How long were first-generation Connecticut Puritans able to keep the kind of society they wanted? The multiplicity of additional laws enacted during the second half of the 17th century is perhaps an indication that things were out of hand: if one law doesn’t solve the problem, other laws may do the trick.
16
Jones believes the Congregational Commonwealth was healthy for about one generation, about twenty years.
17
From the very beginning it is clear there were people who had to be brought into line. As early as 1639 several men are punished for raping a servant girl.
18 Here is evidence, on the
one hand, of people in a Puritan society whose behavior was far from demonstrating a serious intent to follow God’s law and, on the other, the presence from the start of a kind of under-class, the servants whose ideas or religious convictions were hardly considered by the leaders of the Commonwealth to be important enough to find out about. The leaders insisted that they behave correctly in all things, but one wonders whether the lower class residents imagined that they might actually ever become church members.
The Puritans themselves recognized danger from uneducated people, including their own children, who did not understand the necessity of the godly life, unattached males who tended towards rowdiness until they settled down with their families on a piece of land, and strangers who came to settle but worried more about getting ahead than pleasing God. Whether children, servants, bachelors, adventurers, and other less-than-solid citizens caused more disturbance to early Connecticut society than would have been found elsewhere is hard to find out. Possibly the closeness and religiosity of the early towns created an atmosphere of rather better behavior; probably the strictness of the standards, and the high expectations, exacerbated the problem.
The biggest threat to the Puritan dominance of Connecticut came not from those who were the ordinary rebellious, independent types but from those who actively fought the existing system because they wanted it to include more options. The most important groups that challenged Connecticut’s leaders to open up to a degree of pluralism were two: the dissident religious groups and the groups, not necessarily religious, who wanted a more open government. When these two forces combined after 1800 and fought side by side for more than one choice in religion and more than one group in the government, the Standing Order was nearing its end. The religious challenge came first, long before 1800.