Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still others were content to remain within the structure of the national church, but set themselves against the doctrinal and liturgical vestiges of Catholic tradition, especially the vestments that symbolized episcopal authority.
As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed by their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life; or they were caricatured as licentious hypocrites who adopted a grave aspect but cheated the very neighbors whom they judged inadequate Christians.
They appeared in drama and satire as secretly lascivious purveyors of feigned piety. Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, in part because it was congenial to their growing discontent with mercantile economic restraints.
- Létincelle du désir (Harlequin Azur) (French Edition).
- The Political Discourse of Spatial Disparities: Geographical Inequalities Between Science and Propaganda (Contributions to Political Science).
- History of New England.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I , an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued. Many men and women were more and more forced to contend with the dislocations—emotional as well as physical—that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy. Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit. Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions especially the law with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities.
With the growth of a continental market for wool, land enclosure for sheep farming became an attractive alternative for large landowners, who thereby disrupted centuries-old patterns of rural communal life. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen, and vagabonds—a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.
One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in and thence, in , to the place they called Plymouth in New England. A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. But in practice they acted—from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home—exactly as the separatists were acting.
By the s their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about ten thousand persons, and through the inevitable centrifugal pressures of land scarcity within the borders of the swelling towns, ecclesiastical quarreling, and sheer restlessness of spirit, they had outgrown the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut , New Hampshire , Rhode Island , and Maine , and eventually beyond the limits of New England.
History of the Puritans in North America - Wikipedia
The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men. The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems, and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate— Quakers , Antinomians, Baptists—fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.
These sorts of disputes—which have a certain inevitability in any community where the quality of true faith is the only value worth disputing—make the history of American Puritanism seem a story of family rancor and, ultimately, of disintegration. But Puritanism as a basic attitude was remarkably durable and can hardly be overestimated as a formative element of early American life. Among its intellectual contributions was a psychological empiricism that has rarely, if ever, been exceeded in categorical subtlety. More Puritans continued to travel over from England and the number of colonies in New England expanded to a total of four: These colonies included many villages.
Each village consisted of houses, a community garden and a meetinghouse to host church services. Schools were also built, including the first American public school, called the Boston Latin School, and laws were passed requiring a school in every town with more than 50 inhabitants. In , the four colonies formed a military alliance, known as the New England Confederation , to help defend themselves from Native American attacks. In , the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried and executed an accused witch for the first time.
The accused was a midwife named Margaret Jones from Charlestown and she was hanged at Gallows Hill in Boston after she was accused by some of her patients. Diseases brought by the colonists started to ravage the Native American population. By , about 90 percent of the Native Americans living in New England died due to disease.
The Native Americans that survived the war either fled to the west or surrendered and were sold into slavery. While the Native American population declined, the number of colonists flourished. By , Boston had 4, residents. Both Foreign and Domestick. Colonists also declared war on local wildlife that they deemed a threat, such as the local wolf population, according to the book Disguised as the Devil: They became the pariah of the wilderness — dark, insidious predators biting at the heels of civilization.
They had a price on their heads from almost the moment of contact with the English colonists. Well nourished on deer meat, this thriving wolf population was unfortunately not discerning enough to know a domesticated animal from their wild prey.
When they began to add pork, beef, and mutton to their diet, it was not tolerated. In Salem Village was rimmed by a set of wolf traps. The last wolf bounty in Massachusetts was paid in the nineteenth century at the end of a successful eradication program that took over years to complete. The population of Boston continued to grow in the 17th and early 18th century, despite small-pox outbreaks in , and By , Boston had over 13, residents.
From the moment they landed in the New World, the Massachusetts Bay colonists worked tirelessly to establish a government that was not only efficient but one that also reflected their personal and religious ideals, according to the book Massachusetts: Mapping the Bay State Through History:. They moved quickly to establish their political and religious — and eventually, geographical — authority, with confidence based on their religious faith and the later economic success that they took as a sign of divine consent.
