Calvert, a Catholic, envisioned Maryland as a refuge for persecuted Catholics in England, especially younger sons of Catholic gentry.
He hoped Protestants and Catholics could live in harmony, unlike in Europe.
The first group of 130 colonists included Catholic gentlemen and two priests.
Most appointed officials were Catholic, including relatives of the proprietor, as were those given the best land grants.
Protestants always formed a majority of the settlers.
Most came as indentured servants, but others used Maryland's headright system to acquire land by transporting workers.
High death rate: in one county, half the marriages lasted fewer than eight years before one partner died.
Almost 70 percent of male settlers in Maryland died before reaching the age of fifty, and half the children born in the colony did not live to adulthood.
Maryland initially offered servants greater opportunity for land ownership than Virginia.
Freedom dues in Maryland included fifty acres of land.
As tobacco planters engrossed the best land later in the century, the prospects for landless men diminished.
Cecil Calvert attempted to provide some degree of religious toleration in Maryland
Only Christians who believed in the concept of the Trinity could live in Maryland.
Those who violated religious expectations could be whipped, jailed, or fined.
New Englanders Divided
Key Guiding Concepts:
Explain the effect Puritans religious beliefs had upon the founding and development of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Explain the effect of interaction of the English and Americans upon American Indian society and culture in Massachusetts
Explain the impact of religious debates over time in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
New Englanders Divided
Puritans valued individual judgment, emphasizing reading the Bible.
The first item printed in English America was a broadside, The Oath of a Freeman (1638), explaining citizens' rights and duties.
Puritans would find modern ideas of individualism, privacy, and personal freedom strange, considering too much emphasis on the "self" dangerous.
New England residents monitored each other's behavior, aiming for social harmony and community stability.
Dissenters were banished or chastised for violating communal norms; the main freedom was "liberty to keep away from us."
Individuals were banished for criticizing the church or government or complaining in letters home; Abigail Gifford was banished for being "a very burdensome woman."
Tolerance of difference was not a Puritan value.
Roger Williams
By the mid-17th century, English settlement had spread in New England.
Differences of opinion emerged about organizing a Bible Commonwealth.
Puritanism contained the seeds of its own fragmentation due to its emphasis on individual interpretation of the Bible.
Roger Williams criticized the existing order, arriving in Massachusetts in 1631.
He insisted that congregations withdraw from the Church of England and that church and state be separated.
Williams believed "soul liberty" required individuals to follow their consciences.
Most Puritans believed religious truths held society together and could not be questioned.
Williams argued any law-abiding citizen should be allowed to practice any religion.
Government should not "molest any person, Jew or Gentile, for either professing doctrine or practicing worship," as genuine religious faith is voluntary.
Williams aimed to strengthen religion, believing government corrupted Christian faith and led to religious wars.
John Winthrop saw Williams' attack on the religious political establishment as bad.
Williams rejected the conviction that Puritans were an elected people on a divine mission to spread the true faith, denying God had singled out any group as special favorites.
Rhode Island and Connecticut
Banished from Massachusetts in 1636, Williams and his followers established Rhode Island.
Rhode Island received a charter from London and became a beacon of religious freedom.
It had no established church, no religious qualifications for voting until the 18th century, and no requirement that citizens attend church.
It became a haven for Dissenters (Protestants who belonged to denominations other than the established church) and Jews persecuted in other colonies.
Rhode Island's government was more democratic: the assembly was elected twice a year, the governor annually, and town meetings were held more frequently.
Religious disagreements in Massachusetts led to other colonies.
In 1636, Thomas Hooker established Hartford, with a system of government modeled on Massachusetts, except men did not have to be church members to vote.
New Haven, founded in 1638, wanted an even closer connection between church and state.
In 1662, Hartford and New Haven united as the colony of Connecticut with a royal charter.
The Trials of Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson was threatening to the Puritan establishment due to her gender and large following.
Hutchinson, a midwife and daughter of a clergyman, was described by John Winthrop as "a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit."
She arrived in Massachusetts with her husband in 1634 to join their minister, John Cotton, who had been expelled from his pulpit in England.
Hutchinson began holding meetings in her home, leading religious discussions among men and women, including merchants and officials.
Hutchinson believed salvation was God's direct gift and could not be earned by good works.
She charged that nearly all Massachusetts ministers were guilty of faulty preaching for distinguishing "saints" from the damned based on activities rather than an inner state of grace.
In Massachusetts, church and state suppressed views challenging their leadership.
