New England colonies - North Hunterdon

Colonies established under Stuart king Charles I (1600‐
1649)
Maryland Massachusetts Bay Connecticut
New Haven
Rhode Island.
Colonies established under Stuart king Charles II (1630‐
85)
Carolinas (Restoration colony)
New England colonies:
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Connecticut
Rhode Island
Middle Atlantic colonies:
New York
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Delaware
Southern colonies:
Virginia
Maryland
North Carolina
South Carolina
Georgia
New England Colonies
New England colonies
• The New England colonies were quite distinct from England's other American colonies because each of them was strongly rooted in the beliefs of Puritanism.
• The Puritans did not like the Catholic traditions that the Church of England had kept after breaking away from papal control (e.g. having priests, altars, organ music in church, stained glass windows, other ornaments, religious imagery such as statues, the celebration of religious holidays, and the special clothes worn by priests). • All of these things they considered to be sinful and against Biblical teachings.
• Reformation Calvinism/Anglicanism Puritanism Separatists (Pilgrims)
Puritans
• Puritans were a powerful group in England—many were well‐educated and successful merchants or landowners.
• Because they held seats in Parliament they could make their views known.
• King James I disliked Puritans as much as he did Pilgrims, and he made their lives difficult.
• After King James I died in 1625, his son, Charles I moved even more firmly against the Puritans.
• When Puritans and their supporters in Parliament fought back, Charles dismissed (pro‐rogued) Parliament, saying he would rule without it.
• Charles I threatened Puritans with harsh punishments if they did not obey the bishops of the Anglican Church.
• Thus, Puritan leaders decided that England had fallen on “evil and declining times” and they made plans to emigrate from England.
• Predestination ‐ A Calvinist belief shared by the Puritans that only a "chosen few" (the elect) were predestined by God to reach the kingdom of heaven, whereas everyone else (the reprobate) were condemned to damnation.
• the New England colonies, those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire shared a common Puritan heritage. However, all of them really owed their existence to another colony called Plymouth that was founded in 1620 by a small group of religious extremists that we know as the Pilgrims. The Plymouth Pilgrims shared most of the beliefs of ordinary Puritans (e.g. moralists/purists—that is, they wanted to remove Roman Catholic ceremonies from the Anglican Church), except Pilgrims were separatists while Puritans were not. Their religious extremism paved the way for them to settle in large numbers in New England since they were persecuted for setting up their own church in defiance of the English king/Anglican Church. • Since pilgrims are people who journey (pilgrimage) to holy places, the Separatists who founded the Plymouth colony thought of themselves as "Pilgrims" because their journey to America was made to find religious freedom.
• Merchant Adventurers ‐ a group of rich Londoners who gave money to the Plymouth Colonists to start their colony. In exchange for this money the company took one‐half of everything the colony could produce in seven years time.
• The beliefs and ideals of Puritanism came to play such an important role in shaping the unique culture of the United States.
PURITANS
Simply wanted to transform the Church
from within.
PILGRIMS
Felt the only way they could practice their
religious beliefs was to break away from the Church of
England
Puritanism was a Protestant religion that was started in England in the 1500s. The Puritans got their name
because they wanted to "purify" England's official religion, the Church of England, or Anglican Church, of certain
Catholic practices they believed were violating the laws of the Bible. This was because even though the Church of
England had broken away from the Catholic Church, the king, as its new head, had decided to keep most of the old Catholic ways of doing things. For example, when Catholic churches in England became Anglican churches
all the old decorations, carvings, and brilliantly colored stained glass in the churches stayed the same and priests
still performed religious ceremonies at an altar. Puritans believed these things were pagan and sinful and wanted
their English churches to get rid of them.
• Most Puritan ideas about religion came from a French Protestant theologian named John Calvin. Calvin taught that the Catholic display of religious images was nothing more than idolatry, or idol worship. Calvin also taught that only a chosen few, those who were predestined by God to do so, would reach heaven. Everybody else, he believed, no matter how many good works they performed, would never see paradise. In Calvinist churches there were no priests, no decorations, no music, and no religious ceremonies. Because of their Calvinist beliefs Puritans were often in conflict with the king and other authorities of the Church of England. Even so, most Puritans had no desire to leave the Church of England; they just wanted to "purify" it from within.
• At Plymouth, the Sabbath was a day of "humiliation and thanksgiving."
George‐Henry Boughton, Pilgrims Going To Church
• Unlike ordinary Puritans, a small offshoot group known as the Separatists, the people we call the Pilgrims, believed that the only way to have a pure religion was to follow their own path and separate themselves from the Anglican Church. Their beliefs got them into constant trouble. A lot of Separatist Pilgrims once lived in and around the tiny village of Scrooby in the north of England. They were frequently jailed for conducting private religious services, which was strictly against the king's laws. When the Separatists pleaded with the king for religious freedom he refused to grant it and ordered them to follow his rules. After that, a lot of Pilgrims fled to Holland (e.g. Amsterdam; Leyden), a country where Calvinist churches thrived. But the Separatists were never very happy living in Holland, and after Jamestown in the colony of Virginia got going in 1607, many of them decided that they should go to America, too, and try to establish a colony of their own, where they could freely follow their religious beliefs.
