New England Settlements
By David Saville Muzzey, 1920
The narrative of early America unfolds with distinct chapters in the North and South. While the "Old Dominion" of Virginia was taking root around Jamestown, a vastly different story was being written in the northern territories granted to the Ferdinando Plymouth Company. This venture, initiated in the same year as Jamestown’s founding (1607), met with early hardship. A harsh winter at the mouth of the Kennebec River in present-day Maine proved too much for the initial settlers, who quickly returned to England.
Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the governor of Plymouth, emerged as the driving force behind the company. Undeterred by the setback of 1607-1608, he demonstrated a tenacity reminiscent of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1614, Gorges commissioned Captain John Smith, a key figure in the Jamestown settlement, to explore the coast of "northern Virginia," as the Plymouth grant was then known. Smith meticulously charted the coastline from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, christening the area "New England." His map of America included names that would become synonymous with the region: Cambridge, the Charles River, Plymouth, and Cape Ann. By 1620, Gorges successfully lobbied the king for a new grant, transferring the territory to a council of nobles and gentlemen known as the Council for New England.
Just weeks after the establishment of this council, a group of approximately 100 men and women, later immortalized as the Pilgrims, arrived aboard the Mayflower at Plymouth. Their journey was not orchestrated by the Council or the London Company. Their motivations were far removed from the pursuit of gold or a Northwest Passage. They sought to establish homes in the wilderness, driven by a profound desire to worship God according to their own conscience. These "Independents" had broken away from the Church of England, finding its rituals and structures, such as vestments, altars, and ceremonies, akin to the "idolatrous" practices of Roman Catholicism, which England had already rejected.
In the 17th century, religion was intricately woven into the fabric of the state, not merely a matter of personal choice. Rulers imposed uniformity in belief and worship, viewing it as essential for maintaining their authority. Individuals who held firm convictions that defied the sovereign’s dictates faced stark choices: submission to persecution and martyrdom, armed rebellion, or withdrawal to a place beyond the king’s reach.
Many separatist congregations sought refuge in Holland beginning in 1608, but they longed to maintain their English identity and feared assimilation into Dutch culture. Resolving to venture to the New World, they secured permission from the London Company to settle in America. However, navigational errors led them to the shores of Cape Cod, where they landed on December 21, 1620.
Although lacking legal claim to the land or formal authorization to establish a government, the Pilgrims gathered in the Mayflower‘s cabin before disembarking and pledged to create a self-governing body and abide by its laws. This act represented the first instance of complete self-government in the nation’s history. In contrast, the assembly convened at Jamestown the previous year was convened under the authority of the Virginia Company in England.
The winter of 1620-1621 was a trial by fire for the new arrivals. Yet, when the Mayflower prepared to return to England in the spring, none of the colonists chose to leave. America had become their home.
They had embarked on a mission to conquer the wilderness or perish in the attempt, a sentiment encapsulated in the resolute words of one of their leaders: "It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage." The colony expanded slowly, never receiving a formal charter from the king. Consequently, its government, conducted through the democratic institution of the town meeting, remained technically illegal in the eyes of the English court. Nevertheless, its modest size and peaceful nature allowed Plymouth to persist without interference from the Stuart monarchs.
The colony’s political significance may have been limited, but its moral and religious impact on New England was considerable. The Pilgrims proved that unwavering dedication and hard work could overcome the challenges of the Massachusetts coast’s harsh soil and climate, and that unwavering devotion to an ideal could transform the wilderness into a home.
The colony bravely participated in the defense of New England against Native American attacks, enduring the destruction of half its towns during King Philip’s War in 1675. In 1691, Plymouth was annexed by the neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony, a more powerful entity.
While Plymouth grew at a measured pace, Gorges and other members of the Massachusetts Council for New England made several attempts to establish additional colonies in the New World. By March 1629, approximately 50 scattered settlements had sprung up along the shores and on the islands of Boston Harbor.
Massachusetts
In 1628, a group of Puritan gentlemen obtained a land grant from the Council, initiating the largest and most consequential English settlement in America: the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The following year, they secured a royal charter from King Charles I, forming them into a political entity governed by a governor, a deputy governor, and eighteen "assistants," all elected by the company’s members.
