The chief care of the legislators, in this body of penal laws, was the
maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: they
constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a
sin which was not subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of
the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse
between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was
empowered to inflict a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage *s on
the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may
be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. We find
a sentence bearing date the first of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and
reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language,
and of allowing herself to be kissed. *t The Code of 1650 abounds in
preventive measures. It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity.
*u Innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of
liquor to each consumer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious,
*v is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator,
entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which
he had himself upheld in Europe, renders attendance on divine service
compulsory, *w and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, **
and even with death, the Christians who chose to worship God according
to a ritual differing from his own. *x Sometimes indeed the zeal of his
enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars:
thus a law is to be found in the same Code which prohibits the use
of tobacco. *y It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and
vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were
freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the
community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws.
In 1649 a solemn association was formed in Boston to check the worldly
luxury of long hair. *z