A New England Town: The First Hundred Years Book

1970 proved a seminal year in colonial American scholarship: it saw the publication of four monographs on Puritan communities, inaugurating the influential "New England Town Study" genre of American social history. Kenneth Lockridge's study of Dedham may have been the best of the four. Clearly written, well organized, and deeply researched, it advanced an original argument: the Puritan town was not a distinctly American institution, but rather a European peasant village imported to the continent by people who "turned their backs on the wilderness" (168). The consensus historians of the 1940s and '50s portrayed America as an exceptional and liberal culture from the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. Lockridge instead presented it as a cultural margin of Europe, part of the Old World rather than the New.

Dedham's founders built their town around a Covenant stressing peace and harmony, a church with a restricted but not stagnant membership, and the family ownership of land. Abundant land slowed the emergence of class divisions, and deference to a small elite of selectmen prevented political chaos. The Puritans of Dedham, however, were not Buddhist monks. Peace and order mattered to them, but so did hard work, marriage, and children. By 1700 some Dedhamites had become rich by investing their surpluses in mills and stores and trade. Some became poor as the soil wore out and imperial warfare prevented them from migrating out. Nearly all had too many children. The town's population grew from 150 or so to 750 between 1636 and 1700 (4, 65), and a healthy environment and low infant mortality ensured continued growth. Dedham and New England faced in the 1700s an increasingly Malthusian world.

Change and growth made Dedham a more contentious place. Town meetings, previously devoted to consensus, became more quarrelsome. Outlying settlers demanded separation from the community, and broke off to form their own smaller towns, where "the old political harmonies could be restored" (133). (One of these daughter communities, Norwood, became your reviewer's birthplace in the year of NEW ENGLAND TOWN 's publication.) Other pressures diminished after poor young men went into the army, and after the Revolutionary War opened the Ohio Valley to white settlement. What remained, in Dedham and other New England towns, was a deep-rooted social anxiety, a realization of how easily events could disrupt not only order but social equality.

Herein lies the significance of Lockridge's book. The Puritans, quintessential early Americans, turn out to be not small-town democrats nor hard-working businessmen nor witch-hunting scolds, but anxious peasants obsessed with social harmony and equality. Dedham wasn't a little Athens, but a "Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community" (16). One can see why this interpretation resonated with readers in the 1970s. Lockridge didn't call the Puritans hippies, but they lived in communes and pursued peace and brotherly love nonetheless.

Scholars would adduce two problems with Lockridge's characterization of the early Dedhamites as "peasants." First, as T.H. Breen and Bernard Bailyn pointed out, all of New England's towns depended from an early date on Atlantic trade. Incorporation into an international market undermined Dedham's independence from the start, not just after 1700. Secondly, unlike contemporary European peasants, Dedham's settlers had a very high level of literacy, which allowed them to develop ideas and religious identities at odds with the communitarianism of field, church, and town. The Puritans lived in a much larger mental world, defined by the Bible and religious literature rather than just their geographic locality. Lockridge's townspeople were as much commercial English folk and educated Protestants as they were Dedhamites. This is not to take away, though, from the author's achievement: persuading us to stop thinking of Puritans as mere proto-Americans, and to endeavor to understand them on their own historically-grounded terms.