Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 1 John Winthrop, the second, sixth, ninth and twelfth governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1649. If the southern colonies were established primarily for the purpose of pro fi t or politics, the English colonies in the far north were established mainly for the sake of ideas or religion. The difference between the north and the south would have a lasting impact on American culture. This, of course, refers to New England, or to put it in the terminology that 17th Century New Englanders would have been familiar with, the Puritan colonies. The term “Puritan” was not invented by the Puritans and it was not intended to be a compliment. It is a complex and often ambiguous term. The Puritans were England’s most radical Protestants. It may seem odd to fi nd Puritans on the shores of North America, along side paupers in Georgia and Catholics in Maryland. It may also seem odd, because the Protestants were the big winners in the struggle for the control of English society and religion during the Anglican Reformation. What were they doing in the snowy forests of New England as if they were on the THE UNITED STATES GAZETTE A City on a Hill Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 2 low rung of the ladder along with everyone else? The answer to that question was closely related to the way in which Queen Elizabeth I had made England Protestant. Elizabeth had no love for Catholics. Her sister Mary had threatened Elizabeth’s life on a number of occasions and had brutally tried to force a return to the Catholic Church during her brief tenure as queen, additionally Catholic assassination plots against Elizabeth were uncovered at regular intervals. Elizabeth dealt with these threats to the realm and her person accordingly. But if the Catholics were unhappy at seeing England become a Protestant country, there were also Protestants who believed that England was not Protestant enough. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the church created by Henry VIII, had adopted The Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, which was a thoroughly Protestant statement of religious principles. However, the Church The interior of Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts. The Puritans were predominantly Calvinists and their churches were often plain and unadorned. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 3 of England was allowed to retain much of its Catholic style of governance with bishops ruling their dioceses like aristocrats. Every English subject was automatically a member of the Church of England. She also sanctioned a worship manual known as The Book of Common Prayer in 1559, which used enough Catholic language to make some committed Protestants squirm. Elizabeth also allowed the Anglican clergy to retain Catholic forms of liturgical dress. The committed Protestants in her court advised Elizabeth to jettison all the relics of England’s Catholic past, however, Elizabeth was no more likely to listen to them than she was to listen to the Catholics. Elizabeth treated her Protestant critics just as harshly as the Catholics. She issued orders for them to conform. They refused and when they did so, she had them hunted down arrested and punished in the same way as her Catholic subjects. These radical Protestants were initially called “Precisians” because they wanted to be so precise about every detail of life in the Church of England. Eventually, the term “Puritan” was applied them. Elizabeth’s hostility toward the Puritans posed a problem for them beyond the dangers of persecution. The Puritans wanted to think of themselves as just as loyal to England as Elizabeth herself. They also wanted to think of themselves as the leading edge of what England was called to be as a Protestant nation. In actuality, they owed their A portrait of John Calvin, 1550. John Calvin wrote The Institutes of the Christian Religion and directly in fl uenced every Protestant country is Europe. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 4 allegiance to an international ideological movement known as Calvinism. John Calvin had played only a relatively minor political role in the Protestant Reformation. Despite this, the teachings of Calvin played a hugely in fl uential role in the thinking of every Protestant country in Europe, whether they agreed with him or not. Calvinism taught the complete and absolute control by God over all human affairs. It also taught that not only did God have absolute control over human affairs, but that humans were morally helpless due to the inherited effects of the sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden. If humans were ever to be redeemed from the bondage of sin, it would be as the result of a work undertaken by God according to his plan, and on his own merits. This sort of thinking was not new. Similar teachings had been circulating since the time of St. Augustine and the late Roman Empire. However, in the unstable political climate of 16th Century Europe, the writings of John Calvin struck with the force of a storm. If God was the absolute ruler of all human events, according to his own lights and wisdom, that meant that God was totally and completely sovereign. If God was totally and completely sovereign, that meant that kings were not. If the King was contradicted by God, that meant that God, and not the King, should be obeyed. If the King persecuted his subjects John Foxe, 1587. John Foxe published Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in 1563. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was a collection of the lives of saints and martyrs from across Christian history, and was an in fl uential work of history and theology during the Protestant Reformation. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 5 as a result, it was only with God’s permission, as a test of faith. Calvinism sowed resistance to authority and undermined deference to the Crown, which was one of the pillars of Medieval society. Despite the best efforts of Elizabeth and the Bishops to silence the Puritan critics of the Church of England, the Puritans did not simply disappear. If anything, the Puritans seemed to multiply. If the Puritans had a short term pessimism about human nature and believed that they were unable to overcome their own innate sinfulness, they still had a sense of long term optimism for the future, as a result of the absolute power of a sovereign God, Some Puritans wanted to reform the Church of England from within. As such, they worked to promote Puritan minded clergy into the ranks of the Bishops. Others wanted to abolish Bishops entirely. They believed that the governance of the Church of England should be turned over Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton, 1867. The Puritans rejected the Church of England as too Catholic and wanted to reform the church in order to make it more independent. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 6 to local committees of clergy known as Presbyteries. This is where the Presbyterian Church came from. The most radical Puritans elected to leave the Church of England entirely and establish their own churches. Membership in these churches was entirely voluntary and tested with speci fi c signs of sincerity, rather than the accident of being born an English subject. Operating independent churches in 16th Century England was illegal. People could no more imagine a different kind of church in England than each of the fi fty states adopting a different form of government. It also seemed to constitute a kind of cultural treason agains England to set up your own church. Both the Presbyterians and the Puritans who remained in the Church of England fought with and disassociated themselves from the separatist Puritans. The Embarkation of the Pilgrims by Robert Walter Weir, 1857. The Pilgrims who settled Plymouth Colony in 1620 were among the most radicalized Puritans and sought complete separation from the Church of England. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 7 In 1620, a small group of separatist Puritans took these ideas about religion and government to their logical conclusion. They hired themselves out to a joint stock company that wanted to establish a trading post on the shores of New England and left England all together. These Puritans have been misleadingly called the Pilgrims. They have probably been given more than their due in early American history. They were the smallest, least popular and most radical Puritans. They went to America, not to found a new nation, but to escape from an old, corrupt and oppressive one. None of these disagreements endeared any of the Puritans to Elizabeth at all. That the Presbyterians and the mainstream Puritans actively tried to distance themselves from the Separatists meant nothing to her. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, they were all cut from the same An engraving of the Winthrop colony fl eet arriving in Boston Harbour in 1630. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 8 cloth. Elizabeth’s successors, the Stuart Kings, James I and Charles I, took an even dimmer view of the Puritans than Elizabeth had. Charles pursued the Puritans with particular venom. By the end of the 1620s, even the mainstream Puritans were beginning to lose hope. They began to wonder if their only real option was to follow the Separatists to America. However, they were unable to bring themselves to admit that they were contemplating this. They were only loyal Protestant Englishmen. As a result, as much to deceive themselves, as to allay the suspicions of the King’s of fi cials and royal spies, they organized themselves not as a Puritan exodus, but as a nondescript joint stock company that called itself the Massachusetts Bay Company, complete with a board of directors, known as the General Court, a company charter, and a governor in the form of a Sussex lawyer named John Winthrop. They insisted to the King’s of fi cials that they were not Separatists, merely Englishmen interested in doing business in New England. That they all happened to be Puritans was purely coincidental. The Massachusetts Bay Company fl eet, which consisted of eleven ships, set sail for New England in the spring of 1630. No one realized at the time, that despite laws to the contrary, Governor Winthrop, the company charter and the General Court, had all sailed with the fl eet, along with the company’s seven hundred pseudo-employees. Upon landing in Massachusetts Bay, they established a settlement on a small peninsula, which they named Boston. The Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 to 1691. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 9 Winthrop and the General Court became not just the heads of a joint stock company, but the de facto governors of a Puritan colony on Massachusetts Bay. For the fi rst time in their lives, the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts Bay were able to breath freely as Puritans. However, the new found freedom to practice their religion came with a problem for John Winthrop. The Puritans had left England swearing that they were not Separatists trying to dismantle the Church of England, however, now that they were out from under the gaze of the King’s of fi cials, there existed a temptation to throw out these promises and push Puritan radicalism to the limit. Winthrop had anticipated this possibility. As Governor, during the passage to New England he had issued the following warning for his fellow immigrants. We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly a ff ection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our super fl uidities...