The Great Migration: Puritans and Pilgrims

Part 1: Before Plymouth

The first English colony in New England was Plymouth. Plymouth and the so-called Pilgrims who founded it hold a special place in American lore – one that is often more legend than history. This essay will explore the events that led to the Mayflower’s voyage. Later essays will tackle more of the legend, dispel myths, and provide context for the WASP¹WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” infestation of North America.

Countless books have examined the reasons for the Puritan migration to the New World. In a nutshell, the English monarchy and the Protestant Reformation were to blame. The bloody upheavals of the Reformation and the monarchy’s on-again, off-again relations with the Pope were a perfect storm. England herself suffered a crisis of faith for nearly two centuries.

In 1517, Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses officially started the Protestant Reformation. But less than 15 years later, the decision of King Henry VIII of England to climb aboard the separatist bandwagon was utterly unrelated to theology. He needed a male heir. To get one, he needed a different wife. When the Pope refused to grant him an annulment, Henry essentially deposed the Pope in England and declared himself head of the Church. He dissolved English monasteries and confiscated their wealth.

He removed most of the clergy from the House of Lords. He prosecuted people for treason if they refused to acknowledge the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. In the space of a few months, England was no longer Catholic. Henry divorced his wife and would marry five more times. (He divorced and beheaded his non-producing wives to speed up the process of begetting a legitimate male heir.)

Henry’s successor and only surviving son, Edward VI, died at 15. He had been England’s Protestant king for six years. Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, was the daughter of his Catholic first wife, Catherine of Aragon. When Mary assumed the throne, she immediately reversed her father’s Protestant policies. Queen “Bloody” Mary embarked on a purge of British subjects who refused to accept the Pope. For the five years of her reign, Mary lit bonfires under hundreds of recalcitrant, outspoken Protestants. The fiery persecutions stopped temporarily when Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne in 1658. But when Spain threatened to invade England, Elizabeth relit the fires. She burned Catholics instead.

The Puritans wanted no part of the official English Church any more than they wanted to return to Catholicism. Elizabeth’s government enacted laws that punished people for not attending or supporting the established Anglican Church. The government executed separatist leaders for sedition. Elizabeth’s successor, James IV and I of Scotland and England, continued these policies after assuming the English throne in 1603.

To quell dissent in some measure, James commissioned an English translation of the Bible. This translation served as the official book of the English Reformation. This edition of the Bible is famous, not because of the accuracy of its translation (spoiler: it isn’t accurate), but for its poetic use of language. The Authorized King James Version is still used everywhere in the English-speaking world more than 400 years later.

In 1606, James required people to take Oaths of Allegiance to deny the Pope’s authority over the British monarch. Before he inherited the English throne, King James wrote an infamous text on witches, stoking the fires around ever more stakes throughout Britain.²Demonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, 1597. Read more about the effects of this book and the witch fears of the time in “James VI and I: the king who hunted witches,” History Extra, website (https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/king-james-vi-i-hunted-witches-hunter-devilry-daemonologie/ : accessed 7 Jan 2024), 2013.

The Puritans strongly disapproved of the Church of England trading a pope for a monarch at its head. As they saw it, the Anglican Church was only a partial reformation of the problems with Catholicism. Anglican rituals reminded the Puritans entirely too much of the Catholic Church. The established Church of England, in their minds, had not purified itself of the taint of Catholic abuses. These Puritans advocated separation from the Church of England. They wanted a completely different ecclesiastical structure.

Some separatists wanted a church controlled by elders in a presbyteral polity. The presbyterian³Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination. structure was still hierarchical but gave power to the coalition of like-minded churches to choose the people in positions of authority. Other English separatists eschewed the notion of a church hierarchy altogether. They thought each congregation should govern itself autonomously. This congregational church polity was very popular among the most zealous separatists.

By 1607, a group of Puritans led by Rev. John Robinson had grown utterly frustrated. They chafed under the English government’s religious restrictions and decided to leave England for a place friendly to religious dissent. No English settlement had yet survived in America,⁴The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower. so the New World was not an option. The entire congregation moved to Leiden, Holland.

The separatists did not find their answer in Holland, though. After a decade in Leiden, the expatriated Puritan community was impoverished and saw their children becoming more Dutch than English. They wanted a place where they could be entirely English, thoroughly Puritan, and completely autonomous.

Emissaries approached the Virginia Company of London. By this point, the Virginia Company had collaborated with settlers to maintain a shaky English foothold in Jamestown. However, the separatists did not want to establish a settlement near the Anglicans in Virginia. They had fled Anglican oppression when they left England for Holland and were not eager to risk it again. Nor did they want to settle near the Dutch in New Netherlands. They already knew that the influence of more libertine Dutch culture frustrated their Puritan ideals, and they did not want to compound the problem by relocating to a Dutch-American colony. The emissaries finally obtained a land patent from the Virginia Company for land at the mouth of the Hudson River, south of the inland Dutch settlements at what is now Albany, New York.

After a series of misadventures, their ship, the Mayflower, left late in the season and arrived at Cape Cod in November 1620. The ship was considerably north of where it was supposed to be; the Virginia Company had no authority to grant land patents north of Long Island Sound. Nevertheless, the separatists decided to land. Before going ashore, they drafted an agreement for governing themselves. All 41 adult males aboard the ship signed the Mayflower Compact.

William Brewster, one of the Fennig family’s colonial ancestors, was the pastor and leader of the Mayflower Puritans. William Chilton, one of my ancestors, was alive at the signing of the Mayflower Compact but died before stepping onto land. Half of the Mayflower’s passengers would die the first winter in Massachusetts. They had arrived in November without food or shelter.

Plenty of good books about the fate of those initial settlers of the Plymouth Colony exist, so I will not cover the next ten years in detail. Suffice it to say that the legends taught in classrooms across this country are inaccurate, whitewashed accounts that ignore salient facts. The only religious freedom that concerned the Mayflower Puritans was their own; they came to establish a theocracy and quickly expelled religious dissenters. The Europeans brought immense suffering and oppression to the native population, which had already been devastated by European diseases before settlements on the mainland were successful. Between more disease and enslavement, the English quickly showed the pattern of colonial abuses that they practice even today.

The story of the peopling of North America did not start with the English. The Spanish began colonizing North America in the 16th century, but even they weren’t the first.  Columbus did not “discover” an empty land devoid of civilization, governments, or a recognizable economy.  English settlers did not have to hack their way through a wilderness to find arable land. Native Americans were not barbarous savages without laws, diplomacy, or philosophy.

We must understand the reason for European migration to the New World, but we must also understand what the Europeans found here and why to put our ancestral history into context.

Part 2: The Great Migration and Colonial Upheaval

Select Bibliography:

• Bailyn, Bernard, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
• Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
• Loewen, James W., Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History, New York: Viking, 2003.
• Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
• Mann, Charles C., 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, New York: Random House, 2011.
• Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.
• Quinn, Arthur, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, New York: Berkeley Books, 1994.
• Rounding, Virginia, The Burning Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the Protestant Martyrs of London, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Last Updated on January 7, 2024 by Anne

Footnotes

• 1
  WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
• 2
  Demonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, 1597. Read more about the effects of this book and the witch fears of the time in “James VI and I: the king who hunted witches,” History Extra, website (https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/king-james-vi-i-hunted-witches-hunter-devilry-daemonologie/ : accessed 7 Jan 2024), 2013.
• 3
  Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination.
• 4
  The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower.