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Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity
Michael P. Winship
| ON October 19, 1630, the male adults of the raw new colony of Massachusetts Bay stood in a clearing in Charlestown and listened as John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, made two proposals. One was that they put themselves forward to become freemen, or voters, in the company. The other was that these freemen would elect assistants, the directors of the company, "when there are to be chosen." Any necessary elections were to take place in a yearly meeting of the company's General Court. The assembled colonists assented to Winthrop's proposals. Thereafter the new freemen's powers rapidly expanded. Annual elections of all the assistants and the governor commenced in 1632. In 1634 the General Court became the colony's chief judicial court and legislative body, meeting four times a year with the freemen represented by deputies from each town.1 Yet even the initial changes of 1630 made Massachusetts the only polity within King Charles I's realms where freemen had final control over all the officials who immediately affected their lives. It was the initiation of a process whereby the colonists created a hybrid political order whose ideological foundation can be characterized as godly republicanism. |
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A New England innovation, godly republicanism was a constitutional arrangement intended to preserve the purity of the churches and the liberties of the people. Its roots lay in ecclesiastical agitation by late-sixteenth-century puritans who brought republican assumptions about the nature and dangers of government to questions of church polity. Their ecclesiastical republicanism fed into a broader, eventually self-consciously republican civic ideology nurtured by the resistance of many of Massachusetts' founders to the fiscal innovations of Charles I. The recovery of godly republicanism opens new perspectives on the history of the political cultures of British North America, draws attention to long-standing ideological fissures in England, and sheds light on neglected political aspects of puritanism itself.
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| Republicanism is perhaps as slippery to define as puritanism and is subject to even more heuristic abuse. The 1970s and 1980s saw a swelling flood tide of republicanism sweep over United States historiography. Republicanism was increasingly perceived as the chief ideological propulsion behind American history, and at its peak this tide carried on its vast explanatory current groups as disparate as eighteenth-century Virginia planters and twentieth-century factory workers. A prominent 1993 article exposed the vacuousness with which scholars were handling the concept, and the tide receded with the rapidity of the dot-com crash.2 |
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Scholars of Elizabethan and early Stuart England largely sat this boom-and-bust cycle out. In the early seventeenth century, "republican" was an insult; "republic" itself was far more often used to mean "commonwealth" in general rather than specifically a kingless state with accountability to the "people"; such a kingless state was more commonly described as a "free state" or popular state than a "republic." J. G. A. Pocock pronounced English republicanism a structural impossibility before the 1650s, and historians of Anglo-American republicanism routinely began chronologically with the English political theorists of that decade.3 |
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