Introduction

Years before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas,
the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as
more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from
cooperation to indignation to revolt.

After siding with the French in numerous battles during the French and Indian War and eventually
being forcibly removed from their homes under Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Native
American populations were diminished in size and territory by the end of the 19th century.

1492: Christopher Columbus lands on a Caribbean Island after three months of traveling. Believing at
first that he had reached the East Indies, he describes the natives he meets as “Indians.” On his first
day, he orders six natives to be seized as servants.

April 1513: Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon lands on continental North America in Florida and
makes contact with Native Americans.

February 1521: Ponce de Leon departs on another voyage to Florida from San Juan to start a colony.
Months after landing, Ponce de Leon is attacked by local Native Americans and fatally wounded.

May 1539: Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto lands in Florida to conquer the region.
He explores the South under the guidance of Native Americans who had been captured along the way.

October 1540: De Soto and the Spaniards plan to rendezvous with ships in Alabama when they’re
attacked by Native Americans. Hundreds of Native Americans are killed in the ensuing battle.

C. 1595: Pocahontas is born, daughter of Chief Powhatan.

1607: Pocahontas’ brother kidnaps Captain John Smith from the Jamestown colony. Smith later writes
that after being threatened by Chief Powhatan, he was saved by Pocahontas. This scenario is debated
by historians.

1613: Pocahontas is captured by Captain Samuel Argall in the first Anglo-Powhatan War. While
captive, she learns to speak English, converts to Christianity and is given the name “Rebecca.”

1622: The Powhatan Confederacy nearly wipes out Jamestown colony.

1680: A revolt of Pueblo Native Americans in New Mexico threatens Spanish rule over New Mexico.

1754: The French and Indian War begins, pitting the two groups against English settlements in the
North.

May 15, 1756: The Seven Years’ War between the British and the French begins, with Native
American alliances aiding the French.

May 7, 1763: Ottawa Chief Pontiac leads Native American forces into battle against the British in
Detroit. The British retaliate by attacking Pontiac’s warriors in Detroit on July 31, in what is known as
the Battle of Bloody Run. Pontiac and company successfully fend them off, but there are several
casualties on both sides.
1785: The Treaty of Hopewell is signed in Georgia, protecting Cherokee Native Americans in the
United States and sectioning off their land.

1788/89: Sacagawea is born.

1791: The Treaty of Holston is signed, in which the Cherokee give up all their land outside of the
borders previously established.

August 20, 1794: The Battle of Timbers, the last major battle over Northwest territory between Native
Americans and the United States following the Revolutionary War, commences and results in U.S.
victory.

November 2, 1804 - Native American Sacagawea, while 6 months pregnant, meets explorers
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their exploration of the territory of the Louisiana
Purchase. The explorers realize her value as a translator

April 7, 1805 - Sacagawea, along with her baby and husband Toussaint Charbonneau, join Lewis and
Clark on their voyage.

November 1811: U.S. forces attack Native American War Chief Tecumseh and his younger brother
Lalawethika. Their community at the juncture of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers is destroyed.

June 18, 1812: President James Madison signs a declaration of war against Britain, beginning the war
between U.S. forces and the British, French and Native Americans over independence and territory
expansion.

March 27, 1814: Andrew Jackson, along with U.S. forces and Native American allies attack Creek
Indians who opposed American expansion and encroachment of their territory in the Battle of
Horseshoe Bend. The Creeks cede more than 20 million acres of land after their loss.

May 28, 1830: President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act, which gives plots of land west
of the Mississippi River to Native American tribes in exchange for land that is taken from them.

1836: The last of the Creek Native Americans leave their land for Oklahoma as part of the Indian
removal process. Of the 15,000 Creeks who make the voyage to Oklahoma, more than 3,500 don’t
survive.

1838: With only 2,000 Cherokees having left their land in Georgia to cross the Mississippi River,
President Martin Van Buren enlists General Winfield Scott and 7,000 troops to speed up the process by
holding them at gunpoint and marching them 1,200 miles. More than 5,000 Cherokee die as a result of
the journey. The series of relocations of Native American tribes and their hardships and deaths during
the journey would become known as the Trail of Tears.

1851: Congress passes the Indian Appropriations Act, creating the Indian reservation system. Native
Americans aren’t allowed to leave their reservations without permission.

October 1860: A group of Apache Native Americans attack and kidnap a white American, resulting in
the U.S. military falsely accusing the Native American leader of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, Cochise.
Cochise and the Apache increase raids on white Americans for a decade afterwards.

November 29, 1864: 650 Colorado volunteer forces attack Cheyenne and Arapaho encampments along
Sand Creek, killing and mutilating more than 150 American Indians during what would become known
as the Sandy Creek Massacre.

1873: Crazy Horse encounters General George Armstrong Custer for the first time.
1874: Gold discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills drives U.S. troops to ignore a treaty and invade
the territory.

June 25, 1876: In the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” Lieutenant Colonel
George Custer’s troops fight Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Crazy Horse and Sitting
Bull, along Little Bighorn River. Custer and his troops are defeated and killed, increasing tensions
between Native Americans and white Americans.

October 6, 1879: The first students attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the
country’s first off-reservation boarding school. The school, created by Civil War veteran Richard
Henry Pratt, is designed to assimilate Native American students.

February 8, 1887: President Grover Cleveland signs the Dawes Act, giving the president the authority
to divide up land allotted to Native Americans in reservations to individuals.

December 15, 1890: Sitting Bull is killed during a confrontation with Indian police in Grand River,
South Dakota.

December 29, 1890: U.S. Armed Forces surround Ghost Dancers led by Chief Big Foot near Wounded
Knee Creek in South Dakota, demanding the surrender of their weapons. An estimated 150 Native
Americans are killed in the Wounded Knee Massacre, along with 25 men with the U.S. cavalry.

January 29, 1907: Charles Curtis becomes the first Native American U.S. Senator.

