The Puritan Experiment with Sumptuary Legislation; G. North

ThePuritan ExPeriment SUMPTUARY LAWS, as defined by one dictionary, are "laws regulat ing extravagance in food, dress, etc. on religious or moral grounds." No other aspect of Puri tan. soci.al legislation during the first half century of New England life better testifies to the funda mentally medieval orientation of that culture. Yet the grandsons of these men became the Yankees the sharp· traders, mobile entre preneurs, and practical inventors whose outlook on life was that of Ben Franklin's cre'ation, Poor Ric'hmrd's Almanack. This astound ing transformation from Puritan to Yankee has fascinated histor iansfor many years, and the fate of the sumptuary legislation serves as a kind of touchstone in tracing that transformation. Dr. North, economist, lecturer, author, cur rently is an associate of Chalcedon, an educa tional organization dedicated to Christian re search and writing. His latest book is An Introduction to Christian Economics, Craig Press, 1973. He is the editor-publisher of the Remnant Review, a fortnightly economic news letter.

The early Puritan communities were organic, tightly knit struc tures. The inhabitants were con vinced that aU men need direction in life. No single institution on earth was seen as possessing ab solute sovereignty, of course; their intensely Protestant outlook for bade placing total trust in any hu man organization. Nevertheless, they believed that the various levels of the civil government did have basic responsibilities in regu lating prices, the purchase of land, public utilities, and personal fash ion. The ministers might advise the public officials on such matters, but it was the political authorities who were seen as being ultimately responsible for their enforcement. The Question of Status In the mid-nineteenth century, the British scholar, Sir Henry Maine, characterized the coming of the modern world in terms of the concept, Hfrom status to con tract." Seventeenth-century New 341 342 THE FREEMAN June England fits this outline beauti, fully. Members of the first gen eration of Puritans (1630-60), as well as the second generation (1660-90), were deeply concerned about the threat posed by open, voluntary contracts to the received medieval world view. Considera tions, 01 status were paramount· in their' minds, and it became in~ creasingly obvious to everyone concerned that the New World 'was not going to be a place in which inherited concepts of personal sta tus were going to flourish. There was too much cheap land, too many economic alternatives, too many "callings" - occupations -- for' the survival of traditional status con cepts.

The essence of the Puritan idea of status is found in the Larger Catechism of the Westminster Confession of Faith, that compre hensive body of theology ham mered out by the Puritan' scholars of Cromwell's England in the mid 1640's. The question of status was basic to the Puritans' interpreta tion of the Fifth Commandment, "honor thy father and thy mother." By father and mother, in the fifth commandment, are meant not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God's ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, .or commonwealth . . . . The general scope of the fifth commandment is, the performance of those duties. which .. we mutually owe in our several relations, as Inferiors, superiors, or equals~l There is nothing innately rep rehensible in the··.. ideaL that, ';men should observe distincti'onsarnorig each other; "civility" and basic etiquette· have always required as much. The idea that· superiors ("parents") have duties to infer iors ("children"),· and vice versa, is commonellough. When the So viet Union in the early years of its history attempted to tamper with this principle in f.amily life and in military affairs, the whole fabric of Russian Iif e Was .dis rupted, and these short-lived ex periments in supposedly non-status society were abandoned for the sake of survival. Society never really faces the question of "status or no status," but only questions of what kind of status and the locus of .authority in the enforce ment of status distinctions. It was here that Puritan' New England encountered its difficulties.

The Larger Catechism summar ized the accepted status ethic of Puritan culture. Both superiors and inferiors. were given positive injunctions and negative warnings about respecting the duties and obligations of authority and sub1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 343 mission. Leaders are to expect the following from inferiors: rever ence, respect, prayer, obedience, love, and honor. Inferiors are not to neglect their duties, rebel, curse, or mock their superiors. Superiors, on the other hand, owe their' in feriors the following: love, prayer, counsel, rewards, chastening, pro tection. The sins of superiors are also listed: "an inordinate seeking of themselves, their own glory, ease, profit, or pleasure," and "in ordinate" is understandably but unfortunately left undefined. Su periors are not to command any thing unlawful from their infer iors, or correct them unduly, or to lead them into temptation, "or any way dishonouring themselves, or le,ssening ,their authority, by an unj ust, indiscreet, rigorous, or re miss behaviour."2 In a family, church, or volun tary society, these injunctions can be more easily applied. But the medieval perspective of the Puri tans can be seen in their unwill ingness to limit the locus of the term "family." They were intent upon transferring the status re quirements of the family to the civil government.

