A Constitutional Culture

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown’s priorities. Charles demanded that puritans change voting practices, baptismal policies, and laws, and he also cast an eye on local resources such as forests, a valuable source of masts for the English navy. Moreover, to enforce these demands, the king sent four royal commissioners on warships, ostensibly headed for New Netherland but easily redirected toward Boston. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners’ authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown.

Those resisting the crown included not just freemen (voters) but also people often seen as excluded or marginalized such as non-freemen, indentured servants, and women. Together they crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned. Weimer shows how they expressed this constitutional culture through a set of well-rehearsed practices—including fast days, debates, committee work, and petitions. Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule, with a providentially informed capacity for risk-taking, and with a set of intellectual frameworks for divided sovereignty, the constitutional culture that New Englanders forged would not easily succumb to an imperial authority intent on consolidating its power.

Adrian Chastain Weimer is Professor of History at Providence College.Adrian Chastain Weimer is Professor of History at Providence College and author of Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England.

"With A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer joins the first rank of historians of colonial New England and makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the nature of political culture in early America. Weimer centers the period immediately following the Restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660 as the critical moment when a distinctive constitutional culture, different from and in resistance to the constitutional culture of Restoration England, coalesced in New England."

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A Constitutional Culture tells a captivating story of division, resistance, and the charter-based allegiance of New England’s colonists to the newly restored Stuart Crown in the 1660s...Weimer constructs a clear, resolute perspective of colonial resistance through the Restoration era that is both compelling and comprehensive. Her
familiarity with the sources and historiography is evident in the well-crafted, detail-rich story of this very impressive work.

"The 1660s in New England were once considered diminished and insignificant, a once united and inspired society that had lost its original direction….In Adrian Chastain Weimer’s hands, the 1660s emerge as the opposite of diminished and insignificant….[Her] analysis of this decade and her argument about constitutional thinking in the early English Atlantic are convincing….She rehabilitates Restoration New England as a vibrant and politically engaged place where dynamic debates took place about the future among an energized population"

"Exactly where, or in the words of whom, a widespread belief in colonial sovereignty first articulated itself is really not the question this book sets out to answer—its author is far too astute and sensitive a reader of the archive to fall into that trap. Instead, we have a messier portrait of this time and place, one that is richer because its author wisely chooses to let these competing, contradictory, confusing, and (quite?) arbitrary set of political, cultural, and religious arguments exist without forcing them into resolution...Thanks to Weimer’s study, we have a much more detailed, better-argued, and persuasively evidenced account of one of the lesser-studied chapters of the longer narrative of how the United States came to believe in the legitimacy of its own self-rule."