Puritans of Boston

“From all this cheerful and ample dress, this might well be a Cavalier emigration; in truth, the apparel supplied as an outfit to the Virginia planters (who are generally supposed to be far more given over to rich dress) was not as full nor as costly as this apparel of MA Bay. In this as in every comparison I make, I find little to indicate any difference between Puritan and Cavalier in quantity of garments, in quality, or cost – or, indeed, in form. The differences in England were much exaggerated in print; in America they often existed wholly in men’s notions of what a Puritan must be.” – Alice Morse Earle:

PURITAN THOUGHT

If men had remained as they had been created fresh from the hand of God, then the laws of nature which the Anglicans saw as laws civil as well as ecclesiastical would work. But to Puritan experience mankind was not naturally noble, reasonable, honest, kind, decent of intelligent.

John Cotton: “Man’s perverse subtlety in inventing ways of backsliding.”
Man needed the aid of God to achieve their natural capacity, The natural man, if left to himself, will not read the lessons of nature and reason correctly.

BIBL: The Puritans – A Sourcebook of their writings.

Religion was the primary and all-engrossing business of man – all human thought and action should tend to the glory of God.

The visible universe was under God’s direct and continuous guidance.

Rev. William Parson, 1685: “His hand has made and framed the whole fabrick of Heaven and Earth. He hath hung out the Globe of this world…the yearly seasons, also Seed-time and Harvest, Summer and Winter, binding up and covering the earth with Frost, Ice and Snow, and the releasing and renewing of the face of the Earth again, it’s His Work.”

Welfare of the nation served by each and every person keeping to his proper station: “Observe the will of God by keeping to the service that belongs to our station, which providence has made our peculiar business…”

“The Puritan mind was one of the toughest the world has had to dealt with. There was nothing of the fatalist about him. The soldiers of Jehovah.

“The Indians of NE learned to their great sorrow how vehement could be the onset of troops who fought for a predestined victory.
“Men were saved by their faith, not their deeds. Puritans trained at universities, men of learning and scholars. Demanded study and logical interpretation against all ignorant men who claimed personal instructions from God.

“New France/ New Amsterdam = extensions of the mother country. New England was exactly that = New England. Purified, holy England in a new world of new men. Utopia

“Puritans feared nothing on earth – what they feared were the invisible powers of the air, darkness, and hell.
Settlers came as an armed host – with armor, long pieces, swords and ammunition—ready to defend their colony against possible attack, not only from Indians and Spaniards but England itself.

Puritan government: Political liberty/Church was voluntary/Increase Mather: Divines clearly understood “that a particular church is constituted by the Covenant and an agreement of saints to walk with God and one another according to the Order of the gospel.
Future of New England and American society bound up with the life of this idea. (Perry Miller, The New England Mind, p 450)
Puritan Legacy: Free Government/ Government not of mere Archbishops, Popes, Kings but of God. Gov not of cant, ceremony and mindless repetition of words but of Scripture written not by men but God.

NEXT Step = Jefferson and Laws of Nature. Not of men. God = Nature. Natural evolution of human progress.

“If the people be governors, who then shall be governed?” John Cotton
The elect and the ordained – “as if allegiance was due only to God”

Puritan theology: Men must receive from God a special infusion of Grace –- that God gives the grace to some and not to others out of his own sovereign pleasure.
Certain souls were predestined to heaven – The Saints of the Church—the leaders of society.
Obviously, the experience was given to relatively few men; therefore God, who is outside time, must have known from the beginning of time, who would and would not achieve sainthood. This is the law of life.
Emigrants went to New England to prove that a state and a church would be blessed by God and prosper.
Magistrates of Boston alarmed at growing calls for more democracy. When 108 residents petitioned to be made freemen (voters) the Magistrates solved the problem by admitting as Freemen only those who were church members – those who had passed the stringent examination of purity as demanded by Puritan ministers. In that way church and state became one, the ideology of the Commonwealth became one – democracy was not a threat to the power of the magistrates.

Winthrop: two freedoms
Natural: freedom to do as one wants, good or evil
Moral: covenant between God and man and liberty to do only which is good, just and honest – “this liberty you are to stand for with the hazard of your lives.”

The Puritans were not interested in material prosperity and were prone when it came, unfortunately, to take it as a sign of God’s approval. Yet their fundamental criterion of success was not material wealth, but the creation of a community in which a genuinely ethical and spiritual life could be lived.
Puritan settlements, the first of many efforts to create Utopian communities in America. Gave the American experiment a utopian touch it has never lost.

Bancroft: p243 self-gov in MA: “A commonwealth of chosen people in covenant with God.
The genius of the Puritan sect = two cardinal principles:
Faith in absolute sovereignty of God, whose will is perfect; and the Equality of all who believe that his will is to be done.
Religion struggling in, with, and for the people,

BSRHeath “Puritanism is a tough discipline to study. Puritan influences on the Revolutionary thinkers are not very sound. I do think, though, that the concepts of covenant, of laws above those of Archbishop and King, are of an order which Jefferson called nature and the Puritan’s God, are connected from Puritanism to Republican.”

BSRH x Constance Post NE Quarterly, Sept 1993 – “Eliot who arrived in 1631 did no proselytizing until 1646”

BSRH letter from John Culver: “The Great Migration had both a political as well as religious impetus. The Puritans had controlled the house of Commons politically and represented the great middle class of England. Because of royal abuses, the parliament was able to extract the Petition of Right from King Charles I in 1628 before it would grant any new taxes. Once the King had placed his seal on the Petition of Right and received his money from vote of Parliament, Charles dissolved Parliament swearing never to call Parliament back into session. With this the (Congregational) Puritans lost all hope of completing the Reformation in England and decided to migrate to Virginia. At about the same time, some Puritan merchants bought the MA Bay Company, and it became the vehicle of Puritan migration to NE. Of course, the religious motive was present as well, and the disputes with Laud did not help the situation. For the NE Puritans then, their “errand into the wilderness” became the establishment of the Kingdom of God in America.”

BSRH: In Sept 1630, John Winthrop spoke to the New Israelites…”We have entered into a Covenant with God for his work... now the only way to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly and to love mercy…we must be knit together as one man. We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourne together, labor and suffer together always having before our eyes our community in the work.”

BS RH : Puritan ideology was formed in the 1560’s – a return to the purity of the Church of the 1st century as established by Christ himself. It was in reaction to the spread of hierarchy and privilege in the Church of England and to what the Puritans considered to be the wicked influence of the Catholic Church. Both Rome and the Archbishop of the Anglican Church were the archfiends.
That theology was a way of life. The visible universe was under God’s direct and continuous guidance. The Puritan Magna Charta was the Bible; the law of God, not of Popes or Archbishops. They believed in earnest that they were the chosen of God who had formed a covenant with them to erect a Zion in the wilderness of New England. As God had created a covenant first with Adam, then Abraham, so too, with the Puritan saints. John Winthrop explained “the errand into the wilderness” to the passengers aboard the Arbella just before they landed in Boston. “that the work we have in hand is by mutual consent to seek out a plan under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. The case between God and Us: we are entered into covenant with him for this work.”

Increase Mather said it most eloquently: “that a particular church is constituted by the Covenant or an agreement of Saints to walk with God and one another.”

This agreement was freely given because the Puritan believed that God endowed man with
Natural liberty, acting upon choice. These two concepts are the bulwark of American government. They evolved into the thought of Thomas Jefferson. To the Puritan, the covenant was also a two-way agreement: responsibility to God and an agreement of responsibility to the people of New England.
The visible church would lead the people into the New Israel. The chosen of that church were only those that demonstrated clearly their covenant of grace with God.
They took their meaning from I Corinthians, “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus shall be called Saints;” and from Psalm 50, ‘Gather my Saints unto me those that have made a covenant with me.”
The First Church in Roxbury houses not only the faith of the Puritan, but his state as well: the holy state of Roxbury; the oligarchy of the Saints; God, who is outside time, must have known from the beginning who could, and who could not, achieve divine grace. Therefore, the Church-State was pure. The Saint’s were God’s vice regents here on earth.
This is what the Puritan set out to achieve when the Arbella landed in Boston in 1630: New regenerated England. Israel reborn in the wilderness of America.
“Without doubt,” wrote the minister of the second church in Dorchester in 1674, “the Lord Jesus hath a peculiar respect unto this place and to this people. This is Immanuel’s Land. Christ hath dispossessed Satan and here the Lord hath caused New Jerusalem.”

Puritan thought was at variance with Anglican policy. To the Puritan the Scriptures contained the constitution for the organization of the visible church. To the Anglican prelates this was a serious threat to their vested interests of wealth and privilege. The power was in the hands of Archbishop Laud, who assumed the championship of the Anglican Church in 1628. Defender of the Church hierarchy, Laud was the veritable Anti Christ to the Puritans.
The Puritan fled not so much from persecution – although Laud did imprison some of them – but mainly, from error. Their overwhelming fear of error which might cast them into hell, forced them to board tiny little wooden ships for the wilderness of America.

One of the principal objects of the Massachusetts Bay Charter granted by Charles I on March 4, 1629 was that the corporation “may win and incite the Natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only God.” That summer the seal of MA was designed by an unknown artisan. It bore the image of a standing Indian dressed only in leaves at his loins with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Out of his mouth was a label which read: “come over and help us.”
These words were taken from Acts 16 9-10, where in a vision Paul sees a Macedonian: “standing, beseeching him and saying, come over into Macedonia and help us. And when he had seen the vision straight away we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel unto them.”

Massachusett – the clan nearest Roxbury lived on the falls of the Neponset with its rich fishing beds and hunted in the vast tracts of what were called the Blue Hills by the Puritans. Each settlement of Indians was led by a Sachem, ruled by a paramount sachem from a larger tribe. The spiritual life of the Indians was governed by the powwas or shamans. These men ( and women) inhabited the world of visions and magic. The Indians believed that Chepian, the devil entered the soul of the powwa in a strange dream and by this power they cured the sick and soothed the afflicted and appeased evil spirits.

Cotton Mather: “we know not when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of this mighty continent, yet we may guess that probably the devil decoyed those miserable savages thither … that old landlord of America.”

Puritanism: more than any other factor it explains the differentiation of the English from their Continental cousins. It is a fashion in England nowadays to decry Puritanism; those that do so are reviling that element in their heritage that makes them most English. (Stein)
Possibly the last great expression of American Puritanism was Prohibition, which the English Puritans would have looked upon as passing strange
Closing line of Fair Harvard …”till the last stock of the Puritans die”

Leading way to purification of the Church. Denied a voice at home, they fervently hoped that their exemplary colony, self-consciously set in the New World would draw King and countrymen to the Truth.
A Covenant people compacting individually with God and collectively with each other.
Puritan piety and economic ambition, in intensity and rigor comparable to the first followers of Christ and to 20th century Kibbutzim.
Non-separation Congregationalists first derided as “Puritan”
Bible as supreme authority

The Puritan demanded learned ministers not Jesus-shouters.

New England “conscience”
“tendency toward self deception still strong today in those of puritanical antecedents, and apt to slop over into self-hypocrisy”
“The Puritans called themselves People of God, or simply, Christians, for they believed their faith was what Christ and his apostles preached. It was not until the end of the century that they came to accept the term Puritan and to glory in it.”

