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Puritanism helped thousands of ordinary people cope with the economic and social turmoil that afflicted England during the early seventeenth century. Puritanism liberated people from a sense of helplessness by encouraging effort, persistence, study, and purpose.
During the late 1620s and early 1630s, Laud and most other bishops enforced the new Anglican orthodoxy, dismissing Puritan ministers who balked at conducting the high church liturgy. Church courts also prosecuted growing numbers of Puritan laypeople. Laud strictly censored Puritan tracts and had pilloried, mutilated, and branded three Puritans who illegally published their ideas. Puritan hopes of securing redress dissipated after 1629, when Charles I dissolved Parliament and proceeded to rule arbitrarily for the next eleven years. Faced with the growing power of the king and his bishops, some
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In 1607 English West Country promoters established a small settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River on the coast of Maine. But Indian hostility and the hard winter demoralized the colonists, who eagerly sailed home in the spring of 1608. Their failure saddled the region with a daunting reputation as frigid and hostile. Determined to improve that reputation, Captain John Smith (of Jamestown fame) explored the coast in 1614 and named it New England because, he claimed, the climate and soil replicated the mother country.
Once in Massachusetts, the company leaders established the most radical government in the European world: a republic, where the Puritan men elected their governor, deputy governor, and legislature (known as the General Court).
Beginning with a settlement named Boston, Winthrop’s Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay colony on the coast north of Plymouth.
By 1640 the expanding settlements spawned new colonies. To the northeast, some Puritans settled along the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine,
Southeastern New England became a haven for especially radical Puritan Separatists who settled around Narragansett Bay in independent towns that eventually made up the colony of Rhode Island.
At the other religious extreme, some particularly conservative and ambitious Puritans found Massachusetts too lax in religion and too stingy in land grants. They proceeded southwest to found the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven along the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound.
With 20,000 of the region’s 33,000 inhabitants in 1660, Massachusetts remained the most populous, influential, and pow...
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In 1691, the crown issued a new charter for Massachusetts, extending its jurisdiction over Plymouth. That left four colonies in New England: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire.
In fact, the religious and the economic were interdependent in the lives of people who saw piety and property as mutually reinforcing. A leading Puritan said that New England should belong to those in whom “religion and profit jump together.”
The middling sort also felt burdened by increasing crime and by escalating taxes both to feed the poor and to fund the government of an arbitrary king.
By emigrating and acquiring substantial farms, middling folk hoped to escape the threat of poverty in England and to secure a prosperous future for their children in a New England. By emigrating to a new land, they sought to ensure their “independence” as small producers working on their own property.
Their God was remarkably merciful. During the 1630s, of 198 recorded voyages bearing passengers to New England, only one sank, and the mortality from disease was less than 5 percent, far lower than what indentured servants experienced on a voyage to the West Indies or the Chesapeake—to say nothing of the African slaves bound to the New World.
About fourteen thousand English Puritans participated in the Great Migration of the 1630s.
colonial New England became peopled primarily by the descendants of the one great surge of emigrants during the 1630s.
Most seventeenth-century English emigrants were poor young single men who lacked prospects in the mother country. Seeking regular meals in the short term and a farm in the long, they gambled their lives as indentured servants in the Chesapeake or the West Indies. In sharp contrast, most of the New England colonists could pay their own way and emigrated as family groups.
By the end of the century, servants amounted to less than 5 percent of the New English population.
Although not the wealthiest English colonial region, New England was the healthiest, the most populous, and the most egalitarian in the distribution of property.
Because New England had the most decentralized and popularly responsive form of government in the English empire, royalists despised the region as a hotbed of “republicanism.”
In effect, seventeenth-century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. Each was incomplete without the other. New English freedom depended on West Indian slavery.
Indeed, Boston ranked second only to London as a shipbuilding center in the empire.
New English imported most of their books from London, but they also established a press, the first in English America, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640.
In 1650, Massachusetts had one minister for every 415 persons, compared with one per 3,239 persons in Virginia.
To train an orthodox Puritan ministry for so many churches, Massachusetts founded Harvard College in 1636—the first such institution in English America
A leading New Englander denounced “the lawlessnesse of liberty of conscience” as an invitation to heresy and anarchy, and ultimately to divine anger and punishment. No Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, or Quakers need come to New England (except to exceptional Rhode Island). All dissenters were given, in the words of one Massachusetts Puritan, “free Liberty to keep away from us.” In Connecticut and Massachusetts, the Puritans prosecuted, tried, convicted, and exiled religious dissenters. Exiles who returned risked execution—the fate of four Quakers in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1661.
