Puritans in the woodpile, regicides too. The demons of the 17th century, or, 'that's not who we are.'
A new spirit entered history several centuries ago. Part one of two
In 1861, General Braxton Bragg, then in Mobile, Alabama training the volunteers flocking to the Southern colors, was ordered by President Jefferson Davis to the railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi. There he would combine his men with those of General Albert Sidney Johnston and counter the U.S. move into Tennessee. The untested armies would clash in April 1862, a bloody chaos known now as Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing. But first, General Bragg needed as escort: bodyguards and to courier messages between headquarters and field officers.
Also knocking around south Alabama: Company K, 3rd Alabama Cavalry. Raised in Dallas County by Robert Smith, a local planter and veteran of the Seminole Wars, it came to be known as the Crocheron Light Dragoons for John Jay Crocheron, a New Yorker of Huegenot origin who moved to Alabama in the 1820s. He bought land, planted a crop and was wildly successful. By 1860 he had over 200 slaves at his Elm Bluff plantation on the Alabama River.
More on Elm Bluff here is here at The Forgotten South. Architectural historians consider it a “significant” and “unusual” example of the Greek Revival popular in the antebellum period. He also outfitted Captain Smith’s company with the sinews of war, including a batch of Colt 3rd model revolvers. Ten or twelve survived the conflict. They appear now and again at auction and command a considerable premium.
Anyway, something in Captain Smith’s bearing must have pleased General Bragg, who was something of a martinet. General Bragg was also sparing with praise, but he cited Captain Smith at Shiloh for “personal gallantry and intelligent execution of orders, frequently under the heaviest fire.”
Davis appointed Captain Smith military governor of Corinth. He was replaced by company sergeant Edwin Martin Holloway, a schoolteacher from Selma. The unit sometimes appears as Holloway’s Independent Scouts or Holloway’s Company of Independent Alabama Cavalry (as is the case in the board-and-counter wargame River of Death, about the Chickamauga fight, designed by David Powell, author of a masterful three-volume history of the battle). The company served Bragg through his ruinous tenure as commander of the Army of Tennessee: the Kentucky campaign, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga. General Johnston, who replaced Bragg after the disaster of the Chattanooga battle — the Army of Tennessee was saved from destruction by the courage of General Patrick R. Cleburne and the 4200 men of his division, which held Ringgold Gap against the the 16,000 Americans of Hooker’s division – kept it as his escort on the long retreat through north Georgia to Atlanta.
President Davis, frustrated by Johnston’s backward movements, replaced him with General John Bell Hood, the famed commander of the Texas Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia. An outstanding brigadier provided the orders were to attack, Hood wasted tens of thousands of his men in hopeless attacks, evacuated Atlanta and destroyed the Army of Tennessee at Franklin and Nashville. General Johnston reassumed command and surrendered to Sherman in April 1865. Holloway’s company was his escort through it all.
Captain Holloway returned to Selma. He ran as sheriff on the Republican ticket and passed away in 1885. But he caught my interest. The surname appears in my father’s lineage, which prior to the war was concentrated in central to southern Alabama. The names “Edwin” and “Martin” were unfamiliar (“Francis” and “Marion” appear a lot, usually in conjunction; ditto “Lafayette”). A bit of digging showed that Edwin was not from Alabama. Nor from any Southern state. I assumed we were unrelated. And, indeed, that was my hope.
Edwin was one of those people: a northerner. And not just a random northerner, a German or Irishman or Scotsman who’d entered via Philadelphia and settled on the wrong side of the Ohio River. But an actual Yankee: that is, the spawn of the “Great Puritan Migration” usually considered to commence with John Winthrop of Edwardstone, Suffolk. Winthrop’s ship, the Arbella, departed the Isle of Wight in April 1730, landing in Salem in June. At some point during the passage Winthrop preached a sermon called “A Modell of Christian Charity.” This contains the infamous “city on a hill” image, which the more militant American types — neocons, Fox News, Ronaldus Magnus — consider their divine mandate for Empire.
That’s not, as we will see, what Winthrop meant, much less the goal of the first generation of Puritans. Whatever their sins, this is not one.
But first things first.
