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Inhaltsangabe
A community is defined not only by inclusion but also by exclusion. Seventeenth-century New England Puritans, themselves exiled from one society, ruthlessly invoked the law of banishment from another: over time, hundreds of people were forcibly excluded from this developing but sparsely settled colony. Nan Goodman suggests that the methods of banishment rivaled—even overpowered—contractual and constitutional methods of inclusion as the means of defining people and place. The law and rhetoric that enacted the exclusion of certain parties, she contends, had the inverse effect of strengthening the connections and collective identity of those that remained.
Banished investigates the practices of social exclusion and its implications through the lens of the period's common law. For Goodman, common law is a site of negotiation where the concepts of community and territory are more fluid and elastic than has previously been assumed for Puritan society. Her legal history brings fresh insight to well-known as well as more obscure banishment cases, including those of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Morton, the Quakers, and the Indians banished to Deer Island during King Philip's War. Many of these cases were driven less by the religious violations that may have triggered them than by the establishment of rules for membership in a civil society. Law provided a language for the Puritans to know and say who they were—and who they were not. Banished reveals the Puritans' previously neglected investment in the legal rhetoric that continues to shape our understanding of borders, boundaries, and social exclusion.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Nan Goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also teaches law. She is author of Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor (with Michael P. Kramer) of The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch.
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Introduction
A Banishment Primer
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company. . . .
. . . I banish thee, on pain of death.
—William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, 5.5
Communities make members. Working from the principles articulated in contracts, constitutions, or even simple screeds, communities create a sense of belonging among their inhabitants that draws people in, binds them together, and fosters a collective identity. This sense of membership has been a commonplace in the history of communities from the city-states of ancient Greece to the incipient nation-states of Europe in the seventeenth century and beyond. Without holding out the possibility of inclusion—in the form of shared principles—few communities would have been established, and fewer still would have endured. Less obvious in the formation of community, however, are those negative principles that facilitate the exclusion of people who do not "belong" and yet work, paradoxically, to reinforce the bonds among those who do. As the legal scholar Peter Goodrich explains, a community's ability to exclude not only strengthens the connections between insiders but also casts the membership of the community in the form of a Manichean struggle. "The establishment of an identity, the constitution of a community, and the capture of subjectivity," he writes, "are first a matter of establishing a collective . . . identity whose virtue will be matched only by the evil of those who do not belong to it." In this way inclusion and exclusion are paired, or as Charles Tilly puts it: "Every act of . . . inclusion consists of creating, activating, or transforming an us-them boundary, and thus inevitably twins with an act of . . . exclusion."
If inclusion and exclusion are twinned, however, there are certain times and certain places where one twin assumes primacy over the other, and where inclusion or exclusion appears to take precedence as a means of producing community. Such a time and place was seventeenth-century New England—from 1620, when the first Puritan colony, Plymouth Plantation, was established, to 1684, when the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the biggest and most powerful of the colonies, was revoked and administrative power was ceded to the Crown. Exercised ruthlessly and obsessively in this period, banishment, by which undesirable individuals and groups were forcibly removed from the colonies, overpowered the ways and means of inclusion—contractual, constitutional, or otherwise—and became a central, and yet up to this point almost entirely unrecognized, way of defining the place and the people within it.
This book is about that period and its banishments. From the moment they first set foot in the New World, the Puritans, banished or in flight from persecution themselves, banished hundreds if not thousands of others. Between 1620 and 1630, the first decade of the Plymouth Colony's existence, Governor William Bradford banished dozens of people, including John Lyford and John Oldham, for sending letters "full of slanders and false accusations" about the colonists back to England. More notably between 1630 and 1631, the first year of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, out of fewer than a thousand people in Salem, Charlestown, and Boston combined, between six and ten people were banished, an astonishing 0.6 to 1 percent of the population. Nor did the percentage of those "sent out of the lymitts of the patent" dwindle much in subsequent years as the theocracies in Plymouth and the Bay Colony continued to attract and to banish traders, visitors, and aspiring members who were deemed to have insufficiently conformed to the Puritans' ways.
Admittedly most of those banished escaped all but the most cursory notice. Their names are enshrined in legal casebooks from the period, but few have paid attention to their stories, and in most cases little of their stories is known. In 1640, for example, the otherwise obscure Hugh Bewett was banished for claiming he was free of original sin, and in 1642 William Collins was banished for seeking sexual favors under a false promise of marriage. During the same period Thomas Walford and Philip Ratcliffe were banished for declaring their "contempt of authorities and confrontinge officers etc," and Captain Stone for calling the magistrate Ludlow "not a justice but a 'just-ass.'" In addition, starting in 1672 records confirm that banishment was imposed in one case of adultery and in another of "adulterous behavior," as well as in one case for prostitution, another for contempt of authority, and two others for unspecified crimes. To this list can be added a banishment in Connecticut for contempt of authority and another in New Haven for lascivious behavior, an indication that while the Bay Colony and Plymouth may have been the most avid of the banishing colonies, other colonies engaged in the practice as well.
In contrast to the Bewetts, Stones, and Walfords of the world, however, many of the banished were and continue to be well known, though for reasons discussed below, the true significance of their banishments has been obscured. In this category are the stories of the Anglican renegade Thomas Morton, banished by Plymouth in 1635 and memorialized by Nathaniel Hawthorne for unlawfully erecting a Maypole in the settlement of Merry-mount, and the controversial minister and founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, who was banished by the Bay Colony that same year. In 1637 the Bay Colony also banished the infamous heretic and "antinomian" Anne Hutchinson, after whose banishment the colony enacted a series of laws banishing whole groups of so-called heretics, including the Anabaptists in 1645 and the Jesuits in 1647. In the 1650s the Bay Colony went on to banish numerous Quakers, including the illustrious Mary Dyer, and throughout the 1660s and 1670s authorities expelled hundreds of Christianized Indians, whose removal to Deer Island in the Boston harbor was banishment in everything but name.
Not Religion
Unsurprisingly those among the banished whose names still resonate today made their banishments memorable by complaining loudly about them. If their names are known, however, the accounts of their punishments and of the consequences that followed in the wake of their banishments have been neglected. Two factors account for this neglect. The first is that their stories—like most of the stories that have come down to us from Puritan America—have been read by scholars almost exclusively for the light they shed on the Puritans' religion and religious practices. In their focus on religion, scholars of history and literature have done no more than follow the Puritans' lead. The initial colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay as well as the subsequent colonies of New Haven and Connecticut were founded on the principle of religious congregationalism, and the communities that were established in these places were structured to serve that end. If an individual qualified for church membership—a qualification that was based on the church's judgment about the candidate's conversion experience—then the candidate also qualified for membership in the colony, and in this way religion provided an undeniably strong basis for social cohesion.
One of the results of the scholarly focus on religion has been to emphasize religion's role in building this social cohesion. Histories of the period, both literary and social, are replete with references to the founding documents—preeminent among them John Winthrop's lay sermon "A Model of Christian Charity"—that not only emphasize the connections between people that religion enabled but also help us think through the principle of community...
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Banished : Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England
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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012
ISBN 10: 0812244273
ISBN 13: 9780812244274
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