As one of the earliest republics of modern times and certainly one of the most successful, the United States has elicited considerable world-wide interest in its constitution, constitutional system, and ideological origins of that system. This is the subject that I shall be addressing in this lecture.
  
  Late eighteenth century Americans were acutely self-conscious of their deviation from the predominant pattern of political organization then known in Europe. Most Western peoples simply assumed that monarchy was both normal and preferable. Even American advocates of republicanism such as Thomas Jefferson spoke of republicanism as an experiment. The question facing Americans in their revolutionary era had two aspects. On the one hand they felt compelled to search through history as well as to explore the depths of human psychology in a search for a republican pattern that would actually work. On the other they were required to defend this pattern as a viable alternative to monarchy.
  
  In the process of dealing with this question, some Americans turned to the democracy of ancient Athens or the Roman republic. Both of these offered impressive evidence for the antiquity of non-monarchical governmental forms, and Americans never tired of citing these examples. Yet neither seemed entirely relevant to the American scene, and it was to other ideas, more British and more modern, that Americans generally turned both in defining and in defending their new constitutional system. These modern sources of American constitutional ideas were essentially derived from Puritanism and from the political theories of John Locke. Indeed, Locke himself, though a latitudinarian Anglican, was the son of a Puritan father; and one could plausibly argue that the Lockean theories themselves were shaped to a significant degree by Puritan ideology.
  
  The myth of Puritan origins of American society is so strong that, though the vast majority of the American people today are not of Puritan or even of English ancestry, we all tend to identify with the sturdy and courageous New Englanders who braved stormy seas and a frontier wilderness to establish their ideal community in America. The Puritan community established in seventeenth century Massachusetts has been praised as the cradle of American democracy providing the ideological bulwark for those Bostonians who first resisted the British and, in our own century,
  
  those Americans who resisted fascism in Europe and Asia. However, the Puritan community has also been described as feudal and unamerican, a theocracy or, at the very least, an oligarchy, persecuting dissent and imposing a moralistic reign of terror on its own people and subsequent generations of Americans. In my lecture today I would like to turn an historians eye on the American Puritans, examine their complex ideas and experiences, and suggest to you how such disparate images of these people can exist simultaneously today. In the course of my analysis, I shall also indicate several significant Puritan contributions to American political thought and to American constitutionalism. I shall not argue that Puritanism is the only source of American constitutionalism but rather that it is a critical source without an understanding of which the development of American constitutionalism becomes unintelligible.
  
  Puritanism is a highly sophisticated system of thought owing much to Calvinism and Biblical analogy but also to the English literary and common law traditions. David Hollinger, a contemporary American historian observes that the outpouring of scholarship on American Puritanism in the last fifty years has taught us to marvel at the highly articulated intellectuality of Puritan culture in both Old and New England. The Puritans were enthusiastic inheritors not only of Christian and biblical scholarship, but also of the new learning and culture of Renaissance humanism. From both sources they took materials that they strenuously manipulated in order to achieve the highest cultural goal of the religious intellectual: a justification of the ways of God to man and woman. Out of this striving came a complex synthesis of supernatural, rationalistic, and emotional elements that has remained a powerful influence in American intellectual life down to the present.
  
  At the heart of the Puritan synthesis is the idea of the covenant. This was a concept, developed first by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century continental and English reformed theologians, that defined the relationship between God and humankind as being based on a covenant--a series of divinely ordained yet understandable rules and mutual responsibilities. The covenant or federal idea had wide-ranging applicability. John Winthrop in his sermon on Christian charity used the concept both to expound a complete theory of political authority and social relations and to explain the world-historical significance of the entire New England venture.
  
  The name Puritan derives from the objective of the Puritan party, that of purifying the Church of England, one of the Reformed churches of sixteenth century Europe, of what the Puritan party regarded as vestiges of medieval and feudal Catholicism.
  
