American literature of the colonial period
The overall goal is to study both historical and literary background of American literature of the Colonial Period.
In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers opened the way to a second wave of permanent colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen’s tools. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships’ logs, and reports to the explorers’ financial backers – European rulers or, in mercantile England and Holland, joint stock companies – gradually was supplanted by records of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent’s mixed ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important to recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.
When European settlers set foot in North America for the first time, they started a historical process that would have far-reaching effects on the rest of the world. As they pushed west, building towns and cultivating land, they took control of this vast continent and shaped it into a new nation. There was, however, a darker side to this spectacular success story. When Ch. Columbusbecame the first European to discover the continent in 1492, North America was inhabited by approximately 500,000 native Indians who had earlier probably migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. By the year 1900 there were just 250,000. The white man, who brought progress to this vast, rich continent, brought disease and alcoholism to a native population that was unable to defend itself against vastly superior forces- They were given no choice but to give up their lands.
These lands were taken over by settlers from Europe, many of whom were from England. They took the long and arduous trip across the Atlantic for different reasons. Some, especially the Puritans, were escaping religious persecution, while others were in search of land and riches. From a national perspective, the English government encouraged colonisation to combat Spanish influence on the American continent, and it also hoped that a route might be discovered from America to the other colonial possessions in the East.
Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first colony was set up in in the southern state of Virginia in 1584 by Sir Walter Raleighwho introduced tobacco and the potato to England. The adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh had sent ships to find land in the New World where English people might settle. He named the land they visited Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth, England’s unmarried Queen. In July 1585, 108 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now the state of North Carolina. They built houses and a fort, planted crops and searched – without success – for gold. But they ran out of food and made enemies of the local Amerindian inhabitants. In less than a year they gave up and sailed back to England.
In 1587 Raleigh tried again. His ships landed 118 settlers on Roanoke, including fourteen family groups. The colonists were led by an artist and mapmaker named John White, who had been a member of the 1585 expedition. Among them were White’s daughter and her husband. On August 18th the couple became the parents of Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in America.
In August White returned to England for supplies. Three years passed before he was able to return. When his ships reached Roanoke in August 1590, he found the settlement deserted. There was no sign of what had happened to its people except a word carved on a tree – “Croaton”, the home of a friendly Indian chief, fifty miles to the south. Some believe that the Roanoke settlers were carried off by Spanish soldiers from Florida. Others think that they may have decided to go to live with friendly Indians on the mainland. They were never seen, or herd of, again. Thus, all the colonists of Roanoke disappeared, and to this day legends are told about blue-eyed Croaton Indians of the area.
Since the first Americans were explorers and settlers, adventurers and idealists who crossed the ocean in search of new opportunities or to escape poverty and intolerance, their writings were matter-of-fact accounts of life in America, which explained colonisation to Englishmen back in the homeland. An example of this form of writing is the exploration of Roanoke carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) in A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). This descriptive work gives much information about the flora and fauna, the Amerindians from whom Hariot, having been taught their language, learned a great deal, difficult relationships between Europeans and native people, “fierce” dealings with Wingina’s people, ample evidence that diseases imported by the English had already begun to decimate Amerindians. Hariot’s book was quickly translated into Latin, French, and German; the text and pictures were made into engravings and widely republished for over 200 years.
In A Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia, Thomas Hariot discusses at length the subject of religion among the Amerindians. Hariot, in particular, focuses on the similarities and differences between the religious beliefs of the Amerindians and the English. In the process, he also provides his readers a great deal of information, not only about the religious life of the Native Americans, but also about the situation of their culture and society. However, Hariot’s personal and national sense of superiority to the natives mars much of his account, explicitly condoning past and future cases of English barbarity against the Amerindians.
It should be mentioned that A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia by T. Hariot was only the first of many such works. Back in England, people planning to move to Virginia or New England would read the books as travel guides[29]. But this was dangerous because such books often mixed facts and fantasy. For example, William Wood claimed that he had seen lions in Massachusetts. It is probable that these “true reports” had a second kind of a reader. People could certainly read them as tales of adventure[30] and excitement. Like modern readers of science fiction, they could enjoy imaginary voyages to places they could never visit in reality.
The writings of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) probably satisfied readers of both kinds. The second colony’s – main record, the writings of Captain John Smith – one of its leaders, is the exact opposite of Hariot’s accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable romantic, and he seems to have embroidered his adventures. A real adventurer, he had fought the Turks in Hungary, where he was wounded and taken prisoner. He was sold as a slave and escaped by killing his master.
In 1607 he helped found Jamestown, the first English colony in America. The early years of this settlement were hard ones. This was partly the fault of the settlers themselves. The site they had chosen was low-lying and malarial. And although their English homeland was many miles away across a dangerous ocean, they failed to grow enough food to feed themselves. They were too busy dreaming of gold. The settlers had been sent to Jamestown by a group of rich London investors, who formed the Virginia Company. Its purpose was to set up colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America, between 34° and 38° north latitude. It was a joint-stock company, i.e. the investors paid the costs of its expeditions and in return were given the right to divide up any profits it made. The Jamestown settlers were employees of the Virginia Company. The Company’s directors hoped that the settlers would find pearls, silver or some other valuable product in Virginia, and so bring them a quick profit on their investment. Most of all, they hoped that the colonists would find gold, as the Spanish conquistadores had done in Mexico.
