Days before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, they gathered on the deck of the Mayflower to draft the Mayflower Compact, a rudimentary statement of the rules they would follow in the New World, which ultimately became an early landmark in the development of American participatory democracy.
William Bradford (1590–1657), the founder and chronicler of the Plymouth Colony, said the compact was deemed necessary because some of the passengers on the Mayflower were suspected of making plans to “use their own liberty” once they reached land by abandoning their shipmates, posing a threat to the unity of the tiny group.
In the short document, the forty-one signers pledged to remain loyal to King James I of England—and, more importantly, to one another. They would not go their own way in the New World but would instead “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,” the document read, forming a community of shared obligations in the Plymouth Colony.
The Mayflower Compact was not a constitution, since it did not establish a form of government. Rather, it was a statement of shared vision and a blueprint for the sort of colony the Pilgrims wished to build. Like the Puritans, the Pilgrims came to the New World not to make money but to build a particular sort of disciplined religious community.
The communitarian vision expressed in the compact, as Bradford noted in his Of Plimouth Plantation, often clashed with the individualistic impulses of some of the settlers. How to strike the right balance between individual desires and the obligations to the larger community has proved an agonizing debate for Americans ever since.
1. The Pilgrims had originally intended to settle in Virginia, but they stayed in Massachusetts after getting lost during their difficult trip across the Atlantic.
2. According to legend, the Pilgrims first landed at a large boulder along the coast called Plymouth Rock, although their records made no mention of the celebrated landmark.
3. The first actual constitution in the English colonies was signed in Connecticut in 1639, thereby earning the region the nickname of the Constitution State.
British soldiers shot and killed five Americans who had pelted them with rocks and snowballs on March 5, 1770, in an infamous event dubbed the Boston Massacre. The shooting of unarmed civilians enraged Bostonians and helped turn public opinion in the city against the mother country. For the next five years, until the start of the American Revolutionary War, Boston would be at the forefront of American opposition to British rule.
The British government had sent soldiers to Boston in 1768 to enforce the Townshend Act, a series of taxes on tea, paint, paper, and other goods that it had imposed on the colonies the previous year. Many Bostonians resented the presence of the troops, and crowds regularly harassed British soldiers.
On the night of the massacre, a mob of about sixty protestors accosted a squad of troops near the Boston customs office. Jeering and chanting slogans against the British, they began throwing ice and snowballs at the men and daring them to fire. Unfortunately, one of the soldiers did. In the melee that followed, three of the protestors were killed. Two more later died of their wounds.
Patriot leaders in Boston, in particular Samuel Adams (1722–1803), immediately branded the event a “massacre” and seized on the shootings to inflame public opinion against the British. The British soldiers were arrested and tried for murder. At their trial, however, evidence presented to the jury made it clear that they had been provoked, and none of the soldiers were imprisoned.
Despite the verdicts at trial, the Boston Massacre became a potent rallying cry for the patriot cause. A famous etching of the event made by silversmith Paul Revere (1734–1818), whose workshop was only a few blocks from the site of the shootings, circulated throughout the thirteen colonies and made the colonists increasingly disillusioned with British rule.
1. John Adams (1735–1826), the future signer of the Declaration of Independence and second president of the United States, was the defense attorney for the commander of the British troops.
2. In the months before the Boston Massacre, Bostonians often taunted the British troops patrolling their city by calling them “lobster-backs,” a reference to the floggings the British army inflicted on its soldiers for discipline.
3. British officers tried to force American homeowners in Boston to provide housing for their troops, a move that angered landowners. After the Revolution, sour memories of the British occupation inspired the Third Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which made it illegal for the new government to force citizens to “quarter” soldiers.
On June 1, 1660, a Quaker woman named Mary Dyer was hanged by the Puritans at the gallows on Boston Common for her religious beliefs. She offended the Puritans by preaching in the streets of Boston and loudly defending her Quaker faith. Dyer’s execution was part of a spree of hangings in Massachusetts around 1660, marking one of the worst outbreaks of religious persecution in early American history.