  Finding themselves in a state of perpetual dissent during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, the Puritans bided their time and hoped for a better day. They constituted an interesting and diverse group of people whose lives and fortunes were tied more to the modern than to the old era. They tended to be urban, middle- class or skilled artisans, practitioners of the common law (as opposed to practitioners in Royal Prerogative courts). They were frequently involved in navigation and trade. In 1625 they would be faced with the ascension to the throne of Charles I, profoundly anti-Puritan in his attitudes and program. Thus, early in the seventeenth century, some Puritans began to explore their alternatives: Separatism, Revolution, exile, or the New England way. Hence Massachusetts Bay.
  
  That portion of British North America that we now call New England had been granted to the Plymouth Company, a joint stock company, by King James I in 1606. Colonies were being planted as early as 1607, but these were quickly abandoned. By 1620 all that remained in New England were a few isolated fishing villages. In that year a new charter conveyed to the New England Council, the successor to the Plymouth Company, all the territory in North America between latitudes 40 and 48 degrees north. In this same year, the first permanent settlement of New England was made at Plymouth by a small group of English Separatists known to history as the Pilgrims. It was this group that adopted the Mayflower Compact, the first articles of government in British America.
  
  This small settlement persevered and survived. Yet the much larger and, historically, more significant settlement was that of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay. Their views differed from those of the Plymouth group largely in the fact that the Plymouth Pilgrims were Separatists whereas the Massachusetts Bay Puritans were non-separatists.
  
  The Puritans differed widely among themselves from reforming Anglicans to Presbyterians who sought a national establishment of religion like that of Scotland or of the City of Geneva in Switzerland to the Independents who, accepting the idea of an establishment of religion, nonetheless sought to rest juridical authority in the local congregation. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans looked with horror at the separatism of the Pilgrims. While deploring the religious conditions in England, they deplored and feared even more the idea of religious schism within the national church. Some of these non-separating Puritans, probably the vast majority of them, were Presbyterians. Those who came to America were Independents or Congregationalists, but congregationalists with a difference; non-separating Congregationalists.
  
  In this group were many urban people, particularly of the rising middle class. Economically many of them were men of substance. Some had served in the House of Commons, and a very few were even among the nobility. They had all sorts of vested interests in England and no desire to leave home, its comforts, and its privileges. Yet with the accession of Charles I in 1625 and his dissolution of Parliament in 1629, it seemed that nothing less than civil war would possibly accomplish their program at home. Thus many began to look with favor on the possibility of settlement in the New World.
  
  In 1628 the Massachusetts Bay Company received a grant of territory from the New England Council which was subsequently approved by the crown. This approval was technically the royal approval of the Charter, one of the most interesting documents of English settlement in America. All other charters specified the headquarters of the company, normally London but occasionally Bristol or another English city, where the stockholders would meet to conduct their business. Through design or oversight the Massachusetts Bay charter failed to specify a headquarters. The English joint stock companies previously formed were resident in England. They might, and usually did, send colonial governors as their representatives to manage the settlements, but such officers were delegates of and responsible to the officers of the company in England. The English government was thereby able to monitor the activities of the companies and keep them in check. Few stockholders actually migrated to the colonies.
  
  But in the Massachusetts Bay charter there was no stipulation with respect to where the Company should have its headquarters and hold its business meetings. Such an omission may have been an oversight, but it was likely planned either with the ignorance or the connivance of the government. By 1629 the Company was making arrangements for a large permanent settlement, and those stockholders who desired to remain in England were prevailed upon to dispose of their stock to others who would settle. Clearly the design of those who migrated to Massachusetts in
  
  1630 was to take the charter to Massachusetts and there to carry on government and trade and all company business safely removed from the coercive force of the King and the Kings Council.
  
  Already in 1628 before Royal confirmation of the charter in 1629, the Company sent John Endecott to New England with a small party of settlers who established themselves at the little village of Salem. In 1630 the government of the Company transferred itself to New England and, under the leadership of Governor John Winthrop, laid the foundations anew for the Massachusetts Colony when they settled in Boston in the fall.
  
