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Thomas Hooker—Puritanism and Democratic Citizenship

A Preliminary Inquiry into Some Relationships of Religion and American Civic Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

In a special advertising supplement to the New York Times (May 6, 1962) the State of Connecticut sponsored an old claim: “The world's first written constitution, creating government by consent of the governed, appeared in Connecticut in 1639.” The diverse implications of this venerable assertion and their relation to the Rev. Thomas Hooker are the subject of the present essay. Intimations that Hooker deserved remembrance as a champion of liberty date at least to William Hubbard's General History of New England, written in the 1670's. But full-blown theories came after 1776, and especially after Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's discovery in 1860 of a remarkable notebook of sermon notes taken down in cipher between April, 1638, and April, 1641, by Henry Wolcott, Jr. of Windsor. Herein was found an outline of Hooker's now famous sermon to the Connecticut Court on May 31, 1638, as that body began its historic deliberations on a “Frame of Government.” George Bancroft would reflect the impact of this find in the revised edition of his widely read History of the United States. He saw in Hooker's pronouncements the “seed” whence flowered the “first of the series of written American constitutions.” Paraphrasing Ezekiel Roger's epitaph, Bancroft refers to Hooker as “the one rich pearl with which Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.” John Fiske in his work on The Beginnings of New England (1889) would claim even more stridently that Thomas Hooker “deserves more than any other man to be called the father [of American democracy].” George Leon Walker accepted Fiske's judgment and subtitled his biography “Preacher, Founder, Democrat.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1963 , pp. 415 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1963

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References

1. This essay is based on the Third Hooker Lecture given at First Church, Hartford, May 16, 1962, on an endowment of Leonard Watson and his sons to provide lectures “on the spiritual origin of the basic principles of free government … with particular reference to the ministry of Thomas Hooker …”

2. Conn. Hist. Soc., Collections, I (1860), pp. 20, 21.Google Scholar

3. Trumbull, Mass. Hist. Soc., Collections, 2nd Ser., V (1815), pp. 165, 305Google Scholar; Bancroft (rev. ed.; Boston, 1876), I, pp. 291, 318; Fiske (Boston, 1889), p. 127, cf. also, pp. 36–37, 45–49.

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12. Mather, Cotton, “Piscator Evangelicus, or The Life of Mr. Thomas Hooker,” in Johannes in Eremo (Boston, 1695)Google Scholar, makes Hooker a representative figure; Magnalia. Book III. See Prince's, preface to Hooker's, The Poor Doubting Christian Drawn to Christ (Boston, 1743), p. 1Google Scholar. Dwight, Timothy, Travels; in New England and New York, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1821–1822), I, pp. 237–39.Google Scholar

13. The Life of Thomas Hooker (Boston, 1870)Google Scholar. chap. IV, passim, esp. p. 91.

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18. “Thomas Hooker and the Puritan Contribution to Democracy,” Bulletin of the Congregational Library, X (Oct. 1958), p. 6.Google Scholar

19. “Hooker: Puritanism: Democracy,” typed copy of 2nd Hooker Lecture.

20. “The civill power may compell them [the people] to come under the call of God and attend the Ordinances, and force them to use the means of information and conviction.” Hooker, , A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (London, 1648), Part 3, chap. I, p. 3Google Scholar. See also Pellman, Hubert Ray, “Thomas Hooker,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1958), esp. chap. ivGoogle Scholar. For Cotton's similar views see Miller, Perry and Johnson, T. H., The Puritans (New York: American Book Co.), p. 209.Google Scholar

21. Op. cit., note 12, supra.

22. Mather, , Magnalia, I, p. 318Google Scholar. “…to behold at once the wonders of New England,” says Mather, “… it is [in] one Thomas Hooker that he shall behold them …” Ibid., p. 303; see also Rogers' Epitaph, Ibid., p. 318.

23. Besides standard histories see Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness, pp. 99–140Google Scholar; Levy, Babette M., “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” Proceedings, American Antiquarian Society, LXX (04, 1960), pp. 69–348Google Scholar, passim.

24. American Protestantism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 17–24.Google Scholar

25. See Bailyn, Bernard, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, LXVII (01. 1962), pp. 339–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nichols, James H., Democracy and the Churches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951).Google Scholar

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28. Cf. Winslow, Ola, Meeting-House Hill, 1680–1783 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).Google Scholar

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30. Op. cit., pp. 1, 7.

