Unnatural Sex and the Puritans

I've been doing some research on my father's side of the family, and I've discovered that nearly all of them came not from New York, as I'd assumed, but from Massachusetts and Connecticut.  Most of them had left England by the mid-1600's, so I've been reading up on the Puritans and Pilgrims. One of the things I've found out is that they were appalled by unnatural sex.  By that phrase they meant everything except intercourse between a husband and wife.  Masturbation was condemned everywhere in New England and made a capital crime in the colony of New Haven.  Following the Bible, adultery and sodomy were capital crimes.

And so was bestiality, sex with animals and fowls.  In Albion's Seed:  Four British Folkways in America (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), David Hackett Fisher relates the case of George Spencer, a servant with only one eye in New Haven.  Spencer had been anything but a model servant, and when a sow gave birth to a piglet with only one eye, Spencer was accused of bestiality.  Under great pressure, Fisher relates, Spencer confessed, then recanted, confessed a second time, and then recanted again.

Two witnesses were required to convict him of bestiality, but the magistrates, determined to find him guilty, got around that inconvenient technicality.  The one-eyed piglet was admitted as one witness, and Spencer's confession was admitted as the other one, even though he'd recanted it.  Although Fischer is silent on this point, New England courts treating cases of bestiality followed the Biblical injunction of Leviticus: "And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast" (20:15), So both George Spencer and the sow would have been executed.

Fortunately for John Lawrence at his trial in 1677, the Court of Assistants in Cambridge was not willing to circumvent the required two witnesses for bestiality.  In Sex in Middlesex:  Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699, (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1986), Roger Thompson relates that John Lawrence was seen by Thomas Michelson between seven and eight in the morning "standing on a tree that lay along on the ground having his face towards his mares tail and his hand clasped about her Buttock."  After awhile, he deposed, Lawrence "turned the mares tayle on one side and then he again clasped his hands about her Buttocks as before and wrought with his body against hers."  But a second person near the scene, one Isaac Amsden, deposed that he was too far away to witness the act, so the case was dismissed.

Another notable case was that of Thomas Granger, a sixteen or seventeen year-old servant in Duxbury, one of the Pilgrim settlements in Massachusetts. William Bradford found it horrible to mention his case in his history, Of Plymouth Plantation, but he believed that the truth of history required it.  Granger was first seen copulating with a mare ("I forbear particulars," Bradford comments primly), and when he was examined on that topic, he confessed to buggery not only with the mare "at sundry times" but with "a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey" (Bk. II, Chapter 32).

Although Granger at first denied this charge, he eventually confessed to the entire court and was condemned to death.  But there was some difficulty in following Leviticus.  One sheep looked much like another, with the result Granger had to identify each one he'd had sex with: "whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not."  On 8 September 1642, the executions took place: "first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face," and then Granger himself was executed.

Remarkable as these cases are, they seem far from typical.  Roger Thompson points out in Sex in Middlesex that only two men were executed for bestiality in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. (The one-eyed George Spencer lived in Connecticut.)  Thompson's meticulous study of town and court records led him to believe that most people in that county were as law abiding about sexuality as they were about other matters.  Not all inhabitants were members of the church, and not all church members were godly, but bestiality was not common.  In part, the occurrences we know about may have been the few ones in which the act was observed (as it was not in the case of George Spencer), and more perhaps may have taken place in private.  But many members of these communities believed that God was watching them--"God can see you in the dark" was a common warning--and might well punish all of them for the sins of the few.  So were they taught, and so they believed--at least for the greater part of the seventeenth century.  They were called to be communities of their brothers' keepers for the greater glory of God, and in that watchful context what they termed "abominations in the eyes of the Lord" accordingly would have been rare.

Why the Puritan John Winthrop Gave Up Hunting

John Winthrop (1587/88-1649), who was to become the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, belonged to the socio-economic class in England that could count hunting among its privileges.  Nevertheless, he gave it up.  In 1611, when he was  twenty-three,  Winthrop carefully enumerated his reasons:

"Finding by much examination that ordinary shooting in a gun, etc:  could not stand with a good conscience with myself, as first, for that it is simply prohibited by the law of the land, upon this ground amongst others, that it spoils more of the creatures than it gets:  2 it procures offence unto many:  3 it wastes great store of time:  4 it toils a man's body overmuch:  5 it endangers a man's life, etc.:  6 it brings no profit all things considered:  7 it hazards more of a man's estate by the penalty of it, than a man would willingly part with:  8 it brings a man of worth and godliness into some contempt:  --lastly for mine own part I have been crossed in using it, for when I have gone about it not without some wounds of conscience, and have taken much pains and hazarded my health, I have gotten very little but most commonly nothing at all towards my cost and labour."

Many today would probably agree with reasons 1-8, but to my ear the final reason is the most telling. It's the only reason that is personal rather than impersonal.  Here, and here alone, I'd suggest, for just a moment we can hear the human voice of John Winthrop, a hunter who has returned home too many times empty-handed.  Despite enduring "some wounds of conscience," despite undergoing many pains and exhausting himself, he typically was unsuccessful.  That lack of success--his being crossed, thwarted in his pursuit of game, and almost certainly missing what he shot at--appears to be what motivated his inventory.  Reasons 1-8, then, serve less as reasons to change his behavior than as rationalizations.

What's fascinating to me is that even after enumerating no less than eight of these arguments, his own frustration explodes at the end, overriding everything he has listed before.  By the time he had his portrait painted, however, his projected self, his public persona, if you will, is much more contained.   He appears to be completely in control.  When a portrait was commissioned in that period, hands were an added expense. Winthrop is quietly showing that he could afford to have both hands painted, and his affluence is further displayed by the lace that edges both his ruff and his cuffs.  This is not a portrait composed to engage its audience.  His hands are not making a gesture outwards:  the upper hand, indeed, is turned inward, held close to his chest.  His youthful frustrations are long gone--and to that degree, he appears less human and much more the austere representative of Puritan authority.

Source:  The Winthrop Papers, 1498-1649, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929-1947), vol. I, p. 165; quoted by Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War:  Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham, MD:  Madison Books, 1991), p. 54.