  The charter of the Company granted virtual self-rule. The Company had control over admission of freemen, full and absolute power and authority to correct, punish, and rule subjects settling in the territory comprised in their grant, and power to resist . . . by all fitting ways and means whatever all persons attempting the destruction, invasion, detriment or annoyance of the plantation. The Company, by charter to be ruled by a Governor, a Deputy Governor, and a General Court of assistants with the former elected by the latter and the latter by the freemen, was now made up of Puritan elements. It simply used the charter to establish in the New England wilderness the good society of their dreams.
  
  The Puritans ideas of government and of religion were so closely connected both in theory and in practice that this early New England government has often been spoken of as a theocracy. Others have used the term oligarchy, and one of the early Puritan leaders described the system as a silent democracy in the face of a speaking aristocracy. Yet there were profoundly democratic principles embedded both in Puritan theory and in Puritan practice, principles that they only faintly understood at the time.
  
  The Massachusetts Bay Puritans believed that, within the bounds of charity, one may distinguish the saints, i.e., the elect, from the damned. Two marks of sainthood were established: first, a religious mark, a work of grace in the heart and visible holiness; second, a civil mark, owning the covenant, i.e., signing the church covenant and agreeing to be bound by it. Obviously, the Puritans argued, if one may determine the saints within the community, then one should designate the saints to rule. Therefore suffrage was limited, not by property qualifications at first but by church membership, by visible sainthood. Because of this limitation, the clergy exercised a profound influence in New England life, but it was always an indirect influence. Never in Massachusetts Bay did a member of the clergy serve as governor of the Colony. Thus one had a kind of aristocracy imposed upon the community, but among the saints, those selected to be among the aristocracy, there was real democracy. Within the church, every male member had a vote, and every members vote was as important as any others. Shortly after arrival in Massachusetts, the franchise was extended to all male church members. Thus every church member was given the rights of stockholders in the Company and full political franchise without reference to property qualifications.
  
  Partially because of the level of self-government available in Massachusetts, partially because of the continuing frustration of Puritan hopes and political troubles in England on the eve of the English Civil Wars, partially, and for a variety of other reasons, large numbers of Puritans migrated to Massachusetts in the first decade of settlement. Indeed, this is known as the Great Migration. Among these migrants were many well-educated men, far more than in any other colony of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and here was formed the first American college, Harvard College, in 1636. Here also the first printing in Anglo-America took place.
  
  These Massachusetts Bay Puritans vested their enterprise with cosmic implications. It was probably aboard the Arbella, the ship that carried Winthrop and other future leaders of Massachusetts, that Winthrop preached his sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity. In this sermon, Winthrop clarified the importance of the Puritan community. Wee shall be, he said, as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all the people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present helpf from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Nothing ever written better expresses the American sense of destiny. Daniel Boorstin observes that The Puritan beacon for misguided mankind was to be neither a book nor a theory. It was to be the community itself. America had something to teach all men: not by precept but by example, not by what it said but by how it lived. Or, as Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury state the case in From Puritanism to Postmodernism, migrants were seen as new Israelites, small bands placed firmly on the stage of cosmic history. . . . [Their] arrival in the New World marks a specific point on a historical continuum which had begun with creation and will cease only with the apocalyptic fullness of Gods final judgment
  
  This emphasis on the community gave Puritanism a practical bent in spite of its origins in the minutiae of Protestant theological doctrine. It is instructive that in the very first year in America Winthrop called a meeting of freemen to agree to their frame of government and to elect their leaders. Even with a royal charter, Winthrop believed consent of the governed was required for a due form of government. Fundamental deviation from the Puritan theological system was simply unknown. On those few occasions where it arose, in the case of Roger Williams most especially, it was silenced by banishment or, in the case of Mary Dyer, execution. More typically, controversies centered on practical matters of governance. Laws were modeled closely on the Bible. In 1647 at Cambridge a Synod defined the role of the magistrates as nursing fathers to the church within their bounds.
  
