Pugnacious Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Hadley and New England

(Hardback)

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Hadley, located on the Connecticut River at the far western frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was settled from the colony of Connecticut to the south, and early Hadleys social and economic relations with Connecticut remained very close. The move to Hadley was motivated by religion and was a carefully planned removal. It resulted from an important dispute within the church of Hartford, and Hadleys earliest settlers continued to observe their very strict form of Puritanism which had evolved as the New England Way. The settlers of Hadley also believed in a high degree of colonial independence from the Crown. These beliefs, combined with a high degree of internal cohesion and motivation in the early settlement, enabled the community of Hadley, despite its isolation and small size, to play an unusually prominent and contentious role in three great crises which threatened the Bay Colony. The first Episode examines the refuge given by Hadley, at great risk and in defiance of the Crown, to the important English Regicides, Edward Whalley and William Goffe, between 1664 and 1676 when the surviving Regicide, Goffe, was removed to Hadleys allies in Hartford where he was sheltered before disappearing from the record. The second Episode describes Hadleys divisive support for Increase Mather and John Davenport in opposing the Half-Way Covenant, a dispute which split the New England churches over baptismal practice and church polity. The third Episode deals with an internal dispute within Hadley over the direction of the local school which then was caught up into the larger dispute over the Dominion of New England government imposed by the Crown after the suspension of the Bays Charter. Through the course of these troubles within the Bay Colony from the 1660s to the 1680s, the initial internal solidarity of the town fractured, and its original unity of purpose with the rest of Colony was eroded. This secular declension led to Hadleys political decline from prominence into the pleasant but unremarkable village it is today.

Reviews

Carl I. Hammer skillfully integrates three incidents at the frontier town of Hadley, Massachusettsinteresting in themselves, but not obviously of more than local importanceinto the larger canvas of the evolution of New England during the latter half of the seventeenth century. He contends that declension from the founders ideals ought to be understood as secular, i.e., political and social as much as religious. Not the least appeal of this engaging book is Hammer's account of the further adventures of the regicide William Goffe, the legendary Angel of Hadley.' -- Baird Tipson, Gettysburg College
A deep dive into the religious debates and political tensions that shaped the founding of this once-influential Massachusetts town, Carl I. Hammer's Pugnacious Puritans tracks the entangled motives of powerful personalities as they navigated imperial, colonial, and local interests. This up-close look at early Hadley is illuminating not only as a case study of town-making in the Connecticut Valley, but also as a window to theology, ambition, interest, and power across seventeenth-century New England. -- Marla R. Miller, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Author Bio

Carl I. Hammer is research associate at the University of Pittsburgh.