Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Still, the Child episode had important consequences. The general court was aware that Massachusetts still had no proper legal code. Many settlers had from the beginning been worried by the arbitrary nature of the justice dispensed by the court of assistants, with its unsystematic use of the Bible, common law, and individual whim. In 1636 John Cotton had drawn up a code which Winthrop called “a model of Moses” because of its biblical references. This code had been modified in 1639 by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward, though the intent was still “to compose a model of the judicial laws of Moses.” It was this draft which had finally been issued in 1641 as the Body of Liberties. Many deputies, however, felt that it still left too much to the arbitrary judgment of the magistrates and quirks of the Mosaic law. Accordingly, in 1648 a further revision was undertaken, during which a number of legal volumes were imported from England. The result, published as The Book of General Lawes and Libertyes, defined more precisely the powers and functions of the magistracy, the “liberties” of the individual, and the due process of the law. Another important step had been taken in the evolution of Massachusetts from a semitheocratic state to a constitutional polity.

  Another result of the Child affair was the need to address the charge that nonmembers of the church were being discriminated against. In addition, there was a wider need for a definitive statement of the congregational church's theology and procedures. Accordingly, the Cambridge Platform of August 1648 attempted to do for the church what the Book of General Lawes and Libertyes had done for the state. On relations between the two it asserted, “As it is unlawful for church officers to meddle with the sword of the magistrate, so it is unlawful for the Magistrate to meddle with the work proper to church officers.” The days when Winthrop could dominate both were over. The dividing lines were now clear. The church pronounced on matters of doctrine, the magistrates enforced them. As to doctrine, the ministers decided to adopt the 1648 Westminster Confession, bringing them into line with their colleagues in England. The Platform, however, made no concession on church membership, arguing that the issue of “saints by calling” was a matter for the congregations to decide. There must be no lowering of standards, whatever the civil disabilities for the rest of the community.

  6 Stable Societies

  Despite religious and political challenges to the authority of the Puritan magistrates, the Puritans who immigrated to New England between 1630 and 1642 had managed to create remarkably stable societies by 1650. A model which had begun to be worked in Virginia was being more fully developed here, producing settler societies in New England that could not have been more different from Virginia's.

  New Englanders were, first of all, more actively committed to the church, and this commitment translated into high rates of civic participation. Among the smaller towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut church membership was as high as 60 percent, though by 1650 Boston had only 625 saints out of a total populace of 3,000. The 1648 code had laid down that male church members who failed to qualify as freemen might still serve as constables, jurors, selectmen, and highway surveyors. An additional law permitted nonfreemen to vote for selectmen and serve as jurors. Unlike the individualistic society developing in Virginia, New England was developing a society full of active citizens.

  Because of the characteristics of New England's immigrant population, its society would from the outset be exceptionally stable and family-oriented. Unlike the young, predominantly male settlers in early Virginia, a large proportion of the settlers who flocked to New England before 1642 were in their thirties and came with their spouses and a few children. They were used to working, having left behind established trades or farms. They continued to have children once they arrived in New England, largely because those children gave them their best chance for success as family farmers. Working together, a family could clear their land, improve it, and then rely upon it for their economic subsistence, insulated from the ups and downs of a commercial economy. An additional attraction of family farming was that it allowed the Puritans to raise their children in a godly manner, free from the temptations of England's increasingly commercial society and safe from the danger of slipping into the ranks of the landless poor.14

  A third difference from Virginia was that New England's population was growing steadily. Because the healthy climate reduced childhood mortality, New England settler families grew larger than average families in England, with six to eight children typically surviving to adulthood. The settlers' fertility led to New England's remarkable expansion throughout the seventeenth century and made up for a dramatic decline in new immigration after the beginning of the English Civil War. Though almost no new immigrants arrived during the period, the number of towns in Massachusetts rose from 21 in 1641 to 33 by 1647.

  Unlike the Virginians, New Englanders did not get rich during these early decades, for the region never developed a profitable staple crop. For the first 10 years, Massachusetts prospered because a continuous stream of immigrants arrived bringing cash to buy livestock and other supplies with which to establish themselves. However, most farming was of a subsistence nature, the main produce being hogs and corn. Those with servants could diversify into cattle and wheat, but in the absence of a profitable staple crop few families produced enough wealth to bring more servants from England. The absence of a staple crop also meant that the distribution of wealth remained fairly consistent. Although the wealthiest investors had larger landholdings than the rest, most settlers here were middling people with small farms. Unlike England, New England had no significant group of impoverished, landless laborers during the seventeenth century.

