. . . a fit instrument to begin this Wildernesse-worke, of courage bold undaunted, yet sociable, and of a chearfull spirit, loving and austere, applying himselfe to either as occasion served.
EDWARD JOHNSON, Wonder-Working Providence, 1653
For good reason John Endicott figured centrally in
"The Maypole of Merry Mount" while Morton was nowhere to be seen. More scrupulous than Lowell in his use of sources, Hawthorne curbed any temptation to achieve dramatic unity by staging a showdown that did not and could not have occurred. In fact Morton was on his way into exile for the first time, in the late
summer of 1628, when Endicott landed with the Puritan forerunners at Salem, then Naumkeag. Shortly
afterward Endicott did lead an expedition to Merry Mount and no doubt regretted his inability to get his hands on "mine Hoste" who had thus unavoidably been detained elsewhere. According to Bradford, Endicott
merely rebuked the remnant of Morton's band "for their profaneness and admonished them to look there should be better walking"that is, they should walk the straight and narrow path of Puritan virtue. Beyond that we know next to nothing, save for the one detail
Hawthorne found so critically important. Seeing the magnificent banner-staff still standing, Endicott fell upon it and did in historical truth cause "that Maypole to be cut down."
Endicott was in charge of the colony from 1628 until the summer of 1630, when he turned his authority over to Governor John Winthrop and became an assistant, in which post he served from 1630 to 1634, 1636 to 1640, and 1645 to 1648. He was deputy governor from 1641 to 1643 and in 1650 and 1654. He was governor in 1644, in 1649, from 1651 to 1653, and from 1655 until his death in 1665. In 1637 he was elevated to the
Council for Life (later declared unconstitutional), on which the only other members were Winthrop and Thomas Dudley. Throughout his life, clearly, he
en-Page 22
Governor John Endicott, n.d. (1665?). By an unknown hand, this was an
earlier portrait than that of the American Antiquarian Society mentioned in the textdefenders complained that the latter made their hero appear
"a cold and narrow bigot." Here Endicott still appears Hawthorne's Pu-ritan of PuPu-ritans. (Courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.)
Page 23
joyed the high esteem of his fellow Saints. As Lawrence Shaw Mayo pointed out in his filial
biography, it may be significant that Endicott was born in 1588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada:
"It was also the natal year of John Winthrop. Who will say that fundamentally 1588 is not the most important date in the history of Massachusetts? If it had not been for the defeat of the Armada and the birth of John Endecott and John Winthrop, where should we be today?"
Where indeed? And there are other good questions.
Was Endicott the relatively irresolute leader depicted by Lowell? Or was he the iron-willed zealot who appeared in Hawthorne's pages and in the old portrait of the
American Antiquarian Society? Or was he but the "fit instrument" another admirer, Captain Edward Johnson, saw in him, "loving or austere . . . as occasion served"?
It appears that almost invariably the occasions of his public life served austerity and not love, presumably reserved for family and close associates. Before
Winthrop's arrival Endicott had not only cut down Morton's Maypole but had also deported two Puritan
brothers whom he pronounced "schismatical" for opposing his ideas of church government. As an assistant he physically assaulted Thomas Dexter of Lynn, for which act he apologized to Winthrop,
acknowledging that he had been "too rash in strikeing him, understanding since that it is not lawful for a justice of the peace to strike. But if you had seen the manner of his carriadge, with such daring of mee with his armes on kembow &c. It would have provoked a very patient man." Never a patient man, he verbally assaulted three Anabaptists from Rhode Island who came before the General Court in 1651. After sentence had been imposed, they had had the temerity to ask what law they had broken. In his Ill Newes from New-England (1652), John Clark, one of the defendants, recalled Governor Endicott's response: that they had denied infant baptism; then "being somewhat
transported [he] broke forth and told the prisoners they really deserved death." He held them to be trash and declared the magistrates of Massachusetts "would not have such trash brought into their jurisdiction."
Endicott earned his reputation as "a greater persecutor."
