I. Clerical Conflict: John Cotton, John Davenport, and Thomas Hooker

The 1655 sodomy statute reflected larger tensions and contestations of interpretations of Puritanism in New England and reveals more about interpersonal dynamics than views about sexuality in seventeenth century New England. As the first generation of founding settlers and religious leaders gave way to a new generation of less rigid congregations and ministers, Puritans waged a theological war for the soul of their church. Though most historians acknowledge, and many effectively explore, the nuances of these arguments, to merely classify Davenport, Cotton, and Hooker on a spectrum from conservative to progressive is to misunderstand the complexities of the broader debates. Though the Antinomian Controversy, Pequot War, and Half-Way Covenant controversies of the 1630s certainly reflected religious tensions and the beginnings of significant theological dissent in the Puritan colonies, deep interpretative differences continued through the 1660s.Footnote ² Janice Knight classifies Hooker among the “intellectual fathers,” a group of ministers invested in interpreting God as all-powerful and the necessity of a committed congregation, actively engaged in acts of service in order to maintain God's favor and grace. John Davenport and John Cotton reflect a subgroup Knight identifies as the “spiritual brethren” that are more closely associated with Cambridge scholarship, who characterized God in more loving and paternal terms.Footnote ³ The “spiritual brethren” also embraced a more aggressive interpretation of millennialism and eagerly anticipated the second coming of Christ, a theme evident in sermon literature. Once in New England, these tensions manifested themselves in the relationship between these three men, beginning with settlement in the 1630s and enduring throughout the 1650s as the first generation faced the complications of the second.

The competitive relationship between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton began in England and escalated in New England. Hooker, the more prominent minister in England, was quickly outshined by John Cotton upon their arrival in New England in 1634. Cotton received the more prestigious Boston congregation while Hooker served a small congregation in Newtown, a location Hooker mistakenly hoped would become the capital of Massachusetts Bay and where many of his Essex congregants settled in previous voyages. Tensions between the two men led Hooker to remove his congregation to Connecticut, where he could establish a rival colony and seat of authority from which to challenge John Cotton. The hostilities between Massachusetts and Connecticut, fueled by their respective ministers, underscore this point. John Cotton's friend and devotee, John Davenport, established New Haven shortly thereafter. There, he sought to create a colonial model that incorporated John Cotton's insistence on a broad interpretation of Mosaic Law, thus empowering ministers to interpret meanings and create statutes to reflect personal perspectives. This colony stood as a reproach to Hooker's settlement, which many accused of increasing liberality in the seventeenth century. Though Cotton and Davenport attempted to sustain traditional Puritanism, it would be Hooker's inclusive approach, most overtly framed in the Half-Way Covenant, that characterized New England Puritanism throughout the second half of the seventeenth century.

Rivalries as well as friendships began in England through an expansive network of correspondence and commonality of purpose.Footnote ⁴ Francis Bremer's Congregational Communion and Tom Webster's Godly Clergy correctly underscore the tangible network of communication among ministers on both sides of the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵ Yet evidence suggests that these networks encompassed a great deal of conflict and theological argumentation.Footnote ⁶ Though Webster is perhaps more pragmatic, often acknowledging petty quarrels and rivalries, Bremer minimizes the vast evidence supporting the existence of conflict among ministers, both within their congregations and across the broader Atlantic world. Correspondence in letters, visits, and circulation of sermons created a large network of spiritual support and collective consciousness among the increasingly persecuted Puritan clergy in the early seventeenth century. Although Bremer's work effectively argues for the close association among the three men discussed in this article (John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and the less-influential John Davenport), he fails to address the conflicts among them.Footnote ⁷ These three well-respected clergymen arrived in New England in the 1630s but began their association years before in England.Footnote ⁸ However, rather than the perpetual harmony asserted by Bremer, there were, in fact, religious rivalries as well as deep and meaningful conflicts in the lives of these three men that appeared in the theological arguments among the three separate colonies of New Haven, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.Footnote ⁹ In particular, theological divisions associated with the Antinomian Controversy and expanding congregationalism complicated puritanism and often created conflict among ministers, who held strong opinions on these subjects. The New Haven sodomy statute not only reflects John Cotton's friendship with John Davenport but also the religious discord prevalent in seventeenth-century New England. New Haven rejected the perceived religious liberalism visible in Hooker's theology, his colony, and Massachusetts Bay. The sodomy statute, an extension of Cotton's influence upon John Davenport, stood in contradiction to Thomas Hooker and his increasingly liberal Connecticut Colony. It was also a rebuke of the liberality of the Half-Way Covenant and an effort to assert more traditionally rigid concepts of Puritanism. Davenport, as did many New England ministers, perceived the Antinomian Controversy and the Pequot War as a consequence of flagging piety in their communities.

Prior to their arrival in New England, Cotton, Hooker, and Davenport worked within a larger network of Calvinist theologians in England and the Netherlands. John Cotton and Thomas Hooker both attended Emmanuel College at Cambridge. Cotton received his MA in 1606 and Hooker his BA in 1608. Graduates continued to foster friendships and networks of communication with their fellow alumni, often suggesting one another for ministerial posts and exchanging letters and scriptural commentaries. For example, in 1621, John Preston was chosen as a replacement for James Ussher at Trinity College.Footnote ¹⁰ Deeply connected to his own congregation and unwilling to accept the position, Preston looked among his friends to suggest a replacement. John Cotton, under scrutiny from the English religious authorities because of his Puritanism, was the first choice, but as Cotton's troubles passed and his position became more secure, Preston turned his attention to Thomas Hooker. Although Trinity rejected Preston's suggestion, the fact that it was made does suggest that Hooker and Cotton operated within the same networks of communication and consideration.

Thomas Hooker and John Davenport, who later established rival colonies in the Connecticut Valley, corresponded in 1631 regarding John Paget's search for an assistant in the Netherlands. Paget presented him with twenty questions scrutinizing his theology. Hooker circulated his prepared response to Paget's “Twenty Questions” among various members of the clergy and friends in the Netherlands and England, among them John Davenport.Footnote ¹¹ The congregation invited Hooker to assume the position of assistant to John Paget, but Paget rejected him based on Hooker's doctrinal statements. Hooker's responses proved unsatisfactory, mostly due to his rigid emphasis on congregational principles. The congregation later extended the invitation to John Davenport, who likewise responded to the “Twenty Questions.” Unlike Hooker, Davenport proved more flexible, and his responses were “more conciliatory than Hooker's,” though he, too, was denied the position.Footnote ¹² George Williams, biographer of Thomas Hooker, suggests that the issue of Paget's assistance and both Hooker and Davenport's lack of success was a topic of conversation in 1633 when Cotton, Davenport, Goodwin, and Nye met to discuss conformity in London.Footnote ¹³

Cotton's friendship with John Davenport began through their mutual friend and minister, Thomas Goodwin, who corresponded with both men throughout the 1630s.Footnote ¹⁴ William Laud persecuted both Cotton and Davenport in the 1620s, which cemented their friendship. In 1632, Cotton, Goodwin, and Davenport (along with Thomas Hooker) convened in England and discussed conformity within the Church of England. Archbishop Laud's agents reported this activity and suggested that “Mr. Cotton of Boston hath convinced Mr Damport and Mr Nye, two of the great preachers of the citty that kneeling at the sacrament etc is plaine Idolatry.”Footnote ¹⁵ This discussion foreshadowed the relationship between Cotton and Davenport and the theological influence Cotton exerted in New Haven through Davenport. John Davenport's letters, though scarce in number, indicated his reliance upon John Cotton for theological guidance and the potential extension of Cotton's theology into a second generation of colonists. In a letter from 1650, Davenport solicited Cotton's advice on a number of issues, including the Ezekiel Cheever controversy, and for commentary on a number of sermons previously sent to Cotton.Footnote ¹⁶ Davenport offered complete trust to Cotton's suggestions, writing, “I leave it wholly to your wisdom, to add, or alter, as you find expedient, and analogous with other scriptures.”Footnote ¹⁷ The letter also indicated that Davenport had already incorporated several of Cotton's interpretations into his sermons, revealing a pattern of reliance on John Cotton's scriptural elucidations and spiritual advice. In the commentary to the collected letters of John Cotton, Sargent Bush wrote that, concerning matters of theology, “in Davenport's mind, Cotton's word . . . was as good as law.”Footnote ¹⁸

Though both men were successful Calvinist ministers in England, the zealous sermons of Thomas Hooker outshined those of the more austere and academic John Cotton. The differences between Cotton and Hooker in their differing styles partially explains the congregations each attracted in New England. Hooker—more dramatic, bombastic, and willing to engage controversy—embraced more progressive interpretations of Puritanism and drew congregants of the same ilk. Cotton, however, tended toward moderation in style, and though he perhaps engaged in radical support of Anne Hutchinson, his Moses, His Judicials was very conservative. Though more consistent with Davenport's theology, Cotton was more moderate in temperament, avoiding both the brashness of Hooker and the rigidity of Davenport.

Cotton Mather described Hooker as a man “cheerful and courteous . . . born to be considerable.”Footnote ¹⁹ Hooker garnered attention from Archbishop William Laud, who concerned himself with the popularity of Hooker's sermons.Footnote ²⁰ Samuel Collins, vicar of Braintree, commented that, though he had “seene the people idolizing many new ministers and lecturers,” Thomas Hooker “surpasses them all for learning . . . [and] gains more and far greater followers than all before him.”Footnote ²¹ Hooker fled from England to Holland in 1629. Then, in 1634, he sailed to New England on a ship with John Cotton. Once in America, John Cotton received the auspicious position of Minister of the Church of Boston and New England. Meanwhile, Hooker settled in Newtown, which turned out to be a far less glamorous position.Footnote ²² We can only speculate as to Hooker's reaction as Newtown became increasingly marginalized in favor of Boston, but the rivalry that continued between Cotton and Hooker—not to mention Hooker's desire to leave Massachusetts altogether—suggests that he felt the Newtown position to be inferior and unacceptable given his successes in England.