The Quakers were members of a small Christian sect called the Religious Society of Friends that was founded by George Fox (1624–1691) of England in about 1647. Fox traveled widely, and Quakerism spread quickly. Dyer, who had immigrated to Massachusetts in 1635, converted during a return visit to England. Quakerism stresses personal faith in the “Inner Light” of Christ rather than formal creeds and sacraments. The Puritan authorities considered Quakers heretics and ordered them banished from Massachusetts. Dyer refused to obey the edict, proclaiming her faith publicly in Boston.
From the standpoint of the Puritans, the Quakers posed a dire threat to Massachusetts.
The whole purpose of the colonial experiment in the New World, from their point of view, was to build a religiously unified community of Puritan believers. Allowing religious dissenters like Dyer to challenge the church’s teachings, they felt, would destroy the soul of Massachusetts.
In total, four Quakers were executed by the Puritans for defying orders to leave the colony. Most other British colonies in North America, including neighboring Rhode Island, accepted Quaker immigrants. Pennsylvania was founded specifically as an enclave for members of the faith. The Massachusetts theocracy that had condemned Dyer ended in 1686 when King James II (1633–1701) terminated the colony’s Puritan charter, placing the province under direct rule by London.
1. Dyer had been imprisoned before, in 1659, but was given a reprieve after her husband begged the governor for her life.
2. Dyer’s last words on the gallows were “I am not now to repent.”
3. A statue of Dyer was erected in front of the Massachusetts State House near Boston Common.
In 1793, the year Eli Whitney (1765–1825) invented the cotton gin, farmers in the United States produced about 10,000 bales of cotton—a relatively modest harvest. For planters, cotton growing was often a laborious and unprofitable business due to the high cost of handpicking the seeds out of the plant fiber, which was then made into fabric. In the late eighteenth century, tobacco remained the most popular crop in much of the agricultural heartland in the South.
However, Whitney’s invention changed the economics of cotton almost overnight. The hand-cranked machine, which Whitney patented in 1794, made it possible to remove the seeds from the fiber much more easily. With his invention, the New England native removed the single greatest impediment to the commercial success of the cotton crop.
The cotton gin had an immediate impact on the American economy. Only eight years after the gin’s invention, the quantity of cotton farmed in the United States had risen tenfold, to 100,000 bales; in 1835, it topped 1 million bales. (To put the number in perspective, that’s enough cotton for 2.1 billion pairs of boxer shorts.) The United States became one of the world’s leading cotton exporters, and “King Cotton” became the leading big business of pre–Civil War America.
The cotton gin’s social impact, however, was tragic. Many historians believe that the invention of the cotton gin had the unintended consequence of prolonging the institution of slavery in the southern United States. Prior to 1793, many Americans expected the “peculiar institution” to wither away and eventually disappear in the South, as it had in the North; the explosion of cotton farming, and the sudden demand for unskilled labor to plant and harvest the cotton it created, shattered this hope and exacerbated the differences between the North and the South.
1. Gin is short for engine; the alcoholic beverage of the same name comes from an unrelated Dutch word.
2. After inventing the cotton gin, Whitney went into business selling arms to the US government.
3. Despite the enormous popularity of the cotton gin, Whitney felt he was swindled out of his fair share of the profits, and he left the South for good in 1804.
In 1636, a group of Puritan ministers founded Harvard, the first institution of higher learning in the New World. Opened in 1638 and named for John Harvard (1607–1638), an English benefactor who donated money and more than 400 books for Harvard’s first library, the institution had as its primary purpose the training of new clergymen for the pulpits of New England. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts—at the time of its founding a distant Boston suburb called Newtowne—the old Puritan academy has grown into one of the world’s richest and most prestigious universities.
In its historical context, the decision to build a university in the New World reflected the spiritual priorities of the Puritan immigrants. Unlike the Jamestown farmers in Virginia—or, for that matter, Spanish settlers farther south—the Puritans wanted to build their version of a religious utopia in the New World. To produce the next generation of Puritans, Harvard’s founders modeled the university on Cambridge University in England, where many of them had studied.
Religious instruction remained the most important part of a Harvard education well into the eighteenth century. Many leading Puritan theologians and Massachusetts politicians, including Increase Mather (1639–1723), his son Cotton Mather (1663–1728), and the chief judge at the Salem witch trials, were all educated at Harvard. Still, by the early 1700s many ministers were upset with what they perceived as Harvard’s liberal drift, and they created a more conservative rival, Yale, in 1701. Harvard began to broaden its curriculum in the 1870s. Under an agreement with nearby Radcliffe College for women, Harvard allowed women into its classrooms for the first time in 1943. Radcliffe merged with Harvard in 1999.
