A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in 18th-Century Connecticut, by Christopher Grasso, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, 524 pp.; $24.95, paper

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, by Jane Kamensky, Oxford University Press, 1997, 291 pp.; $19.95, paper

These two studies of power and speech in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England are models of the best kind of historiography. They carefully attempt to reconstruct the social and intellectual worlds of early New Englanders, while at the same time using the critical tools of their trade to understand early American religion and society in new ways. For example, while many historians have told the story of the Salem witch trials, Jane Kamensky's fascinating retelling argues that the Salem trials—which resulted in the execution of 19 (probably) innocent men and women—marked the first and last time in early New England's history that magistrates did not suppress the accusations of young women against their elders. The irony is brutal. These were not the good old days.

But neither do these books demonstrate unequivocally the superiority of our own political culture, which conspicuously lacked the institutional resources to express or expiate a national sense of shame during our recent presidential impeachment crisis. Perhaps we could have learned something from seventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans, who demanded compulsory public apologies to restore respect for those offended by wrongful public speech. Offenders were warned not to make their retractions too short or too general; even if their intentions were not sincere, "expressed shame was public shame."

While early New England may have had better mechanisms for dealing with some kinds of public wrongs, these books vividly illustrate why most of us would not want to have inhabited that world. Its rigid social hierarchy left very little room for Americans other than educated white males to speak or write in formal public settings. As Kamensky puts it, Puritan women were expected to be content "speaking to God [but] silent before men."

Hence Boston's Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Bay Colony because of her "breach of gender roles." To be sure, that was not her only offense. She had publicly criticized her minister's sermons, and claimed that God spoke specific words to her heart—an experience of God that many Puritans believed to have ceased with the death of the apostles. But Kamensky suggests that what most deeply rankled the Massachusetts ministers who were her judges was Hutchinson's presumption that she could teach men and engage in theological debate like a man. Boston theologian John Cotton reminded her that her speaking gifts were to be used solely "to instruct [her] Children and Servants and to be helpful to her husband in the Government of the family." Salem minister Hugh Peter said Hutchinson's problem was that she would "have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a Preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject."

Christopher Grasso focuses not on gender but on social class, and limits his study to eighteenth-century Connecticut, showing how elites dominated public speech and writing. In the first half of the century, clergy dominated public discourse primarily through sermons, while in the second half newspapers, essays, and poetry written by lawyers, journalists, and satirists competed with ministers' speech and writing. Before mid-century, Grasso argues, the "speaking aristocracy" of clergymen spoke to the people, but after mid-century there emerged a "civic conversation" of the people. Nevertheless, political and religious dissenters complained that public speech was still controlled by a few elites.

This was an age that talked incessantly about the need for character among public servants and complained bitterly that most leaders were miserably deficient. (Sound familiar?) According to many orators and writers, this sad state of affairs could be explained by the fact that most politicians were lawyers, whose profession was notorious for self-interest, faction, and skillful deception. As one wag put it, "Their cunning and intrigue is become a bye-word, and their want of honesty an't much better."

The character of students at Yale College, who went on to become Connecticut's leading speakers and writers, did not favorably impress their president, Thomas Clap, whose story may resonate with beleaguered adminstrators today. During the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, after a decade of rising campus hooliganism, Yale students set off bombs in the college yard, poisoned food in the commons, and sent a note to Clap threatening to "skin [his] hide." Then they attacked his house, broke some windows (slightly injuring the president), and terrorized their professors. Clap resigned the following year. Connecticut's ministers, said satirist John Trumbull, anticipating H.L. Mencken, were better behaved than the riotous students but intellectually uninspired. The pulpits were filled by "dunces who dozed through four years of college and by barely literate blunderers who were licensed to preach by their brethren as long as they could recite the Calvinist creed. The few clerics with some brains scrambled them with metaphysical speculation and plunged the colony into violent controversies."

And yet this was also an age of intellectual athletes. Trumbull himself, for example, by his fourth year had read through the Bible, memorized Isaac Watts's lyrics, and begun writing his own verse. He passed Yale's entrance exams at age seven, read Milton at eight, and was steeped in Homer, Horace, and Cicero by the time he was thirteen. Timothy Dwight, who was Yale's president from 1795 to 1813, studied Latin grammar during breaks in his regular lessons when he was six and had read through his father's library by the age of ten. After starting Yale at the traditional age of thirteen, Dwight studied fourteen hours a day after four hours of sleep, beginning each morning with one hundred lines of Homer. He practiced penmanship during lunch, ate only twelve mouthfuls of vegetables at dinner, and studied by candlelight into the night. This regimen nearly killed him and permanently damaged his eyesight.

Grasso's massively researched, engagingly written book also makes some important comments on several longstanding debates among scholars of early American religion. The first concerns what is called the "national covenant," the idea that God calls whole societies (in this case, New England) for special purposes, and rewards or punishes them accordingly in this world. While some scholars have argued that by the time of the American Revolution the idea had largely lost currency, Grasso shows that although ministers less frequently preached that God made covenants with nations (the emphasis hvaing shifted to covenants with a nation's churches), nevertheless they still taught that a whole people could bear corporate guilt and be punished in this world.

At the same time, however, Grasso finds evidence that the self-conception of America as a "redeemer nation" was not as widespread among New England Christians as many scholars have believed. On another contentious topic, Grasso argues that the Great Awakening, while not the single source of the American Revolution or American democracy or even American evangelicalism, was nevertheless a "contingent," surprising event that cannot be explained merely by reference to Old World religious patterns, as some revisionist historians have suggested.

Together these books raise many questions about the relationship betwen authority and speech and the ways in which Christians have interpreted Scripture through the often distorting lenses of inherited cultural assumptions. Pondering these questions, we may be able also to think a bit more clearly about the present, not forgetting the possibly distorting effect of our own assumptions. Kamensky suggests, for example, that while early Americans clearly overreacted to wrongful speech, they were right to recognize that "words can kill." She cites approvingly the slogan from a Planned Parenthood ad, "Words are like bullets—they can be used to kill," and hints that hate-crime legislation should be seriously considered. She does not point out Planned Parenthood's studied avoidance of the word "baby" when referring to late-term fetuses, surely a potent example of the way words can be artfully arranged to justify killing. More surprising, she does not discuss the likelihood of hate-crime or hate-speech legislation being used to muzzle dissent—a clear and present danger, it would seem, given the evidence marshalled in her own book.

But if lessons from the past are not easily interpreted or applied, they are ignored only at our peril. We too readily assume, for example, that we could never turn on our neighbors as professing Christians did in Rwanda and Kosovo. We may never be so vulnerable as when we thank God that we are "not like other people" (Luke 18:22).

Gerald McDermott teaches religion at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is the author most recently of Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (Oxford Univ. Press), and Can Evangelicals Learn from the Buddha? Jesus, Revelation, and the Religions (InterVarsity).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:

• A Speaking Aristocracy, by Christopher Grasso
• Governing the Tongue, by Jane Kamensky

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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