The Emancipation of Massachusetts

Brooks Adams, great-grandson of two U.S. presidents and one of the most bracingly pessimistic minds of the Gilded Age, turned his formidable intellect to the question of how Massachusetts freed itself from theocratic rule. The result is neither a dry chronicle nor a reverent portrait of colonial virtue: it is a forensic dissection of how a society built on religious intolerance gradually, violently, and incompletely transformed itself into a beacon of democratic possibility. Adams traces the arc from the iron-fisted Puritans of the 1630s through the revolutionary ferment of the 1770s, interrogating thePuritan divines who governed with the confidence of men who believed God had appointed them, and the slow erosion of that divine mandate by merchants, dissenters, and the irreducible human hunger for self-determination. Written with the controlled fury of a man who believed civilization was less a progression than a managed decline, this book remains essential for anyone who wants to understand the deep roots of American religious and political freedom, and the cost at which they were purchased.