John Winthrop's journal leaves a potential explanation for why Boston chose Cotton over Hooker for the prominent position there. As was traditional, new arrivals lodged with established settlers until properly settled themselves. Upon arriving in America, both John Cotton and Thomas Hooker accepted invitations in different parts of Massachusetts Bay. According to Winthrop, “Mr. Hooker . . . went presently to Newtown . . . to be entertained, and Mr. Cotton stayed at Boston.”Footnote ²³ Many suspected Newtown to be the future site of the colonial capital, and several of Hooker's former congregants already lived in Newtown. Hooker journeyed to stay with his old friends, hoping that Newtown would become the capital of Massachusetts Bay. While in Boston and attending the local congregational meeting, Cotton, “being desired to speak to the [congregational] question” at hand, offered an inspiring interpretation of the scriptures and received praise from the Boston Church.Footnote ²⁴ In the wake of his performance, “he was then (with his wife) propounded to be admitted a member.”Footnote ²⁵ In the following days, he and his wife each provided acceptable theological views and testimonies of God's grace. Hooker, residing in Newtown, resigned himself to the local congregation, which languished in the shadows of the increasingly powerful and illustrious Boston.

II. Controversy in Connecticut: Thomas Hooker's Removal and the Creation of a Rival Colony

In 1635, residents of Newtown, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Thomas Hooker, petitioned for their removal to the Connecticut River Valley, the furthest outpost of settlement in New England. This request provoked ire among many prominent Massachusetts Bay residents, who argued that division would lead to weakness and vulnerability. John Winthrop recorded the debate that arose when Hooker's group made their position known. Winthrop describes three motivations for removal: “want of accommodation for their Cattle,” “the fruitfullnesse & Comodiousnesse of Conect,” and “the Stronge bent of their spirittes to remove thither.”Footnote ²⁶ Winthrop records several objections to their departure. Threats from the Dutch concerned many, as did the “departure of mr Hooker,” which “would not onely drawe many from us, but also deserte other friends that would come to us.”Footnote ²⁷ Several thought it unwise to dissolve a sacred covenant, especially after God expressed his blessing of their removal from England. Puritans of Massachusetts Bay feared that the separation of a holy and ordained community might inspire God's wrath. Letters and journals indicate that Massachusetts greatly feared the loss of such a successful minister. Winthrop recorded that the “removing of a Candlestick is a great judgment which is only to be avoided.”Footnote ²⁸ At its core was the great fear that English immigrants would prefer the Connecticut settlement to Massachusetts Bay and thus Hooker to Cotton.

At the height of this unrest, John Cotton offered a sermon on a “daye of humiliation to seeke the Lord” in which he praised liberty of spirit, thus calming the congregation and supporting Hooker's petition to leave Massachusetts Bay.Footnote ²⁹ William Hubbard described Cotton's effectiveness, likening it to a “soft tongue [which] breaketh the bone.”Footnote ³⁰ John Cotton exercised his influence to allow Hooker and the Newtown congregation to leave Massachusetts and establish his Connecticut colony. According to General John Mason, noted for his leadership in the Pequot War, “The great popularity of Rev. Hooker's sermons together with his pleasing personality was the cause of the Cotton's favoring the settlement in Connecticut.”Footnote ³¹ With Hooker in the wilderness of Connecticut, “Cotton would have no fear of being supplanted in the hearts of the Massachusetts church.”Footnote ³²

Cotton's motivations for supporting the removal of Thomas Hooker and his Newtown congregation become especially suspicious when reading his God's Promise to His Plantation, a farewell sermon to the first Puritans leaving to settle New England. In this sermon, Cotton likens the Puritans to the Jews in the desert seeking Canaan, proclaiming that New England would also become a promised land. Cotton enjoined them to remember God's favor and support in leaving England to establish a holy colony reflective of God's laws. Cotton placed great emphasis on “planting the people,” encouraging them to stay collected and “take roote there” in order that they might become “Trees of righteousnesse.”Footnote ³³ The theme of taking root indicates that Cotton believed the early colony to be covenanted with God and under obligation not to separate from one another. Cotton wrote that “when [God] establisheth them there, then he plants, and rootes not up.”Footnote ³⁴ He repeats the idea that, once planted, no part should be uprooted and move apart, lest the entire colony provoke the ire of God. This sermon directly contradicts the logic employed to support Hooker's removal to Connecticut six years later. Clearly at odds with Puritan theology and his own earlier writings, Cotton's defense of Hooker is conspicuous and lends credence to the notion that Cotton wanted Hooker out of Massachusetts Bay where he would be enticing to new settlers. Hooker's lack of affection for Cotton and Boston was made clear in his “blistering attack on the godly's lack of zeal in New England” in the days before departing for Connecticut.Footnote ³⁵

For John Winthrop, the removal of Massachusetts residents to Connecticut corrupted the covenant between God and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Congregationalism relied upon a church in one accord, collectively maintaining the covenant relationship with God. Winthrop rejected the Connecticut request because the residents of Newtown were “knit to us in one body and bound by oath to seek the welfare of this commonwealth.”Footnote ³⁶ In a 1635 letter, John Winthrop took pains to reassure Sir Simonds d'Ewes that, though Hooker petitioned to move to Connecticut, it was not due to “any difference between Mr. Cotton and him (soe reporte) for they doe hould a most sweet and brotherly communion together (thoughe their judgments doe somewhat differ about the lawfulllnesse so the Crosse in the ensigne) but that the people and cattle are so increased as the place will not suffice them.”Footnote ³⁷

The very necessity of indicating no quarrel casts suspicion. Sir d'Ewes certainly perceived disagreements, and Winthrop's letter attempts to affect harmony and peace during a time Cotton and Hooker clearly disagreed over more than just the use of a cross in an ensign. Clearly, Winthrop took pains to reflect a felicitous relationship between the two prominent ministers. He acknowledges differences between them while making an effort to minimize these conflicts to lay leaders, who watched closely for indications of dissent in New England.