The Fami/istic State A family is a limited entity. Members are born into it and grow to maturity; eventually they die. Sons and daughters leave to form new families, and this alters the relationship between parents and children. Parents grow old and sometimes feeble, so they have an incentive to rear children com petently; their own future survi val may depend upon the maturity and faithfulness of the children. The parents therefore have an in centive to avoid keeping offspring in perpetual childhood. The rela tionships are intensely personal, and therefore bounded by feelings of love, honor, loyalty, and directly threatened by feelings of jealousy, disrespect, or hatred. The civil government, however, is a completely different institu tion, established for different ends, and governed by different rules. Its function is not to father chil dren, rear them, promote their ma turity, or care for them. The state's function is to protect men against violence, both domestic and foreign. Invasions are to be repelled; thieves and bullies are to be restrained. The state is to be ruled by formal laws that are pre dictable, applying to all members of society.3 By its very nature, it is an impersonal structure; it is not to respect persons in the ad ministration of justice. Ideally, men are to be ruled by formal civil law, not by capricious men. Formal law is to restrain the activities of the state itself, limiting its arbi trariness.

344 THE FREEMAN June A Hopeless Conflict of Interests and Lack of Harmony In retrospect, it is not difficult for us to understand why the New England Puritans, no less than their English cousins, would find it difficult to assign limits to a familistic state. It is rather like children setting limits· on fathers, especially when fathers confront their children not merely with the threat of violence, but also with the moral obligation of submis sion. Yet from the 1630's through the 1670's, this is precisely what Puritan leaders attempted to do. They wanted to permit godly men sufficient freedom to exercise their personal callings, for they well un derstood that if a man is person ally responsible before God for his acts, he must· be given wide lati tude in exercising his personal tal ents without interference from other men, including leaders. Nevertheless, they also wanted to insure that the "family of God's people" would preserve its in herited status distinctions, and that peace and harmony would prevail as a testimony to the whole world. As the seventeenth century progressed, they were to find that the two goals were very frequently in opposition, and harmony was not maintained.

Modern commentators must be extremely careful not to read our contemporary views about· status back into the seventeenth century - or at least not back into the first three quarters. There was no public outcry from "oppressed" in feriors, no colony-wide movement to redress grievances. There is little, if any, evidence that the "inferior sort" and their elected representatives, the deputies, were in fundamental opposition to the medieval view of status obliga tions. Puritan society was in reality a society made up of peo ple who in England would have been regarded as the "middling sort" - sons of the lesser gentry, yeoman farmers, craftsmen, and others who had sufficient capital to make the journey. There were servants, however, and these could wind up as members ofa truly lower class, but masters were ex pected (and even compelled legal ly) to provide some capital, usu ally in the .form of tools and training, to departing indentured servants (who could be kept in service no more than seven years) .

Still, in every society there are higher and lower, richer and poorer, and the sumptuary legis lation codified these distinctions. For many years, the subordinate population was willing to acquiesce in what the Larger Catechism re quired, an acknowledgement of their superiors "according to their several ranks, and the nature of their places."

