Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (50 page)

In embarking on a `holy experiment' for the harmonious coexistence of peoples of different nationalities and adherents of all faiths, Penn was foreshadowing the religiously and ethnically pluralist society that British North America would in due course become. At the time of Pennsylvania's foundation, toleration in many colonies was at best only grudging, but the lack of any effective mechanism for the enforcement of orthodoxy left them with no option but to move, however hesitantly, down the road that would lead, as in Pennsylvania, to free religious choice.

The great changes in England produced by the Glorious Revolution and the Toleration Act of 1689 provided additional sanction for the route that was being taken. It is true that the Toleration Act was a strictly limited measure. In Maryland in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Roman Catholics were progressively barred from public life, and eventually, in 1718, lost their right to vote. Similarly, in 1705 the Pennsylvania assembly was forced by pressure from the crown to exclude Roman Catholics, Jews and non-believers from the enjoyment of political rights.141 Yet the Act represented a grudging recognition that uniformity of belief and practice was no longer regarded as indispensable for the survival of the British polity. As such it reflected what had long been the reality on both sides of the Atlantic. Dissenting Protestants had come to stay. So too, it seemed, had the Jews, whose tacit readmission to England by Cromwell had not been reversed by Charles II.

Since the middle years of the seventeenth century small communities of Sephardic Jews had been establishing themselves on mainland North America, initially in New Netherland, and then in 1658 in Newport.149 The majority of them came by way of the British and Dutch Caribbean, to which a number had fled from Brazil after the Portuguese recovered it from the Dutch in 1654. The acceptance of their presence in the British colonies provided a neat counterpoint to the fate which overcame them or their brethren in the Iberian New World. Although from the beginnings of colonization the Spanish crown had prohibited the entry of Jews or New Christians (conversos) into its American possessions,"' a continuous trickle of New Christians - among them the seven brothers of St Teresa of Avila151 - managed to get through. Following the union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal in 1580 the policy of exclusion became virtually unworkable. New Christians, many of them covert Jews, had not only settled in Brazil but were also the dominant element among the Portuguese merchants who controlled the transatlantic slave trade, and they seized the opportunity offered by the union of the crowns to establish themselves in the Spanish American ports of Vera Cruz, Cartagena and Buenos Aires.152 From here they infiltrated the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, where they became a significant presence, particularly in Lima.

Although the objects of constant suspicion by the Inquisition, which was always on the lookout for signs of Jewish practices, the New Christians clearly felt that the risks were well worth taking. There was obvious scope for profitable commercial activity in the silver-rich viceroyalties, and for at least sixty years after 1580 they made an important contribution to Spanish American economic life, some of them simply as small traders, shopkeepers and artisans, but others as wealthy merchants. Both as Portuguese and as suspected Jews, however, they were disliked and distrusted in the Spanish territories, where opinion hardened against them in the 1620s and 1630s. In 1639 Lima was the scene of an impressive auto de fe, and their vulnerability increased dramatically when the Portuguese revolution of 1640 dissolved the union of the crowns and anyone of Portuguese origin was liable to be regarded as a traitor. In Mexico alone some 150 `judaizers' were seized by the Inquisition in the early 1640s, and the anti-converso campaign reached its climax in the terrible `great auto de fe' held in Mexico City on 11 April 1649, when thirteen of them were burnt at the stake, and twenty-nine abjured.is3

Although sporadic trials of suspected crypto-Jews would continue into the eighteenth century, the great days of the clandestine Jewish presence in Spanish America were at an end. But, in part at least as a consequence, Jews were to find a fresh field for their enterprise and skills in a British America where there was no Inquisition to harass them, and no necessity to conceal their faith. Their coming, like that of the Quakers, added yet another distinctive piece to the patchwork quilt of creeds and cults that was beginning to cover the north Atlantic seaboard.

With a growing diversity of faiths, British American religion at the end of the seventeenth century stood in a very different relationship to both society and the state from that which prevailed in the American territories of the Spanish crown. Orthodoxy, whether of the Anglican or Congregationalist variety, had failed to impose itself. The apparatus of an ecclesiastical establishment, in the form of a clerical hierarchy, church courts and a regularized system of taxation for the payment of the ministry and the propagation of the faith, was notable by its absence. Religious pluralism, more or less tolerated, was becoming the order of the day. As a result, the clergy were having to compete with each other in an increasingly crowded market-place. Nor was it easy for them to assert their authority in a diversified and often vociferous lay society, some of whose members resolutely refused to recognize them as special conduits of grace and found in the inspiration of the Holy Word, or an Inner Light, a sufficient guide to salvation.

The implications of all this for the development of colonial society were profound. Religious diversity reinforced the political diversity that was already such a striking feature of British American colonial life. The collective Puritan ideal of ordered liberty, which was enshrined in the 'Body of Liberties' adopted by the General Court of Massachusetts in 1641, inspired a style of political life very different from that of Anglican Virginia, where `liberty' involved, at least for the governing class, a minimum of restraint.154 In the Middle Colonies religious diversity, coming on top of a growing social and ethnic diversity as Scottish, ScottishIrish, French and German immigrants began arriving in increasing numbers, contributed to the political instability of the region as a whole.155

The unstable combination of religious and political diversity enhances the impression of British America as an atomized society in a continuous state of turmoil. At first sight this appears truer of the Middle Colonies and the Chesapeake than of New England, where the collective values and ideals of a covenanted people had struck deep roots, and where the magistrates continued to take with extreme seriousness their duty to support the church and ensure that the people remained true to the terms of the covenant. Yet even New England had never been the tranquil society which its own historians liked to depict, and the collective discipline of a godly state was always fragile and precarious.116

The turmoil and confusion, however, also reflected the vitality of New World Protestantism, made up as it was of unresolved tensions - between institutionalized authority and the free movement of the spirit, between the aspirations of individuals and those of the group with which they had entered into a voluntary association. These tensions offered the prospect both of continual spiritual turmoil and of no less continual spiritual renewal as the pendulum of religious life swung between institutional attempts to impose discipline and spontaneous outbursts of revivalist enthusiasm imbued with millenarian hopes.

