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From: "Sally Pavia" <>
Subject: [NEWGEN] New England Colonies .. should be about 4 pages if printed out
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 17:04:43 -0700

New England Colonies

Their opponents ridiculed them as "Puritans," but these radical reformers, the
English followers of John Calvin, came to embrace that name as an emblem of
honor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, England faced a gathering
storm in religious life - the Puritan movement. Before the storm abated, the
Puritans had founded the first permanent European settlements in a region that
came to be known as New England.

The Puritans believed that God had commanded the reform of both church and
society. They condemned drunkenness, gambling, theatergoing, and
Sabbath-breaking and denounced popular practices rooted in pagan custom, like
the celebration of Christmas. They deplored the "corruption's" of Roman
Catholicism that still pervaded the Church of England - churches and ceremonies
they thought too elaborate, clergymen who were poorly educated.

The refusal of English monarchs to attack these "besetting evils" turned the
Puritans into outspoken critics of the government. This King James I would not
endure: he decided to rid England of these malcontents. With some of the
Puritans, known as the Separatists, he seemed to have succeeded.

The Separatists, a tiny minority within the Puritan movement, were pious people
from humble backgrounds who concluded that the Church of England was too corrupt
to be reformed from within. In 1608 one Separatist congregation at Scrooby
decided to flee to Holland. That move afforded them religious freedom, but they
found only low-paying jobs and were distressed by desertions from within their
ranks to other religions.

Some decided to move again, this time to North America. In December of 1620,
eighty-eight Separatist "Pilgrims" disembarked from the Mayflower at a place
they called Plymouth on the coast of present-day southeastern Massachusetts. But
misfortune followed the Separatists to the New World. The hardships of the
crossing and inadequate provisions left many vulnerable to a "starving time"
during the winter. The Plymouth colony would have failed entirely the Pilgrims
had not received assistance from local Indian tribes.

The Pilgrims had received permission from England to settle farther south in the
New World, but they had sailed off course and lacked any legal sanction for
their land claims or their government in Plymouth. English authorities, however,
distracted by more pressing problems, left the tiny colony alone. Among these
distractions were other Puritans who were still striving to reform church and
society in England. By the 1620s, Charles I, James's son and successor, had
undertaken even more stringent measures for suppressing dissent. Compounding the
religious crisis were mounting political tensions between the king and
Parliament and continuing economic problems of recession and unemployment.

Many Puritans concluded that England was slipping toward the Apocalypse. Some,
from the ranks of the Congregationalists, became interested in colonization, and
in 1629, a group of merchants, landed gentlemen, and lawyers organized the
Massachusetts Bay Company. Unlike the Separatists, these Puritans were imbued
with a strong sense of mission; they claimed that they were neither separating
from the church nor abandoning the cause of reform but, rather, regrouping for
another assault on corruption on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Massachusetts Bay Company procured a royal charter confirming its title to
most of present-day Massachusetts and New Hampshire and securing its rights to
govern the region. Then the stockholders voted to transfer the company itself to
Massachusetts Bay and elected as their first governor John Winthrop, a pious,
tough-minded Puritan lawyer and landed gentleman. Winthrop sailed from England
in 1630, declaring to his fellow passengers that "we shall be as a city on a
hill." Once settled, Winthrop and the other stockholders transformed their royal
charter for a trading company into the framework of government for a colony,
which enabled them to shape state, society, and church to their liking.

The character of the initial migration itself gave New England settlers a unique
opportunity to fashion an orderly society. Most of the immigrants, some
twenty-one thousand, came in a cluster between 1630 and 1642, a movement of
families from the middling ranks of English society known as the "Great
Migration." The settlement of New England within the short span of twelve years
meant that the colonies there escaped the strain of having to absorb a steady
stream of newcomers throughout the seventeenth century. Rapid settlement also
made for solidarity, because immigrants were unified by their persecution and
their sense of religious mission. After the English Civil War and until the
American Revolution, immigrants from throughout the British Isles trickled into
New England at the rate of only a few hundred each year. The region was peopled
largely by the descendants of members of the Great Migration.

Not only their like-mindedness but also their long lives fostered a sense of
continuity for New England immigrants and their progeny. Probably because of
their healthful climate, seventeenth-century New Englanders lived on average
nearly twice as long as Virginians and about ten years longer than men and women
in England itself. That longevity, combined with relatively low rates of infant
mortality and roughly equal numbers of men and women, resulted in rapid
population growth. While the people of Europe and the Chesapeake colonies barely
reproduced themselves, the number of New Englanders doubled about every
twenty-seven years; a typical family raised seven or eight children to maturity.

As the immigrants arrived in the colony after 1630, they quickly planted a ring
of small villages around Massachusetts Bay. Others settled in Connecticut and
Rhode Island, which received separate charters from Charles II in the 1660s. In
the 1640s, Massachusetts successfully asserted its claim to New Hampshire, which
did not become a separate colony until 1679. In 1658 the handful of families who
had settled along the coast of present-day Maine also accepted rule by the
Massachusetts Bay colony.

The settlement of New England towns proceeded in a pattern that laid the
groundwork for a coherent organization of local life. Townspeople gradually
parceled out among themselves the land granted by the colony. The distribution
of land was remarkably even, allotting an average family about 150 acres. The
first farmers left much of their acreage uncultivated, and it became a legacy
for future generations. But as succeeding generations subdivided family lands,
the legacies became smaller, and a growing number of young families moved on to
found new communities on the frontiers of western Massachusetts, Maine, and New
Hampshire.