Plymouth
• By 1620, the Pilgrims had convinced a company of merchants in London to provide them with everything they needed to start a new colony. In return, they agreed to give the London Company half of everything the colony produced for seven years. In September of that year, the Pilgrims along with a group of Anglican colonists sailed for Virginia on a ship called the Mayflower. However, the ship was blown off course and ended up at Plymouth Rock off of Cape Cod in New England instead. The Pilgrims realized they had come to a place where no English people had ever successfully settled and where English laws did not apply (that is, they were outside London Company territory), so they made an agreement about how they would govern themselves.
• This agreement called the Mayflower Compact outlined a plan for a very simple form of democratic self government and was the first such document in the history of America. Under the Mayflower Compact, they decided to “covenant and combine themselves into a civill body politick”. In addition, recognizing the need for law, order, and cooperation, they also pledged submission and obedience to the law(s).
• The Plymouth colony was the first successful English colony in New England founded in 1620. • Squanto ‐ the English‐speaking Native American who showed the Plymouth colonists how to plant corn, hunt for game, find fish, and where to locate paths through the wilderness. The American holiday of Thanksgiving can be traced back to the harvest feast celebrated at Plymouth in November of 1621. In 1789, President George Washington made November 26th a day of national thanksgiving.
Plymouth
• After the Mayflower Compact was signed, the colonists began to search for a suitable site for their colony. The spot they chose was on a partially wooded hillside where an American Indian village had once stood. They liked this spot for several reasons. First, because some of the land had already been cleared of trees so it would be easier to start farming, and also because it was right on Cape Cod Bay. Being on the Bay was very important not only because of its abundant supply of fish, but also because ships could safely anchor there and this would allow goods to be easily transported to and from the colony.
• The Plymouth colony became part of the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691.
When the Pilgrims arrived off Cape Cod, William Bradford described the new land as a “country full of woods and thickets,” that had a “wild and savage” look.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
•
A Puritan Colony started by John Winthrop (below right) near Plymouth around 1630. •
1628: A small group of Puritans secured a tract of land around Massachusetts Bay from the Plymouth Company and a charter was secured for the Massachusetts Bay Company from the King of England (1629).
•
August, 1629: Prominent Puritans met at Cambridge, England—During the winter of 1629 the Puritans prepared to leave..
•
March 1630: Having secured a charter, seventeen (17) ships and over 1,000 Puritans left for America led by John Winthrop—some joined a small group of Puritans who had already settled in Salem while many went to Boston..
•
As New Hampshire's first town was being settled a "Great Migration" of Puritans had begun just to the south. •
The Massachusetts Bay Colony rapidly developed around two main towns: Salem and Boston, under the leadership of its first governor, John Winthrop, the lawyer and country‐
gentleman who in 1630 led 1,000 people in what would be the first wave of the "Great Migration" of Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and who helped organize the colony and was elected governor of the colony 12 times. Winthrop firmly believed that people should act according to Christian principles and, as a devout Puritan, he commanded the respect of other colonists. •
During the 1630s, thousands of Puritan colonists came to Massachusetts hoping to find religious freedom, to escape economic hardships in England, and to build a model community for the entire world to see. By 1640, while the Plymouth colony had grown to a population of 2500 people, 20,000 lived in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. •
Boston (founded by Puritans in 1630) soon grew into the largest town in the colony while new villages sprang up throughout the colony.
•
Plymouth eventually was so overshadowed by its much larger neighbor that it joined up with it. By then the Massachusetts Bay Colony even controlled the lands of Maine.
•
1691 Plymouth and Martha's Vineyard are combined into the Massachusetts Bay Colony when a new royal charter issued.
Settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Company
• Salem
• Boston
• Charlestown
• Dorchester
• Roxbury
• Watertown
• Cambridge
Massachusetts Bay Colony
• The Puritans held strong beliefs about how people should live and govern themselves—they felt they had a mission to build a new society in the Massachusetts Bay Colony based on the laws of God. If they obeyed God’s laws, Puritans believed God would protect
them. John Winthrop told the settlers “that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us.”
• Massachusetts Bay colony was a “Bible Commonwealth” that recognized and practiced religious orthodoxy.
• In Massachusetts, the Congregational churches of the Puritans were supported by public taxes. Church membership was required for voting and there was no separation of church and state. Strict Puritan ministers watched over people's lives very closely. And, if anyone did anything considered sinful, the ministers served as judges as well. In fact, in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, Puritan judges convicted 19 people of being witches and had them put to death by hanging. However, well before this time, Puritan ministers unhappy with things in Massachusetts had started to look for other places to settle.
• Winthrop and other officials of the Massachusetts Bay Company decided who could take part in the government of the new colony—under the company charter, only stockholders had the right to govern. This rule was difficult to adhere to, however, as most settlers were not stockholders. • Eventually, Winthrop realized that the colony would be run more smoothly if more settlers could take part—as a result, al men who were church members were allowed to vote for a governor and for representatives to an assembly called the General Court (in fact, only a limited number of men could vote; still, the idea of representative government was planted in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony).
• New England colonists contributed the town meeting form of government in America.
• General Court: legislature of the colony
•
Not really representative until 1634 when each town sent two members (prior, only certain members could participate in politics).