Reverend William Hubbard's seventeenth-century history of New England corroborates the conflict between Hooker and Cotton. A contemporary, Hubbard wrote that the desire of the Newtown congregation under Hooker's encouragement to move to Connecticut based on the “strong bent of their spirits” was, in fact, partially due to the continued rivalry between Cotton and Hooker. He observed that “two such eminent stars, such as were Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, both of the first magnitude, though of differing influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb.”Footnote ³⁸ Later in the text, Hubbard declared that “some men do not well like, at least, cannot well bear to be opposed in their judgments and notion. . . . Nature doth not allow two suns in one firmament, and some spirits can as ill bear an equal as others a superiour.”Footnote ³⁹ Although he does not mention Hooker and Cotton specifically as the “two suns,” he offers these comments in the middle of a passage detailing Hooker's popularity among towns adjacent to Boston and their desire to join him in his migration to Connecticut. This is an especially tart rebuke. This metaphor also appeared in the writings of Anne Bradstreet. In a series of instructions to improve the character of her son, Bradstreet piously affirms that “in the firmament there is but one sun among a multitude of stars and those stars also do differ much one from the other in regard of bigness and brightness,” yet only God is the sun from which all other stars “receive their light.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In her metaphor, “Christ . . . is the sun of righteousness, in the midst of an unnumerable company of saints and angels.”Footnote ⁴¹ Hubbard's commentary that Hooker and Cotton both reflected the prominence of the sun suggests the importance both ministers perhaps held in the community and their congregations—but also in their own estimation. Hubbard's commentary can easily be read as satirical of extraordinary egos.

Following Hooker's move to Connecticut, he and John Cotton continued their rivalry and often disagreed on matters of theology.Footnote ⁴² Thomas Hooker, the most prominent minister of Connecticut colony, was also one of the most vocal in his criticism of Massachusetts Bay. Dissatisfied with what he saw as the movement away from evangelism in Massachusetts, he advocated for maintenance of the elect in Connecticut, but also with evangelical zeal. Far from representative of most Connecticut ministers, Hooker's exhortation to preach to the unconverted received little support.Footnote ⁴³ Concerned with maintaining church purity, most Connecticut ministers fell within the category of “rigid” Congregationalists, who encouraged separatist policies between the elect and the non-elect. Conversion offered opportunities for dissention and pollution. Public recitation of individual conversion narratives and encouragement to conform to rigorous church doctrine provided safeguards to separate the saved from the damned. However, Hooker's liberal policies of church admission, particularly when compared to New Haven, allowed for an expansion of the Puritan church. John Davenport and his New Haven colony vigorously repelled any mention of expanding the “elect,” thus placing them in direct contradiction to their Connecticut neighbors.Footnote ⁴⁴

Acrimony and hostility seemingly followed the Connecticut residents. The various settlements and colony of Connecticut lived in the shadow of the more successful and prominent Massachusetts Bay. Reaching only half the population of Massachusetts Bay by 1700, Connecticut relied heavily upon subsistence agriculture, while Massachusetts relished the successful export of agricultural products through the port of Boston.Footnote ⁴⁵ In terms of political, economic, and social prominence, Massachusetts dominated New England. Although Massachusetts Puritans receive the bulk of attention from scholars, New Haven asserted far more conservative religious policies and a greater degree of rigidity. Unable to claim independence in all other measures, religion offered an opportunity for the Newtown and Connecticut colonies to establish slightly variant theologies and colonial patterns from Massachusetts Bay. Thomas Hooker seized the opportunity to expand church membership and preach in a style more dramatic and full of fury than his more austere and academic counterpart in Boston. Likewise, John Davenport created a colony deeply conservative in its application of Puritan theology and rigid in its interpretation of scripture.

III. Conflict and Competition: Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut

Conflict and jealousies characterized the relationship between Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut colonies. In a letter to John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker complained that residents of Massachusetts cautioned would-be settlers: “If they will needs go from the Bay, go any whither, be anywhere, choose any place, any patent—Narragansett, Plymouth—only go not to Connecticut. We hear and bear.”Footnote ⁴⁶ According to “that which is reported, cried openly, and carried by sea,” Massachusetts Bay criticized Connecticut to newcomers.Footnote ⁴⁷ Those who wanted to go to the Connecticut valley received warnings “that all their cows at Connecticut are dead.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Others heard that the Connecticut “upland will bear no corn, their meadows nothing but weeds, and the people are almost all starved.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Hooker insists that “these are not jealousies” but instead “realities, which passengers daily relate.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Not long after, Winthrop records in his journal (1638) the many “jealousies and differences between us and our friends and Connecticut.”Footnote ⁵¹ Winthrop contends that Connecticut resisted governance by Massachusetts Bay and were “very jealous” of the prominence of Massachusetts Bay in New England and thus resisted their efforts to govern the burgeoning New England Confederation.Footnote ⁵² According to Winthrop's own diary, he thought things “not well at Connecticut” as early as 1636.Footnote ⁵³ By 1638, Winthrop wrote angrily of Thomas Hooker and the Connecticut colonies, saying that there had been

