The Pilgrims were not the first English colonists to inhabit the northern regions. The Plymouth Company had settled a group on the Kennebec River in 1607. These colonists gave up after a few months, but fishermen and traders continued to visit the area, which was christened New England by Captain John Smith after an expedition there in 1614.
In 1620 the Plymouth Company was reorganized as the Council for New England, which had among its principal stockholders Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his friend John Mason, former governor of an English settlement on Newfoundland. Their particular domain included a considerable part of what is now Maine and New Hampshire. More interested in real estate deals than in colonizing, the council disposed of a number of tracts in the area north of Cape Cod. The most significant of these grants was a small one made to a group of puritans from Dorchester, who established a settlement at Salem in 1629.
Later that year these Dorchester puritans organized the Massachusetts Bay Company and obtained a royal grant to the area between the Charles and Merrimack rivers. The Massachusetts Bay Company was organized like any other commercial venture, but the puritans, acting with single-minded determination, made it a way of obtaining religious refuge in America.
Unlike the Separatists in Plymouth, most puritans had managed to satisfy both Crown and conscience while James I was king. The England of his son Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in 1625, posed a more serious challenge. Whereas James had been content to keep puritans at bay, Charles and his favorite Anglican cleric, William Laud, intended to bring them to heel. With the king’s support, Laud proceeded to embellish the already elaborate Anglican ritual and to tighten the central control that the puritans found so distasteful. He removed ministers with puritan leanings from their pulpits and threatened church elders who harbored such ministers with imprisonment.
No longer able to remain within the Anglican fold in good conscience and now facing prison if they tried to worship in the way they believed right, many puritans decided to migrate to America. In the summer of 1630 nearly a thousand of them set out from England, carrying the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company with them. By fall, they had founded Boston and several other towns.
The early settlements struggled. The tasks of founding a new society in a strange land were more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Of the
1,000 English settlers who arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1630, 200 died during their first New England winter. Governor Winthrop himself lost eleven family servants. When ships arrived the following spring, they returned to England nearly filled with immigrants who had given up.
But they were replaced many times over. Continuing bad times in England and the persecution of puritans there led to the Great Migration of the 1630s. Within a decade, over 10,000 puritans had arrived in Massachusetts. This infusion of industrious, well-educated, and often prosperous colonists swiftly created a complex and distinct culture on the edge of what one of the pessimists among them called “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”
The directors of the Massachusetts Bay Company believed their enterprise to be divinely inspired. Before leaving England, they elected John Winthrop, a twenty-nine-year-old Oxford-trained attorney, as governor of the colony. Throughout his twenty years of almost continuous service as governor, Winthrop spoke for the solid and sensible core of the puritans and their high-minded experiment. His lay sermon, “A Modelle of Christian Charity,” delivered mid-Atlantic on the deck of the Arbella in 1630, made clear his sense of the momentousness of that experiment:
Wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake.
The colonists created an elected legislature, the General Court. Their system was not democratic in the modern sense because the right to vote and hold office was limited to male church members, but this did not mean that the government was run by clergymen or that it was not sensitive to the popular will. Clergymen were influential, but since they were not allowed to hold public office, their authority was indirect and based on the respect of their parishioners, not on law or force. At least until the mid-1640s, most families included at least one adult male church member. Since these “freemen” soon secured the right to choose the governor and elect the representatives (“deputies”) to the General Court, a kind of practical democracy existed.
The puritans had a clear sense of what their churches should be like. After getting permission from the General Court, a group of colonists who wished to form a new church could select a minister and conduct their spiritual affairs as they saw fit. Membership, however, was not open to everyone or even to all who led outwardly blameless lives. It was restricted to those who could present satisfactory evidence of their having experienced “saving grace,” such as by a compelling recounting of some extraordinary emotional experience, some mystical sign of intimate contact with God. This meant that full membership in the churches of early Massachusetts was reserved for “visible saints.” During the 1630s, however, few applicants were denied membership. Having removed oneself from England was considered in most cases sufficient proof of spiritual purity.
•••-[Read the Document Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity at myhistorylab. com
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