June 2, 1924: U.S. Congress passes the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Native
Americans born in the territorial limits of the country. Previously, citizenship had been limited,
depending on what percentage Native American ancestry a person had, whether they were veterans, or,
if they were women, whether they were married to a U.S. citizen.

March 4, 1929: Charles Curtis serves as the first Native American U.S. Vice President under President
Herbert Hoover.

April 11, 1968: The Indian Civil Rights Act is signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson,
granting Native American tribes many of the benefits included in the Bill of Rights.

The First Americans These first Americans descended, or came from cave men of Asia. These were the
first people to live in North America. That is why we call them Native Americans. Cultural Regions of
North America

Cultural Regions
Indians of the Northwest Coast lived between the ocean and rugged mountain ranges. It was what is
today the states of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. • The growing season was short, and
the climate was too wet for much agriculture. • There were plenty of fish, especially salmon. There
were also deer and bears. • There was lots of wood to build houses and to make tools. • People traveled
by water. • Northwest Coast Indians traveled in dugouts, or boats made from large, hollowed out logs.
Northwest Coast.
Best known traders – Lived near the coast – to one another. – Chinooks held potlaches which were
celebrations to show off wealth. They would give gifts to people to exhibit this Northwest Coast The
Makahs Makahs Whales were plentiful along the Northwest Coast. The Makahs built canoes to hunt
the whales at sea. Makahs made wooden harpoons-long spears with sharp shell points-for whale
hunting. Every part of the whale was used. The skin and meat were eaten, the blubber , or fat, was used
for oil, and the tendons were used to make rope. Southwest • The climate of the Southwest is very dry
or arid. • Much of the land in the southwest is desert. • The Southwest has fierce heat during the day
and sharp cold at night. • The Southwest has very few animals because of the desert. Southwest
Hopis • Hopi means “Peaceful One” • The Hopis lived in Pueblos-adobe houses of many rooms next to
or on top of one another. • The early Hopi’s lived in present day Arizona. • Most of their villages were
built on top of mesas. The Navajos lived in houses called hogans. A hogan was a cone shaped frame
covered with mud or grass. Navajos built their hogans in small, family size groups, miles apart from
one another. Southwest Navajos The Navajos settled in the area of the Southwest known as the Four
Corners. The Four Corners is where the four states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet.
The early Navajos were nomads. They often attacked the Hopis and stole their supplies.

Kachinas Kachinas were Hopi spirits or gods which lived within the mountains. These spirits were
called on to bring rain, make crops grow, heal the sick, or find animals to hunt. • Hopi Kachinas talked
to the gods by singing and dancing, like for rain. • The Hopis’s made Kachina figures representing the
spirits and used them to teach children about tribal religious beliefs. Southwest.
Myths About Pocahontas

Four centuries after Pocahontas’ death, unlearn everything you thought you knew about this Native
American icon.

Myth 1: Her name was Pocahontas.

Born around 1596, Pocahontas was reputedly the favorite daughter of Wahunsenaca (known to the
English as Powhatan), paramount chief of a coalition of some 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes in
Virginia’s Tidewater region. As is possible even today among the area’s Native Americans, she
received multiple names, including Matoaka and Amonute. Pocahontas was merely a childhood
nickname, meaning “Little Playful One” or “Little Mischief.” “It would not have been a name she
would have kept throughout her life,” says Camilla Townsend, a history professor at Rutgers
University and author of “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma.”Yet because John Smith, a founder
of the Jamestown colony whose interactions with her would propel them both to lasting celebrity,
called her Pocahontas in his writings, that’s how she’s become known to history. After marrying
English tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614 and converting to Christianity, Pocahontas picked up yet
another name, Rebecca, and was sometimes referred to as “Lady Rebecca.”

Myth 2: Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life.

In 1607, not long after arriving in Jamestown, Smith was captured by Wahunsenaca’s forces and kept
prisoner for a few weeks. According to Smith, his captors then held a ceremony at which they were on
the verge of clubbing him to death when Pocahontas threw herself across his body and saved his life.
This story has since been repeated endlessly and become the main component of the Pocahontas
legend. Smith still has his defenders, but most historians doubt the veracity of his claim. “No serious
scholar believes that anymore,” Townsend tells HISTORY. “It doesn’t ring true to Algonquian
culture.” She and others emphasize, for example, that the Algonquians never would have killed a
prisoner of war in that way—they would have burned or tortured him to death instead—and that
Wahunsenaca never would have indulged his daughter’s wishes in such a circumstance. “They
wouldn’t stop just because a little girl says, ‘Stop, I like him,’” Townsend says. Moreover, as a child of
10 or 11, Pocahontas probably wouldn’t have been allowed to attend such a ceremony in the first place.

Some historians hypothesize that Smith misinterpreted the ceremony, and that Wahunsenaca’s true
intent was to adopt him into the community and make him a sub-chief (while establishing authority
over him). Others, however, think Smith fabricated the story outright. They point out that he never
mentioned the Pocahontas rescue in his first few accounts of Virginia, instead waiting until 1624—after
Wahunsenaca, Rolfe and Pocahontas herself were already dead.

The fact that Smith, a notorious braggart, wrote of similarly being saved by other beautiful women has
also sown doubts. “There is no way Powhatan was trying to kill him,” says Angela “Silver Star”
Daniel, president of the Foundation for American Heritage Voices and co-author of “The True Story of
Pocahontas: The Other Side of History.” “If anyone was going to kill John Smith, it was his English
comrades,” Daniel adds, pointing out that he was arrested for mutiny on the voyage over to Jamestown,
that he was sentenced to hang soon after for a separate incident and that he was forced to return to
England in 1609 following a mysterious gunpowder accident.

Myth 3: Smith’s claims were accepted as fact until relatively recently.