Many Saints viewed the new world commonwealth as a temporary expedient. They intended the City of the Hill to manifest a viable plan for Calvinist society in England. Anticipated a day when their comrades across the sea would beckon them to implement the model on English soil.
1640s Parliament versus Crown: Puritan leaders felt a sense of cultural displacement similar to, though not as severe as the Massachusett

Pilgrims and Puritans: “It is a peculiar characteristic of the human mind that, having what it considers errors in the tenets of any faith, and set up its own standards, it at once becomes intolerant of any one who suggests or even thinks that he has the same right to dissent from the latest standard established.
The Pilgrims and Puritans came here in search of a home where they might be free, but closed their doors to others impelled by the same love of freedom to flee their native land, thus following the example of those whose persecutions they themselves had fled. In this they were following the inscrutable workings of the human mind, and indirectly and unintentionally laying the foundations of a broader liberty than they ever believed in their wildest flights of fancy, for the very intolerance which they displayed, but sharpened the spirit of resistance, and led to a more thorough understanding of true liberty, the liberty to pursue one’s own inclination until the pursuit reaches the bounds of positive evil, or trespasses upon the liberties of another” (BIBL Massasoit by Alvin Weeks CPL)

DH Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature: What did the Pilgrim fathers come for then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea?…They came largely to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away? Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves.” DB – “Lawrence got it right: To use a phrase that in the 60s served as the shorthand term for all malcontents, the founders of New England were dropouts – with all the indignation, idealism and wounded righteousness that the term implies.
Sermons – according to the Anglican calendar only four homilies or sermons were required on the liturgical calendar. Puritan sermons were different. For one thing they were abundant – Every congregation included at least one “preaching elder” and sometimes two; a “teacher” who elucidated points of doctrine, and a “pastor” whose charge was to address the issues of daily life (responsibilities to family, neighbors, nation) that had become so vexing in England. One modern scholar, Harry Stout, estimates that in New England during the colonial period, the average churchgoer attended something like seven thousand sermons in a lifetime.
BSF 225 1898 A defense of Puritans against aspersions of fanaticism, narrowness, bigotry… “In an age of universal intolerance, how can one expect these Puritans to be free from this fault? It is impossible for men suffering persecutions for their opinions to be moderate in those opinions. These men were engaged in a stern struggle to secure freedom from the tyranny that the Roman church imposed upon its followers and which the English church had in many ways copied. Coming to Salem in 1628 and to Boston two years later, they sought to build a church and state according to their own ideas, and made no claims to offer a refuge to the oppressed of the earth. They were not behind their age, but very much ahead of it. As to the hanging of witches, for which the Puritans have received so much condemnation, more persons were killed in one month under charge of witchcraft than were hung in New England in the whole course of the fallacy. It is true hat there were some persecution of Quakers, but the Quakers of that day were often a disorderly band of fanatics. There was hardly anything to do with them but expel them.
The American republic was founded upon the Puritan ideas. They were Puritan guns that thundered at Bunker Hill. Puritan ideas appeared in the declaration of Independence, and the Cavalier finally surrendered to the Puritan under the apple tree at Appomattox.”

NE Magazine Vol 1V 1833 NE Superstitions by W.B. Peabody… “I have known a person who was thrown into great alarm by seeing a blossom on a cinnamon rose in October, who was so free from other supersititious fears that she would sleep on a bed by the side of a corpse, to fulfiul the duty, as was formerly regarded, of protecting the dead until they were committed to the grave.

BSRH: Puritanism – “without some understanding of Puritanism, there is no understandig America,” Not only a religious creed but an organization of man’s whole life, empotional and intlellectual.
Belived in the curtailing of individual profits in ythe interests of the welfare of the whole
Puritanism was the belief that the Church of England should be restored to the purity of the church as established by Christ Himself.

BOSTON, ENGLAND

BIBL: Towns of New England and Old England, Ireland and Scotland, Allen Forbes, New England Historical sketches x State Street Trust Company.

BSN: In 654 a wandering Saxon monk called Botolf founded a priory in a little village called Icanhoe in the fens of Lincolnshire. In 1270 the name of the town was changed to Botolfston. In the 14th century, Botolestone. Later Botolf’s town. About 1577 called Bostonstown commonly corrupted to Boston. The Danes destroyed both the buildings and the followers of St. Botolph. In 1309 the church was rebuilt.”

BSN: Pause to look back about five centuries.
Fifteenth century
Lincolnshire, England
Saxon monk – spent time in prayer
Specialist – prayed for sailors and boats
Called “Boat Helper” In Anglo Saxon – “Bot holph”
Canonized – called Saint Botolph
Cathedral built – town grew up around it. Called Saint Botolph’s Town
The sloppy English Way of pronouncing caused it, through the centuries, to be called
Botolph’s Town
Botolphston
Bottleston
Botston
Buston
and finally – Boston”

Boston, England – 700 A.D. fishing village on River Witham, Lincolnshire – Benedictine monk –? bastard son of King Ethelmund – Blessed boats each morning – “Botulph” = bot OE boat and ulph helper – “Bot Ulp’s Town – Bottleston –St. Botolph – Boston

Elizabeth 1
Mary, Queen of Scots, executed
Philip of Spain
Elizabethan court = theater (Marlowe)
Great King Harry

1592 White Hist of NE: Prince says a company set up another church in London choosing Mr. Francis Johnson. pastor, and Mr. Greenwood teacher, who with 54 of their church were soon seized by the bishop’s officers, and sent to several jails, where some were loaded with irons, some shut up in dungeons, some beat with cudgels, some, both men and women, perished. Mr. Greenwood and Barrow executed, other skeps in close prison four or five years.

Goodrich says “Toleration was a virtue unknown on English ground. In exile along was security to be found from the pains and penalities pof non-conformity to the Church of England.”

1603 Death of Queen Elizabeth I
King James VI of Scotland, son of Catholic Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots = James 1
James I “a penniless young Scotsman proved as politically tactless as he was personally arrogant. “Every English subject should surrender to the doctrines and practices of England.”
“Dissenters – harry them out of the land”
1605 Guy Fawkes
“No popery”

1608 – one congregation in Nottinghamshire left England. Asylum in Holland = 1620 Pilgrims

“A Puritan of stern Calvinistic kind”
“Wasn’t it the plain duty of every freeborn Puritan to march with the brethren toward the light and build God’s kingdom – the shining city on the Hill”
Geneva Bible – Tyndale/Coverdale translated and revised by scholars in Calvin’s Geneva
“King James or Authorized Bible”

London x medieval order = mayor, alderman, 24 wards, each ward = council.
Parish x vestry of principal pensioners

Three tides: chained to a stake at low tide, downstream from the tower of Wapping and left till high tide ebbe three times = pirates

By the early 1620s, reflective men were becoming saddened and looked back wistfully to the reign of Elizabeth.
Charles: “a dull-witted man” – In March 1629, he dismissed Parliament and set out to rule on his own, with the help of Bishop William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury – “the best friend the Mass Company ever had”
Scots rebellion against Laudian high-Anglican ceremonies
1640 –Parliament summoned and hell broke loose

Piety, Patriotism and Profit:

1599 “company” – word “shareholder” not yet coined = householder
Royal Exchange: A group of bold Elizabethan entrepreneurs, mostly mercers, who called themselves the Merchant Adventurers.
Levant Company/Muscovy Company/Guinea/East India Company/The Virginia Company/The Plantation of Ulster

“Adventurers – a word that had two pertinent meanings in contemporary usage –explorer-adventurers willing to risk their lives and investors willing to risk their money” Delbanco DB

“With each shipwreck and failed treasure hunter, America confirmed its reputation as a place for crackpots and dreamers, a reputation it had been unable to shake off since one explorer dispatched in the 1570s by Queen Elizabeth brought back a mound of yellow ore for deposit in the Tower of London, as “gold” that turned out to be nothing but worthless dirt.

Bibl: Hakluyt – A Particular Discourse About Western Discoveries – A way of setting up merchants who had gone bankrupt and were in debtor’s prison. In 1620s Hakluyt held out hope that the large vagrant population of England might be shunted to the New World and learn new ways there.

Bibl Astrid Friis Alderman Cockayne’s Project – Merchant Adventurers of 17th century
3-4000 members : “the most famous company of merchants in Christendom.”
Joint stock companies e.g. East India Company 1599 Sir Thomas Smith and 24 assistants x 218 members.
+ companies organized for privateering by men like Drake.
1605 Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, sent out Sir George Weymouth who touched Nantucket and coast of Maine and brought back five Indians.
Sir Ferdinando Gorges
Virginia Company – 1606 patent, first colony in south London Company
Second = Plymouth Company – northern Virginia
Project not well considered: English more experienced in establishing trade facilities, not colonies.

1613 James 1 – William Cockayne, the king’s merchant adventurers. Cloth—Dutch – failure
1614 Virginia: John Rolfe married Pocahontas and two years later took her to England where she died of smallpox

1617 The Little Ice Age x price of wood in London
1618 Thirty Years’ War. Cut off markets for English goods – Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex worst hit

1622 Virginia Indians attack…massacre of 347 of 3000 settlers

Pilgrims
Mayflower: 35 from Leyden/ 66 from London and Southampton
Mary Chilton, first person to set foot on Plymouth Rock. ? first white woman to come to Boston to live.
50 died. At one point only seven fit to labor on. Then 1624, to 124 and 1630, to 300
Pilgrims boasted that hardly one had a drop of blue blood – Puritans on the aristocratic side – upper crust merchant adventurers – landed with their wives and children.
Within 10 years, there were 35 flourishing churches
(1691 Boston absorbed Plymouth)

Dorchester Company x Rev. John Smith
1623: Council for New England “patent” for fishing c Cape Ann x Roger Conant

1625 James I – Charles I just as opposed to religious dissenters x William Laud
Royal persecution
Depression in many areas where Puritans located. East Anglia – imports of silk from France and other European countries affected the local cloth trade
“A land that grows weary of its inhabitants”
Middle class Puritan dissenters –
“Evil times were coming upon us”

1626 Naumkeg = Salem
1628 New England Company x John Endicott

Elizabeth Poole/John Humfrey and Roger Conant
Stayed after Dorchester Company broke up
1626 20-30 settlers to North Shore x Naumkeg/Salem
1628, June Endicott to Salem

Massachusetts Bay Company began in 1623 as the Dorchester Company, a trading and fishing venture with an outpost at Salem. London merchants like Sir Richard Saltonstall and East Anglican gentry like John Winthrop. London and East Anglican investors gradually gained control of the company. Old Dorchester Company re-emerged as the Massachusetts Bay Company with new charter.
Where then charter resided, there the annual stockholder meeting was held.
“Knit together as one in their task of forging a government both civil and ecclesiastical.” (Winthrop)
1629 March Massachusetts Bay Charter took place of the NE Company – Governor and eighteen assistants
Political events favored the MA Bay Co – March 1629 dissolution of Parliament was a great discouragement to the Puritans.

Sempringham, the seat in Lincolnshire (near East Anglia) of the Earl of Lincoln became a center where men gathered and discussed plans – Winthrop, his brother in law, Emmanuel Downing, Isaac Johnson, Lincoln’s son in law

East Anglia, according to Havelock Ellis, has produced the greatest statesmen, scientists, ecclesiastics, scholars and artists in English history and has always been distinguished by a profound love of liberty and independence.

Bibl: 17th century descriptions by John Taylor, poet
Bibl The Massachusetts Bay Company and its predecessors Frances Rouse-Troup (Dorchester, New England, Mass Bay Co) - “Adventurers of the Northern Colony of Virginia”
Bibl: Ten Eminent Puritan Divines, Clarke
A Treatise of the Sabbath, 1592 Richard Greenham
Two Elizabethan Diaries, Michael Krappen

WINTHROP

BIBL Puritan Dilemma Edmund Wilson

Rebels
Demands of authority/permissiveness of freedom
New Canaan – Bible Commonwealth
Dangerous to allow man to build his own Utopia

Adam Winthrop, grandfather, 1544, cloth merchant, Manor of Grafton for L408.11.3, part of a confiscated monastery. Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk
1588 John Winthrop born = year of Spanish Armada
Adam was former lawyer and farmer at Groton Manor/country gentleman and businessman/
“A Roman Catholic uncle and excommunicated bigamist
1602 John 15 to Trinity College, Cambridge – Adam was auditor.
“The boys had a woman which was from chamber to chamber in the nighttime”
John was two years at Trinity – not common for gentleman to stay at college long enough for degree
1605 John and Mary Forth m. April 17…First child 10 months later
1613 Study of law – admitted to Gray’s Inn, London
Wife Mary died in 1616 leaving six children
M Thomasine Clapton, who died on the first anniversary of their wedding
A year later at 30, he married Margaret Tyndal, a very gracious woman

1617 Justice of the Peace Suffolk county
1618 Father turned over the Lordship of Groton Manor
1620 Depression – textiles – shrinking resources
Govt. work as comoon attorney in His Majesty’s Court of Wards and Liveries
London Sessions x four a year x three to seven weeks
Wardship court was “rotten” simply existed to make money out of the misfortunes of widows and orphans.