Edwin’s line, in the form of one William Holloway, landed in Massachusetts in 1633 or 1634. Was he perhaps fleeing a crime? A lawsuit, filed against him by one Nathaniel Crewkerne, a Somerset yeoman, followed in 1640. He joined a church in Dorchester in 1635. In 1637 he joined with 45 other Bostonians to “purchase” land from the Indians. Soon the New Englanders began to display their passion for litigation and just being horrible people. Someone in Massachussets sued William for trespassing. Was he? Well, property rights were uncertain then, so maybe a misunderstanding? Or maybe it was just someone being an ass? We have questions about William’s character. In 1646 he entered a complaint against an “old woman” he had “brought out” of England. She was apparently living in his abode, and William didn’t like it. We don’t know why. Did she snored? Did they quarrel over a difficult passage of Scripture? Who knows. The court of Taunton, Massachussets found in William’s favor, and instructed she be dumped in the village with “clothes, bedding and such things as she hath”:
That’s quite the rationalization. isn’t it? “No present return in services rendered.” Early on, we can see, the New Englanders were groping their way toward economic value as the measure of the Good. The old bag is crimping your margins? Hurting your 17% IRR target? Throw her into the street, then. The New Englanders early on developed the reputation of cold, greedy, penny-pinching, graceless killjoys who cared nothing for hospitality, kindness or the more enjoyable aspects of life. Yankee merchants were notoriously dishonest: fingers on the scales, bags of flour packed with sawdust, nutmegs carved from wood; they also thought of themselves as more clever than everyone else. Mark Twain was from Missouri, but he showed this in Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, published at the dawn of the “Progressive Age.” Hank Morgan, the titular Yankee, is a champion of democracy, reason and progress over the obscurantism of medieval peasants and ridiculous chivalry of the knights.
Other markers of Puritanism throughout William’s descendants, like the Old Testament names: Jedediah, Josiah, Abiah, Mehitable, Zilphah. There’s a Hopestill, a Malachi, a Patience. One joined a raid against the French in Quebec; another fought the Wampanoag in King Philip’s War. Zepheniah Holloway, inflamed by the outrages of the British Crown against . . . well, whatever the New Englanders were bent about, he made it his fight too, and enlisted in a company of volunteers raised by a Captain Job Knapp in Worcestor County, Massachussets.
I poked around the Holloway genealogy off and on for several years in (God forgive me) amused contempt. Those shitty people. Those goddam Yankees. England was glad to be rid of them. As the British digitized more records, I was able to trace the lineages back. All sorts of interesting discoveries. A Colonel Thomas Horton appeared as cousin to someone in my father’s line. He died on campaign in Ireland in 1649. Could it be? Yes, it does seem to be Colonel Thomas Horton of Leicestershire. Horton was related to Sir Arthur Haselrigg, whom King Charles I tried to arrest for treason in 1642, one of the precipitating causes of the English Civil War. Haselrigg raised a regiment of cavalry — it was known as the “London Lobsters” for the pattern of its armor — and Horton was commissioned as a cornet. He fought at Edgehill, the war’s first battle, served with the army of Sir William Waller in the west of England and badly wounded at Naseby in 1645. He died at Wexford in 1649 while on campaign in Ireland, but not before signing the death warrant of King Charles.
Genealogy research is nothing if not uncertain. England is fortunate to have never suffered the destruction of, say, Germany, but records are lost, misplaced, poorly digitized. I’m maybe 80% confident on the Horton connection. His records are messy, and there’s confusion as to where descendants may have ended after the Restoration. But that’s the fun, isn’t it? Seeing if these things can be sorted out.
But I’m more certain of others. Such as one which appeared unexpectedly in my mother’s line. Her mother was a Williams; a line that traced to Wales, where it’s a common surname. The connection, though, was through a family in Gloucestershire. The first of that line arrived in Virginia in 1666 as an indentured servant with a four-year term. On its expiration he planted a crop of tobacco. Over time he became an aristocrat of the Old Dominion with 2000 acres in Surrey County. And yes, of course he owned slaves.
But through that branch we are cousin to that most famous, or infamous, Puritan of them all: “a gentleman by birth, living in neither any considerable height nor yet in obscurity.” He was obscurity-bound, farming rented land near St Ives in East Anglia when elected to the Long Parliament as member for Cambridge. He raised a troop of horse and soon displayed a native genius as a cavalry commander. He was named Colonel, and later Lieutenant-General of Horse, in Parliament’s Eastern Association, then Lord-General of Horse in the New Model Army. Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who John Milton called Our Chief of Men.
Cromwell. Cromwell. Cromwell.
What are we to make of Oliver Cromwell?
Cromwell does not lend himself to simple analysis. The great-great grandson of a Welsh brewer named Williams who attached himself to Henry Tudor’s train, married the sister of Sir Thomas Cromwell, took the surname and got rich from the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The family rose to prominence in East Anglia under Henry and Elizabeth, made the usual strategic marriages, but were in decline by the time Charles I ascended the throne.
