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Chapter II - Pilgrims and Puritans
Pilgrims and Puritans 1620 - 1640
While purely economic motives drove some English colonists to settle in the Chesapeake region, religious persecution compelled others to flee to the New World. These settlers yearned to free themselves from the corruption of the Church of England and establish a Christian commonwealth which would serve as a utopian model. In 1620 these separatists received permission from the London Company to colonize, and in September, 101 adventurous men, women and children led by William Bradford set sail on the Mayflower. Only thirty were devout Pilgrims; the rest were a mixture of non-Pilgrims, hired hands and servants. By November, rough seas had blown the Mayflower off course, and finding themselves hundreds of miles north of Virginia with winter quickly approaching, they decided to seek shelter. Bradford later wrote that on the solid safety of land "they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean." The Pilgrims, realizing that they were outside the jurisdiction of the English government, then wrote the Mayflower Compact, the document which established the Puritan-controlled government of a new colony.
Like the original settlers of Jamestown, the Pilgrims initially suffered life-threatening hunger and disease. However, in the spring of 1621 they met Squanto, a friendly Indian who generously showed them how to grow maize, Indian corn. By the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims had a surplus of corn and a growing fur trade. Celebrating their success, they invited the Indians to a sumptuous harvest feast, the first Thanksgiving.
When word of the separatists' success reached other dedicated reformers of the Church of England, they also petitioned the government for land grants to build their own "wilderness Zions" in the New World. In March of 1630 the Arbella and six other ships carrying one thousand people sailed for North America. Led by John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, this group planned to build a "city upon a hill," the model of a "godly community."
Between 1630 and 1640, over forty-five thousand English people fleeing religious persecution and economic hardship found refuge in the newly formed colony of Massachusetts Bay. Religion permeated the lives of these righteous Puritans who believed that an omnipotent God predestined souls to heaven or hell prior to birth. Each day of their lives they "assessed the state of their souls." Even so, because of their belief in predestination even the most righteous could not be certain that they would be "saved" by God. Consequently, Puritans were constantly filled with intense anxiety about their spiritual condition.
 
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