During the early 1630s the Salem minister Roger Williams sorely provoked the Massachusetts authorities by insisting that they had not gone far enough in separating themselves from the Church of England and the king. To evade arrest and deportation back to England, Williams fled southward with his followers to found Providence, the first settlement in what became Rhode Island.
By drawing dissidents out of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Rhode Island settlements helped to maintain orthodoxy in the two major Puritan colonies. Although the orthodox leaders of Massachusetts and Connecticut despised Rhode Island, they benefited from it as a safety valve for discontents who would otherwise fester in their midst.
The theological diversity of Rhode Island led the colonists there to adopt a policy of religious toleration that was unique in the English world and that attracted Baptists, Quakers, and even Jews. The Rhode Islanders also sought a separation of state and church from a conviction that any mingling corrupted religion.
The authorities pardoned witches who confessed and testified against others, but persistent denial consigned the convicted witch to public execution by hanging. Contrary to popular myth and previous European practice, the New English did not burn witches at the stake.
No Puritan wished to believe that misfortune was purely random and without supernatural meaning, for that would confirm their helplessness and isolation in a world without God.
Communities and authorities disproportionately detected witchcraft in women who seemed angry and abrasive, violating the cultural norm celebrating female modesty.
Women constituted both the majority of the accusers and 80 percent of the accused. While attesting that the words of women had power in Puritan communities, their disproportionate prosecution also demonstrated the considerable unease generated by that power.
Because it was no easy matter to prove witchcraft, juries usually found innocence. The New English prosecuted ninety-three witches but executed only sixteen—until 1692, when a peculiar mania at Salem dramatically inflated the numbers.
Reassessed as a fiasco, the Salem mania became a spectacular flameout that halted the prosecution of witches in New England.
The Puritans also worked to subdue, convert, and transform the Indians into replicas of English Christians. In sum, both to benefit and to reassure themselves, the New English worked to dominate the external world of the forest, its wild animals, and its Indians.
Honor and influence accrued to chiefs who gave away food and deerskins rather than to those who hoarded all that they could acquire.
Although the West Indies frustrated the aspirations of most of their own colonists, the sugar islands promoted prosperity on the mainland of North America, where farmers produced lumber, fish, livestock, and grain to supply the sugar plantations.
Despite their small size, the West Indies received over two-thirds of the English emigrants to the Americas between 1640 and 1660. In 1650 more white colonists lived in the West Indies (44,000) than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England colonies (23,000) combined. The great majority of the English West Indians dwelled on a single island, Barbados. Its relatively large population of 30,000 was especially striking because Barbados is only twenty-one miles long and fourteen wide.
By 1660, Barbados made most of the sugar consumed in England and generated more trade and capital than all other English colonies combined.
Because white men could more easily escape to pass as free on another island or aboard a pirate ship, planters increasingly saw an advantage in employing only permanent slaves of a distinctive color immediately and constantly identified with slavery.
As they came to define a certain minimal dignity due to all white men, the English magnified their superiority over people of another color, especially those who seemed most different: the “black” Africans.
By 1660, Barbados had become the first English colony with a black and enslaved majority: 27,000 compared with 26,000 whites. More slaves dwelled on Barbados than in all other English colonies combined.
The growing slave population depended on increased slave imports, for the Barbadian slaves died faster than they could reproduce.
Although the planters brought 130,000 Africans into Barbados between 1640 and 1700, only 50,000 remained alive there at the dawn of the new century. The slaves succumbed to the deadly combination of tropical diseases, a brutal work regimen, and the inadequate diet, housing, and clothing provided by their masters. Rather than improve those conditions, the Barbadian planters found it more profitable to import more slaves.
The Barbadian slave code became the model for those adopted elsewhere in the English colonies, particularly in Jamaica (1664) and Carolina (1696), which both originated as offshoots from Barbados.
By 1680 over half of the arable land on Barbados belonged to the richest 7 percent of the free colonists, the 175 big planters who possessed at least sixty slaves. A great planter commanded, on average, 115 slaves, 250 acres, and a net worth of £4,000.
By 1700 the free white population had fallen to 15,000 (from 26,000 in 1660) while the number of enslaved blacks had grown to 50,000 (from 27,000 in 1660).
When buccaneers blew into town after a successful raid, Port Royal earned its reputation as the wickedest place in the English-speaking world: the Sodom of the West Indies.
With 2,900 inhabitants in 1680, Port Royal was the third-largest town in English America, behind only Bridgetown on Barbados and Boston in New England.