The colonists eagerly obeyed the Company’s orders to search for gold. By doing so they hoped to become rich themselves. There was “no talk, no hope nor work, but dig gold, wash gold, load gold”, wrote one of their leaders, Captain John Smith.
And then the colonists began to die – in ones, in twos, finally in dozens. Some died in Amerindian attacks, some of diseases, some of starvation. By April 1608, out of a total of 197 Englishmen who had landed in Virginia only 53 were still alive. “Our men were destroyed by cruel diseases,” wrote a colonist who survived, “swellings, fluxes, burning fevers and by wars. But most died of famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were in Virginia”.
Jamestown reached its lowest point in the winter of 1609-1610. Of the 500 colonists living in the settlement in October 1609, only 60 were still alive in March 1610. This was “the starving time”. Stories reached England about settlers who were so desperate for food that they dug up and ate the body of an Amerindian they had killed during an attack.
So, the colony endured starvation, brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the colonization became world-renowned. And new settlers continued to arrive. Following its own interests, the Virginia Company gathered homeless children from the streets of London and sent them out to the colony. Then it sent a hundred convicts from London’s prisons. Such emigrants were often unwilling to go, and even some cases are known when criminals preferred being hanged than sent to Virginia. However some Virginia immigrants sailed willingly, as for many of them these early years of the 17th century were a time of hunger and suffering: incomes were low, but the prices of food and clothing climbed higher every year. The point that attracted them was that Virginia was a plentiful land and it seemed more important than the reports of disease, starvation and cannibalism there. For a number of years after 1611, military governors ran Virginia like a prison camp. They enforced strict rules to make sure that work was done. But it was not discipline that saved Virginia, it was a plant that grew like a weed there: tobacco. Still the Virginia Company never made a profit. By 1624 it had run out of money. The English government put an end to the Company and made itself responsible for the Virginia colonists.
Although the details are not always correct, True Relation of Virginia (1608) and Description of New England by Captain Smith (1616) are fascinating “advertisements” which try to persuade the reader to settle in the New World. His Elizabethan style is not always easy to read, and his punctuation was strange even for the 17th century, still he could tell a good story.
His General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) contains the story of his rescue by a beautiful Indian princess, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical imagination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, the 12-year-old favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith’s life by shielding his body with her own when he was a prisoner of the chief. Pocahontas went on to play an important part in Virginia’s survival, bring ing food to the starving settlers. “She, next under God,” wrote J. Smith, “was the instrument to preserve this colony from death, famine and utter confusion”. Later, when the English persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe, an English gentleman, tobacco planter. The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians, ensuring the survival of the struggling new colony. In 1616 she travelled to England with him and was presented at court to King James I. It was there that the portrait you can see here was painted. Pocahontas died of smallpox in 1617 while waiting to board a ship to carry her back to Virginia with her newborn son. When the son grew up he returned to Virginia. Many Virginians today claim to be descended from him and so from Pocahontas.
Almost from the beginning, as the English settled along the Atlantic coast of America, there were important differences between the Southern and the New England colonies. In the South, enormous farms or “plantations” used the labor of black slaves to grow tobacco. The rich and powerful plantations owners were slow to develop a literature of their own. They preferred books imported from England.
But in New England, the Puritan settlers had come to the New World in order to form a society based on strict Christian beliefs. Like the Puritans in England, who were fighting against the English king (in a war that lasted from 1642 to 1652), they believed that society should be based on the laws of God. Therefore they had a far stronger sense of unity and of a “shared purpose”. This was one of the reasons why culture and literature developed much faster than in the South. The first printing press in America was started there in 1638, and America’s first newspaper began in Boston in 1704. It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans. Harvard, the first college in the colonies, was founded near Boston in 1636 in order to train new Puritan ministers. Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country – an astounding fact when one considers that most educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted education to understand and execute God’s will as they established their colonies throughout New England.
The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth. Puritan style varied enormously – from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history. Whatever the style or genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of constant battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises. Many Puritans excitedly awaited the “millennium,” when Jesus would return to Earth, end human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity.
Puritans disapproved of such secular amusements as dancing and card-playing, which were associated with ungodly aristocrats and immoral living. Reading or writing “light” books also fell into this category. Puritan minds poured their tremendous energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, and histories. Their intimate diaries and meditations record the rich inner lives of this introspective and intense people.
Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on ambition, hard work, and an intense striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not know, in strict theological terms, whether they were “saved” and among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans tended to feel that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought not only for themselves, but as welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.
Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted all things and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their own profit and their community’s well-being, they were also furthering God’s plans. They did not draw lines of distinction between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the divine will – a belief that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism.
In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph over the New World and to God’s kingdom on Earth.