The Puritan Dilemma
• Refers to those issues that were central to American Puritanism.
• To Edmund S. Morgan, the “dilemma” that Puritans, Like John Winthrop, faced was how to be in the world yet not of it.
• I.E. how to keep one’s heart and mind stayed on God and the things of God without withdrawing, like a hermit, from the responsibilities and temptations inherent in the relative world of sinful men.
• This struggle with the world is a familiar and important side of Puritanism.
The Puritan Dilemma
• Winthrop wrestled with the weakness of the flesh in his youth—that is, he struggled with his human cravings for the pleasures of eating, drinking, smoking, hunting, and loving.
• In his own life, Winthrop was able to resolve that tension; by the age of forty, Winthrop was able to come to acceptable terms with the world, or at least he was able to wean his affections from it.
The Puritan Dilemma
• A more subtle, yet more harmful, temptation that beset the Puritan was that of “holiness”
• Holiness meant the temptation to claim that God, through His grace, had completely emancipated one from the trammel’s of sin, and to conclude that the saint, so perfected, should therefore separate himself from his sinful brothers (this lay at the very heart of the Puritan faith).
• Morgan’s thesis is that John Winthrop set himself resolutely against this separatist tendency, insisting on not separating and not tolerating the spirit/temptation of separatism in his fellow Puritans.
• For this reason, Winthrop’s chief problem as Governor of Massachusetts Bay was not “to punish the wicked,” but “to control the good”.
• The most dangerous tendency among the saints of Massachusetts was not excessive liberality but excessive purity.
• Examples: Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson
Rhode Island
• The colony of Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by a Puritan minister named Roger Williams, who had fled from Salem, Massachusetts, to avoid being sent back to England. Williams and his followers settled Providence in June, 1636.
• Williams's views had gotten him into trouble with church authorities. Like the Pilgrims at Plymouth he became a Separatist but he also believed that people should have complete freedom to choose what religion they wanted to follow and that churches should be kept separate from government. Roger Williams didn't think that the king of England had any right to grant colonial charters to lands that belonged to American Indians. In the beginning he allied himself with the native people and befriended their leaders. He even went on to learn their language and write a book about it.
• Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations ‐ the colony of Rhode Island's official‐ name. Originally the colony had towns on a large island called Rhode Island, and towns on the mainland that were called the Providence Plantations.
Rhode Island
• Roger Williams founded Rhode Island's original colonial settlement, a town he named Providence for, as he said, "God's merciful providence unto me in my distress,“ Referring to the trouble from which he had escaped back in Massachusetts. It was in Providence where the smallest English colony, officially known as the Colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, began.
• For many years the colonial capital was the city of Newport located on an Island called Rhode Island. Newport was settled by William Coddington and his followers in 1639. In the years before the Revolutionary War, Newport rivaled New York and Boston as the greatest port city in the colonies. Newport was also an important center of the shipbuilding industry and for a while was the largest slave trading port in the world.
Rhode Island
(1636‐1644: self‐governing; 1644‐1663: joint stock; 1663‐1776: royal)
• 1636 Providence, Rhode Island, is founded by a Puritan minister at Salem named Roger Williams after he was banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging the governor’s authority.. • The religious authorities in that colony did not approve of his ideas on the separation of church and state, on the taking of Indian lands, and on religious freedom and tolerance. Williams said that the king of England did not have the right to give land in North America to Puritans or anyone else because the land belonged to the Amerindians. Instead, he asserted, English settlers should buy their land from the Amerindians.
• Williams even wanted to enfranchise men who were not church members.
• In Massachusetts, Puritans refused to let people with different religious beliefs worship freely.
• 1635: Williams was banished from Massachusetts and was ordered back to England but escaped after Governor Winthrop took pity on him and secretly advised him to flee. Upon his escape, Williams led emigrants from Plymouth through frozen forests in the winter to Narragansett Bay where he stayed with Indians before buying land from them for a settlement.
• 1644: Williams went to England to secure a charter for his colony. • At first, the colony was called Providence Plantations—later, Providence and other towns became the colony of Rhode Island. • Williams's Rhode Island became a colony whose constitution permitted separation of church and state, religious freedom, and democracy. Williams allowed white men to vote even if they were not church members.
• Religious freedom and toleration in Rhode Island attracted both Catholic and Jewish settlers.
• Economic activities: shipping, livestock, agriculture
Rhode Island
Among those who fled to Rhode Island was Anne Hutchinson (right) who arrived in Boston with her husband William in 1634 where she worked as a midwife (she was herself the mother of 14 children).
An intelligent individual and a devout churchgoer, Hutchinson often met with friends at her home after church services to discuss the minister’s sermons. These meetings worried Puritan officials who believed that only clergymen were qualified to explain God’s laws.
When Hutchinson claimed that many ministers were teaching incorrect, she was put on trial. During her trial, she answered each question put to her by either Governor Winthrop or other Puritan officials with what Winthrop described as “nimble wit and active spirit”. Time after time she revealed weaknesses in Winthrop’s arguments thwarting his efforts to demonstrate she broke Puritan laws or religious teachings.
That is, until, after two days of questioning, she erred by claiming that God had spoken directly to her—that she had received “an immediate revelation” from God. This violated the Puritan belief that God spoke only through the Bible/scriptures, not to individuals.
