The Puritans believed that they were the Chosen People of God destined to found a New Jerusalem-a New City of God in the wilderness. They interpreted the Bible more literally than their British counterparts, and sought to establish a purified church, which sometimes meant imposing their religious beliefs on unwilling citizens.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company obtained a charter allowing it to trade and colonize in New England. Its Puritan stockholders envisioned the colony as a refuge from religious persecution. The charter, which ceded lands from three miles south of the Charles River to three miles north of the Merrimack, allowed the company to establish its own government, subject only to the king. Its government was to be placed in the hands of a governor, deputy governor, and eighteen assistants, to be elected annually by the company.
Unlike the poor and humble Pilgrims, the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony were men of wealth and social position. They left comfortable homes in England to found a Puritan state in America. They got a large tract of land extending from the Merrimac River to the Charles, and westward across the continent.
In the fall of 1630, the Company called the first General Court in the new colony. All male residents were designated as freemen, but they only had the right to choose the colony's assistants. All legal and judicial powers were retained by the assistants themselves, who elected the governor and deputy governor. They later restricted the right to vote to only those freemen who were Puritans.
The Bay Colony government deeded title for townships to groups of male settlers, who then distributed the land among themselves. And though men of the highest rank received the largest plots, all men received enough land to support their families.
The first winter at Massachusetts Bay Colony was a harsh one. Starvation and disease took the lives of two hundred people, and another two hundred returned to England in the spring. But the core group of Puritans persevered.
The Connecticut Colony
The Massachusetts Puritans drove many people from their colony with their strict rules, but there were others who left of their own free will. They were not content with the Puritans and decided to leave. Among these were the founders of Connecticut. They settled the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield on the Connecticut River.
At about the same time, John Winthrop, Jr. led a colony to Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Up to that time, the Dutch seemed to have the best chance to settle the Connecticut Valley, but the control of that region was then firmly in the hands of the English.
The Connecticut people had no charter, and they wanted something more definite than a vague compact. So in the winter of 1638-39 they met at Hartford and set down on paper a complete set of rules for their guidance. The Connecticut constitution of 1638-39 is looked upon as "the first truly political written constitution in history." The government they established was similar to that of Massachusetts, with one key exception-in Connecticut you didn't have to be a member of the church to vote and participate in the government.
Rhode Island
Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, disagreed with the Massachusetts leaders on several points. He thought that the colonists had no right to lands that were not purchased from the Native Americans. And he insisted that the rulers had no power in religious matters. He insisted on these points so strongly that the Massachusetts government expelled him from the colony.
In the spring of 1636, with four companions, he founded the town of Providence. There he decided that every one should be free to worship God as he or she saw fit. Other nonconformists followed Roger Williams to that region, including Anne Hutchinson and William Coddington, who founded Portsmouth in 1638.
A short-lived dispute sent Coddington to the southern tip of Aquidneck Island (purchased from the Narragansetts), where he established Newport in 1639. The fourth original town, Warwick, was settled in 1642 by Samuel Gorton, another dissident from Portsmouth.
These communities were founded on the principle of absolute freedom of conscience. Most of the settlers were people who couldn't endure the rigors of Puritan theology, law, and custom. In fact, they couldn't agree among themselves, and for many years Rhode Island was the most turbulent of all the New England colonies. Their soul liberty, as Roger Williams called it, apparently didn't extend to civil matters.
New HavenJohn Davenport, an extreme Puritan clergyman, and Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant, were the leaders of the Eastland Company that eventually settled the Colony of New Haven. The leaders and many of their followers were men of considerable property. The Company included men and women from London and others from Kent, Hereford, and Yorkshire in England.
Davenport and Eaton were also members of the Massachusetts Bay Company. On arriving in America in June, 1637, they stopped at Boston and remained there during the winter. Pressure was brought on them to make Massachusetts their home, but Davenport wasn't content to remain where he would be only one among many.
He sent Eaton voyaging to find a suitable place for worship and trade. Eaton suggested that Quinnipiac on the Connecticut shore would be perfect for their new settlement. On April 24, 1638, five hundred English settlers arrived at the harbor to settle permanently on the lands of the Quinnipiac Native Americans.
Before winter most of the colonists who had arrived in April were living on their house-lots, leaving their cellars or other temporary shelters for new-comers. Some of the houses, being occupied by persons of small estates, were presumably such as a Dutch traveler saw at Plymouth, and describes as block-houses built of hewn logs.
At a meeting of the General Court, a body of sixteen members under the leadership of Eaton, in September 1640, the new harbor was officially referred to as New Haven. These leaders felt that in order for New Haven to become a new trading center they should create a series of settlements in the area. These towns would deliver their products to New Haven for export. The leaders of these communities would be members of the General Court, and would meet on a regular basis in New Haven.
The colony's success soon attracted other believers, as well as those who were not Puritans. They expanded into additional towns: Milford and Guilford in 1639, Stamford in 1640, and later to Fairfield, Medford, Greenwich, and Branford. These towns formally joined together as the New Haven Colony in 1643. They based their government on that of Massachusetts, but they maintained an even stricter adherence to the Puritan discipline.
The New England Confederation
When civil war in England broke out in 1641, the New England colonists-more than twenty thousand, with fifty villages, almost forty churches, and currently without any pressure from the motherland-seriously began to contemplate the establishment of a new nation. In 1643, the British Parliament acknowledged that "the plantations in New England had, by the blessing of the Almighty, had good and prosperous success without any public charge to the parent state."
The New England Confederation was a political and military alliance of the British colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven. Established in 1643, its primary purpose was to unite the Puritan colonies against the Native Americans living in their midst, against the French to their north, and the Dutch in the New Netherland Colony to their west.
The colonists living in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine asked to be admitted to the Confederation, but were denied. Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop said they were refused, "because they ran a different course from us, both in their ministry and civil administration." Whatever that means.
The business of the confederation was to be transacted by a commission of eight men, two from each colony. A vote of six was required to carry a measure. The expenses as well as the spoils of war were to be divided among the colonies, according to their male populations between the ages of sixteen and thirty years.
The confederation disintegrated in 1654 after Massachusetts Bay Colony refused to join the war against the Netherlands during the First Anglo-Dutch War.
Social Conditions
The New England colonies were all settled on the town system. Each town consisted of a church congregation, with family homes and public buildings. In the middle of the community was the Puritan church, where services were held every Sunday, and by law everyone had to attend. The church building also served as the meeting house, where laws were made and town business was conducted.
There were no crops that demanded large plantations-like the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia. The colonists were small farmers, mechanics, ship-builders, and fishermen. Unable to afford servants or slaves, the colonists relied upon the family labor of their sons and daughters.
The family was the social unit. The healthy climate and good diet enabled parents to raise six or seven children to maturity. By age ten, boys worked with their fathers in the fields and barn, while daughters assisted their mothers in the house and garden. Most sons remained unmarried and worked on the family farm until their middle or late twenties, knowing that their fathers could eventually provide them with a farm from the family rights in the town lands.
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Maggie MacLean is an amateur historian and a lover of women's history. Please visit her History of American Women blog, which begins with the early American colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth, and it will cover all eras of women's history, with particular emphasis on the fight for women's rights in the United States. Read the new articles about slavery and witchcraft in the New England colonies.
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