A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer Carla Gardina Pestana A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire. Early American Studies. By Adrian Chastain Weimer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 379 pages. Cloth, ebook. The 1660s in New England were once considered diminished and relatively unimportant, a once united and inspired society that had lost its original direction. The 1953 great work of Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, both began with and dismissed the period. To his way of thinking—a perspective that dominated early American historiography for decades—New England was a society in decline. The initial sense of mission disappeared as the founding generation passed from the scene. Young people failed to join their local churches and the sense of shared purpose fractured with rising concern for material success. Preachers, trying to reverse this dismaying trend, delivered sermons that rebuked the populace, and Miller labeled their laments "jeremiads" after the Old Testament prophet who harangued his people to forgo their sinful ways. New Englanders lost confidence, focus, and unity. He brilliantly illustrated a society in crisis with his treatment of the tribulations of Cotton Mather, son and grandson of illustrious ministers, who frantically labored to defend the witchcraft prosecutions even though he lacked both the information and the conviction to do so.1 In Adrian Chastain Weimer's hands, the 1660s emerge as the opposite of diminished and insignificant. To be sure, as she demonstrates in A Constitutional Culture, New Englanders faced challenges and, like the youngest of the famous Mathers, they struggled over how best to respond. These colonials, however, presented a largely united front that relied upon a common understanding of their circumstances. They shared, she argues, a commitment to a constitutional arrangement that sustained their connection to England, accepted monarchy, and sought local control over institutions. Over three decades in North America, starting in the 1630s, these colonists learned to manage their own affairs in church and state, and they hoped to retain this right. They did not seek autonomy beyond what local control entailed; they did not long for independence or even imagine that such a state was sustainable. They willingly fought for what they did desire, even as they debated the best strategy for achieving their goals. [End Page 785] Weimer sees New Englanders—magistrates, clergymen, merchants, and farmers—as eager to protect a shared "constitutional culture." This culture reflected their view of how their own settlements and their relationship to empire ought to function, valuing local participation in decision making by male householders (who were also typically, but decreasingly, church members), a distant monarch who interfered little but accepted settlers as loyal subjects, and a church organization under the control of male church members and the clergymen they appointed. With decades of experience running their own affairs without much oversight—indeed, in a remarkable number of cases, setting up thriving though unsanctioned colonies—they organized churches, distributed land, and managed trade, warfare, and relations with neighboring colonies. Four of the New England polities established a mutual defense pact in the 1643 United Colonies, allowing a regional approach to problems that affected all, with wars against displaced Indigenous residents and the neighboring Dutch dominating their deliberations. Most residents supported these arrangements; participation extended to most adult men and decisions were made locally and coordinated regionally. The goal of upholding constitutional culture reverberated across the region once the Stuart government moved to curtail it in the early 1660s. Weimer deals primarily with Massachusetts, which wielded outsized power and where a preponderance of evidence remains, but she attends to other polities as well. She examines the smaller entities of Connecticut, New Haven (which became part of the Connecticut Colony in 1664), Plymouth Plantation, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and even Maine and New Hampshire—usually (and regrettably) overlooked in studies purporting to deal with New England. Weimer does not minimize the differences that divided them, acknowledging the peculiarities of each outpost, but she demonstrates that all engaged in local governance and felt a commitment to...