John Winthrop (1588–1649) led the first group of Puritan settlers who founded the colony of Massachusetts in 1630. Winthrop and his followers, despite the poor farming conditions in the rocky New England soil and bloody clashes with Native Americans, established a successful colony that quickly grew in population as a “great migration” of Puritans fled persecution in England for a fresh start in the New World.
The Puritans, a splinter sect of the official Church of England, sought to “purify” the church and wanted to break from the ornate and ostentatious customs that the Anglican Church began to adopt in the mid-sixteenth century. Fleeing England, John Winthrop thought, provided the only alternative for Puritans to practice their religion.
Winthrop, a Cambridge-educated native of England’s Suffolk County, landed in Salem, Massachusetts, aboard a ship called the Arbella. Before going ashore, Winthrop gave one of the most famous sermons in American history, urging his followers to remain true to their religious beliefs as they built a new community in the new continent and to always behave as if the entire world were watching their “city on a hill.”
In the years that followed, Winthrop was repeatedly elected governor of Massachusetts by his fellow Puritans. His cherished “city on the hill,” however, proved shortlived. As word of Winthrop’s successful colony made it back to England, thousands more immigrants departed for Massachusetts’s shores, many of whom were not Puritans. Within a century of Winthrop’s death in 1649, Puritanism was no longer the dominant faith in New England, but the legacy of the Puritans’ industriousness and high sense of moral purpose has echoed through the region’s history.
1. Winthrop’s son, also named John Winthrop (1606–1676), would later become one of the first governors of the neighboring colony of Connecticut.
2. Although Winthrop was a devoted Puritan, he was also a personal friend of Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683), the Puritan dissenter who founded neighboring Rhode Island after his banishment from Massachusetts—a banishment Winthrop supported.
3. Although Puritanism lost its hold on the New England mind, it did not vanish entirely. The faith of the first settlers evolved into modern-day Congregationalism, which remains relatively common in New England.
King Philip’s War (1675–1676) was the last serious threat to the survival of English settlements in North America. Native American warriors led by Metacom, better known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, scored a string of victories at the beginning of the war that seriously endangered the future of the New England colonies. However, the colonists eventually turned the tide on the Wampanoag, and the war ended with the near obliteration of the tribe.
The Wampanoag, who inhabited the forests of eastern Rhode Island and the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts, were the first indigenous people to greet the Pilgrims when they arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. For a few decades, the two communities lived side by side in relative harmony.
Two developments in the 1650s and 1660s caused tensions to heighten. Native American leaders were increasingly alarmed by the aggressive efforts of Christian missionaries to convert them, and the insatiable English appetite for more land was robbing them of their traditional tribal territories.
The event that triggered the war in 1675 was the hanging of several Wampanoag warriors who had been convicted of murder in an English courtroom. The men were executed because they allegedly killed a member of the Wampanoag tribe who had informed English settlers that the tribe was planning an attack. King Philip, enraged by the killing of his men, organized attacks on outlying English settlements across New England.
The Native Americans, however, lacked an overall strategy for defeating the colonists, and their hesitancy gave the settlers time to regroup. In the spring of 1676, English soldiers began to destroy Native American villages, sending Philip on the run. He was finally cornered and killed in August 1676, and his warriors were executed or sold into slavery.
The war left New Englanders badly shaken. The Native Americans had wiped out many frontier English settlements, and some Puritans interpreted the war as divine retribution for the sins of the settlers. Although it would take decades for New England to recover from King Philip’s War, for the Native Americans it marked a disaster that ended their military power in New England.
1. After winning the war, the vindictive settlers beheaded King Philip and put his head on a pike in Plymouth, where it remained for decades as a decomposing warning to would-be enemies.
2. The war devastated Philip’s Wampanoag tribe, which nearly disappeared but rebounded in the twentieth century and received federal recognition in 1987.
3. During the war, the city of Boston passed a law forbidding Indians from entering the city. Although the rule had not been enforced for centuries, it remained on the books until its repeal in 2005.
One of the first prominent female religious leaders in American history, Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 after defying orders from Puritan authorities to stop holding religious meetings in her home. Although Hutchinson thought of herself as a devout Puritan, her refusal to bow to the wishes of the male-dominated Massachusetts clergy turned her into a feminist heroine and major figure in the history of American dissent.