1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 345 The Sumptuary Codes The Puritan magistrates con cluded, as had leaders in European society for centuries, that it is not always easy to identify members of various classes. In New Eng land, for all intents and purposes, there were three levels - higher, middle, lower - but the law codes only recognized two. Puritan legis lation borrowed a practice of the most familistic of all state struc tures, the military: uniforms. The Larger Catechism listed as one of the duties of inferiors the "imita tion of their (superiors') virtues and graces," but no Puritan leader was so naive' as to believe that such a requirement allowed the "inferior sort" to imitate their superiors' tastes in fashion. Thus, in 1651, both the magistrates and deputies of Massachusetts agreed on the following piece of legisla tion, one that is unrivaled in American history for its sheer medievalism - comprehensive, au thoritarian, and thoroughly hier archical: Although several declarations and orders have been made by this Court against excess in apparel, both of men and of women, which have not yet taken that effect which were to be desired, but on the contrary we cannot but to our grief take notice that intollerable excesses and brav ery have crept in upon us, and es pecially amongst the people of mean condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandal of our profession [i.e., pro fession of faith], the consumption of estates, and altogether we acknowl edge it to be a matter of great diffi culty, in regard to the blindness of men's minds and the stubbornness of their wills, to set down exact rules to confine all sorts of persons, yet we cannot but account it our duty to commend unto all sorts of persons a sober and moderate use of those blessings which, beyond our expec tation, the Lord has been pleased to afford unto us in this wilderness, and also declare our utter detesta tion and dislike that men or women of mean condition, educations, and callings should take upon them the garb of gentlemen, by the wearing of gold or silver lace, or buttons, or points at their knees, to walk in great boots; or women of the same rank to wear tiffany hoods or scarves, which though allowable to persons of greater estates, or more liberal education, yet we cannot but judge it intollerable in persons of such like condition .... 4 Unless a citizen was of a good education, or a military officer, or a civil officer, he could not wear such clothing unless his estate could be valued at £200 or more, according to a "true and indiffer ent value." For a violation of this statute, a ten shilling fine was imposed.

A similar, though shorter, stat ute had been'passed by the Con346 THE FREEMAN June necticut authorities a decade ear lier. 5 This should not be under stood as an indication of Massa chusetts' late arrival in the area of sumptuary legislation. The wearing of lace by social inferiors had been the subject of at least two pieces of Massachusetts legis lation in the 1630's. It was only to be used as a small edging (pre sumably only by the upper classes), and lace in general was prohibited from being worn ex tensively on any garment. 6 Special import taxes were placed on lux ury items, "for preventing the immoderate expense of provisions brought from beyond the seas." Such goods as sugar, spice, wine, and tobacco were included. The tariff was 16% for direct pur chasers, and 33% of the import price for retailers (thus making it more difficult for local retailers to compete in sales with the more distant, and presumably less com pelling, London merchants) .7 Tobacco consumption, which was regarded by Puritan leaders as another unnecessary excess, had been under fire [I couldn't resist] from some of the directors of the Massachusetts Bay Company right from its inception. 8 All four of the Puritan commonwealths - Massa chusetts, New Haven, Connecti cut, and Plymouth - passed nume rous provisions placing restrictions on the sale and consumption of the "noxious weed." These pro hibitions were not really status oriented; they were motivated by a number of fears. One, under standably, was fire. Boston was for ever burning down in the seven teenth century, as .Carl Briden baugh's Cities in the Wilderness reports in some detail. Atone stage, Massachusetts prohibited the buy ing and selling of tobacco entirely, although it was legal to import it for re-export later. 9 Theyappar ently thought it was all right to burn down other cities, if local merchants were to gain some profit iIi the transaction. Plymouth tried to ban its importation in 1641, but repealed the law six months la ter. lO Connecticut's ban is the most amusing in retrospect. It was di rectly tied to the issue of personal health, but in the exact opposite of today's concern: no one under the age of twenty who had not already addicted himself to tobacco was allowed to buy it, unless he had a physician's certificate "that it is useful to him," and he had to pre sent the certificate to the Court in order to obtain a license to pur chase the weed.ll Time-Wasting Taverns, brewers, and liquor re tailers were under restrictions throughout the .century. Indeed, some of these controls are as com1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 347 mon today as they were in the New England colonies. Men were not to waste precious, time in tav~ erns, the magistrates believed, so they went to' considerable lengths to protect men from their. own weaknesses. Then, as now, licensing was the primary means of control, and it was equally a, source of public revenue. The annual licens~ ingof taverns, said the Massa~ chusetts-, magistrat~s, is ineseap~ able, "Seeing it is difficult to order and keep the houses of public en~ tertainment in such conformity to the wholesome laws established by this Court' as is necessary" for the prevention ,of: drunkenness, ex~ cessive drinking" vain expense, of money, time, and the abuse of the creatures of God.... '?2 Although it seems incredible to~ day, shuffleboard was regarded :;ts, a prim,e danger.~ There were.' not to be scenes 'of elderly ,men· spend t ing a leisurely ,afternoon in -,the park playing this Devil's game.