Cromwell the killjoy Puritan Christmas-banning fanatic who will not rest if someone on the earth was having fun, the intolerant Protestant bigot, the murderer of the saintly King Charles, the betrayer of the principles of the `Good Old Cause’: such was the portrait painted by Royalists and disappointed Parliamentarians after the Restoration. This changed with the Victorians: Thomas Carlyle, who published the first collection of Cromwell’s letters, found him a Hero. For Lord Macaulay and the great English historian Samuel Rawlinson Gardiner, he was a champion of democracy, a defender of the English constitution against the Divine Right tendencies of the Stuarts. And, indeed, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, merely made permanent policies initiated by either the Long Parliament or the Protectorate. William Cortez Abbott, a Harvard historian who in the 1930s and 1940s published a four-volume collection of the letters and speeches, regarded Cromwell a proto-fascist.
Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol College, echoed the Gardiner thesis of Cromwell the democrat. Hill naturally has an appreciation for porto-socialists like William Walwyn, John Lilburne and the Levellers. The British rulers will perhaps “accept” Cromwell under that banner — a forerunner of the Welfare State — but no more.
My interest in Cromwell dates from the 1970s. The eponymous movie starring Richard Harris was released in the first year of that decade; at some subsequent point I’d obtained the grade-school novelization offered through a school book club. The movie was not Harris’ best. The book was better. The opening scene was the Restoration, when the London crowds hauled Cromwell’s body from Westminster to Tyburn. There he was mock-executed, the displayed on a pike.
The book described Cromwell’s dead eyes watching the crowds riot and caper. It described “tears coursing the dead cheeks.”
It’s a haunting image, no? But Cromwell, like the Confederacy, is not “who we are.” Cromwell is a demon from a dark, racist and insensitive past, we are told, and we are instructed to disown him; we’ve “progressed.” Puritanism — noisy, emotional “hot Protestantism” — embarrassed the English, and probably even more so the New Englanders. Their evangelical fire largely disappeared after the Restoration, and they turned to what they do best: making money and meddling in the affairs of others.
But what people think they know about Cromwell and the Puritans is wrong. Wrong, wrong, complete wrong. The tales peddled by the Royalists that have become part of the standard narrative are incorrect across the board. Cromwell did not ban Christmas – that was Parliament, 1641. Simon Schama praises Cromwell, and the far right curses him, for allowing the Jews to return to England. Unfortunately that’s not accurate either. And, surprise! The charges of fanaticism don’t hold water either. Had Cromwell appeared in Massachussetts, he would have been clapped in the stocks and then sent to Rhode Island with Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson and similar offenders against Boston’s good and decent order.
Dismissing Cromwell and the Puritans as cautionary tales — or as no more than cogs in a centuries-old conspiracy theory — is, perhaps, a mistake.
Because something happened in the 17th century. Something broke in that century, or something ran off the rails, or time became undone, or something. A new and dark spirit entered history, or perhaps legions of them.
Cromwell was at the center of this. He did not open the door to that spirit, but it fell to he and the Puritans to face it. Perhaps they failed — the wreckage of Protestantism in our dark and evil age would suggest that’s so — but that doesn’t mean they did not fight with courage. And it does not mean that the Puritans — our ancestors, after all — are not deserving of honor.
Lord Macaulay once called the English Puritans of the 1640s the bravest in the history of England. Perhaps there’s something to be said for that.
Which I’ll cover that in the next chapter. First, though, to close the book on my Yankee kin. Captain Edwin returned to Selma and served as deputy sheriff. He got married, but lost his son, then his daughter. He died in 1885. From The Selma Times’ obituary:
Edwin had an older brother: Benjamin Francis, a farmer in Massachussets. He enlisted Company C, 4th Regiment Massachussets Volunteers on September 19, 1862. “The reverses suffered by the Federal armies in Virginia during the spring and summer of 1862, and the drawn battle at Antietam, Maryland on the 17th of September of that year may have had something to do” with Benjamin’s decision, a family record reads. “And then too the fact that his younger brother was serving with the Confederates may have been praying on his mind.”
Benjamin enlisted for a nine-month term. The 4th Massachussetts Regiment was assigned to the army of Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts politician whose record included a complete thrashing by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah in 1861 and a more complete defeat and humiliation by General Richard Taylor in the Red River Campaign of 1864.
Banks’ army was sent to New Orleans with orders to work up the Mississippi toward Vicksburg. In the trenches outside besieged Port Gibson, Benjamin had an unfortunate collision with an artillery shell. He bid farewell to this vale of tears on June 16, three days before his term of enlistment expired.
This is his grave in Massachussets:
Here’s Edwin’s in Alabama:
I plan to obtain a CSA grave marker for Edwin (if someone from the Alabama SCV could return my phone calls).