CommonEssay Preview: CommonReport this essayColonial America BookNotesJohn Putnam Demos(1937-)A Little Commonwealth:Family Life in Plymouth ColonyNY: Oxford UP, 1970. xvi + 201 p. Ill.: 15 photos (btw. 108-09). Appendix: demographic tables (191-94). Bibliographical footnotes, index (195-201). ISBN: 0195128907 (1999 ed.)
Thesis:“A familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth, at least a lively representation thereof, whereby triall may be made of such as are fit for any place of authoritie, or of subjection in Church or commonwealth. Or rather it is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth.” — Epigraph by William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622)
BookNotesReviews:Henretta, James A. “The Morphology of New England Society in the Colonial Period.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2.2 (Autumn 1971): 379-398.The dominant historiographical theme since about 1900 has been the declension of English traditions in the New World “wilderness.” Frederick Jackson Turner and Perry Miller formulated the declension theory that English customs, institutions, and ideas were disintegrating in America, a theory with nationalist implications. The declension theory proposes that the English colonists were religious peasants who instituted medievalistic communal plantations that were necessarily transformed by the American environment, a social change that culminated in the American Revolution. In A Little Commonwealth, Demos provides “barren artifacts” to demonstrate the transforming social existence of the 1620 Plymouth settlement until its demise in the 1691 Massachusetts charter incorporating Plymouth. Demos describes the small rustic houses and presents some court cases involving families, then discuss the effects of the crowded conditions on the large families. He suggests that the colonists were forced by these conditions to displace their natural aggression onto their neighbors.
Isaac, Rhys. American Historical Review 76.3 (June 1971): 728-37.“We are presently confronted by fundamental questions concerning the nature of order and authority in a traditional society, and these questions have been given added point by researches into the ideological transformations wrought by adaptation to growth and expansion in the New World environment and by the first great secular revolution of our era.” Historical demography reveals the “evolution of basic patterns of everyday life, providing social history with the sense of movement that history at large has lost since the idea of progress was discredited.” John Demos has employed historical demography techniques first developed in France, then transmitted to American historians through the English historians Peter Laslett and E. A. Wrigley, but adapted to the American perspective transcending demography to encompass “experience,” the values and emotions of the culture studied. Demos merges “micro-observations” gleaned from court records of conflict involving families in Plymouth Colony with “imaginative reconstruction of the spatial arrangement of the Old Colony houses and concludes that hostile impulses within the family, arising inevitably from frequent abrasion in congested conditions, were themselves inhibited but were eventually displaced outward in aggression toward neighbors.” Demos study reflects and develops that of Perry Miller, who merged intellectual and social history, but supplemented an intuitive perception for his evaluation. Bernard Bailyn, in The Origins of American Politics (1968), merged the study of political culture with structure and experience. Both Miller and Bailyn produced works with an elitist bias, which is corrected in community studies such as A Little Commonwealth by Demos. Philip Grevens Four Generations, a similar 1970 community study, finds unusual stability in Andover, Massachusetts, but Demos finds significant mobility in Plymouth Colony.
Macfarlane, Alan. Man 6.4 (December 1971): 713-14.Demos accomplishes for Plymouth colony what Laslett destroyed some of the myths regarding English marriage and family, and Demos achieves this goal in A Little Commonwealth. He provides data on the typical age of marriage for men and women, and he presents the nuclear family style as typical. However, “the extremely complex psychological and sociological problems of domestic life cannot be satisfactorily answered from odd remarks in wills, an occasional court case or theological essay, and our understanding is not helped by the authors failure to describe used and potential sources in any detail.” Demos “thesis that smallish houses cramped large families and must have caused huge inter-personal tensions, anxieties, and so on, could have been made far less naive by reference to the work of Max Gluckman on the ritualisation of personal relations.”
Middlekauff, Robert. The Journal of American History 57.2 (September 1970): 404-05.Demos has focused on the family in Plymouth colony, but he aspired “ultimately for general answers, for a picture of the family rather than any single instance thereof” (viii). This generalization is tentative, and Demos approaches religion in only a casual fashion. Demos evidence regarding patriarchy in Plymouth contrasts with that of Grevens Andover in that Plymouth documents do not show the manipulation of grown sons by fathers who owned the family property. Demos concludes that Plymouth colony children moved without significant crisis.
Murrin, John M. History and Theory 11.2 (1972): 226-75.Demos study of the family and community is among several influenced by sociology of the family and techniques of historical demography that originated in France and migrated through England to the United States. Benjamin Franklin developed a 1751 model of open land leading to large families, and in The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England, 1944) Edmund Morgan “humanized” the Puritans but theorized a New England “tribalism.” After examining court records and literary works, Morgan concluded that the Puritans, obsessed with converting their children, had “committed the very sin that
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Author John Demos has made a number of important contributions to the history of the Puritan family in New Hampshire. He first developed the Puritan doctrine of a family in which the offspring were the primary role of the household. This led to the idea of an “order of the house,” a structure in which children “live in group social relationships with their parents.” In practice, after establishing a hierarchy he also made other changes that brought the family into common. He found that the Puritans were, in practice, an egalitarian and tolerant people in who were able to choose what to do with children and the family.
A number of other scholars at the time are in favor of the “family” idea; they regard it as a rationalized process of family formation in the middle class, and even as a moral responsibility. Demos also established the idea that the first family should be taken with pride, for it was a way to ensure that all children, all generations of any age, could be raised and to secure that the children of all generations of generations should be placed in shared responsibility. He believed that children should be part of the family first, for “the people of this state should serve as a primary caretaker for orphans” of the children who arrived during the Civil War: “the children of the white child should be cared for in such a manner that only the white children shall be sent [sic] to die at home.”
In 1800, Demos found that even white children had the potential to become children of white families.
Demos’ views have been echoed by many other scholars, most of whom had never seen the story of the Puritans before. Demos began to argue in 1824 that the Puritans represented a family in which all children must be raised, and he had many witnesses in support. The first family tradition he encountered, which he then continued to study in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was that of William A. Smith, Thomas C. Clark, and Frank B. Wren. All three men in fact wrote and wrote such popular books, and had written, as some scholars say, “a great many books”[e.g., “E.T. Smith’s History of American Folk Culture in the Early Colonial Era by F.J. Houghstone and C.H. Miller”] by which they understood their position. But Demos’ most significant contribution was his own study and teaching of his family. Here Clark and Wren published the Puritan family genealogy, of which Demos was the first to do so. The family was a family in New Hampshire about the size of a football field; after a