  With this emphasis on community and with their predisposition not to separate, i.e., to accommodate insofar as possible, we see the beginnings of the New England Way. Until the time of Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the eighteenth century, again if we except Roger Williams, there was hardly an important work of speculative theology produced in New England. Instead there came from New England an abundance of sermons, statutes, and remarkable works of history. Their disputes were more practical than theoretical. They experienced crises over who should rule, whether the towns should be represented in the General Court as they were after 1634 by deputies, a system that by 1644 produced a bicameral legislature. They argued over the power or representation of different classes,
  
  whether penalties for crime should be fixed by statute, whether the deputies should have a veto, whether outlying towns should have greater representation in the General Court. Again to quote Daniel Boorstin, if, indeed, the Puritans were theology-minded, what they argued about was institutions. Their attention focused less on doctrine than on the living community. Alternative points of view were not welcome. In 1647 Nathaniel Ward spoke for Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam when he declared: I dare take upon me, to be the Herauld of New-England so farre as to prroclaime to the world, in the name of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better. In their very success in keeping the community orthodox, the Puritans made it sterile of speculative thought. This sterility and intolerance is probably the most unattractive element of Puritan thought, and it has been noted by every critic from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The boundless physical space, the surrounding wilderness into which dissenters were driven, deprived New England ministry of the need to develop within its own theology that spaciousness, that room for variation, which came to characterize Puritanism in England. Thus it was English Puritans, not their American cousins, who first developed ideas of toleration in the English-speaking world. Persons looking for the ideological roots of liberty, for a firm commitment of these early Americans to toleration and respect for others, will be profoundly disappointed. Nearly every American, unless educated in history, naively believes that these hardy pioneers were dedicated to freedom; it is almost an embarrassment to discover that they never even wrestled with the idea. Yet, this very failure was for a time a source of strength. They focused on community building, and orthodoxy strengthened their practical bent.
  
  More like Americans of later generations than their contemporary Puritans in England, the American Puritans were more interested in institutions that functioned than in elegant theories. They were more interested in purifying practices than in perfecting theology, and more committed to platforms than to creeds. This emphasis on practice, on a way of life, was so strong that it made any generalized concept of the church seem unreal or even dangerous. They offered neither a creed nor a church but the New England Way.
  
  That way, increasingly, was defined in terms of outward, social responsibilities. Sainthood was defined in terms of the inward work of grace in the heart and the outward owning of the covenant. But only owning the covenant was an empirical phenomenon visible to all and indisputable. More and more the social dimension was given priority in human relationships. By the end of the first generation, the Half-Way Covenant was adopted whereby critical rights were extended to those citizens lacking an experience of grace but willing to own the covenant.
  
  The basic fact about New England congregationalism, again to quote Boorstin, was its emphasis on the going relationship among men. Each church was not a part of a hierarchy, nor a branch of a perfected institution, but a kind of club composed of individual Christians searching for a godly way of life. At the heart of their ideas
  
  was the unifying notion that a proper Christian church was one adapted to the special circumstances of its place and arising out of the continuing agreement of particular Christians. A church was formed by the covenanting or agreement of a group of saints, that is, Christians who had had a special converting experience. They replaced the traditional European sacramental system with a more modern and functional one. A minister was called by a congregation; when the relation ceased, he was no longer a minister. Marriage was a contract between two consenting parties. Thus relationships among men overshadowed inherited or anointed status. As Jonathan Clark insists in his recent study, The Language of Liberty 1660-1832, the theory which grounded the legitimacy of government on the consent of the governed [for Americans in the Revolutionary era]] did not arise primarily as a comment on the practice of representation in the colonies: it drew its main force from the idea of covenant in colonial religion.
  
  Being colonials encouraged the Puritans in their conservative thought patterns. However utopian their thought, they did not consider themselves free to construct their political institutions apart from English precedents and control. They assumed that there were definite limits which the legislators were not free to transgress; i.e., constitutionalism. Furthermore, they assumed that the primary and normal way of developing civil institutions was by custom and traditon rather than by legislative or administrative fiat. The charter of 1629 provided they could make all manner of wholesome and reasonable laws, but with the provision that they be not contrairie to the Lawes of this our Realme of England. In 1635, the deputies, worried about lack of restraints on the magistrates, convinced the General Court that some men should be appointed to frame a body of grounds of laws, in resemblance to a Magna Charta, which . . . should be received for fundamental laws. Though, in codifying their laws, the Puritans said that they started from the lawes of God, rather than the laws of Englishmen, in their minds the two frequently coincided. This conservative cast saved Puritans from many of the extremes that so frequently accompany utopian thought. There is a strikingly pragmatic quality to their work, a quality nurtured by the English law as well as by their own vivid sense of evil. Again and again one sees in Puritanism a focus on human and practical problems.
  