“A man with full Elizabethan beard, large eyes, long nose”

Winthrop…
“living in this world without taking his mind off God”
“He was a countryman of simple tastes who liked good food, good drink and good company. He liked his wife. He liked to stroll by the river with a fowling piece and have a go at the birds. He liked to smoke a pipe. He liked to tinker with gadgets…He resolved to give up his tinkering “ and content myself with such things as was left by our forbears.” He resolved to give up shooting…It was against the law…Dangerous and expensive…Plus he was a poor shot.
“the life which is the most exercised with temptation is the sweetest and will prove the safest. For such trials which fall within our compass. It is better to arm and withstand them than the avoid and shun them.”
“A steady course of godliness in a world of temptation”
The Puritan loved his God with all the sensual abandon he denied himself in dealing with the world.
Song of Solomon
Men with their eyes on Heaven but their hands in the everyday business of their college.
“Every nation of people, the Puritans believed, existed by virtue of a Covenant with God, an agreement whereby they promised to abide by his laws, and He in turn agreed to treat them well.”
An England full of plenty and delights, but under the shadow of God’s wrath

Winthrop thought that England had become a place where “children, servants and neighbors are counted the greatest burden which if things were right would be the chiefest earthly blessing.” W spoke from the experience of the landowning class many of whom had lately expelled or where considering expelling tenants from their land to make way for the more lucrative business of raising sheep. DB

1625 Charles I replaced James 1. Anglicans – many in James’ time – fell into heresy of Arminianism, a belief that men by their own willpower could achieve faith and salvation.
1629, Mar 10: Charles formally dissolved Parliament
“the last bulwark against heresy and sin”
Protestantism was sinking
(French x Richelieu and German Wallenstein)

“I am verily persuaded that God will bring some heavy affliction on this land, and that speedylye”

A second Protestant Reformation, to give up England and the Church of England as beyond saving and to withdraw from them as they had withdrawn from Rome 100 years before = Separatists = who would sacrifice the world rather than compromise
To avoid the problem rather than solve it = leave England “altogether, yet leave it with the approbation of the king and without repudiation of the Churches and the Christians within them.

Virginia – Bermuda – Barbados – Plymouth
1623 Cape Ann – Dorchester Adventurers – gave up in 1627 and most returned…a few hung on in Salem
1620 Council for New England charter = three miles south of the Charles to three miles north of Merrimac River + sent John Endicott to take charge at Salem
Sarsaparilla, sassafras, furs, silk grass

Second son, Henry Winthrop to Barbados in 1627 and returned two years later with expensive habits and no fortune
Henry Winthrop “degeneration.” Painting the town red since his return from Barbados – Not the only Puritan father with a wayward son.
John Jr….14 months to Constantinople, Leghorn and Venice

1629, March, just one week before Charles dissolved Parliament, the members of New England Company managed – how it is not clear – to obtain a royal charter confirming the grant and changing the name of the company to the “Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.”

Armininian prelates were riding high, the Tower was filled with Puritan patriots
Puritan clergy concerned about the infection of the younger generation by the contagion of wickedness that surrounded them in England.”
“This land grows weary of her Inhabitants.”

1629 May 25, to Margaret: “If the Lord seeth it will be good for us, he will provide a shelter and a hiding place for us and ours.”

1629 July 28, Winthrop and others met at Tattershall home of Isaac Johnson and Lady Arbelle.

Bay Company – through oversight, design or indifference, no place of meeting was prescribed./ Governors of Company = governors of colony/ General Court of the Company = legislative assembly of colony
Daring proposal worked, effectively removing the colony from control of the Crown.
A self-governing Commonwealth
The citadel of God’s chosen people and spearhead of world Protestantism
1629 August 20, Cambridge… Winthrop and 11 others signed agreement to leave for New England the following March
England could not be saved: the only hope was to cross the water and establish a government of Christ in exile.

1629, Oct 20, Winthrop elected as governor
trading company/holy experiment
A 1000 men and women were selling their possession and saying goodbye to their friends” Cost L50 to come to New England properly equipped
People all over England talked about the venture
Highly sensitive to any suggestion of schism
Free passage for poor but desirable immigrants
“sober well-to-do men of middle age to whom the spirit of adventure was entirely foreign”

John W said to be too elderly (41!) and gentle for the task
His farewell letter to his wife…to think of each other at 5 o clock on Mondays and Fridays and so hold communion together

1629 late summer..John Winthrop, Lord of the Manor of Groton, East Anglia and Justice of the Peace + John Humphrey, Isaac Johnson, Thomas Dudley and others from Lincolnshire

Craddock’s land grant – represented a group of merchant adventurers
Matthew Craddock was governor of the New England Company – What happened to Matthew Craddock?
“Charter of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay in New England
Winthrop and supporters bought up controlling shares in the company
Cambridge Agreement – company base not in England but America. Name changed to Massachusetts Bay Company. Winthrop elected governor. Took charter with to America

East Anglia—Family – persecution prior to Winthrop meeting

Winthrop – East Anglia
Richard Saltonstall – London
John White West Country

February/March 1630 plans x speed = By early April first 11 vessels on their way
Winthrop people (Midland and London) embarked at Southampton
West Country – Bristol and Plymouth
1630, April Arbella, 350 tons Talbot, Ambrose, Jewel and 7 other ships departing in their wake
BIBL: Rev Francis Higginson diary – New England Plantation
“The winds blew mightily, the sea roared, and the waves tossed us horribly”

Winthrop : A democracy is among most civil nations …the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”

Many of the Puritans came from Boston, England – Its minister, John Cotton delivered sermon when they left; later he came to America and was a teacher in the First Church of Boston.
“Forget not old England” – John Cotton at Southampton sermon. “Forget not the wombe that bore you and the breasts that gave you sucke”

“A model of Christian charity…a spirit of brotherly love
“For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The Eyes of all people are upon us.”

1630, Apr 8, Arbella under way – “Arbella borrowed a midwife from the Jewel”
April – May Two months of heavy seas and spare diets
June 8 two months out = Mount Desert, Maine
June 11 Plum Cove, Cape Ann, Salem
“straggling collection of huts and hovels and canvas booths”
June 14, Salem
Talbot x 14 passengers x three months
Lion was already there
By end of summer, 1000 people and 200 cattle, there times as many as New Plymouth ten years earlier

July 16: Yet for all the things I am not discouraged, not do I see cause to repent, or despaire of those good days here, which will make amend for all.”
Winthrop fell to work with his own hands

Winter: 200 indentured servants had to be turned loose to fend for themselves
Isaac Johnson and Lady Arbella died

Meadows = “champion land”
Three days after landing went to look for a roomier place than Salem
Mystic River
Samuel Maverick: house + palisade on the north side of the river mouth x had arrived six years before
Charlestown
William Pierce of the Lyon
“caves and cellars”
“to Boston – bringing the frame of the house Winthrop had begun to erect in Charlestown

William Blackstone: “A well-educated, sophisticated man who had been living quietly for several years in the country was now inundated by Saints.
From Lincolnshire – once was college mate of Isaac Johnson at Cambridge

By end of November, Winthrop lost 10 servants
Most letters from MA filled with disillusionment
Winter – a freezing north-west gale the day before Christmas
1631 February – when starvation in sight – arrival of Lyon. 80 left with him,..
200 dead that winter and 200 returned to England.

Move south? Winthrop said no…
Never another starvation time like that winter

600 acre farm up the Mystic River
Sassafras in demand in Europe as a cure for syphilis + furs and fish
What sustained colony was neither furs nor fish but immigrants

1631 fall, Margaret and rest of family arrived. Welcomed ashore with a volley of shot

Winthrop – a family excursion to their island known as Governor’s garden
1649, March 26 Winthrop died.

BOSTON SETTLEMENT

BIBL: Charles Adams Three Episodes of Boston History

Landfall at Cape Ann, moved along the coast of Maine; anchored in the North river near Salem {Previously Northern Parte of Virginia, Gosnold 1602, Martin Pringle, George Weymouth (1604, Kennebec Mouth) = small, temporary and commercial} One by one fleet put in at Salem or further south at Charlestown, until by the end of summer nearly 1,000 settlers had arrived.

BSN: In these 11 ships there were about 700 souls beside the people of the ships –Drake
“With Winthrop and immediately after forming a part of his expedition, came 7 or 800 persons. On the heels of these followed two or 300 more, and after these in turn came quickly so many colonists that the total number with which his settlement virtually began amounted to about 2,000.”

BSN: In 1630 Winthrop arrived with 900.
Edward Ward, writing in the London Spy of 1703…”Three terrible persecutions drove our unhappy brethren to seek their fortunes in Foreign Colonies. They were Bishops, Bailiffs and Bastards.”
Not common adventurers. Higher Percentage of college graduates than in the rest of England.”
One of them said in his journal, modestly: “God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness (William Stoughton, 1688)

1629 April Winthrop sailed with 5 ships; 1630, 11 ships 1,000 people “The Great Migration”
1634 = population 4000

First settlers intended to become farmers. Hardscrabble upland pastures hardly worth the clearing. They turned to the sea: BLS

“The common people immediately went ashore, and regaled themselves with strawberries, which were very fine in America, and were then in perfection. This might give them a favorable idea of the country but they met with enough to fill them with concern. The first news they had was of a general conspiracy, a few months before, of all the Indians as far as Narrangansett, to extirpate the English. Eighty persons, out of about 300, had died in the colony the winter before, and many of those who remaine in a weak, sickly condition. There was not enough corn to last above a fortnight, and all other provisions were scare.” – White’s History of NE

What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness for the season was winter…For summer being done, the whole country full of woods and thickets reprsente a wild and savage hew…William Bradford, History p 91

1629 April Winthrop sailed with 5 ships; 1630, 11 ships 1,000 people “The Great Migration”
1634 = population 4000
1635, August – First hurricane

BS J2 Winthrop at Salem in a less familiar pose – In one hand a beer mug, the foaming contents of which he is testing with an experienced palate. In the other a pewter fork , with which he vigorously demolished a savory pie. … This is a very true to life picture for all Winthrop’s stern Parliament…Winthrop after sampling a beaker or two, declared the beer to be a good beer and the pie to be good, and set the fact down in his journal. Gov John Endicott sat in with Winthrop and assisted in making away with the liquor….Beer party in the town of Salem 1630…It gives us to understand that when the colonists who were to found Boston came here, these parts weren’t as wild and inhospitable as we might expect

BS E67 “The location chosen by Blackstone must have commanded a view of exceeding loveliness. The bright and sparkling waters of the broad western bay open to the Charles and extending southward nearly to the line of Washington Street, and bounded in all directions by verdant hills covered with the richest of foliage greeted his eye as he glanced inland, while seaward beyond Fort Hill, his vision could sweep down out island-dotted harbor, full of picturesque beauty, though there was not yet a single white sail as yet to light up and enliven the scene with a touch of humanity. Nor was there a single human habitation in sight as he looked over the bare fields…
Blackstone’s favorite outlook was doubtlessly over the lovely western or Back Bay, the dancing waters of which came up to the lower edge of his garden, near the present line of West Charles Street, We can easily imagine him enjoying the cool western breeze as it greeted him from over the waves on a hot summer’s day…”

“William Blackstone, a solitary bookish recluse in his 35th year in 1630 had a dwelling on the west side of Beacon Hill, not far from Beacon and Spruce Streets, from which he commanded the mouth of the Charles. Trading with the savages, tending his garden and apple trees.

BSN “About 10 years before the Puritans came here, Sir Fernando Gorges attempted to found a settlement in Boston. (X) He showed little judgment in selecting his companions and they were from the sweepings of the slums and docks of London. It was the fashion of the time for an expedition to be accompanied by a clergyman and Sir Fernando had two of them….One of the clergy – Blackstone elected to remain – and he did with his library of 200 books, a small store of seeds and tools…”

Winthrop insisted that Blackstone become a Freeman and generously gave him back 50 acres of his own land.
At this time Boston was a peninsula of only 783 acres, At high tide it was an island. It was connected to the mainland by a long, narrow strip of land along what is now Washington Street between Beech and Northampton St. This was known as Boston Neck.

Shawmut = two miles long and mile wide at widest point – joined to mainland by Boston neck so low-lying that waters of harbor swept over it in stormy weather
An isolated, independent jagged fragment of land whose irregular coastline was broken up by numerous coves, creeks, inlets and marshes

80 foot Fort Hill on south looking out toward Roxbury Bay
Windmill Hill overlooking the Charles
Between the two, a high mountain with three little rising hills on top of it, whereof it is called Tremont
80 ft Cotton Hill east
West Hill on the Charles Side and in the middle Beacon Hill, or Sentry Hill = 150 feet
1631 x 200; 1632 3000; 1633 400+

Widow Varren + infant on island
William Jeffreys and John Bursley and others at Wessagusset
A few straggling people at entrance to harbor at Hull
Mount Wollaston: Morton still hanging about, though his trade with the Indians was broken and he was marked for destruction by Salem.
Thomas Walford, the blacksmith, with his wife at Mishauwum or Charlestown in “English palisade and thatched house.”

