Introduction
Last week, we examined the Jamestown Colony and the results of their faith, their philosophy, and their societal structure. This week, we will look at two other colonies that had very different philosophies from that of Jamestown and had, as a result, much different results. This is where the two brands of Christianity in America’s earliest days very quickly diverges, and as we will see, it is from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth that the foundations for much of our civil liberties and laws were taken.
The Prevailing Philosophies
Economic Philosophies in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay
Much like Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay both started out with a socialistic system. They landed in the New England area where the soil was not nearly so rich and easy to work with as it was in Jamestown, and they arrived in the winter when it was hardest to work the ground.
The challenges ahead of them would claim roughly half of those who had first arrived on the Mayflower. However, unlike those in Jamestown, the settlers here were built of sterner stuff. They did not believe that they were owed anything by those who were native to the land and did not demand of the Indians what they did not trade for fairly. Shortly after their arrival, by God’s grace, the Wampanoag tribe, led by Chief Massasoit, stepped in and helped them to learn how to prepare their fields, plant crops, hunt and fish, and survive the first harsh winter.
Still, the socialist system they adhered to led to some of the same problems as it had in Jamestown. Some of the settlers refused to work, and many slacked in their duties in the communal fields. According to William Bradford’s journal the year he as governor and the colony’s council voted out collectivism, “The failure of that experiment of communal system, the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community by the commonwealth, was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.” He noted of the changes in mentality at Plymouth after the voting out of collectivism that it “had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any other means the governor or any other could use…and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability. Any general want or famine hath not been amongst them to this day” (Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, 177-178).
After abandoning collectivism in favor of private property, the Plymouth colony no longer had any issues with prosperity due to laziness. While they dealt with famines due to drought, most years they did well. Speaking of the legacy that their economic system left behind, historians David and Tim Barton state, “In fact, the first free-market business in America was a Pilgrim-run 1627 trading post at Aptucxet. Massachusetts became known for what was historically called ‘the Puritan hard-work ethic’ and was the most productive of all the early American colonies” (The American Story, 79).
To sum up their economic philosophy, the Pilgrims and Puritans believed in the Biblical precept taught in II Thessalonians 3:10 that said “If anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat either,” and in I Timothy 5:8, which says “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” As the Bartons point out, “Applying this principle saved the colony. The Biblical focus on individual rights and responsibilities is a core element of the free-market system, especially the requirement that every person provide for his own family, not that of someone else” (The American Story, 54).
Settling Philosophy in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth
When it came to their philosophy on settling the New World, the settlers at the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were also complete opposites of their Jamestown counterparts. Recall that Jamestown’s settling philosophy was that the king had said he owned the land and that settled it. There was no need to recompense the natives, and in fact, they were entitled to the land even if they had to displace the natives violently. The Puritans, however, recognized that the land did not belong to the king simply because he said it did.
They made a point not to settle land that was owned by Indian tribes without making a trade that both they and the Indians found amenable. Often, people have the misconception that the Pilgrims stole the land from the Indians and chased them off. In fact, that was never the case. Their first settlement was on land that no one inhabited. There were abandoned, run-down structures, and when they explored the surrounding area, they did not find anyone. So they settled there for the winter.
After the winter was over, the Wampanoag Indians came to see them and told them that the land had belonged to the Patuxet Indians, who had been wiped out by a plague. No one was willing to settle it after because they believed the area was cursed and haunted. For the settlements that followed in the tradition of Plymouth in the north of America, the Indians were always consulted and traded with in order to acquire the land for the settlement.
Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the way that William Penn handled the acquisition of the land for Pennsylvania, the original settlement that would grow into the colony. The Bartons explain that “he even purchased some of the same land multiple times because different tribes claimed the same property, having taken and retaken it from each other in conquest. Penn ensured that he secured a clear title from each tribe that claimed it” (The American Story, 87).
Civic Philosophy in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth
Another key area that these two colonies differed from Jamestown and every other European country of the time is in civic philosophy. They believed strongly that the Bible should guide everyday life, and this was easy to see in their code of civil laws. Because they understood the Biblical concept that Church and State leaders were not to be the same and that the State should not have authority over the realm of the spiritual nor the Church authority over the realm of the civil, they elected officials for church and state separately. They kept the institutions separate, but they did not separate Christian principles or the Bible from their civil laws.
