Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (8 page)

Exactly how representative that house was in those days is another question. Certainly women didn’t vote. Before 1619, there were few women in Jamestown, and in that year a shipload of “ninety maidens” arrived to be presented as wives to the settlers. The going price for one of the brides: 120 pounds of tobacco as payment for her transport from England.

Ironically, in the same year that representative government took root in America, an ominous cargo of people arrived in the port of Jamestown. Like the women, these new arrivals couldn’t vote, and also like the women, they brought a price. These were the first African slaves to be sold in the American colonies.

Who started the slave trade?

While everyone wants a piece of the claim to the discovery of America, no one wants to be known for having started the slave trade. The unhappy distinction probably belongs to Portugal, where ten black Africans were taken about fifty years before Columbus sailed. But by no means did the Portuguese enjoy a monopoly. The Spanish quickly began to import this cheap human labor to their American lands. In 1562, the English seaman John Hawkins began a direct slave trade between Guinea and the West Indies. By 1600, the Dutch and French were also caught up in the “traffick in men,” and by the time those first twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Dutch slaver, a million or more black slaves had already been brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America.

Who were the Pilgrims, and what did they want?

The year after the House of Burgesses met for the first time, the Pilgrims of the
Mayflower
founded the second permanent English settlement in America. Their arrival in 1620 has always been presented as another of history’s lucky accidents. But was it?

Had Christopher Jones, captain of the
Mayflower,
turned the ship when he was supposed to, the little band would have gone to its intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson, future site of New York, and a settlement within the bounds of the Virginia Company’s charter and authority. Instead, the ship kept a westerly route—the result of a bribe to the captain, as London gossip had it—and in November 1620, the band of pioneers found safe harbor in Cape Cod Bay, coming ashore at the site of present-day Provincetown. Of the 102 men, women, and children aboard the small ship, fifty were so-called Pilgrims, who called themselves “Saints” or “First Comers.”

Here again, as it had in Queen Elizabeth’s time, the Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in events. After the great split from Roman Catholicism that created the Church of England, the question of religious reform continued heatedly in England. Many English remained Catholic. Others felt that the Church of England was too “popish” and wished to push it further away from Rome—to “purify” it—so they were called Puritans. But even among Puritans strong differences existed, and there were those who thought the Church of England too corrupt. They wanted autonomy for their congregations, and wished to separate from the Anglican church. This sect of Separatists—viewed in its day the same way extremist religious cults are thought of in our time—went too far for the taste of the authorities, and they were forced either underground or out of England.

A small band of Separatists, now called Pilgrims, went to Leyden, Holland, where their reformist ideas were accepted. But cut off from their English traditions, the group decided on another course, a fresh start in the English lands in America. With the permission of the Virginia Company and the backing of London merchants who charged handsome interest on the loans they made, the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth in 1620. Among their number were the Pilgrim families of William Brewster, John Carver, Edward Winslow, and William Bradford. The “strangers,” or non-Pilgrim voyagers (men faithful to the Church of England, but who had signed on for the passage in the hope of owning property in the New World), included ship’s cooper John Alden and army captain Miles Standish.

What was the Mayflower Compact?

When the rough seas around Nantucket forced the ship back to Cape Cod and the group decided to land outside the bounds of the Virginia Company, the “strangers” declared that they would be free from any commands. Responding quickly to this threat of mutiny, the Pilgrim leaders composed a short statement of self-government, signed by almost all the adult men.

This agreement, the Mayflower Compact, is rightly considered the first written constitution in North America. Cynicism about its creation, or for that matter about the House of Burgesses, is easy in hindsight. Yes, these noble-minded pioneers slaughtered Indians with little remorse, kept servants and slaves, and treated women no differently from cattle. They were imperfect men whose failings must be regarded alongside their astonishing attempt to create in America a place like none in Europe. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it in
The Oxford History of the American People
, “This compact is an almost startling revelation of the capacity of Englishmen in that era for self-government. Moreover, it was a second instance of the Englishmen’s determination to live in the colonies under a rule of law.”

Despite their flaws, the early colonists taking their toddling steps toward self-rule must be contrasted with other colonies, including English colonies, in various parts of the world where the law was simply the will of the king or the church.

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From the Mayflower Compact (signed December 1620):

We whose names are under-written . . . doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equal lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. . . .

Did the Pilgrims really land at Plymouth Rock?

After a brief exploration of Cape Cod, the
Mayflower
group sailed on and found a broad, round harbor that they recognized from Captain John Smith’s maps as Plimoth (Plymouth). The Indians called it Patuxet. On December 16, the
Mayflower
’s passengers reached their new home. There is no mention in any historical account of Plymouth Rock, the large stone that can be seen in Plymouth today, into which the year 1620 is carved. The notion that the Pilgrims landed near the rock and carved the date is a tradition that was created at least a hundred years later, probably by some smart member of the first Plymouth Chamber of Commerce.

