| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. By James F. Cooper Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xii, 282 pp. $55.00, isbn 0-19-511360-8.)

The old story gets another fresh twist in James F. Cooper Jr.'s reconstruction of just how "tenacious of their Liberties" (the phrase is Cotton Mather's) were "the Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts." Cooper marshals evidence from his exhaustive study of local church records to refute the commonplace of twentieth-century historiography that Puritanism was not (as nineteenth-century filiopietists imagined) the source of American Revolutionary democracy. Cooper shows how "church government served as a political training ground for ordinary churchgoers, one that profoundly shaped Massachusetts political culture." Opening the book with the 1639 admonition of John Cotton "that all power that is on earth be limited, church power or other," he closes with Joseph S. Clark's 1858 encomium that American democracy "owes its origin" to "that system of church government which our New England fathers deduced from the Bible"—and which was "in practical operation . . . a hundred and fifty years" before the Revolution. Cooper concludes that, "hyperbole and parochial conceit aside, we can now see in Clark's claims a fundamental truth of no small moment." . . .

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