The Harvard campus along the Charles River now forms the nucleus for the country’s largest concentration of colleges and universities. More than forty universities operate in the greater Boston area, making it the center of American higher education.
1. The country’s second-oldest university, the College of William and Mary, was founded in 1693 and named after the king and queen of England at that time.
2. All but one of the books bequeathed by John Harvard to the university’s library were lost in a subsequent fire.
3. Cambridge University was a stronghold of Puritanism in the early seventeenth century and had educated several Massachusetts luminaries, including John Winthrop (1588–1649) and John Harvard himself.
Diplomat, essayist, and short story writer Washington Irving (1783–1859) was one of the first Americans to earn international literary acclaim. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Irving served as an inspiration and mentor to many early American writers and is considered one of the founders of the American literary tradition. Several of his most famous short stories, including “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” are still read and taught today.
Irving was born in New York City shortly after the Revolutionary War and named after George Washington. He was trained in law and employed as an American diplomat in Europe for much of his life. Irving spoke Spanish fluently, and in addition to his fiction, he wrote well-received books about Christopher Columbus and fifteenth-century Spanish history.
The author’s most well-known short stories were first published in 1819. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” tells the tale of the gloomy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, who is chased by a headless horseman in the New York village of Tarrytown. In “Rip Van Winkle,” a “a simple, good-natured man” in the Catskill Mountains of New York falls into a twenty-year coma after drinking a mysterious liquor and is shocked by how much American society has changed when he finally awakes.
Irving continued to publish fiction between his diplomatic stints, and he wrote several well-received Western adventure novels in the 1830s. He also wrote a lengthy biography of his namesake, Life of George Washington.
In the history of American literature, Irving is notable as one of the earliest writers to be able to earn a living from his writing. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), proved that American writers could compete with Europeans and laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century American literature.
1. Appropriately, Irving is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
2. Tim Burton directed a movie version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” titled Sleepy Hollow, in 1999.
3. Irving coined many words associated with New York City, including Knickerbocker, now the name of the city’s NBA team.
Painter John James Audubon (1785–1851) loved birds. His enthusiasm for winged creatures was so great that he once had to beg his long-suffering wife, Lucy, “not to be troubled with curious ideas such as my liking birds better than thee.”
Lucy, however, may have been on to something. For Audubon, birds were a lifelong passion bordering on obsession. Born in Haiti, Audubon moved to France as a child but fled to the United States in 1803 to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s army. He married Lucy in 1808. In the United States, he started a number of failed businesses in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, all the while drawing his famous watercolors of the continent’s birds on the side.
Audubon pursued his hobby with meticulous zeal. Over several decades he trapped and killed thousands of birds, then posed their bodies in simulated natural settings for his life-size paintings. However, no American publishers were interested in Audubon’s painstaking drawings.
Finally, Audubon found a publisher in England for his seminal work, Birds of America, which was released in 87 parts from 1827 to 1836. The book, containing 435 engravings made from his original watercolors, was unlike anything seen before—or since. A dazzling feat of artistic accomplishment, each page of Birds of America was nearly two feet by three feet in size, because Audubon insisted on accurate, life-size pictures of the birds.
In England, Audubon’s exotic watercolors were a huge sensation among those wealthy enough to afford them. In the years afterward, he composed several more successful volumes of wildlife drawings. Although Audubon was not a painter in the conventional sense, his art remains hugely popular and influential among both artists and scientists. After his death, the Audubon Society was formed to encourage the study of birds and safeguard the artist’s legacy.
As for Audubon himself, his ornithological passion lasted for the rest of his life. His last word, reportedly, was “ducks.”
1. Audubon’s original watercolors are on permanent display at the New York Historical Society.
2. The original volume of Birds of America cost about $1,000 and was delivered in batches of five pages at a time. Only about 200 were made, and first editions now sell for $2 million and up.
3. Subscribers to Audubon’s first edition included the queen of England and the American statesmen Daniel Webster (1782–1852) and Henry Clay (1777–1852).