To the editor:
Colin Woodard (WWF June 03) is hard on Puritans and lumps good people with a fanatic clergy. He shares historian Banks’s bias in favor of the peaceable loyalists in Maine whom, wrote Banks, the Puritans persecuted and plundered. Yet some of us in York thought even worse the Royal Commissioners whom England saw fit to impose on us. We petitioned the Bay Colony to take over in their stead, for then we should have a voice in its General Court or legislature. His Majesty’s Justices in York jailed us for that impertinence. That took place 109 years before the Declaration of Independence.
That Puritan legislature enacted a Body of Liberties and a Book of General Laws and Liberties. A Puritan governor reprieved a woman who had been condemned to death for witchcraft, and another Puritan governor ordered the release of all who were accused of it. Puritans conceived the need for common public schools, and founded a college in Cambridge. A Puritan, Anne Bradstreet, wrote our first poetry.
So, our coin is good, whether you look at this side of it, or that.
Roger Bragdon
Bath