Governor Winthrop, himself not a minister, recognized the need for lay leadership in conjunction with religious authority. Unlike the construction of Massachusetts Bay, which relied upon both ministers and secular governors, Hooker and his religious men had seemingly chosen individuals whose good intentions fell short of good governance. In this passage, Winthrop indicates that ministers lacked the qualifications to govern and had stepped “out of their course,” meaning they deviated from their appropriate role in society. Clearly an attack on Thomas Hooker, Winthrop made an unsuccessful effort to scratch out these latter remarks from his journal.

The Antinomian Controversy—or what Michael Winship calls the “free grace controversy”—provided a moment of theology difference visible to those in New England and in old. It also placed John Cotton in a precarious position in Boston.Footnote ⁵⁵ John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson effectively accused the New England ministry, excepting John Cotton, of embracing a covenant of works over a covenant of grace.Footnote ⁵⁶ Puritan soteriology was systematic and identified and extolled the necessity of the various stages. The first stage required recognition of one's innate depravity, followed by a period of humiliation. Justification then came when the salvation occurred. Finally, sanctification was evidenced by a change in one's spirit, outward behaviors, affections, and godly works. The covenant of grace relied upon God's almighty benevolence and goodness. Sanctification, an outgrowth of justification, could be falsified by those not truly saved. Furthermore, the notion that a person could do anything to facilitate salvation, such as good works, reeked of Arminianism, a declared heresy in the Church of England and within Puritanism.Footnote ⁵⁷

As many associated John Cotton with the increasingly radical heresies of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, Cotton took pains to distance himself from his former congregants and seemingly close friends while asserting a more orthodox understanding of Puritanism.Footnote ⁵⁸ In an effort to exonerate John Cotton of encouraging Hutchinson in her accusations, Thomas Shepard, minister at Newtown, sent six questions to Cotton for formal reply. Beyond issues of works and grace, Shepard's questions show a fear that Cotton espoused familism—a belief that permanent salvation liberated people from obeying government and church laws, which would lead to wanton behavior and a breakdown of society. While the questions were couched in terms of brotherly love and concern, it included an admonition for Cotton to watch his congregants carefully for signs of heresy; Cotton could be in no doubt of the message. In his reply, he fell in line with older Puritan orthodoxy and stressed that sanctification was merely a consequence of justification and that salvation of the soul required justification as a sign of being among the elect.

Shortly thereafter, Peter Bulkeley wrote to Cotton questioning him on his beliefs and any potential misguidance he had delivered to the congregants at Boston. The two ministers disagreed only minimally in their perceptions of justification and sanctification. While Cotton emphasized sanctification as a response to justification, Bulkeley insisted that human agency assisted in the process of identifying justification and adhering to the demands of salvation. At another time, these differences could easily have been dismissed as semantics, but in 1636, as religious controversies raged all around, even minute differences received greater acknowledgment and concern. Though Wheelwright and Cotton acquiesced that good works might reflect evidence of sanctification, the controversy placed them in a risky position. Cotton needed to reassert his opposition to Antinomians and distance himself from any whiff of radicalism. As a consequence, Cotton increasingly sought to assert his conservatism.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Dwight Bozeman, John Cotton attempted to “lift his audience to a stricter standard of life.”Footnote ⁶⁰

IV. Common Law or Mosaic Law? Legal Codes of Early New England

The religious divisions of New England became visible in the legal codes of each individual colony and in the influence of John Cotton upon John Davenport. New Haven, like other colonial settlements, enacted its own laws and list of capital crimes. Massachusetts Bay relied upon English common law and defined capital criminal codes based on Leviticus and Deuteronomy.Footnote ⁶¹ As a result, the early Massachusetts sodomy statute reflects brief assertions of scriptural law. Supporting passages of scripture often accompanied each law, citing religious justification for its creation. Capital crimes in the Body of Liberties (1642), Massachusetts's first organized and formal code of laws, appear as brief citations and reassertions of Hebrew law. For purposes of comparison, the sodomy statute in the Body of Liberties reads: “If any man lyeth with mankind as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death.”Footnote ⁶² In 1642, the United Colonies of New England asserted colonial harmony in Articles of Confederation betwixt the Plantations under the Government of Massachusetts, the Plantations under the Government of Plimouth, the Plantations under the Government of Connecticut, and the Government of New Haven, with the Plantations in Combination therewith.Footnote ⁶³ The preface acknowledged that New England, “encompassed with people of severall Nations, and stranger languages, which hereafter may prove injurious to us and our posterity,” needed uniformity.Footnote ⁶⁴ Though primarily for military defense, particularly in the wake of the Pequot War, the United Colonies also encouraged legal conformity. Relying heavily upon earlier legal codes, Connecticut established “severall Courts for severall purpose, and of different constitutions and power.” Court of Magistrates based in New Haven heard cases of “all weighty and Capitall causes, Civill and Criminall.” Capital offenses, including those relating to sexual wrongdoing, required “the testimony of two witnesses” of the same kind of crime for a conviction.Footnote ⁶⁵ It also suggested brief and limited interpretations of sodomy, similar to that expressed in Ward's Body of Liberties.

