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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England by Jane Kamensky (1999)

by Zachary Carmichael

Governing the Tongue discusses the importance of verbal communication in seventeenth-century New England society.image Kamensky argues that early settlers were uniquely preoccupied with the act of speech and held to specific but unwritten rules about correct speaking.  Speech was bound up with Puritan religious beliefs and represented a way of directly interacting with God’s word.  Right speech could represent a link with the divine, but incorrect speaking constituted a break with the natural order.  Regulating oral communication presented both philosophical and practical difficulties that informed larger issues of social status and order, and Puritans thought uncontrolled speech could corrupt their fragile society.

Multiple social hierarchies governed correct speaking, including class, wealth, age, and gender, Kamensky’s most useful lens of analysis.  A married woman, she argues, had to be a “goodwife,” supporting the head of the household, her husband.  Women made up the majority of the nonconformist congregations and often held radical beliefs, most famously Anne Hutchinson, banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1638.  For Puritan leaders, ungoverned speech equaled the threat of uncontrollable women, exemplary of the social disorder they feared. Women faced some of the harshest penalties for violating speech limitation. Ann Hibbens, for example, was brought to court for complaining too loudly in public about a dispute with male carpenters over the quality of their work, but the trial soon became an evaluation of Hibbens’ continued violation of right speech expectations and her failure to support her meek husband.  Excommunicated in 1641, Hibbens was executed for witchcraft fifteen years later because of a “quarrelsome” tongue.

Kamensky also focuses on speech expectations among men, emphasizing the contested verbal domains of fathers and sons.  Sons often found it difficult to establish patriarchal order in their own households while remaining verbally respectful to their fathers, exemplified by the case of John Porter, Jr., the only Puritan ever brought to trial for rebelling against his father.  John, Jr. insulted and criticized his father repeatedly, failing to live up to high expectations in a society that valued the orderly transmission of status and property from father to son.  Although John Porter, Sr. was one of the wealthiest men in Salem, his son died destitute after being taken to court for his disobedience.  Kamensky contends that Porter’s parental disrespect echoes a larger struggle in New England during the 1660s, when generational tension between the founders and their children brought the issue of verbal respect to a head.

image

After illustrating the elaborate rules that governed women’s and men’s tongues, Kamensky convincingly argues for the decline of this system at the end of the seventeenth century.  A falling away from original ideals for speech behavior, aided by the increased importance of the written word, paralleled the larger religious and intellectual declension of Puritanism.  Discussing the witchcraft trials of the 1690s, Kamensky emphasizes the role of speech in the supposed activity of those practicing witchcraft, including curses and demonic possession, and in the public trials, which depended upon verbal testimony.  The emotional and physical trauma of the accusations and executions in towns like Salem helped to debase the “currency of speech” for New Englanders.  Numerous apologies from both accusers and judges failed to restore social order, as they once had done.

Kamensky acknowledges the difficulty of hearing Puritan voices in the available evidence. Writing a book about speech, solely using written records is a paradoxical and ultimately unachievable task, but she does an excellent job of finding examples of recorded speech in court records, sermons, and other writings..  Kamensky argues that although it is impossible to get back to the “hearfulness” of New England, the careful recording of court documents, responses to sermons, and quotations in diary entries brings us close to being able to hear the Puritans speak.

Kamensky’s study is a valuable account of the people and ideas responsible for the Puritans’ complicated relationship with the spoken word.  She ably identifies the tension between free and governed speech, leaving the reader with the impression that, in Puritan New England, public speech could be both necessary and dangerous.

Photo credits:

George Henry Boughton (artist) and Thomas Gold Appleton (engraver), Puritans Going to Church, 31 March 1885

Library of Congress

 

You may also like:

UT professor of history Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s DISCOVER feature on John Winthrop’s famous speech “City Upon a Hill.”