King Charles I, increasingly influenced by figures who favored suppressing independent thought and demanding subservience to the crown, saw little difference between Separatists and Puritans. He was as eager to rid England of the latter as his father had been to expel the former. He granted the Massachusetts charter not as a favor, but as a form of exile. He failed to anticipate that he was laying the groundwork for a virtually independent state in his distant American territory.
In 1629, Charles I dissolved Parliament and initiated his eleven-year period of absolute rule. At this juncture, several leading members of the Massachusetts Company decided to emigrate to America themselves, taking their charter with them. In 1630, they dispatched 17 ships carrying nearly 1,000 colonists to Massachusetts.
John Endicott established the company’s first settlement at Salem in 1628. However, when the main body of emigrants arrived under the leadership of John Winthrop two years later, the colony was relocated to a narrow strip of land a few miles to the south, known to the Native Americans as Shawmut. This site was renamed Boston, after the Puritan fishing village in eastern England where John Cotton served as pastor. Winthrop and Cotton were the colony’s leading figures during its initial two decades: Winthrop, a refined gentleman from southern England, served almost continuously as governor; Cotton, a scholar and powerful preacher, acted as the guiding influence on the Massachusetts conscience. The Puritans, like the Separatists, objected to what they perceived as "the idolatrous remnants of papacy" in the English Church, but unlike the Separatists, they advocated for reforming the Church from within rather than abandoning its communion.
The Massachusetts Puritans aimed to create a colony where they could practice worship free from what they considered "the idolatrous remnants of popery" within the English Church. However, they did not extend refuge to all forms of religious expression. Others could reside in the colony as long as they did not challenge the authorities, disrupt the ministers, or discredit the Puritan system of worship and government. Nevertheless, they were required to contribute to the support of the Church and submit to its pervasive oversight of both public and private life. Soon, the Colony of Massachusetts Bay became the core of America’s largest and most significant English settlements.
Between 1630 and 1640, the growing tyranny of King Charles and the persecutions led by Archbishop Laud of Canterbury drove another 25,000 refugees to the new colony. "God sifted a nation," wrote a Massachusetts governor half a century later, "in order that he might send choice grain to this wilderness." Archbishop Laud derisively referred to the Puritans he forced into exile as "swine which rooted out God’s vineyard."
The king, preoccupied with his conflict with Parliament, was likely unaware of the charter’s removal from England until, in 1634, Archbishop Laud’s persecution of the Puritans prompted him to demand its return. The company’s English representatives politely informed the king that the charter was in America, beyond the reach of his officers. The American colony politely declined to return the charter. Before the king could resort to force, he became embroiled in a war with his Scottish subjects. Consequently, the Massachusetts Company avoided the fate that had befallen the London Company’s colony of Virginia ten years prior.
The substantial immigration to Massachusetts had several crucial political consequences. It alleviated the colony’s immediate fear of attacks by Native Americans; it enabled the authorities to quickly expel various groups of settlers established by agents of Gorges and other claimants to Massachusetts lands under the grants of the Council for New England. Finally, it led to a representative form of government.
In 1634, the towns demanded the right to elect their own representatives to participate in lawmaking. More liberal members of the colony protested the restriction of representation to "freemen" alone. However, the Puritan leaders remained steadfast in their determination to exclude from government anyone suspected of heresy or moral laxity. "A democracy is no fit government either for Church or the commonwealth," declared Cotton, and even the tolerant John Winthrop defended the exclusive Puritan system.
This "Puritan aristocracy," which many colonists found oppressive, inevitably led to both voluntary and forced exile from the territory governed under the Massachusetts charter. Roger Williams, the pastor of the church in Salem, espoused doctrines that were deeply objectionable to the Puritan governors. He argued that the land on which they had settled belonged to the Native Americans, regardless of the king’s charter; that the state had no authority over a person’s conscience; and that requiring a man to take an oath of citizenship encouraged lying and hypocrisy. As a result, the civil authorities banished Williams from the colony in 1636. After a difficult journey southward through the forests in midwinter, moving from one Native American tribe to another, he arrived at the head of Narragansett Bay, where he purchased land from the Native Americans and established a settlement that he named "Providence," in recognition of God’s guidance.