Born in England, Hutchinson had arrived in Boston in 1634 with her wealthy husband, William, and their eleven children. Initially, the family was well liked, and they were accepted into the city’s leading church. Hutchinson’s skills as a nurse and midwife made her a valuable member of the young colony.
Within a few years, however, Hutchinson began holding meetings on Mondays to give Boston women an opportunity to discuss the previous day’s sermons. She also offered her own religious opinions at the meetings, which were often highly critical of leading Puritan ministers. By assuming a role of religious leadership, Hutchinson threatened the authority of the Puritan church. The colony’s governor, John Winthrop (1588–1649), warned her to stop holding the meetings, which he said were “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for your sex.” When she refused, Hutchinson was excommunicated and forced to leave the colony.
The Hutchinsons first moved to neighboring Rhode Island, where they were greeted by Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683), the colony’s founder. From Rhode Island, Hutchinson waged a long-distance war of words over various points of theological doctrine with the Boston religious authorities. Fearful that Massachusetts would invade Rhode Island, Hutchinson later moved to the Dutch colony of New Netherland (which later became the English colony of New York), where she was killed in an attack by Native Americans.
1. In an era when women frequently died during childbirth, Hutchinson had fifteen children.
2. One of Hutchinson’s followers was Mary Dyer, who later converted to Quakerism and was hanged by the Puritans in 1660.
3. A monument to Hutchinson, praising her as a “Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration,” was erected in Boston in 1922.
By allowing large groups of investors to pool their resources, joint-stock companies—the forerunners of modern-day corporations—revolutionized the English business world in the seventeenth century and helped spur British settlement in North America. Many of the first English colonies in the New World, including Jamestown, were founded by profit-seeking ventures that hoped to export American tobacco back to English smokers.
Corporations first emerged in Europe during the late Middle Ages as a way of financing large-scale business ventures that were too big or risky for any one merchant. England was the first European country to embrace corporations on a large scale. In essence, a corporation is a legal structure that allows investors to combine their assets—“incorporate”—into a single legal body.
By the seventeenth century, English corporations already resembled their modern counterparts in some respects, with stockholders and an elected board of directors, but were much more difficult to create and usually required a charter from the monarch. For instance, the Virginia Company, which built the Jamestown settlement, was chartered by King James I (1566–1625) in 1606. Early British corporations were often granted exclusive rights to do business in a particular region of the British Empire, giving them enormous power.
Although taken for granted now, the corporation was one of the single most influential concepts in the history of finance. After the American Revolution, states relaxed their incorporation laws one by one, allowing groups of investors to form corporations without an individual charter from the legislature. By the late nineteenth century, the corporation in the United States had evolved into roughly its current form.
1. North Carolina was the first state to offer an incorporation law, in 1795.
2. The Plymouth Colony was founded by the same corporation as Jamestown was.
3. Officially, the settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth were employees of the Virginia Company.
The city of St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest continuously occupied settlement established by Europeans in the United States. Founded by Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519–1574) in 1565, the city changed hands several times before becoming American territory in 1821. St. Augustine, which today retains much of its Spanish architecture and colonial ambience, is home to some of the oldest structures in the United States as well as the oldest surviving military fortifications built by Europeans.
The first European to explore Florida was Juan Ponce de León (c. 1460–1521), who arrived in the area in 1513 and claimed the region for Spain, naming it La Florida, meaning “flowery.” At the time, most European settlement was focused on the Caribbean and South America, and the Spanish paid little attention to Florida for the next fifty years. In the 1560s, French Huguenots (Protestants) fleeing religious persecution briefly established a settlement on the east coast of Florida, but it was destroyed by Menéndez de Avilés. The Spaniards were Roman Catholics.
Menéndez de Avilés, along with 800 settlers, founded the city on the feast day of Saint Augustine and named the colony in his honor. Founded forty years before Jamestown, St. Augustine was already a thriving trading outpost by the time the first English ships arrived in Virginia. As the British presence in North America grew, St. Augustine became a flashpoint for tensions between the two empires. The English privateer Sir Francis Drake (c. 1543–1596) burned and looted the city in 1586, and the British attempted to invade in 1740.
The British finally won control of the city at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, but British rule was short-lived. During the American Revolution, Spain sided with the Americans and were given Florida back as part of the 1783 treaty ending the war. With the Spanish Empire in serious decline during the nineteenth century, the United States got Florida under the terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty ratified by the US Congress in 1821.
