A Secular Revival: Puritanism in Connecticut, 1675–1708

For many years it has been agreed that New England Puritans became Yankees. Although scholars have largely confined their studies of this process to Massachusetts, the titles of two recent books on Connecticut indicate that the interpretation fits that colony as well. Puritanism declined in Connecticut as elsewhere in New England. Fitz-John Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut between 1698 and 1707, suffers by comparison with the standards set by his grandfather, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and by the founders of Connecticut, Hooker, Ludwell, and Haynes. In 1680, Governor William Leete of Connecticut judged Fitz by these standards, and found that he lacked his ‘fathers virtues & cordiality of love to this colony’. The accusation was well-founded, for Fitz and his brother Wait had allied themselves with Governor Edmund Andros of New York in pushing the Duke of York's claim to large parts of Connecticut. That they did so in part to protect their land holdings would not have softened Leete's judgement. The Winthrops come out of the affair the archetypal Yankees: not only provincial, but materialistic as well. Yet on balance, there was in Connecticut little of the intense self-criticism so prevalent in Massachusetts, where the spirit of accommodation with the empire was more widespread and produced considerable political strife and the usual crop of doomladen sermons. Fitz's temporary defection was rare in Connecticut and resulted in little more than Leete's rather gentle remonstrance and a short-lived, if acrimonious, correspondence between Fitz and the General Court. As Richard L. Bushman suggests, Connecticut's isolation from the imperial system and its relative homogeneity gave rise to a Puritan society unique in its autonomy and, one might add, unique in its self-confidence.