant to finalize the dominance of Congregationalism in England, and this was also happily adopted by New England Churches as soon as it was passed.
And of course, as all this was happening, news arrived of Cromwell’s death. For New England, this was discouraging. Davenport and Williams already thought things might not be going in the direction other Independents were saying, with Cromwell’s rule ushering in Christ’s return, and Cromwell dying certainly lent credence to their arguments. His death brought uncertainty in New England in the same way it brought hope in Virginia.
All they could do was hope for the best. New England immediately declared Richard Cromwell to be the new Lord Protector, and Richard wrote a nice letter telling New Englanders how highly his father had thought of them. As everyone knew, though, if something were to happen, the aftermath of Cromwell’s death would be the time.