The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified the seriousness of Reformation Christianity. Known as the “Pilgrims,” they were a small group of believers who had migrated from England to Holland – even then known for its religious tolerance – in 1608, during a time of persecutions. Despairing of purifying the Church of England from within, “Separatists” formed underground “covenanted” churches that swore loyalty to the group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the king as well as heretics damned to hell, they were often persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New World. These pilgrims thought of themselves as soldiers in a war against Satan – the Arch-Enemy – who planned to ruin the kingdom of God on earth by sowing discord among those who professed to be Christians. Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literally. They read and acted on the text of the Second Book of Corinthians – “Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.” So, this small band of believers saw no hope of reforming a national church and its Anglican hierarchy from within. In 1608, five years after the death of Queen Elizabeth and with an enemy of Puritanism, James Stuart, on the throne, they left England and settled in Holland, where they saw “fair and beautiful cities” and the “grisly face of poverty” confronting them. Isolated by their language and unable to farm, they turned to mastering trades. Later, fearing that they would eventually lose their identity as a religious community living as strangers in a foreign land, they applied for a charter to settle in the Virginia Plantation – a vast tract of land that included what is now New England. Sponsored by merchants (Adventurers or "Strangers" as they were called by the Pilgrims) who were anxious to receive repayment in goods from the New World, they sailed from Southampton, England, in September 1620. There was actually serious contention between the two groups (the Pilgrims and Adventurers) when they met in London and during the trip to the New World. This is understandable, since the two contingents had very different reasons for making the voyage – the Pilgrims were in search of religious freedom and the Adventurers were in search of a profitable business venture. They all came together, however, after their arrival, there were far too many challenges in their new environment for them to concern themselves with fighting each other.
The Pilgrims’ ship was an old trading vessel, the Mayflower. For years the Mayflower had carried wine across the narrow seas between France and England. Now it faced a much more dangerous voyage. Sixty-six days later, taken by strong winds much farther north than they had anticipated, they dropped anchor at Cape Cod and established their colony at Plymouth on December 21, 1620. It should be mentioned that Cape Cod is far to the north of the land granted to the Pilgrims by the Virginia Company, but the Pilgrims did not have enough food and water, and many were sick. So they decided to and at the best place they could find.
As it was in winter, the Pilgrims’ chances of surviving were not high. The frozen ground and the deep snow made it difficult for them to build houses. They had very little food. In two or three months' time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts. So as there died sometimes two or three of a day in the foresaid time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. In April, the Pilgrims gathered at the harbor to say goodbye to the Mayflower as she began her return trip to England. As sad and apprehensive as they must have been to watch her set sail, none of the surviving Pilgrims opted to return with her.
Despite the fact that the Pilgrims’ separatism does not make them representative of the large number of emigrants who came to these shores in the 17th century (Plymouth was eventually absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691 when a new charter was negotiated), their story has become an integral part of American literature.
William Bradford (1590-1657)was elected governor of Plymouth shortly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several languages, including Hebrew, in order to “see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.”
William Bradford epitomizes the spirit of determination and self-sacrifice that seems to us characteristic of the first “Pilgrims”. His own life provides a model of the life of the community as a whole. He was born in Yorkshire, in the town of Austerfield, of parents who were modestly well off. Bradford’s father died when he was an infant; his mother remarried in 1593, and he was brought up by his parental grandparents and uncles. He did not receive a university education; instead he was taught the arts of farming. When he was only twelve or thirteen, he heard the sermons of the Nonconformist minister Richard Clyfton, who preached in a neighboring parish; these sermons changed Bradford’s life. For Clyfton was the religious guide of a small community of believers who met at the house of William Brewster in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, and it was with this group, in 1606, that Bradford wished to be identified. Much against the opposition of uncles and grandparents, he left home and joined them. They were known as “Separatists”, because unlike the majority of Puritans, they saw no hope of reforming the Church of England from within and wished to follow Calvin’s model and to set up “particular” churches, each one founded on a formal covenant, entered into by those who professed their faith and swore to the covenant. Their model was the Old Testament covenant God made with Adam and that Christ renewed. In their covenanted churches God offered himself as a contractual partner to each believer; it was a contract freely initiated but perpetually binding. They were not sympathetic to the idea of a national church. Separating was, however, by English law an act of treason, and many believers paid a high price for their dreams of purity. Sick of the hidden life that the Church of England forced on them, the Scrooby community took up residence in Holland. Bradford joined them in 1609 and there learned to be a weaver. When he came into his inheritance he went into business for himself. Living in a foreign land was not easy, and eventually the Scrooby community petitioned for a grant of land in the New World. It has already been mentioned that their original grant was for land in the Virginia territory, but high seas prevented them from reaching those shores and they settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, instead.
Bradford’s participation in the migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as governor (he was chief judge and jury, superintended agriculture and trade, and made allotments of land), made him ideally suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony’s beginning. It describes the Puritans’ difficult relations with the Indians, their difficulties during the first winter, when the half of the small colony died. This is all told in the wonderful “plain style”, in order to present the “clear light of truth” to uneducated readers, Puritan writers avoided elegant language. The examples they used were drawn either from the Bible or from the everyday life of farmers and fishermen. Bradford’s history is deeply influenced by the belief that God directs everything that happens; each event he writes about begins with, “It pleased God to…” So, his description of the first view of America is justly famous: “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles ... they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor ... savage barbarians ... were readier to fill their sides with arrows than otherwise. And for the reason it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country, know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms ... all stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue”.