1638: the General Court exiled Hutchinson who emigrated to Rhode Island with her husband, children, and followers.
Later, she moved to New Netherland where she and most of her family were killed by Indians.
Rhode Island
• Portsmouth and Newport were settled by Anne Hutchinson and her followers of Massachusetts Bay religious refugees.
• Warwick was settled by Samuel Gorton and followers (also Massachusetts Bay religious refugees).
• In the 1600s, Rhode Island had become a place that welcomed all faiths not just Puritans. • Reminders of this fact can still be found in Newport today (home to the oldest Jewish synagogue in the United States—Its first congregation assembled in 1658). • Nearby is a Meetinghouse founded by a group of Quakers a few years later—it stands just across the street from America's oldest surviving tavern: The White Horse (Two hundred fifty years ago the White Horse was a favorite gathering place for Rhode Island's colonial legislators).
Morgan on Williams and Hutchinson:
• The most serious complaint and accusation leveled against Roger Williams was not his supposed “democracy” or “liberalism,” but his “heedless holiness,” his “furious and indefatigable [tireless/persistent] righteousness”.
• Anne Hutchinson’s heresy: her preaching of a covenant of grace issued in nothing less than “seventeenth century nihilism”.
• nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.
• Traditional accounts of Hutchinson and Williams are often apologetic—that is, they are admired for their religious stands.
• Morgan, on the other hand, while “scrupulously fair to Winthrop’s antagonists,” also points out that Winthrop had a social and religious experiment committed to his hands and that the success of that experiment required the suppression of those zealots.
• Morgan described Williams as “a charming, sweet‐tempered, winning man, courageous, selfless, God‐intoxicated….”
• Morgan found that Hutchinson was “nimbler of wit and subtler in theological argument than [Winthrop]….”
An infamous example of Puritan intolerance was the Salem witchcraft hysteria:
Prominent theories that have been forwarded in attempts to explain the phenomenon at Salem:
• The mass hysteria in Salem that contended the craze was triggered by the girls faking their symptoms and judges who simply hanged the accused witches so the state could confiscate their lands.
• Ergot chemical poisoning was a contributing factor in the Salem witch‐hunting.
• A fear of the devil that was inflamed by the Indian Wars and a distrust of those opposed to war was a contributing factor in the hunt and hysteria.
• Group psychology and/or the power of suggestion as a possible factor in the mass hysteria during the witch trials/hunts.
Rhode Island
March, 1640: Newport & Portsmouth federated; fearing future aggression from Puritan colonies, establishing a
General Court, consisting of a governor, deputy-governor, and 4 assistants.
Meanwhile, Roger Williams went to England to secure a charter from Parliament.
March, 1644: the new charter named “Free Charter of Civil Incorporation and Government” was issued.
Under the new charter colonists were given full power/authority to self-govern (the first free charter for a colony
granted by the English government).
1647: freemen from 4 original settlements (Providence, Portsmouth, Warwick, and Newport) met to accept
their new charter and to incorporate as the “Providence Plantations” under a colonial government (General
Court).
General Court consisted of a President and 4 Assistants from each town.
freedom and religion was granted by the General Court, based upon the principle of referenda and initiative.
July, 1663: The charter was re-confirmed by King Charles II and thename of the colony was changed to
Rhode Island (royal colony).
New Hampshire (1622‐1641: proprietary colony; 1641‐1679: joint stock—part of Massachusetts; 1679‐1776: royal colony
•
People from New Plymouth started to settle on the northern lands that became the colony of New Hampshire as early as 1623. •
Although, in 1607 a colony named Popham Plantation (a bit further north in present‐day Maine) was founded by the English near the mouth of the Kennebec River—it was abandoned after one winter.
•
The first successful English settlement in this region occurred when Plymouth colonist David Thomson began trading furs and fishing near the mouth of the Piscataqua River. A few years later the English government handed over a huge tract of land that included this area to two men: Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason. •
1629: The lands of New Hampshire and Maine are divided. •
Gorges, Sir Ferdinando ‐ the man who was granted the rights to the lands of Maine in the 1620s.
•
Soon the pair divided the land in half. •
The land to the north of the Piscataqua River that is today Maine went to Gorges. •
Maine was a huge region of land that was never a colony but remained part of Massachusetts from 1677 up until it achieved statehood in1820. •
Mason got all the land to the south and named it New Hampshire.
•
New Hampshire's first town called Strawberry Banke grew up along the river a few miles inland from the first English settlement. It became today's city of Portsmouth.
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Early leaders of New Hampshire: Benning Wentworth and John Wentworth.
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Reason(s) for settling in NH: emigrants from Massachusetts Bay colony seeking profit from trade and fishing.
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1638: John Wheelright and followers settled Exeter.
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1639: 35 Exeter settlers entered into an agreement for self government.
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Massachusetts, the largest colony in New England, controlled trading and fishing villages along the coast north of Boston.
•
1679‐1680: New Hampshire becomes a separate English royal colony with its own charter.
