A Refinement on the Principle of Resistance: The Puritan Roots of Political Resistance in America

Puritanism was a religious movement that historically developed with an innate tendency toward political resistance. Birthed out of the complexities of the English Reformation, Puritan non-conformity caused tensions between dissenters and the English monarchs. These tensions followed non-conformists when they chose to emigrate to Massachusetts Bay in order to establish a church and government favorable to their ideas of Congregationalism. Their experience in New England continued to demonstrate the Puritan penchant toward political resistance as they strove to develop and maintain a virtual independent, sovereign republic despite attempts by the royal government to bring the Northern colonies into conformity consistent with imperial colonial policies. The structure of government imposed upon Massachusetts with the second charter emphasized and enhanced the political divisions that had grown within the colony. These divisions developed into rebellious tendencies directed against the loyalist component of the colonial government and the royal government in Great Britain that eventually built up to the open hostilities of the American Revolution under the influence of the Puritan clergy of New England. This dissertation traces the persistence of Puritan political resistance and argues that it was a result of the history of English dissenters that produced and maintained it as a characteristic of Puritanism both in England and America and was one of the reasons why revolutionary hostilities of the latter half of the eighteenth century began first in New England.