Such games were a sign of idling - a waste of God's most precious resource, time - and they were es pecially prohibited in taverns and when practiced by servants and youths. The magistrates were will ing to go to' real extremes to stamp out games of chance and shuffle board. 13 These regulations ex~ tended throughout the century, unlike virtually all other sumptu ary laws, indicating a continuity of opinion against "vain pur~uit~." (I t might -be said that at least in New England, shuffleboard was not to be an old man's pastime because old. men were always re garded as fully prod ucti ve until they grew feeble; if a man could work, he was expected to. If shuf flebQard drew tl).e wrath of Puri tan,magistrates, Leisure World or Sun City or retirement centers. in Florida .would, have been regarded by them as nothing, short~f ,Sa tanic - the worst sort of wasteful~ ness of men's productive capaci ties.) As in" so many other cases, one colony did not participa~e in the surnptuarymania: Rhode IslandJ4 But Rhode Island was not a Puri tan commonwealth. Its founder, Roger Williams, ha.d argued for the separation of church and state ...,.... not primarily to, protect the state, but to protect the church!

The Problem 01 Social Mobility The Puritans', emphasis on per: sonal responsibility, thrift, hard work, the moral righteousness of all lawful occupations, careful ac counting (moral and financial), honest dealing, the fulfillment of contracts (covenants), and their concern with the future, both heavenly and (especially from 1630-60) earthly, all combined to provide an atmosphere conducive to economic growth and personal 348 THE FREEMAN June wealth. Another important feature of Puritan thought that has sel dom been recognized is the anti pathy of Puritan preachers to the sin of envy. Samuel Willard, whose two decades of Sunday evening sermons on the Larger Catechism, A Compleat Body of Divinity (1726), stands as the Summa of Puritan theology, saw envy as a direct violation of the law of God. Reset forth this standard to his congregation: they U~ught not to envy, but to rejoice in the pros perity of their neighbors."l5 Willard's lengthy attack on the sin of envy stood as one of the longest -expositions on the subject in Eng lish until the publication, in 1969, of Prof. Helmut Schoeck's crucial study, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Cotton Mather agreed entirely with Willard's analysis: "It will have no good aspect upon us, if it should be so, that a level ing spirit gets so much head among us, that no man shall be in anything sup·erior to his neigh bors, but his very superiority shall make him obnoxious to envious in dignities. . . ."16 Envy, as Schoeck has argued so incisively, restricts the incentives for and impetus to economic de velopment. First, it discourages the free discussion among mem bers of a society of a basic fact of life: time. Men do not discuss their personal futures if their goal is to conceal their aspirations, for tunes, and plans. Yet they must con ceal such matters in a society mo tivated by feelings of envy. Sec ond, under such restraints, inno vationsare unlikely, since no one wants to let his neighbors see how much better off a person is asa result of some advance. 17 Cut off discussion of the future,compro mise men's orientation toward the future, penalize advancement tech nologically and personally, and the society in question will show few signs of economic growth. 18 Personal and Social Growth Puritan preaching, therefore, served as a stimulus to both per sonal wealth in one's calling and economic development for the com munity. Men were to be moderate in all things, and they were not to pursue wealth for its own sake.