Jamestown’s civil law had been based on Christian principles as given to them by their priests, but very little of their law directly quoted Scripture or even referred to it. Most did not read the Bible and relied entirely on the priests to tell them what God expected and what the Bible said. The Pilgrims operated on no such philosophy. They had a strong understanding of Scripture, and almost all of their laws had Scripture references beside them to indicate where they had pulled the principle from. (See The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusets)
The combination of separation of the roles of the authorities and the foundation on actual Scripture, not just general principles, made them what they were. As the Bartons state, “The long-term result of Plymouth Colony was that it literally changed the world. It introduced and successfully demonstrated many concepts largely unpracticed at that time but which thereafter became common–principles such as local self-government, a free-market/free-enterprise economic system, racial equality, religious freedom, education for all children, protection for the rights of individual religious conscience, and much more” (The American Story, 58).
Religious Philosophy in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay
In the earlier philosophical foundational points, religion came up here and there. This is because the Pilgrims’ faith was so integral to their lives that it infused every part of what they did.
When it came to their religious philosophy, the Pilgrims once again showed how different they were from those in the colonies in Virginia. First of all, the main reason the Pilgrims went to the New World was for religious freedom. They were not part of the Anglican church, and as such, they experienced intense persecution in England. They moved to Holland in an attempt to escape. Unfortunately, Holland had an undesired secularizing influence on their young people. Unhappy with the loss of future generations of their community, the Pilgrims once again packed up and headed for the New World to settle where they would be free to develop their community and live in religious freedom.
In the New World, they found exactly what they were hoping for, and the broad impact they had on the development of America should be given much more attention than it is. The focus, then, of the colonists in the Massachusetts area was not on looking for gold to make a profit for their sending benefactors or on exploring. Their focus was on building the settlement and on spreading the Gospel to the New World. This showed in their approach to the Indian tribes around them. They treated their neighbors very well and had few issues with them in the early years. In one of the journal entries made within the selection of colonists’ journal entries (compiled in A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England, by Certain English Adventurers both Merchants and Others), a colonist relates the following:
“One thing that was very grievous unto us at this place; there was an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than an hundred years old, which came to see us because she never saw English, yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us, she had three sons, who when Master Hunt was in these parts went aboard his ship to trade with him, and he carried them captives into Spain (for Tisquantum [Squanto] at that time was carried away also) by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age. We told them we were sorry that, any Englishman should give them that offense, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same: but for us we would not offer them any such injury, though it would gain us all the skins in the country. So we gave her some small trifles, which somewhat appeased her” (“A Voyage Made by Ten of our Men to the Kingdom of Nauset to seek a Boy that had lost himself in the Woods; with such Accidents as befell us in that Voyage” from A Relation or Journal of the Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth).
This is only one of many such stories. Once again, those who followed in their footsteps, at least in the earlier years of colonization before others created major antipathy between the natives and the colonists (regardless of their personal character), had no issues with their neighbors. In one early American encyclopedia, it is said of those in Pennsylvania who followed William Penn that “the influence of Penn was so great among the Indians, that to be a follower of his was at all times a passport to their [the Indians’] protection and hospitality” (Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography). Furthermore, historian George Bancroft says that in the early years of colonization “not a drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian” (History of the Unites States, 382-383).
King Philip’s War in Massachusetts
At this point, it should be clear how different the colonists in Jamestown were from the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. The two brands of Christianity–one based on the word of the religious leaders and the other based on the Bible–led to two radically different legacies. But what about the wars waged between the colonists and the Indians?
At this point, our discussion would be lacking if we did not discuss King Philip’s War. Modern history textbooks would have us believe that the Indians snapped because of ill treatment by the colonists and launched a war on them for it. While this was very certainly the case in the situation with the Jamestown settlers and their neighbors, the Powhatan Indians, it was not the case with the Pilgrims. So if the problem was not the Pilgrims’ treatment of the Indians, what was the problem?
In a word, Christianity. The tribe that began the attack on Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay was actually the same Wampanoag tribe that had helped the Pilgrims so greatly in their early days. The relationship between the Wampanoags and Pilgrims had been extremely good, and in fact, the Pilgrims had great success in converting many of the Indians over to Christianity. By the time that King Philip’s War began, Chief Massasoit had passed on, and his grandson, Metacom, had taken over.
Metacom disliked the Christian missionaries and their teachings of Christian morals because the teachings were converting too many Indians away from the native traditions. The traditions in question were those surrounding their barbaric, sadistic torture of captives. The things they did to their captives ranged from cutting holes in the chest of the victim to pull out his guts before proceeding to cut off his head to burning the victim’s feet in the fire and staking him to the ground by them afterwards. The converts refused to behave in these horrific ways. According to the Bartons, “By 1674, just before the outbreak of the war, Eliot’s Christian villages of ‘praying Indians’ numbered as many as 3,600 converts” (The American Story, 62).
This was the tipping point for Metacom. Furious with the changes in behavior in his braves due to Christianity, the chief launched his attack against settlers all throughout the region even if they had lived peacefully up to that point with the Indians. Even Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and a champion of native rights and claims, was not spared, having his home burned down in an attack. Metacom instructed his men to kill all Christians.