At least some colonists distrusted Smith’s tales from the very beginning, including Jamestown’s first
president, who called him a liar, and another Jamestown leader, who described him as “ambitious,
unworthy, and vainglorious.” His writings were even mocked in a popular 1631 satirical poem. Early
Americans, on the other hand, tended to treat him as a hero. But as the Civil War approached, northern
authors started attacking Smith’s credibility, with one lambasting his “tendency to exaggeration and
over-statement.”Southerners responded with a vigorous defense that included the use of Pocahontas’
likeness on a Confederate battle flag. “She was very much a pawn in the arguments between the North
and the South leading up to the Civil War,” says William Rasmussen, lead curator at the Virginia
Historical Society. The North-South culture wars over Smith and Pocahontas continued into the 20th
century. In fact, so many leading Virginians claimed to be descended from her that the state included a
“Pocahontas exception” to its infamous 1924 Racial Integrity Act, thereby allowing those with one-
sixteenth or less of Native American blood to remain white in the eyes of the law.

If his contemporaries provided the first round of Smith criticism and anti-Confederate northerners the
second, then the third round has come from modern historians and Virginia’s tribes. “Everything was
recorded by white, male English[men],” Rasmussen explains. “We don’t have a word from
[Pocahontas], we don’t have a word from any Native American or woman.” Yet, as it turns out, Native
Americans have passed down stories of Pocahontas orally over the past 400 years—as detailed in
Daniel’s book—and these frequently contradict Smith. Of late, historians have also finally begun
highlighting the Algonquians’ motives in their dealings with the English and noticing the discrepancies
between Smith’s writings and native culture

Myth 4: Pocahontas and Smith fell in love

Despite what Disney (and numerous authors going back to the early 1800s) would have you believe,
there is no historical basis for the claim that Pocahontas and Smith were romantically involved. In fact,
the two were so far apart in age that any such relationship would have been disturbing: Pocahontas was
around 12 during her repeated visits to Jamestown in 1608, whereas Smith was 28. Smith departed
Jamestown for good the following year, and the pair would not reunite until Pocahontas’ lengthy trip to
England in 1616 and 1617, when, according to Smith, she became so overcome with emotion upon
seeing him that she could barely speak. (As part of that exchange, she apparently accused the English
of constantly lying.)

Rasmussen tells HISTORY “it’s safe to say” that Pocahontas and Smith established a friendship, but
that 19th century Romantic-era writers turned it into something more because they thought “that’s the
way it should have been.”

Myth 5: The English treated Pocahontas well.

By all accounts, the English enjoyed Pocahontas’ presence in Jamestown. She brought them food from
her father, thus helping stave off a famine, and astonished them with naked cartwheels. According to
Daniel, however, the colonists never intended on living in peace with their neighbors. “They never
even thanked the native people for bringing them food,” she says. “They would thank God.”Once war
broke out in 1609, Pocahontas stopped showing up in Jamestown and largely disappeared from the
historical record, only to reappear in 1613 when English Captain Samuel Argall kidnapped her and
held her hostage.

She gained her freedom only after converting to Christianity and marrying Rolfe, a union that ushered
in an era of peace between the Algonquians and English that would last until 1622. Stories passed
down by Virginia’s Native Americans—along with one English source—maintain that Pocahontas was
married to a warrior named Kocoum prior to the abduction. Controversially, these Native American
stories also state that the English killed Kocoum and that Pocahontas was raped while in captivity.

During her trip to England, Pocahontas was treated cordially—and as an object of fascination—and
even met the king and queen. But she fell ill and died around March 21, 1617, in the town of
Gravesend just after starting out on the voyage home. Most scholars put the blame on tuberculosis,
smallpox or another disease, though her sister and brother-in-law, who accompanied her overseas,
purportedly believed she had been poisoned.

The first Thanksgiving

In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying about 102
passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely
practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the
New World. After 66 days, the pilgrims hit land in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then one month later,
they made it to Plymouth, where they settled. After the first winter there, only half of the pilgrims lived
due to cold and diseases. In March, they were visited by an Abenaki Indian who spoke English. He
brought with him a former captured slave Squanto. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by
malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and
avoid poisonous plants. In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, the
Governer invited a group of the Native Americans to a celebratory feast, now remembered as
America’s first Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving today

• In 1941, President Roosevelt made Thanksgiving a federal holiday. • The main event of any
Thanksgiving is the Thanksgiving dinner. • It is traditional to have baked or roasted turkey. This is
usually accompanied with mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, fall vegetables, cranberry sauce, and gravy.
Pumpkin pie is the most commonly eaten dessert. • The Thanksgiving holiday weekend is one of the
busiest times of the year for traveling. It is a four-day or five-day weekend vacation for most schools
and colleges, and many businesses and government workers get three or four days off. • Thanksgiving
is also the unofficial signal for Christmas preparations to begin. Once Thanksgiving finishes, stores fill
their shelves with Christmas goods.

THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION

Had history taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the great Spanish
or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one nation with
Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone Quebec and Montreal.

Yet the earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French. The first European record
of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old Norse Vinland Saga recounts how
the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering Norsemen settled briefly somewhere on the
northeast coast of America -- probably Nova Scotia, in Canada -- in the first decade of the 11th
century, almost 400 years before the next recorded European discovery of the New World.

The first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of the world, however, began
with the famous voyage of an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish rulers
Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus's journal in his "Epistola," printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama
-- the terror of the men, who feared monsters and thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the
near-mutiny; how Columbus faked the ships' logs so the men would not know how much farther they
had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first sighting of land as they neared America.

Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source of information about the early contact between American
Indians and Europeans. As a young priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed Columbus's journal,
and late in life wrote a long, vivid History of the Indians criticizing their enslavement by the Spanish.

Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first colony was set up in 1585 at Roanoke,
off the coast of North Carolina; all its colonists disappeared, and to this day legends are told about
blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area. The second colony was more permanent: Jamestown,
established in 1607. It endured starvation, brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period
paints America in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the colonizations
became world-renowned.
The exploration of Roanoke was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of
the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's book was quickly translated into Latin, French, and
German; the text and pictures were made into engravings and widely republished for over 200 years.