This was made clear by a century of preaching, from John Cotton to Cotton Mather to Benj amin Frank lin. Nevertheless, there was noth ing innately wrong with wealth in the Puritan view, however much a spiritual snare and delusion great wealth might become. So when men began to follow the tenets of the Puritan faith, they found themselves steadily increasing in wealth, both personally and cul turally. This was to raise an ab solutely baffling dilemma: how was the fact of social mobility to 1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 349 be reconciled with medieval cate gories of fixed status, implying defined place .and function? The Puritans were hardly the first people to face this dilemma. The millennium of institutional struggles over monastic reform in the Roman Catholic Church testi fies to the traditional nature of the problem. From the day that St. Benedict set forth hisemi nently practical monastierules humility, hard work, thrift, p·a tience, self-help, discipline-the monasteries that followed his guide faeed the problem. of eco·· nomic growth. The monasteries had a tendency to get richer and.

richer. Then the original ideal of personal poverty was abandoned by certain abbots and monks, and pressures for reform came from the outside. 19 This pattern pre vailed right down into the· six teenthcentury, when Henry VIII confiscated monastic property in the name of a highe'r morality. In 1632, it was one thing for Gov. John Winthrop to challenge Thomas Dudley with respect to the latter's ostentation in adorning his home with wainscoting (a wooden paneling on the walls of a house). He had more justifica·· tion, given Puritan standards, for such an act, for it was, in his words, "the beginning of a plan·· tation."20 Even so, it is not hard to understand Dudley's anger when Winthrop had the frame of his house removed. Dudley - who was to alternate with Winthrop as the Governor of Massachusetts Bay,in the early years, and who regarded himself as the strieter Puritan of the two - objected, and Winthrop, in his own words, "acknowledged himself faulty" in taking this responsibility on him self without having consulted with other magistrates. 21 But after half a centuryhadelaps-ed, we find ministers using the same old "wil derness condition" argument in order to justify the intervention of the civil government in com munity fashions. Sermons deliv ered in the second generation of New England would dwell on the graciousness of God in making New England into a fruitful land, and a few .pages later would revert to the older "wilderness" pattern.

It is unlikely that .anynewlyrich citizen of Boston or some optimis tic social climber would conclude that his, or his wife's, style of dress in some mysterious way con stituted a grave deviation from a hypothetical "wilderness standard" of clothing - not in 1680, at least. Unprecedented Mobility The very success of the Puri tans in overcoming the .limitations of a wilderness disrupted the re ceivedmedieval tradition of fixed or semi-fixed status distinctions.

350 THE FREEMAN June The rapidity of soe,ial .change and the fluidity'of social ,mobility baf fled· Puritan ministers. By medi eval standards, the,' social mobility was unprecedented' and, incompre hensible.' This was especially true of Boston, which was' becoming the'majo,r port ,in the colonies. It was a society inwhich,a,formel' indentured servant' could become a ship owner .,or a wealthy' skilled craftsman. John Hull/one' of the most'respected men: ih New 'Eng land, and surely one "of the Tich est, had raised himself from very modest circumstances. 22 How was a magistrate' to determine some":' one',s social status, ,except in, cases of extreme poverty -or· 'wealth? :Social status', became as much of aproblent for the' second gen~ eration as the administration of a "just price." had been for the first. It was an elusive quality, even as the just price ,. had been an elusive quantitY,which refused to be catalogned or defined in ,writ ten legislation. Yet it ,seemed as though this very elusiveness" hyp., notized Puritan preachers'., They were certain that a proper defini tion could' be found, but the per verse changes going on in New England society kept it concealed.