As head of the commonwealth he shouldered primary responsibility
Page 24
for whipping, branding, and banishing, and ultimately for executing the "open and capitall blasphemers"
called Quakers. His General Court hanged four members of the Society of Friends. With the
Restoration, the unrepentant governor explained why in a letter to Charles II. The Quakers were "open enemies to government itself" in any other than the hands of their friends; he and his assistants had, therefore, "to passe a sentence of banishment against them upon pain of death." Such was their turbulency, however, he had at last, "in conscience both to God and man . . . to keep the passage with the point of the sword held toward them." And since the Quakers had wittingly rushed on the point of the sword by ''their owne act, we with all humility conceive a crime bringing their blood upon their owne head." Unresponsive to this humble appeal for sympathy, Charles commanded Endicott to cease any current actions against Quakers and to "forbear to proceed any farther therein."
2
Every shred of believable evidence supports
Hawthorne's view of the man. Oddly enough the
novelist approached Endicott as if he had New English Canaan at hand, a most unlikely possibility. Still, had it been available, Hawthorne would have found it most engaging. Of course Morton could hardly have given him or us a "balanced" view of the man he called
"Captaine Littleworth," for Endicott truly "had an
akeing tooth at mine Host of Ma-re Mount" and proved it time and again. Yet just as obviously Morton had a direct personal interest in understanding his inveterate adversary. His prescient chapter, "Of the manner how the Seperatists doe pay debts to them that are without,"
anticipated Hawthorne's key insights.
Morton knew well the case of "an honest man, one Mr.
Innocence Fairecloath," since he had helped present it to the Privy Council in the course of his attack on the Massachusetts charter. "Fairecloath" or Philip Ratcliff, as he was known in the flesh, had come over as an agent of Matthew Cradock. Members of the Salem congregation found his beliefs "without" their church, however, so "disdained to be imployed by a carnall man, (as they termed him,) and sought occasion against him, to doe him a mischeife." They worked their way into his debt and, when he sought to collect, sent him
"an Epistle full of zealous exhortations to provide for the soule; and not to minde these transitory things that
per-Page 25
ished with the body." The counsel moved Ratcliff to exclaim in a moment of unguarded anger: "Are these youre members? if they be all like these, I beleeve the Divell was the setter of their Church."
Endicott promptly charged blasphemy and determined Ratcliff would be "made an example for all carnall men to presume to speake the least word that might tend to the dishonor of the Church of Salem; yea, the mother Church of all that holy Land." In court the charges against him multiplied, "seeing hee was a carnall man, of them that are without." In June 1631, according to Winthrop's Journal, Ratcliff was sentenced to be whipped, have his ears cut off, pay a fine of forty pounds, and be perpetually banishedall this for "most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government."
Morton dwelt on the pleasure the punishment gave the Saints. "Shackles," or the deacon of the church at
Charlestown, sobbed and wept with Ratcliff, "and his handkercher walkes as a signe of his sorrow for Master Fairecloaths sinne, that hee should beare no better
affection to the Church and the Saints of New Canaan:
and strips Innocence the while, and comforts him." The executioner of their vengeance then went to work "in such manner that hee made Fairecloaths Innocent back like the picture of Rawhead and blowdy bones, and his shirte like a pudding wifes aperon. In this imployment Shackles takes a greate felicity, and glories in the
practice of it." And "be,'' Morton concluded, "this is the payment you shall get, if you be one of them they
terme, without."
