New England

Sources

Financial Backing. The survival of the Plymouth Colony planted in 1620 spurred others to think about settlements in the same area. In 1622 Thomas Weston gave up on Plymouth and financed another group at Wessagusset in Boston harbor. The next year the Dorchester Adventurers, a group of investors who were interested in the codfish industry, attempted to set up a permanent base on the mainland, but only a small settlement arose at Naumkeag. In 1628 the New England Company for a Plantation in Massachusetts-Bay received a grant that included some of the lands already given. John Endicott led fifty new colonists in June to the Naumkeag settlement, which would become Salem, Massachusetts. The most important group, The Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, received a royal charter in 1629. Many of its stockholders were Puritans, people who believed that the Church of England still had too much of Roman Catholicism in it and who wanted instead something simpler and purer like the earliest Christian congregations. Like the Pilgrims at Plymouth they were looking for a place to bring families and start life again without the laws which interfered with their form of worship. The company that financed them sympathized with their aims but also hoped to make a profit. While it might not have lost money, it did not make much either. The Massachusetts Bay Company charter omitted to specify where the company’s meetings were to be held. Since one of the underlying ideas was to provide a place where settlers were free of English control, the company decided to take the charter to America and hold meetings there, three thousand miles from royal intervention. This shrewd move allowed the governor and General Court of the company to become the political leaders of the colony.

LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE 1600S

Both men and women lived longer in New England than in the Chesapeake Bay area during the early colonial period. This table shows at what age a person on average would die if he or she reached various ages.

Reasons to Migrate. One of the early promoters of settlement was Robert Cushman, who had arrived in Plymouth aboard the Mayflower but then returned to England as the colony’s business agent. There he published a pamphlet outlining why English people, “here born and bred, and hath lived some years, may remove [themselves] into another country.” After assuring would-be settlers that God was not opposed to such a move he went on to say, “a man must not respect only to live and do good to himself, but he should see where he can live to do most good to others.” Immigrating to America was not only best then for oneself but also for others as well. First, it would bring Christianity to the Indians. Second, the land was not well used by the Indians and was empty, a belief common among Europeans who did not acknowledge that Indian land-use patterns were legitimate or adequate. Third, England was overpopulated. The towns had too many young tradesmen, “and the hospitals are filled with old laborers”; everywhere there were beggars. Fourth, England had become a land of religious contention and strife that brought neighbor against neighbor and consumed energies better spent converting the heathen. Fifth, times were hard, and it became more difficult not only to live but to leave some legacy to one’s children. In America things could be different:

To conclude, without all partiality: the present consumption [deadly illness] which groweth upon us here, whilst the land groaneth under so many close-fisted [stingy] and unmerciful men, being compared with the easiness, plainness [honesty and simplicity], and plentifulness in living in those remote places, may quickly persuade any man to a liking of this course, and to practice a removal—which being done by honest, godly and industrious men, they shall there be right heartily welcome.

There were many reasons to come to America, and Cushman appealed to them all. They were not mutually exclusive. People could leave England for religious freedom—at least for themselves—and in the hopes that they and their children would have a better economic future. They could migrate overseas in the pious anticipation of converting the Indians to Christianity. The decision became easier for some as the religious climate in England deteriorated and many ministers intent upon purifying the English Church were relieved of their congregations or imprisoned. Congregations looked around for a place where they and their ministers would be left in peace.

Great Migration. Between the first settlers to Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1640, some ten thousand English folk—men, women, and children—came to New England in what is known as the Great Migration. The leader of the Massachusetts migration was John Winthrop, a well-educated and wealthy country squire whose grandfather had purchased one of the abbeys confiscated by Henry VIII when he left the Roman Catholic Church. Winthrop sailed with the first fleet of seven hundred persons who arrived in Massachusetts in June—early enough to begin planting crops. These earliest arrivals spread out since they needed fresh water and realized that keeping that many people together led to poor sanitation and disease. Indeed, two hundred died the first