  Interestingly and significantly, these practical problems in the political arena are precisely the problems with which Americans have wrestled in every age and which continue to engage us today: problems of the proper organization of society and of making it function for the common good; problems of insuring the integrity and self-restraint of its leaders, and with preventing its government from being oppressive.
  
  The critical problems with which the Puritans in New England struggled may be summarized under three broad topics. The first was how to select leaders and representatives. From the beginning what had distinguished the Puritans was their strict criterion of church-membership and their linking of church membership with the franchise, their fear that if the unconverted could be members of the church they might become its rulers. Their underlying determination was that only saints, those chosen by God, might be allowed to ascend to political power. Their concept of a
  
  church was, in its own very limited way, of a kind of ecclesiastical self-government: there were to be no bishops because the members of each church were fit to rule themselves. Many of the major disputes of early New England were essentially debates over who were fit rulers and how they should be selected. What were to be the relations between the magistrates and the deputies? How many deputies from each town?
  
  Their second concern was with the proper limits of political power. This question was never better stated than by John Cotton. It is therefore most wholsome for Magistrates and Officers in Church and Common-wealth, never to affect more liberty and authority then will do them good, and the People good; for what ever transcendant power is given, will certainly over-run those that give it, and those that receive it: There is a straine in a mans heart that will sometime or other runne out to excesse, unlesse the Lord restraine it, but it is not good to venture it: It is necessary therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited. . . . The form of the early compilations of their laws shows this preoccupation. The first compilation of Massachusetts law (1641) was known as The Body of Liberties and managed to state the whole of the legal system in terms of the liberties of different members of the community. It began with a paraphrase of Magna Charta, followed by the limitations on judicial proceedings, went on to the liberties of freemen, women, children, foreigners, etc. Even the law of capital crimes was stated in the form of liberties. This conviction that government must be limited and that no person must be permitted to hold absolute power is well reflected in the first inaugural address of that decidedly non-Puritan American president, Thomas Jefferson. I know, Jefferson said, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the worlds best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. . . . Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
  
  The Puritans third major problem was what made for a feasible federal organization. How should power be distributed between local and central organs? Congregationalism, the Puritan church, itself was an attempt to answer this question with specific institutions, to find a means by which churches could extend the free hand of fellowship to one another without binding individual churches or individual church-members to particular dogmas or holding them in advance to the decisions of a central body. Thus a synod, a gathering of representatives of all of the churches, was empowered to examine scripture and determine a correct position. However, this synod was denied juridical authority. Any charges brought against an individual for violation of the doctrinal or disciplinary standards of the church had to be presented in the individuals local congregation and resolved there in a kind of ecclesiastical trial before a jury of ones peers. The practical issues which did not fall
  
  under either of the two earlier questions came within this class. What power, if any, had the General Court of the colony over the towns in their selection of their militia officers? One of the townsmen of Hingham expressed willingness to die for the right to choose the officers of the town militia. Or, what was the power of the central government to call a church synod? The deputies of the towns were willing to consider an invitation to send delegates, but objected to a command.
  
  If we examine the actual offices and functions of government is Massachusetts Bay in its first generation, we look in vain for the complex system of checks and balances that characterizes American constitutionalism or for the fully elaborated definition of authority vested in federal and state governments. Yet the major themes with which the Constitutional Convention wrestled in 1787 and which have enlivened American political debate ever since seem to be there in embryo:
  
  How to choose good leaders and avoid choosing bad leaders; how to vest sufficient power in government to permit its functioning without granting a license for tyranny; how to balance the interests of the whole people with the interests of smaller units, and, finally, how to move from principle to application, from grand design to a functioning, viable society.
  
