Welcome to our third video in the series. In this lecture, we will focus on the pilgrims who settled Plymouth and the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay. We will also discuss the concept of religious freedom and look at the colonies that did offer religious freedom, or at least religious toleration. The pilgrims and the Puritans did not support religious freedom, nor toleration.
Instead, they wanted their communities to be the same religion, the same sect of Protestant Christianity. Even other Protestants were not welcomed, as we will see what the founding of Rhode Island. The Pilgrims and Puritans, central to the myths about the founding of America, settled in the region known as New England. The Pilgrims arrived in 1620 in the Plymouth Colony, the area south of Massachusetts Bay, which is where the Puritans would settle just over a decade later.
The Plymouth Colony would be absorbed by the then larger Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1691. Today the areas are part of the state of Massachusetts. Who were the Puritans and Pilgrims? They were both known as Puritans in England before they left.
The main difference between these two groups is that the Pilgrims, who arrived about a decade before the Puritans, were known as separating Puritans. They wanted to completely break from the The Massachusetts Bay Puritans, on the other hand, were non-separating Puritans. They didn't want a fully break from the Church of England.
Instead, they wanted to set up a community that would serve as a model for England and hopefully the rest of the world to follow. Although it didn't happen, it helps to explain the difference between these two groups. The Plymouth Pilgrims want to separate from the Church of England, and the Massachusetts Bay Puritans do not want to separate from the Church of England.
So it might help if we just stood back for a minute and look at the broader picture of Christianity. So within Christianity, we have three main branches, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. So Catholic was original, and then Eastern Orthodox broke off from it.
And then by 1517, we get the Protestant Reformation, the beginning of Protestant sex. Well, after that, as the Protestant Reformation gets going, we get the creation of more sex so yes we had had lutheran martin luther kicked the whole thing off but then you're going to get calvinists and anglicans and other sex what's important for us here is we're focused on the anglicans and the calvinists so the anglican church is the church of england and it was started because henry viii the gentleman on the left decided that he wanted a divorce from his wife catherine of aragon in order to marry anne boleyn Well, the Roman Catholic Church would not grant him an annulment so that he could annul his marriage to Catherine and marry Anne. So what he did was he broke from the church and he decided that he was going to be the head of the Church of England. And once he's the head of the Church of England, he could get his divorce from Catherine and marry Anne. So this is how the Church of England starts.
The problem is, at least for the Calvinists, is they think it looks... Very similar to the Catholic Church still. There's still the stained glass cathedrals. There's still the same rituals during mass. There's still the images of saints or iconography pictured throughout the cathedrals.
And so what the Puritans wanted was to purify the Church of England. They wanted to strip it of all that ornateness of all those images. And they wanted to turn to plain services in common meeting houses. They wanted to get rid of sacraments.
They wanted it to be... based more on contract. So this is who the Puritans were protesting against, right?
The Anglicans, who they thought seemed a little too Catholic. The State Church of England was the Church of England, which meant that tax money went to support the church, and under James I, dissenters could face imprisonment for disregarding the church and holding services in private. The government thought that such dissent would lead to anarchy. A small group of dissenters who lived in northern villages continued to hold their own congregational services in private. William Brewster, one of the dissenting leaders, had been influenced by dissenters he met while away at Cambridge.
He had also traveled to the Netherlands, where freedom of religion existed. Upon his return, he helped spread the dissenting practice of congregationalism through his home area. As the congregants met in private, one of the archbishops found out and had them arrested.
A number of the dissenters soon fled to the Netherlands. Although the pilgrims enjoyed religious freedom in the Netherlands, a number of them disliked the tolerance of the Netherlands, which offered many worldly amusements and diversity of beliefs. For the pilgrims, they wanted to avoid the world of sin completely. In addition, they were also concerned about learning the Dutch language and about their children becoming too Dutch. Those who fled England to the Netherlands had been fleeing to practice their own religion.
But those who fled the Netherlands and settled in Plymouth were not fleeing oppression. They were not persecuted when they set sail on the Mayflower. They set sail to create a religious commune in which they would work together to build a godly community. The Thanksgiving story gives us the image of these peaceful pilgrims, yet the reality that the historical record paints is a darker story.
The pilgrim settlement is part of a beginning, the beginning of what Dr. Berner-Balin calls The Barber's Years in his recent book. Ballen is one of the top scholars of early American history. He taught at Harvard for his entire academic career and remained active with publishing during his retirement. His books have been landmark studies and must-reads for early American students.
And his newest book on The Barber's Years is once again a landmark study based on thousands of sources. His research is meticulous. The painting featured on the slide references the Pilgrim's Massacre of the Pequots. In 1637, part of the war between the Pequot natives and the Pilgrims. The Pequots took part in intertribal warfare.
What this means is once the Pilgrims arrive, what they're arriving into is already a system of alliances where the Pequots would be allied with certain tribes against other tribes. What's more, on top of that, they were suffering from disease. So majority of the people in each of these tribes.
had actually recently perished from the disease that was spread from Europeans traveling to the North American continent. So it was into this system that the pilgrims landed. Also, the Pequots have, like other Native Americans, have animist beliefs that require balance.
It's not like the Disney Pocahontas where they're all one with nature and a gentle remedy against creative materialism. Instead, it meant that one tribe Killing a member of another tribe required revenge. Their understanding of everything being alive could be frightening and unsettling.
It required a balance to keep the spirits happy. So in other words, if one tribe killed a member of another tribe, that tribe needed revenge in order to keep the balance, in order to keep the spirits happy. The Pequots and other native tribes however did not want to wipe the pilgrims off the map.