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 each other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour and su ff er together; always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work. Our community as members of the same body, for we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through all the world. The Seal of Plymouth Colony, designed in 1629, is still used by the town of Plymouth today. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 10 Winthrop had every reason to believe that the Puritans would heed his warning about the need for solidarity and community. At heart, the Puritans who settled in New England were cut from a different cloth than the freebooters and adventurers who populated the other European colonies. Take the passenger lists of three immigrant ships that set sail from England for North America in 1635. Two of these ships, the Merchant’s Hope and the Elizabeth DeLowe, both bound for Virginia, carried a combined total of 174 settlers, however, of these, seventy two were single men, and their average age was twenty. All of them were going as indentured servant labour. Meanwhile, the same year an unnamed passenger ship departing from Weymouth, and bound for Massachusetts carried 136 passengers, comprising thirteen complete households. The average age of the heads of these households was thirty six, which A cut away model depicting the cramped conditions of a 17th Century merchant ship, such as the May fl ower Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 11 was middle aged by the standard life expectancy f o r 1 7 t h C e n t u r y England. The people bound for Virginia were footloose and poor. They were not part of a community and were not bound by any communal ties. They were a l s o ov e r w h e l m i n g l y young and male. They were as different than the ship bound for the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a company of new Marine recruits is from a Sunday school class. The people bound for Massachusetts brought their families, which provided stability and a fi rm idea about the kind of community they wanted to build, which was shaped by years of experience. As such, it is reasonable to imagine that the Puritans took Winthrop’s words about the need for unity to heart. However, ideas can be volatile and unpredictable things. Radical ideas can drive apart stable communities and families just as easily as a garrison of short tempered gentlemen. Winthrop seems to have intended for his vision of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a city on a hill to be taken literally. Boston would be the only Puritan settlement, and that all the Puritans in New England would submit themselves to the rule of the Governor and the General Court. This very quickly proved not to not to be the case, because in 1631, the Puritans who had crowded themselves onto Boston’s tiny peninsula almost immediately moved across A 2007 re-enactment of the landing of the fi rst colonists in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the colony of Virginia. Many of the fi rst migrants to Virginia were poor and in search of a better life. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 12 the Charles River, where they founded t h e s e t t l e m e n t o f C h a r l e s t o w n . Charlestown was followed in short order by Dorchester, Roxbury, Hingham, Watertown, Concord, Newbury, Ipswich and Lynn. In 1635, a minister named Thomas Shepard moved out of the Massachusetts Bay area all together and founded a settlement on the Connecticut River named Hartford. This far from England, John Winthrop suddenly found that he had very little power in containing the Puritans’ inclination to wander. When he tried to intervene in a case involving the promotion of a militia of fi cer, he found himself indicted and brought before the General Court by the Hingham settlers on grounds of exceeding his authority. This was a sign that Puritan ideas were as unstable as Puritans communities. In 1631, a radical minister named Roger Williams landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and immediately began to advocate for the conversion of all of the colony’s churches into Separatist congregations. Winthrop was having none of it. In 1635, he intervened and had Williams exiled to Narragansett Bay, where Williams proceeded to organize the Separatist colony of Rhode Island in 1636. A radical laywoman named Anne Hutchinson divided Boston’s churches claiming that God’s grace and sovereignty were so ineffable and mysterious that not even the Bible could stand in their way. Once again Anne Hutchinson was put on trial and exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638. Her religious declarations shook the colony and she became a martyr for freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and free speech. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 13 Wi n t h r o p w a s f o r c e d t o intervene when Hutchinson starting spouting what appeared to be private revelations from God, whereupon she was banished to the Dutch colonies on Long Island. Winthrop was able to hold off the most extreme Puritan ministers, however he was unable to stop the gradual drift of most of the Puritan churches toward Separatism. One after another, the churches in the various Massachusetts towns began to rede fi ne their c o n c e p t i o n o f c h u r c h membership to exclude anyone who could not give a believable and detailed relation of their faith. Individual congregations came to regard their power over their own affairs as total and absolute. As result, they rejected any attempt to substitute higher civil or church authority over that of their individual congregations. Without actually using the word “Separatist,” Massachusetts became in essence, an entire settlement of Separatist Puritans and the churches jealously guarded their ability to conduct their own affairs. As a result, the New England churches gradually came to be known as Congregational churches. In the context of the drift of Puritan ideas, the gradual drift into Separatism was probably The Banishment of Roger Williams by Peter F Rothermel, 1850. Roger Williams was an early advocate for freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. Williams founded Providence Plantations, which would become the colony of Rhode Island in 1636. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 14 i n e v i t a b l e . T h e a n t i - authoritarianism at the heart of Puritanism, which came directly f r o m C a l v i n i s m m a d e Congregationalism a logical end point for Puritan thinking. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, no idea will rest until it reaches its extreme. Regardless of whether or not this process was inevitable, nobody in England was checking up on it. Additionally, the fact that the fi rst generation of settlers born in New England had not endured the same suffering, persecution and sacri fi ce as the Puritans in England merely to come to New England to practice the same half-hearted church reform made it easy for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to slip in the Congregationalist direction. Change these facts, however, and matters take on a different slant. John Winthrop died in 1649. He left behind a personal journal which has become one of the most remarkable and important documents of any European settler in the 17th Century. With his death, the fi rst generation of settlers began to pass from the scene. Within a decade of Winthrop’s death anyone who had been born or raised in New England, as opposed to old England, were seen as lacking the same spiritual edge that had been been forged by their parents in the fi res of persecution in England. Gradually, the number of New Englanders who were both willing and able to run the gauntlet of religious faith began to decline because the need and urgency to do so also declined. The grave of John Winthrop in King’s Chapel Burying Ground, Boston, With the death of John Winthrop in 1649, the fi rst generation of New England colonists began to pass from the scene. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 15 The Massachusetts Bay Colony retained on its statute books a number of laws that compelled all the colony’s inhabitants to regularly attend parish church services on Sundays, but these laws were only indifferently enforced. Even when they were, the only thing these statues accomplished was to fi ll the churches with people who technically did not qualify for membership in the congregation. As a result, they were not able to receive communion or have their children baptized. This was not the way to be a city on a hill, and the ministers frequently pointed this out. The decline of the churches was matched by the accelerating breakdown of the colony’s community life. Boston was increasingly a town of merchants rather than saints. The citizens of Boston were more interested in building up trade with Europe than treasures in heaven. From 1650 to 1715, the per capita income in Boston rose by a rate of 1.6% per year. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. In Salem, the total amount of An engraving of southeast Boston from 1730. Over the course of the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, Boston increasingly became a city of merchants. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 16 wealth owned by the top 10% rose from 21% during the same time to 65%. New Englanders also began to fi nd less sancti fi ed ways of spending their wealth. Boston’s fi rst brothel began operating in the mid-1650s. From 1696 to 1720, the number of slaves bought by New Englanders multiplied by a factor of six. To the west of Boston, as the second and third generation of New Englanders came to maturity, they began to marry and look for land of their own. They found, however, that land in their home towns was increasingly unavailable. The pressure to fi nd new land began to force them to move, fi rst westward, then south, and fi nally north. By the 1660s, New England had broken apart not just into a series of disconnected towns, but six separately organized colonies; Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, New Haven, Connecticut and New Hampshire. The fi rst generation of Puritans had gotten along relatively well with the local indigenous population, the Wampanoags and the Naragansetts, however, this had less to do with any attempts at actual co-existence than fact that the natives had been decimated by small pox. By 1675, the growth of the New England colonies had suf fi ciently pressed the natives that in June, the Wampanoag chief known as King Philip, formed an alliance of threatened tribes and fell upon the New England towns like a hurricane. Nearly half of the towns in the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies were put to the torch. Five hundred settlers were killed and dozens of others were scalped, raped and sold into slavery. A 19th Century engraving of Roger Williams meeting with the Narragansett leaders. The Puritans initially had relatively good relations with the indigenous population, however this was mainly because the natives had been stricken with European diseases such as small pox. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 17 King Philip’s War, as the raids came to be called, prompted the preachers to issue a series of dire warnings that the original vision of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was being betrayed by the feckless materialism of the c o l o n y ’ s c h i l d r e n . Samuel Danforth asked, “what then, is the cause of our cooling, faintings and languishings? The grand and principle cause is our unbelief. We believe not in the grace and power of God in Christ.” For these reasons God was visiting his judgement upon New England. In addition to the war, there was also a slow down in Puritan emigration to New England, which drove the ministers into a creative fever pitch. As a result, a new type of sermon known as the “Jeremiad” emerged. The Jeremiad gets its name from the Book of Jeremiah, in the Old Testament. The Jeremiad was the fi rst written literary form in American history. In addition to being a howling catalogue of New England’s moral failings, the Jeremiad also did a remarkably creative thing. Despite the fact that the sordid reality had drifted from the original Puritan vision, God still had a purpose for New England and that he had renewed and revitalized the Puritans’ mission. “Why hath the Lord smitten us with blasting and mildew?” A coloured 19th Century woodcut depicting a Native American raid on a colonial settlement during King Philip’s War Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 18 The answer, according to Danforth was so that the Puritans would remember where they came from, and why they had come to New England. Attend we our errand, upon which Christ sent us into the wilderness and he will provide bread for us. If the people cleave to the Lord and to his prophets and to his ordinances, it will strike suck a fear into the hearts of enemies that they will be at their wits end and not know what to do. Danforth’s call for a cultural revitalization wasn’t new. The European Renaissance of the 15th Century had been one for m of cultural revitalization. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century had been another. The Jeremiad fi rmly established the idea of cultural revival into the cluster of basic American ideas that all Americans still live with today. The Jeremiad also primed British North America for the greatest cultural explosion it would ever see. An engraving of the Prophet Jeremiah lamenting the fall of Jerusalem by Gustave Dore from 1866. The Jeremiad was inspired by the Book of Jeremiah from the Old Testament and was intended to reinvigorate the Puritans and bring them back to their original mission. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 19 Geography and Destiny A large part of the story of English settlement and exploration in North America is a story of geography. The reason for this is because much of this story revolves around the great ocean inlets that lie on North America’s east coast. The Hudson River and Chesapeake Bay were attractive to the settlers because they offered protected waters for shipping, but also offered the tantalizing possibility of a quick route to Asia through through the North American continent, which never seemed to completely go away. In 1642, John Winthrop wrote in his journal with a kind of breathless anticipation when an adventurous Irishman named Darby Field had scaled the White Mountains in western New Hampshire and beheld a great lake in the distance. Maybe it was the Paci fi c? In actuality, it was Lake Champlain, however the eagerness with Winthrop seized on this news serves to emphasize the extent to which the Europeans underestimated the size and shape of North America. The European obsession with fi nding the Northwest Passage would persist until the 1850s, when a major expedition under the command of Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic and was never heard from again. Even though it was the English explorer Henry Hudson who tacked up, and gave his name to, the Hudson River, in 1609, he did so while in the pay of the Dutch. It A satellite photo of Lake Champlain. The earliest European settlers thought that Lake Champlain led to a route to Asia. Issue 2 https://longstorypress.blogspot.com/ The United States Project 20 was also the Dutch who fi rst laid claim to the Hudson River Valley. However, the Dutch colony of New Netherland was not a particularly serious affair. The Dutch controlled the Hudson River Valley from New Amsterdam, the colony’s capital, all the way north to Fort Nassau, on the site of what is now Albany. Once the colony’s boundaries were established the Dutch were comparatively uninterested in expansion, either to the north or the west. However, it is worth noting that the Dutch were hemmed in by the prescience of the Iroquois Confederacy, which controlled most of what is now the State of New York, outside of the Hudson River Valley. In any case, nether the English or the Dutch paid any attention to the one remaining inland river system, the Delaware. Delaware Bay is located between the Chesapeake Bay and the Hudson River. The Delaware River and Delaware Bay enjoyed all the advantages of the Chesapeake and the Hudson, but had a more moderate climate, in addition to a less fractious indigenous population. The Delaware River Valley was home to the Algonquin speaking Delaware tribe. Even more curiously, the Europeans who settled the Delaware Valley in the 1630s, were neither English, or Dutch, but Swedes. The story of how and why this happened is a somewhat peculiar one. In the 16th Century, Scandinavia was a A map of Swedish settlements along the Delaware River from 1636 to 1655.