1. St. Augustine’s Castillo San Marcos, the oldest fort in the United States, was in active military use through the Spanish-American War in 1898.
2. Like many European settlements in the New World, the isolated and almost completely womanless St. Augustine was a dreaded assignment for Spanish soldiers; some were deployed there as punishment for desertion.
3. The arrival of Europeans in Florida was devastating to the region’s American Indian population; between 1614 and 1617, an overwhelming number from Florida’s Timucua tribe died of disease.
The first African-American author to publish a book, Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753– 1784) was a literary sensation in colonial-era Boston for the volume of poetry she wrote in 1773 titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Although raised as a slave, Wheatley learned to read and write and was freed by her owners following the book’s publication. Wheatley’s work astonished whites, many of whom refused to believe an African-American was capable of writing such elevated poetry. Wheatley never published again, however, and died in poverty ten years after the book’s appearance.
Wheatley’s verse, heavily influenced by the English poets Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and John Milton (1608–1674), often took the form of traditional heroic couplets. A heroic couplet, one of the oldest kinds of poetry in the English language, is composed of two rhyming lines. For instance, in a poem called “On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age,” addressed to grieving parents who have just lost a young daughter named Nancy, Wheatley wrote:
From dark abodes to fair etherial light
Th’ enraptur’d innocent has wing’d her flight;
On the kind bosom of eternal love
She finds unknown beatitude above.
This known, ye parents, nor her loss deplore,
She feels the iron hand of pain no more.
Many of Wheatley’s poems revolve around religious themes and imagery that reflected her Christian faith. Only a few of her poems refer to Wheatley’s own status as a slave, and even those references are usually oblique.
The reception to Wheatley’s book reflected the backward beliefs about black people in eighteenth-century America. Amid disbelief that a slave had written the poems, Wheatley was forced to appear before a group of leading citizens to prove she had written the poems. When her book was published, it included a preface signed by leading Boston citizens attesting to the fact that an “uncultivated Barbarian from Africa” had actually penned the verses. Wheatley is now considered one of the founders of African-American literature and a lasting influence on poets of all races.
1. One of the signers who attested to her authorship was John Hancock, later a leader of the American Revolution.
2. Her name was assigned to her by her owner, Boston merchant John Wheatley, who bought her in 1761.
3. She married once, to a freed black man named John Peters, but he abandoned her after his grocery business failed.
In 1769, the Virginia politician Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) began construction of Monticello, a forty-three-room mansion on a stately, 1,000-acre plantation he had just inherited. The mansion, which Jefferson designed himself, would take nearly forty years to complete. Jefferson used stone quarried from his own land and expensive glass imported from Europe. By the time the house was finished, Monticello was one of the most distinctive and influential architectural landmarks in the United States.
Indeed, in addition to his celebrated political accomplishments, Jefferson also emerged as one of the foremost architects of his day. His designs for Monticello and the University of Virginia in nearby Charlottesville are among the finest examples of classic American architecture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Heavily influenced by Greek and Roman forms, Jefferson’s designs embodied the hopes of the generation of Americans who dreamed of re-creating a modern Roman republic in the New World.
Jefferson inherited the property in 1757 and named it Monticello, meaning little mountain in Italian. In 1768, at age twenty-five, he began teaching himself architecture so he could design the house. In his studies, Jefferson was influenced by the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), who gave his name to the Palladian architectural style of domes, porticos, and columns. (The White House was also designed in the Palladian style, though not by Jefferson.)
In addition to Monticello, Jefferson also designed the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, the centerpiece of the campus that bears many similarities to the Pantheon in Rome, a famous ancient temple. By popularizing classical design, Jefferson helped inspire the Federal style, which became the predominant American architectural form of the early nineteenth century. Federal buildings—replete with symmetrical columns and stately facades—expressed the optimistic, revolutionary spirit of the early years of the young Republic.
1. A portrait of Monticello was featured on the back of the nickel from 1938 until 2003 and then reinstated in 2006.
2. Jefferson grew thirty-one kinds of fruit in his orchards at Monticello, including figs, peaches, cherries, and grapes.
3. After Jefferson’s death, the site was saved from destruction by Uriah Levy (1792–1862), a Jewish American naval officer who admired Jefferson’s views on religious toleration.