The goal for the Puritans was distant but, in the context of their faith, realizable: to construct a harmonious community ruled by the love of God and enforced by divine commandments when necessary. It eventually became evident that Winthrop’s admonition to live lives of “Justice and Mercy” did not apply to their relationships with Native Americans, who were described as no better than “speaking apes” by the seventeenth-century English scholar, Samuel Purchas. That tendency toward saving souls even if the bodies they inhabited had to be destroyed continued to plague criminal justice in all subsequent decades.11
The Puritan settlers’ intention to create a theocratic community has had no equal in America. Though the intensity of commitment to that agenda diminished during the following centuries, many of its assumptions were sufficiently embedded in the social consciousness to remain active. Those assumptions have guided the actions of subsequent generations down to the present, even when those assumptions were no longer operative. Puritan Christianity has been considered by most historians of the era to be the most basic, the most important feature of the New England colonies and, to a significant degree, one of the most significant sources of American culture. Historian Mark Noll succinctly summarizes its impact: “They were the one group of colonists who aspired to establish an entire society on the basis of their theology and the only ones to have partially succeeded.”12
The iconic testament to the Puritan form of faith is found in the sermons delivered by John Winthrop. During his three-month long trip across the Atlantic, Winthrop served as his fellow voyagers spiritual as well as governmental leader. He preached regularly during the journey to instruct and inspire his companions. Winthrop’s best-known sermon is titled “A Model of Christian Charity.” Seeking an image to make his point clear, Winthrop draws on Saint Matthew’s version of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, urging the colonists not toward pride but toward humility. God was depending on their risky mission to succeed. It was a “holy experiment…. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”13
The phrasing is significant in that it postulates a divine destiny for their voyage as well as a sense of divine judgment if they failed. The Puritans at their worst were certainly characterized by an elitism that bordered on self-righteous arrogance, arising from their sense of being chosen by God. It is commendable, if not always admirable, when it is remembered that they risked everything they had for the sole purpose of establishing a biblically based church and government that would stand as an example to the world. Their goal was not economic prosperity (though it was assumed that God would take care of the faithful), nor was it just personal freedom from oppression (though they would achieve that also if they were faithful). Puritans desired with religious desperation to be such a witness to God’s glory that it would convert the Anglican Church in England, to which they still gave their allegiance, and the oppressive English government, from which they had fled, and inspire all nations for all time to come.
The idea of living under a covenant with God and subject to the scrutiny of the world gave rise to a moral theocracy within the Massachusetts colony. Their desire was to build a religious framework so strong that it would hold society together regardless of the weakness of some. “Despite the awful sinfulness of many,” the founders of Massachusetts Bay “erected civil and ecclesiastical institutions to ensure that their society would be godly even if the majority of people in it were not.”14
The metaphoric ideal of a resplendent city on a hill, dedicated to God’s glory, was a powerful source of physical and spiritual strength to a people whose survival was never guaranteed or easy. The remarks of John Winthrop faded gradually, but the concept sank deep into American consciousness. The Puritan sense of mission to become a model for the world became one of America’s characteristic ideals, lifted even higher in the nineteenth century, by the idea that God had given the United States a “manifest destiny” to spread American culture first across the eastern mountains and finally across the continent, by force if necessary.
The Puritan life, carried out as a divinely guided mission, was perhaps the reason why none of the Puritan colonies in New England embraced the transportation of offenders from England, Ireland, or Scotland as a source of labor or skills. More than twenty thousand (and perhaps two or three times that number) criminals were transported to the Americas between 1700 and 1775, most of them to Maryland and Virginia. It need not be concluded that the rationale was based on any great compassion for offenders who were available for transport. Connecticut, like the other New England colonies, simply had no need of that particular resource. Their biblical morality would be more open to the African slave trade.
Puritan Protestantism’s influence on New England society extended down the Atlantic and westward to the degree that one historian thought it not excessive to label it the “Righteous Empire.”15 As colonies evolved into states, the general Protestant culture held the upper hand politically, socially, and morally, especially in rural areas, but also to a remarkable degree in the urban regions. The Puritan clergy and laity expounding and living out this vision became the first leaders of government and society. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the civic officials, judges, schoolteachers, and business owners, as well as the resident pastors and theologians, were drawn from the Puritan churches. Well into the eighteenth century, the state governments in Connecticut, and most of New England, did not officially recognize a new town until a theologically acceptable pastor had been installed. Once in place, power does not yield its sway easily. Two centuries passed before the disenfranchisement of the Congregational Church was voted into Connecticut’s constitution in 1818. Connecticut was one of the last of the original colonies to take that step away from a virtual theocracy to allow a more democratic system to emerge. It remains one of the great ironies of the first American immigrants that, having fled persecution and oppression in Europe, they tended to be just as exclusive and oppressive as the governments and churches they had condemned, until the early nineteenth century when they were forced by the legislature to share power and control.
American Puritanism differed in one key regard from dissenters left behind in England. They were far more adaptable over the next two centuries. The rigid systematic theology of John Calvin, which had inspired and guided them, was softened slowly under the exigencies of frontier living as the wildernesses of New England were tamed, the Native Americans subdued, and thousands of new immigrants brought other faiths to Connecticut and every other colony. The foundations of Puritanism evolved to absorb ideas from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Divine sovereignty, predestination, human sinfulness, and total dependence on God’s grace to survive and thrive were remodeled to integrate new ideas about humanity’s willpower and capacity to change. Instead of moral inability, theologians talked of the human power to do otherwise than had previously been though possible. The importance of that shift for criminal justice was immense.
Among the numerous theologians and pastors who transformed the original theocratic concepts of the first Puritans, several were particularly important in creating the Connecticut religious context in 1875: Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Taylor, and Horace Bushnell. All four raised moderating voices within Connecticut that set them apart from the orthodox leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their preaching and writing made the transition from a European theology to a distinctive American theology possible, particularly in Connecticut. What is not well understood (or even well known) is that the Protestant Puritan theology of the state’s religious leaders in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was a major factor in the shaping of Connecticut’s particular approach to criminal justice in their own eras and up to the twentieth century. It was certainly not the only religious influence, but it penetrated more deeply into the cultural context than any other.
Few remember that there were two colonies along the Connecticut River for a time. Hooker’s colony, which covered the eastern half of the region from Old Saybrook on the coast to Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield on the upper Connecticut River, had a rival settlement of Puritans in the western portion of the area, centered