When Edmund S. Morgan published The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England in 1944, he probably did not realize what he was starting. By the 1980s, scholars in fields as diverse as historical demography, African-American history, and women's history had joined colonialists in establishing early American family history as a burgeoning area of study. M. Michelle Jarrett Morris's Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts is simply the most recent of numerous interpretations. It also ranks among the liveliest and most persuasive.
If Morris focuses more than Morgan on sex and sexual sins, she is quick to acknowledge that her conclusions echo his in several respects. She too finds that the still-lingering popular view of the Puritans as killjoys, ever vigilant to ensure that no one partakes of earthly pleasures, hardly fits the picture that emerged from her research. She agrees as well that Puritan households were profoundly hierarchical but that familial relationships were characterized more by affection and concern than stern discipline. Most notably, like Morgan, she argues that her subjects were “an intensely ‘tribal’ lot” (3), fiercely loyal to their families, sometimes to the detriment of their communal mission.
Under Household Government comes fully into its own as Morris tells the stories of those residents of Middlesex and Suffolk counties who came before the courts between 1660 and 1700 on charges of sexual misbehavior, rape, or infanticide—or as witnesses for or against the accused. Strikingly, she discovers that rather than prying neighbors, most court witnesses were friends and kin who could be counted on to close ranks in the face of perceived threats to a family's reputation or economic well-being. What is more, at least some of these families went beyond loyalty and protection to influence the courts unduly by means of perjury, slander, false alibis, and jury tampering. Visualizing these cases, as well as divorce petitions, as windows into the everyday dynamics of household and community life, Morris adds considerable complexity to our picture of Puritan morality and family values.
Although the metaphor of the family as a “little commonwealth” has been analyzed before, Under Household Government speaks vividly to the relationship between the authority of fathers and masters and governmental authority. The former, Morris demonstrates, sometimes undermined the latter. In their determination to protect their own families' reputations and estates, some fathers and masters in Massachusetts failed as household heads to live up to their obligations to church and state, in particular the reform of young sinners and the stability of households. Clashes are apparent in cases where fathers (with the support of kin) subverted the truth in defending offspring charged with fornication or rape. Masters also thwarted political and ecclesiastical authority when they discharged pregnant servants, retaliating against them for naming family members as partners in sin. Especially if they did not have relatives nearby, dismissed female servants and their infants bore the brunt of masters' shielding of their own. Expected to act as surrogate fathers to servants and slaves, masters stopped short of embracing this role when family advantage conflicted with Puritan ideals of social order. Surprisingly, slaves often fared better than servants, in that household heads were not as likely to abandon dependents when their own economic interests were at stake.
It is hard to convey in a short review either the richness of the evidence Morris assembles or her talent for recreating events from conflicting points of view. Although scholars interested in seventeenth-century court cases tend to favor published sources, Morris's concentration on Middlesex and Suffolk counties required her to spend more time on unpublished records. Thus, the trials she writes about, and the families who played such central roles in them, are largely unfamiliar even to specialists. The freshness of her material, along with her painstaking reconstruction of family crises, heightens the book's appeal to both students and scholars. Her contention that families that faced public scrutiny for the sexual misbehavior of its members differed little from other Puritan families is convincing in part because of the variety of cases she presents and in part because her opening chapter features a particularly disorderly household presided over by one of the most prominent men of his generation. Without vilifying prosperous men and their families, she also makes vivid their considerable power to affect the outcome of trials and the plight of those with fewer familial networks and more limited means.
Morris also contends that family members who came into court because of their sexual indiscretion, or that of relatives or servants, were not necessarily any less religious than other Puritans. Most of her subjects concurred with their ministers' teachings about sex and knew both their Bible and the Massachusetts laws based on it. They acknowledged that sex outside of marriage was a sin against God, their families, and the commonwealth and were heard quoting scriptures, most commonly in admissions of guilt, but sometimes in efforts to give meaning to events by then beyond their control. Morris distinguishes her book from others that have dealt specifically with religious belief, saying that she “draws on popular religion to explore how seventeenth-century colonists made sense of sex” (259). If what people had to say in court is more central to her book than what Increase or Cotton Mather had to say from their pulpits, ministerial thinking on godly parenting, household governance, and sexual sin nevertheless comes regularly to the fore.
