Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. “New England being a country,” said Cotton Mather, “whose interests are remarkably enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest themselves in politics.” Indeed, for many years they virtually controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not democracy, but theocracy. “God never did ordain democracy as a fit government,” said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the Colony as heathen,--that is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was afterwards rebuked in England as “fanatical and absurd.” But the government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered by theological controversy.

In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as late as 1708, that “the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon, on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for the direction of the town in the work before them.” They wrote state papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with-“taking the stump” for his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people