In their eyes, the evil lay with the overly fluid society and not with the lack of rigor in the definition of status. Changes in fashion, imi tation by members of the lower classes of their social superiors, the increase in affluence of the lower class as a class, this seem ingly perverse" unwillingness of men to' keep, in their original sta tions into which they had been born: here were signs of despair. Puritan commentators were con vinced that ,New England society was in the process of dissolution; God was about to depart from the land. Puritan Preaching Against Pride ana. Ambition By 1674, Cotton,. Mather's fa ther, Increase Mather, was con":' vinced that the continual :violation of the Fifth "Commandment-the status commandment - was the chief sin of his generation. (That someone named Increase could take this position only serves to em... phasize the' irony.) Inferiors were rising up· against superiors in the commonwealth-,- in families, schools, churches. It was not an uprising that he feared, :but this incessant rising ·up."If there be any prevailing iniquity in New England, this is it.... And mark what I say, if ever New England be destroyed, this very sin of dis obedience to' the fifth command ment will be the ruin of the land."23 .' Samuel Willard agreed with Mather. 24 The, problem, as the Puritan divines saw it, was that men were 1974 THE PURIT'AN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 351 not satisfied with their lot in life.

Daniel Dension's last sermon, ap pendedby another famous preach er of his day, William Hubbard, to Hubbard's funeral sermon for Denison, cities ambition as the curse of the land, along with envy: ". . . Ambition is restless, must raise commotions, that thereby it might have an opportunity of ·ad vancement, and employ envy to depress others, that. they fancy may stand in their way.... "25 Such ambitious.men are unwilling "to abide in the calling, wherein they are· set; they cannot stay· for the blessing, nor believe when. God hath· need of their service, he will find· them an employment, what ever .stands in· the' way of their design, must give place.... "26 The clergy's practical problem was obvious: assigning explicit guidelines that would help the magistrate to decide in any given case whether a man's ambition was of the "restless" sort, or whether the individual was simply exercising newly discovered per sonal talents in some new calling.

To argue', as Denison did, that a fixed calling is basic to God's plan of salvation for each saint, in volved him in a form of feudalism manorialism that was unlikely to survive the acids of the competi tive market mechanism, with its concept of voluntary free labor, the right of private contract, and profit in terms of an impersonal price mechanism. The Boston Synod of 1679 listed pride in apparel and the unwar ranted imitation by servants of the dress of their superiors as ea.rly entries in its catalogue of over a dozen social evils that had brought miseries to New Eng land. 27 Five years earlier, Increase Mather himself had announced the difficulty of distinguishing .the dress of the regenerate from that of the unregenerate. It is a dark 'day· when "professors of religion fashion·· themselves according to the world."28 But given the in escapable and undeniable exist ence of human sin, what could be done to correct this problem?

What are the standards of legiti mate fashion for a godly society? Are they subject to change? Like the standards of economic oppres sion, the just price, and usurious interest, the standards of godly fashion were elusive. Strange Apparel Rev. Urian Oakes struggled mightily with this difficulty. He was convinced that human pride expresses itself in outward garb, "in affected trimmings and adorn ings of the outward man, that body of clay that is going to the dust and worms." Strange apparel is going to be punished, he said, citing Zephaniah 1:8 as proof. Yet 352 THE FREEMAN June some rich and lovely garments are all right (II Samuel 1 :24) : Nor am. I so severe,or morose, as to exclaim against this or that fash ion, provided it carry nothing of im modesty in it, or contrarily to the rules of moral honesty. The civil custom of the place where we live is that which we must regulate in this case.· But· when persons spend more time in· trimming their bodies than their souls . . . When they go beyond what their state and condi tion will allow, that they are necessi ..

tated to run into debt, and neglect the works of mercy and charity, or exact upon others in their dealings, that they may maintain their port and garb; or when they exceed their rank and degree (whereas one end of apparel is to distinguish and put a difference between persons accord ing to their places and conditions) and when the sons and daughters of Sion are proud and haughty in their carriage and attire in an humbling time, when the church is brought low, Jerusalem and Judah are in a ruinous condition, and the Lord calls to deep humiliation: This is very displeasing to God, and both Scrip ture and Reason condemn it. 29 Oakes was preaching to the magistrates of the colony, in a 1673 election sermon, that annual ritual that helped to bridge the gap between church and state. But he did not go into specific details concerning the nature of the re quired legislation - election sermons almost never did - and so nothing was put into operation.