The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one of its leaders, is the
exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable romantic, and he seems
to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of the Indian maiden,
Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical imagination. The
story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith's life when
he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them
as a hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married
John Rolfe, an English gentleman. The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and
the Indians, ensuring the survival of the struggling new colony.

In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers opened the way to a second wave of permanent
colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen's tools. The early literature of
exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships' logs, and reports to the explorers'
financial backers -- European rulers or, in mercantile England and Holland, joint stock companies --
gradually was supplanted by records of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took
possession of the North American colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is
English. As American minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life
becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed
ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important to
recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND

 It is likely that no
other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690,
there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of the United States, known as New
England, as in the mother country -- an astounding fact when one considers that most educated people
of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-
made and often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted education to understand
and execute God's will as they established their colonies throughout New England.

The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the importance
of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth. Puritan style varied
enormously -- from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious
history. Whatever the style or genre, certain themes remained constant. Life was seen as a test; failure
led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. This world was an arena of
constant battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many
disguises. Many Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium," when Jesus would return to Earth, end
human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity.

Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on ambition, hard
work, and an intense striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not know, in strict
theological terms, whether they were "saved" and among the elect who would go to heaven, Puritans
tended to feel that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought not only for
themselves, but as welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal life.

Moreover, the concept of stewardship encouraged success. The Puritans interpreted all things and
events as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings, and felt that in advancing their own profit and their
community's well-being, they were also furthering God's plans. They did not draw lines of distinction
between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the divine will -- a belief
that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism.

In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the
Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph
over the New World and to God's kingdom on Earth.

The Puritan Authors

In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the
Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph
over the New World and to God's kingdom on Earth.

The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified the seriousness of Reformation
Christianity. Known as the "Pilgrims," they were a small group of believers who had migrated from
England to Holland -- even then known for its religious tolerance -- in 1608, during a time of
persecutions.

Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literally. They read and acted on the text of the Second
Book of Corinthians -- "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord." Despairing of
purifying the Church of England from within, "Separatists" formed underground "covenanted"
churches that swore loyalty to the group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the king as well as
heretics damned to hell, they were often persecuted. Their separation took them ultimately to the New
World.

William Bradford (1590-1657)

William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the
Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several languages,
including Hebrew, in order to "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty."
His participation in the migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as
governor, made him ideally suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history, Of Plymouth
Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony's beginning. His description of the
first view of America is justly famous:

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles...they had now no friends to welcome them nor
inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to
seek for succor...savage

barbarians...were readier to fill their sides with arrows than otherwise. And for the reason it was winter,
and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel
and fierce storms...all stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods
and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

Bradford also recorded the first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the
"Mayflower Compact," drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on board ship. The compact was a
harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to come a century and a half later.

Puritans disapproved of such secular amusements as dancing and card-playing, which were associated
with ungodly aristocrats and immoral living. Reading or writing "light" books also fell into this
category. Puritan minds poured their tremendous energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry,
sermons, theological tracts, and histories. Their intimate diaries and meditations record the rich inner
lives of this introspective and intense people.
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)

The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book to be published by
a woman -- Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in England, given the lack
of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies. Born and educated in England,
Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager. She emigrated with her family when she
was 18. Her husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew
into the great city of Boston.

She preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary
readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her
husband and children. She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse
Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other
English poets as well. She often uses elaborate conceits or extended metaphors. "To My Dear and
Loving Husband" (1678) uses the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular in
Europe at the time, but gives these a pious meaning at the poem's conclusion:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let s so persevere

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first writers, the intense, brilliant poet and
minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman farmer -- an independent farmer
who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take
an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at Harvard College, and, like most Harvard-
trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a
missionary to the settlers when he accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the frontier town of
Westfield, Massachusetts, 160 kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. Taylor was the best-
educated man in the area, and he put his knowledge to use, working as the town minister, doctor, and
civic leader.

Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered only in the
1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence; today's readers
should be grateful to have his poems -- the finest examples of 17th-century poetry in North America.

Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-page Metrical
History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according to modern critics, are
the series of short Preparatory Meditations.

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)

Michael Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-born, Harvard-educated Puritan minister who practiced
medicine, is the third New England colonial poet of note. He continues the Puritan themes in his best-
known work, The Day of Doom (1662). A long narrative that often falls into doggerel, this terrifying
popularization of Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem of the colonial period. This first
American best-seller is an appalling portrait of damnation to hell in ballad meter.

It is terrible poetry -- but everybody loved it. It fused the fascination of a horror story with the authority
of John Calvin. For more than two centuries, people memorized this long, dreadful monument to
religious terror; children proudly recited it, and elders quoted it in everyday speech. It is not such a leap
from the terrible punishments of this poem to the ghastly self-inflicted wound of Nathaniel
Hawthorne's guilty Puritan minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Herman
Melville s crippled Captain Ahab, a New England Faust whose quest for forbidden knowledge sinks
the ship of American humanity in Moby-Dick (1851). (Moby-Dick was the favorite novel of 20th-
century American novelist William Faulkner, whose profound and disturbing works suggest that the
dark, metaphysical vision of Protestant America has not yet been exhausted.)

Like most colonial literature, the poems of early New England imitate the form and technique of the
mother country, though the religious passion and frequent biblical references, as well as the new
setting, give New England writing a special identity. Isolated New World writers also lived before the
advent of rapid transportation and electronic communications. As a result, colonial writers were
imitating writing that was already out of date in England. Thus, Edward Taylor, the best American poet
of his day, wrote metaphysical poetry after it had become unfashionable in England. At times, as in
Taylor's poetry, rich works of striking originality grew out of colonial isolation.

Colonial writers often seemed ignorant of such great English authors as Ben Jonson. Some colonial
writers rejected English poets who belonged to a different sect as well, thereby cutting themselves off
from the finest lyric and dramatic models the English language had produced. In addition, many
colonials remained ignorant due to the lack of books.