Rhode Island
Other dissenters from Massachusetts followed Williams, and soon four towns were founded on the mainland around Narragansett Bay, forming what would become the State of Rhode Island. In 1643, Roger Williams secured recognition for his colony from the English Parliament, which had driven King Charles from London the previous year. The small colonies of Rhode Island and Providence were notable for two things: democracy and religious freedom. Election by ballots was introduced, and the government was "held by free and voluntary consent of all the free inhabitants." Here, all men were free to "walk as their conscience persuaded them, everyone in the name of his God."
The scornful orthodox brethren in Massachusetts referred to Rhode Island’s population as "the Lord’s debris." Others facetiously remarked that "if a man had lost his religion, he would be sure to find it in some Rhode Island village."
Massachusetts further demonstrated its animosity towards the dissenting settlers by refusing to admit Rhode Island into the confederation of New England colonies, which was formed in 1643 for protection against Native Americans. It was not until the colony received a royal charter from King Charles II in 1663, recognizing its boundaries and its self-elected government, that it was securely established. Roger Williams deserves recognition as one of the most admirable figures in colonial history for his unwavering commitment to principles of freedom that were far ahead of his time.
Connecticut
In the same year that Massachusetts banished Roger Williams, the magistrates permitted citizens of Cambridge, Dorchester, Watertown, and other places to relocate themselves and their properties to what would become the State of Connecticut. These emigrants were drawn by accounts of the Connecticut Valley’s fertile lands and repelled by the extreme rigidity of Massachusetts’ "aristocracy of righteousness," which stifled the free expression of opinion.
Led by their pastor, Thomas Hooker, they traversed the wilderness between the Charles and Connecticut Rivers, driving their cattle before them and transporting their household goods in wagons, becoming the first heralds of the westward expansion that would continue for two centuries until reaching the Pacific Ocean. The Connecticut emigrants founded the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield.
In 1639, they adopted their "Fundamental Orders," the first written constitution in America and the first in modern history drafted by the free founders of a state. It did not require church membership as a prerequisite for voting, and the clergy wielded less influence over political affairs than their counterparts in Massachusetts. Despite conflicts with Massachusetts, which still claimed jurisdiction over them, and with the Dutch, who had expanded from the Hudson River to the Connecticut River, the colonists of the river towns were strong enough to defend their land and government.
Following the extermination of the dangerous Pequot Native Americans in 1637, the colony experienced peace and prosperity. In 1662, it was granted a charter by King Charles II, extending its territory westward to the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean).
John Davenport, a stern Puritan, established a third seceding colony from Massachusetts when he led his congregation from Boston to the shores of Long Island Sound and founded the settlement of New Haven in 1638. The colony, which soon grew to encompass several towns, was even more rigidly Puritan than Massachusetts.
The founders hoped to combine their piety with worldly success by turning New Haven into a major commercial port. However, the proximity of New York’s superior harbor rendered such ambitions futile from the outset. Instead of becoming an independent commercial colony, New Haven and its neighboring towns found themselves, to their dismay, incorporated into Connecticut by the royal charter of 1662. They vehemently protested the consolidation but were ultimately forced to yield, leading to the demise of the New Haven colony in 1665.
The expansion of colonies southward and westward from Massachusetts was counterbalanced by Massachusetts’ absorption of settlements to the north and east. Ferdinando Gorges, the driving force behind these settlements, was a staunch opponent of Massachusetts. As a courtier, he opposed the reforming party in Parliament, and as a devout member of the Church of England, he despised the entire Puritan movement.
He obtained a royal charter in 1639, making him the proprietor of Maine. He worked diligently to attract staunchly anti-Puritan settlers to his province and to New Hampshire, the neighboring province of his fellow courtier and churchman, John Mason. Based on the charter of 1629, Massachusetts, whose territory extended from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles River, laid claim to these settlements. It annexed the New Hampshire towns in 1641-1643 and, after a protracted dispute over the Maine towns, eventually purchased the claims of Gorges’ heirs for £1250 in 1677. King Charles II was outraged by the transaction. In 1679, he separated New Hampshire from Massachusetts and appointed a royal governor, but Maine remained part of the Bay Colony, and later the Bay State, until 1820.
