2. GETTING STARTED IN AMERICA

THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND

Persecuted "Separatists."  Meanwhile another English settlement was in the making – but of a very different nature.  It began in the Dutch Netherlands (at Leiden), to which in 1607-1608 a group of English Calvinists of the "Separatist" variety had fled in order to escape the persecution they were experiencing in England.  They were labelled "Separatist" because they had given up all hope that the Church of England would ever be reformed to Puritan standards and simply wanted to "separate" themselves from the English Church, something King James felt amounted to treason.

But it had not been an easy time in Leiden for these English "Pilgrims", as only some of them possessed technical skills that could find work there, the rest being simply of a farming background and thus having to take menial jobs just to survive.  Also these Pilgrims wanted to retain their English identity, which seemed to hold less importance among their youth, who were taking up the Dutch language and its more libertine ways.  And Dutch politics was bringing them under pressure, as the English King James was leaning on the Dutch authorities to suppress the English Separatist communities taking refuge in their land … at a time that the Dutch needed English support in the face of ongoing Spanish efforts to defeat the Dutch and force them back into Catholicism.

Thus after ten years at Leiden, the Pilgrims knew they had to move on.

The Plymouth Plantation and the Pilgrims.  Finally, the English refugees chose to make that move to North America, despite the horror stories concerning the "dying times" that accompanied all English attempts at settlement there.  They had a social ideal as a "Reformed" Christian community to live up to, in America if need be.  And they would meet this responsibility no matter what the cost might be.  They were like soldiers going off to war, except their war was in service to God, not any king, not any bishop, not any such human authority.

Tragically, these Pilgrims suffered a huge delay in their departure (a leaking ship forced them to return to port, then try again) and consequently they arrived late in the season (November) at a destination in America that proved to be well north above where they were assigned to settle.  Also, the prevailing winds that had blown them north of their course prevented them from heading south along the American coast to that intended destination (the Hudson River area).  Thus they were stuck there at Cape Cod – just as winter set in upon them.

But they were determined to make the most of this unexpected situation.  Thus before they disembarked from their ship, they created a covenant (the Mayflower Compact) among themselves, covenanting to work together as a community.^[1]  And then they set out to do just that. 

The pilgrims' landing 
(actually considerable exploration by search parties occurred
before families left the Mayflower)

But the winter weather they were forced to contend with proved to be a deadly challenge – and tragically in January (1621) a building they had just constructed to shelter their group burned down. At this point death began to ravage their numbers, the community and the crew losing half its members (of the 102 colonists only 47 survived).  The dead included 14 of the 16 women in the group.  The children tended to survive better than the adults – although now a number of them found themselves to be parentless orphans.

Nonetheless these Pilgrims persisted – and finally that spring they were able to put into place a permanent settlement, a plantation they named "Plymouth." 

Friendly relations with the local Wampanoag Indians (including, miraculously, the English-speaking Squanto who showed them how to grow corn!) helped immensely.  And thus at that first harvest time in New England they were able, with their Indian friends, to celebrate a great Thanksgiving to God for their success. 

Clearly, they had built a community of Christian faith where they now could freely worship God as they understood he was to be worshiped – without fear of the English authorities.^[2] 

And they prospered, not elegantly like English (or Virginia) nobility, but like the hardworking Protestant commoners they indeed were.

The Pilgrims were soon followed to New England by other settlers, including, importantly, a Puritan settlement well to the north of Plymouth at Salem.  But poor organization and poor leadership almost scuttled the plantation there – and by 1630 most were returning to England, having given up on the venture. 

John Endecott – Governor of the earliest (and relatively 
unsuccessful) Puritan colony at Salem in Massachusetts

But another attempt was made that same year, one which would be amazingly successful – due to the excellent leadership of John Winthrop and the accompanying leadership team of equally talented and deeply dedicated Puritan pastors and elders.  

Winthrop himself personally helped finance the migration of the first group of eleven ships carrying some 1000 Puritans from England to the new Massachusetts Bay colony, located in the large harbor region (the future Boston) just south of the Salem site and north of the Plymouth plantation.

Winthrop and company arrive at Massachusetts

Some of the ships John Winthrop brought to New England, 
anchored in Boston harbor – by William F. Halsall

In essence this group of Puritans were now also Separatists by the mere fact that as Puritans they were facing heavy opposition from the newly crowned and quite pro-Catholic King Charles who took the throne in 1625 when his father James died.  Thus it was that numerous Puritans had finally concluded that it was time to leave England.  They thus had applied for a charter to set up a colony of their own in America, King Charles believing that this was simply just another commercial venture like the Virginia Company.  But it was not.  Not only would the major financial backers be themselves part of this group leaving England for America (1630), but this group was the advance guard of some 20,000 Puritans who would over the next dozen years migrate to New England, in order to establish there the Reformed society that they had previously hoped would take root in England.

Some Puritan fathers:  John Cotton Richard and Saltonstall

Josiah Winslow

The Puritan covenant.  Just as this first wave of Massachusetts Bay settlers were about to leave on ships for their new life in America (March 1630), Winthrop delivered one of America's most famous sermons, reminding these Puritans of the Covenant they were taking out with God, he to be their God and they to be his people.  In this Covenant, their settlement was to serve as a "City upon a Hill," a "Light to the Nations," demonstrating to the larger world how living under the authority of God in Christ – in close accordance with God's Word in Holy Scripture – could bring human life to great success.   He told them:

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of EstIsrael is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by word through the world.

In short, they were going to attempt to do in America what Calvin had achieved in Geneva.