The great model of writing, belief, and conduct was the Bible, in an authorized English translation that
was already outdated when it came out. The age of the Bible, so much older than the Roman church,
made it authoritative to Puritan eyes.

New England Puritans clung to the tales of the Jews in the Old Testament, believing that they, like the
Jews, were persecuted for their faith, that they knew the one true God, and that they were the chosen
elect who would establish the New Jerusalem -- a heaven on Earth. The Puritans were aware of the
parallels between the ancient Jews of the Old Testament and themselves. Moses led the Israelites out of
captivity from Egypt, parted the Red Sea through God's miraculous assistance so that his people could
escape, and received the divine law in the form of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, Puritan
leaders felt they were rescuing their people from spiritual corruption in England, passing miraculously
over a wild sea with God's aid, and fashioning new laws and new forms of government after God's
wishes.

Colonial worlds tend to be archaic, and New England certainly was no exception. New England
Puritans were archaic by choice, conviction, and circumstance.

Samuel Sewall (1652-1730)

Easier to read than the highly religious poetry full of Biblical references are the historical and secular
accounts that recount real events using lively details. Governor John Winthrop's Journal (1790)
provides the best information on the early Massachusetts Bay Colony and Puritan political theory.

Samuel Sewall's Diary, which records the years 1674 to 1729, is lively and engaging. Sewall fits the
pattern of early New England writers we have seen in Bradford and Taylor. Born in England, Sewall
was brought to the colonies at an early age. He made his home in the Boston area, where he graduated
from Harvard, and made a career of legal, administrative, and religious work.

Sewall was born late enough to see the change from the early, strict religious life of the Puritans to the
later, more worldly Yankee period of mercantile wealth in the New England colonies; his Diary, which
is often compared to Samuel Pepys's English diary of the same period, inadvertently records the
transition.

Like Pepys's diary, Sewall's is a minute record of his daily life, reflecting his interest in living piously
and well. He notes little purchases of sweets for a woman he was courting, and their disagreements
over whether he should affect aristocratic and expensive ways such as wearing a wig and using a
coach.

Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678)

The earliest woman prose writer of note is Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife who gives a clear,
moving account of her 11-week captivity by Indians during an Indian massacre in 1676. The book
undoubtedly fanned the flame of anti-Indian sentiment, as did John Williams's The Redeemed Captive
(1707), describing his two years in captivity by French and Indians after a massacre. Such writings as
women produced are usually domestic accounts requiring no special education. It may be argued that
women's literature benefits from its homey realism and common-sense wit; certainly works like Sarah
Kemble Knight's lively Journal (published posthumously in 1825) of a daring solo trip in 1704 from
Boston to New York and back escapes the baroque complexity of much Puritan writing.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

No account of New England colonial literature would be complete without mentioning Cotton Mather,
the master pedant. The third in the four-generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at
length of New England in over 500 books and pamphlets. Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana
(Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the
settlement of New England through a series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy Puritan
errand into the wilderness to establish God s kingdom; its structure is a narrative progression of
representative American "Saints' Lives." His zeal somewhat redeems his pompousness: "I write the
wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand."

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)

As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious dogmatism gradually dwindled, despite sporadic, harsh
Puritan efforts to stem the tide of tolerance. The minister Roger Williams suffered for his own views on
religion. An English-born son of a tailor, he was banished from Massachusetts in the middle of New
England's ferocious winter in 1635. Secretly warned by Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, he
survived only by living with Indians; in 1636, he established a new colony at Rhode Island that would
welcome persons of different religions.

A graduate of Cambridge University (England), he retained sympathy for working people and diverse
views. His ideas were ahead of his time. He was an early critic of imperialism, insisting that European
kings had no right to grant land charters because American land belonged to the Indians. Williams also
believed in the separation between church and state -- still a fundamental principle in America today.
He held that the law courts should not have the power to punish people for religious reasons -- a stand
that undermined the strict New England theocracies. A believer in equality and democracy, he was a
lifelong friend of the Indians. Williams's numerous books include one of the first phrase books of
Indian languages, A Key Into the Languages of America (1643). The book also is an embryonic
ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian life based on the time he had lived among the tribes.
Each chapter is devoted to one topic -- for example, eating and mealtime. Indian words and phrases
pertaining to this topic are mixed with comments, anecdotes, and a concluding poem. The end of the
first chapter reads:

If nature's sons, both wild and tame,

Humane and courteous be,

How ill becomes it sons of God

To want humanity.
In the chapter on words about entertainment, he comments that "it is a strange truth that a man shall
generally find more free entertainment and refreshing among these barbarians, than amongst thousands
that call themselves Christians."

Williams's life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit to England during the bloody Civil War there, he drew
upon his survival in frigid New England to organize firewood deliveries to the poor of London during
the winter, after their supply of coal had been cut off. He wrote lively defenses of religious toleration
not only for different Christian sects, but also for non-Christians. "It is the will and command of God,
that...a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships,
be granted to all men, in all nations...," he wrote in The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of
Conscience (1644). The intercultural experience of living among gracious and humane Indians
undoubtedly accounts for much of his wisdom.

Influence was two-way in the colonies. For example, John Eliot translated the Bible into Narragansett.
Some Indians converted to Christianity. Even today, the Native American church is a mixture of
Christianity and Indian traditional belief.

The spirit of toleration and religious freedom that gradually grew in the American colonies was first
established in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. The humane and tolerant Quakers,
or "Friends," as they were known, believed in the sacredness of the individual conscience as the
fountainhead of social order and morality. The fundamental Quaker belief in universal love and
brotherhood made them deeply democratic and opposed to dogmatic religious authority. Driven out of
strict Massachusetts, which feared their influence, they established a very successful colony,
Pennsylvania, under William Penn in 1681.

