In the Puritan world view, everything worked according to a plan set by God, and an orderly society of people worked and lived out that plan. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a tight-knit group, founded on the ideal of being a harmonious community of people who agreed to work together and abide by the wishes of the larger community.
Puritan theology gave weight to the idea that if people allowed God’s will to rule and guide the community, peace, harmony and prosperity would follow. If the community did not live up to that ideal, however, God’s wrath would come down and destroy the community. The Puritan elders, therefore, felt obligated to make sure that people conformed to the ideals of the community. To not conform suggested that a person was an “impostor” who was not predestined to be saved and did not really belong in the community.
As with any group, there were differences of opinion, but the leaders of the colony made sure that such differences did not stray too far from established ideals. Harmony and faith, not tolerance, were the guiding principles. When forced to choose between the harmony of the colony and banishing or executing dissenters, Governor Winthrop and the ministers did not hesitate to act against nonconformists to preserve what they felt were the best interests of the larger community.
One dissenter, Roger Williams, was a highly educated man who held a strong belief in an individual’s freedom of worship. He arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, after a short stay in Plymouth. Even by Plymouth’s standards, Williams was a radical Separatist, who came to be known as the purest of Puritans. He was troubled by the idea that the Puritans had not made a clean break from the corrupt Church of England.
Williams was elected minister of a church in Salem in 1635, where he found a forum for advocating his ideas. One of his more extreme ideas was that the English should respect the land rights of the Native Americans, and that it was a sin to take possession of any land without first buying it from the Indians. This notion was in direct conflict with the Bay Colony’s charter and the general opinion of many Englishmen.
Another idea that Williams held was that religious groups should be supported by voluntary tithes, not taxes as demanded by the Bay Colony leaders. When Williams went on to claim that magistrates should have no voice in spiritual matters, he went too far. He wanted a complete separation of church and state, asserting that “forced religion stinks in God’s nostrils.” His views proved to be too extreme for the radical church of Salem, which finally removed him. The Bay Colony General Court found Williams guilty of disseminating dangerous opinions and banished him from the colony.
Fleeing the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, Williams headed southwest where he settled at Narragansett Bay and established a Baptist church. He acquired land from the Narragansett Indian Chiefs and named his settlement Providence, in thanks to God.
In 1644, Williams secured a Charter from Parliament to oversee a colony made up of Providence and the other communities of Rhode Island. Williams was ready to practice what he preached, establishing a government based on the consent of the people, tolerating all religions, and rigidly separating church and state.
His endorsement of religious tolerance made Rhode Island most liberal settlement of its time. This colony served as a refuge where all could come to worship as their conscience dictated without interference from the state. Rhode Island provided a tolerant home for Quakers and was also home to the first Jewish community. The Puritan clergy in Massachusetts viewed Rhode Island as the “sink” of New England where the “Lord’s debris” rotted.
Williams was not the only one whose views challenged the authority of the Bay Colony elders. Anne Hutchinson was one of the more famous dissenters from Massachusetts. She was an articulate, strong-willed woman whose views developed out of the Puritan tradition but soon clashed with that same tradition and the authorities who preserved Puritanism.
Hutchinson challenged the Puritan views on salvation. She believed that all one needed to be admitted into Heaven was faith and God’s saving grace and that leading a holy life was not a guarantee of salvation. This simplified view of salvation raised questions about the status of who was “elect,” which raised awkward questions about the role of the community and its leaders. The Bay Colony’s leaders accused Hutchinson of “antinomianism,” or the idea that if you were saved you did not need to obey the laws of God or man. To most Christian groups, Puritan and non-Puritan alike, this idea was a rejection of the very institutions that God put in place and implied the equally uncomfortable idea that people could question civil and religious authority.
Hutchinson began hosting meetings in her home to review the weekly sermons and discuss the Scriptures. These discussions rapidly turned into forums for Hutchinson to assert her own interpretations of religious matters, specifically the idea that there was no direct relationship between moral conduct and salvation. She firmly asserted that good behavior was not a sign of being saved or one of the “elect.” Her meetings generated a good deal of interest and a larger number of colonists came to hear her speak each week.
Hutchinson’s increasing leadership began to worry Governor John Winthrop. He felt she was a threat to the authority of the Puritan leaders. Additionally, a woman leading a religious discussion struck the Puritan leadership as a rejection of what they viewed as the natural order of things. They believed that women should be content to be submissive to their husbands and the community. Hutchinson’s subversive gatherings led Winthrop and the Puritan leaders to take action against her. She was arrested and brought to trial in 1638 for challenging the clergy and asserting her view of the "Covenant of Grace," or the belief that moral conduct and piety should not be the primary qualifications for "visible sanctification."