Early New Englanders established other institutions that contributed to the
coherence of social life. First and foremost was the family, headed by fathers
who exacted strict obedience from their children, even after they had reached
maturity. Wives were also subordinated to their husbands' authority: by law,
married women surrendered to their husbands any property they possessed before
marriage, and divorce was almost impossible to obtain until the late eighteenth
century. Only widows and the few single women had the same legal rights as men,
and even they could not vote in colony elections.

To ensure the hierarchy that was regarded as essential to a stable society, each
town also developed a group of village leaders. The heads of certain families -
usually men with university degrees or craftsmen with some practical skill -
received a little more than the average land allotment. These "town fathers"
took the lead in directing local affairs, and their sons and grandsons often
inherited their power and influence. But though only a handful of families
monopolized local offices, the decisions of the town meeting, the basis of local
self-government, required the unanimous agreement of the entire body of
townsmen.

Equally important in maintaining order was the church. Ministers accompanied the
immigrants to the colonies, and they formed churches as quickly as they founded
towns. Although ministers exerted much informal influence over public and
private life, they did not serve as officers in the civil government, and in the
churches, the laity claimed ultimate power. Each village church conducted its
own affairs, answerable to no higher authority. Church membership was voluntary,
but in every colony except Rhode Island inhabitants were bound by law to attend
Sabbath worship and to contribute to the support of the Congregationalist
clergy. Membership was not available to anyone merely for the asking. Candidates
had to give evidence that they had experienced "conversion" - a turning of the
heart and soul toward God that was betokened by a disciplined life. After the
middle of the seventeenth century, however, full church membership declined,
especially among men.

Although many aspects of life in early New England enhanced order, perfect
harmony proved elusive. A few fishing villages and fur-trading centers on the
periphery of settlement during the seventeenth century departed dramatically
from Puritan norms. These "company towns" were financed and developed by
merchants who recruited crews of free and indentured laborers from the ports of
England, Ireland, and the Channel Islands. Extreme inequality among classes
deprived such settlements of any stability until the beginning of the eighteenth
century.

But such inequality was not a source of strain in most early New England
communities, because the region offered few opportunities to amass great wealth.
Farmers could coax enough from the land to feed their families, but outside of
the fertile Connecticut River valley, the climate and soil did not yield a large
surplus. Since their farms could not sustain a profitable commercial
agriculture, most farmers had no incentive to import large numbers of servants
and slaves. Trade, fishing, and shipbuilding brought greater returns for the
minority of New Englanders - about one in ten - who lived in seaports like
Boston, Salem, Newport, and Gloucester, and over time, as these commercial
centers expanded, class divisions became more clearly etched.

Most conflicts, however, were occasioned by other tensions. When immigrants from
several English villages settled in the same New England community, variations
in English local customs produced disagreement among townspeople about the
proper way to distribute land, regulate livestock, or plant crops. As the first
generation passed from the scene, disagreements of this sort died with them, but
other quarrels arose to take their place. As local populations expanded and the
centers of towns became overcrowded, many families moved to outlying districts
and then petitioned the town meeting to create schools and churches of their own
or to split off as a separate town. Reluctant to lose taxpayers, the town
meeting often resisted, and a running battle between the two factions would
ensue.

While such local controversies were little more than petty quarrels among people
who agreed on fundamentals, religion triggered far more serious conflicts. Most
of the men and women who settled in New England called themselves Puritans, but
the name did not imply a uniform code of belief and practice. For example, the
Pilgrims of Plymouth believed that religious purity required renouncing the
Church of England, whereas most other New England Puritans clung to the hope of
reform while remaining within the Anglican communion. During the earliest years,
religious diversity led to the spread of settlements beyond Massachusetts Bay.
In 1636, Thomas Hooker's more liberal standards for church membership prompted
him to establish the first English outpost in Connecticut. Rhode Island served
as a haven for the most radical religious outcasts from Massachusetts Bay, among
them its founder, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson and some of her antinomian
followers, and many members of the Society of Friends, called Quakers.

Even the inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay differed among themselves about
religion. Congregationalism fostered a growing diversity of opinion and
practice, because each local church was free to go its own way. By the end of
the seventeenth century, many churches had adopted more liberal standards for
admission to membership or to the sacraments of baptism and communion. Divisions
among New England's Congregationalists became even more pronounced after the
1730s because of the first Great Awakening, a major religious revival. Some
welcomed it, but others disliked the emotionalism and disorder that attended the
new religious enthusiasm. Competing denominations gained from the
Congregationalists' disputes: disgruntled conservatives deserted to the
Anglicans and Quakers, and the most radical advocates of revivalism formed
"Separate" churches or joined the Baptists.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, New England had become a more mobile,
commercialized, stratified, and diverse society. But for most of the region's
inhabitants, earlier patterns of life persisted. The majority remained an
insular, rural folk, their lives defined by the seasonal rhythms of agriculture,
the bonds of family, church, and local community, and a fundamentally religious
outlook.

Bibliography: Francis Bremer, The Puritan Experiment (1976).

Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
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http://www.myhistory.org/history_files/articles/n_eng_colonies.html
6 Jun 2000

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• [NEWGEN] New England Colonies .. should be about 4 pages if printed out by "Sally Pavia" <>