John Woolman (1720-1772)

The best-known Quaker work is the long Journal (1774) of John Woolman, documenting his inner life
in a pure, heartfelt style of great sweetness that has drawn praise from many American and English
writers. This remarkable man left his comfortable home in town to sojourn with the Indians in the wild
interior because he thought he might learn from them and share their ideas. He writes simply of his
desire to "feel and understand their life, and the Spirit they live in." Woolman's justice-loving spirit
naturally turns to social criticism: "I perceived that many white People do often sell Rum to the
Indians, which, I believe, is a great Evil."

Woolman was also one of the first antislavery writers, publishing two essays, "Some Considerations on
the Keeping of Negroes," in 1754 and 1762. An ardent humanitarian, he followed a path of "passive
obedience" to authorities and laws he found unjust, prefiguring Henry David Thoreau's celebrated
essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), by generations.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

The antithesis of John Woolman is Jonathan Edwards, who was born only 17 years before the Quaker
notable. Woolman had little formal schooling; Edwards was highly educated. Woolman followed his
inner light; Edwards was devoted to the law and authority. Both men were fine writers, but they reveal
opposite poles of the colonial religious experience.

Edwards was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the rigid Puritan environment, which
conspired to make him defend strict and gloomy Calvinism from the forces of liberalism springing up
around him. He is best known for his frightening, powerful sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God" (1741):

[I]f God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge into the
bottomless gulf....The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked....he looks upon you as worthy
of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.

Edwards's sermons had enormous impact, sending whole congregations into hysterical fits of weeping.
In the long run, though, their grotesque harshness alienated people from the Calvinism that Edwards
valiantly defended. Edward’s sermons had enormous impact, sending whole congregations into
hysterical fits of weeping. In the long run, though, their grotesque harshness alienated people from the
Calvinism that Edwards valiantly defended. Edwards's dogmatic, medieval sermons no longer fit the
experiences of relatively peaceful, prosperous 18th-century colonists. After Edwards, fresh, liberal
currents of tolerance gathered force.

To My Dear and Loving Husband : BY ANNE BRADSTREET

To My Dear and Loving Husband

BY ANNE BRADSTREET

1. -If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

2. -My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Introduction

Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford

Mayflower pilgrim William Bradford wrote a detailed manuscript describing the pilgrim’s experiences
in Holland and in the New World, which is now known as Of Plymouth Plantation.

In the manuscript, Bradford recorded everything from the pilgrim’s experiences living in the
Netherlands, to their voyage on the Mayflower and their daily life in Plymouth colony.

The book is considered the first American history book ever written and is known by many names,
such as The History of Plymouth Plantation, History of the Plantation at Plymouth and William
Bradford’s Journal.

When Was Of Plimoth Plantation Written?

The book was written between the years 1630 and 1651, and is a 270 page manuscript written in the
form of two books.

Why Was Of Plimoth Plantation Written?

William Bradford explains, in chapter six of the book, that the reason he wrote the manuscript was so
that the descendants of the Pilgrims would know and appreciate the hardships their ancestors faced:

Chapter IX –Sept. 6

OF THEIR VOYAGE, AND HOW THEY PASSED THE SEA; AND OF THEIR SAFE ARRIVAL
AT CAPE COD

After they had enjoyed fair winds and weather for a season, they were encountered many times with
cross winds and met with many fierce storms with which the ship was shroudly 1 shaken, and her upper
works made very leaky; and one of the main beams in the midships was bowed and cracked, which put
them in some fear that the ship could not be able to perform the voyage. So some of the chief of the
company, perceiving the mariners to fear the sufficiency of the ship as appeared by their mutterings,
they entered into serious consultation with the master and other officers of the ship, to consider in time
of the danger, and rather to return than to cast themselves into a desperate and inevitable peril.

And truly there was great distraction and difference of opinion amongst the mariners themselves; fain
would they do what could be done for their wages' sake (being now near half the seas over) and on the
other hand they were loath to hazard their lives too desperately. But in examining of all opinions, the
master and others affirmed they knew the ship to be strong and firm under water; and for the buckling
of the main beam, there was a great iron screw the passengers brought out of Holland, which would
raise the beam into his place; the which being done, the carpenter and master affirmed that with a post
put under it, set firm in the lower deck and other ways bound, he would make it sufficient. And as for
the decks and upper works, they would caulk them as well as they could, and though with the working
of the ship they would not long keep staunch, yet there would otherwise be no great danger, if they did
not over press her with sails. So they committed themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed.

In sundry of these storms the winds were so fierce and the seas so high, as they could not bear a knot
of sail, but were forced to hu11 2 for divers days together. And in one of them, as they thus lay at hull
in a mighty storm, a lusty 3 young man called John Howland, coming upon some occasion above the
gratings was, with a seele of the ship, thrown into sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the
topsail halyards which hung overboard and ran out at length. Yet he held his hold (though he was
sundry fathoms under water) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then
with a boat hook and other means got into the ship again and his life saved. And though he was
something ill with it, yet he lived many years after and became a profitable member both in church and
commonwealth. In all this voyage there died but one of the passengers, which was William Butten, a
youth, servant to Samuel Fuller, when they drew near the coast.

But to omit other things (that I may be brief) after long beating at sea they fell with that land which is
called Cape Cod; 5 the which being made and certainly known to be it, they were not a little joyful.
After some deliberation had amongst themselves and with the master of the ship, they tacked about and
resolved to stand for the southward (the wind and weather being fair) to find some place about
Hudson's River for their habitation.

But after they had sailed that course about half the day, they fell among dangerous shoals and roaring
breakers, and they were so far entangled therewith as they conceived themselves in great danger; and
the wind shrinking upon them withal, they resolved to bear up again for the Cape and thought
themselves happy to get out of those dangers before night overtook them, as by God's good providence
they did. And the next day 7they got into the Cape Harbors where they rid in safety.

Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the
God of Heaven 10 who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all
the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present
condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the
vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went
before), they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather beaten
bodies; no houses or much less town to repair to, to seek for succour.