•
In 1680, the king of England made these settlements into a separate colony called New Hampshire. New Haven
• People from Separatist Plymouth, led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founded this colony in 1638, in the midst of the territory of Puritan Connecticut. • The New Haven colony came to be made up of a group of church‐ruled towns clustered on Long Island Sound and on Long Island itself. • 1662: King Charles II granted the Connecticut Colony an unusual charter that made it almost independent from England (in fact, he even gave them the right to elect their own governor). • Under this charter, the king commanded that all the lands held by the colony of New Haven be put under the control of the colony of Connecticut. • New Haven turned out to be a very short‐lived English colony, ending just 24 years after it began.
Connecticut
(1636‐1662: Self governing colony; 1662‐1776: Royal colony)
• The colony of Connecticut lay to the west of Rhode Island and was founded in 1636 at the same time Rhode Island was being founded. • Remember, before the English ever arrived in the region, a non‐English colony, New Netherland had, on and off, claimed this land west of the Connecticut River. In fact, in 1633, Dutch fur‐traders established an outpost here.
• That same year a Puritan from Massachusetts set up his own trading post nearby and the town of Windsor developed from it. Soon other settlers came from Massachusetts and started the town of Wethersfield to the south. As more English people arrived from Massachusetts the Dutch gave up their trading post on the river and English settlers built the town of Hartford there. It is now the capital of the state of Connecticut. In 1636 these three towns united to form the original (though unofficial/illegal) Connecticut Colony.
• Reason(s) for settlement: some dissatisfied groups from Massachusetts Bay emigrated in the hope of establishing a Puritan settlement; establish fur trade route.
• Economic activities: triangular trade
Early leader(s): Thomas Hooker (led one group into the Connecticut River Valley).
The son of John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay colony, also named John Winthrop (1606‐1676) was the long‐time governor of the colony of Connecticut. John Winthrop (1638‐1707) left Massachusetts to fight against the king in England's Civil War It was also he who he received the charter from King Charles II that united the Connecticut and New Haven colonies. Connecticut
• Thomas Hooker was a Puritan minister from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He believed that every congregation should be independent, be able to choose their own judges, and decide what powers they should have. These views clashed with those of the conservative ministers of Massachusetts. Whereas Winthrop believed he had the right to rule the colony as he saw fit being the elected governor, Hooker argued that an official like Winthrop might mean well but still govern badly and he wanted laws to limit the governor’s power. Thus a rivalry grew between Hooker and Winthrop.
• In 1636, Hooker moved his congregation of about 100 out of Massachusetts and founded the colony of Connecticut. A handful of Puritans already lived in the fertile Connecticut River valley. Taking the same path, Hooker and his followers drove their cattle, goats, and pigs along Indian trails that cut through dense forests before reaching the Connecticut River valley where they settled Hartford. Others soon followed Hooker into Connecticut, setting up many new towns along the river.
Connecticut
• There was trouble in Connecticut soon after it was founded when a brief war broke out. • Settlers attacked a group of Pequot Indians, believing their warriors had killed a colonial leader. As a result of the Pequot War, 600 native people including women and children were massacred. • From its early days as a colony, the people of Connecticut were governed by a code of laws called the Fundamental Orders, considered to be the first constitution for a government ever written in America (framed by representatives from Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield). Under the Fundamental Orders certain people other than Puritan ministers were allowed to have a voice in government, even at that, only white male landowners that belonged to the Puritan Congregational Church were allowed to vote, for in Connecticut there was no freedom of religion.
• Hooker had a strong influence on the drafting of the Fundamental Orders, the rules under which Connecticut was governed and the first written constitution in America. The government established under the Fundamental Orders was similar to that of Massachusetts, except that the power of the governor in particular and the government in general was limited. Hooker argued that the government’s power came only from “the free consent of the people”. The ideas of limited government and the consent of the governed are central to a democratic government in which the people hold power and exercise it by choosing representatives in free elections.
Connecticut
• 1662: Connecticut became a separate colony when the towns along the Connecticut River were joined and the king granted the colony a royal charter.
Daily life in the New England Colonies
Since New England was settled mostly by Puritans and their offspring, Puritan attitudes and beliefs influenced the way of life in the New England colonies. In addition, geography affected life in New England.
New England: A Land of Towns and Villages
• New England farm families lived in towns and went each day to their fields outside the towns (Puritans thought people should live in towns so that they could worship and take care of local matters as a community).
• Wooden houses with steep roofs lined both sides of the narrow streets of a town.
• Often, the second floor of a house was built over the street—this overhang gave the second floor rooms more space and protected the first‐floor walls from rain.
• At the center of most New England towns was the common: an open field where cattle grazed.
• Nearby the commons was the meetinghouse.
•
•
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The meetinghouse was the center of town life.
As one New Englander observed, the meetinghouse was “built by our own vote, framed by our own hammers and saws, and by our own hands set in the most convenient place for all.”
The meetinghouse served two purposes: (1) it was the church where Puritans met to worship; (2) it was used for town meetings.
Village of New Plymouth
New Plymouth
• Only seven years after coming to America, the colonists at New Plymouth had managed to overcome great difficulties and death to create an outpost of English civilization in the wilderness. • Not surprisingly, New Plymouth looked a lot like the villages from which the settlers had originally come. • Back in the 1620s, New Plymouth had no stores where groceries, medicines, or tools could be purchased; no hospital; no school(s); no inn(s)—unlike most English villages. • Having been completely made by hand, the many useful buildings that were built by 1627 all possessed a special beauty. • For example, they had constructed large barns for both cattle and hay, as well as a combination fort and meeting house, which was the largest and most important building in town. • The Meetinghouse served a dual purpose: (1) upstairs cannons stood ready to guard the town from attack, (2) downstairs there was a room where religious services and town meetings were held.