Religion and government were deeply intertwined in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and only the most devout Puritans could participate in governmental affairs, according to the book Politics and Religion in the United States:. The civil government had authority over everyone in the community, but was controlled by the minority of the population that had achieved full church membership. The Puritans were highly intolerant of other religions and came to the New World specifically to escape religious persecution and create their own community where they could live only among like-minded people.
However, as Quakers kept coming, harsher punishments were introduced for them, such as cutting off their ears or boring a hole in their tongues with a hot iron — and then banishing them. Between and , four Quakers were put to death by the Puritans. It appeared that the persecution would become even more deadly; however, in , King Charles II intervened and prohibited any corporal punishment of Quakers.
After the establishment of the English Commonwealth in , the colonists also declared Massachusetts a commonwealth, although they had no authority to do so.
The Cromwell government in control of England at the time did little to respond to this move. The list of violations included establishing religious laws, discriminating against Anglicans and Quakers and running an illegal mint. Andros immediately set to work proposing new taxes, pushing aside the General Council and forbidding town meetings. In April of , when word reached Boston that King James II had been overthrown by William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of , a mob formed in Boston and they quickly seized and ousted the royal officials and put the former Puritan leadership back in power.
Background
In , a compromise was made over the unpopular Dominion of New England and a new charter was issued. See the main articles on each of the colonies for information on their political and social history; this article focuses on the religious history of the Puritans in North America. The Puritans of New England evolved into the Congregationalist churches. Puritanism was a Protestant movement that emerged in 16th-century England with the goal of transforming it into a godly society by reforming or purifying the Church of England of all remaining Roman Catholic teachings and practices.
Like Puritans, most English Protestants at the time were Calvinist in their theology, and many bishops and Privy Council members were sympathetic to Puritan objectives. The major point of controversy between Puritans and church authorities was over liturgical ceremonies Puritans thought too Catholic, such as wearing clerical vestments , kneeling to receive Holy Communion , and making the sign of the cross during baptism. During the reign of James I , some Puritans were no longer willing to wait for further church reforms.
These Separatists left the national church and began holding their own religious meetings, with many migrating to the Netherlands in order to escape persecution and worship freely. Nevertheless, most Puritans remained within the Church of England. Under Charles I , Calvinist teachings were undermined and bishops became less tolerant of Puritan views and more willing to enforce the use of controversial ceremonies. New controls were placed on Puritan preaching, and some ministers were suspended or removed from their livings.
Increasingly, many Puritans concluded that they had no choice but to emigrate. This congregation was subject to ecclesiastical investigation, and its members faced social hostility from conforming church members. Fearing increasing persecution, the group left England and settled in the Dutch city of Leiden. They therefore organized a company which they named the Dorchester Company and in sailed to England seeking a patent from the London Company giving them permission to settle there.
They were successful and were granted the Sheffield Patent named after Edmond, Lord Sheffield, the member of the Plymouth Company who granted the patent.
History of the Puritans in North America
On the basis of this patent, Roger Conant led a group of fishermen to found Salem in , being replaced as governor by John Endecott in Other Puritans were convinced that New England could provide a religious refuge, and the enterprise was reorganized as the Massachusetts Bay Company. In March , it succeeded in obtaining from King Charles a royal charter for the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
During the crossing, Winthrop preached a sermon entitled "A Model of Christian Charity", in which he told his followers that they had entered a covenant with God according to which he would cause them to prosper if they maintained their commitment to God. In doing so, their new colony would become a " City upon a Hill ", meaning that they would be a model to all the nations of Europe as to what a properly reformed Christian commonwealth should look like. Most of the Puritans who emigrated settled in the New England area. However, the Great Migration of Puritans was relatively short-lived and not as large as is often believed.
It began in earnest in with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , and ended in with the start of the English Civil War, when King Charles I effectively shut off emigration to the colonies. Emigration was officially restricted to conforming churchmen in December by his Privy Council. Between and , over 13, men, women, and children sailed to Massachusetts. The religious and political factors behind the Great Migration influenced the demographics of the emigrants. Just a quarter of the emigrants were in their twenties when they boarded ship in the s, making young adults a minority in New England settlements.