The General Court quoted the Bible to make their case against Hutchinson, and she responded that she had come by her beliefs through direct revelations from God. The Puritan ministers felt this was blasphemy and banished her from the Bay Colony. Hutchinson, her children, and a few followers left Massachusetts for Roger Williams’ more tolerant Rhode Island and settled south of Providence. After her husband’s death in 1643, she moved to New York where she and all but one of her children were killed by Indians. Governor Winthrop and several other leaders in the Massachusetts Bay community saw this as God’s final judgement of a sinful and unsaved person. They felt the colony had escaped being contaminated by such an evil influence.
An expanding population and increasing levels of Puritan intolerance in Massachusetts led to the founding of several new colonies throughout New England. A group led by Reverend Thomas Hooker founded Hartford, along the Connecticut River, in 1635. Hooker helped to draft the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a type of constitution created for the settlement in 1639. The Fundamental Orders were unique because they did not reference the King or any other government or power outside of Connecticut. They also established democratic control by all citizens and did not limit voting rights to members of the Puritan church. Connecticut was granted a royal charter in 1662.
North of the Massachusetts Bay Colony lay communities that emerged from the fishing and trading activities along the coast and eventually became Maine, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia. The relationship between these areas and Massachusetts changed periodically during the seventeenth century. By the middle of the century Maine and New Hampshire had been absorbed into the Bay Colony. Then in 1679, the King separated New Hampshire from Massachusetts, making New Hampshire a royal colony.
Initially, the coastal Indians helped the English develop their economy in the new colonies, but as the settlers continued to spread inland it inevitably led to conflict with the natives. In 1637, the Pequot War erupted when a Massachusetts colonist accused a Pequot Indian of murdering a settler, and conflict erupted between the two groups. The English set fire to a Pequot village and as the Indians fled their huts the Puritans shot and killed them. During the war, hundreds of Pequots were indiscriminately killed, virtually eliminating the tribe.
The remaining Indians forged an alliance in hopes of resisting English encroachment on their land. Metacom, a Wampanoag Indian called King Philip by the English, led the coalition. In 1675 they attacked several English villages throughout New England, and within a year they were threatening Boston. In total, King Philip’s group attacked 52 Puritan towns and destroyed 12 of them completely. After about a year of fighting the Indians’ resistance wore down. Philip’s wife and son were sold into slavery and Philip himself was captured and beheaded. It is estimated that nearly 20,000 people were killed in this bloody war.
Those Indians who remained were drastically reduced in numbers. Many either fled to the west or were forced to settle in villages supervised by the English so they no longer posed a threat to the colonists. However, King Philip’s War did slow the westward movement of English settlers for several decades.
For a brief time in the late 1600s, the English government developed the “Dominion of New England,” which sought to bolster colonial defense in the event of war and bring the colonies under tighter royal control. King James II was becoming apprehensive about the New England colonies' increasingly independent ways, so the Dominion of New England was also designed to promote closer relations between England and its colonies. The Dominion of New England sought to stop American trade with anyone not ruled by England through Navigation Laws, therefore bringing England’s overseas possessions closer to the motherland. King James II felt that out of all of the colonies, Massachusetts was in particular need of supervision because of its expanding power in the New World.
Sir Edmund Andros, the president of the new Dominion, arrived in Boston with orders to stop the northern colonies from behaving like sovereign powers. He proceeded to abolish popular assemblies, institute new taxes, suppress smuggling, and enforce religious toleration. Then, in the late 1680s England experienced their “Glorious Revolution” and enthroned a new King, William III, which led to the collapse of the Dominion. When news of these events reached Boston, a mob rose up against Andros and shipped him back to England. Although Massachusetts was rid of Andros, they did not gain as much individuality from this change as they hoped. In 1691, the King made Massachusetts a royal colony and instituted a royal governor.
Many British officials' attitudes toward the American colonies were temporarily changed when the Dominion of New England failed and the Navigation Laws were no longer enforceable. Some officials believed England would gain more from encouraging mercantilism with the colonies than from meddling in their governmental affairs. This period of disregard in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries fostered the growth of self-government in America.
The New England colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island were founded as a part utopian experiment and part commercial venture. The Puritans felt it was their opportunity to start over, to build a new society according to Calvinist ideals, and to live freely from dissention and worldly influence. Over time, the prosperous small towns, farms, and seaports brought wealth to the region. The tradition of the village meeting enabled commoners to have an unusual amount of participation in local affairs, in spite of the firm control of Puritan elders.
As the colonies developed, a number of flaws in the plan were exposed. Although the colonies were set up by people looking for religious freedom they ended up punishing those who did not conform to their beliefs. Refugees from New England ended up establishing colonies in the middle Atlantic whose reputation for relative tolerance stood in sharp contrast to New England's theocracy. The passion of the founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay was hard to maintain in younger generations. By the 1700s, younger colonists maintained many of the structures of the seventeenth century society but were disillusioned with the rigidity of the old Puritan orthodoxy and with England's attempt to control a growing assortment of colonies.