Reproduction of the Pilgrim fort at Plymouth Plantation Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Boston Common, Boston
• The oldest public park in the history of the USA, Boston Common's history goes back as far as 1634, when the area was designated a common pasture. It was also used for military purposes and for public hangings. The gallows were removed in 1817 and from 1830 on the grazing of cattle was forbidden. New Plymouth
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New Plymouth was totally surrounded by a high a wall of heavy logs. •
The village had a lot of footpaths but only two streets and people walked wherever they needed to go. •
In 1627, New Plymouth had over a dozen houses. •
Each one stood on its own little patch of ground and each had a garden where vegetables, herbs, and tobacco were grown. •
By modern standards, the houses of New Plymouth were pretty simple affairs with their thatched roofs and walls of hand‐split boards. •
At New Plymouth, the chimneys were almost always smoking because wood was burned for cooking and heating (large piles of wood were a common a sight as was piles of rubbish that stood outside each door). •
On the inside, the better houses had wooden floors, while the poorer ones had floors that were nothing more than hard‐packed dirt. •
Most houses were just one room furnished with a big bed where the adults slept, and, if they had a baby, a nearby cradle as well. •
Wealthier colonists often had a few treasured pieces of beautifully carved furniture that they had brought with them from Europe. •
Every house had a table and chairs, which gave people a place where they could sit down to eat their meals or enjoy an evening of conversation (in most houses nearby shelves held precious items such as books, plates, and glassware, while on the walls corn and onions could usually be found drying). •
The colonists really didn't have many possessions; mostly just what they needed to survive and to live the very simplest kind of civilized life.
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Brewster, William 1566‐1643 ‐ The main religious leader of the Plymouth colony for many years. William Brewster and William Bradford came from the same part of England.
Every house At New Plymouth was different. The home of the colony's long time governor, William Bradford, and his wife Alice looked like this:
Down the street from the Bradford home, Anthony and Jane Annable and their two daughters lived here in a type of house called a hovel, meaning that is partially below ground.
New Plymouth
• New Plymouth was basically an agricultural community; that was why much of what its 150 people did each day had something to do with farming. • The colony's farmlands stood outside the walls of the town. • Outside New Plymouth, grains like rye and barley were raised. • By far the most successful crop produced at New Plymouth was corn, a New World plant that had been unknown to them back in England. • American Indians had shown the colonists that the best way to grow corn was to use dead fish. Holes were dug. The fish were thrown in, covered with dirt, and then the seeds were planted on top; that way, when the fish rotted, they fertilized the corn plants and helped them grow. In the fall when the plants were fully‐grown, the corn was harvested. Back in the village, the women prepared the ears for drying by braiding them together. After the ears had completely dried, the kernels of grain were removed. Then they were stored and could be ground in to cornmeal whenever needed to make things like bread or porridge. The corn crops at New Plymouth were so good sometimes that extra corn was traded to the native people for valuable furs. These furs were shipped back to England and used to pay off the colony's debts. New Plymouth
• By 1627, the raising of cattle had also become a very important way of making a living because cattle could be easily sold to new colonists from England for high prices. Getting enough food for the animals was a lot of work since to make hay, acres of grass had to be slowly cut by hand, raked up, collected, and then prepared for drying. The dried hay was stored for the winter in the Dutch barn whose roof could be raised higher and higher as more hay was added. It took a good supply of hay not just for the cattle but also for the colony's goats, which were valuable as milk‐producers. Hay was also fed to the colony's sheep that were important for their wool from which cloth was made. The colony's pigs ate mostly scraps and acorns and didn't need hay. Even so, each autumn many of them were butchered and their meat salted for winter use.
New Plymouth
• As we have just seen, the Plymouth colonists were able to raise most of what they needed, but it was still not enough. That was why they also hunted wild game and collected shellfish and other creatures that lived in the bay so they always would have enough to eat. But besides providing food there were lots of other tasks that needed to be done each day to keep the colony running smoothly, ordinary things such as preparing a supply of fuel for the blacksmith shop, making lumber for new houses, digging postholes for fences, or drying reeds for thatching. Having to do these jobs kept the people of New Plymouth very busy six days a week. But Sunday was the exception, for on that day it was forbidden to work and everyone headed off to the meetinghouse to attend religious services. And so on that one special day that was given over to worship the entire village shut down and became an unusually peaceful place.
Connecticut girl’s description of her day’s chores (1775)
“Fixed gown…mended Mother’s Ridinghood, spun short thread, fixed two gowns for Welsh’s girls…spun linen, worked on cheese basket, [combed] flax whith Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece. Pleated and ironed, read a sermon of Dodridge’s, spooled a piece, milked the cows, spun linen, did 50 knots, made a broom of guinea wheat straw, spun thread to whiten, set a red dye,
[visited with]two scholars from Mrs. Taylor’s, I carded two pounds of whole wool [and then] spun harness twine and scoured a pewter.”