It is recorded in Scripture 12 as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the
barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they
met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And
for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and
violent, and subject-to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to
search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, fall of
wild beasts and wild men—and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not.

What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children
of these fathers rightly say: "Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were
ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on
their adversity," 13 etc. "Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies
endure forever." "Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered
them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and
found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them
confess before the Lord His loving kindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men.

The Starving Time

When they finally landed, their misery continued. The winter was fierce. The people stayed aboard the
ship, trying to survive on the rations that were left. They had not taken food to prepare for being
stranded during the winter. In the section of his history called "The Starving Time," Bradford writes
that in two or three months, at least half of the Pilgrims had died, sometimes two or three a day--of
starvation, scurvy, and other illnesses. Out of more than 100 Pilgrims, barely 50 lived. Those that lived
also were terribly sick. At one time, only six or seven were well enough to care for the others.

INDIAN RELATIONS

Meeting Squanto, the Native American Who Spoke English

All this while the Indians came skulking about them, and would sometimes show themselves aloof off,
but when any approached near them, they would run away; and once they stole away their tools where
they had been at work and were gone to dinner.

In March, the Indians finally made contact with the settlers. Samoset, who spoke broken English, came
first. He told them of Squanto, another Indian who had actually been to England and spoke English
well. Squanto stayed with the Pilgrims at Plymouth for the rest of his life, acting as their teacher and
guide. He taught them how to plant corn and where to fish. He also was "their pilot to bring them to
unknown places for their profit." Bradford considered Squanto "a special instrument sent of God."

During that first spring, Chief Massasoit and the Pilgrims made a peace agreement that had lasted 24
years when Bradford wrote his history. Without the assistance of these Native Americans, the
Plymouth Colony most likely would have perished.

With the aforesaid Squanto, with whom, after friendly entertainment and some gifts given him, they
made a peace with him (which hath now continued this 24 years) in these terms:

TERMS Of PEACE

1. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of their people.

2. That if any of his did hurt to any of theirs, he should send the offender, that they might punish him.

3. That if anything were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be restored; and they
should do the like to his.

4. If any did unjustly war against him, they would aid him; if any did war against them, he should aid
them.

5. He should send to his neighbours confederates to certify them of this, that they might not wrong
them, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

6. That when their men came to them, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them.

After these things he returned to his place called Sowams, some 40 miles from this place, but Squanto
continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good
beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure
other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never
left them till he died.

he Puritans vs. The Pilgrims

Who Were the Pilgrims?

Every British citizen was expected to attend the Church of England, and those who didn’t were
punished by the state. One group of farmers in Northern England, known disparagingly as the
Separatists, began to worship in secret, knowing full well that it was treasonous.

“Once they decided that the only way they could be true to their conscience was to leave the
established church and secretly worship, they were hunted and persecuted, and many of them faced the
loss of their homes and the loss of their livelihood,” says Donna Curtin, executive director of the
Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “When it became impossible for them to continue
in this way, they began to seek another place to live.”

Pilgrims Look to the New World

The Separatists first fled to the Netherlands, a wealthy maritime superpower that was far more
religiously diverse and tolerant. But while life in Holland was peaceful, it wasn’t English, and the
Separatists feared that their children were losing their native culture. They decided that the only way to
live as true English Christians was to separate even further and establish their own colony in the New
World.

Not all of the Separatists could make the cross-Atlantic journey, including their spiritual leader,
Reverend John Robinson. Writing years later in Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford recounted
the tearful farewell at the docks in Delftshaven, where a ship would take the Separatists to meet the
Mayflower in London.

“So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but
they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the
heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”

Curtin points out that Bradford didn’t name his community “Pilgrims,” and wouldn’t have heard the
term in his lifetime. The first usage of capital-P “Pilgrim” appeared around 1800, when a group of
citizens in Plymouth proposed the creation of a Pilgrim Society to organize the annual celebration of
the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1620. Before 1800, the Separatists who landed at Plymouth
Rock were known as the “first-comers” or “forefathers.”

The Pilgrims, led by Bradford, arrived in New England in December. Roughly half of the 102
passengers on the Mayflower died that first winter from starvation, exposure and disease. With the help
of the native Wampanoag people, the Pilgrims learned to fish and farm their new lands, resulting in the
famous feast of Thanksgiving attended by natives and new arrivals in 1621.

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in
the late 16th century.
So who, then, were the Puritans? While the Separatists believed that the only way to live according to
Biblical precepts was to leave the Church of England entirely, the Puritans thought they could reform
the church from within. Sometimes called non-separating Puritans, this less radical group shared a lot
in common with the Separatists, particularly a form of worship and self-organization called “the
congregational way.”

In a congregational church, there is no prayer book, no formal creeds or belief statements, and the head
of the church isn’t a Pope or the King, but Jesus Christ as revealed in the scriptures. Sabbath worship
doesn’t include sermons and preaching, but extemporaneous “testifying” by the Holy Spirit. As an
organizing principle, congregational churches are bound together by a “covenant” and make decisions
democratically, including the selection of religious leaders.

The biggest difference between the Separatists and the Puritans is that the Puritans believed they could
live out the congregational way in their local churches without abandoning the larger Church of
England.

“The Puritans said, ‘It’s completely acceptable that this ecclesiastical structure is above us, but we’re
going to operate as a congregation in this biblical way,’” says Vicki Oman, associate director of group
participation and learning at the historic Plimouth Plantation. “The Separatists said, ‘That’s baloney.
We have to completely separate ourselves and have this congregational community separate from the
state church.’”

This theological split between Separatists and non-separating Puritans had lasting consequences.

“Separatists end up on the outside of society,” says Oman. “Even if they’re educated, they end up with
low-paying jobs. They leave for places like the Netherlands, where they’re also not financially
successful. Meanwhile, the Puritans stay wealthy.”
Puritans Seek Land in America

The Puritans ultimately decided to journey to the New World, too, but not for the same reasons as the
Separatists. The Puritans, who already had some money, saw a favorable investment opportunity by
owning land in America. And somewhat paradoxically, the Puritans also believed that by being far
away from England, they could create the ideal English church.

