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Alan TaylorAmerican Colonies: The Settling of North America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 8 Summary: “New England: 1600-1700”
The 16th and 17th centuries saw titanic shifts in England’s religious environment. In the 1530s, Henry VIII rejected Catholicism and became the head of the new Church of England (Anglicanism), entwining church and state. Religious dissenters of the new church thus became increasingly religiously and politically problematic.
One such sect were the Puritans, “a broad movement of diverse people who shared the conviction that the Protestant Reformation remained incomplete in England” (160). Puritans rejected the Anglican and Catholic emphasis on priests, encouraging instead a one-on-one relationship with God via the Bible. Increasingly marginalized in England, and hearing from John Smith of fantastic opportunities in America, some Puritans considered moving. They wanted to form a “City upon a Hill, an inspirational set of reformed churches conspicuous to the mother country” (167). When Charles I dissolved Parliament and solidified monarchical power in 1629, Puritan Separatists (now called Pilgrims) began emigrating in earnest.
In 1630 the “Great Migration” of Puritans began under the leadership of John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Company (165). Once settled in their proprietary colony of Massachusetts, these leaders “established the most radical government in the European world: a republic, where the Puritan men elected their governor, deputy governor, and legislature (known at the General Court)” (165). Later in the century, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were founded. With Massachusetts, they are collectively referred to as the New England colonies.
The hard work required in the New World did not deter the Puritans. Their sense of moral goodness was tied to active labor: “their rhetoric yoked together material aspiration and the pursuit of salvation” (161; 166). In contrast to the Chesapeake, where most colonists were poor, single males, most Puritan immigrants were middle-class families. While the land in New England was harder to work, the climate offered a healthier environment. New England farms were smaller than those in the Chesapeake but bigger than those in England, and most importantly, they were completely self-owned (170).
Rich and poor alike owning property led to a more egalitarian society. As slaves were too expensive for New Englanders, their population was fairly homogenous. Their crops were also diversified, shielding them from the bust-or-boom cycles suffered in the Chesapeake (171). Facing economic depression at the end of the Great Migration in 1640, they branched out into secondary markets, especially cod fishing and shipbuilding, the latter of which facilitated transatlantic trade. Moving into these markets put the Puritans in rivalry with England traders (174-77).
As Puritans emphasized study of the Bible as the primary means of closeness with God, they boasted an unusually literate population that taught both men and women to read (178-79). But while Puritanism encouraged an involved and educated congregation, it was no utopia for religious tolerance. Vocal dissidents in Massachusetts and Connecticut were expelled to Rhode Island, which promoted greater religious tolerance and a separation of church and state (181-82).
Belief in magic and superstition was widespread among the Puritans as a means of combatting the helplessness inherent to premodern life. Omens and portents were observed and suspected witches punished, lest God punish the community (183). New England took part in witch hunts longer than the rest of the colonies and England, though the acknowledged mania of the Salem witch trials finally slowed the practice in 1692 (182-84).
Ultimately the “City on a Hill” failed, as the English back home saw the New England colonies as an aberration at best, treasonous at worst. But Taylor underlines that the so-called “declension” of Puritanism is a myth. In mourning the decline of their ideals (jeremiahs), the Puritans emphasized that the core principles of Puritanism persisted and continued to evolve in the New England colonies, later inspiring America’s egalitarian society (184-86).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Puritans and Indians: 1600-1700”
The Puritans’ new neighbors, the southern New England Indians, “possessed cultural, and especially linguistic, affinities, but lacked political unity” (188). Unlike the Virginian Indians, they did not have a paramount chief like Powhatan. Instead they grouped in bands ruled by a chief sachem, whose political power lay in his ability to influence and persuade via gift-giving (189).
The Indians prioritized leisure over exhaustive labor. This outlook was antithetical to the Puritan equation of hard work with moral goodness, an incompatibility that led to profound cultural misunderstandings. New Englanders, for example, planted crops separately, while the Indians mix-planted their crops. The Indian method was “more efficient, producing substantial yields from relatively small amounts of land and labor” (189), but it appeared lazy to the New Englanders. The Indians also maintained the local forests with controlled fires, encouraging nut-producing trees and food sources for wildlife. The English were completely unaware of this labor, as they preferred to clear forests completely for their farms.
In sum, the Indian way of life demanded less of the land and its people, while, like other Christians, the New English believed that God commanded man to dominate nature. In their eyes, the Indians were “pagan peoples who had surrendered to their worst instincts to live within the wild, instead of laboring hard to conquer and transcend nature” (187). As the Indians were unwilling to work the land, they did not deserve to keep it.
1636 saw the first major conflict: a war between the Puritans and the Pequot. The following year the Puritans razed a Pequot village to the ground, shocking their Indian allies, the Narragansett and the Mohegan. Taylor pinpoints a recurring problem for the Indians in resisting the colonizers: they lacked a collective identity as “Indians,” while white settlers tended to band together against outside forces. In 1642 a Narragansett sachem named Miantonomi proposed a revolutionary pan-Indian alliance, but short-sighted rival sachems helped the New English and undermined his efforts (196). In 1643, Miantonomi was captured and executed.
While the Puritans focused on their own settlements in the 1620s and 1630s, they began aggressive evangelization efforts in the 1640s. In Massachusetts they forced Indians into “praying towns,” where they Anglicized their appearances and forced them into the Puritan model of hard agricultural labor (197).
In 1675, Puritan hostilities against the Indians finally came to a head. Metacom, a Wampanoag sachem called King Philip by the English, led an uprising. Taylor writes, “To reverse the alienation of their land, the Indian rebels systemically burned, killed, mutilated, and desecrated all those mark of English civilization” (200). Unable to track down Metacom and his associates, the Puritans killed the Indians they could access: the inhabitants of the praying towns (200). The next year Indian allies helped the colonists end the so-called King Philip’s War.
Part 2, Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Chapters 8 and 9 detail the Puritans’ arrival in the Americas and the founding of the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
The New England colonies were unique. Unlike the Spanish conquistadors and the French fur traders, who largely immigrated for profit, the Puritans were motivated by a potent combination of religious and economic reasons, which for them were mutually reinforcing. They were primed for the hard work required in the New World by their religion, which itself sprang in no small part from the economic hardships they had suffered in England. Puritanism was a powerful force of good for the disenfranchised; it “helped thousands of ordinary people cope with the economic and social turmoil that afflicted England” and “liberated people from a sense of helplessness by encouraging effort, persistence, study, and purpose” (162).
The irony, Taylor points out, was that in leaving England to freely practice their religion, Puritans created a free society for only themselves. They were intolerant of atheists, other Christian denominations, and even of other Puritans, ejecting dissidents to Rhode Island. They were quick to find fault with the lifestyle and beliefs of the natives, “sins they were quicker to detect in others than in themselves” (198). While some Puritan values—hard work, commercialism, enterprise—would remain influential throughout the early years of the colonies and to some extent the modern day, their strictly stratified society and unwavering faith in authority would be challenged sooner rather than later in the revivals of the late 1700s. In their rigidness, intolerance, and complete disinterest in alternative ways of life, the Puritans represented Europeans colonists as a whole. They achieved extraordinary things but also had a shocking lack of understanding and empathy.