Morton rather deftly emphasized the sanctimonious cupidity of the Saints by having the punishment carried out in "the Counting howse," with the deacon
expostulating with Ratcliff about being "so hasty for payment." More obvious still was Morton's
denunciation of the nature of their sentenceits
stupefying harshness created a stir in England and word even came back to Massachusetts, through one of
Winthrop the younger's correspondents, that there had been "diuerse complaints against the severitie of your Gouernement especially mr. Indicutts and that he shalbe sent for ouer, about cuttinge off the Lunatick mans
eares, and other greiuances." Morton also put before his readers Endicott's menacing conviction that the Puritans were God's chosen, so that to speak against them was to
defile their holy mission; and as Hawthorne later had Endicott say, "woe unto them that would defile it." But Morton's analysis went beyond the economic level of pious acquisitiveness and the political level of religious nationalism to a psychological truth: his enemies were not coldly righteous monsters, however great their hypocrisy, but men who found their
Page 26
cruelty bloody good fun. Though they could hardly admit it, it gave them "greate felicity, and glories in the practice of it." Morton recognized in effect, again
before Hawthorne, that the pleasures they took from the whipping post made it their equivalent of his Maypole.
3
As a Puritan, Endicott believed in a two-species theory of European humankind. Outside the true faith were the carnal menmen like the libertine Morton, whose carnality was palpable, the traducer Ratcliff, the
blasphemous Quakers, and the Anabaptist trash from Rhode Islandall concupiscent, rational animals scarcely more worthy of consideration than the dancing bear Endicott ordered shot through the head in Hawthorne's story. Within the faith were the grace-endowed men, men redeemed from their sinful bodies by Jesusmen like Endicott, Winthrop, Dudley, Bradford, all
instruments of God's purpose. But it was hard,
devilishly hard as it were, for spiritual men not to ease down into their sinful bodies, not to think of sex for more than procreation, to avoid "impurity" of thought
and act. Not to "fall back into nature" required no less than twenty-four-hour watches all the days of their lives.
Within this context Endicott naturally would have
commanded, as Hawthorne had him do, that the young Lord of the May be shorn of his lovelock and curls. In fact as governor in 1649 he and the magistrates had sought to stop such adornment of wickedness:
Forasmuch as the wearing of long haire after the manner of Ruffians and barbarous Indians, hath begun to invade new England contrary to the rule of Gods word, which saith it is a shame for a man to wear long hair, as also the
Commendable Custome generally of all the Godly of our nation until within this few yeares Wee the Magistrates who have subscribed this paper (for the clearing of our owne innocency in this behalfe) doe declare and manifest our dislike and detestation against the wearing of such long haire, as against a thing uncivil and unmanly whereby men doe deforme themselves, and offend sober and modest men, and doe corrupt good manners.
Long hair took root in the lubricous skin, flaunted its origins, and seemed barbarously ungroomed,
pubescent, suggestive of the unmentionableof carnality, mortality, beastliness. The
magis-Page 27
trates, with Endicott at their head, entreated the elders to manifest their zeal in ensuring that the members of their "respective Churches bee not defiled therewith."
At the very least Endicott had cleared his name and witnessed his "own innocency" of such defilement.
Women were the opposite sex and as such a threat to purity. It was admittedly better to marry than to burn, so Endicott, before he emigrated and then nearly forty, married Anna Gover, a cousin of Matthew Cradock.
She died shortly after their arrival at Naumkeag,
howeverMorton unkindly suggested that it was through the good offices of Samuel Fuller, butcher turned
Plymouth physician, that Endicott had been cured "of a disease called a wife." In August 1630 he married Mrs.
Elizabeth Gibson, a widow, of whom little more is known than of the first Mrs. Endicott, save that she bore him two sons and survived him.
The obscurity of his wives was not fortuitous, for Endicott would have considered it unmanly to let a
"weaker vessel" take the lead or share authority and responsibilities. During the examination of Anne Hutchinson, for instance, he revealed keen interest in
whether she had presumed to teach at meetings of men, found her defiance intolerable, hoped "the court takes notice of the vanity of it and heat of her spirit," and joined his brothers in finding her "unfit for our society.'' For a woman to presume to act as an
enlightened individual with a conscience of her own would subvert the patriarchal family, church, and state, and lead to all the anarchic evils of the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, the Familists, "that filthie Sinne of the Comunitie of Weomen," as John Cotton defined the sect for Anne Hutchinson, "all promiscuus & filthie
cominge togeather of men & Weomen. wthout
Distinction or Relation of Marriage [all of which] will necessarily follow. . . ." Endicott, too, knew very well
"where the foundation of all these troubles among us lies." He frankly believed, as Hawthorne had him say, that the female sex required the stricter discipline and supported Paul's injunction that woman not pray "with her head uncovered," which he interpreted to mean that she had to wear not only a bonnet but also a veil to meetings.*
Her reproductive flesh being more accessible, woman was the
* John Cotton successfully opposed the veil requirement. It
does not follow, however, that Endicott's patriarchism, though characteristically forceful and forthright, was aberrant. Winthrop berated Anne Hutchinson for
transgressing the Fifth Commandment (to honor parents) by casting reproach on "the Fathers of the Commonwealth."
