The first part of this chapter explores the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony’s conception of law on matters of religion. For the Pilgrims, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for sustaining a sanctified society. The second part of the chapter details how the legislature and the courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted many statutes and issued scores of judicial decisions to help ensure the success of their Puritan “Citty vpon a Hill.” In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was issued a new charter as a royal colony. The 1691 provincial charter required that “liberty of Conscience” be allowed “in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists).” The third part of the chapter focuses on the laws enacted and adjudicated during the provincial period to determine whether Massachusetts Bay complied with the new charter’s requirement about religious toleration. Massachusetts Bay’s Puritan Standing Order—the unofficial alliance between Congregational ministers and godly magistrates—would not abandon the animating principle of Puritan Congregationalism without a fight, and that fight was waged in large part through statutes and court cases. It was not until 1833 that Massachusetts disestablished church and state.

This chapter explores the relationship between the animating principle of colonial Connecticut—Puritan Congregationalism—and the colony’s laws. Part I chronicles how central Puritan Congregationalism was in the organic law, statutory law, and common law of the River Colony at which Connecticut was originally planted. Part II investigates the law of the New Haven Colony, a separate community settled in 1638 that joined with the River Colony in 1665 to create a unified Connecticut Colony. Part III examines the law of the unified Connecticut Colony and endeavors to discern when Connecticut’s laws began to deviate from Puritan Congregationalism. Part IV concludes the chapter by assessing the events that led to the official demise in the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 of Puritan Congregationalism as the animating principle of Connecticut. As will be seen, the law of colonial Connecticut eventually came to reflect the idea of religious toleration sweeping, albeit unevenly and imperfectly, across the larger Atlantic World.

In the mid-1860s, as Britain enjoyed global power thanks to coal-fueled industrial capitalism and as American industrialization was poised to take off, George Perkins Marsh of Vermont in America and William Stanley Jevons from Liverpool in Britain published books that warned unsustainable use of natural resources threatened to impoverish future generations. Their Reformed Protestantism upbringing, descended from forebears’ Puritanism, had instilled in both Marsh and Jevons perspectives and values that informed their analyses and solutions. Since their publication, their books’ reputation has risen with concern for the environment and about limits to growth. They remain valuable and relevant today.

To understand what puritans were doing in New England, we have to begin elsewhere, for the place of New England is itself not a beginning but a consequence – an effect of causes long in process before there ever were colonists at Plymouth, Salem, or Boston. Puritanism originated many decades before as a movement for reform of worship and the church in Scotland and England, a movement committed to a certain understanding of redemption – the passage from sin to salvation in the Christian life – that had wide-ranging social, political, and theological ramifications. This chapter maps the basic features of that movement and carries the dynamics forward into the “puritan revolution” of c. 1640–1660, including the theological currents that swirled beyond 1660. Tracking how Calvinist ideas circulated from the Continent to England and Scotland and what impact those ideas had on society, this chapter spells out the origins of puritanism and describes the battles and transatlantic dynamics that shaped American puritan literature.

John Cotton and Roger Williams were Puritan ministers in colonial New England. Cotton authored Abstract of the Laws of New England (1641), an early example of American constitutionalism drawing from both scripture and English law. Cotton’s Abstract was adopted by the New Haven colony and influential in the legal systems of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Cotton also became a prominent spokesman for the laws of Massachusetts Bay, and also advocated a particular style of Congregationalism significant for development of American political and legal thought. Roger Williams, once an apprentice and recording secretary for the eminent English jurist Sir Edward Coke, served briefly as a minister in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Exiled for his criticism of the colonial charters and the Puritan partnership of church and state, Williams eventually founded the colony of Rhode Island and served as its President. Williams argued eloquently for religious liberty, provoking Cotton to engage him in a now-famous “Bloudy Tenant” debate published in London and read on both sides of the British Atlantic. Both Cotton and Williams were articulate representatives for opposing sides of a legal question contested as much in colonial America as today, the question of church-state relations and religious liberty.