As part of their effort to project itself as more conservative and reflective of traditional Puritanism, early New Haven legal codes present a greater reliance on Mosaic law and sermon literature, which often elucidated potential interpretations of Hebrew scripture rather than English law or the precedent established by Massachusetts Bay. These more interpretative approaches bear similarity to the 1655 sodomy statute in New Haven, though the effusion of sentiment in 1655 is undeniable. According to Richard Godbeer and other historians of early American sexuality, New England “ministers condemned with particular vehemence as “abominable” and deserving of “death without mercy,” sins involving sodomy and bestiality, although sermons reflected concerns of broad sexual deviance.Footnote ⁶⁶ New Haven rejected the division between sermon and law, bridging the two in their 1655 sodomy statute. Inconsistent with legal statutes in England and other colonies, the law is striking in its conformity to sermon literature that echoed firm applications of Mosaic Law. For example, Samuel Whiting's sermon Abraham's Humble Intercession for Sodom interprets sodomy according to broad scriptural precedent:Footnote ⁶⁷

Whiting, like other Puritan ministers, feared that New England would become a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. The fear of “unnatural uncleanness” and strange sin imperiled all of New England and invited God's wrath upon them.Footnote ⁶⁹ Because of the vague descriptions of literal sins committed by residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, ministers often interpreted this broadly to encompass a myriad of sins, including masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, and prostitution, among others.

Likewise, Samuel Danforth's famous sermon, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (1674) discusses sodomy as specific sexual acts but takes liberties in interpreting scripture.Footnote ⁷⁰ Written to justify the execution of Benjamin Goad for the crime of bestiality with a female mare, Danforth discusses a litany of sexual sins and the necessity of classifying them as capital crimes. Relying upon Genesis 19 and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Danforth asserts that the sins of those communities were “abominable filthiness in all manner of Uncleanness.”Footnote ⁷¹ Danforth distinguishes the city of Sodom as a place full of debauchery and sexual crimes, including masturbation, prostitution, adultery, fornication, incest, buggery, bestiality, and sodomy. For Danforth, sodomy included “filthiness committed between parties of the same Sex: when Males with Males, and Females with Females work wickedness.”Footnote ⁷² For such crimes, “no indignation is sufficient,” and Danforth proceeds to list the societies that condemned such sinners to death.Footnote ⁷³ Danforth even describes this ancient city as “filthy sisters, Sodom and her Daughters.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Reverend Danforth, the sin of sodomy was as much a female as male sin.Footnote ⁷⁵ The cities themselves were corrupted and “extremely wicked, prodigiously unclean, monstrously profuse in all manner of lechery, obscenity and lasciviousness.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Both Whiting's and Danforth's sermons parallel the conservative nature of legal codes found in the 1655 capital crimes code of New Haven. Despite the anxieties in sermon literature, and perhaps in the enactment of the code itself, only twelve people faced execution for sexual crimes in all of New England from its inception to 1675.Footnote ⁷⁷ Despite the few executions as a result of the capacious sodomy statute, its importance lies in the assertions of Mosaic Law and the proposed austerity of New Haven laws, especially when compared to those in Massachusetts Bay or in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts Bay, John Cotton proposed a sweeping sodomy statute, more reflective of conservative interpretations of scripture and consistent with seventeenth-century sermon literature. John Cotton proposed in Moses, His Judicials that “unnatural filthiness [was] to be punished with death, whether sodomy, which is a carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman, buggery, which is a carnal fellowship of man or woman with beasts or fowls.”Footnote ⁷⁸ More importantly, Cotton emphasized the necessity of an inclusive and interpretative list of capital crimes. In Cotton's Moses, His Judicials, he suggests that incest, adultery, rape, buggery, prostitution, sodomy, and “pollution of a woman known to be in her flowers” should all be punished with death.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Massachusetts colonial legislature rejected Cotton's Moses, His Judicials in 1639 and instead adopted Nathanial Ward's Body of Liberties, laws that prohibited only sodomy between men and bestiality as the official legal code of Massachusetts Bay, sins that required penetration and thus a male member. Ward's proposition was far more consistent with English law than Cotton's more elaborative Moses, His Judicials, which exemplified sermon literature rather than law.

John Cotton's proposition, only a few years after the Antinomian Controversy, also placed it squarely within a conservative interpretation of Puritanism more in line with what Janice Knight classifies as the Cambridge “spiritual brethren.” It also placed him in what R. J. Ross calls a culture of “Mosaic Legalists,” who appeared in the sixteenth century but reached its height of influence in the mid-seventeenth century, the exact time Cotton proposed Moses, His Judicials.Footnote ⁸⁰ For Mosaic Legalists, the laws of the Old Testament provided an eternal barometer of offenses and rules that were eternal rather than “passing issues in a specific territory.”Footnote ⁸¹ In his exploration of these individuals and their efforts to impose Mosaic Law, Ross found that Mosaic Legalists were especially attentive to enforcing sexual crimes elucidated in biblical scripture.Footnote ⁸² Ross draws parallels between the early Mosaic Legalists and their influence upon Cotton's proposed Moses, His Judicials. He also locates Cotton squarely within this religious and legalistic movement.Footnote ⁸³ Massachusetts found Cotton's laws too traditional and specific, employing Ward's Body of Liberties instead, a code of laws far more consistent with English common law. Though the latter included reference to scripture, it failed to formally enact Mosaic Law.Footnote ⁸⁴