Samuel Maverick at east Boston in a stronghold or fort which probably served as trading post. Built with the aid of Thompson, three years previously, armed with four large guns or “murtherers” as a protection against the Indians. General place of refuge in time of danger.
1631 Dixie Bull, Penobscot Bay, pirate x 1632 captured by Samuel Maverick

1629 Noddles/ = East Boston
Hog or Susanna = Orient Heights
John Breed on Hog’s island./house 200 feet x one storey/ two great horse pistols x $5000 silver in canoe
Noddles waterfowl and pigeons
Maverick later moved to New York

All of these were C of E and associated with Sir Ferdinando Gorges.

1630, August Upon Blackstone’s advice the Charlestown settlers acted, and many removed to Trimontaine/Shawmut by the end of August 1630.
Easily guarded peninsula hanging by a slender stem of the narrow neck of land at Roxbury, with tide-waters and flats nearly surrounding it – was safe against the artifices of Indian warfare.
English: “Most of the newcomers had never swung an ax”

In the first boatload that went over was Anne Pollard, who lived to be nearly one hundred and five years old. She herself related when more than one hundred years of age, that she “came over in one of the first ships that arrived in Charlestown; that in a day or two after her arrival, on account of the water there being bad, a number of the young people, including herself, took the ship’s boat to cross over to Boston; that as the boat drew up towards the shore, she (being then a romping girl) declared she would be the first to land, and accordingly, before anyone, jumped from the bow of the boat onto the beach.”
According to this statement, which is based upon good authority, Anne Pollard was the first white female that trod upon the soil of Boston. Hudson’s Point, now the head of Charlestown bridge, but formerly the site of the old ferry, was probably the place where Anne left the impress of her foot. Her portrait, at the age of one hundred and three, is in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and her BIBL deposition, (CHECK) at the age of eighty-nine years, was used to substantiate the location of Blackstone’s house. In it she says that Mr. Blackstone after his removal from Boston, frequently resorted to her husband’s house, and that she never heard any controversy about the land, between her husband, Pepys, or Blackstone, but that it was always reputed to belong to the latter. (D)

Anne Pollard, young girl – first woman to land in Boston who came over with Governor Winthrop jumped from the bow of the boat onto the beach in order to gain distinction of being first ashore. Outliving her husband by 50 years, she supported herself by keeping open house for Harvard Students at an inn on Beacon Street and lived to be 105/ AT 103, she had her portrait painted lest her example of fortitude be lost on future generations of her sex.”

1633, April “it is agreed that William Blackstone shall have fifty acres set out for him near his house in Boston to enjoy forever”.
1634 Blackstone sold the town all of his allotment except six acres, on part of which his house then stood; the sale also including all his right in and to the peninsula, – a right thus in some form recognized by Winthrop and his associates. The price paid for the whole peninsula of Boston was 30 pounds, assessed upon the inhabitants of the town, some paying six shillings, and some more according to their circumstances and condition The Charlestown records locate Blackstone as “dwelling on the other side of Charles River, alone, to a place by the Indians called Shawmut, where he only had a cottage at a place not far off the place called Blackstone’s Point; this is also confirmed by Johnson in his “Wonder Working Providence (1654)
“Motley in his early romance Merry Mount introduces…Blackstone as riding on a bull about his peninsula.”

The six acres which Mr. Blackstone reserved have been traced through Richard Pepys, an original possessor by a sufficiently clear connection, – supplied where broken by depositions – to the Mount Vernon proprietors. Copley, the celebrated painter, was once an owner of Blackstone’s six acres, which were bounded by the Common on the south and the river on the west.
1634 After purchase by the town of Blackstone’s 44 acres, they laid out the “training field, which was ever since used for that purpose and the feeding of cattle.” – This was the origin of Boston Common.

The first settlers found Boston thinly wooded, whatever its original condition may have been. The timber lay mainly around the Neck, with clumps of trees here and there. The great elm on the Common was doubtless one of native growth, and before the Revolution of 1776 there was another one almost equally large near the corner of what is now West and Tremont streets.

1634 Blackstone removed to Rehoboth, not liking, we may conclude, the close proximity of his Puritan neighbors, of whom he is reported to have said, that he left England because of his dislike to the Lord Bishops, but now he would not be under the Lords Brethren.

(1659 Blackstone was married to Mary Stevenson of Boston, widow, by Governor Endicott. He died in 1675, a short time before the breaking out of King Phillip’s War, during which his plantation was ravaged by the Indians, and his dwelling destroyed with his papers and books. (Drake)

Men like Blackstone and Maverick who though Mass Bay a good enough place before the saints arrived to purify it – Blackstone moved to Narragansett Bay remarking that he had left England because he did not like the Lord Bishops and he found the rule of the Lord Brethren no better. Maverick moved to the comparative isolation of Noddles Island, where his bibulous hospitality frequently annoyed the government

Newtowne farmland = Cambridge? Seat of government
“Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”
Puritan leaders virtually all graduates of Cambridge University

Governor Winthrop and his Assistants (called the General Court)
Royal Charter granted the Vote to all freemen of the colony but in 1631 brazenly limited suffrage to Church Members.
All residents whether of the elect or not had to attend Sunday services and pay tithes.
One fifth were bona fide church members
Despite addition of a lower house of Deputies and town selectmen, early governments source of legitimacy resided not in the popular will but squarely in the Bible and all ordinances proceeded from Scripture.
A symbiosis between the ministers who deciphered scriptural meaning and the magistrates who enacted legislation.
Puritans worked harder at implementing Bible law in MA than they did in obeying the King. Puritans saw no irony in the fact that having left England with an intolerant archbishop at their heels, they themselves would brook no dissent.

Assistants met once a month – 1630 Aug 23, first mention of assistants at Charlestown.
General Court four times a year – 1630, October 19, first General Court
Freemen chose assistants, assistants chose governor and deputies = transformation of the Bay Company’s charter into a constitution for government of the colony
Great advantage of the government Winthrop established was its simplicity
116 admitted as freemen at first General Court – freemen = church members
“provided they followed this procedure and make no laws repugnant to the laws of England, they could govern MA in any way they saw fit”
No King, Parliament, Bishops or Judge to stand in their way
in all governments of the western world at the time, that of early MA gave the clergy least authority – clergy’s advice was frequently asked and given, their influence over the people was invaluable, but authority rested in the hands of laymen

A watch on every kind of heresy and nip all weeds in the bud
“They knew that they must punish every sin committed in Massachusetts and punish they did”
It was forbidden for anyone to live alone
Congregationalists – disdained bishops – no church larger than a congregation – “Saints”
Presbyterian – presbyteries – synods – all who did not forfeit privilege by scandalous behavior
The most dangerous tendency among the saints of Massachusetts was not excessive liberality but excessive purity

Differences between Winthrop, Endicott and Dudley
1633 Endicott – women’s veils in church issue
Winthrop leniency in the infancy of the colony…Winthrop’s moderation brought the colony through its crucial first years pp separatism posed a threat to its mission if not survival
Separatists denounced English church members as whores and drunkards
“he did think that the Lord had forsook New England for failing to separate her churches from the filthiness of English corruption”

Dudley – uncompromising purity vs. charity

Mass Bay Co was virtually independent of England. Stockholders were called freemen and required to meet four times a year = FIRST BRAHMINS
“General Court” or assembly to legislate for the bay colony as a whole. Local matters = fences, weights and measures, militia
a distinction between freemen and general inhabitants

“the Godly Community”
“to preserve the liberties of freeborn Englishmen”
“neither exalt the rich nor degrade the poor”

“Those people involved in public life rarely put down in writing what they did, how they did it, how they politicked; or what techniques they used in deciding the fate of the town. An early example of the secrecy for which the conduct of local affairs in Boston would later become famous.”

1630 By the middle of October, the settlement had a population of 150 – by the end of the year the congregation had moved from Charlestown: “First Church of Boston”
Congregational: stark and simple meetinghouse stripped of every outward sign of symbols reminiscent of Catholicism or Anglicanism
Only the so-called “visible saints” were considered full members and participated in the Lord’s Supper
Membership was trial, a personal ordeal, the successful passage of which involved obligations of ‘mutual watchfulness, helpfulness and rigorous conduct” (Morrison)
A visible saint was someone admitted to the body of communicants only after rigorous examination by himself or by the elders concerning his conversion to the faith and his ability to walk with God. (no baptism, confirmation etc.)

The examination of a visible saint

God’s Will – Humfry children x abuse of 10-year-old
BIBL James Adams “Founders of NE” – Puritans took a morbid interest in the most indecent sexual matters.”

Women were “mute observers” denied all political rights as were men who either were not church members or did not own property

“The design of our first planters was not toleration.” John Cotton
A colony based on Puritan ideals and governed according to strict Puritan principles
A Bible Commonwealth they were certain would become a model for the ages
Close cooperation between the clergy and political leadership
In early stages of Boston’s history, it was always the rule of the Bible that came first
John Cotton loved to “sweeten his mouth with a piece of John Calvin “ before going to sleep”. Controversy with Roger Williams x swine and goats
Letter to Lord Say and Seal

1633 Great Immigration x William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury

Protests at lack of representation
1634 April Reps from several towns forced Winthrop to show them the charter : “general elections” x once a year and laws by all freemen
1644 Two legislative houses established – a bona fide commonwealth

Conservative congregational establishment contained seeds of revolutionary democratic forums

1641 114 men with university training known to be in New England
1642 14 returned to England as a result of price collapse
1640s Depression – only solution was to find foreign markets for MA goods had been sold to the horde of immigrants
Nova Scotia – West Indies – Spain and Portugal (Fayal, Funchal, Tenerife, Malaga)

New settlers built central town with church meetinghouse as the hub. All the residents and their dwellings live under the watchful eyes of the ministers and saints. Creation of the agricultural village became the cornerstone of Puritan NE. Town center facilitated the town meeting, knit together the congregation and influenced every phase of social life.
Puritan conceived of beauty as order – the order of things as they are – not as they appear… as they are in the mind of God.
His churches were lovely – bare, crude, without altars or choirs, square and solid.

BSN: Boston Neck was over a mile long. The neck began at Beach Street and extended to Dedham Street. The narrowest part was at Dover St. Full tide overflowed the road over the hooves of the horses.”

BSN: The sole object of the colonists in erecting their houses was to obtain security and shelter as quickly as possible. They gave no thought to beauty or elegance. In a generation or two they developed the necessary wealth and leisure to add some touches of luxury and beauty to their dwellings. They were influenced by remembrances and traditions of their old homes and by the materials on hand.
The houses were simple in plan, an entrance hall seldom more than 10 or 12 ft in width running through the middle from front to rear, with a straight staircase on one of its walls and two square rooms opening from each side. The staircase was often the most elaborately designed feature of the house and much ingenuity was bestowed on its newell-posts, its twisted balusters, its carved string, and its paneled soffitts.
The walls of the principal rooms are usually wainscoted in square panels, sometimes extending from floor to ceiling. Often a single broad panel was set above the chimney piece finishing with a light wooden cornice.
A delicate reserve featured all the work of the colonial period.”

BSN: Winthrop appealed to the clergy of England as to whether a turkey is a “beast.”
John Cotton searched for “witch signs”

BSn: In 1708, every street received a name. Before that they were called “The Street Leading to the Mylne.” “The Street to the Poor House” or the street leading to the home of some individual.
“Wherever the streets of Boston are well blocked out, straight and pleasing to the countryman from other parts – the chances are you are standing on an old sea bottom. Whenever the streets are snarled up you are in the ancient town itself – a feeling often pleasing to Bostonians.”

BSN: Food of Puritans
“Flights of pigeons darkened the sky and broke down the limbs of trees in which they lighted.”
Some years pigeons were so plentiful that they sold for a penny a dozen.”
Bennet, traveler, wrote of Boston in 1740: “Fish is exceedingly cheap. These sell a fine cod, will weigh a dozen pounds of more, just taken from the sea for twopence sterling.
Two kinds of fish beloved above all others today, salmon and shad, seem to have been lightly regarded in colonial days”
It is told that farm laborers engaged for work stipulated that they should have salmon for dinner but once a week. Shad was profoundly despised. It was even held to be somewhat disreputable to eat them.
A family who were about to dine on shad, hearing a knock at the door, they would not open it until the platter holding the obnoxious shade had been hidden.
They used trenchers of wood.
Nearly every family had a service of pewter.
Among the pewter lovers was John Hancock who hated the clatter of porcelain plates.
Turkeys of 30 pounds were common and one of 60 lbs was recorded.
Wild turkeys sold by Indians for a few pennies.
Over 100 kinds of fish caught in NE waters.
Some maintain that bees were not native to America and were brought over from England. The Indians called them “English flies.”
Lobsters weighing over 25 pounds were plentiful. Some were six feet long, but the traveler Van Donck said “Those a foot long fit better on the table.”

