Misconceptions About The Puritans

The traditional image of a New England puritan is that they were dressed in black, with a steeple hat and lots of buckles. None of these is historically accurate; this is a 19th-century idea of how a puritan would have looked, with the buckles representing a stereotype of quaintness. Actually they normally dressed as colourfully and variably as everyone else.

Black suits were for Sunday best, because black dye was expensive and faded fast. If you were having your portrait painted, you wore your best clothes – which is why portraits tend to show them in black. (They are also sometimes depicted as armed with a blunderbuss, but this is another invention: it’s a crowd-control weapon, not a hunting piece.)

“The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.” – H.L. Mencken

Also, Puritans aren’t the same as pilgrims. The Mayflower Pilgrims were a mixture of utopians and fortune hunters, and welcomed dissent. The Puritans, on the other hand, came to America not to find religious freedom so much as to take refuge from it: their party had lost power in England and they wanted to go somewhere that remained free of the taint of religious tolerance. Puritans were not fleeing religious persecution so much as trying to establish an environment in which they could persecute others.

They were active suppressors of religious freedom: for example, a woman named Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston in 1660 for being a Quaker. Those legal measures to promote religious tolerance which did exist were promulgated from England and imposed on the colonies against their wishes.

Language and Culture

‘The Quakers rejected the use of you as a polite form of address, and preferred thou, which to them signalled intimacy and equality. By refusing to use you because they took it as a deferential form of address, the Quakers provoked hostility from others who regarded their behavior as a sign of contempt. The repercussions of such deviant usage were severe for some Quakers such as Richard Davis, who reported that when he addressed the lady of the house in which he worked as thou, “she took a stick and gave me such a blow upon my bare head, that made it swell and sore for a considerable time. She was so disturbed by it, that she swore she would kill me.”

Romaine (2000)’

– Yule, G. 1985. The Study of Language Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press (2010) p. 266