There is no other word in English as effectively dismissive as “puritan.” Americans, even or especially historians, tend to treat the early New Englanders as dogmatists: narrow, pious simpletons. That their region and culture became a profoundly influential force in the modern world is for all purposes unacknowledged, except in allusions to Max Weber, whose bad little book deals with neither America nor Puritanism. Because of Weber, perhaps, the successes adumbrated in Winthrop’s phrase “a city on a hill” seem always to be associated with wealth and power, as opposed to the stratum of communal or political life that touches on justice and, yes, liberty. These elements in our history seem to be increasingly confounded by the force of cynicism, particularly the belief that wealth and power were all it was ever about. The word “puritan” brackets a crucial culture and period with a peculiar prejudice, the notion that it was ridiculous in its pretensions and in its provincialism. I may seem to overstate. There have been specialists in the field, certainly. But their work often illustrates and compounds the suppression or occlusion of this history. An entrenched habit of what must be called piety in the treatment of England by American historians obscures the context within which the determined non-conformity of the Puritans might be understood.
Almost fifty years ago, I learned by pure accident that a code of law was drawn up in Massachusetts in 1641 that substantially anticipated the Bill of Rights. I happened to read a letter to the editor in the New York Times that mentioned the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. I had a PhD by then and was supposedly an Americanist by training, yet I was learning of this for the first time. When I finally read these laws, I wondered why the narrative of American history did not begin with them. They long remained the basis of the Massachusetts legal system, which indicates that they were not simply an early burst of utopianism but an expression of an enduring political philosophy.
With all respect to Thomas Jefferson, I know of no reason to doubt that he read them, too. How else would lawyers prepare for drafting laws appropriate to a new country, if not by looking at the systems the various colonies had proposed for themselves? John Adams of Massachusetts played a dominant role in the convention that drafted the Declaration of Independence, in which the English king is charged with suppressing the work of colonial assemblies; certainly the work of those assemblies was of great interest to those gentleman revolutionaries, members of the political class whose intentions the king had scotched.
The attempt to retrieve the particulars of a life slighted by history is much complicated by the prejudices that suppressed it in the first place. While it is probable that Peters’s influence would have been strongly felt in these laws, the Liberties also reflected a consensus, likewise reflected in the Mayflower Compact, presumably, and urged onto the colonists by Winthrop as Christian charity. The code was ratified by the colony’s assembly.