Bradford also recorded the first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the “Mayflower Compact,” drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on board ship. The compact was a harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to come a century and a half later.
Other English Puritans followed the Pilgrims to America. Ten years later a much larger group of almost a thousand colonists settled nearby in what became the Boston area. These people left England to escape the rule of a new king, Charles I. Charles was even less tolerant than his father James had been of people who disagreed with his policies in religion and government. The Boston settlement prospered from the start. Its population grew quickly as more and more Puritans left England to escape persecution.
Many years later, in 1691, it combined with the Plymouth colony under the name of Massachusetts. The ideas of the Massachusetts Puritans had a lasting influence on American society as they wanted to build an ideal community for the rest of mankind to learn from. They believed that governments had a duty to make people obey God’s will, so they passed laws to force people to attend church and laws to punish drunks and adulterers. Even men who let their hair grow long could be in trouble.
The most interesting works of New England Puritan literature were histories. To the Puritans, history developed according to “God’s plan”, in all of their early New England histories, they saw New England as the “Promised Land” of the bible. The central drama of history was the struggle between Christ and Satan. Puritans believed that God’s hand was present in every human event and that He rewarded good and punished bad. History, therefore, revealed what God approved of or condemned, and if God looked favorably on a nation, His approval could be evidenced in its success. Puritans had enough confidence in God’s design to believe that no facts were too small or insignificant to be included in that design; everything could emblemize something. Such sense of universal significance of all things meant that drama was present in every believer’s life and that individual lives could be as symbolic as the life of a nation.
John Winthrop (1588-1649), the son of Adam Winthrop, a lawyer, and Anne Browne, the daughter of a tradesman, was born in Groton, England, on an estate that his father purchased from Henry VIII. It was a prosperous farm, and Winthrop had all the advantages that his father’s social and economic position would allow. He went to Cambridge University for two years and married at the age of seventeen. It was probably at Cambridge University that Winthrop was exposed to Puritan ideas. Unlike Bradford and the Pilgrims, however, Winthrop was not a Separatist; that is, he wished to reform the national church from within, purging it of everything that harked back to Rome, especially the hierarchy of the clergy and all the traditional Catholic rituals. For a time Winthrop thought of becoming a clergyman himself, but instead he turned to the practice of law.
In the 1620s severe economic depression in England made Winthrop realize that he could not depend on the support of his father’s estate. The ascension of Charles I to the throne – who was known to be sympathetic to Roman Catholicism and impatient with Puritan reformers – was also takes as an ominous sign for Puritans, and Winthrop was not alone in predicting that “God will bring some heavy affliction upon the land, and that speedily”. Winthrop came to realize that he could not antagonize the king by expressing openly the Puritan cause without losing all that he possessed. The only recourse seemed to be to obtain the king’s permission to emigrate. In March of 1629 a group of enterprising merchants, all sympathetic believers, were able to get a charter from the Council for New England for land in the New World. They called themselves “The Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England”. From four candidates, Winthrop was chosen governor in October 1629; for the next twenty years most of the responsibility for the colony rested in his hands. On April 8, 1630, an initial group of some seven hundred emigrants sailed from England. The ship carrying Winthrop was called the Arbella. somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean Winthrop delivered his sermon A Model of Christian Charity. It set out clearly and eloquently the ideals of a harmonious Christian community and reminded all those on board that they would stand as an example to the world either of the triumph or else the failure of this Christian enterprise. Although the actual history of the colony showed that Winthrop’s ideal of a perfectly selfless community was impossible to realize in fact, Winthrop emerges from the story as a man of unquestioned integrity and deep humanity.
The History of New England by Winthrop is also in the “plain style”. His writing style is rather cold. He rarely shows shock or sadness, even when he describes scenes of great unhappiness. Sometimes, the dryness of his “plain style” is very effective. Take, for example, an extract from his description of the New England coast when he arrived on June 7, 1630: “We had now fair sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and there came a smell of shore like the smell of a garden”. Like all of the Puritan historians, Winthrop believed that most events could be seen as a sign from God. For example, when a snake was found and killed in a church, people saw this as the victory of New England religion over Satan.
Some Puritans regarded that it was wrong to run the affairs of Massachusetts in this way, they objected particularly to the fact that the same men controlled both the church and the government. They thought that church and state should be separate and that neither should interfere with the other. Such repeated criticisms made the Massachusetts leaders angry, so they even tried to arrest those people. Fortunately they escaped and went south, where they were joined by other discontented people from Massachusetts. On the shores of Narragansett Bay they set up a new colony called Rhode Island which promised its citizens complete religious freedom and separation of church and state. The leaders of Massachusetts could not forgive the people of Rhode Island for thinking so differently from themselves. They called the breakaway colony “the land of the opposite-minded”.