The New World Puritan population was more of a cross section in age of English population than those of other colonies. This meant that the Massachusetts Bay Colony retained a relatively normal population composition. In the colony of Virginia, the ratio of colonist men to women was 4: By contrast, nearly half of the Puritan immigrants to the New World were women, and there was very little intermarriage with Indians. The women who emigrated were critical agents in the success of the establishment and maintenance of the Puritan colonies in North America.
Success in the early colonial economy depended largely on labor, which was conducted by members of Puritan families. The struggle between the assertive Church of England and various Presbyterian and Puritan groups extended throughout the English realm in the 17th Century, prompting not only the re-emigration of British Protestants from Ireland to North America the so-called Scotch-Irish , but prompting emigration from Bermuda , England's second-oldest overseas territory.
Roughly 10, Bermudians emigrated before US Independence. Most of these went to the American colonies, founding, or contributing to settlements throughout the South, especially. Many had also gone to the Bahamas , where a number of Bermudian Independent Puritan families, under the leadership of William Sayle , had established the colony of Eleuthera in Emigration resumed under the rule of Cromwell, but not in large numbers as there was no longer any need to "escape persecution" in England.
In fact, many Puritans returned to England during the war. Once in New England, the Puritans established Congregational churches that subscribed to Reformed theology. The Savoy Declaration , a modification of the Westminster Confession of Faith , was adopted as a confessional statement by the churches in Massachusetts in and the churches of Connecticut in The Cambridge Platform describes congregationalist polity as practiced by Puritans in the 17th century.
Every congregation was founded upon a church covenant , a written agreement signed by all members in which they agreed to uphold congregational principles, to be guided by sola scriptura in their decision making, and to submit to church discipline. The right of each congregation to elect its own officers and manage its own affairs was upheld. There were two major offices: There were two types of elders.
Jamestown Founded in 1607
Ministers , whose responsibilities included preaching and administering the sacraments , were referred to as teaching elders. Large churches would have two ministers, one to serve as pastor and the other to serve as teacher. Prominent laymen would be elected for life as ruling elders. Ruling elders governed the church alongside teaching elders, and, while they could not administer the sacraments, they could preach. The duties of deacons largely revolved around financial matters. Other than elders and deacons, congregations also elected messengers to represent them in synods church councils for the purpose of offering non-binding advisory opinions.
The essential Puritan belief was that people are saved by grace alone and not by any merit from doing good works. At the same time, Puritans also believed that men and women "could labor to make themselves appropriate vessels of saving grace" [emphasis in original]. This doctrine was called preparationism , and nearly all Puritans were preparationists to some extent.
The first stage was humiliation or sorrow for having sinned against God. The second stage was justification or adoption characterized by a sense of having been forgiven and accepted by God through Christ 's mercy. The third stage was sanctification , the ability to live a holy life out of gladness toward God. Puritans believed churches should be composed of "visible saints" or the elect. To ensure that only regenerated persons were admitted as full members, New England churches required prospective members to provide a conversion narrative describing their personal conversion experience.
Members' children were considered part of the church and covenant by birth and were entitled to baptism. Nevertheless, these children would not enjoy the full privileges of church membership until they provided a public account of conversion. Church services were held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, and there was usually a mid-week service. The ruling elders and deacons sat facing the congregation on a raised seat. The pastor then preached for an hour or more, and the teacher ended the service with prayer and benediction.
In churches with only one minister, the morning sermon was devoted to the argument interpreting the biblical text and justifying that interpretation and the afternoon sermon to its application the lessons that could be drawn from the text for the individual or for the collective community. For Puritans, the family was the "locus of spiritual and civic development and protection", [22] and marriage was the foundation of the family and, therefore, society.
Unlike in England, where people were married by ministers in church according to the Book of Common Prayer , Puritans saw no biblical justification for church weddings or the exchange of wedding rings. While marriage held great religious significance for Puritans—they saw it as a covenant relationship freely entered into by both man and wife—the wedding was viewed as a private, contractual event officiated by a civil magistrate either in the home of the magistrate or a member of the bridal party.
According to scholars Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis, some historians argue that Puritan child-rearing was repressive.