Oakes had put most of the Puri tan theologians' opposition to the flux of modern life into one lengthy exposition. Excessive so cial change breaks down familiar communal standards, which in turn are supposed to help preserve members of differing classes in traditional occupations and in dress reflecting those occupations. The hierarchy of medieval life a hierarchy reflecting a great chain of being from God to Satan -was being shattered by the winds of .change. Men and women were increasingly unwilling in the late seventeenth century to accept the limitations of such arbitrary status concepts on the exercise of their property rights. What was "civil custom"? In a society which had grown frQrn a tiny, rural col ony in an uncharted wilderness to a thriving and productive com ponent of a newly developed Eng lish trade system, civiI custom was indeed the question. Customs were anything but fixed or universal.

And after 1680, clerical opinion no longer carried as much weight in establishing or maintaining older customs. The very fluidity of fashion, where new styles could sweep through the community, re flected the lack of fixed standards, and this fact dismayed the preachers.

1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 353 Conclusion Status distinctions were sup posed to be respected by members of a Holy Commonwealth; this meant that each status required its appropriate fashions, manners, customs. The problem which the first generation had never been willing to consider was to make itself felt in the 1670~s. In a so ciety in which men are not only free to increase their estates, but in fact have a moral obligation to do so, should men not be allowed to improve their social statuses? If Puritan frugality, the rational use of time and resources, system atic accounting, personal respon sibility, and a future-oriented view of the world are allowed to com bine into an ethos favoring both individual and aggregate eco nomic growth, then social mobil ity, upward or downward, should be characteristic of that society. Yet the Puritan theologians of the second generation did not reach such a conclusion. There fore, given their unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of social mobility on such a scale, they had.

an obligation to spell out the na·· ture of specific legislation, both ecclesiastical and civil, that would define the relationship between status and wealth, and between status and fashion. This was the great stumbling stone for the Puritan oligarchs. The ministers were never able to agree on such rules. The sumptuary laws went unenforced, relics of the first gen eration's confidence in status leg islation. Fashions continued to degenerate, and finally, to the hor ror of many of the pastors, Puri tan saints began wearing wigs! As far as the sermons of the 1670's are concerned, Worthing ton C. Ford's description holds good: "Massachusetts Bay was becoming degenerate, the older generation said. It is always be coming degenerate."3o By the 1680's, the civil magistrates had abandoned the attempt to main tain medieval concepts of social status in an increasingly modern culture. The older Puritan standards of social propriety had become the victims, not of Enlightenment ra tionalism or philosophical skepti cism, but of operational Puritan ism. Like the medieval monas teries, the Puritan commonwealth had prospered as a direct result of Puritan teachings. But unlike the monasteries, the society of late seventeenth-century New England did not heed the call to reform it self. Indeed, the cries for reform were so vague, especially after the defeat of ~he Indians in King Phil ip's War (1675-76), that had any magistrate wanted to listen, he would have had nothing to hear in the way of specific reforms.

354 THE FREEMAN June The saints in the churches were as unwilling to abide by the older standards of dress and social status as those outside the churches who had neglected to "own the covenant" of church membership. Puritan sermons had warned of God's wrath in the face of hardheartedness, but when judgment came - in the shape ·of an Indian uprising - the Puritan military forces were victorious. Success was the one thing that the pessimistic jeremiad sermons of the second generation simply could not deal with successfully. Religious pietism was sweeping the Western world after 1660, in England, the·· Continent, and the Puritan colonies. The former con fidence in· the future about the possibilities for the expansion of God's external kingdom - cultural, social, and political-had faded. Louis XIV, Charles II, and other secular monarchs were ·no longer interested in the expansion of the kingdom of God, but rather. with their own political kingdoms. 31 A religious pessimism concerning the external affairs of the world set in for the next eight decades in New England, from 1640 until the Great Awakening of the 1740's, and by 1680, Puritan theologians and preachers knew that in all likelihood, their· hopes concerning the Holy Commonwealth were not going to be realized.