 

Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill”

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

I recently came across John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered in 1630 on a boat to those about to establish a “New England” across the ocean from the old. Winthrop urged his congregation to create a “city upon the hill,” a model for others to imitate. Ever since Winthrop, the meaning of that city has been hotly debated. It is clear, however, that Winthrop’s city has come to stand for the ongoing experiment that is America: unique, exceptional, inspiring. Modern rebels, like those who have gathered on a platform of social and cultural conservatism around the Tea Party, a name full of references to Puritan Massachusetts, owe Winthrop, their alleged ideological ancestor, a careful reading.

Winthrop was a man of his age. He understood societies to be naturally divided into two camps: the “great ones” and the “inferior sort.”  He thought that, for all their divisions, societies had built-in limits to social polarization so “that the riche and mighty should not eat up neither the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke.” Natural instincts pushed the rich to be merciful and the poor not to be too rebellious. A society that has lowered the taxes of the wealthy so that it could then dismantle both collective bargaining and public education would have puzzled Winthrop. He would have been surprised by last summer’s developments in Wisconsin.

JohnWinthropColorPortraitWinthrop was a realist and acknowledged that there were limits to giving and forgiving. Individuals needed to put aside some of their wealth to guard against future hardship; they needed to take care of their family before they practiced charity. According to Winthrop, even the Bible found this prudence virtuous: the wise Egyptian Joseph put grain away and saved his treasonous brethren, the sons of Jacob, from famine when drought struck Israel.  Winthrop, however, also thought that members of communities under siege demonstrated unusual degrees of solidarity. Natural law dictated that, under these circumstances, the wealthy would openly share their property. Winthrop would have not recognized his city upon the hill in America today: a society whose most needy voluntarily sign up to fight wars while the most powerful avoid such sacrifices and tirelessly lobby to get ever larger tax cuts.

But it is perhaps the failure of America to live up to the laws of a Christian community that would have disoriented Winthrop.  Winthrop made a distinction between societies ruled solely by natural law and those ruled by the “law of Grace or of the Gospel.” Christian societies were bodies whose disparate parts were also glued by the ligaments of “love.” For all our desire to remember the Pilgrims as peaceful Christians who fled England to escape persecution, the fact is that Puritans were just as intolerant as their enemies, and Winthrop was no exception. Winthrop drew a clear line separating true Christians from the rest. He argued that the ligament of love worked best in communities that were ideologically homogenous.  And yet, Winthrop did think that love caused communities to be more egalitarian. His model was the primitive Church whose members “had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own.”

500px-Page_from_John_WinthropE28099s_JournalTea Party radicals, the alleged ideological heirs of men like Winthrop, might be surprised by Winthrop’s views on love and same-sex relationships. Winthrop’s descriptions of the love required to create his city on the hill are moving. His examples are all biblical. He explained that the love Eve felt for Adam was so carnal because her flesh literally came from Adam’s. But Winthrop also acknowledged the love Jonathan felt for David, the courageous shepherd who would soon dethrone Jonathan’s father, Saul. Winthrop was deeply aware of the force and depth of homoerotic love: “so that it is said [Jonathan] loved [David] as his own soul.” These two lovers would have their hearts broken when they were apart, “had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Winthrop also considered the love of Ruth and Noemi exemplary.

The city upon the hill that Winthrop sought to create in New England is a different world from that of his alleged ideological heirs. For Winthrop, the stakes of getting the city right were high (and they continue to be). To build a lasting “city upon the hill” the Puritans needed to create a society held together by charity, mercy, and love. A danger loomed: this new experiment could be overtaken by lack of either foresight or solidarity. Puritans then would meet the fate of so many failed social experiments. So let’s take Winthrop’s parting words as a warning: “The eyes of all people are upon us. So 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 byword through the world.”

The text of the sermon can be found here.

President John F Kennedy on the City Upon a Hill: video/audio

President Ronald Reagan on the City Upon a Hill, text

To read more of Canizares-Esguerra on Puritans in North American see our monthly feature on his work from May 2011.

Portrait of John Winthrop, author unknown.
Page from John Winthrop’s journal: Wikisource, The Founding of New England

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