First Founders (New England in the World)

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.

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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. Central to this argument are the views of John Robinson , the Pilgrims' first pastor, who wrote in a treatise "Of Children and Their Education", "And surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubborness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down.

They write that Puritan parents "exercised an authoritative, not an authoritarian, mode of child rearing" that aimed to cultivate godly affections and reason, with corporal punishment used as a last resort. According to historian Bruce C. Daniels, the Puritans were "[o]ne of the most literate groups in the early modern world", with about 60 percent of New England able to read. In , Massachusetts required heads of households to teach their wives, children and servants basic reading and writing so that they could read the Bible and understand colonial laws.

In , the government required all towns with 50 or more households to hire a teacher and towns of or more households to hire a grammar school instructor to prepare promising boys for college. Boys interested in the ministry were often sent to colleges such as Harvard founded in or Yale founded in The Puritans anticipated the educational theories of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. Like Locke's blank slate , Puritans believed that a child's mind was "an empty receptacle, one that had to be infused with the knowledge gained from careful instruction and education.

Puritans did not celebrate traditional holidays such as Christmas, Easter or May Day. They also did not observe personal annual holidays, such as birthdays or anniversaries. They did, however, celebrate special occasions such as military victories, harvests, ordinations , weddings and births. These celebrations consisted of food and conversation. Beyond special occasions, the tavern was an important place for people to gather for fellowship on a regular basis. Increase Mather wrote that dancing was "a natural expression of joy; so that there is no more sin in it, than in laughter.

Dancing was also discouraged at weddings or on holidays especially dancing around the Maypole and was illegal in taverns. Puritans had no theological objections to sports and games as long as they did not involve gambling which eliminated activities such as billiards, shuffleboard, horse racing, bowling and cards.

They also opposed blood sports , such as cockfighting, cudgel-fighting and bear-baiting. Team sports, such as football, were problematic because "they encouraged idleness, produced injuries, and created bitter rivalries. Other sports were encouraged for promoting civic virtue, such as competitions of marksmanship, running, and wrestling held within militia companies. Only a few activities were completely condemned by Puritans. They were most opposed to the theater. According to historian Bruce Daniels, plays were seen as "false recreations because they exhausted rather than relaxed the audience and actors" and also "wasted labor, led to wantonness and homosexuality, and invariably were represented by Puritans as a foreign—particularly French or Italian—disease of a similar enervating nature as syphilis.

Not only were card playing, dice throwing and other forms of gambling seen as contrary to the values of "family, work, and honesty", they were religiously offensive because gamblers implicitly asked God to intervene in trivial matters, violating the Third Commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain.

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For Puritans, the people of a society were bound together by a social covenant such as Plymouth's Mayflower Compact , Connecticut's Fundamental Orders , New Haven's Fundamental Agreement, and Massachusetts' colonial charter. Having entered into such a covenant, eligible voters were responsible for choosing qualified men to govern and to obey such rulers, who ultimately received their authority from God and were responsible for using it to promote the common good. If the ruler was evil, however, the people were justified in opposing and rebelling against him.

The Puritans also believed they were in a national covenant with God. They believed they were chosen by God to help redeem the world by their total obedience to his will.



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If they were true to the covenant, they would be blessed; if not, they would fail. In Massachusetts, no new church could be established without the permission of the colony's existing Congregational churches and the government. There was a greater separation of church and state in the Puritan commonwealths than existed anywhere in Europe at the time. In England, the king was head of both church and state, bishops sat in Parliament and the Privy Council, and church officials exercised many secular functions. In New England, secular matters were handled only by civil authorities, and those who held offices in the church were barred from holding positions in the civil government.

When dealing with unorthodox persons, Puritans believed that the church, as a spiritual organization, was limited to "attempting to persuade the individual of his error, to warn him of the dangers he faced if he publicly persisted in it, and—as a last resort—to expel him from the spiritual society by excommunication. The Puritans did not come to America to establish a theocracy , but neither did they institute religious freedom.