Critics denounced Cotton and Hutchinson for Antinomianism (putting one's own judgment or faith above human law and church teachings).
In 1637, she was tried before a civil court for sedition (expressing opinions dangerous to authority).
Her position as a “public woman” was considered outrageous by governor Winthrop
Winthrop said Hutchinson's meetings were neither "comely in the sight of God nor fitting to your sex."
Hutchinson debated interpretation of the Bible with her accusers. But when she spoke of divine revelations, of God speaking to her directly rather than through ministers or the Bible, she violated Puritan doctrine and sealed her own fate.
Such a claim posed a threat to the existence of organized churches and all authority.
Hutchinson and her followers were banished.
The family went to Rhode Island and then to Westchester, where Hutchinson and most of her relatives died during an Indian war.
Anne Hutchinson left her mark on the region's religious culture.
Puritans and Indians
New England, like other colonies, had to deal with relations with Indians.
The native population of New England numbered perhaps 100,000 when the Puritans arrived.
Due to recent epidemics, migrants encountered fewer Indians near the coast than in other parts of eastern North America.
Some settlers, notably Roger Williams, sought to treat the Indians with justice.
Williams learned complex Indian languages and insisted that the king had no right to grant land already belonging to someone else.
No town should be established before its site had been purchased.
John Winthrop believed uncultivated land could legitimately be taken by the colonists but recognized the benefits of buying land rather than simply seizing it.
Puritan Views on Indians
To New England's leaders, the Indians represented both savagery and temptation.
In Puritan eyes, they resembled Catholics, with their false gods and deceptive rituals.
They enjoyed freedom, but of the wrong kind—Winthrop condemned it as undisciplined "natural liberty" rather than the "moral liberty" of the civilized Christian.
Concerned that sinful persons might prefer a life of ease to hard work, Puritans feared that Indian society might prove attractive to colonists who lacked the proper moral fiber.
Limiting Contact with Indians
In 1642, the Connecticut General Court set a penalty of three years at hard labor for any colonist who abandoned "godly society" to live with the Indians.
To counteract the attraction of Indian life, New England leaders encouraged the publication of "captivity" narratives by those captured by Indians.
The most popular was The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson, who had emigrated with her parents as a child in 1639, and was seized along with a group of other settlers and held for three months until ransomed during an Indian war in the 1670s.
Rowlandson acknowledged that she had been well treated and suffered "not the least abuse or unchastity," but her book's overriding theme was her determination to return to Christian society.
Conversion of Indians
Puritans announced that they intended to bring Christian faith to the Indians, but they did nothing in the first two decades of settlement to accomplish this.
They generally saw Indians as an obstacle to be pushed aside, rather than as potential converts.
The Pequot War
Indians in New England lacked a paramount chief like Powhatan in Virginia.
Coastal Indian tribes, their numbers severely reduced by disease, initially sought to forge alliances with the newcomers to enhance their own position against inland rivals.
As the white population expanded and new towns proliferated, conflict with the region's Indians became unavoidable.
The turning point came in 1637 when a fur trader was killed by Pequots—a powerful tribe who controlled southern New England's fur trade and exacted tribute from other Indians.
A force of Connecticut and Massachusetts soldiers, augmented by Narragansett allies, surrounded the main Pequot fortified village at Mystic and set it ablaze, killing those who tried to escape.
Over 500 men, women, and children lost their lives in the massacre.
By the end of the war a few months later, most of the Pequot had been exterminated or sold into Caribbean slavery.
The treaty that restored peace decreed that their name be wiped from the historical record.
Consequences of the Pequot War
The destruction of one of the region's most powerful Indian groups not only opened the Connecticut River valley to rapid white settlement but also persuaded other Indians that the newcomers possessed a power that could not be resisted.
The colonists' ferocity shocked their Indian allies, who considered European military practices barbaric.
A few Puritans agreed; William Bradford wrote of the raid on Mystic, "It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire."
But to most Puritans, including Bradford, the defeat of a "barbarous nation" by "the sword of the Lord" offered further proof that they were on a sacred mission and that Indians were unworthy of sharing New England with the visible saints of the church.
The New England Economy
The leaders of the New England colonies prided themselves on the idea that religion was the primary motivation for emigration.
Economic Motives
Economic motives were hardly unimportant.
One promotional pamphlet of the 1620s spoke of New England as a place "where religion and profit jump together."
Most Puritans came from the middle ranks of society and paid for their families passages