Like the first arrivals at Jamestown, the Pilgrims and “strangers” had come to Plymouth at a bad time to start planting a colony. By spring, pneumonia and the privations of a hard winter had cost the lives of fifty-two of the 102 immigrants. But in March, salvation came, much as it had in Virginia, in the form of Indians, including one named Squanto, who could speak English. Who Squanto was and how he came to speak English are among history’s unsolved mysteries. One claim is made for an Indian named Tisquantum who had been captured by an English slaver in 1615. A second is made for an Indian named Tasquantum, brought to England in 1605. Whichever he was, he moved into the house of William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, and was the means of survival for the Pilgrims until his death from fever in 1622. Another Indian of great value to the Pilgrim Fathers was Samoset, a local chief who also spoke English and introduced the settlers to the grand chief of the Wampanoags, Wasamegin, better known by his title Massasoit. Under the rule of Massasoit, the Indians became loyal friends to the Pilgrims, and it was Massasoit’s braves who were the invited guests to the October feast at which the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest. For three days the colonists and their Indian allies feasted on turkey and venison, pumpkin and corn. It was the first Thanksgiving. (Thanksgiving was first officially celebrated during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1864. It became a national holiday and was moved to its November date by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

While life did not magically improve after that first year, the Pilgrims carved out a decent existence and, through trade with the Indians, were able to repay their debts to the London backers and even to buy out the shares that these London merchants held. Their success helped inspire an entire wave of immigration to New England that came to be known as the Great Puritan migration. From 1629 to 1642, between 14,000 and 20,000 settlers left England for the West Indies and New England, and most of these were Anglican Puritans brought over by a new joint stock company called the Massachusetts Bay Company. They came because life in England under King Charles I had grown intolerable for Puritans. Though the newcomers demonstrated a startling capacity for fighting among themselves, usually over church matters, these squabbles led to the settlement and development of early New England.

Must Read:
Mayflower
by Nathaniel Philbrick.

HIGHLIGHTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW ENGLAND

1629
Naumkeag, later called Salem, is founded to accept first wave of 1,000 Puritan settlers.

1630
John Winthrop, carrying the Massachusetts Bay Charter, arrives at Naumkeag and later establishes Boston, named after England’s great Puritan city. (In 1635, English High and Latin School, the first secondary school in America, is founded. The following year a college for the training of clergymen is founded at Cambridge and named Harvard after a benefactor in 1639.)

1634
Two hundred settlers, half of them Protestant, arrive at Chesapeake Bay and found St. Mary’s, in the new colony of Maryland, granted to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who instructs his brother, the colony’s leader, to tolerate the Puritans. The so-called Catholic colony, ostensibly named for Charles I’s Queen Henrietta Maria, but in fact named to honor the Virgin Mary, will have a Protestant majority from the beginning.

1636
Reverend Thomas Hooker leads a group into Connecticut and founds Hartford; other Connecticut towns are soon founded.

1636
Roger Williams, a religious zealot banished from Boston by Governor Winthrop, founds Providence, Rhode Island, preaching radical notions of separation of church and state and paying Indians for land.

1636–1637 The Pequot War, the first major conflict, is fought between English colonists, joined by their Native American allies (the Mohegan and Narragansett), against the Pequot, a nation that was essentially wiped out in a brief but brutal war.

1638
Anne Hutchinson, banished from Boston for her heretical interpretations of sermons, which drew large, enthusiastic crowds, settles near Providence and starts Portsmouth. (Newport is founded about the same time.) In 1644, Rhode Island receives a royal colonial charter.

1638
New Haven founded.

1643
New England Confederation, a loose union to settle border disputes, is formed by Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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N
ATHANIEL
M
ORTON,
1634, witnessing Roger Williams’s demands for freedom of religion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony:

Whereupon [Williams] never came to the Church Assembly more, professing separation from them as Antichristian, and not only so, but he withdrew all private religious Communion from any that would hold Communion with the Church there, insomuch as he would not pray nor give thanks at meals with his own wife nor any of his family, because they went to the Church Assemblies.

The prudent Magistrates understanding, and seeing things grow more and more towards a general division and disturbance, after all other means used in vain, they passed a sentence of banishment against him out of the Massachusetts Colony, as against a disturber of the peace, both of the Church and Commonwealth. After which Mr. Williams sat down in a place called Providence . . . and was followed by many of the members of the Church of Salem, who did zealously adhere to him, and who cried out of the Persecution that was against him, keeping that one principle, that every one should have the liberty to worship God according to the light of their own consciences. [Emphasis added.]

Born in London, Roger Williams (1603?–83), a clergyman, was a strong supporter of religious and political liberty and believed that people had a right to complete religious freedom, rather than mere religious toleration that could be denied at the government’s will.

Williams entered Cambridge University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1627. A religious nonconformist, he disagreed with the principles of England’s official church, the Church of England. At the time, King Charles I and William Laud, bishop of London, were persecuting dissenters, and as a result, Williams began to associate with nonconformists who were anxious to settle in New England.