  As colonial ventures, the New England colonies never fit the model of profitable, export-producing outposts that early promoters like Hakluyt had envisioned. Yet the investors in New England could be satisfied in what they had accomplished. By 1650 their economy was growing more diversified, with a fishery that managed to compete with Spain and Portugal in supplying fish for European markets. The fishery in turn encouraged a nascent boat- and later shipbuilding industry in towns like Boston and New Haven. And eventually new markets for New England farmers would appear in the West Indies, where planters were happy to exchange sugar for other provisions, primarily fish, beef, pork, and corn. Lumber and fish from Maine were also products which could be marketed in England, and some trade with the local Indians was still taking place. Not all experiments had succeeded, of course. An attempt in Massachusetts to establish an ironworks near Lynn on the Saugus River folded because of a lack of skilled labor. However small-scale smelting and the fashioning of items like nails and simple tools did continue at a number of sites.

  New England's churches, too, appeared to be flourishing. The churches had become less dependent on England for qualified clergy since 1636, with the founding of Harvard College. Its first graduates were ordained as ministers in 1641, by which time over 20 scholars were in residence. In addition, basic education was being provided to the population at large, at least in Massachusetts. Since knowledge of the Scriptures was essential for salvation, all Massachusetts towns with 50 households were required after 1647 to appoint someone to teach their children to read and write, and larger towns were expected to provide grammar schools for teaching Latin, the language of university instruction.

  Serious attempts had been made as well to convert the Indians. The earliest missionary activity was undertaken by Thomas Mayhew at Martha's Vineyard, partly in response to criticism by Williams and others of the Puritans' failure in this matter. As time went on many southern New England Indians became more ready to embrace Christianity, following the breakdown of their own societies under the impact of war and disease. Accordingly, in 1646 the Reverend John Eliot, the minister at Roxbury, established a mission for the surviving Pequot and Massachusetts peoples. They were herded into four settlements known euphemistically as the “praying towns,” the chief one being at Natick. Eliot provided a written liturgy in 1654, when he published a translated version of the catechism, followed in 1
660 by a translation of the New Testament. Plans were also made for the training of an Indian ministry at Harvard. About the same time, the Natick congregation was even admitted to the Roxbury Church, despite some reluctance on the part of the white community.

  The pattern of Indian relations developing in New England by the 1650s could not, on the face of it, have been more different than the pattern established by this time in Virginia. Instead of being separated into distinct English and Indian societies, English and Indian villages in New England often coexisted side by side. New England leaders had sought to place Indian communities under the umbrella of their own authority rather than driving them out, as in Virginia. In this they had largely succeeded. Especially in the longest settled region around Plymouth, whites lived in close proximity with their Native American neighbors, interacting with them on what was sometimes a daily basis. Many local Indians had become bilingual, and some had even learned to read English and to negotiate the expectations and unwritten rules of English society.

  Still, life was not improving for the Native Americans in New England, especially around the most heavily populated settler communities in the south. English livestock was driving out the game in their hunting grounds, forcing many of the Indians in Massachusetts to become fully sedentary farmers. Meanwhile English hogs were wreaking havoc on Indian cornfields, and the Indians had become dependent for many of their supplies on trade with the English.15 Moreover it was clear by this time that the Indians had become a subordinate group within New England society. In southern New England the Indians were by now largely subject to colonial laws that restricted their purchases of arms, alcohol, and trade goods, and placed them under the jurisdiction of colonial courts. Whether or not they liked to admit it, New England's Indians had become a colonized people, living among their colonizers. It was a new and uncomfortable role.

  1. For this interpretation of the motives of both Squanto and Massasoit, see Neal Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,” in David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash, eds, Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley, 1981), 228–46.

  2. Thanksgiving days were observed sporadically thereafter in Plymouth and other New England colonies. Thanksgiving became a national holiday only in 1863, following a proclamation by President Lincoln.

  3. Land held in free and common socage could be bought and sold by the owner. In England, some forms of land tenure prohibited the transfer of land outside the owner's family.

  4. The view that Winthrop and other Puritan leaders went to America for economic reasons was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century with Progressive historians like James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921). The Progressives were anxious to show that American democracy had always been threatened by wealthy business elites. More sympathetic is Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958). This account was written during the Cold War when it was fashionable to reaffirm traditional views about America, especially the contribution of Puritan New England. For the most recent view, see note 8.

  5. Indian trade and land policies in Massachusetts are described in Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York, 1982).

  6. For the financial aspects of Puritan town building, see John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1991).

  7. Historians have long recognized the importance of town governments in shaping New England politics and society. See for example John Fairfield Sly, Town Government in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1930); Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middleton, Conn., 1963), and Kenneth Lockridge and Alan Kreider, “The Evolution of Massachusetts Town Government, 1640–1740,” William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (1966), 529–74.

