A Place of Safe Worship
By Peter C.
On June 19, 1630 a small group of sickened Puritans arrived in Massachusetts with the goal of creating a place where they could safely worship God the way they wished.
The Puritans did not just want to create a religious community for they alone to worship, but to create a system for the Old England to follow. While this belief was to change over time the people who first arrived in New England still considered themselves English and only wanted to reform the Anglican church. This belief was also held by John Winthrop, the first governor of the colony and the founder of the city of Boston. Winthrop thought that the Puritans should rely on and help each other so that there was joint trust in a community. As he said about the Puritan community “Be as a Citty uppon a hill, the eies of all are uppon us.”
While the Puritans may have wanted to purify the Church of England the King and his bishops felt differently. King Charles the First of England was persecuting the remaining Puritans in England. Due to this, many more Puritans started to come to Massachusetts. Over the next ten years, roughly 20,000 Puritan men, women, and children arrived in Massachusetts. This was known as the Great Migration. As this large group of people arrived the colony began to rapidly expand into New Hampshire and Maine. But by 1640 almost all immigration to the colony stopped and the population increased regularly.
One must remember this was not just a new home for the Puritans; it was also a business venture. The settlement of Massachusetts was funded by rich merchants hoping for a profit as well as a king who had provided a charter and expected pay in return. To pay off all this debt the Puritans had to find a way to make a large sum of money. While the Puritans made some money from exporting extra farmed goods, the way they made the biggest amount of money was exporting the new resources available to them in the Americas. Among these new resources were the huge amount of fish and whales in the north atlantic. The Puritans also made lots of money cutting down trees for ships, because people had been living in Europe for such along time and did not understand plants very well they had cut down all of the large mast worthy trees in Europe so the trees the Puritans could supply were in very high demand. Along with these other goods the largest thing that managed to get the Puritans real money was furs, because they were so popular in European fashion that the Puritans managed to turn a huge profit and this essentially ended the Puritans financial problems for some time.
With this large influx in population came the founding of many Puritan towns including the largest town in modern-day Massachusetts, Boston. These towns were, to the Puritans a necessity for good worship. The Puritans felt that, to lead a truly godly life, one must share it with others. To this extent every town had a church in it and everyday people went into town to go to church. Here they were expected to sit in silence and listen to the their minister preach. The church was very strict and if you did not attend church the magistrates, who were members of the legal system and not the church system could severely punish, and even expel one from the colony for supposed acts of blasphemy.
But some things within the colony were not run through the church. By the mid 1650’s towns had been allowed to choose their own representatives of the lower house of the general court. As political freedom in the colony increased, the older generations began to feel that the younger generations of the colony were beginning to stop believing in God as much as they should and were looking more to make a profit of the colony. The older generations, including the ministers, wanted to create a time like the original colonization when many saints had been named and religion was of the utmost importance. Along with these challenges the Puritans were also fighting lots of wars against the Native Americans and French for the areas where they could find the furs which were so valuable. These included King Philip's war in 1675 along with King William’s war which was about half way done in 1692. Needless to say the colony was very unstable at the time and things only got worse leading up to 1692.
While the Puritans were fearing a religious collapse and vicious attack from outside armies they were also dealing with members of the colony creating new ideas of worship ministers or otherwise. Among these people was Anne Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson provided religious advice from her home, of which large portions took a stance on the growing divide between the new and rich merchant class and the religious elite of the colony which the latter saw as unacceptable. These blasphemous individuals and even groups such as the Quakers and Baptists were exiled from the colony. While dealing with these religious threats to the colonies safety, Puritans were still facing opposition from the crown all the way into 1688 when the Catholic King James the Second was deposed.
Even as the colonies problems were resolving themselves new ones were continually occurring. Before King James the second was deposed he revoked the colony's charter giving them the right to own the land they lived on. Therefore the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Phips was as of 1692 away in England attempting to renew the charter. Due to Phips being away, the colony was already a bit disorganized, and with the fear from the last war with the French and their Native American allies bubbling just under the surface the colony was primed for something to set it off. In 1691 that something came in the form of a royal charter dictating that the Massachusetts Bay colony and the Plymouth colony were to be combined into one. Not only that but also the fact that the king was now to choose the governor of the conjoined colony. Even though not particularly large portions of the rights the people of Massachusetts had come to expect from life were gone, it was still a huge change in the way of
life for the people of Massachusetts.
By the point of 1692 the colony was primed for an explosion from all the fear and hate that had been building over decades in an environment unfamiliar to the Puritans. So, when in 1692 three young girls began to act strangely, the older generation of ministers and magistrates, feared that the younger generations had fallen to the devil. They were afraid of this because they knew it could happen having had groups of the church splinter off before. Along with the fear that they were soon to lose a war and their colony would be destroyed. They decided that the people being of accused of bewitching other members of the colony they jumped to the conclusion that they were in league with the devil. This began one of the bloodiest the purges yet seen in the New World claiming the lives of nineteen people.