Instead they worked them into their atlant- alliance and opponent system. The Pilgrims, on the other hand, had their own religious background that influenced their actions. The Pilgrims saw the natives as agents of Satan, the Antichrist.
So by killing the natives, the Pilgrims saw it as vanquishing the devil. Balin explains that this is what explains the brutality of the Pequot War. The brutality depicted in this painting is upheld by the historical record.
So although the Pilgrims could ally with certain Native American tribes, and they did occasionally, right? As we see with the Thanksgiving incident, right? So the Thanksgiving feast was forming an alliance.
But when they went to war with other Natives, it was a brutality on a level that we just don't see if you're fighting for land, right? There was something else, and it was that this religious background was influencing their view of that tribe that they're fighting with. And so here we can see a map of different native tribes from this time period. So you can see that like that first lesson that we had, it's not a homogeneous community.
There is a lot of diversity going on within what becomes Massachusetts. So as we turn our focus to the Puritans, we can see a large influx of immigration from England. in the 1630s to 1642. This is the Great English Migration and this is Puritans or non-separating Puritans leaving England. As you notice the large majority actually go to the West Indies where they're going to set up sugar plantations. A small minority, that 25,000, are the ones we're going to focus on here.
They're the ones that go to New England. They set up, that set up Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts Bay's beginning was about a decade after Plymouth. Massachusetts left a larger imprint though on the history of early America.
This was in part because they were non-separating Puritans. Although they disagreed with the Church of England, they sought to reform it. Those who settled in Boston believed that they were creating an example that England could then follow. It was through being an example that they would reform the Church of England.
That never happened though. Many ignored the small colonial settlement on the edge of the British Empire. Why did these non-separating Puritans leave? The initial settlers left during the reign of Charles I because they feared that he would make England Catholic again.
Those who went to Massachusetts sought to create a religious community with their brand of Christianity influencing their society. Like the Plymouth colony, it was a closed community which did not allow freedom of religion and only allowed for freedom to practice the same religion as everybody else in the colony. The first governor of Massachusetts Bay was John Winthrop. The Massachusetts Bay Company had secured a charter which Winthrop always kept with him and would not let others see.
In this way, he sought to have more control. Winthrop and other non-separating Puritans believed in the Puritan dilemma to live in a world of sin without sinning. For example, this means drinking alcohol but not getting drunk.
Total abstinence would not test an individual to not sin. Instead, it would be avoiding the world of sin altogether. Also, unlike the image presented in the Scarlet Letter, a fictional story about the Puritans, the Puritans celebrated the marriage relationship, but also allowed for divorce.
They saw it as better to end a relationship that had already dissolved so that the former partners could be part of a new functional family. While the Church of England forbade divorce, except for a small number of wealthy men, the Puritans allowed for it. The reason is they saw marriage as a contract. A contract, unlike a sacrament, can be broken.
It is this belief in contracts that provides the basis for the concept of a covenant. What is a covenant? Well, for the Puritans, a covenant was a covenant with God. Their agreement with God to come to America and live a holy life. And then a covenant or an agreement with each other.
for how they're going to live together, a civil covenant. This concept of a covenant or contract forms the basis for the system of government that the U.S. has today, but the concept that influenced the founders had been modified by the Enlightenment and made secular. It is that process, along with the diversity of religious sects in the American colonies, that led to the First Amendment to the Constitution promising freedom of religion.
Also, the Enlightenment that it was the Enlightenment that focused on ensuring individual liberty. In Massachusetts Bay, propertied men who were full church members had a say, but that did not ensure individual liberty. It did not ensure individual rights.
It is always important to consider change over time and note that it's not a straight line of cause and effect between the 1630s and the 1780s, nor the 2020s. So if we turn to the question of freedom of religion in America, where do we actually see freedom of religion or religious toleration in colonial beginnings? First, let's look at the story of Roger Williams. He was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because he was a separatist who thought that everyone should break with the Church of England. Williams was well educated, well-spoken, and attractive, which made him all the more dangerous.
to the moderate leaders of Massachusetts Bay. He constantly tried to find the perfect version of Christianity and so kept changing his mind. His different theological views prompted the leaders of Massachusetts to banish him from the colony. They ordered him back to England, yet Williams hid out and eventually made his way to Narragansett Bay where he founded his own colony, Rhode Island.
He lived among the natives and continued to struggle to find perfection. While searching though, he promoted religious toleration. His own version of Christianity was deeply personal and not shared by many others, and so in some way he had to allow diversity of religion, because so few believed in his particular brand of religion.
Just a little south, another early colony knew Netherland, the Dutch colony on the North American mainland, also provided religious freedom. New Netherland was a trading settlement on the fringe of the Dutch Empire. The colony, like Virginia before it and South Carolina after it, was created with the sole intention of making money. It was not a religious colony. Neither were Virginia or South Carolina.
The Dutch perspective was that oppression hindered profit. Anyone was allowed into the colony. The more the merrier was the idea.
And so there was not exclusion on the basis of religion. It should be noted that although New York and Rhode Island offered religious freedom, their views on liberty did not extend to slaves. Both colonies became involved in the international slave trade, as merchants from each grew wealthy off the trade. Slavery can be found in all of the colonies. Although we will focus on the rise of plantation slavery in the southern colonies, especially Virginia and South Carolina, it's important to remember that slavery existed in the north as well.
The northern colonies though were societies with slaves while the southern colonies were slave societies. The difference is that slavery was a part of a larger more diverse economy in the north while slavery dominated the economy and the culture in the south.