II. CHILDREN IN THE COLONIAL FAMILY
English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, whether Puritan, orthodox Anglican, or secular in social outlook, agreed that the father's unquestioned rule was the only assurance of a proper discharge of the family's social obligations. In "the good man or master of the familie," wrote William Perkins (1558-1602), the leading Puritan divine of his time, "resteth the private and proper government of the whole household, and he comes not unto it by election, as it falleth out in other states, but by the ordinance of God, setled even in the order of nature. The husband indeed naturally beares rule over the wife, parents over their children, masters over their servants."[1] A champion of the divine right of monarchy, Sir Robert Filmer (ca. 1588-1653), reinforced his theory of royal authortiy with a parallel between family and kingdom. "I see not," he wrote, "how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subordination of children is the fountain of all regal authority."[2] The duties of fathers and kings, he continued, were the same. "We find them to be all one, without any difference at all but only in the latitude of extent of them. As the Father over one family, so the King as Father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and defend the whole Commonwealth."[3] Even Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the great theorist of sovereignty, and a far more modem thinker than either Perkins or Filmer, assumed that families were the original and natural social unit existing prior to the creation of states. It followed, he wrote in Leviathan, "that a great Family if it be not part of some Common-wealth, is of it self, as to the Rights of Soveraignty, a little Monarchy…wherein the Father or Master is the Soveraign."[4] Although the creation of a national sovereign deprived fathers of their absolute rights over subordinates, they retained a substantial residue of authority since "the Father and Master being before the Institution of Common-Wealth, absolute Soveraigns in their own Families, they lose afterward no more of their Authority, than the Law of the Common- wealth taketh from them."[5] Father and monarch ruled their analogous realms unchallenged and unchallengeable by those arranged in hierarchy beneath them. So at least the theorists maintained.
Another common social idea was that the family or household served as the principal educator of children. Church and school, though valued for their contributions, were subservient to the family in turning unruly, immature children into dutiful subjects. The family introduced children to social customs and both cultivated and tested their ability to perform worthwhile services. "For the family," wrote William Gouge, a renowned Puritan preacher, "is a seminary of the Church and Common-wealth. It is a Bee-hive in which is the Stocke, and out of which are sent many swarms of Bees: for in families are all sorts of people bred and brought up and out of families are they sent into the Church and Common-wealth…Whence it followeth, that a conscionable performance of domesticall and household duties, tend to the good ordering of Church and Common-wealth."[6]
This neat social diagram drawn by preachers and philosophers did not encompass all of the realities of family life in either England or America. Aspiration and fact were combined in their portrait of the paterfamilias earnestly transmitting to his heirs and other dependents his own loyalties. Yet the ideals and needs of family life were sufficiently strong to inspire a determined effort in the colonies to duplicate the English model and even improve upon it. The requirements, as viewed by the colonists themselves, were different in New England and the southern colonies. The Puritans initially saw the New World as a means of liberating the family from Old World restraints. In leaving England, they escaped the evils of interference in their daily lives from improper ecclesiastical and governmental authorities. In America, they believed, the family would surmount the hardships of a wilderness to flourish and grow as nature and God intended, uniting with church and state to create a Christian commonwealth. In the South, however, where migration had been commercial in its character and implemented by individuals rather than families, deliberate policies were required merely to make possible the formation of families. With a population disproportionately composed of men, the permanence of the colonies and the transplantation of the rudiments of civilization required the provision of wives for the planters. Brides were among the essential provisions sent to the colonists of Virginia.
Even in New England, where it was expected the ideals of family life would have the best opportunity for fu1fillment, ministerial exhortation, advice, and eventually legislation were found necessary to shore up the desired family style. The younger generation frequently seemed to be on the verge of a decline into impiety and insubordination. Their behavior in home, church, and school was constantly examined and often found wanting. Some congregations set aside sections of the meetinghouse for them where they could be easily observed and praise, reproof, or correction administered as occasion demanded. Severe punishments for disobedience, including even the penalty of death, were decreed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, although there are no recorded instances of its imposition. More or less constant surveillance was the lot of the young in New England.
Repression was not the only device used by the leaders of the New England colonies to sustain authority. More important was a series of laws designed to encourage parents to meet the responsibilities that social theory and biblical injunction placed upon them. Beginning with the Massachusetts law of 1642 that required parents to see that their children and other dependents were taught reading and a trade, the New England colonies tried to make the family function as a broadly educational and socializing institution. Town officials were obligated to enforce the laws, but, after repeated failures, the General Court of Massachusetts created a new class of officers in 1675, the tithingmen, charged with the inspection of families. Although parents were brought before the authorities for neglecting the proper rearing of children, some repeatedly, in many towns it apparently was impossible to secure obedience to the law. A comparable manifestation of the family ideal was the attempt to bring single persons whatever their age under family government. Relying upon Psalms 68: 6, "God setteth the solitary in families," the authorities required single persons to attach themselves to a household. But this measure too seems to have been only partially effective.
No colony's population of children consisted entirely of those in natural families. There were anomalies, such as bastards and orphans who, through no fault or failure of their own, could not provide for themselves and were without families for protection and nurture. In general, the American colonists attempted to continue the traditional English way of caring for unfortunate children. Bastards, for example, were to be supported by the father if he could be determined, if not, then by the parish or town. In case a father failed to acknowledge his child, the word of the mother given during the crisis of childbirth was to be accepted, although a court could relieve a man of a manifestly false charge. The large number of bound servants in the southern colonies created a special situation. At first Virginia penalized women servants who bore illegitimate children by adding two years to their term of service, laying upon the father the obligation to provide for the child. This law had to be changed to prevent unscrupulous masters from adding to the terms of their female servants by forcing them to bear children. The solution was to deprive the master of the additional time, transferring it to the parish.
Orphans were another familiar category of dependency. Their care in England had been provided by binding them out to foster parents and this method was readily employed in America. Novel uncertainties, however, sometimes threw upon the traditional system a weight it could scarcely bear. Such, for instance, was the case when Indian massacres, natural disasters, or epidemics created homeless orphans in large numbers. The only response then was to consider some form of institutional care.
Another anomaly in New World society was the child of mixed parentage. The establishment of a slave system resting upon racial identity added a third category of persons to the traditional two of the free and the servant.
Slaves, servants, and free persons of both sexes and races and of all ages mingled together in the colonies. English experience obviously gave little guidance in establishing the legal status and the rights of the children who resulted. Although authority frowned upon unions between white servant women and Negro slavemen as unnatural, unchristian, and socially disruptive, it is clear that they sometimes took place. Laws were passed to discourage informal matings, to outlaw marriage between those of different races, and to ensure that the children born out of wedlock to a slave mother would inherit her status.
In sum, America presented many new circumstances that required adjustments in traditional English institutions. The family that the colonists brought with them could not solve all of the problems it encountered. The belief that it could serve as the theater for the drama of child-rearing began to give way before the pressures of the New World environment. As children grew restive under the rule of parents less in touch than they with the requirements for success and happiness in a land of greater opportunity, they prompted the initiation of a search by the leaders of society for variations and innovation in institutions that would supplement the family.
1. William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie (London, 1609), p. 164.
4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1924). p. 107; first published in 1651.
6. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), pp. 17-18.