Also, most of the Puritans who found their way to the New World were well-educated. Cotton Mather, influential New England Puritan minister.
The story begins in the late 15th and early 16th centuries when people who felt dissatisfied with the Church of England were referred to as puritans. Within this wide group of people, there were people having a very distinct set of beliefs.
Historically, Puritanism is a child of the English Reformation. The key tenets of their beliefs included:
The Puritans…were great souls serving a great God. In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined. Visionary and practical, idealistic and realistic too, goal-oriented and methodical, they were great believers, great hopers, great doers, and great sufferers.
They branded the land with the Protestant Ethic. They introduced New England to a lingering burden of guilt and existential angst. They overwhelmed the same Native Americans so helpful to Mayflower survivors.
In 1630, John Winthrop led some 1,000 English Puritans in the initial wave of the Great Migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, north of Plymouth. They were fleeing the royal wrath of King Charles I and Bishop William Laud, who were escalating persecution of dissidents.
Around a hundred Separatists left England in 1607-08 in search of religious freedom in the Netherlands ; many of them later migrated to America in 1620 aboard Mayflower.
On Massasoit's death, his son Metacomet (also named Philip) became leader of the powerful Wampanoags. A half century of broken promises spurred Metacomet's violent retribution. He cobbled together a volatile coalition of tribes and attacked Massachusetts and Rhode Island villages in hopes of regaining ancestral lands.
A Thanksgiving holiday appealed to political leaders eager to promote unity and patriotism.
The equation was skewed and, by the 1660s, their world had been turned inside out. Resentment among sons and daughters who had seen their fathers humiliated, threatened and robbed of their heritage could not be contained. As the younger generation watched its options dwindling, the resulting calamity became inevitable.
That Pilgrim legacy still survives almost 400 years later, and the spirit of sharing sustains our hope for the future. Rockwell Stensrud is the author of Newport: A Lively Experiment 1639-1969, recently released in paperback.