From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765

by Richard L. Bushman

The years from 1690 to 1765 in America have usually been considered a waiting period before the Revolution. Mr. Bushman, in his penetrating study of colonial Connecticut, takes another view. He shows how, during these years, economic ambition and religious ferment profoundly altered the structure of Puritan society, enlarging the bounds of liberty and inspiring resistance to established authority.

This is an investigation of the strains that accompanied the growth of liberty in an authoritarian society. Mr. Bushman traces the deterioration of Puritan social institutions and the consequences for human character. He does this by focusing on day-to-day life in Connecticut--on the farms, in the churches, and in the town meetings. Controversies within the towns over property, money, and church discipline shook the "land of steady habits," and the mounting frustration of common needs compelled those in authority, in contradiction to Puritan assumptions, to become more responsive to popular demands.

In the Puritan setting these tensions were inevitably given a moral significance. Integrating social and economic interpretations, Mr. Bushman explains the Great Awakening of the 1740's as an outgrowth of the stresses placed on the Puritan character. Men, plagued with guilt for pursuing their economic ambitions and resisting their rulers, became highly susceptible to revival preaching.

The Awakening gave men a new vision of the good society. The party of the converted, the "New Lights," which also absorbed people with economic discontents, put unprecedented demands on civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The resulting dissension moved Connecticut, almost unawares, toward republican attitudes and practices. Disturbed by the turmoil, many observers were, by 1765, groping toward a new theory of social order that would reconcile traditional values with their eighteenth-century experiences.

Vividly written, full of illustrative detail, the manuscript of this book has been called by Oscar Handlin one of the most important works of American history in recent years.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, 18th Century, American, Religion, Sociology

352 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 1980

About the author

Richard Lyman Bushman obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard and published widely in early American social and cultural history before completing his most well-known work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among his books were From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. He teaches courses on Mormonism in its broad social and cultural context and on the history of religion in America, focusing on the early period. He has special interests in the history of Mormon theology and in lived religion among the Mormons. He has taken an active part in explaining Mormonism to a broad public and in negotiating the tensions between Mormonism and modern culture.

Reviews

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

And what a tumultuous few decades they were. . . .

Early Connecticut towns effectively acted as corporations, disbursing lands to all admitted inhabitants, denying shares to those who moved out. But the Restoration raised the little problem that they were not chartered as corporations and forced changes -- including inheritance rights and excluding newcomers.

And land patterns changed. They had tried building towns like pie wedges, so that everyone could get to the meeting house easily. The difficulties in getting about resulted in poor men first setting up temporary residences in the outer fields, and then selling their inner lands to richer farmers and buying more outer fields. Which made it hard to get to church and be supervised to be sure you were practicing properly. . . outliers petitioned for separate parishes much more eagerly than new towns did.

Not that farmers' difficulties ended there. Timber was the most profitable, actually, but once you had cut down the trees -- well, unimproved land was not taxed, but to get the timber, you had to cut it down and so had to do something. Cattle, usually, though a lot of farmers underestimated how much hay they needed to keep them over winter. And trade exploded in this era despite all the warnings against covetousness, there being no cash crop like tobacco or indigo. Which lead to a rapid problem -- and much conflict -- about the lack of actual cash. Getting the colony to issue more leads to inflation, which would naturally cause a lot of conflict.

And church governance! They had introduced the Half-Way Covenant after it was clear that many children of church members were not qualifying before they had children -- a difficult job, as a mere upright man did not qualify -- the congregation was supposed to consist of visible saints -- so they allowed children to be baptized because their grandparents were church members. They also got more loose about admittance. And then along came the Awakening, which inspired everyone -- men, women, young, old, rich, poor -- to join churches, but which revived the visible saint standard, and produced the New Lights, to contrast with the Old Lights.

Meanwhile Dissenters had to be handled -- Baptists, Quakers, and er, Anglicans. The New Lights were bigger on religious liberty since you couldn't make a man religious by law -- or, for that matter, reason or good works. Only passionate, inspired preaching. Which is where a lot of conflict arose. Plus arguments about deposing or ordaining men as ministers. Lots of furor about heresy. The Old Lights had been drawing more power in the ministry, which caused the New Lights to froth at the mouth. And it hooked into many other issues. The Stamp Act brought about the New Lights' victory because they were staunch opponents where the Old Lights were less so -- they favored authority more.

Not that things were over yet. One Anglican wrote back to England after the Stamp Act to-do that they suffered so much because they were almost a mere democracy; revoking their charter would make them happier.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Bushman’s 1967 work From Puritan to Yankee is a case study focused on Connecticut from 1690 to 1765. Bushman traces the sources of the titular cultural transformation, arriving at a thesis similar to Miller’s in “From Covenant Chain to Revival” by way of social history. Finding that the communities within which separatist churches were established were more likely to be commercial centers, Bushman reasoned that rising material prosperity created personal and social tensions which were difficult to reconcile with traditional social norms. The revivals combined personal emotional catharsis with social transformation, splintering communities and desanctifying established church authority. These internal divisions lost their biting edge during the communal engagement in the wars of 1745 and 1756, but the axis of social coherence had changed. “Concentration of community loyalties on the state intensified devotion to those principles on which all could agree,” Bushman wrote. “The contents of the social compact – liberty and prosperity – became the rallying cry of the social order. When the opportunity to defend the common interest arose, men responded with religious fervor.”

[Terry Earley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was truly interesting. The evolution of Connecticut politics and how religion affected it from the first, raw settlements which became villages and towns is enlightening.

The first colonizers, the Pilgrims, were very strict and conformist. What their minister told them, they did. By the mid seventeen hundreds, Yankees were hard nosed individualists, cherishing their independence. How they got there is the real story.

[Scott Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

My main issue with Bushman's work is the way he attempts to distance himself from Perry Miller by pushing the period back where the declension materialized. 1690 seems like an odd date for this decline to start.
In my belief, this is one of the best early arguments espousing economic shifts adding to loss of Puritan power. If that argument is of interest to the reader, she would be advised to see Mark Valeri's Heavenly Merchandize.