  However, early American Puritanism was elitist and hierarchical. How these basic Puritan ideas came to be worked into a revolutionary framework can only be explained by reference to the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and to the defense of revolution against the monarch advanced by John Locke.
  
  The first civil wars, those of the 1630s and 1640s, sometimes termed the Puritan Rebellion, pitted the Parliament against the King in a struggle over an appropriate definition of sovereignty. The leadership of the Parliamentary and anti- royal party was Puritan. While the Parliamentary armies defeated the royal armies and the king was subsequently executed, the Protectorate that followed proved to be a failure. Therefore in 1660 the English monarchy was restored. However, since Parliament invited Charles II to return and become king, it assumed he would honor the rights of Parliament. He and particularly hiss brother, James II, who succeeded him on the throne, failed to do so. Parliamentary frustration with the restored monarchy led in 1688 to a second revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.
  
  Whereas the earlier civil war had divided the country and pitted the two political parties, Whigs and Tories, against one another, in 1688 both parties united in demanding that James II vacate the throne. Consequently the king was left with little support and had little alternative but to honor the demand of Parliament and leave the country. Parliament then declared the throne vacant and invited William and Mary to rule as joint sovereigns and as constitutional monarchs.
  
  From this political transition emerged a new concept of sovereignty as residing in the King-in-Parliament and of the relationship of the two parties as one of governing party and the kings loyal opposition. Thus dissent was domesticated and given a voice and a place in the decision-making process. This concept of a two party system with the party out of power recognized as loyal and legitimate became a central theme in the American constitutional system.
  
  James II fled to France and there tried to enlist the support of France and of
  
  other monarchies for military action to restore him to the throne of England. The
  
  argument used was the familiar divine right one: Kings rule by divine right. That is,
  
  kings are responsible only to God. Subjects must be obedient; God will judge a bad
  
  ruler; this is not the responsibility of subjects.
  
  To counter the effect of this argument, the noted English philosopher John Locke published Two Treatises of Government in 1690 defending the Parliaments dismissal of the king. Locke presented against the divine right theory what is called the social compact theory of government. He insisted that governments are not created by God but by people themselves for very pragmatic purposes. Every human being, he insisted, has the right to life, to liberty, and to his own property. However, in ancient times people learned that for every individual to protect his own life, liberty, and property is an inefficient and dangerous way to proceed. So, argued Locke, peoples banded together into societies and created social compacts or contracts. Basically, they agreed that they would be governed by a ruler. They would subject themselves to a state, they would support, pay for, and defend their state, so that the state could protect their basic rights.
  
  However, for Locke, the government compact was like any other contract. It required performance of its terms by both parties. Therefore, he reasoned, if a king fails to protect the life, liberty, and property of his subject; if, instead, the king abuses and violates these rights, then the people are relieved of any obligation to obey the king and have a right to dismiss him. As Locke viewed the English revolution of 1688-89, it was not the Parliament that revolted but the king. When James II ceased being a good king and performing his contractual obligations, the Parliament had no alternative but to fire him and find a new king who would act properly. Thus Locke sought to remove the mystery of kingship, the claim that it rested on the will of God, and to replace that claim with one that kingship rests on a contract with the people which, if violated by either party, terminates the obligation of the other.
  
  This Lockean way of looking at government shaped the American defense of their own revolution a century later. Jeffersons Declaration of Independence is essentially a listing of the ways in which Americans believe that the English king had violated their rights and thus lost the right to govern them. Not surprisingly, when the Americans got around to writing their own constitution, a considerable part of it was shaped in such a way as to guarantee the sovereignty of the people and to limit the ability of an office holder to violate his (or her) obligations. This is the source of the American conviction that people, not governments, are sovereign and that constitutions must protect the people and their rights against encroachment by the government.
  
  Puritanism and Lockean thought were not, of course, the only ideological sources of American constitutionalism. Yet these were absolutely central, and I hope that you now have a better understanding of American Puritanism, of Lockean political theory, and of their contributions to the American constitutional system.

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