What Puritan Guarantee?

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a few New Englanders did search for prophetic millennial geographical reassurance, provoked by the famous English apocalypticist Joseph Mede's prediction that America would be Satan's kingdom during the millennium.2 The prominent Bostonian Samuel Sewall in Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica (1697) gave a barrage of reasons why the Americas would participate in the millennium (tiny New England scarcely figured in them) and speculated that the New Jerusalem might hover over Central America. Even Sewall's and Mather's exceptional tracts, however, have little conceptual overlap with Bercovitch's long-term, New England-centric Puritan guarantee, and Mather's should be read in light of the general decline of deuteronomic themes in his preaching in the eighteenth century (Winship, Seers 84, 190n46).\n Bercovitch elsewhere takes Oakes's "latter end" sentence out of context to support his claim that New Englanders thought that their region had a divine guarantee of survival (American Jeremiad 56).