BSN: Robert Keayne…a tailor and accumulated some money. Taken to court for getting too rich. The court ruling is a gem: “Inasmuch as he was already wealthy and had but one child and inasmuch as he came over here for conscience sake he shall not strive to make money.” HE was fined 80 pounds. According to court records he promised “with tears in his eyes” to try not to make so much money.”
Capt Keayne was pound keeper
Mrs. Sherman, sort of widow, husband in England
Kept a pig and a boarder
Boarder George Story… and there were stories about Story and the widow. Pig – disgusted perhaps at living in a House of Sin – ran away. The boarder stayed,
A pig was found and taken to Capt Keayne.
Pig killed. Mrs. S claimed it was hers. Case taken before elders. Capt Keayne was exonerated. Mrs. S and boarder took case to the Court. Court found for Capt and fined Mrs. S awarding the captain three pounds for his trouble in coming to court and 20 pounds for the injury to his character.
Six years passed and Mrs. S and the faithful boarder reopened the case in the Superior Court. Court then made up of Reps appointed by the gov and delegates elected by the people. Met as one body.
Row of Mrs. S pig split the court wide open and when the smoke cleared the delegates and reps were meeting in two separate bodies.
The bicameral system of government was born and has continued to the present.

BSN: There was a sheltered harbor, plenty good pure water, few trees and what looked like good soil for farming. It also seemed to be free of dangerous wild animals – including Indians. The only thing lacking – a source of power. At the north end of the town was a deep bay of some 70 acres. A long narrow island extended part way across its mouth. Taking earth from nearby Beacon Hill, the colonists extended both ends of the island so that it formed a serviceable dam which impounded the water of the cover. They then cut a canal across to the Town Dock. Water gates at the entrance of the canal completed the work….
At high tide the gates would be opened and the water would rush in turning the mill wheels. At low tide the gates would again be opened and the water would rush out – again turning the wheels. A fine but of engineering for an infant community. For 150 years these mills worked for the community

BSN: Early need for power – Rivers Charles and Mystic too sluggish. Only things that moved perceptibly were Animals, Wind, Tide. First settlers had spent two years in Holland and naturally turned to windmills. There was one on Copp's Hill, one at the foot of Summer (Mylne) and two on the Common. They soon found out that Boston weather was not Holland weather. There would be calm for days and then a gale that would blow mill and all half way to hell. This left the tides.

BSN: Milk Street...the ashes of John Milk for whom it was named lie in Copp’s Hill cemetery, near those of William Beer. Mrs. Milk kept the Sun Tavern in Moon Street. Her sign displayed a gilded sun with the legend below:
The best Ale and Porter Under the Sun”

BSN: Hanover Street – one of the first streets laid out by the Puritans. Originally called Orange Tree Lane from the tavern at its head. Why the name of a detested house should be preserved in the name Hanover when King Street was changed to State, Queen to Court, etc. is not known.

BSN: “Boston was a large field with few trees, According to a map made in 1720 there were only three trees on the Common. Each settler chose the spot that suited him. The dock (Dock Square) attracted the fishermen and sailors. The market (State and Washington) drew the businessmen. A church was built on the south side of State Street and the minister lived nearby. Some liked farming and took land further away. (Boylston St. and Beacon Hill). Visited back and forth, drove cows to pasture on the common. Paths went around trees, boulders, and hills. Paths became roads and later the narrow and crooked streets of Boston”

BS W 13 The first tide mill was formed in the canal called Mill Creek which originally divided the central part of Boston. This was in 1631. A causeway across the neck which separated the tide water at Dock (now Adams) square, on the east, from a cove running up from the north at Green street, converted the cove into a good-sized Mill Pond, and the Mill Creek through the neck admitted the tide to the mill. The same year in which the water-mill was erected, the General Court was presented with a specimen of rye.
Windmill Point was at the southerly end of Sea Street, now called Federal Street, at the site of the gasometer, and was so called in consequence of its being a noted site for windmills. Mill Cove was an indentation of that part of the peninsula caused by the widening of the Charles River at its mouth. This cove (Mill Pond) comprised the large space bounded by portions of Prince and Endicott streets on the East, Leverett street, Tucker’s pasture and Bowling Green on the west, and on the south it covered the whole space now occupied by Haymarket Square,
Most of the estates on Back Street (now the westerly part of Salem street) and on Hawkins and Green streets originally extended to the Mill Pond. Probably the location of the First and Second Baptist meetinghouses was selected for the convenience of using the water of the pond for baptisms.
The cove was originally a salt marsh.
The old canal or Mill Creek ran just east of the present Canal Street, from Causeway Street to Haymarket Square, thence through Blackstone to the present North Street, then until it reached Clinton, thence into the “town dock” which occupied nearly all of North Market Street. Blackstone Street was laid out in 1833. All the mills in this area lost their peculiar vocation long before the water was cut off from the canal in 1828. The people, however, depended on the mills for their motive power. The last two of these were not removed until two years after Boston became a city.

BS U83 Neck: Soon after the settlement a fortification was built at the northerly end of the Neck Road as a protection against the Indians who were then such an immediate source of danger that no sympathy was excited in their behalf. The old fortification had two gates, one for vehicles and another for foot passengers, and it was one of the pleasing excitements of the retainers of the solid men of Boston to keep watch and ward near this gate to prevent the redskins from rushing through and overwhelming their families. At a certain hour at night the gates were fastened, and no one was permitted to enter of leave the town till the following day.

BS L18 “From North Street is only a step to Blackstone Street…in the seventeenth century, a salt creek ran up into the land even to the beginning of North Street, and all about were grist mills, saw mills, even a chocolate mill, so that the vicinity was known as Mill Creek. At Prince Street was then a mill pond and no fewer than 64 mills of different sorts, many receiving their power from the wind , stood in this section. At Hanover Street in olden times the creek was bridged and a second bridge at North Street was provided with a draw. A century later Mill Creek and become Middlesex Canal and hence we see today the name of Canal Street, though it has been many years since the canal cut through the busy thoroughfares, Still later a broad street was laid on the line of the creek and canal = Blackstone Street.
No Boston street of greater interest than Milk Street…It was laid out in 1663 and ten years later it was ordered to be extended through the land of Benjamin Ward and Stephen Butler to the sea. Even in 1673 this had no name, but when in 1669 the third house of worship was erected at the north corner of this unnamed way, on the land which was at the settlement allotted to Governor Winthrop, the path was identified as “the lane from the South Meeting House to Atkinson Dock. It was not in the early 18th century that the name of Milk street appears. Just across the narrow way was house where Benjamin Franklin was born. On Milk Street, too lived Jean Baptiste Gilbert Paylat de Julien, not far from Congress Street.
On the south corner of Milk Street, where the Transcript Building stands was the house and garden of Robert Reynolds, a shoemaker…eighty years later after the tap tap had ceased, a carved effigy of a lordly buck was raised over the doorway and Samuel Gerrish sold books. He was replaced by Robert Pateshall, a leather dresser while Daniel Johonnoton a distiller of ardent spirits was next door.
Summer Street was then lined with dwellings occupied by people of prominence. Washington Street was in early days at its northerly end known as Cornhill; in the vicinity of Milk and extending to Summer Street, it was called Marlborough Street, and to the south as Newbury and Orange Street, When the first president of the US visited, it was named in his honor…
On the south corner of Marlborough Street dwelt the famous diarist Samuel Sewall, the Pepys of Boston, born in England 1652 and died in Boston 1730.
NB: Sewall judged the Salem witches…his conscience pressed him and he felt that he had shed innocent blood, so one day in the Old South Meeting House he stood up before the people, in confession of his sin against his fellow men, and listen as a clerk read his solemn condemnation of himself. The nobility of this act has been Judge Sewall’s chief title to nobility in the history of the Commonwealth. In this corner house before Sewall dwelt Robert Hull, whose daughter Sewall afterwards married – Hull was the mint master of the Commonwealth entitled to one shilling for every 20 he minted and so acquired a fortune,
In Summer Street, too, dwelt Benjamin Green, early printer, Boston Newsletter…
In the early days, Summer Street was known as Myline (perhaps Mill?) Street, and also was sometimes designated as the South Street being upon the southerly border of the town. Again it was alluded to as “the broad street from the town toward the water”, sometimes as the South Meeting Lane…In 1708 the first record appears designating this as Summer Street.
Congress Street is one of the very old highways reaching back into colonial times. It was known as Dalton Street, from John Dalton, whose dwelling was sacrificed to make a passage for the highway. Back in 1661 this was a cart path which led from the highway to the land of John Leverett and for a time it was called Leverett’s Lane…It was close by the old Dalton House where dwelt William Hibbens, a merchant of note who died in 1654. His widow, Ann Hibbens, A SISTER OF GOVERNOR BELLINGHAM, was hanged for witchcraft.

BSH 67 Spring Lane was originally the line of a water course that served as an outlet for the copious waters that bubbled up from the spring. The brook ran down along the line of the Water Street side of the present post-office building and into a salt water creek that extended through Post Office Square from the harbor. The spring, at first a natural basin in the earth, was after some years given a plank curbing and also fenced about from cattle and about 1700n a pump was placed in it , remaining in use until well into the 19th century.

BSI 1 1642 John Ruggles given supervision of the cows on Boston Common, and authorized to demand a bushel of Indian corn a year for each cow in his charge. He was ordered to go forth with them to the Common with the sun an hour high and to return with them to their owners at 6 p.m.
1646 “all present inhabitants of Boston were to have equal rights to grazing of cattle on the Common. But no future inhabitants except heirs of those of 1646
The town officials were constantly at war with William Hawkins, a butcher who lived near the site of the present Somerset Club and who persisted in throwing entrails and other offal from his establishment on the Common.

BS H 72 “water yoke”. initials C.S.H. are plainly branded on both the right and left shoulder of the yoke. Seems to have been in use into the 1830s
BS F 13 “Common 1646 : seventy milch cows were allowed to be kept, but if any wished to keep sheep, he might keep four sheep in lieu of a cow.
1647: It is ordered that no person shall dig any sods out of the Common upon peril that may insue on the damage so done, nor mowe any grass in the marsh.”
1657: whereas the Common is at much time annoyed by casting stones out of the bordering lotts, and other things that are offensive…if any person hereafter annoy the Common by spreading stones or other trash on it or lay any carrion upon it, he shall be fined twenty shillings.

BS F 29 “the first whipping post was erected in front of the old meeting house, This, the First Church of Boston, was an unpretentious structure of wood on State Street on the ground now occupied by Brazer’s bldg. The church remained here until 1640 when it was moved to what we now call Washington Street…But the whipping post stayed for some years until it was moved to near the West Street gate of the Common, and public whippings continued to be inflicted as late as 1803.
“The large whipping post painted red stood directly under the windows of a great writing school, which I frequented and from time to time the scholars were indulged in the spectacle of all kinds of punishment suited to harden their hearts,
“Here women were taken from a huge cage on which they were dragged on wheels from prison, and tied to the post with bare backs on which 30 to 40 lashes were bestowed, amid the screams of the culprits and the uproar of the mob. A little farther in the street was to be seen the pillory, with three or four fellows fastened by the head and hands, and standing for an hour in that helpless posture, exposed to gross and cruel insult from the multitude who pelted them with rotten eggs and every repulsive kind of garbage that could be collected.
Margaret Brewer whipped on 8 July 1677

BS B84 It was in the Frog Pond that the ducking stool dipped “scolds and raillers” in those early days. And near by were stocks and pillories and the like where folks were punished…

BS D92 “Old South Church which stood on the spot where Gov Winthrop built his house and where he lived during his sojourn in Boston. It is fitting that the title of sanctuary of freedom should be conferred on the Old South meeting house, a place identified with the names of Otis, Adams, Quincy and Warren, those eloquent champions of liberty….That ground was the oldest historical spot in the peninsula. Winthrop was invited to settle there by Mr. Blackstone.
Here was Winthrop’s home. Here Indian chiefs, magistrates, divines and men of illustrious quality met around Winthrop’s hospitable board, and here the liberty of the nation was founded on the basis of good government laid for all time for all people.
House: according to tradition, it was a simple two-storied house surrounded by land, which was known then as the governor’s green.
No one can tell how much the pious, tender loving Winthrop gave up nor how much he suffered as a husband and a father in coming to this land as a pioneer. He was the lord of the manor at home, had a competent fortune, and was surrounded by illustrious friends and kindred, who frowned upon the perilous deeds he undertook in leaving the old country for a new land and its new life. They reasoned with him that the church and the commonwealth at home needed his labor and his presence, and that the plantation was at a great distance. They told him that the work he was undertaking was more suitable for young men and that he was going to a land where there was no learning and less civility.
Winthrop spent 19 years of his life in the colony, 12 as governor, three as deputy governor and four years as an assistant governor. He was often censured and sometimes impeached. But he had a magnanimous nature, a generosity of feeling and a patient forgiveness toward his enemies. He was even censured for over-lenity in his decisions. He used his substances in paying the charges of his office. He had a wonderful endurance and fidelity to his convictions. He had no fear of man, for he had unbounded faith in God. But while of a generous and forgiving nature, he could both feel and express indignation in resenting an injustice.
Speaking of position and power he once said he was no more in love with it “than with a frieze coat on a summer day.”
There was a pathos in his life. He was a believer in monstrous omens, in special providences, in witchcraft, and in these things he seems far removed from our times, but he was a great man in the circumstances and surroundings of his day.

