"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards
into the future. "
Marshall McLuhan
Mcluhan is widely accepted as proposing that the first content of any
new medium is the old media and that there is a moment, a boundary,
when that transition occurs. While this idea has been applied most
often to the transitions between oral language, written language, the
codex and various incarnations of electronic language, the idea can
also be applied to the transition faced by seventeenth century English
emigrants to New England. Though these colonists crossed a quite
obvious geological boundary, they carried the content of their "old
media" with them in the form of their presuppositions about how
society is organized, how it functions, and how its participants should
function within it.
The form those presuppositions took, and the alterations they underwent
as colonists from different areas encountered each other, adapted to
their new environment, and passed from one generation to the next, is
the subject of Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village: The Formation of a New
England Town. The book explores the town of Sudbury,
Massachusetts in its earliest years. The author
suggests that even though the inhabitants came from England with
specific assumptions about how their society should be organized,
the fact that they came from several areas,
each with its own distinct structures, led to the establishment of new,
complex, societies. Many of the
early settlers stated explicitly that they were interested in creating
new laws and social structures that did not conform to those they left
behind in England. The land granting system was such that they could
attempt
this on a
town by town basis.
As Powell pursuasively argues, those new social structures were
developed by people whose backgrounds differed in various ways. Powell
traces the pre-colonist life of several of the leaders of
Sudbury to explore those differences. The most important, in terms of
subsequent practice in new England, was in land use. Settlers from the
communal, open-field system of East Anglia organized their towns as
central living space surrounded by communal fields, pastures, and
woodlands. Land division and ownership were neither communal nor
egalitarian, however, shared use of the land was the norm for the early
Sudbury community. The process of land distribution was unlike that in
England. As Powell points out: "the Bay
government and the town government were accomplishing a virtual
revolution in the systems of social and economic status of each
community. For the first time in their lives, the inhabitants of an
English town were assuming that each adult male would be granted some
land free and clear." With that land came expectations of
responsibility. Land grants were not
sustained for those who would not settle in the town, that is, for
absentee
landlords and speculators, taxes were to be determined and collected
by the town, decisions were to be made as a town through town meetings,
and communal
land practices were to continue.
In Sudbury, as in similar towns throughout colonial New England, the
development of the town government was one of adaptation based on the
prior experience of the participants. In addition to those with an
open-field system background, early leaders came from such disparate
systems as that of Berkhamstead, a market town and borough with a
written charter that delineated specific rights and Sudbury, Suffolk,
where parish and town government were inextricably entertwined, and
town governance rotated through the hands of a few. While seventeenth
century New Englanders came from a culture that accepted the communal
regulation of their personal behavior, the extent of that regulation,
and thus the expectations of what constituted the "correct" degree,
also varied from region to region.
Despite a concerted effort on the part of colonists to work together as
a community, reconciling such differing backgrounds and expectations
did result in conflict. Problems related to the division, use and
maintenance of the land appear to have been the subject of much of this
early conflict. Powell also finds problems related to structuring town
government and determining the amount of service deemed appropriate by
the free townsmen, as well as implementing an appropriate tax system to
cover town expenses. Other areas of conflict settled around the church,
especially the responsibilities of the minister and his role in the
community. Resolving intra-community relations, as well as relations
with neighboring towns, the General Court, and with the indigenous
population were also the purview of the selectmen.
While the first generation of colonists needed to adapt to both a
different physical and social environment, the second generation
brought its own challenges. Powell suggests that most Sudbury settlers,
given the structure of colonization process, became landowners, a fate
they may not have achieved had they stayed in England. By moving into
the ranks of land owners, or, for some, by owning or acquiring rights
to larger areas of land than they could have expected in England,
settlers accepted for themselves the definitions, expectations,
identities and responsibilities that land ownership entailed. Among
these was the belief that land ownership was a family concern and that
land was an inheritable item.
Powell, Demos, and Greven all look at the impact of population pressure
on this system. In a society where children were valued and seen as
potential contributor to the family welfare yet infant mortality was
high, a large number of infant births were the norm. While the low
infant mortality rates of the first years of settlement were bo doubt
greeted as a blessing, that population growth, which according to Demos
doubled every 15 years, was not without challenges.
Although Greven falters when attempting to adduce the reactions and
motivations
Changing expectations: Lockridge, town government: younger generation
has only the NE experience to guide them
The problem: second generation saw notthe English forms as they were in
England but as they were filtered and transformed in New England. Thus
different conclusions...land, church, leaders?
However, still accepted some practices:
Ruddock and his townsmen were granted land that was still in
Indian control. After that was resolved they divided it up fairly
equally. Those with larger lots had larger responsibility to the town.
No one could get land if they did not also contribute to the town's
welfare.
Change of deference over time: seating; selectmen/town meetings
Powell, Demos, Lockridge, Greven, and Dinkins illuminate societal
beliefs and practices of specific New England communities. In Fierce
Communion: Family and Community in Early America, Helena Wall how those
beliefs spanned the many communities of the English speaking New World.
The continuity between English life in England and life in New England
is thrown into sharp relief when compared to the social structure and
practice of the Dutch
The early English settlers, in pouring the "old medium" of their lives
in England into the "new medium" of life in the colonies certainly
created a new society with changing expectations. Wall notes that
"colonists sought to reproduce, even freeze in time, patterns of family
and community life that were already beginning to erode in Europe."
(Wall, 1) Though the world they created was to become something quite
different from that which they had left, they certainly, intentionally
or not, eyed their English "rear-view mirror" as they "marched
backwards into the future."