Religious Anxiety and the Social Pressures of Adherence

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In “The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741”, Horsmanden presents the sacredness of oaths, and the profound religious influence on everyday life in colonial America, especially in New York. The circumstances regarding the case represented in the 1741 trials embody colonial anxiety over religion and its justification through law and imperial domination. These anxieties caused many of the accused of the trials to begin confessing, out of fear of harsh civil punishments, which allowed for a larger plot to unfold. A crime as petty as larceny spawned into a national panic, a fear of a larger Catholic backed conspiracy to overthrow Protestant Anglo-American civil order. The religious dogma of Christianity had a great impact on the civil and social order of the early colonies. It exemplified the importance of oaths, which were made in reverence to God and also helped to maintain the hierarchical and social boundaries which limited people to specific social duties and liberties. Most civil order was justified through the numerous fundamentals alluding to biblical text as well as British concepts of civility. The religiosity of the overall spectrum of Colonial life, also represented a collective social anxiety in regards to disputes among other powers, especially the conflicting Catholic regimes striving for imperial domination, which led to further accusations of the parties convicted in the trials of 1741. The social orders justified through religious texts, paved the way for the unfair treatment of social outcasts, especially the Negroes and others deemed lesser of the social strata of Anglo colonial society; all which were legitimized through the dogmatic principles of Christianity, which resulted in the final outcome of the and unfair...

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...epresents the religious significance behind the sentencing process as well; the cruel death sentencing was justified as an attack on the Christian faith as well as the civil order through which it is justified. England’s constant struggles with their enemies caused fear among all of its subjects, which resulted in conspiracy accusations, and hastened death sentencing without fair trials, with tangible evidence. All of the early law systems seemed as if they deemed its structure righteously advocated through the works of the Christian bible, and the Protestant ethics in maintaining social order.

Works Cited

Daniel Horsmanden, “A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy,” in Serena R. Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 48

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