By the end of the seventeenth century a string of English colonies stretched along the east coast of North America. More or less in the middle was Pennsylvania. This was founded in 1681 by William Penn. Under a charter from the English king, Charles II, Penn was the proprietor, or owner, of Pennsylvania. Penn belonged to a religious group, the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers. Quakers refused to swear oaths or to take part in wars. These customs had helped to make them very unpopular with English governments. When Penn promised his fellow Quakers that in Pennsylvania they would be free to follow their own ways, many of them emigrated there. Penn’s promise of religious freedom, together with his reputation for dealing fairly with people, brought settlers from other European countries (Ireland, Germany, etc.) to Pennsylvania.
There was also a strong Dutch presence on the east coast, as can be seen from the fact that up until 1664 New York was known as 'New Amsterdam'. It had first been settled in 1626. In 1664 the English captured it from the Dutch and re-named it New York.
A few years later, in 1670, the English founded the new colonies of North and South Carolina. The last English colony to be founded in North America was Georgia, settled in 1733.
Thus, it should be mentioned that as settlers arrived from Germany, France, Sweden, Scotland and Ireland, more colonies were set up in the northeast, which became known as New England, and down along the coast as far as Georgia in the south.
Some of the new arrivals had left Europe to escape from poverty, and their new home certainly offered them the chance to have a better standard of living and the opportunity to acquire wealth. Others were fleeing from social and political discrimination and helped to set up a society where there was no privileged nobility. Early American society was basically middle class, and people felt they were freer and less open to discrimination than they had been in Europe.
However, things proved difficult at the beginning for those who dreamed of a country where the religious divisions of Europe could be left behind. The first English colony, Massachusetts, which was run on Puritan principles, gained a reputation for being very intolerant of those who did nol live by those principles. For example, anyone who was caught cursing had his ear cut off. This form of religious fervour reached a high point in the town of Salem in 1692, when nineteen women were executed on suspicion of being witches. Religious extremism was not to everyone's liking, however. Those who believed that State and Church should be separate, and that all religious beliefs should be respected, left Massachusetts and founded a new colony in Connecticut.
So, in other words, the first Puritans were not 'very democratic'. The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England by Edward Johnson (1598-1672) defends the harsh laws made by the Puritan leaders. Everybody had to obey these church laws. Believers in other forms of Christianity were called “snakes” or even worse names. So, Puritan society was a “theocracy”: the laws of society and the laws of religion were the same. Those who broke the laws were punished severely.
A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline by Thomas Hooker (1586-1647) is the most famous statement of these Puritan laws.
Less severe was John Cotton’s Way of the Churches of Christ in New England. In fact, by the beginning of the 1700s newer Puritan ideas were becoming important to the development of democracy. In fact, by the beginning of the 1700s, newer Puritan ideas were becoming important to the development of democracy.
Richard Mather (1596-1669), the founder of his family in America, was greatly admired as a typical strong Puritan minister. Another preacher, who knew him well, described his way of preaching as “very plain, studiously avoiding obscure terms”. Among his literary works we can find Manuscript journal (1635) that describes his voyage across the Atlantic, Bay Psalm Book (1640) that is considered to be a common hymnal for the Massachusetts Bay colony, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed (1643), The Summe of Certain Sermons upon Genes (1652) which is the only published collection of his sermons, A Farewell Exhortation to the Church and People of Dorchester in New England (1652) – a personal sermon on the loss of piety and a call for a renewed commitment to God.
It should be mentioned that his style is considered to be simple and practical and his views showed moderation concerning the various religious disputes of those times.
Increase Mather (1639-1723), his son, was a leader of the New England theocracy until it began to fall apart at the end of the 17th century. He was also a minister at North Church in Boston, the most powerful church in New England. The 1690s was the time of the great witchcraft panic. In the town of Salem, Massachusetts, young girls and lonely old women were arrested and put on trial as witches. A number of these people were put to death for “selling their souls” to the Devil. Increase Mather’s best-known book, Remarkable Providences (1684), tells us much about the psychological environment of the time. The book is filled with the Puritans’ strange beliefs. To Mather and other Puritans, witchcraft and other forms of evil were an absolutely real part of everyday life.
No account of New England colonial literature would be complete without mentioning Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the master pedant. The third in the four generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books and pamphlets. Increase’s son, Cotton Mather, became the most famous of the family. He had “an insane genius for advertising himself”. Whenever something happened to him in his life, he wrote a religious book. When his first wife died, he published a long sermon (religious address) called Death Made Easy and Happy. When his little daughter died, he wrote The Best Way of Living, Which is to Die Daily. Most of these works were quite short and are of little interest to us today. But some, such as his famous Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), were very long and were published in many volumes. Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the settlement of New England through a series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy Puritan errand into the wilderness to establish God’s kingdom; its structure is a narrative progression of representative American “Saint’s Lives.” His zeal somewhat redeems his pompousness: “I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand.”
He was certain that his longest work, The Angel of Bethesda (1723), would “prove one of the most useful books that have been published in the World”. But the book was so long, no one ever tried to publish it. Cotton’s Diary gives us a clear picture of the inner life of this strange and often unpleasant man. On almost every page, he speaks of his special relationship with God. When he had a pain in his stomach or teeth, he though about how he had broken God’s law with his stomach or teeth. During his last years, he expressed shock at the “increasing wickedness” of the people around him, including his own children.
