A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 1: Colonialism and NationhoodPart 5: The Massachusetts Bay Colony

JOHN SMITH: A RETURN TO NORTH AMERICA

John Smith returned home to England after he left Jamestown in 1609. But in 1614, he made another voyage to North America.

Smith surveyed the coasts of present-day Massachusetts and Maine, and gave the name New Plymouth to a spot on the southern tip of Cape Cod.

A PURITAN EXODUS FROM ENGLAND

• In the early 1600s, a group of English Protestants known as the Puritans experienced what they saw as religious persecution.

• The Church of England is a Protestant institution that receives official support from the English Government. It separated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 and the Puritans wanted it to be purged of all remaining traces of Catholicism.

• When King James I did not agree to the Puritans’ demands, many of them decided to separate from the church by leaving England.

WHAT DID THE PURITANS BELIEVE?

• The Bible should be interpreted and followed literally.

• Human beings are corrupt and wicked and must therefore work for the glory of God in order to receive salvation.

• Physical or worldly pleasure is a distraction from glorifying God.

• These sorts of distractions are the work of the Devil, so that anyone who offers them to you is one of the Devil’s servants. Non-believers are ‘heathen’ and thus also serve the Devil.

WHAT DID THE PURITANS BELIEVE?

• Women should be subservient to men in all respects of life.

• Men should be subservient to their elders, particularly elders in positions of church authority.

• There should be no distinction between, or separation of, the church and the government.

• The first Puritans left England to settle anew in Holland, but the difficulties they faced there caused them to try again in North America. They left aboard a ship called the Mayflower.

THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT (1620)

• Established a Puritanical governing authority for the Plymouth settlement.

• Established this governing authority by majoritarian approval, by an affirmative vote of a majority of all those deemed eligible to vote, without any input from King James I.

• Signed by forty-one of the 101 passengers on the Mayflower.

• Gave the governing authority a way to ensure the peace and stability of the settlement.

THE GROWTH OF THE PLYMOUTH COLONY

A colony usually grows from several scattered settlements. Other settlements in the Plymouth Colony were founded by those who left Plymouth itself to settle elsewhere in the area.

THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY (1628)

Founded by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, this Puritan colony was centered around the ports of Salem and Boston. It attracted about 20,000 migrants to America over the next decade.

JOHN WINTHROP: MINISTER AND GOVERNOR

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

One of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the lawyer John Winthrop led waves of migrants to the colony from 1630. He was an authoritarian figure who governed the colony for most of its first twenty years.

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

In his famous sermon‘A Model of Christian Charity,’ quoted above, Winthrop laid out a vision of America as a blessed land whose people were favored by God and were therefore special, exceptional, in comparison to others.

JOHN WINTHROP: MINISTER AND GOVERNOR

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 1: Colonialism and NationhoodPart 5: The Massachusetts Bay Colony