Puritan New England -- A New Wave of Colonists
The Puritans were radical Protestants who wanted to purify the Church of
England, or Anglican Church, of its remaining Catholic practices, including the
Latin Mass and the governing hierarchy of bishops and archbishops. They
favored a plain service and a church government of autonomous congregations.
The Puritans who came to America were of two types. Some remained within
the Church of England, and others, called Separatists, formed their own
churches, so as not to be corrupted by the established church.
But both groups were harassed by the government to the
point where they felt they had to leave England. The
Separatists, or Pilgrims as they came to be called, left for
the New World first, in 1620, on the Mayflower, after
having settled briefly in Holland. These simple, plain-living
people were less prosperous and less committed to big
designs than were the Puritans who built Massachusetts Bay, a far larger colony
to the north of Plymouth Plantation.
John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Colony – “A City on a Hill”
The founder of Massachusetts Bay was John Winthrop, a Cambridge-educated
lawyer and landholder. He and a group of Puritan friends took over a company
that had been formed to promote American settlement, the Massachusetts Bay
Company, and turned it into the nucleus of a civil government. Winthrop was
elected Governor and sailed for New England in 1630. He took the company
charter with him -- that's important -- insuring that the colony would be selfgoverning.
In the next thirteen years, 20,000 more Englishmen migrated to the Bay
Colony. No colonizing group would come to America in greater numbers or
better prepared. Before leaving, Winthrop had talked with John Smith, who had
mapped New England and given it its name.
Winthrop agreed with Smith that Virginia was an example to be avoided. Not
enough discipline, along with a lust for immediate profits, had corrupted it.
Winthrop was determined to go a different way.
He launched the Puritan adventure with a stirring secular
sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," which he delivered
at sea, on board the ship, Arbella. In it, he set down a vision
of human fellowship totally lacking in the Virginia experiment.
As for the enterprise in which we are engaged, it is to seek out a place to live
together under a proper form of civil and church government. In such cases as
this the interest of the public must outweigh all private considerations. . . . As
for the purpose, it is to improve our lives in order to serve the Lord more, to
increase and comfort the body of Christ of which we are members . . . . The
truth that most people in their churches merely profess we must bring into
familiar and constant practice. . . .
Thus stands the covenant between God and us. We have entered into a
covenant with him for this enterprise. . . . We have professed to undertake the
enterprise for such and such reasons, and for such and such purposes. On these
grounds we have sought his favor and blessing. Now if the Lord should please
to hear us and bring us in peace to the place that we desire, then He has
ratified this covenant and sealed our contract and will expect a strict
performance of the terms contained in it. But if we fail to observe these terms
which are the purposes we have professed, and deceiving our God shall sink
into worldliness [placing one's individual interests above those of the
community] and follow our sinful purposes. . . the Lord will surely break out in
wrath against us. . . . Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck is to be knit
together in this enterprise as one man. . . . . We must delight in each other,
make each other's condition our own, rejoice together, labor and suffer
together. . . . For we must bear in mind that we shall be like a city set upon a
hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."
A Puritan Society : Success of the "City on a Hill," 1630-1660
Beginning at Boston, Puritans settled in tightly-knit town-building groups. And
the towns became the focal units of government. To understand New England,
you must start with the towns. And to know the towns, you must know
something about Puritanism, for faith was the glue that held the towns together.
When the glue started to loosen, the Puritan commonwealth began to fly apart.
The Puritans were the disciples of the sixteenth-century French theologian,
John Calvin. In Geneva, Switzerland, Calvin established an unforgiving
theocracy in which women were drowned and men beheaded for the sins of
heresy and adultery. Calvin's core belief was the absolute depravity of man
after the fall of Adam and the impossibility of salvation except for those few,
the Elect [also called "visible saints"], predestined to enter Heaven.
Good works could not bring on God's saving grace. But once a person received
grace, he felt an inner peace, and became a crusader against sin. Puritans
admitted only the elect, or Saints, to church membership, and applicants had to
prove they were saved by passing an oral test administered by church members.
The test was doubly important in Massachusetts, where only church members
could vote and hold political office.
Since Puritans believed in a closely knit community and
"ordered liberty," Puritan towns were the most completely
and equitably planned of any American settlements. Land
that had belonged to Indians was handed out free of charge
by the General Court [representative assembly of the
colony] to town-building groups, rather than individuals. To
keep title to it, the group had to build a town around a congregational church
and agree, in a signed covenant, to live in harmony and Christian brotherhood.
The town group then parceled out land to families, while retaining portions in
common in the center of the town for
grazing.
Since Puritans believed in equity, not equality, men of means and stature were
given larger allocations of land for their families. Even so, a rough equality
prevailed, and every family received land to build homes and farms. Church
members elected representatives from each town to sit in the General Court and
make laws for the colony, such as "just price" laws that fixed the prices of
essentials such as nails and also specified the amount of flour o be used in
making bread; those same church members constituted the town meeting
which set rules for church attendance, fence maintenance, the number of days
men had to work on public roads, bridges, and dams. Church members also
hired and fired their ministers. Ministers were not permitted to hold political
office, but church and state acted together to enforce moral orthodoxy. And all
families had to pay taxes to support the church, whether they were members or
not.
