"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards
into the future. "
Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan has proposed that the first content of any
new medium is the old media and that there is a moment, a boundary,
when that transition occurs. While this idea has been applied to the transitions between oral language, written language, the
codex and various incarnations of electronic language, the idea can
also be applied to the transition faced by seventeenth century English
emigrants to New England. Though these colonists crossed a quite
obvious geological boundary, they carried the content of their "old
media" with them in the form of their presuppositions about how
society is organized, how it functions, and how its participants should
function within it.
The form those presuppositions took, and the alterations they underwent
as colonists from different areas encountered each other, adapted to
their new environment, and passed from one generation to the next, is
the subject of Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New
England Town. The book explores the town of Sudbury,
Massachusetts in its earliest years. The author
suggests that even though the inhabitants came from England with
specific assumptions about how their society should be organized,
the fact that they came from several areas,
each with its own distinct structures, led to the establishment of new,
complex, societies. Many of the
early settlers stated explicitly that they were interested in creating
new laws and social structures that did not conform to those they left
behind in England. The Massachusetts colonial land granting system was such that they could
attempt
this on a
town by town basis.
As Powell pursuasively argues, those new social structures were
developed by people whose backgrounds differed in various ways. Powell
traces the pre-colonist life of several of the leaders of
Sudbury to explore those differences. The most important, in terms of
subsequent practice in new England, was in land use. Settlers from the
communal, open-field system of East Anglia organized their towns as
central living space surrounded by communal fields, pastures, and
woodlands. Land division and ownership were neither communal nor
egalitarian, however, shared use of the land was the norm for the early
Sudbury community. The process of land distribution was unlike that in
England. As Powell points out: "the Bay
government and the town government were accomplishing a virtual
revolution in the systems of social and economic status of each
community. For the first time in their lives, the inhabitants of an
English town were assuming that each adult male would be granted some
land free and clear." (Powell, )With that land came expectations of
responsibility. Land grants were not
sustained for those who would not settle in the town, that is, for
absentee
landlords and speculators, taxes were to be determined and collected
by the town, decisions were to be made as a town through town meetings,
and communal
land practices were to continue.
In Sudbury, as in similar towns throughout colonial New England, the
development of the town government was one of adaptation based on the
prior experience of the participants. In addition to those with an
open-field system background, early leaders came from such disparate
systems as that of Berkhamstead, a market town and borough with a
written charter that delineated specific rights and Sudbury, Suffolk,
where parish and town government were inextricably intertwined, and
town governance rotated through the hands of a few. While seventeenth
century New Englanders came from a culture that accepted the communal
regulation of their personal behavior, the extent of that regulation,
and thus the expectations of what constituted the "correct" degree,
also varied from region to region.
Despite a concerted effort on the part of colonists to work together as
a community, reconciling such differing backgrounds and expectations
did result in conflict. Problems related to the division, use and
maintenance of the land appear to have been the subject of much of this
early conflict. Powell also finds problems related to structuring town
government and determining the amount of service deemed appropriate by
the free townsmen, as well as implementing an appropriate tax system to
cover town expenses. Other areas of conflict settled around the church,
especially the responsibilities of the minister and his role in the
community. Resolving intra-community relations, as well as relations
with neighboring towns, the General Court, and with the indigenous
population were also the purview of the selectmen.
While the first generation of colonists needed to adapt to both a
different physical and social environment, the second generation
brought its own challenges. Powell suggests that most Sudbury settlers,
given the structure of colonization process, became landowners, a fate
they may not have achieved had they stayed in England. By moving into
the ranks of land owners, or, for some, by owning or acquiring rights
to larger areas of land than they could have expected in England,
settlers accepted for themselves the definitions, expectations,
identities and responsibilities that land ownership entailed. Among
these was the belief that land ownership was a family concern and that
land was an inheritable item.
Powell, Demos, and Greven all look at the impact of population pressure
on this system. In a society where children were valued and seen as potential
contributors to the family welfare yet infant mortality was high, a large
number of infant births was the norm. While the low infant mortality rates
of the first years of settlement were no doubt greeted as a blessing, that
population growth, which according to Demos doubled every 15 years, was not
without challenges. Later citizens may have seen the United States in terms
of limitless space and Manifest Destiny. For New England colonists, claiming
the uncleared and still hostilely populated forests to their west involved
rather more, politically and practically, than simply picking up and moving.
