Word for the Day
Most of the colonists obtained passage to the New World by signing a contract called an indenture, thereby becoming indentured servants–in effect, slaves for the seven-year term of the agreement. This would prove a very popular method of bringing settlers to the fledgling English colonies.
Voice from the Past
Here is the original Pocahontas—John Smith story, as related in A History of the Settlement of Virginia, by the early Virginia merchant Thomas Studley and Smith himself—
At last they brought Captain Smith to Powhatan, their emperor. At Captain Smith’s entrance before the king, all the people gave a great shout. The queen was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, instead of a towel, on which to dry them. Having feasted him after the best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held. At last two great stones were brought before Powhatan. Then as “any as could lay hands on Captain Smith dragged him to the stones, and laid his head on them, and were ready with their clubs to beat out his brains. At this instant, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own head upon his to save him from death. Thereupon the emperor was contented to have him live.
A Rock and a Hard Place
(1608-1733)
In This Chapter
Puritans, Separatists, Pilgrims
Settlement of Plymouth and Massachusetts By colonies
Religious tolerance in Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania
Oglethorpe’s utopia experiment
Introduction of slavery
The settlement of Virginia was motivated by a combination of commercial enthusiasm and the intense social and economic pressures of an England that had outgrown its ancient feudal system. Farther north in America, in the area still known as New England, settlement was motivated more immediately by religious zeal.
As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, certain members of the Church of England (which the queen’s father, Henry VIII, severed from the Roman Catholic Church during 1536-40) had become extremely critical about what they considered compromises made with Catholic practice. A group of Anglican priests, most of them graduates of Cambridge University, advocated such articles of religion as direct personal spiritual experience, rigorously sincere moral conduct, and radically simple worship services. They felt that the mainstream Anglican church had not gone far enough in reforming worship and purging it of Catholic influence. When James I ascended the throne in 1603, Puritan leaders clamored for reform, including the abolition of bishops. James refused, but Puritanism (as the new reform movement came to be called) gained a substantial popular following by the early 17th century. The government and the mainstream Anglican Church, especially under Archbishop William Laud, reacted with repressive and discriminatory measures amounting to a campaign of persecution. Some Puritans left the country, settling in religiously tolerant Holland, while others remained in England and formed a powerful bloc within the parliamentarian party that, under the leadership, of Oliver Cromwell, ultimately defeated (and beheaded!) Charles I in the English Civil War (1642-46).
The New Israel
The Puritans who left England were, logically enough, called Separatists. Most of them were farmers, poorly educated, and of lowly social status. One of the Separatist congregations was led by William Brewster and the Reverend Richard Clifton in the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. This group left Scrooby for Amsterdam in 1608, then, the following year, moved to another Dutch town, Leyden, where they lived for 12 years. Although the Scrooby group had found religious freedom, they were plagued by economic hardship and were concerned that their children were growing up Dutch rather than English. In 1617, they decided on a radical course of action. They voted to immigrate to America.
Brewster knew Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, and, through him, the Scrooby congregation obtained a pair of patents authorizing them to settle in the northern part of the company’s American territory. With supplementary financial backing from a London iron merchant named Thomas Weston, somewhat less than half of the congregation finally chose to leave Leyden. They boarded the Speedwell, bound for the port of Southampton, England, where they were to unite with another group of Separatists and pick up a second ship. However, both groups were dogged by delays and disputes. Ultimately, 102 souls (fewer than half of whom were Separatists) piled into a single vessel, the Mayflower, and embarked from Plymouth on September 16, 1620.
After a grueling 65-day voyage, the Pilgrims (as their first historian, William Bradford, would later label them) sighted land on November 19. Apparently, rough seas off Nantucketforced the Mayflower’s skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, to steer away from the mouth of the Hudson River, where the Pilgrims were supposed to establish their “plantation,” to a landing at Cape Cod. This lay beyond the Virginia Company’s jurisdiction, and some historians believe that the Pilgrims actually bribed Captain Jones to alter course precisely in order to insure the group’s independence from external authority. Be that as it may, the Mayflower dropped anchor off present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts, on November 21.
There remained two problems. First, the settlers consisted of two distinct groups: the Separatists, united by their religious beliefs, and the others (whom the Separatists called “Strangers”) united by nothing more or less than a desire for commercial success. Second, neither group had a legal right to settle in the region, which was beyond the boundary of their charter. While riding at anchor, the two groups drew up the “Mayflower Compact”—in effect, the first constitution written in North America-in which they all agreed to create a “Civil Body Politic” and abide by laws created for the good of the colony.
Plymouth Rock
The settlers probed for a good place to land and soon discovered Plymouth Harbor, on the western side of Cape Cod Bay. They set foot on shore-supposedly on a rock now carved with the year 1620—on December 21, with the main body of settlers disembarking on December 26. They could hardly have picked a less favorable time and place for their landing. A bitter New England winter was already under way, and the site boasted neither good harbors nor, given its flinty soil, extensive tracts of fertile land. As at Jamestown, people began to die: during the first winter, more than half of them. But these settlers were also very different from their earlier Jamestown counterparts. They were neither moneyed gentlemen, on the one hand, nor indentured servants on the other. Most were yeoman farmers, hard workers who were by right and inclination free.