SLAVES

BS J 34…”1641 General Court passed what at first glance seems to have been an abolition law…”there shall never be any bond slavery, villinage or captivity among us unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us.
But when we consider that slaves were commonly captives taken in wars, and that it was impossible for Boston magistrates to determine whether the inter-tribal wars of Africa were “just” wars or not, it can be seen that the prohibition was not very effective
In Fall of 1645 two slaves returned….had been enticed aboard a ship – It must be noted it was not slavery but man-stealing that was condemned
The law quoted did however make one thing clear: Under its provisions and contrary to general law elsewhere at that time for centuries after, the children of slave parents were free. Not all of them were actually free. But by repeated decisions of the highest courts, when speaking specifically on that point, it has been settled that no child born in MA since 1641 was ever, by law, a slave.

BS E136 The story of the militia of MA begins in the days when colonists first set foot on the shores of the bay and taught the Indians to respect and fear the paleface. Every man was a soldier then ready to band himself to the common defense. He went to church with his musket, and kept it within reach while he listened to the service. By tacit consent such was the rude but effective militia of the day. The same principle – the nominal enrolment of every able-bodied man – has lain at the root of the militia system ever since. After the inhabitants became numerous enough to disperse with the individual caution and vigilance required of the earlier colonists, there were companies of volunteers, the members of which were encouraged to choose the manner and association in which to perform their duty.

Winthrop’s Boston : Thus Edward Hawes could send John Winthrop Jr., four wild dogs “with an Irish boy to tend them” and assure him that although the boy was a Roman Catholic “with God’s grace he will become a good convert”

“If the people be governors, who then shall be governed?” John Cotton
The elect and the ordained – “as if allegiance was due only to God”

At yearly town meeting colonists chose a swarm of supervisors – constable, surveyors, fence-viewers, hog-reeves, wood-reeves, who supervised burning off underbrush, chimney viewers, who watched for fires, haywards, whose charges were cattle.

Meeting House and Village Tavern

Mass Bay Co brought two professional soldiers with them. By 1636, there were 200 militia. (Pequot War)
Companies mustered each year on Boston Common where they entertained huge crowds.
Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company – oldest military organization in North America
(1673) 500 flintlock muskets from England
(1675) 75 well-organized and disciplined companies in MA.
Foot companies = 70 privates and officers – to 90 each foot company = pike men until latter became useless in forests. Replaced by long knives attached to muskets = bayonets, for close combat against tomahawks.

Cavalry 50 + 20 70

(1641 Biblical laws modified x Body of Liberties which ensured the mainstays of English jurisprudence – the right to due process and trial by jury.)

Death sentence other than murder: blaspheming on the Sabbath or dishonoring parents (after age 16), arson, kidnapping, adultery with a married woman, rape of a virgin and witchcraft.
In just two years the population of white settlers doubled, thereby surpassing the number of Indians around the Bay.

Seductive frontier – to prevent solitary ventures into the wilderness, the General Court only permitted westward expansion by plantation.
With Indian parties into interior…
Emigrés who left MA jurisdiction for the uncharted territory of CT and CT river valley – a serious challenge to the unity of the Puritan enterprise.

1634 Wethersfield
1635 Windsor
1636 Hartford

At western Massachusetts outpost of Springfield, a settler risked fine, three years imprisonment or corporal punishment for living with an Indian. Inter-marriage was forbidden. Connecticut likewise outlawed miscegenation.
For religious reasons as well, the Puritans feared too close contact with Indian rituals and customs. They believed that Indians were “pawns of Satan who might lure the pious from righteousness.”

INDIANS

Winsor/Memorial – George Ellis on “dispossession” of Indians by Puritans.
“Protestant heretics ( and Spaniards) as Christians they by the law of Nature and “Grace” dominant rights over the heathen, not only to the soil but to everything beside, including even existence. Spaniard said “be converted or die,” without allowing time or money for the saving process. The Puritan avowed it his main intent to convert the savage, but was too dilatory or too inefficient in the attempt for its success. But from the moment the Puritan had experience of Indian warfare, the savage became to him a heathen to be put to the slaughter than a subject of salvation by the method of the gospel.”

“Vagrant Indians”

NB: Frequent references that before the planters left England they had learned that the natives had been exterminated by some desolating plague or disease.
Initially stressed “missionary errand and purpose”
Bradford says that the Pilgrims before leaving Leyden expected to find but a scanty number of natives on their arrival.

White: Planter’s Plea: “The land affords void ground, on account of a desolation from a three years plague twelve or sixteen years past, which swept away most of the inhabitants along the sea coast, and in some places utterly consumed man, woman and child, so that there is no person left to lay claim to the soyle which they possessed. In other places, 20 or 30 miles up into land, not one in a 100 is left. Those of them who are left we will teach providence and industry, which in their wastefulness and idleness they much need. Also we shall defend them from the Tarratines who have been wont to destroy and desolate them.”
White grants that no progress made in converting the Indians in Virginia; and that in New Plymouth in ten years not one of them had been converted.”

(When under the so-called Usurpation of Andros with the overthrow of the Colony charter, all the titles to land held by it were put in peril, the magistrates of Boston made haste to secure a confrontation of the deed of the peninsula from the grandsons of the Old Sachem.
It seems that Indians thought gifts from Whites conferred a right of joint occupancy. They seemed to have no idea that they had shut themselves off from the right of roaming over their lands. – Half a century after Puritans landed in Boston, claims by Indians.
Finding spot desolated, except for Blaxton, whites inferred that its former inhabitants had perished in the plague or had deserted and they were free to take possession. (Suffolk Registry/Copy of Indian Deed of Boston, dated 1708)
Town meeting June 18, 1685, a citizen charged with purchasing any claim, legal or pretended, that Indians might advance to Deere Island, the Necke of Boston or any part thereof.”
Indian chief in these negotiations was Wamptauck by English called Josias, grandson of Chickataubut, who upon first encountering the English did grant, sell or alienate ..all that neck of land now known as Boston and the island called Deer Island for “a valuable sum of money.” (not stated.)
BUT neither court records, Winthrop etc. make any reference to earlier transactions with Chickataubut at Wollaston. He lived three years after arrival of Puritans.)

A lingering dread of a native uprising (1622, Virginia Uprising) – No war like Spanish conquistadors, instead manipulate the natives wherever possible under a mantle of legality and the pretext of fairness.
Population estimate 1600 = 60,000- 140,000 x 8,600 1674

18 generations x Plymouth settlers versus 600 generations x Indians in America

1630: Massachusett tribe depleted by disease and war with the Tarratines did not have a principal sachem, but subject to those of Wampanoag and Narraganset

Cutshamekin, sachem of Braintree, who treated with Winthrop on Arbella = a tributary paying tribute to more powerful chiefs

Chickataubut, sachem of Passonagesset, most powerful of surviving Massachusett sachems submitted to Massasoit
1631, March 23 Came from Neponset on the south with his sannops and squaws and visited Winthrop at Boston…Presented him with a hogshead of corn and drank at his table “as soberly as an Englishman” – He least favored the English of any sagamore by reason of an argument with the men of Plymouth in which he lost seven men.
Son = Squamog
1633, Chickataubut died in second wave of plague
Obbatinawit, successor of Chickataubut, a relation
Punkapoag Pond = Canton
Pakachoag, son, wrongfully accused of killing a settler and hanged at Worcester

1633-34 Smallpox epidemic decimated the natives. God had “cleared out the salvages to make way for the City on the Hill”
Winthrop: Many of their children escaped and were given to the English
Pestilence 1616-1619.1633-36/1646-47
Martha’s Vineyard was not affected until 1642-43, with the first outbreak of the plague
Mayhew: “They did run up an down until they could run no longer, they made their faces black as coal, snatched up any weapon, spoke great words but did no hurt; I have seen many of them in this case”
Manitoo = spirits e.g. Cantantowwit was great spirit who first made man and woman. Magical Hobbema ( Hobbamock), “The Old Serpent,” to release his healing powers to drive out illness. – “Eliot never perceived the subtle difference between devil worship and spirit healing.”

Wampum: decorative beads of white and purple – beads which the coastal Shinnecook (Long Island), Narraganset and Pequot fashioned from quahog and periwinkle shells. Wampum bought from coastal Indians to trade with interior for pelts. Until 1660, these shell beads were permitted as currency for any transaction except to pay taxes. Indian coastal tribes were held hostage to wampum production to the detriment of other transactions and crafts.

FUR TRADING

Beaver, late 16th century, high fashion. Beaver hat
Micmac/Abenaki trading partners with French/St Lawrence …Micmac had no corn and the French offered ready supply
MA fur trading posts at Springfield, Ipswich, Concord
1640-1674 heyday of the NE fur trade
Indian trappers
Beaver fur exchanged for woolen cloth
General Court licensed only certain highly placed colonists e.g. John Winthrop, Simon Willard, William Pynchon to treat with Indians for wampum, beaver and other furs.
Saybrook Fur Trading Company – John Winthrop Jr.

Change of Indian rhythm of life. Bartered less frequently with other tribes for hides, wooden bowls and earthenware pots. Beaver trapping took them further away from home for a longer period than older hunting duties. Competition with other client tribes. More critical need for guns. Algonquin and Iroquois warfare. Rivalry between English, French and Dutch traders.

When there was nothing left to trap in the forest, dependant Indian worse off than before. Turned increasingly to sale of lands to survive and pay off debts.
Puritans traced their land rights to the Bible – vacuum domicilum – derived from Genesis 1:28 “to take command of the earth and all in it”
“reapers keepers” philosophy
Grants to groups of covenanting settlers to establish a community. Unlike sachems, the town fathers distributed land according to wealth not need. First settlers in town granted 20 to 40 acres. Once he held land from common pool, he had right to sell it.

Roger Williams: Indians were true proprietors not the King. This set Salem in direct conflict with Boston and General Court. If OK, then Salem could buy directly from Indians and circumvent the jurisdiction of the General Court.
1636 Williams was banished for “divers new and dangerous opinions”

Land scams (documented in 1660 by a Royal Commission)
1) set livestock to trample corn, harassing Indians and driving them from the land
2) paying one Indian to lay claim to another’s land and then buying from the claimant
3) mortgages offered in lean pelt years
Wholesale land transactions destroyed native agrarian society
When they sold land they were conferring right to use and occupy it. They did not realize they were taking the land from the sachem’s domain and placing it under the colonial government.

Policy of the whites was to aggravate the dissensions of the tribes, and to make alliances with one or more of them, e.g. Pequot-Mohegan-Narragansett x March 1631 visit of a CT Indian, probably Mohegan, to Boston.

Winthrop: “Look out to the West Indies for a trade”
Triangular – rum to Africa/slaves to West Indies/molasses to Boston

“Most knowledge from writings of clergymen and land records…know nothing of 80 per cent of the European inhabitants…Lack of membership in established churches.”

John Mason burned up 700 Pequots in their wigwams + wretched victims were writhing impaled upon their own palisades: Thus was God seen in the Mount, crushing his proud enemies.”

BIBL Puritans, Indians and Manifest Destiny, Segal/Stineback

“In a way few colonial Europeans could understand, the land WAS Indian culture. It provided native Americans with their sense of a fixed place in the order of the world, with their religious observances, and with their lasting faith in the importance of the struggling but united community, as opposed to the ambitious, acquisitive individuals that seemed to them to characterize Europeans in the New World”

An inveterate refusal to see Indians as rational beings. Puritan leaders were opposed to rapid expansion of their population into Indian territories, which they regarded as the realm of nature under Satan’s conflict.

Sincere Puritan desire to save Indians from the Devil was inseparable from the requirement that they abandon their own culture and capitulate to colonial government.