If the colonists maintained the open-field system of agriculture, land use
patterns would determine what types of land, in what proximity, would need
to be allotted.
Perceptions of familial roles would also be a determining factor in deciding
how expansion would occur. Although Greven falters when attempting to adduce
the reactions and motivations of colonists, his work does show some interesting
trends. Marriage was a family decision, with age of marriage being most closely
linked to when the married couple could acquire a home and attendant properties
of their own. Thus, elder sons who could receive an inheritance of new land
from their parents would marry at a slightly earlier age, while younger sons,
who might have to wait to inherit the home of their parents, married at later
ages. The communal expectations of families, that members would continue
to interact closely and even live in close proximity, combined with the expectations
of subsequent generations that land ownership was a given, combined with
the expanding population of those families, put pressure on the system.
These second and subsequent generations of colonists, though acting within
a social system transported from England by their parents, filtered and adapted
that system based on their new circumstances. Some practices continued to
be observed while others changed. Land ownership and a right to vote may
have been available to a larger percentage of the white males in the community
than that experienced in the world they left behind, but deference, an acceptance
of one's rank within a stratified social system, remained in force throughout
the seventeenth century. Through his study of meetinghouse seating
arrangements, Dinkin concludes that "within the 'democratic' framework of
Massachusetts society, where a majority of the people owned at least some
property. . .there existed a highly ordered social system that ranked persons
according to their standing in the community." (Dinkins, 415)
However, definitions determining both rank and community roles, changed.
The younger colonists New England experience combined several variations
of community and governmental forms, and they adapted accordingly. For example,
in Sudbury the structure of the second generation land grants are markedly
different from that of the first generation. The uniformity of lot shape
and size indicated a move toward individual ownership and use, and away from
the seemingly haphazard, but emminently practical, first division of land
that privileged open-field communal use. Town governance also shifted, as
described by Lockridge and Kreider. Examing the towns of Dedham and Watertown
between 1640-1740, they conclude that "the locus of effective political power
in these two towns shifted from one body--the board of selectmen--to another--the
town meeting--and that the locus of power remained firmly with the meeting
thereafter." (Lockridge, 550)
Powell, Demos, Lockridge, Greven, and Dinkins illuminate societal
beliefs and practices of specific New England communities. In Fierce
Communion: Family and Community in Early America,
Helena Wall shows how those beliefs spanned the many communities of the English
speaking New World. Her work focuses on court cases and traces the shift
from a society based on communal interests to that which prized the individual.
Through arbitration and court, colonists sought to achieve community stability
by guarding their reputations, regulating the personal affairs of their members,
and controlling the behavior of their children through pressure on parents.
Hall suggests that a society that saw disorder in personal affairs as a threat
to the whole community, had no compuntion in exerting "its influence even
when its goals were contradictory or when they ran contrary to the needs
and desires of couples. . .Community influence tended to give greater weight
to social obligations than to emotional needs, to the reinforcement of expected
roles within marriage, and to maintaining the appearance of a happy marriage
while sacrificing hopes for its achievement." (Hall, 49, 66) This power of
community is also reflected by Rutman: "we can postulate good neighborliness
to be an aspect of the mentalité of the neighborhoods, for we are
probably not far wrong when we assume that, to the degree that the necessity
of being a good neighbor required, good neighborliness was internalized."
(Rutman, 160)
Like Hall, Rutman looks at colonial communities and community studies to
try and find overarching similarities and differences. However, despite the
differences in individual community practices among English-based colonies,
the continuity between English life in England and life in New England is
thrown into sharp relief when compared to the social structure and practice
of the Dutch. Despite the myriad differences between individual English colonial
communities, Merwick shows that those differences fade in the face of comparison
to the quite different "town" system developed by the Dutch colonialists
in the Albany region with its own conceptions of land use, land expectations,
and governance practices. The early English settlers, in pouring the "old
medium" of their lives in England into the "new medium" of life in the colonies
certainly created a new society with changing expectations. Though the world
they created was to become something different from that which they had left,
they certainly, intentionally or not, eyed their English "rear-view mirror"
as they "marched backwards into the future."