Have a drink with: New Haven Puritans
Judge swung his fist down, plunk plunk…
Ask them about: Anything but Quakers.
It’s election season, which means we are faced with ample opportunity to confront our worst tendencies and unresolved problems as a society, along with the inevitable call to harken back to a better, simpler, more moral time in American history.
Just so we’re clear, though, that time was not the 17th century.
Consider The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity, a fascinating collection of thirty-three cases heard before the Puritan courts of the 17th century New Haven Colony and superbly edited by Connecticut superior court judge Jon Blue. We can learn a few things from this book:
- Do not let a few instances of good justice wallpaper over a majority approach that marginalizes citizens and preserves a fear-based status quo.
- Don’t serve sailors booze by the quart.