The most fascinating part of this work is the description of the Salem witch trials. He makes it clear that he personally believed that this was an “assault from Hell” and that all of New England was filled with evil spirits from hell. At the same time, he admitted that the witch trials had been a mistake and that it was good that they were finally stopped.
The writings of Cotton Mather show how the later Puritan writers moved away from the “plain style” of their grandfathers. The language is complicated and filled with strange words from Latin. Although Mather called his style “a cloth of gold”, ordinary people usually found it difficult to read.
Even in the early days some writers were struggling hard against the Puritan theocracy. Anne Hutchinson (July 20, 1591 – August 20, 1643) was a pioneer settler in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Netherlands, and the unauthorized minister of a dissident church discussion group. Hutchinson held Bible meetings for women that soon had great appeal to men as well. Eventually, she went beyond Bible study to proclaim her own theological interpretations of sermons, some of which offended the colony leadership. A major controversy ensued, and after a trial before a jury of officials and clergy, she was banished from her colony.
She is a key figure in the study of the development of religious freedom in England’s American colonies and the history of women in ministry. The state of Massachusetts honors her with a State House monument calling her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.”
The majority of colonial European settlers who came to America for religious reasons came for the freedom to practice their own religion, and in some cases to impose it on others. In their early years, most colonies enforced a uniformity at least as strict as had occurred in the country they had left. There was considerable Puritan intolerance in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her particular “heresy” was to maintain that it was a blessing and not a curse to be a woman.
Against that background, Anne was extremely outspoken about some of her most controversial views. She was an avid student of the Bible which she freely interpreted in the light of what she termed her “divine inspiration.” She generally adhered to the principles of Puritan orthodoxy. Notably, however, she held enormously progressive, ahead‐of‐her‐times notions about the equality and rights of women, in contradiction of both Puritan and prevailing cultural attitudes. She was forthright and compelling in proclaiming these beliefs, which put her in considerable tension not only with the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s government, who were accountable to the established Church of England (Anglican), but also with other Puritans, especially the clergy.
She began conducting informal Bible studies and discussion groups in her home, something that gave scope to Puritan intellects. Hutchinson invited her friends and neighbors, at first, all of them women. Participants felt free to question religious beliefs and to decry racial prejudice, including enslavement of Native Americans. Hutchinson explored Scripture much in the way of a minister. Rather than teach traditional Puritan interpretations of Scripture, she studied the Bible in great depth for herself. Often her spiritual interpretation differed widely from the learned but legalistic reading offered from the Puritan Sunday pulpit. In particular, Hutchinson constantly challenged the standard interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. This was a vital text for the Puritans, key to the doctrine of original sin. But it was regularly cited to assign special blame to women as the source of sin and to justify the extremely patriarchal structure of Puritan society.
Since she had a strong personal concern for women’s lack of rights and the racial prejudice against Native Americans, she also applied her personal interpretation of the principles of the Bible to those social concerns. Furthermore, she openly challenged some of the moral and legal codes that the Puritans held, as well as the authority of the clergy, something that would weigh against her later on.
As word of her teachings spread, she attracted new followers, including many men. Among them were men like Sir Henry Vane, who would become the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. Attendance at her home study group grew to upwards of eighty people and had to be moved to the local church.
Increasingly, the ministers opposed Hutchinson’s meetings, ostensibly on the grounds that such “unauthorized” religious gatherings might confuse the faithful. But gradually the opposition was expressed in openly misogynistic terms. Anne paid no attention to her critics. When they cited the biblical texts on the need for women to keep silent in church, she rejoined with a verse from Titus permitting that “the elder women should instruct the younger.”
To the chagrin of clergy and colony officials, she began espousing the “covenant of grace” instead of the “covenant of works,” a theological position emphasized in the Protestant Reformation and taught earlier by John Calvin. She tended to believe that faith alone was necessary to salvation. She also claimed that she could identify “the elect” among the colonists. These positions caused John Cotton, John Winthrop, and other former friends to view her as an antinomian heretic.
By 1637, Puritan ministers in the colony had labeled Hutchinson a modern “Jezebel” who was infecting women with perverse and “abominable” ideas regarding their dignity and rights.[5] That year, Sir Henry Vane lost the governorship to John Winthrop, who did not share Vane’s favorable opinion of Hutchinson. He instead “considered her a threat to his ‘city set on a hill’” (a distinctive of Puritan theology) and criticized her meetings as being a “thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for [her] sex.” Governor Winthrop and the established religious hierarchy considered many of her comments in her discussion groups to be heretical, in particular and specifically, her “unfounded criticism of the clergy from an unauthorized source”. She told the governor that the Lord had revealed himself to her: “… upon a Throne of Justice, and all the world appearing before him, and though I must come to New England, yet I must not fear nor be dismayed.” Governor Winthrop’s retort came swiftly: “I am persuaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.”