Years after John Cotton's efforts to enact his sweeping sodomy statute in Massachusetts, the colony of New Haven in Connecticut did so successfully. John Davenport and the magistrates of New Haven eagerly embraced the severity of Mosaic Law as a way to prevent an effusion of sin in their colony. Relying heavily upon Moses, His Judicials, the Connecticut Code of Laws included a sodomy statute far more capacious in form and description.Footnote ⁸⁵ New Haven indicted few criminals under the 1655 sodomy statute, which was repealed in 1665 when New Haven officially came under Connecticut Law. Despite the paucity of cases affected by this statute, its importance lies in its enactment and what it represents for religious and legal conflict in early New England. Connecticut court proceedings “adhered to Deuteronomy's evidentiary rule in criminal cases,” meaning that if the “suspect refused to confess, the bench could convict only with two witnesses to the crime.” However, in cases of sexual crimes, “where eye witnessing was unlikely,” New Haven, following in the footsteps of Massachusetts Bay, found the combination of a single witness and circumstantial evidence sufficient.Footnote ⁸⁶ These policies made prosecuting sexual crimes more probable and returned New Haven to a traditional sodomy statute.

John Davenport may have also been eager to employ Cotton's legal suggestions because of the increasing tension between New Haven and the other Connecticut colonies. As ministers and politicians debated church membership requirements, Thomas Hooker became increasingly inclusive, a position that put him at odds with Davenport, who fiercely rejected both the half-way covenant and Presbyterianism. Hooker and Connecticut gravitated toward “consociationalism” (also known as “presbyterialism”), an amalgam of Presbyterianism and congregationalism—a trend that continued throughout the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Once Connecticut absorbed New Haven, Davenport left for the First Church Boston, the most prestigious pulpit in New England. There he hoped to revive congregationalism. Instead, however, he found a congregation divided in its support for traditional practices. As a result, the Second and Third Churches split away, leaving Davenport without hope of reasserting his conservative vision for New England. Historian Janice Knight concludes that both John Cotton and John Davenport fell into a category of ministers she describes as Augustinian in nature, stressing a “passionate mysticism” that embodied a “vibrant alternative within the mainstream of Puritan religious culture.”Footnote ⁸⁸

New Haven reflected Davenport's rigid theology but also the right of the clergy to interpret scriptures to combat perceived sins through Mosaic Law. Reverently associating John Davenport with the “middle advent,”—or active visitation of Christ in daily life—Francis Bremer contents that Davenport embraced the idea that God would restore the “institutions and practices” found “in the Israel of the Old Testament that were found in the Apostolic church.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Unlike other Puritan founders who espoused millennialism, Davenport focused on the Second Temple and ways to prepare for an impending millennial reign.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bremer points out that the design of New Haven reflected this perspective. Eaton and Davenport organized New Haven into nine squares, an “arrangement that evoked the design not only of the encampment of the Israelites in the wilderness but also of Solomon's Temples, Ezekiel's vision of the Temple, and the New Jerusalem seen by John in Revelation.”Footnote ⁹¹ Cotton's emphasis on an encompassing interpretation of scripture to create law—a code rejected by Massachusetts Bay—fit well into Davenport's vision of New Haven. More than any other colony, New Haven relied upon broad interpretations of scriptural law to determine criminal prosecutions and sentences.

New Haven was also the most austere of all the colonies in New England, due largely to the founders Reverend John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton. New Haven's river location and relative isolation from Massachusetts Bay made it an ideal site for its earliest settlers who criticized their Puritan neighbors as too lenient and impure.Footnote ⁹² Seeking guidance for their legal code, Davenport turned to his friend John Cotton and his Moses, His Judicials (1636) for inspiration.Footnote ⁹³ John Davenport, a close associate and friend of John Cotton, embraced Cotton's Moses, His Judicials as the governing legal doctrine of New Haven years after the General Court of Massachusetts rejected it.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like other Puritan colonies, New Haven residents relied heavily upon Mosaic Law for legal precedent, but Moses, His Judicials expanded the interpretation to encompass a variety of sexual practices.Footnote ⁹⁵ In New Haven and through John Davenport, John Cotton could enact the conservative Puritan code he desired for Massachusetts but also assert spiritual dominance over Thomas Hooker's competing settlement.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to Michael Winship, who echoes Cotton Mather, “Cotton welcomed Davenport, as Moses did Jethro, hoping that he would be ‘as eyes unto them in the wilderness.’”Footnote ⁹⁷