Fervor of Puritan farmer wrestling the howling wilderness from the clutches of the devil

John Cotton: Where there is a vacant place, there is liberty for the son of Adam and Noah to come and inhabit, though they neither buy not ask of their leaves…In a vacant soil, he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is. And the ground of this is from the Grand Charter given to Adam and his posterity in Paradise –Genesis 1:28 “Multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.”

The Bible made it perfectly clear that Satan had been allowed by God to rule the world’s wilderness areas after Adam and Eve’s original disobedience in the Garden of Eden.
Puritans left England not only in revulsion against the Anglican church’s corruption of the Reformation but also in full anticipation that they were entering a region of pure unchallenged evil.

Cotton Mather: Satan had decoyed Indians to North America in the hope if evading Jesus Christ – The Lost People

“The native inhabitants of the wilderness were both enemies of God’s people and pawns in God’s plan to remind the people of their superiority to the natives. Only if the Indian’s dual purpose in Puritan eyes is understood – Children of Satan and instruments of God – will the student of Puritan-Indian experience understand how desire to convert Indians and convert natives and readiness to kill them could be part and parcel of a single view of reality.”

Techniques for acquiring Indian lands “cattle tramping his corn.” “strong water” “getting a corrupt Indian to lay claim and then buying it from him. “Threatening Indian with violence. Have an Indian charged with a variety of offences – fines – pay and mortgage.

Winthrop: “And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell among them in their wastelands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites.”

Secondly…”there is more than enough for them and us.”

Thirdly: “God hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left void of inhabitants”

Fourthly: “We shall come in with good leave of the natives”

1623 ? Massachusetts conspiracy = Pratt’s warning/ “Some of you steal our corn…”

“They saw a walking island and wanted to go and pick strawberries.”

John Josselyn, a non-puritan (rumored)… “instead of bringing them to the knowledge of Christianity, we have taught them to commit the beastly and crying sins of our nation, for a little profit.”

John Cotton: “God’s people take the land of promise”

Trade: wampum beads rated at 4 to 6 to the penny. A fathom of wampum beads, 240 to 260 beads, five shillings or 60 pence.
&&&&&

BIBL New England’s Prospect William Wood 1634

“I have written the latter part concerning the Indians in a more light and facetious style than the former because their carriage and behavior hath afforded more matter of mirth and laughter than gravity and wisdom.”

500 ship anchorage /40-odd islands. “The entrance into the great haven is called Nantasket, where ships cast anchor until wind and tide serve them to sail to the river of Wessagusset, Neponset, Charles and Mystic.”

Winter beginning in December and breaking up the 10th day of February. It has been observed by the Indians that every 10th year there is little or no winter.

Northwest Wind: “In the extremity of winter the north-east and south wind coming from the sea produce warm weather, and bringing in the warm-working waters of the sea, loosens the frozen bays, carrying away the ice with their tides, melting the snow, and thawing the ground. Only the northwest wind coming over the land is the cause of extreme cold weather, being always accompanied with deep snows and bitter frost, so that in two or three days the rivers are (un)passable for horse or man. This cold wind blows seldom across three days together after which the weather is more tolerable, the air being nothing so sharp but peradventure in four or five days after this cold messenger will blow afresh, commanding every man to his house, forbidding any to outface him with prejudice to their noses

“…some men had their overgrown beards so frozen together that they could not get their strong-water bottles into them.”

“piercing cold produceth not so many noisome effects as the raw winter of England. In public assemblies it is strange to hear a man sneeze or cough as ordinarily as they do in old England.
“The common diseases of England, they be strangers now to the English in that strange land.”

(Three flight shot – the distance an arrow flies = 200-300 yards.)

Fishermen out to sea in January and February, in which they get more fish and better than summer…reach some good harbor before night.

Virginia having no winter to speak of, but extreme hot summer, hath dried up much English blood and by pestiferous diseases swept away many lusty bodies, changing their complexion not into swarthiness but into paleness, so that when they come to trading in our parts we can know many of them by their faces.

“the Indians who are too lazy to catch fish plant corn eight or ten years in one place without it, having very good crops” Suggests that the Indians got idea from Settlers?

BIBL: Fish Fertilizer, a Native North American practice? Science 188, April 1975 – Argued that use of fish native to Europe, not North America.

Good water: Those that drink it be as healthful, fresh and lusty ad those that drink beer.”

Custom of the Indians to burn wood in November when the grass is withered and the leaves dried, it consumes all the underbrush and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it impassable, and spoil their hunting. So that by these means in these places the Indians inhabit, there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground. In some places where the Indians died of the plague 14 years ago is much underwood, as in the midway between Wessagusset and Plymouth because it hath not been burned.

“A great black bear which being most fierce in strawberry time when they have their young. At this time they will go upright like a man and climb trees and swim to the islands – which if the Indians see, there will be more sportful bear-baiting than Paris Garden can afford. For seeing bears take water the Indian will leap after him where they go to water…bloody noses and scratched sides. In the end the man gets the victory, riding the bear over the watery plain until he can bear him no longer.”
Bear hibernation: and food being scant in those hard times, they live only by sleeping and sucking their paws, which keep them as fat as they are in summer.

Wolves attack the bears – a kennel of these ravening renegades setting on a poor single bear will tear him as a dog will tear a kid.
Wolves attack swine, goats and red calves which they take for deer. In time of autumn and the beginning of spring, these ravenous rangers do most frequent our English habitations, following the deer which come down in those parts.
10 to 12 in a pack.
Wolves be killed daily in some place or other by the English and Indians, who have a certain rate per head.

Moose: 40 miles to the north east there be great store of them.

Flying Squirrels: “with a great deal of loose skin which she spreads when she flies, which the win gets and so wafts her bat-like body from place to place

The ounce or wild cat is as big as a mongrel dog.

Beaver: The wisdom and understanding of this creature will almost conclude him a reasonable creature.
“Houses” and “Ponds”
Their wisdom secures them from the English who seldom or never kills any of them, being not patient to lay a long siege or to be so often deceived by their cunning evasions. So that all the beaver which the English have comes first from the Indians whose time and experience fits them for that employment.

Sturgeon in Merrimac River (12-14-18 feet long?)
Bass – most favored fish…though men are soon wearied of other fish, yet never are they wearied with bass.
Lobsters: 20 pounds. Their plenty make them little esteemed and seldom eaten. The Indians get many of them every day to bait their hooks.

Oysters – shoehorn, some a foot long (?)

South to North:
Wessagusset = Weymouth
Mount Wollaston = Quincy 3 miles north
Massachusetts Fields, where the greatest sagamore lived before the plague
Dorchester, six miles further, in this plantation, a great many cattle
Roxbury, a mile on = a fair and handsome country town, the inhabitants in it all being very rich
“Smelt Brook” “Stony River”
Boston, two miles north east of Roxbury… Their greatest wants being wood and meadows ground, which never were in that place, being constrained to fetch their building timber and fire wood from the islands in boats and their hay in lighters…the inhabitants have taken to themselves farm houses in a place called Muddy River (Brookline), two miles from town, where there is good ground, large timber, and store of marshland and meadow. In this place they keep their swine and other cattle in summer, whilst the corn is on the ground at Boston, and bring them to the town in winter.
Charlestown
Medford
Newtowne – one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures , with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them are very rich and well stocked with cattle and all sorts, having many hundred acres of ground paled in with one fence, about a mile and a half long.”
Watertown fish weir below the fall…shads and alewives. Ships of small burden do come up to these towns but the oyster banks do bar out the larger ships.
Mystic three miles from Charlestown later incorporated into Medford – Old Medford was absorbed into Charlestown
Winnisimet = Chelsea
Deer Island, which lies with a flight shot of Pullin Point (named for “pull-in boats) … “some have killed fifteen deer in a day upon this island – 1655 trees cut for fire wood
“These islands abound with woods and water and meadow grounds…inhabitants used to put cattle here for safety.”

Beyond Bay, Saugus, which was renamed Lynn
Nahant, “one Black William, an Indian duke, gave this place in general to the plantation of Saugus
Romney Marsh = part of Chelsea. Four miles long, two miles wide, half marsh, half upland grass, diverse creeks, geese and ducks, ponds for duck “coys”
Salem “there be more canoes than in all the patent, every household having a water horse or two”
Marblehead
Agawam = Ipswich
Merrimac renamed Newberry …last two according to Wood best places for a plantation.

Annoyances 1) wolves 2) rattlesnakes – dead within the hour unless he takes antidote = “snakeweed” – This weed is rank poison and not to be taken by any man that is not bitten”

The English coming over so newly and uncomfortably provided, wanting all utensils and provisions which belonged to the well being of planters.
“Anyone that shall carry provision enough for a year and a half shall not need to fear want”
Provisions for the journey and settlement:
“good claret wine to burn at sea – stomach/seasick
No man must neglect his munition for the defence of himself and the country. For there is no man there that bears a head but that bears military arms. Even boys of 14 years of age are practiced with men in military discipline every three weeks.”

“Men of good estate may do well there provided they go well accommodated with servants. I would not wish them to take over many, 10 or 12 lusty servants being able to manage an estate of two to three thousand pounds.”

“All in NE must be workers in some kind”
“For 4,000 souls, there are 1500 head of cattle and 4,000 goats plus swine innumerable

“Of the Indians: Our Indians that live to the north of (Pequots and Narragansetts) are called Aberginians, who before the sweeping plague were an inhabitant not fearing, but rather scorning the confrontments for such as now count them but the scum of the country and would soon root them out of their native possessions were it not for the English

Mohawks “a cruel bloody people, “sometimes eating on a man, one part after another, before his face and while yet living. (Mohawk cannibalism was ceremonial rather than dietary) …
“a rough-hewn satyr cut a gobbit of flesh from his brawny arm, eating it in his view, searing it with a firebrand lest the blood should be wasted before morning, at the dawning of which they would make an end as they had begun”

Bore holes through their hamstrings through which they thread a cord coupling ten or a dozen men together

BIBL: The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America – American Philosophical Society Proceedings 82 (1940) 151-225 Nathaniel Knowles

Mohawks wear barks of trees as impenetrable as steel and headpieces of same + “sea horse’s skins”

Tarratines saving that they eat not men’s flesh are little less savage and cruel “the more insolent by reason they have guns which they daily trade for with the French, who will sell his eyes, as they say, for Beaver

Pequots “ a stately warlike people” of whom I never heard any misdemeanor, but that they were just and equal in all their dealings, not treacherous either to their countrymen or the English,

Narraganset “most numerous, industrious and rich.”

“Our Indians” (see WOOD descriptions) = “They grow so proportionable and continue so long in their vigor because they are not brought down with suppressing labor, vexed with annoying cares, or drowned in the excessive use of overflowing plenty…

“Boys not permitted to wear hair long until 16. Not a little fanatical in the custom of their hair.”

An Englishman’s bastard = one that hath a beard

“They love not to be imprisoned in English fashion.”

“A sagamore with a hummingbird in his ear for a pendant, a black hawk on his occiput for a pendant, “mowhacheis” for his gold chain, good store of wampum begirting his loins, bow in hand, quiver at back, with six naked Indians spatterdash at his heels for his guard…thinks himself little inferior to the great Chan.

Wood speaks of local Indians friendship and hospitality etc. +
“many lazy boys that have run away from their masters have been brought home by these ranging foresters”

‘beat them, whip them, punch them, is they resolve not to wince for it they will not”
“strong fettered in the chains of laziness, so as they would rather starve than work – one of the strongest accusations that can be laid against the men (the women being more industrious)
adulterer: “he takes a bastinado in his hand, so lamentably beating him that he is a fitter subject for some skilful surgeon than the lovely object of a lustful strumpet”

“their old soldiers being swept away by the plague which was very rife among them 16 years ago.”

Forts: 40 or 50 ft square. Trees ten to 12 feet high. Loopholes

Games: pium and hubbub

Hunters: “It grieves them more to see an Englishman take a deer than a thousand acres of land”
Deer trap: a hedge more than a mile long, narrower and narrower by degrees, leaving only a gap of six foot.
Deer traps: springs made of young trees and smooth-wrought cords, so strong as it will toss a horse if he be caught in it.

Sturgeon fishing by night with blazing torches.