New England magistrates did not investigate private views, but they did take action against public dissent from the religious establishment. The period — saw the execution of Quakers and the imprisonment of Baptists. Historian Daniel Boorstin stated, "the Puritans had not sought out the Quakers in order to punish them; the Quakers had come in quest of punishment.

Roger Williams , a Separating Puritan minister, arrived in Boston in He was almost immediately invited to become the teacher at the Boston church, but he refused the invitation on the grounds that the congregation had not separated from the Church of England. He then was invited to become the teacher of the church at Salem but was blocked by Boston political leaders, who objected to his separatism. He thus spent two years with his fellow Separatists in the Plymouth Colony but ultimately came into conflict with them and returned to Salem, where he became the unofficial assistant pastor to Samuel Skelton.

Williams held many controversial views that irritated the colony's political and religious leaders. He criticized the Puritan clergy's practice of meeting regularly for consultation, seeing in this a drift toward Presbyterianism. In , Skelton died, and the Salem congregation called Williams to be its pastor. Williams refused to back down, and the General Court warned Salem not to install him in any official position. In response, Williams decided that he could not maintain communion with the other churches in the colony nor with the Salem church unless they joined him in severing ties with the other churches.

In October, Williams was once again called before the General Court and refused to change his opinions. Williams was ordered to leave the colony and given until spring to do so, provided he ceased spreading his views. Unwilling to do so, the government issued orders for his immediate return to England in January , but John Winthrop warned Williams, allowing him to escape. 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. 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.

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.

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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. It furnished Americans with a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. Massachusetts politicians Samuel Adams , John Adams , and John Hancock rose up as leaders in the growing resentment toward English rule. New Englanders were very proud of their political freedoms and local democracy, which they felt was increasingly threatened by the English government.

The main grievance was taxation, which colonists argued could only be imposed by their own legislatures and not by the Parliament in London. Their political cry was " no taxation without representation. A ship was planning to land tea in Boston on December 16, , and Patriots associated with the Sons of Liberty raided the ship and dumped all the tea into the harbor.

This closed the port of Boston, the economic lifeblood of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it ended self-government, putting the people under military rule. British troops were forced back to Boston by the local militias on the 19th in the Battles of Lexington and Concord where the famous " shot heard 'round the world " was fired.

The British army controlled only the city of Boston, and it was quickly brought under siege. He forced the British to evacuate in March After that, the main warfare moved south, but the British made repeated raids along the coast, seizing Newport, Rhode Island and parts of Maine for a while. After independence, New England ceased to be a unified political unit but remained a defined historical and cultural region consisting of its constituent states.

By , all of the states in the region had introduced the gradual abolition of slavery, with Vermont and Massachusetts introducing total abolition in and , respectively. Twenty-seven delegates from all over New England met in Hartford in the winter of for the Hartford Convention to discuss changes to the US Constitution that would protect the region and retain political power.

The war ended triumphantly, and the Federalist Party was permanently discredited and faded away. The territory of Maine was a part of Massachusetts, but it was admitted to the Union as an independent state in as part of the Missouri Compromise. New England remained distinct from the other states in terms of politics, often going against the grain of the rest of the country.

Massachusetts and Connecticut were among the last refuges of the Federalist Party , and New England became the strongest bastion of the new Whig Party when the Second Party System began in the s. Leading statesmen hailed from the region, including conservative Whig orator Daniel Webster. New England proved to be the center of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country, along with areas that were settled from New England, such as upstate New York, Ohio's Western Reserve , and the states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

The anti-slavery Republican Party was formed in the s, and all of New England became strongly Republican, including areas that had previously been strongholds for the Whig and Democrat Parties. The region remained Republican until the early 20th century, when immigration turned the states of southern New England towards the Democrats.

The Census showed that 32 of the largest cities in the country were in New England, as well as the most highly educated. Prescott , and others. New England was an early center of the industrial revolution. The Beverly Cotton Manufactory was the first cotton mill in America, founded in Beverly, Massachusetts in , [35] and was considered the largest cotton mill of its time. Technological developments and achievements from the Manufactory led to the development of other, more advanced cotton mills, including Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Several textile mills were already underway during the time.