31. Hooker's views on toleration and “denominationalism” are seen in the Survey, Part 4, chap. 3, p. 57; Part 2, chap. 3, pp. 79–80, and many other places. Cf. Hudson, op. cit., pp. 33–48, 184.

32. I have profited from David Minter's seminar paper on Puritan political ideas. On Roman Catholic claims see Schaff, David S., “The BellamineJefferson Legend and the Declaration of Independence,” Amer. Soc. of Church History, Papers, 2nd. Ser., VIII, pp. 237–76.Google Scholar

33. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926; New York: Penguin Edition, 1947), p. 165.Google Scholar

34. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. Bradley, Phillips, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1946), I, pp. 247–48.Google Scholar

35. The Americans in Their Moral, Social and Political Relations (1837), in Commager, H. S. (ed.), America in Perspective (New York: New Amer. Library, 1948), p. 75.Google Scholar

36. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1889), II, pp. 463–471.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., II, p. 270.

38. For bibliography and representative selections, see Green, Robert W. (ed.), Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and Its Critics (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1959)Google Scholar. See also Samuelson, Kurt, Religion and Economic Action (Stockholm, 1957)Google Scholar and Lenski, Gerhard E., The Religious Factor (New York: Doubleday, 1961).Google Scholar

39. Puritanism and Democracy (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944), pp. 242, 243, 297, et passim, esp. chaps. IX-XIV.Google Scholar

40. Christ and Culture (New York: Harpers, 1951), esp. chaps. I, VI.Google Scholar

41. See note 2, supra.

42. Foundation of American Freedom (Nashville: Abingdon, 1955), p. 17.Google Scholar

43. Firmin, Giles, The Real Christian (London, 1670), p. 19Google Scholar; quoted by George Leon Walker, op. cit., p. 160.

44. See Emerson, Everett H., “Thomas Hooker and the Reformed Theology: The Relationship of Hooker's Conversion Preaching to Its Background,”(Unpublished Ph. P. Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1955).Google Scholar

45. See Miller, Perry, From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), esp. pp. 53–67, 134Google Scholar; and the large literature on the “Antinomian Crisis.” I also gladly confess my indebtedness to several graduate students at Yale: especially Norman Pettit, David Hall, Gay Little, Joy Bourne, and Robert Pope.

46. Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702; quoted from the Hartford Edition (1820), I, p. 59.

47. Schneider, Herbert W., The Puritan Mind (New York: Holt, 1930), chap. VIIIGoogle Scholar. See also Michaelson, Robert S., “Changes in the Puritan Concept of Calling or Vocation,” New England Quarterly, XXVI (1953), pp. 315–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Foxcraft, Thomas, Humilis Confesso (Boston, 1750), pp. 59–62Google Scholar; A Funeral Sermon (Boston, 1720), p. 40Google Scholar. I am indebted here to Charles W. Akers' forthcoming biography of Mayhew (Harvard Univ. Press).

49. The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harpers, 1937), esp. chap. II.Google Scholar

50. The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (1928; New York: Frederick Ungar, reissue, 1958), esp. chap. II.Google Scholar

51. A classic instance is Beecher's, Lyman, “The Republican Elements of the Old Testament,” in Works (Boston, 1852), I, pp. 175–190Google Scholar. See also “The Bible a Code of Laws,” Works, II, pp. 154–203.Google Scholar

52. Francis Grund, loc. cit., p. 73.

53. See Davies, Horton, The Worship of the English Puritans (London: Dacre Press, 1948)Google Scholar. Miss Gay Little called my attention to the manuscript letter to Cotton. In the controversy over cutting the cross from the ensign, Hooker took the moderate view.

54. Puritanism was the first major movement in Christendom which required an account of an experience of regeneration for church-membership without sacrificing the notion of establishment and enforced conformity, that is, without becoming what Troeltsch would have called a “sect.”

55. In New England those who most strenuously resisted revivalistic trends moved to the other extreme. See Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism (Boston: Beacon, 1955).Google Scholar

56. Saunderson's, Henry HallamPuritan Principles and American Ideals (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1930) is a memorial to this state of alienation.Google Scholar