Religion
• Religion was at the center of Puritan life—the church enforced rules about behavior, clothing, and education.
• Attendance at church was required.
• Sunday services lasted all day:
• In the morning, the meetinghouse bell rang to call everyone to worship.
• At midday, people had an hour for lunch and then returned for the afternoon service.
19th Century New Englanders called this building a Meetinghouse.
This one was built in Sturbridge, Massachusetts in 1832.
Buildings like this were used every Sunday for worship by members of the local Congregational Church.
There were morning and afternoon services, each over two hours long.
Although Christmas and Easter services were very rare, there was always a special Thanksgiving morning service.
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The community’s voting citizens periodically gathered here for town meetings to decide on town affairs and to hold elections. The annual town meeting was most often held in the spring, with other meetings held as necessary. Town meetings could be noisy. Citizens met to discuss questions that affected the town, such as what roads to build, what fences to repair, how much to pay the schoolmaster
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The meetinghouse was also used at various times for concerts, lectures, and public meetings, including Independence Day celebrations.
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With its pillars and strong geometric façade, this meetinghouse resembles an Ancient Greek temple (In the 1830s buildings all over the U.S. were being constructed in the Grecian or Greek Revival style. Americans were also giving Classical names to their children and to newly founded communities, expressing their admiration for Greek architecture and the Greek traditions of democracy and self‐
government (Athens was the “cradle of democracy”).
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Inside, the meetinghouse is plain, unadorned, and unheated (sometimes during winter services, it was so cold inside the communion wine froze in the cups!).
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Descendants of the Puritans opposed the use of religious symbols and forms of decoration in houses of worship—thus no statues, crosses, stained glass, or carvings.
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There is no altar, but there is a prominent pulpit, where the minister preached, prayed, and read from the Bible.
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Both the red drapery behind the pulpit and the organ, which assisted with the Congregational singing were new features during the early 19th century.
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In church, Puritans sat on hard wooden benches while the wealthy sat apart in boxlike enclosures with high walls.
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In the 1600s, women were seated on one side of the house and men on the other while children had their own separate section.
Laws of colonial New England:
Laws of Colonial New England
Stocks and pillories were often used as punishments for drunkenness and swearing. People could be sentenced to spend a few days or hours in the stocks. Often, passersby would hurl filth/eggs/stones or mock the culprit who was uncomfortably confined in stocks or pillories. Stocks and pillories disappeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s as changing beliefs about crime(s) and punishment(s) caused fines and imprisonment in county jails to supplant public shaming for petty crimes. At Home With the Family
• During the long, cold New England winters, life at home centered around the huge kitchen fireplace, which covered an entire wall of the kitchen.
• Despite the fireplace, the room was cold because winds blew down the chimney
• Women and girls spent their mornings in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning, and doing other messy chores.
• Kitchens were workrooms and, unlike today, not a place for entertaining guests.
• In the 1600s, New Englanders sat on narrow benches at long tables to eat their meals. Instead of plates, they used trenchers, or blocks of wood hollowed out for food (two people shared a trencher). In the 1700s, people began to use pewter and/or china plates.
• At meals, children were supposed to eat quickly and remain silent (In some homes, children had to eat standing by the table or behind their parents who handed them food.
• In the bedrooms, thick drapes hung from four posts at each corner of a bed to help keep out the cold. Before going to sleep, people put a metal warming pan filled with hot coals in their beds to heat the sheets.
Women
• In New England (as well as the other colonies), women worked at many tasks from sunrise to sunset.
• Although a woman had few legal rights, she worked as an equal partner with her husband to provide for her family (women helped clear the land, plant and harvest crops, ground corn, skinned/cleaned animals, dried fruits and vegetables such as peppers, pumpkins, and apples, plucked goose feathers for pillows and mattresses, dipped candles by melting animal fat in a huge pot, then dipping candlewicks into the fat letting it cool on the wick (on a good day, a woman could make about 200 candles). Women spent a lot of time making clothes for the family from sheep wool or flax plants. Wool had to be dyed, greased, and combed before it was spun into thread, woven/knitted into cloth, socks, or mittens. Flax had to be cut, beaten, combed, and sorted before it was spun into linen thread.
• Outside the home, women worked as blacksmiths, tin‐makers, weavers, inn‐keepers, merchants, and barbers, nurses, midwives, and doctors.
Education in the Colonies
• New England led the way in education.
• Not a surprise, given that many Puritans were well educated and they believed that all people should learn to read so that they could study the Bible.
• Result: The Massachusetts assembly passed a law ordering all parents to teach their children “to read and understand the principles of religion.”
• 1647: Massachusetts law established the first public schools supported by taxes, requiring all towns with 50 families to hire a school teacher for their children while requiring any town with 100 families to set up a grammar school for boys to prepare them for college.
• Public schools were important because they allowed children from both poor and rich families to get an education.
• The first New England schools had only one room for students of all ages.
• Early schoolteachers were usually paid with furs, fruit, green vegetables, and/or corn since there were few coins in the colonies.
• In the Middle Colonies, churches and individual families set up private schools that charged fees—thus, only children of well‐to‐do families could afford to attend.
