History of the Puritans in North America
The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was established by settlers expelled from Massachusetts because of their unorthodox religious opinions.
Since the law required everyone to attend parish services, these Separatists were vulnerable to criminal prosecution, and some such as Henry Barrowe and John Greenwood were executed.
The Pilgrims originated as a dissenting congregation in Scrooby led by Richard Clyfton, John Robinson and William Brewster.
In 1620, after receiving a patent from the London Company, the Pilgrims left for New England on board the Mayflower, landing at Plymouth Rock.
On the basis of this patent, Roger Conant led a group of fishermen from the area later called Gloucester to found Salem in 1626, being replaced as governor by John Endecott in 1628 or 1629.
Other than elders and deacons, congregations also elected messengers to represent them in synods (church councils) for the purpose of offering non-binding advisory opinions.
[29] Within this worldview, it was the government's responsibility to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained.
[33] The franchise was limited to Congregational church members in Massachusetts and New Haven, but voting rights were more extensive in Connecticut and Plymouth.
[40] Puritans believed that the state was obligated to protect society from heresy, and it was empowered to use corporal punishment, banishment, and execution.
[44] Massachusetts ministers were not legally permitted to solemnize marriages until 1686 after the colony had been placed under royal control, but by 1726 it had become the accepted tradition.
They write that Puritan parents "exercised an authoritative, not an authoritarian, mode of child-rearing" that aimed to cultivate godly affections and reason, with corporal punishment used as a last resort.
[47] According to historian Bruce C. Daniels, the Puritans were "[o]ne of the most literate groups in the early modern world", with about 60 percent of New England able to read.
Like Locke's blank slate, Puritans believed that a child's mind was "an empty receptacle, one that had to be infused with the knowledge gained from careful instruction and education.
Puritans generally discouraged mixed or "promiscuous" dancing between men and women, which according to Mather would lead to "unchaste touches and gesticulations.
[61] Puritans had no theological objections to sports and games as long as they did not involve gambling (which eliminated activities such as billiards, shuffleboard, horse racing, bowling, and cards).
According to historian Bruce Daniels, plays were seen as "false recreations because they exhausted rather than relaxed the audience and actors" and also "wasted labor, led to wantonness and homosexuality, and invariably were represented by Puritans as a foreign—particularly French or Italian—disease of a similar enervating nature as syphilis.
Not only were card-playing, dice throwing and other forms of gambling seen as contrary to the values of "family, work, and honesty", they were religiously offensive because gamblers implicitly asked God to intervene in trivial matters, violating the Third Commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain.
For this reason, slaves and free black people were eligible for full church membership, though meetinghouses and burial grounds were racially segregated.
In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, abolitionists such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause.
He thus spent two years with his fellow Separatists in the Plymouth Colony but ultimately came into conflict with them and returned to Salem, where he became the unofficial assistant pastor to Samuel Skelton.
Unwilling to do so, the government issued orders for his immediate return to England in January 1636, but John Winthrop warned Williams, allowing him to escape.
He was one of the first Puritans to advocate separation of church and state, and Providence Plantation was one of the first places in the Christian world to recognize freedom of religion.
[citation needed] Anne Hutchinson and her family moved from Boston, Lincolnshire, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, following their Puritan minister John Cotton.
Like most of the clergy in Massachusetts, Wilson taught preparationism, the belief that human actions were "a means of preparation for God's grant of saving grace and ... evidence of sanctification.
[78] While denouncing the Puritan clergy as Arminians, Hutchinson maintained "that assurance of salvation was conveyed not by action but by an essentially mystical experience of grace—an inward conviction of the coming of the Spirit to the individual that bore no relationship to moral conduct.
[84] From a gendered approach, offered by Carol Karlsen and Elizabeth Reis, the question of why witches were primarily women did not fully surface until after the second wave of feminism in the 1980s.
Some believe that women who were gaining economic or social power, specifically in the form of land inheritance, were at a higher risk of being tried as witches.
[85] Others maintain that females were more susceptible to being witches as the Puritans believed that the weak body was a pathway to the soul which both God and the Devil fought for.
[88] The decline of the Puritans and the Congregational churches was brought about first through practices such as the Half-Way Covenant and second through the rise of dissenting Baptists, Quakers, Anglicans and Presbyterians in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
[90] Historian Thomas S. Kidd argues that after 1689 and the success of the Glorious Revolution, "[New Englanders'] religious and political agenda had so fundamentally changed that it doesn't make sense to call them Puritans any longer.