year, and another hundred returned to England. But others continued to come even though some of these went back as well. The Puritan migrants, like the Plymouth settlers, intended to settle permanently in America. This meant that they often came as families or if single were placed in family groups. For example, in 1635 the Reverend Joseph Hull sailed from Weymouth, England, for New England with his wife Agnes and his two sons, five daughters, two male servants, and one female servant. Hull was forty years old. Most of those on the ship with the Hull family were younger; many were children under fourteen, but both Richard and Elizabeth Wade were in their sixties, the oldest people on board. New England’s population as a whole was somewhat younger than old England’s, but it still had the full range from newborn to those in their eighties. The Great Migration also brought over those of different social and economic status. While the wealthiest and poorest elements of society generally did not leave England, there were some exceptions. As a wealthy man Winthrop was one of these exceptions, and he and the rest of those early migrants agreed that God never intended for men to be equal. The towns that the first immigrants established filled quickly, and those who came on later ships spread out. Rather than individuals going alone into the wilderness, these New Englanders formed themselves into corporate bodies which bought land from the Indians, petitioned the legislature for the right to become a town, and then moved there as households. Husbands, wives, and their children set up housekeeping immediately, and those men and women who were as yet unmarried boarded in the houses of those who were.

Ethnic Homogeneity. Once the English Civil War, which pitted Parliament and the Puritans against the king and the Church of England, began, migration to New England nearly ended. Many, although not all, had come to America partially to escape religious persecution. Now that Puritans controlled England, those still there felt no need to leave. Indeed, some in Massachusetts felt that they should return and help in the fight against the Crown. Those in New England tried to preserve their religious base and even hanged four Quakers who would not leave the colony. Massachusetts’s soil was relatively poor and its growing season short. Few newcomers arrived in New England, and most of its population growth would be due to high fertility and low mortality rates. Most of the eighteenth-century migrations did not occur in Massachusetts, and the colony boasted no sizable German or Scots populations. There were African slaves, however, although never in large numbers. In the cities they worked as laborers and as helpers in bakeries and storehouses. They also served aboard ships, and in the countryside they performed farm labor. African women worked as domestics. In 1776 Massachusetts, which then included Maine, had some 330,000 whites and maybe 5,200 blacks.

Connecticut. Not everybody who first came to Massachusetts stayed there. Some looked for fertile lands elsewhere, while others found Massachusetts’s brand of Puritanism not strict enough. In 1634 and 1635 Massachusetts migrants settled the Connecticut River valley and founded the three towns of Wethersfield, Windsor, and Hartford. The well-known Puritan minister Thomas Hooker brought some of his English congregation to the area in 1636. Three years later the three towns joined together as Connecticut and adopted the Fundamental Orders “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel.” Meanwhile in 1638 the minister John Davenport and the merchant Theophilus Eaton, with powerful friends in England, purchased land from the Indians along the coast and called their settlement New Haven. Finding the Puritans in Massachusetts some what lax, they adopted a government based on Mosaic Law. The two colonies coexisted, but in 1662 the Crown granted a charter that allowed Connecticut to incorporate New Haven against its will. Connecticut, without a major harbor, could not grow as did Massachusetts. Its population relied mainly on farming and raising livestock. Called “the land of steady habits,” it had neither the wealth nor the poverty of its neighbor. Most of its population came from Massachusetts and so shared its English orientation. An exception were the few African slaves that helped work the farms of the wealthy. In 1774 the white population numbered 191,000; nonwhites (including Indians) totaled 6,450.

A NEW ENGLAND TOWN COVENANT

Some of the earlier settlers, especially in New England, drew up contracts setting out some of the plans for their towns. The following excerpts are from the 1636 Articles of Agreement for Springfield, Massachusetts. They show not only that the town was to be built through attracting families but also that some in the town, already more wealthy, would be given special privileges to maintain that distinction. The agreement also makes clear that this town had yet to find a minister.

We whose names are underwritten, being by God’s providence engaged together to make a plantation at and over against Agawam upon Connecticut, do mutually agree to certain articles and orders to be observed and kept by us and by our successors, except we and every [one] of us for ourselves and in our own persons shall think meet upon better reasons to alter our present resolutions.

1ly. We intend by God’s grace, as soon as we can, with all convenient speed, to procure some Godly and faithful minister with whom we purpose to join in church covenant to walk in all the ways of Christ.

2ly. We intend that our town shall be composed of forty families, or, if we think meet after[ward] to alter our purpose, yet not to exceed the number of fifty families, rich and poor.

