Laws & Morality
Early colonial laws in Puritan New England were largely based on these.
What are Biblical rules?
Punishments were carried out this way in order to deter others and make an example of the offender.
What is publicly?
Long-term prison sentences were almost never used for this practical reason.
What is because maintaining jails was expensive?
Larger towns such as Boston and New York relied on these unpaid volunteers for nighttime security.
What are night watchmen?
The colonial legal system was designed primarily to protect these three things belonging to the elite.
What are wealth, power, and social order?
By the late 1600s, colonial laws began shifting away from strict religious sins toward these.
What are broader moral and community standards?
These wooden devices locked an offender’s head and hands (or feet) for public display and humiliation.
What are the stocks and pillories?
Local gaols mainly served this short-term purpose.
What is holding suspects awaiting trial or people who owed unpaid fines?
These night watchmen were often ineffective for this reason.
What is poor supervision?
Wealthier colonists who broke the law were usually able to pay these instead of facing physical punishment.
What are monetary or tobacco fines?
These were the most frequent violations in the colonies.
What are property crimes (like theft and burglary)?
Offenders sometimes had to wear these items that displayed a letter or description of their crime.
What are signs or marked letters (such as a “B” for burglary)?
This method of execution was reserved for the most serious crimes.
What is hanging?
The colonial period helped establish early versions of these three modern constitutional protections.
What are rights to due process, trial by jury, and limits on general warrants?
Lower-class offenders and indentured servants frequently received these harsh physical penalties.
What are whippings, public floggings, or time in the stocks and pillories?
This behavior was treated as a serious crime alongside blasphemy and profanity in early Puritan New England.
What is skipping church?
This form of corporal punishment was commonly delivered at a public post.
What is whipping?
The death penalty was used less frequently in the colonies than it was here.
What is England?
Colonial criminal justice relied heavily on religious morality, public shaming, and this type of punishment rather than long-term imprisonment.
What is swift corporal punishment?
Enslaved people had none of this under colonial law, allowing brutal extrajudicial violence, mutilation, or execution.
What is legal standing (or rights)?
Besides property crimes, these three lesser offenses were also common.
What are public drunkenness, slander, and trespassing?
These four methods were the main tools of public shaming used in the colonies.
What are the stocks, pillories, whipping posts, and wearing signs or marked letters?
These three severe crimes could bring a sentence of death by hanging.
What are murder, treason, and rape?
Unlike modern police forces, colonial policing was described as this.
What is informal?
Magistrates focused heavily on policing lower-class behavior in order to maintain these two things.
What are labor control and social hierarchy?