“If her husband comes to seek for his squaw and begin to bluster, the English woman betakes her to her arms, which are the warlike ladle and the scalding liquors, threatening blistering to the naked runaway.”
******
Bibl Everyday Life George Francis Dow

“a complete armor”
1626 = Irish servants
Food for a year
’Tween-decks space so low a tall man couldn’t stand erect
Ports and hatches closed in stormy weather
1635 a small bark of 25 tons x 30 feet x 14 passengers including two women
“a large square house made of thick sawn planks stayed with oak beams” (Plymouth 1627)
“mechanics”
1630 shelter at night in an empty cask – Boston
1630 some wigwams and a house – Charlestown
“burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside”
“many lived in tents and wigwams, their meeting place being around a tree”
wattle and daub
diamond-shaped leaded glass
“cames” = oiled paper substitutes
1629 Salem brickfield
MB Co – 10,000 bricks as ballast
Weatherboards = plain boarding
Clapboards = pine
Wooden latches on doors
“only drinking vessel was a quart Staffordshire mug which was passed around the table at the demand of a thirsty one.”
Parlor was also used as a bedroom – “best bed in the parlor or foreroom x rugs = bed furnishings x patchwork quilt
Trundle or truckle beds in which children slept
“hardly in bed when one was shockingly bitten”
winter warming pans and heated bricks to bed
“heard through knothole or crack in a chamber floor”
Table forks unknown – Winthrop had one – said to be only in the colony
Knives, spoons and fingers
Woman smoking pipe = Perkin’s maid. “Mehitabel…set fire to house x 16-year-old girl x fined $40 and whipped.
Wort = beer in the making
Hasty Pudding = corn mush and milk

(Early 18th century = painted papers x painter-stainer
Paper-hangings
1710 sash windows
1714 Peter Sergeant House built – became the governor’s house after the revolution.
1722 Franklin satirizes extravagance of NE housewives in “new glazing houses with new fashioned square paned glass”
1804 Unpainted dingy houses x Indian Red from India – American Indians had “paint mines” at e.g. Augusta, ME)

Winsor

Crosby: Man settled here because conditions seemed to suit his immediate needs. As the city grew and men’s needs became more complex, he began to change the face of the earth by tearing down hills and filling in bays.”
Old Boston n the peninsula had an area of a square mile, much too small for a large city
Mystic Charles Neponset Rivers
Charlestown Neck, Boston Neck, Dorchester Neck
Boston Harbor: Room for 500 ships protected from storms; numerous peninsulas or necks, offered easily defended locations for towns, and islands provided safe pastures.
Drumlins
The isolation of the peninsula by bays and rivers gave protection when the settlers feared the Indians but hindered traffic and necessitated long bridges when city became larger.
The hills which were of use to the early settlers soon became a disadvantage. It was connected to the mainland over narrow neck or isthmus which made communication with all towns except Roxbury difficult.
The hills occupied much of the scant area and were too steep for convenience, and the shallow bays became a nuisance, but man remedied both problems by moving part of the hills into the bay
These natural defects of the location were a challenge to the ingenuity of the inhabits which was recognized and accepted at an early date.

Parallel between early modification of Boston topography and 21st century BIG DIG

Boston was preferred to Charlestown because of scarcity of drinking water/large springs in Boston, then wells/1795, water from Jamaica Pond through wooden pipes/1848 Cochituate Aqueduct from Lake Cochituate in Framingham/ Wachusett Reservoir

Fort Hill – site of Fort
Copp’s Hill – Windmill
Beacon Hill – beacon

Mount Wollaston – The Mount – People of Boston had their farms here – Braintree

Adjacent towns now part of the metropolis: Charlestown, Roxbury, West Roxbury, Dorchester, Brighton

Merrimac River: use of water power of this stream for cotton mills increased until it was said that the Merrimac turned more spindles than any other river in the world
Manchester – Lowell – Lawrence – Haverhill

Yankee Ingenuity: The long winters gave leisure for handicraft: Yankee Ingenuity first showed itself in the variety of products they turned out to supply their own needs and their neighbors needs

1639 law freed from taxes and duties for seven years any ship or other property used in fisheries. + law exempting ship carpenters, fishermen and millers from military service.

Ex-fishermen instead of fishing off the Banks carried dried and salted fish to Europe, Barbados and Bermuda, in exchange for the products of foreign lands.
Winter Fishing fleet “savage encounters with Arctic gales and tremendous seas on the Banks.”

Landon/U. Mass 5/5/2001 – (Wilkinson’s Back Lot/Blackstone Block – Paddy’s Alley x Cross Street – Winslow Farm at Marshfield
Sheep first commercially raised more so than cattle
Love of mutton in Boston: “stuffed leg of mutton”
Large cattle and pigs slaughtered during cold weather
Pork preserved for winter
Little fresh meat at end of winter…until spring lambs born and fish started running
Easter ham/lamb
Calves and dairy products in summer
Sheep culled at end of summer into fall.

Lawn bowling – biased or weighted to increase curve that can be put on ball when it is rolled. Bowl is lathe-trimmed oak and is wheel shaped as opposed to spherical…the lead weight in hole biased the bowle
1650 law made it illegal to bowl in taverns aimed at preventing gambling
Similar to Italian bocci and unrelated to modern bowling
LACE – 1651 denied people of low estate = worth less than L200 …high estate = more than L200 + magistrates and public officers.

BS D109 In 1634 when the original trading company declared that it would be such no longer, but a responsible government, it brought into existence the word “commonwealth” calling MA by that name being first community to apply that term to any government, not excepting England, which was named a commonwealth in 1649
The word “coasting” in the sense of sliding down an inclined plane was used for the first time when Boston was three years old by the court of assistance. The term lumber appeared first in the town records in 1663, being employed to designate the embarrassment caused by the “lumbering” up of the streets at a time when the settlers were doing a great business in forest products.
In describing the first use of rum in 1657…it was the ministers who introduced the article. The speaker also mentioned the words “schooner” “sleigh” “harness” “phaeton” carryall” “barge” “currency” tender “sinking fund” depreciation caucus (1740) labor tryst (1741 unconstitutionality /gerrymander/ warden/ immigrant/ chromo – all Yankee words that have been imitated and used far and wide.

BIBL: Real Founders of New England – Charles Bowlton:

The voyage… “two weeks out of port the sea water began change its color to a cobalt blue and the whole life of the oceam was new. The air became warmer, the water was dotted with little bunches of seaweed – yellow ochre patches sometimes floating singly but more often in procession marching over the crested waves, The Rev Richard Mather calls them a “variety of yellow weeds.” For the first half of the journey Mother Carey’s chickesn hung like swerving airplanes over the water, and tip tiliting they turned their white breasts to the sunlight. In the middle of the ocean flying fishes- whole schools of them – shot out of the swirling sea, skimmed the surface and splashed below. A stately chambered nautilis sailed proudly by. Slippery arched porpoises played about the ships and whales spouted frequently as they still used to do half a centiury ago.
Mather speaks of the stormy petrel or Mother Carey’s chicken. He mentions also the playful porpoises, one of which was cut open on the deck and was “ wonderful to us all, and marvellous merry sport, and delightful to our women and children.” With salt, pepper and vinegar the flesh proved to be good eating. He refers to the whale, grampus, bonito or Spanish dolphin, mackerel and cod; he also notices a change on the color of water on approaching land. The appearance of a bird with blue colored feathers also attracte his attention.

When the passengers tired of salt fish and salt beef, they had “bacon and buttered peas, sometimes buttered bag pudding made with currents and raisins, with potage (or soup) of beer and oarmeal, or water pottage, well buttered”

MEM Hist 1: Winthrop’s house stood nerly opposite the foot of School Street; and while the land on which the Old South now stands was a garden attached, the place was called “The Green”. When the British pulled down the house, they cut down also a row of fine buttonwoods, which skirted the street….the estate passed in 1677 to the Old South Church, and the house became its parsonage.

The repeal of the sumptuary laws in 1644, taken with other legislation indicates that the colony was outgrowing its time of minority.

Timeline Background

1628 Formation of New England Company/Settlement at Salem (Naumkeg) led by John Endicott
1628 (May 1) Thomas Morton and colonists at Merry Mount dance around a maypole and celebrate May Day, upsetting the Plymouth Pilgrims. In June, Capt. Miles Standish is sent to eradicate the settlement and Morton is sent back to England.
1628 Mohawks defeated the Mahican alliance and drove the Sokokis and Pocumtucs away from the Hudson River trade. Thomas Morton, at Passonagesset (Mare Mount) near Massachusetts Bay, accused of selling guns to the Massachuseuck; Standish lead a force to arrest him and send him back to England.
1628: Reformed Protestant Dutch church was established in New Amstedam. Would remain the established church of the colony until the English conquest of the colony in 1664.
1628 English Parliament forces Charles 1 to sign Petition of Rights; it prohibits arbitrary taxation, imprisonment, martial law, and billeting of soldiers. Charles is given badly needed money./ Richelieu captures La Rochells after 14 month siege/Huguenots are subdued.
1628 Taj Mahal built

1629 Formation of Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay corporate colony. Massachusetts Bay Charter
1629 July 10. The first non-separatist Congregational church in America was established in Salem, MA, founded by Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton
1629 Dutch West India Company introduced patroon system to New Netherland. Large grants of lands to those who could establish settlements of 50 persons in four years. By 1630, five established but only 3 ever colonized
1629 Parliament is dissolved. Charles 1 of England rules without it for 11 years.

1630 KATHERINE WHEELRIGHT, born Bixsby, Lincoln, before 4 November, her baptism date
1630-43: English Puritans immigrate to Massachusetts Bay Colony
1630-50 William Bradford writing Of Plymouth Plantation (pub. 1856)
1630-1649 John Winthrop writes The History of New England – Inspiration for many of Longfellow’s New England Tragedies.
1630 John Cotton preaches the sermon God's Promise to His Plantation to the departing colonists aboard the Arbella
John Winthrop delivers the lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity while aboard the ship Arbella.
1630 Winthrop arrives with a fleet of eleven ships and nine hundred settlers
1630 A settlement at Trimountain, also known as Shawmut, an Indian name meaning living fountain, was established by John Winthrop
1630 summer: first church founded in Charlestown – before they crossed to Boston.
1630 Population: 3,000 colonists in Virginia; 300 at Plymouth. During 1630-1640, another 16,000 colonists will arrive.
1630 September 17, Boston named by court order. Colonial government takes shape with a Governor, Deputy Governor and General Court
1630 September 30, John Billington hanged for murder. A member of the original Pilgrim band. First criminal executed in American colonies. (?)
1630 Renselaerswyck, the only successful Dutch patroonship founded by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a director of the DWIC.

1631 Governor Winthrop recorded meteorological findings. Launches the Blessing of the Bay on the Mystic River, July 4
1631 Watches ordered for Boston at night – Definition of “freeman” on religious grounds. Election of Assistants by freemen.
1631 Letter of Governor Thomas Dudley to Bridget, Countess of Lincolnshire described settling of English immigrants
1631 Smallpox epidemic hit the Massachusetts Bay area
1631 Roger Williams arrived at Boston; became pastor of Separatist church at Plymouth
1631 John Eliot arrives at Boston, settled as a teacher at Roxbury, began preaching to the Indians in 1646
1631 Puritan intolerance – only (male) Puritan church members had right to vote
1631 Phillip Ratcliffe’s ears cut off for impiety

1632 Representation in General Court by Town. Settlement of Springfield by Pynchon.1632 Narragansetts attacked Owsamequin (Massasoit) who took refuge with the English at their trading post near his town. Massachusetts Bay sachems, Chickataubut and John Sagamore, allied with Canonicus and joined him to fight the Pequot
1632 June 20: A charter for the settlement of Maryland granted to Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore. Roman Catholic settlement of St. Mary’s was established. His brother, Leonard Calvert, first governor.
1632 The Franciscan missionary Br. Gabriel Segard writes an account of the Huron Indians which contains a dictionary of their language.
1632 “First law against smoking in public. “No person shall take tobacco in any Inne, or common victual house, except in a private room there, so as the master of said house nor any guest there shall take offence, under pain of two shillings and six pence for every such offence.”

1633 Massive smallpox epidemic hit the northeast throughout New England and out to the Huron country in southern Ontario. Massive depopulation
1633 ? Strong liquor, games and dancing are not allowed at inns and taverns

1634 EDWARD NAYLOR, born (or 1636)
1634 Ann Hutchinson emigrated to Boston
1634 Boston purchases 45 acres of land to use as a military training field and common pasturage
1634 First tavern opened in Boston by Samuel Cole
1634 A sumptuary law was passed by the General court prohibiting the purchase of woolen, linen, or silk clothes with silver, gold, silk, or thread lace on them. Slashed clothing was limited to one slash in each sleeve and in the back.
1634 First Roman Catholic Church built in Maryland
1634 Charles I issues ship-money tax on ports and later on inland towns. Charles’ tyranny of taxation leads to public indignation and defiance.