In so far as the tensions were capable of resolution, they would find it in the shared biblical culture that was the foundation of religious life in British North America. The Bible was to be found everywhere - in the libraries of Virginian gentlemen, and in the households of New England, which might possess it in two formats, `great' and small. 117 Since the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge held the monopoly printing rights, colonial printers were not allowed to publish it, although the newly founded press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exploited a loophole in the legislation to produce in 1640 the first printing of what was to be the extremely popular `Bay Psalm Book'.151 Virginia had no permanent printing press until 1730 and, like New England, imported its Bibles, along with much other religious literature, from England.159 If the high cost of book imports kept sales down, the Bible was an overwhelming priority. The language and the culture of the colonies were infused with biblical references and turns of phrase, and white children in eighteenth-century Virginia would use Bibles for their reading primers.160

A biblical culture encouraged literacy and gave an impetus to schooling, both private and public. Behind the laws passed in Virginia and New England in the 1640s for the promotion of schooling there may well have lurked an anxious preoccupation with the upholding of standards of civility in a remote and savage environment'161 but religion was integral to civility. `If we nourish not learning,' wrote John Eliot as plans for the foundation of Harvard College were being mooted, `both church and commonwealth will sink.'162 The prime responsibility for the training of the young lay with the family, as the Massachusetts statute of 1642 made clear in reminding parents and the masters of servants of their duty to ensure that the young were able `to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country'. Further legislation in the same decade ordered that each family should engage in weekly catechizing, but also made provision for formal schooling in every town of over fifty families. 161

The early commitment to education in New England and Virginia, as reflected in their legislation, left an enduring legacy,164 but its effects are difficult to measure. In Virginia, where schooling was so difficult to organize, literacy among white males, as measured by the ability to sign rather than simply make a mark, rose from 46 per cent in the 1640s to 62 per cent around 1710.165 In New England, by the same criterion, 60 per cent of adult men and 30 per cent of adult women were literate in 1660, although this form of measurement would class as 'illiterate' many who, if they could not write their names, may well have learnt the rudiments of reading.166 By 1750 literacy in New England would approach 70 per cent among men and 45 per cent among women - exceptionally high figures by the standards of contemporary Europe.167 Unfortunately, no literacy figures are available for the creole population of the Spanish American viceroyalties. Letters from sixteenth-century settlers writing home to friends and relatives make a point of emphasizing the opportunities for immigrants who could read and write;161 but for all the efforts of the Jesuits it seems doubtful whether, even in the cities, where education was at its strongest and literacy was seen as a means of social ascent, literacy rates among creoles approached those attained in the British colonies by the late seventeenth century.

A biblical culture obviously provided the mass of the population with a strong incentive to achieve an entry into the world of print. A member of the party of Spaniards shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1639 noted how `men, women, youths, boys and girls, and even children all carry their books to church' for Sunday morning and evening services. It is impossible to know how many of the congregation were actually able to follow on the printed page the passage read aloud by the minister, but the sight was a novel one to the Spaniard, who was impressed by the `silent devoutness' of the congregation. 169

If the surprise expressed by the shipwrecked Spaniard testifies to Hispanic ignorance of the character of the Protestant society that was emerging in British North America, British North Americans were at least as ignorant of the Hispanic societies to the south of them. Contacts between the two worlds were becoming more frequent, especially as clandestine trading relations developed with the Spanish Caribbean islands; and the founding of South Carolina meant that a group of British settlers now found themselves closer to Spanish St Augustine than to the Chesapeake settlements of their own compatriots. `We are here in the very chaps of the Spaniard,' wrote a settler to one of the Carolina proprietors, Lord Ashley, the future Earl of Shaftesbury. 170 But greater proximity did not necessarily bring with it a greater understanding.

Mutual perceptions had been shaped by stereotyped images developed over the course of a century of Anglo-Spanish conflict and were liable to be periodically reinforced by some new incident or publication. 171 Oliver Cromwell, whose antiSpanish attitudes were those of an Elizabethan gentleman, was encouraged in his ambitious Western Design by Thomas Gage, whose The English-American first appeared in 1648, and was subsequently republished three times before the end of the century.172 Partly no doubt to reinforce his credentials as an enthusiastic convert from Rome to Anglicanism, Gage misleadingly presented Spanish America as a fruit ripe for the picking. But he also gave a vivid first-hand account of life in New Spain - the first such account of any substance to come from a non-Spanish source. His descriptions of convent life were appropriately lurid, and amply confirmed Protestant assumptions about the scandals and depravity of the Roman church.

One New Englander who owned a copy of Gage was Cotton Mather.173 Reading the book, Mather could hardly fail to be struck by the contrast between the sobriety of his own society, for all the many failings that he so constantly lamented, and the episodes of wickedness and debauchery retailed by Gage in the course of his travels in central America, where `worldliness' was `too too much embraced by such as had renounced and forsaken the world and all its pleasures, sports, and pastimes'.'74 To a man of Mather's spirit, the contrast could only have opened up a vista of new opportunities. `I found in myself', he wrote in 1696, `a strong inclination to learn the Spanish language, and in that Language transmitt Catechisms, and Confessions, and other vehicles of the Protestant-Religion, into the Spanish Indies. Who can tell whether the Time for our Lord's taking possession of those Countreys, even the sett Time for it, bee not come?""