Louise A. Breen. Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692. Religion in America Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. vi + 292 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-513800-9.

Reviewed by Carla Gardina Pestana (Department of History, Ohio State University)
Published on H-Albion (October, 2001)

Elite men who objected to Massachusetts Bay Policies

Elite men who objected to Massachusetts Bay Policies

Louise Breen's book presents fascinating information on a handful of elite men in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and on a number of tense moments in the history of that colony. Her account will have the salutary effect of helping us to see that early "orthodox" New England was far from monolithic, but riven by divisions from the start. Breen's efforts, however, to make this disparate group of men part of a unified tradition of opposition to orthodoxy and mainstream Massachusetts culture are unsuccessful. Still Transgressing the Bounds is a worthwhile read for the little-known but important men whose lives it details.

The thesis of the book is that a group of elite men within the Bay Colony opposed the orthodox religious establishment. Their opposition stemmed from their adherence to the Antinomians and/or to the principle of toleration, their engagement in the wider Atlantic economy that involved contact with outsiders, and their role as soldiers which made them more interested in honor and status than was commonly the case in the Bay Colony. Their position ran counter to that of the majority in New England, which Breen describes as orthodox and intolerant, isolationist and democratic. (Breen describes it as democratic, although she also inexplicably asserts in the epilogue that "the Puritans were, of course, no democrats" [p. 219]).

Aspects of this thesis are not new, but Breen attempts to bring together formerly discrete insights into an interrelated dissenting or transgressive position that she believes motivated these men to oppose the dominate culture of the Bay. The fact that merchants, who depended upon financial dealings with strangers, were also inclined to favor religious toleration has long been remarked upon in the literature on New England. Bernard Bailyn's New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955) made the connection much earlier. Similarly the fact that merchants were among Anne Hutchinson's major supporters is widely known. Breen thinks that the relationship between these facts has not been fully understood previously. She argues that capitalism involved merchants in potentially deceptive exchanges that encouraged them to embrace Antinomianism, which made a distinction between the inner person and his actions. In her understanding of the market she uses the insights of Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (1986). Antinominanism was a relatively fleeting phenomenon in the history of New England, and some scholars have questioned whether the epithet "Antinomian" even accurately conveys the views of anyone involved in the mid-1630s controversy. Breen, however, accepts the term as an accurate description not only of Hutchinson's views but of those of many others. After Antinomianism leaves the New England stage, Breen relies on religious toleration as its functional equivalent in her cluster of transgressive positions.

The argument is constructed in such a way that the reader must accept that all these positions (Antinomianism, toleration, heterodoxy, martial ability, engagement in the wider Atlantic world, honor, elitism) are clearly linked and stand in continuous opposition to its alternative, orthodoxy. Dissent is thus monolithic. The relationship of this thesis to the sources on early New England is worth considering. Each of these men or a position Breen associates with them was criticized at some point for violating a sense of the proper comportment for a New Englander. Until his death in 1649, John Winthrop is Breen's primary source for such criticisms; later the Mathers, Increase and especially Cotton, declaimed upon what made a man a good New Englander. Breen is not especially interested in interrogating the dominant culture, the values of which she more assumes than discusses. In most cases, therefore, she provides no documentation for passages asserting the values and views of the dominant culture. Once the cluster of objectionable positions has been asserted, we are asked to accept that any or all of these positions were considered problematic at all times by everyone save those few who held them. Defenders of orthodoxy believed that those who opposed them were part of a sustained and focused attack upon the godly authored ultimately by none other than Satan himself. Why we should adopt their binary construction in analyzing tensions within this society is not a question that Breen addresses. Indeed her thesis rests on the idea that this construction is self evident.

The elite men featured in this study are Israel Stoughton, John Underhill, a group of men connected to Oliver Cromwell at mid-century (John Humphrey, Edward Gibbon, John Leverett, Robert Sedgwick, and Nehemiah Bourne), Daniel Gookin, and John Alden. The book is organized into four hefty chapters, along with an introduction and a combined conclusion and epilogue. Some of the men were affiliated with the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, founded in Boston just after the Antinomian crisis abated. As some readers will know from an article by Breen that appeared in the New England Quarterly (1995), she sees the artillery company as a key institution: its officer corps brought together elite men engaged in the military, committed to honor culture, and (often) involved in trade. In the first chapter, Stoughton, who was not himself an Antinomian but who expressed some sympathy initially for Hutchinson, is used to introduce the Antinomian threat and to link it to dissent from emerging restriction on elites in the orthodox community. Both the chapter on Stoughton and that on John Underhill rely heavily on the sermon by Wheelwright as an expression of their views. Underhill was of course a reckless and flamboyant character and may have been the inspiration for Breen's argument. He was affiliated with the Antinomians and with other heterodox individuals and was a soldier. He wanted to attain status in the Bay Colony even though his sexual indiscretions and his heterodox views made that impossible. He did not in fact spend most of his career in the Bay, being unwelcomed there. That he had transgressed the bounds too completely to remain a member of the Massachusetts elite makes his a rather problematic case study for this volume. The group of men treated in chapter 3 were all New Englanders who entered into events in civil wars and interregnum England, either by re-migrating or accepting positions from the revolutionary governments in the 1640s and 1650s. They fought in the civil wars or in the various campaigns in the Atlantic basin launched from England in this era. As such, they were military men and they were generally comfortable with the greater toleration advocated in England at this time. Little evidence ties them to the other components of Breen's thesis, such as heterodoxy, obsession with honor, or elitism.

The best chapter by far is that on Gookin. Readers of the Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (1999) will be familiar with some of this material, since Breen published a related piece on Gookin in that collection. Gookin, an especially fascinating character, had Irish connections, lived previously in Virginia, represented Cromwell in the effort to recruit settlers for Jamaica, and became a superintendent for the missions to New England. He was also opposed to toleration and was staunchly orthodox, although Breen unsuccessfully tries to relate his position on the half-way covenant to his controversial support for the Indian missions. The causes of his unpopularity among many settlers are not as difficult to locate as Breen suggests. Gookin was roundly hated in New England for taking the part of the praying Indians during King Philip's War. New Englanders were generally hostile toward Indians and unsympathetic to the effort to evangelize among them, but this fact does not need to be explained by citing isolationism born of Puritan orthodoxy. They shared this hostility with Anglicans in Virginia, and New England frontier dwellers felt it even when they were not themselves orthodox. As Breen points out, many frontier dwellers, especially those on the northeastern frontier, were not in fact orthodox. Gookin's sympathy for Indians, like that of John Alden discussed in the conclusion, did make him suspicious. But that was because he was trying to get a prejudiced people engaged in a grueling war to rethink their basic assumptions.

In general, however, Breen's thesis is more muted in this, the penultimate chapter, than in the remainder of the book. This is one reason that this is the strongest chapter, but that is also the case because it chronicles the career of an intriguing figure as well as an important incident in the history of New England.

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Citation: Carla Gardina Pestana. Review of Breen, Louise A., Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. October, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5579

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