Not Just the Settlers
Sadly, Metacom’s wrath fell not only on the white settlers but also on those of his own people who had converted to Christianity. Most of the Christian Indians joined the English and fought against Metacom. According to American history graduate student Jenny Hale Pulsipher in her article “Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War”, “The English population had been decimated: death or captivity claimed one in every ten adult English males in the colony, along with dozens of women and children. The Indian population fared even worse: thousands of Wampanoag, Narragansetts, and Nimpucs died fighting for Metacom, while Mohegans, Pequots, and Christian Indians died alongside the English–an estimated 5,000 killed in all” (Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War).
The Bartons state that in the end, “Metacom also attacked and killed many Indians–but they were Christian Indians, so they, too, were targeted, hunted, and tortured in ways similar to those used on the settlers. At its core, the war was essentially an anti-Christian crusade, not a war between races, and many of the Christian Indians fought side-by-side with the colonists throughout the conflict.” They further note that “the war finally ended when Metacom was killed by an Indian, not a settler ” (The American Story, 63).
After roughly fifteen months of fighting, about sixty percent of the towns were destroyed. Estimates are that around four hundred to eight hundred settlers die while nine hundred to three thousand Indians were killed. Sadly, the praying Indians’ numbers were cut by nearly fifty percent.
So while obviously the settlers did kill Indians and the Indians settlers, the situation was much more complex than most of the history textbooks make it seem. The war was about far more than perceived grievances, though there were some irritations that the Indians held over Massasoit selling the Pilgrims so much land and over the suspicion that one of their own had been poisoned by the Pilgrims. This last was without any basis, but it was just one more excuse for Metacom to declare war on the people he viewed as the enemy.
What Grew Out of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay
Just as Jamestown was the source of many of the ills that would plague America long past her settlement days, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were the source of much of what was good about America. One little known fact is that they wrote the first constitution in America known as the Mayflower Compact and one of the first complete bodies of law in American history. The documents that were used to govern the colonies and lay out the rights of individuals served as a strong foundation for our founding documents, as we will see when we progress into our discussions on the Founding of America and the men and women behind it.
Without the Pilgrims and their insistence upon going beyond being a “Christian” colony to being a Biblical one, we would not have America as we know it. Massachusetts was the only early settlement region during that time to forbid slavery on the grounds of Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:10, which made “man-stealing” (the practice of forcibly abducting someone from their own country to send to another) a crime.
Up until they were taken over as a British colony, slavery was not permitted in Massachusetts at all. In the court records kept by Nathaniel Shurtleff, account is given of the court’s demand that Negroes who had been wrongfully taken and enslaved be returned home immediately at risk of punishment to those who had taken them and a demand that those perpetrating the wrong appear before the court if they would not return the individuals home. (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England: 1644-1657 from Google Books, 49) When Britain’s control over them ended with the War for Independence, Massachusetts was the first state to ban slavery outright.
We owe a great deal to the Pilgrims for the legacy that they left us and the influence they had on the men who would pen the documents that gave us the protection for the individual rights that the Pilgrims had enshrined in their laws long before the War for Independence began.
Conclusion
Having examined both Jamestown and Massachusetts, we can see that there were two very different Christian legacies in the country. The first was a legacy of being generally Christian and led to some of the worst atrocities ever committed in this country on a grand scale. The second was a legacy of basing law and order on Biblical precepts and returning to the Bible for direction whenever the laws could not cover a given situation or gave no direction on it, and this led to some of the most revolutionary documents penned in history.
Without these brave men and women, our country would not exist as we know it. They sowed the seeds for the United States to be born, and we would do well to know history in all its nuanced glory to ensure that we do not forget the legacy they gave us. Forgetting it places us in grave error and danger because a people who do not know their roots is a people easily misled by any who wish to take them away from those roots. Let us ensure that we know where we came from so that we may then decide if we should really be best served in departing from our foundations.
Below is a list of resources both as quoted in this article and as additional reading.
Resources
“Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War” by Jenny Hale Pulsipher (Will need a free or paid account with the academic journal compilation site that published/posted the piece)
“Biography of Chief Massasoit, Native American Hero” by Thoughtco.com
Bradford’s History of ‘Plimoth Plantation’ by William Bradford
The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusets published on Puritanism.online.fr
Mayflower Primary Sources and Documents from Mayflowerhistory.com
A Relation or Journal of the Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth from Mayflowerhistory.com
“Excerpts from a narrative of the Indian Wars by Charles Henry Lincoln focusing on King Philip’s War in 1675-6” from Digital Public Library of America
1888 Map from Wikipedia Archives
The American Story by David and Tim Barton
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England: 1644-1657 provided via Google Books