V. Committed Congregationalism: John Davenport and Calvinism

The role of John Davenport as the bridge between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton cannot be understated. Often viewed as the most conservative of the early Puritans, Davenport's commitment to congregationalism embroiled him in controversies in New Haven and in Boston where Presbyterianism and the half-way covenant were fiercely argued. In sharp contrast to Thomas Hooker, who saw the inclusion of children of saints as a way to strengthen the church, Davenport viewed this path as a slippery slope to mass inclusivity, undermining the importance of the elect congregation. The church would become worldly, and their inclusion could not be undone.Footnote ⁹⁸ In many ways, Davenport saw the expansion of Puritanism in the 1660s as a “betrayal of the values of pure religion” and of the foundational tenants of the faith.Footnote ⁹⁹

However, long before he made a name for himself as the minister of New Haven, John Davenport escaped the ever-watchful eye of Bishop Laud and fled England to the Netherlands. Taking council from his good friend John Cotton, Davenport continued to preach a traditional and increasingly antiquated Calvinist theology. As previously mentioned, in 1633, Davenport received an offer from the congregation of the English merchant church to assist John Paget in his ministry, but Paget rejected him, as he had Thomas Hooker previously.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was during this period that Davenport became increasingly close to and reliant upon the advice of John Cotton, who later encouraged him to come to New England. Members of Davenport's exiled English congregation joined him and Theophilus Eaton across the Atlantic. Arriving in Boston, the New Haven group sailed for Quinnipicac in April of 1638, on the heels of the Pequot War in Connecticut and the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts Bay, two colonies plagued with attacks from Satan, both internally and externally.

John Davenport's New Haven successfully joined sermons and legal codes to implement a version of Moses, His Judicials in New Haven. Massachusetts—plagued by warfare, Antinomianism, and religious dissention—seemed increasingly prone to satanic influences. By comparison, New Haven appeared more likely to be the hope of traditional Puritanism in America. John Cotton seemed to agree. Writing to Samuel Stone in 1638, Cotton concluded his letter with a post script that read, “Wee [in Massachusetts] were not worthy of Mr. D. & his People here.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Davenport's New Haven became the jewel of conservative Puritanism in New England.

However, in 1655, the laws changed in New Haven. As an amendment to their earlier code, New Haven passed the anomalous sodomy statute, included in its entirely at the beginning of this piece. This massive statute stands out among similar laws in New England for its depth of detail and inclusion of a myriad of sexual practices including rape, sodomy, public masturbation, pedophilia, and any “unnatural” use of women and men. Clearly an interpretation of scriptural mandate founded in Mosaic Legalism rather than a recapitulation of English law, the 1655 statute reads like none other found in New England. Historians have struggled to account for this anomaly. Robert Oaks failed to provide an explanation for the New Haven statute, discussing it as irregular but failing to provide an explanation for its enactment.Footnote ¹⁰² Even Richard Godbeer's Sexual Revolution in Early America, long regarded as the most extensive and inclusive study of early American sexuality, discusses the statute at length but concludes: “Why New Haven rejected a simple restatement of biblical injunction in favor of a lengthy, unusually explicitly, and broadly conceived formulation is a mystery.”Footnote ¹⁰³

VI. Controversies Concealed: Sodomy, Sex, and the Context to be Holy

The irregular New Haven sodomy statute, like so many things seemingly about sex and sexuality, reflects broader political and religious tensions.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This statute provides a lens through which to explore the deep religious tensions between Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and the ministers in those respective colonies. The 1655 New Haven sodomy statute appears to reflect instead a long-standing rivalry between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton and each minister's varying interpretations of Puritanism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Puritan theology consistently emphasized the ongoing struggle to maintain a covenanted society that was rigorous in its defense against the inroads of Satan. Sins of the flesh could easily disrupt social harmony and provide an opportunity for Satan to exert dominance. Certainly sexual sins, both real and imagined, became part of the continuing battle between the godly and the evil. Yet, as is often the case, the New Haven statute reflects not only anxieties regarding sexual conduct but also, on a deeper level, professional anxieties and rivalries between ministers. The importance of maintaining a harmonious and godly society only exacerbated moments of conflict and made their presence more keenly felt among the colonists of New England, as suggested by historians John Demos and Richard Godbeer.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The history of the sodomy statute appears to be a story of religious rivalry, professional competition, and the pressures Puritan ministers faced in early New England to establish holy communities that reflected piety and singularity. John Cotton and Thomas Hooker's rivalry stretched across decades and the Atlantic Ocean, yet it was John Davenport who enacted Cotton's vision. The New Haven sodomy statute echoes larger tensions between Massachusetts Bay, settlements in the Connecticut Valley, and, most importantly, contestations of religious anxiety between John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, with John Davenport serving as the crucial bridge between them and a second generation follower of Cotton's theology. Cotton and Hooker embodied representations of piety, both for themselves and their respective colonies. By establishing Moses, His Judicials as the foundation for New Haven law, Cotton effectively posited himself as the holier, more devout, and more dogmatic of the two ministers. His influence also stood as a rebuke to Hooker's Connecticut policies that appeared to both Hooker and Davenport as too liberal and inclusive. Though Cotton received the more illustrious post at Boston Church, Massachusetts's perpetual struggles against Indians and heretics placed its status as a “city on a hill” in question. Certainly from Cotton's perspective, Hooker's increasingly liberal theology belied the hope, despite its proximity to the wilderness. Only New Haven, with both its location and the spiritual piety of its founders, would be a proper conduit for Cotton's ideal society, both for church and lay governance.