Puritan New England

 From American Literature: A History. By Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen. (1. Beginnings to 1810).

Whatever the attitude of Native American peoples towards their Creation stories, the English Calvinists who landed in New England in 1620 as the vanguard of a mass migration of Calvinists to North America took their story very seriously indeed. For these fundamentalist Chistians, followers of the French reformer Jehan Calvin (1509-64, anclicized as John Calvin), every word of the Protestant Bible — swhich does not include the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Bible — was literally true. The Bible, the word of God, had absolute authority. These Puritans, as they were derogatorily called in England, were deeply unhappy with the Anglican Church, which admittedly had broken with Rome, but had retained the Catholic Church's hierarchical structure and mucho of its ceremonial trappings. It was, moreover, corrupt and theologically unsound. However, the Anglican Church was the national state church and the lives of so-called Dissenters were at the very least made uncomfortable. When in 1603 Queen Elisabeth I died and was succeeded by James I who started out by taking repressive measures against Dissenters, both Catholic and Protestant, many Puritans began to feel actively persecuted and those who had set up their own secret congregations outside the Anglican Church, which was of course against the law, had good reson to fear the authorities. And so, in 1608, a small group of threse so-called Separatists from Scrooby, a village in Northern England, decided to leave the Anglican Church and England altogether and to settle in the Dutch Republic, where they hoped to find religious freedom. They did, but found that the Republic's tolerance not only extended to other religions than Calvinism, but also to ways of life that they considered sinful and a serious threat to their children's salvation. This, coupled with difficult economic circumstances and a sense that they woul never really feel at home in the Netherlands, persuaded them to take the very drastic step of moving to North America. In 1620, having obtaind a charter under the tigle of the Plymouth Company and after various setbacks they set sail for Virginia in the Mayflower. Although the Separatists constituted a minority on board — this was, after all, a commercial venture backed by investors who weren't much interested in the motives of the emigrants whose enterprise they were funding — the Mayflower and the so-called Pilgrim fathers, a term used to describe the (male) Calvinists that it carried to America, would helped by the fact that the Mayflower was blown off course and was by adverse circumstances more or less forced to land in what is now Massachusetts, west of Cape Cod. Naming the place where they had landed Plymouth, they decided to stay even though their charter was for Virginia, much to the south. Realizing that they had settled without a proper legal basis, they drew up their own charter, the famous Mayflower Compact, which on the one hand took care to recognize the English king as their sovereign, but on the other hand established a Calvinist communitythat, exceptionally in those times, was governed by (male) majority rule and because of that came later to be seen as exhibiting a proto-democratic American spirit. 

Plymouth Plantation with its not exactly affluent settlers, never became a booking colony. But its existence on the Massachusetts coast became important when other, middle class and even upper middle class English Calvinists began to think about emigration. The large majority of those Calvinists had no desire to leave the Anglican Church, even if they rejected both the Anglican hierarchy and its teachings. But when after the death of James I in 1625 his son Charles I began to seek what seemed a rapprochement between the Anglican adn Roman Catholic churches, they, too, felt that Anglicanism and Cavinism were irreconcilable. Settling in North America offered a solution to their dilemma, since it allowed them to stay nominally with the Anglican Church, and thus within the law — important for people with property and other monetary interests — while de facto they were free to organize their own Calvinist congregations, a loose network of religious communities (local churches) that guarantees each congregation its indepeendence since there is no overarching and hierarchical organization. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church is centrally organized and its dignitaries are appointed by a hierarchical organization, with the Pope at its very summit, Calvinist congregations elect and appoint their own ministers and church functionaries (and occasionally send them packing, in cases of serious miscondunct or fundamental theological differences). And so non-Separatist Calvinists began to think of leaving England for the New World. The arrival in 1630 of a fleet of eleven ships, with over 700 emigrants, under the leadership of John Winthrop, established a bridgehead at Boston and in the next ten years more than 20,000 English Calvinists crossed the Atlantic to find religious freedom in the properly chartered Massachusetts Bay Colony. And so, with immigration continuing at a seady pace, in the late seventeenth century New England had a fairly homogeneous population, united by a vision of individual, congregational, responsibility and religious freedom — freedom for themselves, that is. As we will see, the Massachusetts Bay colonists had little patience with what from their point of view were dissenting views.

They did of course have virtually everything in common with their Separatist co-religionists at not too far-off Plymouth Plantation, with whom they almost immediately established friendly relations. The Puritan minister and historian Cotton Mather gives us in his Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702 a fascinating glimpse of that earliest period:

In the year 1632, the governor [Winthrop], with his pastor, Mr. Wilson, and some other gentlemen, to settle a good understanding between the two colonies, traveled as far as Plymouth, more than forty miles, through an howling wilderness [...]. The difficulty of the walk was abundantly compensated by the honorable, first reception, and then dismission, which they found from the rulers of Plymouth, and by the good correspondence thus established between the colonies.

Eventually, in 1691,  Plymouth Plantation and the Massachusetts Bay Colony would merge. 

By then