The textile manufacturing in New England was growing rapidly, which caused a shortage of workers. Recruiters were hired by mill agents to bring young women and children from the countryside to work in the factories, and thousands of farm girls left their rural homes in New England to work in the mills between and , hoping to aid their families financially, save up for marriage, and widen their horizons. They also left their homes due to population pressures to look for opportunities in expanding New England cities. The majority of female workers came from rural farming towns in northern New England.

Immigration also grew along with the growth of the textile industry—but the number of young women working in the mills decreased as the number of Irish workers increased. At the beginning of this period, when the United States was just emerging from its colonial past, the agricultural landscape of New England was defined overwhelmingly by subsistence farming.

This not only meant that farmers would largely produce their own food, but also that they tended to produce their own furniture, clothing, and soap, among other household items.

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There were two factors that were primarily responsible for the revolutionary changes in the agricultural economy of New England during the period from to The farmers finally had a nearby market to which they could sell their crops, and thus an opportunity to obtain incomes beyond what they produced for subsistence. The demands of the consumers of the crops, whether factories or individuals, now determined the kinds of crops that each farm cultivated. Potash, pearlash, charcoal, and fuel wood were among the agricultural products that were produced in greater quantities during this time.

For example, myriad new mills produced inexpensive textiles, and it now made more economic sense for many farm women to purchase these textiles rather than spin and weave them at home. Women consequently found new employment elsewhere, typically at the mills, many of which had a shortage of workers, and they began to earn cash incomes. The agricultural competition that emerged from the western states due to improvements in transportation e.

Competition from the western states was principally responsible for the decline in local pork production and cattle-fattening, as well as that in wheat production. These crops included milk, butter, potatoes, and broomcorn. The largely differentiated agricultural landscape of the New England of [48] was distinct from the subsistence-dominated landscape that existed 40—60 years prior. During the colonial period and the early years of the American republic, New England leaders like James Otis , John Adams , and Samuel Adams joined Patriots in Philadelphia and Virginia to define Republicanism , and lead the colonies to a war for independence against Great Britain.

New England was a Federalist stronghold, and strongly opposed the War of At the time of the American Civil War , New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest, which had long since abolished slavery, united against the Confederate States of America , ending the practice in the United States. Henry David Thoreau , iconic New England writer and philosopher, made the case for civil disobedience and individualism. French-Canadians , living a highly traditional life in rural Canada, were attracted to New England textile mills after The first migrants went to nearby areas of northern Vermont and New Hampshire.

However, as the textile factories increased their hiring, the principle destination beginning in the late s until the end of the last immigration wave in the early s, was southern Massachusetts. With a constantly growing immigrant population, these new Franco-Americans settled together in neighborhoods colloquially called Little Canada ; after these faded away. There were some French newspapers, but they had a total of only 50, subscribers in The New Haven railroad was the leading carrier in New England from to New York's leading banker, J.

Morgan , had grown up in Hartford and had a strong interest in the New England economy. Starting in the s Morgan began financing the major New England railroads, such as the New Haven and the Boston and Maine , dividing territory so they would not compete. In he brought in Charles Mellen as president of the New Haven The goal, richly supported by Morgan's financing, was to purchase and consolidate the main railway lines of New England, merge their operations, lower their costs, electrify the heavily used routes, and modernize the system. With less competition and lower costs, there supposedly would be higher profits.

The New Haven purchased 50 smaller companies, including steetcars, freight steamers, passenger steamships, and a network of light rails electrified trolleys that provided inter-urban transportation for all of southern New England. The accident rate rose when efforts were made to save on maintenance costs. Also in it was hit by an anti-trust lawsuit by the federal government and was forced to give up its trolley systems.

The line went bankrupt in , was reorganized and reduced in scope, went bankrupt again in , and in was merged into the Penn Central system, which itself went bankrupt. The remnants of the system are now part of Conrail. The automotive revolution came much faster than anyone expected, especially the railroad executives.