  8. For many years historians disagreed about whether economic or religious motivations were paramount in the minds of Puritan migrants during the 1630s. Today, historians concur that the two motives were inseparable. See Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991), and Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994).

  9. See Lyle Koehler, “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636–1640,” William and Mary Quarterly, 31 (1974), 55–78, and A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, 1980). Other historians have revealed a more nuanced picture of women's status in Puritan colonial societies, finding that in some respects women enjoyed more rights in seventeenth-century New England than their counterparts in England. For example, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1995), argues that Puritan women enjoyed greater access to the courts because procedures were less legalistic. In addition, Puritan magistrates, concerned with morality rather than legality, were more disposed to listen to women of good repute. For more information on the subject see Chapter 12.

  10. Formerly called the Plymouth Company.

  11. Various historians have emphasized the connection between challenges to the Puritans' authority and the ideological uses of Indian wars. On the Pequot War, see Salisbury, Manitou and Providence.

  12. Among those executed was Mary Dyer, a former associate of Anne Hutchinson. For further information on the Quakers, see Chapter 7, section 3.

  13. The Baptists managed to establish a meeting house in 1679 in Boston, but for a long time it was the sole one. The Anglicans established their first formal place of worship in Boston only in 1689, a wooden structure known as King's Chapel. This was superseded in 1723 by a handsome brick building, known as the old North Church or Christ Church; see Chapter 13, section 1.

  14. On the connections between competency and family patterns, see Anderson, New England's Generation, and Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen.

  15. For the environmental changes produced by English colonization and their effect on New England Indians, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983). Virginia DeJohn Anderson explains the impact of English livestock on the Indians' livelihoods in Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004). Discussions of the relationships which had developed between New England Indians and English settlers by 1660 may be found in Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, 2005), James D. Drake. King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst, 1999), and Joshua Micah Marshall, “Melancholy People: Anglo-Indian Relations in Early Warwick, Rhode Island, 1642–1675,” New England Quarterly (1995), 402–29.

  Chapter 5

  Diverse Colonies

  New France, New Netherland, Maryland, and the West Indies

  1608 French merchants establish Québec.

  1609 Henry Hudson explores the Hudson River.

  1624 The Dutch West India Company establishes New Netherland. English colonists found St. Kitts.

  1624–8 The Mohawks triumph over the Mahicans.

  1626 Manhattan is purchased for 60 guilders.

  1629 Kiliaen Van Rensselaer establishes the first patroonship in New Netherland.

  1634 The colony of Maryland is established by the second Lord Baltimore.

  1635 The first assembly of freemen in Maryland takes place.

  1638 The first Swedish settlement is founded on the Delaware.

  1643–5 War breaks out between the Dutch and Indians near New Amsterdam.

  1644–6 Maryland endures “the plundering time.”

  1646 The Dutch West India Company begins selling slaves in Barbados. Peter Stuyvesant is appointed director general of New Netherland.


  1648 Maryland grants headrights to servants.

  1648–9 The Dutch-allied Iroquois defeat the French-allied Huron.

  1649 Maryland passes an act for religious toleration.

  1655 The Dutch take control of New Sweden. Wappinger Indians attack New Amsterdam in the Peach War. The English seize Jamaica from Spain.

  1657 Jews are permitted to become burghers of New Amsterdam.

  Map 5 Locations of major Indian peoples and European settlements in eastern North America, circa 1640.

  1 New France

  THE ENGLISH WERE not the only Europeans to establish permanent colonies in North America in the seventeenth century. Merchants from France and the Netherlands would found colonies early in the century, encouraged by their respective governments who hoped to compete with Spain and profit from an American trade. The French colonies in particular would leave an indelible legacy, still obvious in parts of Canada today. Adventurers and priests from Spain would continue to develop their colony in Florida and establish a new one in New Mexico to help protect and consolidate Spanish holdings in New Spain. Other French and Spanish colonies would later follow. The full story of colonial North America involved a diverse array of Europeans, each interacting in different ways with groups of Native Americans and (usually) Africans as well.

  Since the focus of our story is mainly on the 13 mainland British colonies that would form the United States in 1776, we do not attempt to provide the full details of this multifaceted story. Still, the mainland British North American colonies took shape in an era of globalization, and historians today concur that their history cannot be understood without considerable attention to the other European colonies that coexisted in North America along with them. Some of these colonies would produce economic competitors to English traders, merchants, and planters. Others would pose serious military threats that would limit the territorial expansion and the demographic development of British North America for more than a century and a half. To understand the history of the British colonies, then, we need to understand something about the other colonial North American societies with which they interacted. Since the French were their most direct competitors for much of the seventeenth century, we will begin with them.1