When she contested his assertion, he expressed reluctance
"to discourse with those of your sex." In her church "trial"
John Cotton admonished her sisters in the congregation not to be misled by her, "for you see she is but a Woman." In 1637 the Cambridge Synod actually allowed that women might meet, "some few together." but condemned larger meetings of women as "disorderly, and without rule."
Page 28
devil's gateway to sin. Endicott had occasion to reflect on this commonplace of the times, for he had left a bastard son behind in England. The product of "an amorous episode in earlier years," in the words of biographer Mayo, the first John Endicott, Jr., was put out to a collier and provision made to apprentice the
"poore boy" in "some good trade." Though Endicott provided for his support, under no circumstances did he want the boy with him as a standing reminder of a lustful past he was "myselfe ashamed to write of." As he wrote his agent, "onely I would not by any meanes have the boy sent over.'' He made no mention, of
course, of the person who had given birth to this shame, the boy's mother.
4
Eternal vigilance against the body so as not to fall into former lusts required inordinate energy and was not always possible. "Marvelous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickedness did grow and break forth here, in a land where the same was so much witnessed against and so narrowly looked unto, and
severely punished when it was known," Bradford puzzled. He listed, among the "sundry and notorious sins" that had become surprisingly common,
drunkenness and uncleanness, incontinence between persons unmarried and even married, and, worse,
"sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name)."
Perhaps the devil was moved to greater spite by the greater holiness of the New England churches; perhaps the close examination of church members simply
exposed sins that would have remained hidden elsewhere; and, closer to the marrow of the matter:
Another reason may be, that it may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up.
When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are
suffered to run quietly in their own channels; so wickedness being here more stopped by strict laws; and the same more narrowly looked unto so as it cannot run in a common road of liberty as it would and is inclined, it searches
everywhere and at last breaks out where it gets vent.
Flash floods of backed-up life left behind absurd deposits of the sodomitic Saints: in this remarkable passage Bradford directly foreshadowed Freud, even down to the dam simile, on the discontents of
repressive "civilization." What Bradford could not see,
Page 29
understandably, was that the pent-up natural impulses could find opening not only in forbidden venery but also, alternatively, in Puritan virtue.
Endicott's outbursts against the unchosen were partial returns of this suppressed sexuality. In the role of judge and executioner he gave socially sanctioned outlet to his hatred and fear of carnality, struck at his own by branding and whipping it in others, demonstrated all the while his own innocency, preserved the purity of church and state, and therewith extended their sway. He could measure his spirituality by the number of carnal men and women stretched out prostrate behind him.
Unlike the poor buggers who channeled their
frustrations into sex crimes, Endicott gained the acclaim of all right-minded people.
5
Specific biographical details aside, the exemplary
religious life of the seventeenth century followed a set pattern. Wild youth ran into the misgivings of early maturity and a rising awareness of the tasks to which God put the soul of man. Yet, since "the flesh would
not give up her interest" but shook off "this yoake of the law," "Secrett Corruptions" led to intermissions.
The real conversion came toward age thirty, and then only after the man had been laid low by a realization of the emptiness of his spiritual pretensions. He then had revealed unto him the Lord's free mercy in Christ and
The real conversion came toward age thirty, and then only after the man had been laid low by a realization of the emptiness of his spiritual pretensions. He then had revealed unto him the Lord's free mercy in Christ and