Other institutions enforced order and orthodoxy. The educational system
instilled inflexible discipline and created the most literate public in the western
world, able to read and interpret the Bible. Harvard College was founded in
1636 and in 1647 the General Court created a school system. Each town with
fifty or more families was required to support a teacher, and each town of 100
or more families had to have a Latin grammar school to prepare young men for
the college. In God-fearing families, mothers taught their children to spot sin in
themselves and others, and watched over their husbands' spiritual state, acting
as their moral censors. The original settlers [called the "Saints"] had an
extraordinary life span -- about seventy years -- and three generation
households, in which the "original saints" held sway, were
common.
Today, we hate moral surveillance; Puritans welcomed
it because they saw it as a way of remaining closely knit in one purpose.
Between 1630 and 1660, the Massachusetts colony flourished. In 1637, the
Puritans defeated the Pequot Indians in war. God also seemed to prosper the
Puritan commonwealth. Despite the rocky soil, there were small surpluses of
beef, pork, and beans almost from the beginning. And the New Englanders did
something no other 17th century American colonists were able to do. They
began to engage in trade, carried in their own small ships, instead of depending
on English merchants and shipping. Within a half century, New England
merchants were shipping goods to Europe and the West Indies, and bringing
slaves from Africa to Virginia and the Indies, bringing sugar from the islands to
be distilled into rum and re-exported or consumed, carrying tobacco from
Virginia to England. The Puritans also launched into manufacturing, with a
state-supported foundry, and they minted their own coin: the "pine tree
shilling." All this -- the shipbuilding, the trade, the manufacturing -- was aimed
at making New England as economically autonomous from the mother country
as possible.
No group has played a more pivotal role in shaping American values than the
New England Puritans. The seventeenth-century Puritans contributed to our
country's sense of mission, its work ethic, and its moral sensibility. Today,
eight million Americans can trace their ancestry to the fifteen to twenty
thousand Puritans who migrated to New England between 1629 and 1640.
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Few people, however, have been as frequently subjected to caricature and
ridicule. The journalist H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear
that someone, somewhere, might be happy." And particularly during the 1920s,
the Puritans came to symbolize every cultural characteristic that "modern"
Americans despised. The Puritans were often dismissed as drably-clothed
religious zealots who were hostile to the arts and were eager to impose their
rigid "Puritanical" morality on the world around them.
This stereotypical view is almost wholly incorrect. Contrary to much popular
thinking, the Puritans were not sexual prudes. Although they strongly
condemned sexual relations outside of marriage--levying fines or even
whipping those who fornicated, committed adultery or sodomy, or bore
children outside of wedlock--they attached a high value to the marital tie. Nor
did Puritans abstain from alcohol; even though they objected to drunkenness,
they did not believe alcohol as sinful in itself. They were not opposed to artistic
beauty; although they were suspicious of the theater and the visual arts, the
Puritans valued poetry. Indeed, John Milton (1603-1674), one of England's
greatest poets, was a Puritan. Even the association of the Puritans with drab
colors is wrong. They especially liked the colors red and blue.
Although the Puritans wanted to reform the world to conform to God's law,
they did not set up a church-run state. Even though they believed that the
primary purpose of government was to punish breaches of God's laws, few
people were as committed as the Puritans to the separation of church and state.
Not only did they reject the idea of establishing a system of church courts, they
also forbade ministers from holding public office.
Perhaps most strikingly, the Puritans in Massachusetts held annual elections
and extended the right to vote and hold office to all "freemen." Although this
term was originally restricted to church members, it meant that a much larger
proportion of the adult male population could vote in Massachusetts than in
England itself (roughly 55 percent, compared to about 33 percent in England).
(Previous five paragraphs taken from Digital History Textbook)
Some historians, like the one in the previous paragraphs, like to point out that
Puritans enjoyed beer and good fellowship. One of their favorite expressions
was "Wine comes from God; drunkenness from the devil." But Puritans, like
most of their counterparts throughout the world, were not a tolerant people.
They did not believe that error had rights. People should be free to do good.
People were tried in court for card-playing, drunkenness, and idleness. Sex
within marriage was a good thing. In fact, Puritans disapproved of a celibate
priesthood such as that found in the Catholic church and required their
ministers to be married. Surviving letters between husbands and wives (such as
those between John Winthrop and his wife) are passionate and surprisingly
sensual. Puritans, however, viewed sex outside of marriage as wrong. Couples
who had babies less than 9 months after their marriage were publicly punished
and required to confess their sin to the congregation. Puritans also had an
abhorrence for what they termed "unnatural sex." Several men who had
consenting sex were hanged, for example, and a one-eyed man in New Haven
who was suspected of bestiality (a one-eyed pig had been born in the town) was
also executed.