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By Root 1671 0

statutes were not, by any means, dead letters, especially in the seventeenth century. William Paine was convicted of “unclean practices” in New Haven in 1646, and put to death. He was a “monster in human shape,” an apparent sodomist in England before he came to the colony; and in New Haven he “corrupted a great part of the youth ... by masturbations, which he had committed and provoked others to the like above a hundred times.” Thomas Granger, of Plymouth, a boy of sixteen or seventeen, was indicted in 1642 for buggery “with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” Granger confessed and was required to identify the sheep he had buggered, in a kind of lineup. The animals were killed;e then Granger himself was executed.17 In Massachusetts, a man named Benjamin Goad, “instigated by the Divill” in 1673, one afternoon (“the sun being two howers high”), committed the “unnatural & horrid act of Bestiallitie on a mare in the highway or field.” He was sentenced to die by hanging; the court also ordered “that the mare you abused before your execution in your sight shall be knockt on the held.”18 In the colony of West New Jersey, in 1692, one Harry, a “Negro man Servant,” was convicted of “Buggering a Cow.” This unlucky man had been caught in the act: Mary Myers, and some children, saw him “ride upon the Cow,” which made the “usuall Motions of Cows when they had taken the Bull.” A jury convicted him; and the judge was merciless; Harry would be “hanged by the neck till thy body bee dead, dead dead.” The poor cow, too, was sentenced to death.19

In the eighteenth century, the death penalty was invoked less frequently for these crimes. Even in the seventeenth century, most sexual offenses were petty, and the punishments less than severe. Mild—but amazingly frequent. The smaller vices were punished by the hundreds. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, no crimes appear more often in the ancient pages of court records than fornication and other victimless crimes. Time after time, unmarried men and women who slept together were hauled into court, tried, and then fined, whipped, or put in the stocks. Women could be punished, too, for bearing illegitimate children—Hannah Dickens, of Kent County, Delaware, produced “One Bastard Male Child of Her Body” in 1702, and got twenty-one lashes in consequence 20In Massachusetts, in June of 1670, the Quarterly Court of Salem fined John Roapes and his wife for fornication before marriage, William Batt for drunkenness, and Daniell Salmon for excessive drinking.21

The thousands of cases of fornication and other offenses against morality point in two somewhat conflicting directions. In the first place, they seem to give the lie to a conventional picture of life in colonial times: sour, dour, obsessed with religion, drenched in an ethic of asceticism, treating all pleasures of the flesh with disgust. A frank and robust sexuality leaps from the pages of the record books. Still, our evidence of rampant sexuality comes from the proceedings of courts that were doing their best to punish and suppress that sexuality. And, on the whole, as Roger Thompson wrote of seventeenth-century Middlesex County, Massachusetts, most people probably did not transgress. The “great majority of men, women, and children” simply obeyed the rules of morals and law; the “silent majority behaved themselves and sustained the New England Way.”22

That way was fairly austere. The leaders of the northern colonies were notoriously sour on games and on pleasures. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts decreed that “no person shall henceforth use the ... game of Shuffle-board” in any “house of common entertainment,” because “much pretious time is spent unfruitfully and much wast of wine and beer occasioned.” No one was “at any time” to “play or game for any monie or monyworth.” In western Massachusetts, in 1678, Philip Matoone was accused by several persons of “unseasonably Playing at Cards.” Matoone, summoned to court, confessed that he played cards at night in the cellar of a house, secretly, with a group of men; he