• In the Southern Colonies, people lived too far apart to bring children together in a school, so planters hired tutors, or private teachers, for their children. Sometimes, a school was set up in an old tobacco shed in the fields and children rode on horseback or rowed up a river to school.
A New England schoolbook, or primer, not only taught students to read but also gave moral lessons. From a book such as this one, children learned the alphabet, reading, and spelling. In school, they also studied arithmetic, history, and geography.
Education
• 1636: Harvard College founded in Massachusetts to train Puritan ministers. Harvard got its name from minister John Harvard, who, two years later, left his library to the college.
• 1701: Yale College founded by Puritans in Connecticut
• Before long, colleges also began training lawyers, doctors, and teachers.
New England economy
• The people of the New England colonies created the products upon which their economy was based. The region's economy was greatly helped by the Puritan's belief in what is called the Protestant work ethic. This was the belief that God had commanded six days of work a week, which if pursued with enough enthusiasm, was rewarded with wealth.
Agriculture
• Even though most hard‐working Puritans in New England farmed, agriculture played only a minor role in the region's economy in colonial times because the soil was too rocky and thin to support many large farms. • In New England, thousands of heavy rocks had to be cleared from the fields and piled‐up into stonewalls before any farming could be done. Today these ancient stonewalls are a very familiar sight all across the New England countryside.
New England economy
Wood
• Clearing fields for farming also involved removing trees, producing logs, which in turn were converted into lumber—lumber that was often exported to England where it was in short supply because the forests had been seriously depleted. Some wood was also used to produce the millions of barrels that were used in colonial times for shipping just about everything.
Fishing and Whaling
• In New England fishing and whaling were mainstays of the region's economy, and countless barrels both of whale oil and preserved fish were shipped from its ports.
• Pickled eels were a popular food in England. The Plymouth pilgrims ate eels at their first harvest feast and also exported them back to England.
New England economy
Manufactured Goods
• There were even a few factories in the New England colonies where manufactured goods were produced. Here at the Saugus Iron Works (above right), just outside of Boston, Puritans started the first successful iron‐making factory way back in 1646. It used waterpower as a source of energy (water wheel below below) to run the equipment such as lifting the huge drop hammer (below right) used to pound the iron into special shapes, and the bellows that kept the fires burning hot. Some of the iron made here was sent back to England but most was used in colonial blacksmith shops where it was turned into nails and tools.
Shipbuilding
• Iron products were sometimes used in shipbuilding, which was another big industry in New England. In colonial times large numbers of ships manufactured in New England plied the transatlantic trade routes and created a prosperous regional shipping trade.
New England was a land of forests.
To clear the forests, early settlers organized chopping bees.
The New England climate was quite harsh with short growing seasons.
The rocky soil was not very fertile, and early farming methods were crude—result: the land wore out, requiring farmers to clear new land every few years.
Most settlers in New England were subsistence farmers, working from dawn to dusk in the fields producing enough food for their own needs. Any surpluses were traded for tools, kettles, utensils, etc….
The long cold winters and deep snows sometimes cut towns off from each other.
In other ways, the snow helped farmers because surpluses could be taken by ox‐drawn sleds over packed snow‐covered roads.
New Englanders made good use of what limited resources were available:
Large forests provided lots of timer, as well as pitch and tar.
Fish was plentiful Furs were plentiful
The jagged coast offered many good harbors
Settlers in New England used the forests to supply timber to create a thriving shipbuilding industry
Lumber brought from New Hampshire was used by shipbuilders in major shipbuilding ports such as Boston, and later, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Massachusetts.
The tallest trees became masts.
England encouraged shipbuilding in the colonies as it needed ships for its navy and its own forests had been cut down years before.
The Plymouth colony exported lumber, furs and preserved fish.
Some New Englanders fished the coastal waters.
Fishermen hauled in huge catches (e.g. Captain John Smith hauled in 60,000 cod in just one month when he visited New England).
One New Englander reported: “I myself…have seen such multitudes of sea bass that it seemed to me that one might go over their backs without getting one’s feet wet.”
Catches included oysters over a foot long and lobsters over five feet.
When fish were running, fishermen did not stop to eat or sleep—a cook held food in front of the fishermen so that could eat while they worked.
After fishing boats returned to shore, fish were dried in the sun and sent to other colonies or to England.
In the 1600s, New Englanders began to hunt whales as they supplied settlers with products such as ivory and oil for lamps.
Whaling grew into a big business in the 1700s and 1800s.
The Dominion of New England
• 1680s: England tried to enforce the Navigation Acts, especially in Massachusetts, where smuggling was widespread.
• 1686: King James II combined all the colonies from Massachusetts to New Jersey into the Dominion of New England.
• King James II dismissed their assemblies and appointed Sir Edmund Andros to rule the colonies.
• Andros disliked the Puritans and he soon made himself very unpopular.
• Events in England helped the colonists:
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1688: King James II was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution—the new monarchs: William and Mary, ended the Dominion of New England while restoring elected colonial assemblies.
1689: William and Mary signed the English Bill of Rights which protected the rights of individuals, guaranteeing anyone accused of a crime the right to trial by jury and outlawing cruel punishments, while prohibiting a ruler from raising taxes and/or an army without Parliamentary approval (as English men an d women, colonists were protected by this bill).