Which colonies were puritans

Because the king of England was head of both church and state, the Puritans' opposition to religious authority meant they also defied the civil authority of the state. In , the Puritans set sail for America. Unlike the Pilgrims who had left 10 years earlier, the Puritans did not break with the Church of England, but instead sought to reform it. Seeking comfort and reassurance in the Bible, they imagined themselves re-enacting the story of the Exodus.

Onboard the flagship Arbella , their leader John Winthrop reminded them of their duties and obligations under the covenant. If they honored their obligations to God, they would be blessed; if they failed, they would be punished. Life was hard, but in this stern and unforgiving place they were free to worship as they chose. The Bible was central to their worship.

Their church services were simple. The organ and all musical instruments were forbidden. Puritans sang psalms a cappella. The Puritans believed God had chosen a few people, "the elect," for salvation. The rest of humanity was condemned to eternal damnation. But no one really knew if he or she was saved or damned; Puritans lived in a constant state of spiritual anxiety, searching for signs of God's favor or anger.

The experience of conversion was considered an important sign that an individual had been saved. Faith, not works, was the key to salvation.

But it was not only individual salvation that mattered; the spiritual health and welfare of the community as a whole was paramount as well, for it was the community that honored and kept the covenant. Over time this religious fervor diminished. Scholars disagree about when and why this happened.

The Puritans themselves found it difficult to maintain a society in a state of creative uncertainty. Following Christopher Columbus' voyage, Spain moved swiftly to claim and expand her territories in the New World, embarking on a moral crusade to spread Spanish culture and Catholicism to the non-Christians in present-day Mexico and the American Southwest.

By the s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10, people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut , New Hampshire , Rhode Island and Maine , and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men.

The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation.

Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate— Quakers , Antinomians, Baptists—fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people. Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity.

It supplied an ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within a psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority obscure. By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity.

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment , virtually the definition of Americanism.

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In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower. Two months later, the three-masted Some people, many of them seeking religious freedom in the New World, set sail from England on the Mayflower in September That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts.

A scouting party was sent out, and in late December the In September , a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on the southern coast of England.

Anne Hutchinson was an influential Puritan spiritual leader in colonial Massachusetts who challenged the male-dominated religious authorities of the time. Through the popularity of her preaching, Hutchinson defied the gender roles in positions of power and gathered That story is incomplete—by the time Englishmen had begun to establish colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even Dangerous sandbars and rough waters prevented them from reaching the Hudson River, so the Pilgrim leaders decided they should remain on the Cape.

On December 16, the Mayflower dropped anchor at what is now known as Plymouth Harbor. After three days of exploration, they decided to settle near the site of a Wampanoag village, Patuxet, which they would later learn had been emptied by an unknown epidemic. In England, the new king, Charles I, began cracking down on Puritans, and a new group of them made plans to emigrate to America and settle what would be the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In , led by Puritan lawyer and lay preacher John Winthrop, passengers in a fleet of 11 ships set sail for New England. Some of them settled at Plymouth, but most followed Winthrop north, to the Massachusetts Bay, where they founded the city of Boston.

If Christians worshipped God, pagans worshipped the devil, who was a very real presence for the Puritans. Search Search. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 11, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program.

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