New England Towns and the Puritan Errand

A Puritan town started with a congregation, not a landlord. A group of church members petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a land grant, then laid out house lots close together around a central common and meetinghouse, the building used for both worship and town business. Farmland sat in outlying strips, divided so families walked out to work it and walked back to sleep near the church and each other. The whole point was proximity: a visible, watched community where neighbors could enforce godly behavior and everyone could reach Sunday service on foot.

That closeness carried into government. Adult male church members met in town meeting to elect selectmen, who handled roads, schools, and local disputes, and to choose representatives to send to the colonial assembly in Boston. Only men who were full church members, meaning they had publicly described a conversion experience to the congregation's satisfaction, could vote at all. That rule is the key to why Puritan New England was not tolerant: church and state leaned on each other, so civic rights depended on meeting a specific religious bar, and dissenters like Roger Williams or Anne Hutchinson were banished rather than accommodated.

By the 1660s fewer adults could claim that vivid conversion experience, so the Half-Way Covenant let baptized children of members join the church halfway, gaining baptism for their own children without full voting membership. It kept congregations from shrinking but also loosened the tight fit between piety and belonging that had defined the founding generation's errand into the wilderness.