John Winthrop –Puritan New England's Founding Father.  Indeed, Winthrop was the "Calvin" to New England, the one above all others who directed the course of Puritan Massachusetts to its success as a grand religious or social experiment, on quite new and untested principles.  It was Winthrop's sense of vision and his optimism that kept New England on course.  It was Winthrop who helped steer the course of this development between the dangerous rocks of religious fanaticism on the one hand and heavy-handed religious legalism on the other.  And as with all true leaders, he did so by setting the example himself of the kind of humble, self-critical behavior needed by all in order to produce the spirit of mutual cooperation that the new society needed in order to thrive.  He inspired others to higher behavior – rather than use his social office to dominate and control the behavior of others.  And although he sincerely loved those he was responsible for, he was not one in need of their constant approval.  Ultimately, he was answerable only to God – as Winthrop reminded his followers that they too were.  They were all to live by the counsel of God (prayer and Bible study), and that alone.  Winthrop was to them merely an advisor, not their judge.  And they loved him for it.

Winthrop and his assistant Dudley having a disagreement
over Dudley's unnecessary adornements to his house.
Winthrop insisted on keeping things simple – and equal.

Winthrop was actually nobly born to a father who was a lawyer, landowner, and Cambridge University director, who opened similar doors to John in his development.  After graduating from Cambridge, John became Lord of the Manor at Groton and then eventually a member of his father's law firm in London.

John was also profoundly Puritan in his beliefs, relying on his Christian faith to get him through the death of two wives and then the growing problems as a Puritan with the reign of King Charles.

When as a Puritan he was removed from the Court in 1629, he was then free to take the lead in the development of the Massachusetts Bay Company, using his own finances to help assemble the fleet necessary to bring the first 1000 Puritans to America, be willing to face personally the well-known challenges of life in America by leading that voyage himself, and recruit other Puritan pastors to the same risky mission as leaders in the towns and villages that would constitute Puritan New England. And thus it was that America was blessed to have the New England colony come under such splendid leadership.  Winthrop was a gift of God to America.

"Democratic" small-town Massachusetts.   Massachusetts Bay Colony would take on a character very, very different from Virginia.  The New England soil was rocky and the forests thick – not suitable for huge plantations to develop.  Besides, from the very beginning this was never intended to be an economic venture – nor the path to social status.  Many of those coming to New England were in fact leaving behind quite respectable social status in order to start a new life in America.  And they would be living at a social level fairly equal to everyone else making the trip.  Upon arrival they would be assigned plots of land just large enough to support a hardworking family, these land allotments arranged in such a way as to form a small village, centered on a town square equipped with a meeting house which would serve the village as both church and town hall.  And each village would have a seminary educated pastor^[3] whose job was to help guide the village as it attempted to live out its new covenant life.

When the available plots of land for a village were fully distributed, then another village, normally to the west, would likewise be surveyed and subdivided into fairly equitable plots of land for distribution to Puritan newcomers.  And so the Massachusetts colony slowly spread its way ever westward.

Thus it was that Christian religious refuge – not improved economic status – was the theme that not only brought those Puritans to New England but also became the moral-cultural underpinning of the entire venture.  This had very little to do with what was going on way to the south in Virginia.

The Puritans also celebrate a day of Thanksgiving



Puritans did not celebrate Christmas ...
because of its non-Biblical or pagan Roman roots
(Easter was their big holiday)



To the surprise of moderns,
the Puritans enjoyed their beer
(water was not reliably a healthy drink at the time)



Life in Boston – 1660s

Life in the typical Puritan village

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^[3]This is why Harvard College was founded in 1636, only six years after their first arrival in America.  They needed pastors faster than what Cambridge University back in England was able to provide them.  Note that Virginia would not take similar action until 1693 when the College of William and Mary was established, in part finally to train Anglican priests.

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RHODE ISLAND AND CONNECTICUT

 The whole enterprise being essentially religious in character, it was natural that questions of religion and society would develop among the leaders of this enterprise themselves.  At one point, Roger Williams was forced to leave the Massachusetts colony when he loudly and persistently complained about a number of ways the colony there did not meet his dramatically high idea of proper Puritan standards – first at the Boston church assigned to him, then the Plymouth church, and finally the Salem church.  His constant fault-finding with the lack of proper religious purity in Massachusetts (for instance some of the Puritans had failed to repent of the sin of having taken communion in the Church of England back in the home country) threatened greatly the new-born and still very fragile foundations of the community. Tiring of his tirades, the colony's leaders finally forced him to leave, to start up his own colony elsewhere (Providence, Rhode Island). There he could also put into service his understanding that religion and secular government ought to be treated as separate functions of the colony.

Roger Williams - arrived at Massachusetts and assigned several
pulpits but could never find the "purity" he sought in the colony 
and was thus forced to start up his own "Providence" colony 
in 1635-1636

 

Hooker requested and received leave to establish a colony of his own in the more fertile Connecticut River valley (already being settled by English immigrants) – and there build a community in which also religion and secular government were treated as separate entities. 

Thomas Hooker and his followers move to Connecticut – 1636

Finally Williams came to understand the difficulties of leading a new social venture when he ran into his own troubles with the rowdies who moved to his colony to avoid the disciplines of the Massachusetts colony, rowdies who were glad to remind him of his own words spoken earlier about political freedom amidst religious discipline!  It was frustrating meeting human expectations and demands.  Thus it was that Williams would increasingly look to friendship and counsel with Winthrop over leadership matters.  Indeed Winthrop, Williams and Hooker would find that the path of mutual friendship and counsel served each of them very well over the years, as they took their colonies through the various challenges involved in colony-planting and development.