Massachusetts’ dominance over the other New England colonies was complete, at least until Connecticut and Rhode Island received their charters. It surpassed them all in population and wealth. The New England Confederation, formed in 1643 by Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, primarily for defense against Native Americans and the Dutch, was theoretically a league of four equal states, each with two members holding equal votes in the governing council. However, Massachusetts’ opposition kept Rhode Island out of the confederation. In 1653, when the question of declaring war on the Dutch colony of New Netherland arose, the two Massachusetts councilors vetoed the unanimous vote of the other six.
The latter half of the seventeenth century revealed the colony’s character in its most uncompromising and unappealing aspects. The magnanimous and courteous Winthrop died in 1649 and was succeeded as governor by a rigid and intolerant Puritan "saint" named John Endicott.
Adherence to Puritan ideals reached a level of fanatical cruelty. Witch hunts began in Connecticut in 1647. Quakers were hanged on Boston Common in 1660 for the crime of professing the "inner light," or special divine revelation. Furthermore, in 1692, 19 people, mostly women, were hanged in Salem Village for witchcraft, or secret alliance with Satan, based on flimsy evidence from excitable children and hysterical women.
Politically, the growing power of Massachusetts’ magistrates aroused the king’s suspicions. The colony banished Episcopalians, minted its own money, omitted the king’s name in its legal documents, and violated his laws governing trade. When he sent commissioners in 1664 to investigate these issues, they were insulted by a constable in a Boston tavern. Their chairman wrote back, "Our time is lost upon men puffed up with the spirit of independence." Edward Randolph, dispatched a few years later as a revenue collector, complained that "the king’s letters are of no more account in Massachusetts than an old number of the London Gazette." Finally, King Charles II, his patience exhausted, had the Massachusetts charter revoked in his court in 1684, and the colony became a royal province.
However, before the great Puritan colony entered its complex eighteenth-century phase under royal governors, it played a vital role in overthrowing the tyranny that the last Stuart King, James II, made unbearable for freeborn Englishmen. In 1686, James united New York, New Jersey, and New England into a single large province, intended to serve as a strong defense against French and Native American incursions from the north. The King also believed that his governor should rule absolutely, unconstrained by colonial charters or assemblies. He appointed Sir Edmund Andros as governor of this vast province stretching from Delaware Bay to Nova Scotia. Andros was a loyal and honest man but a harsh, inflexible governor determined to execute his royal master’s instructions to the letter. He attempted to seize the charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island but was thwarted by local patriots in both colonies. Incensed by this resistance, Andros tightened his grip on Massachusetts. He dismissed the assembly, abolished the colonial courts, administered justice himself, charged exorbitant fees, imposed strict press censorship, introduced Episcopal worship in Boston, denied the colonists fair and speedy trials, and levied a land tax on them without the consent of their deputies.
The colony’s patience was nearly depleted when the welcome news arrived in April 1689 that King James II had been ousted from the English throne. The inhabitants of Boston immediately responded with a popular uprising against James’s detested servant. Andros, like his master, attempted to escape the wrath of the people he had so grievously wronged, but he was captured, imprisoned, and later sent back to England. The town meeting of Boston assumed control of the government, appointed a committee of safety, and dispatched envoys to London to ascertain the wishes of the new king, William of Orange. Thus, the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 in Massachusetts was indeed a component of the English Revolution of 1688 and a harbinger of the larger Revolution that would be initiated 86 years later by the descendants of the men who expelled Andros.
King William III granted a new charter to Massachusetts in 1691. Connecticut and Rhode Island quietly resumed governance under their old charters, retaining them as state constitutions well into the nineteenth century.
The new Massachusetts charter stipulated the union of Plymouth and Maine with the Bay Colony under a royal governor. It dismantled the old Puritan regime by guaranteeing freedom of worship to all Protestant sects and establishing property ownership, rather than church membership, as the basis for political rights. Under this charter, the Massachusetts colony persisted until the American Revolution.
By David S. Muzzey, 1920. Compiled and edited by Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated January 2023.
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About the Article: This article was, for the most part, written by David Saville Muzzey and included in a chapter of his book, “An American History,” published in 1920 by Ginn and Co. However, the original content has been heavily edited, truncated in parts, and additional information added.