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The Crisis Of 1637 And The Making Of Colonial New England
Powell, Anne
Powell, Anne
Abstract
In 1637, the English colonists in northeastern North America perceived threats from three directions – Indigenous Pequots, colonial dissenters, and the English crown. The conflicts that emerged from this perception enveloped the entire region in a colonial crisis that transformed its political and social dynamics. I call that moment of colonial catastrophe the “Crisis of 1637.” The components of the Crisis of 1637 are well known to scholars of early America, especially the religious conflict (known as the Antinomian Controversy) and military conflict (known as the Pequot War). The political conflict (over the English crown’s revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter) is also known but does not occupy as significant a place in the historiography as the other two. These known conflicts are usually studied independently, but a more comprehensive analysis shows that they were connected in significant ways. The connections between the conflicts meant that the problems the English colonists faced were larger than has typically been assumed. This dissertation explores the three conflicts that English colonists dealt with in the mid-1630s and how they created a broader, regional, transformative crisis. It considers the rhetoric of heresy that authorities employed against the dissenters, the first articulation of colonial sovereignty that the Massachusetts Bay colony deployed in its struggle against crown control, the experiences of captivity that English and Pequot people faced during and after the war, and the people and ideas that drew them all together into a regional catastrophe. The Crisis of 1637 was a turning point in the English project of American colonization. From exceedingly contested origins, northeastern North America became a place of English (rather than Indigenous or Dutch) power; colonial (rather than crown) authority, and puritan unity (rather than heterodoxy). The Crisis of 1637 turned the region into New England.
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2024-01-01
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History
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-5w2h-0z86