3ly. That every family shall have a convenient proportion for a house lot, as we shall see meet for everyone’s quality and estate.

4ly. That everyone that hath a house lot shall have a proportion of the cow pasture to the north of End Brook lying northward from the town; and also that everyone shall have a share of the Hassokey Marsh over against his lot, if it be to be had, and everyone to have his proportionable share of all the woodland.

9ly. That whereas Mr. William Pynchon, Jeheu Burr, and Henry Smith have constantly continued to prosecute this plantation when others fell off for fear of the difficulties, and [have] continued to prosecute the same at great charges and at great personal adventure: therefore it is mutually agreed that forty acres of meadow lying on the south of End Brook under a hillside shall belong to the said parties free from all charges forever.

Source: John Demos, Remarkable Providences: Readings in Early American History, revised edition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991).

Rhode Island. Like Connecticut, Rhode Island began its existence as various smaller settlements. Unlike Connecticut, or any of the other New England colonies, it served as the refuge for those who were unwelcome in those places. The Dutch called it the “latrina [sewer] of New England,” while Puritans labeled it “Rogues Island.” The most famous of Rhode Island’s founders were

Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, but they were not the only ones to find that their religious beliefs resulted in their banishment. Williams was a young minister who arrived in Massachusetts in 1631. Everybody, including Winthrop, admired him, but Williams soon developed unacceptable ideas, including the unlawfulness of taking land from the Indians and the sinfulness of interaction with those whom God had not saved. He was a separatist—one who wished to break from the Church of England—whose views finally led him to believe that the church and state should be completely separate because the state would corrupt the church. He maintained that since it was unclear who the saved actually were—he believed that he could be sure only of himself and his wife—maybe the church should be open to everybody. Informed by Winthrop that he was about to be arrested in 1635, he fled Massachusetts and lived for a winter with the Narraganset Indians. He bought land from them and was joined by some of his followers in founding the town of Providence.

A Different Heresy. Hutchinson’s beliefs were different from Williams’s but just as dangerous to Massachusetts. She held that some of Massachusetts’s ministers were preaching Arminianism, a gospel of works which said that people could influence God’s will about their salvation through good behavior. She also felt that those who were saints should not obey the laws that were made by those who might not be saints. Her final heresy came out in a lengthy trial when she claimed to know through direct revelation from God who was saved. Puritans did not believe this, and of course it was dangerous to have people claiming that this minister or that magistrate was not among the chosen few. Hutchinson and her followers were banished on 7 November 1637 and founded the town of Portsmouth soon afterward. Hutchinson did not stay in Portsmouth long because religious squabbles plagued the community. Controversy centered around William Coddington, a political leader and former Hutchinson advocate, and Samuel Gorton, already persona non grata in Plymouth and Massachusetts. Gorton believed in the divinity of all human beings and rejected both a church restricted to saints and any form of social hierarchy. His contentiousness proved too much for Coddington, who left in 1639 to found Newport. Gorton finally left in 1641 and established the town of Warwick, the last of the original Rhode Island towns, in 1643.

Charter. Roger Williams meanwhile traveled to England to secure a charter for this menagerie of religious and political misfits. A skillful politician, he succeeded both with the Puritan Parliament in 1644 and the newly restored Charles II in 1663. The charter gave Rhode Island more autonomy than other colonies and was the most tolerant in New England. Quakers found acceptance there, and a small Jewish community emerged.

Rhode Island never had a large ethnic population, but it was the most heterogeneous colony of the region. Newport was a cosmopolitan port town with Scots, French, Dutch, Germans, Portuguese, and Italians. Rhode Island also had the largest percentage of nonwhites in New England. Nevertheless, the numbers of people involved were small since Rhode Island contained only 1,214 square miles, about one-eighth the size of Massachusetts. In 1755 the colony had 36,000 whites and 4,700 blacks and Indians.

Sources

Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 47 (1990): 477–502;

Bruce C. Daniels, Dissent and Conformity on Narragansett Bay (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984);

Benjamin W. Labaree, Colonial Massachusetts: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979);

William D. Pierson, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988);

Robert J. Taylor, Colonial Connecticut: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979).