She was brought to civil trial in 1638 by the General Court of Massachusetts, presided over by Winthrop, on the charge of “traducing the ministers.” The Court included both government officials and Puritan clergy. She was forty‐six at the time and advanced in her fifteenth pregnancy. Nevertheless, she was forced to stand for several days before a board of male interrogators as they tried desperately to get her to admit her secret blasphemies. They accused her of violating the fifth commandment – to “honor the father and mother” – accusing her of encouraging dissent against the fathers of the commonwealth. It was charged that by attending her gatherings women were being tempted to neglect the care of their own families.
Anne skillfully defended herself until it was clear that there was no escape from the court’s predetermined judgment. Cornered, she addressed the court with her own judgment: “...you have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harme, for I am in the hands of the eternall Jehovah my Saviour, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further doe I esteeme of any mortal man than creatures in his hand, I feare none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I doe verily beleeve that he will deliver me out of your hands, therefore take heed how you proceed against me; for I know that for this you goe about to doe to me, God will ruine you and your posterity, and this whole state”.
This outburst brought forth angry jeers. She was called a heretic and an instrument of the devil. In the words of one minister, “You have stepped out of your place, you have rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject.” In August 1637 she was condemned by the Court that included John Eliot, famous missionary to Massachusetts Bay Colony Indians, and translator of the first complete Bible printed in America. They voted to banish her from the colony “as being a woman not fit for our society.” She was put under house arrest to await her religious trial. In March 1638, the First Church in Boston conducted a religious trial. They accused Hutchinson of blasphemy. They also accused her of “lewd and lascivious conduct” for having men and women in her house at the same time during her Sunday meetings. This religious court found her guilty and voted to excommunicate her from the Puritan Church for dissenting from Puritan orthodoxy.
During her imprisonment, some of the leaders of the Hutchinsonian movement prepared to leave the colony and settle elsewhere. Nineteen men, including William Hutchinson, met on March 7, 1638 at the home of the wealthy Boston merchant William Coddington. The men formed themselves into a “Bodie Politick” and elected Coddington their judge. They initially planned to move to Jersey or Long Island, but Roger Williams convinced them to settle in the area of Rhode Island, near Williams’ Providence Plantations settlement. Coddington purchased Aquidneck island from the Indians and the settlement of Pocasset (now Portsmouth) was founded. Anne Hutchinson followed in April, after the conclusion of her trial.
After enduring months of persecution and suffering while pregnant, Mrs. Hutchinson suffered a miscarriage. The Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gloated in her suffering and that of Mary Dyer, one of her followers who also suffered a miscarriage, labelling their misfortunes as the judgment of God. Massachusetts Bay continued to persecute Hutchinson’s followers who had not followed her, and sent church leaders from Boston to Aquidneck in an attempt to persuade her of the correctness of their doctrine. Anne expelled the delegates from her home, denouncing the Boston church as a “whore and a strumpet”.
Meanwhile, judge Coddington began to instigate theocratic policies in the government of the Pocasset colony. Coddington declared that he was permitted to exercise his interpretations of the “word of God” on the settlers and to see himself as a feudal lord ruling the island, with the settlers as his tenants. Anne successfully led a movement to amend the Pocasset constitution to allow the freemen the power to veto the governor's actions and established the positions of three “elders” to be elected by the freemen to share the powers of the governor and thus check his power. Hutchinson and the freemen demanded an election for a government to replace Coddington, who was forced to concede. William Hutchinson was elected governor and Coddington left the colony along with some of his followers, who established the settlement of Newport at the south end of the island. The freemen of Pocasset changed the name of their town to Portsmouth and adopted a new government which provided for trial by jury and separation of church and state. William Hutchinson was chosen as governor.
Coddington returned with an armed force, which was initially repelled, but soon he arrested William Hutchinson and ordered his disenfranchisement. On March 12, 1640, a year after the attack, the towns of Portsmouth and Newport agreed to re‐unite peacefully. Coddington was to be governor and William Hutchinson was chosen as one of his assistants. The towns were to remain autonomous with laws made by the citizens.
Soon after, Anne Hutchinson realized a result of her philosophy which she had until then overlooked. Deciding that the office of magistracy was unlawful, she persuaded her husband to resign from his position, as Roger Williams put it, “because of the opinion, which she had newly taken up, of the unlawfulness of magistry.” Anne Hutchinson had been led by her conscience and by meditation on the Scripture and logic to the conclusion of individualist anarchism.
William Hutchinson died in 1643, soon after his resignation, and the widow Anne decided to leave Portsmouth, along with some of her family and some followers. The group went to Pelham Bay, then part of New Netherland, the Dutch possession which now is the Bronx in New York City. During this time the local Indians were fighting with the Dutch, and in 1643 she and all of her family who followed her except her youngest daughter were killed there by a group of Indians who came calling in a friendly manner, and then suddenly turned on their unsuspecting victims. The Hutchinsons had been friendly to them but the native Americans had been subject to much mistreatment by the ruling Dutch and had begun a war against settlers. They killed the Hutchinson residents, put all their possessions in the house including animals and set the house afire. The youngest Hutchinson, Susanna, was taken captive and lived with the Indians until ransomed by her family members who stayed in The Bay Colony. It is said that she did not want to leave her captors. In 1651 she married John Cole and they started a farm in Rhode Island beginning a long line of descendants.
Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) desired a freer religious environment too; he went off to establish his own colony in Rhode Island. His Bloudy Tenent became a famous statement of the case for religious freedom. To him, freedom was not only “good in itself”, it was necessary condition for “the growth and development of the soul”.
As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism gradually dwindled, despite sporadic, harsh Puritan efforts to stem the tide of tolerance. The minister Roger Williams suffered for his own views on religion. An English-born son of a tailor, he was banished from Massachusetts in the middle of New England’s ferocious winter in 1635. Secretly warned by Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, he survived only by living with Indians; in 1636, he established a new colony at Rhode Island that would welcome persons of different religions.
A graduate of Cambridge University (England), he retained sympathy for working people and diverse views. His ideas were ahead of his time. He was an early critic of imperialism, insisting that European kings had no right to grant land charters because American land belonged to the Indians. Williams also believe in the separation between church and state — still a fundamental principle in America today. He held that the law courts should not have the power to punish people for religious reasons — a stand that undermined the strict New England theocracies. A believer in equality and democracy, he was a lifelong friend of the Indians. Williams’s numerous books include one of the first phrase books of Indian languages, A Key into the Languages of America (1643). The book also is an embryonic ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian life based on the time he had lived among the tribes. Each chapter is devoted to one topic — for example, eating and mealtime. Indian words and phrases pertaining to this topic are mixed with comments, anecdotes, and a concluding poem. The end of the first chapter reads:
If nature’s sons, both wild and tame,
Humane and courteous be,
How ill becomes it sons of God
To want humanity.
In the chapter on words about entertainment, he comments that “it is a strange truth that a man shall generally find more free entertainment and refreshing among these barbarians, than amongst thousands that call themselves Christians.” Williams’s life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit to England during the bloody Civil War there, he drew upon his survival in frigid New England to organize firewood deliveries to the poor of London during the winter, after their supply of coal had been cut off. He wrote lively defenses of religious toleration not only for different Christian sects, but also for non-Christians. “It is the will and command of God, that ... a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men, in all nations...,” he wrote in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644). The intercultural experience of living among gracious and humane Indians undoubtedly accounts for much of his wisdom.
Influence was two-way in the colonies. For example, John Eliot translated the Bible into Narragansett. Some Indians converted to Christianity. Even today, the Native American church is a mixture of Christianity and Indian traditional belief.
The spirit of toleration and religious freedom that gradually grew in the American colonies was first established in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. The humane and tolerant Quakers, or “Friends,” as they were known, believed in the sacredness of the individual conscience as the fountainhead of social order and morality. The fundamental Quaker belief in universal love and brotherhood made them deeply democratic and opposed to dogmatic religious authority. Driven out of strict Massachusetts, which feared their influence, they established a very successful colony, Pennsylvania, under William Penn in 1681.
The new Englanders were quite successful at keeping the absolute “purity” of Puritanism during the early, difficult days of settlement. But When the Indians were no longer a danger, the dark forests had become farmland and more comfortable settlements had grown up, Puritan strictness began to relax. So, gradually the Puritan tradition grew weaker and weaker.
In the writings of the earliest Puritans, we often find poems on religious themes. Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) was the first real New England poet. Her Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America contained the first New World poems published in England. She refuses “to sing of wars, of Captains, and of Kings”. Instead, she gives us a look into the heart of a 17th-century American woman.
The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book to be published by a woman – Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies. Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl’s estate manager, Thomas Dudley. His daughter was very much the apple of his eye. He took great care to see that she received an education superior to that of most young women of the time. When she was only sixteen she married a young man, Simon Bradstreet, a recent graduate of Cambridge University, who was associated with her father in conducting the affairs of the earl of Lincoln’s estate. He also shared her father’s Puritan beliefs. A year after the marriage her husband was appointed to assist in the preparations of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the following year Bradstreet at the age of 18 emigrated with her family. Her husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew into the great city of Boston.
Very little is known of Bradstreet’s daily life, except that it was a hard existence. Added to the hardships of daily living was the fact that Bradstreet was never very strong. She had rheumatic fever as a child and as a result suffered recurrent periods of severe fatigue; nevertheless, she risked death by childbirth eight times. Her husband was always involved in the colony’s diplomatic missions; and in 1661 he went to England to renegotiate the Bay Company charter with Charles II. All of Simon’s tasks must have added to her responsibilities at home. And like any good Puritan she added to the care of Daily life the examination of her conscience. She wrote in one of her “Meditations” for her children that she was troubled many times about the truth of the Scriptures, that she never saw any convincing miracles, and that she always wondered if those of which she read “were feigned”. What proved to her finally that God exists was not her reading who took their consolation not from theology but from the “wondrous works”, as she wrote, “that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end”.
She preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband and children. She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well. She often uses elaborate conceits or extended metaphors. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (1678) uses the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular in Europe at the time, but gives these a pious meaning at the poem’s conclusion:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
The poetry of Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729)was unknown to American literary historians until 1937. Written during the last years of the Puritan theocracy, it is some of the finest poetry written in Colonial America. He created rich, unusual images to help the reader “see, hear, taste and feel religious doctrine”.