1637 Massachusetts Election

[vcczar 1,224]

11 hours ago, Patine said:

@vcczar

 

I remember reading an article linked from my old homepage several years by a professor from Massachusetts whose name slips my mind, who, like you, had (or claimed to have, anyways) a lot of ancestors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (he claimed his family and Senator John Cabot Lodge's were two branches of the same family), and he taught at a smaller university in the state the eminent Harvard, MIT, or University of Massachusetts. He claimed that the number of executions and unwinnable trials of ordeal for strictly religious offences that are not crimes today (witchcraft, sorcery, blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege, homosexuality, Devil worship, etc.) were highly overstated by historians and were actually very rare, and that putting people in the stocks, public floggings, or banishment was much, in truth, much more common. I believe this person had also edited the official Wikipedia article on the Massachusetts Bay Colony with that statement as well, but it's been edited several times since. Is there truth in this statement, or is it Puritan apologism or revisionism?

If you look at the Massachusetts Bay Records, the decrees they order and the things they discuss in the General Court, there are actually very few executions. The communities are small, so these guilty people are generally all people that everyone knows, and so there's some element of compassion. Generally, exile was the extreme punishment. Remember they also operated under English Law. Public humiliation was the most common punishment. However, also murder, sorcery, treason, and other major crimes were rarely rooted out, it seems. I noticed while going through these records from 1630-1638, that punishment for fornication seemed very regular, often punished only with a fine and public humiliation (stocks). Women were punished for speaking their minds at the wrong time or for swearing (they had to stand in public with something attacked to their lips). Only about 3 to 10 arrests or trials are reported per quasi-quarterly session, generally leaning towards 3. There may be local trial and punishments not recorded, which means the radical nature of a town would be unique to the town. For instance, Boston and Cambridge could be relatively liberal. Salem and Dedham would be relatively radical. Concord and Springfield, Ipswich, Hingham and Weymouth, being further from the center, might be more independent in their determination of punishments. 

Massachusetts during this time is odd. You see all the ingredients of the community-oriented, paternal government liberal Massachusetts state, as well as something bordering the decentralized ideal of the Libertarian (at least the very religious libertarians). But it really leans more to the former than the latter. It's sort of like a Decentralized-Utopian Theocratic-Democratic Socialism (Socialism in the Sanders/Scandinavian strain, and not anything like the Marx-Lenin-strain, with theocracy and the faithful taking the place of labor and the workers)