Cultural and economic Puritan ism, however, still operated, but on a private level. Individual saints saved, planned, built for the future. The Holy Commonwealth, while not so holy as it had been in 1630, was more mature. It had freed men from many of the shackles that had bound· them for a thousand years. A new land was ready for the application of Puri tan hard work and thrift. Political institutions, built as they were on the .doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and the validity of covenants, provided the demo cratic mechanism for orderly transfers of politicaJ power. Eco nomic institations, built in terms of individual responsibility before God, now helped to release the eriergies ofa diligent community of citizens. The old Puritan mis trust of concentrated political power, when coupled with the old medieval tradition of localism, created a hitherto unheard of eco nomic freedom. What was socially inoperative in Puritanism had been largely scrapped by a later generation of Puritans. What re mained was to stand as part of the foundation of the American republic. ~ • FOOTNOTES.

1 Larger Catec.hism (1647), answers 124, 126. I am using the standard edition published by the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (1970).

197.4 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT WITH SUMPTUARY LEGISLATION 355 2 Ibid., ans. 127-30. Direct quote from #130. 3 F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, 1960). 4 Nathaniel R.Shurtleff (ed.), Rec~ ords of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston: State Printer, 1853), III, p. 243. I have cited the version approved by, the more democratic deputies; the version approved by the full General Court is almost identical: ibid., IV, pt. I, pp. 61-62. [Cited hereafter as MeR.] 5 J. Hammond Trumball and Charles Hoadly (eds.), The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (New York: AMS Press, [1850-90] 1968), 1 (1641), p.64. [Cited hereafter ,as CCR.] 6 MCR, 1(1635), p. 18.3; (1639), pp. 274-75.' . 7 MCR, I (1636), p. 186. 8 MCR, I,PP. 387-:-89, 403. 9 MCR, 1(1635), p.136;(1635), p.180. 10 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (ed.), Records of the Colony of New Plymouth (New York: AMS Press" [1855J1968), XI, p.38.

11 CCR, I (1647), p. 153. 12 MCR, IV, pt. I (1654), p. 287. 13 MCR, II, pp. 180, 195: III, p. 102; IV, pt. I, p. 20; CCR, I, p. 289; PCR, XI, p.66. 14 On Rhode Island's absence of sump tuary legislation, see William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 (1890), I,' p. 290. Weeden provides a summary of the vari ous sumptuary statute's: pp. 226ff. 15 Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (New York: Johnson Re prints, [1726] 1969), p. 644. This was the largest book ever published in the colonies in its day - close to one million words. 16 Cotton Mather, Concio ad Populum (1719), p. 18. 17 Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), pp. 46-50. 18 On the importance of future-orien tation to economic-and cultural life, see Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969) .

19 Cf. Dom Cuthbert Butler, Benedic tine Monachism (2nd ed.; London: Long mans, Green & Co., 1924), pp. 150-55. St. Benedict, was totally opposed to private ownership among the monks: The Rule of St. Benedict (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952), pp. 85, 87, 127. 20 James K. Hosmer. (~d.),. Wfnthrop's Journal: "History' of 'New England," 1630-1649 (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1908]1966), I, p. 77. 21 Ibid., I, pp. 84-85. 22 Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Company (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930) , -ch. 5., ; ",' , , ' 23 Increase Mather, The Wicked Man's Portion (1675), p.17. Preached in 167'4. 24 Samuel Willard, Useful Instructions for a professing People in Times of great Security and Degeneracy (1673), p. 75. 25 Daniel Denison, Irenicon, attached to.Willi~m Hubbard, The Benefit of Ct well-ordered Conversation (1684), p. 195. 26 Ibid., p. 196. 27 Boston Synod, The Necessity of Reformation (1679), pp. 2-3.

28 Increase Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near (1674), p. 22. ' 29 Urian Oakes, New-England Pleaded with (1673), p. 34. An election sermon delivered in Boston in May, 1673. 30 Worthington G. Ford, "Sewall and Noyes on Wigs," Publications of the Colonial Society of ,Massachusetts, XX (1917-19), p.112. . 31 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-60 (London: Macmillan, 1969).