“[The Puritan leader] John Winthrop talks about creating a church that will be a light to the nations,”
says Oman. “The Pilgrims never really expressed that desire.”

John Winthrop, who was a wealthy English Puritan lawyer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
approaches a Narragansett warrior.

When the Puritans settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, they arrived in 17 ships carrying
more than 1,000 passengers. They came with money and resources and divinely ordained arrogance.
Just 10 years later, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was a Puritan stronghold of 20,000, while humble
Plymouth was home to just 2,600 Pilgrims. Plymouth was fully swallowed up by Mass Bay just a few
decades later.

Because the Pilgrims and the Puritans share a similar backstory, their legacies often got blurred in the
minds of later generations of Americans, and not always accidentally. Writing in 1820, Daniel Webster
used the Pilgrims as nostalgic symbols of Manifest Destiny, which was more of a Puritan thing:

“Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons
of the Pilgrims ... [cherishing the blessings] of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion."

Sarah Crabtree, a historian at San Francisco State University, admits that she gets frustrated by the
“slippage” between the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

“It contributes to the myth that ‘the first Thanksgiving’ and ‘religious freedom’ are part and parcel of
America’s origin story,” writes Crabtree in an email. “The Puritans and their ‘City on a Hill’ explicitly
rejected religious freedom and never attempted to adopt the Pilgrims’ initial, fleeting cooperation with
American Indian peoples.”

What Did the Pilgrims Wear?

And those black hats and buckled shoes? That popular imagery of the Pilgrims was dreamed up in the
late 19th- and early 20th century. Oman says that buckles were around in the 17th century, but weren’t
Pilgrim fashion, and black dye would have been too expensive for the humble settlers. Only the
wealthier Puritans may have worn black hats. Pilgrim clothing was likely very colorful, full of blues,
greens and oranges.

“A lot of our mythology about the Pilgrims comes out of the early 20th century, when Americans were
once again recreating their identity at a moment of great cultural upheaval,” says Curtin. “America was
changing with the rise of manufacturing and the rise of immigration, when many new people were
coming in to become America

Pre-revolutionary southern literature was aristocratic and secular, reflecting the dominant social and
economic systems of the southern plantations. Early English immigrants were drawn to the southern
colonies because of economic opportunity rather than religious freedom.
Although many southerners were poor farmers or tradespeople living not much better than slaves, the
southern literate upper class was shaped by the classical, Old World ideal of a noble landed gentry
made possible by slavery. The institution released wealthy southern whites from manual labor, afforded
them leisure, and made the dream of an aristocratic life in the American wilderness possible. The
Puritan emphasis on hard work, education and earnestness was rare -- instead we hear of such pleasures
as horseback riding and hunting. The church was the focus of a genteel social life, not a forum for
minute examinations of conscience.

William Byrd (1674-1744)

Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the gentleman. A Renaissance man equally
good at managing a farm and reading classical Greek, he had the power of a feudal lord.

William Byrd describes the gracious way of life at his plantation, Westover, in his famous letter of
1726 to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery:

Besides the advantages of pure air, we abound in all kinds of provisions without expense (I mean we
who have plantations). I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to everybody, yet I
have no bills to pay, and half- a-crown will rest undisturbed in my pockets for many moons altogether.

Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and herds, my bondmen and bondwomen, and every sort of
trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on everyone but Providence...

William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the southern colonial gentry. The heir to 1,040 hectares, which he
enlarged to 7,160 hectares, he was a merchant, trader, and planter. His library of 3,600 books was the
largest in the South. He was born with a lively intelligence that his father augmented by sending him to
excellent schools in England and Holland. He visited the French Court, became a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and was friendly with some of the leading English writers of his day, particularly William
Wycherley and William Congreve. His London diaries are the opposite of those of the New England
Puritans, full of fancy dinners, glittering parties, and womanizing, with little introspective soul-
searching.

Byrd is best known today for his lively History of the Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729 trip of some
weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the neighboring colonies of
Virginia and North Carolina. The quick impressions that vast wilderness, Indians, half-savage whites,
wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made on this civilized gentleman form a uniquely American
and very southern book. He ridicules the first Virginia colonists, "about a hundred men, most of them
reprobates of good families," and jokes that at Jamestown, "like true Englishmen, they built a church
that cost no more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five hundred." Byrd's writings are fine
examples of the keen interest Southerners took in the material world: the land, Indians, plants, animals,
and settlers.

Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722)

Robert Beverley, another wealthy planter and author of The History and Present State of Virginia
(1705, 1722) records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and vigorous style. Like Byrd, he
admired the Indians and remarked on the strange European superstitions about Virginia -- for example,
the belief "that the country turns all people black who go there." He noted the great hospitality of
southerners, a trait maintained today.

Humorous satire -- a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or
wit -- appears frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated settlers lampooned Georgia's
philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A True and Historical Narrative of
the Colony of Georgia (1741). They pretended to praise him for keeping them so poor and overworked
that they had to develop "the valuable virtue of humility" and shun "the anxieties of any further
ambition."

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797)

Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano and Jupiter Hammon emerged during the colonial
period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger (West Africa), was the first black in America to write an
autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
African (1789). In the book - - an early example of the slave narrative genre -- Equiano gives an
account of his native land and the horrors and cruelties of his captivity and enslavement in the West
Indies. Equiano, who converted to Christianity, movingly laments his cruel "un-Christian" treatment by
Christians -- a sentiment many African-Americans would voice in centuries to come.

Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800)

The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered for his
religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in which he
advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An
Evening Thought" was the first poem published by a black male in America.

Chapter 2: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820

Introduction

The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of
liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the
time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory fanned
nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing,
few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.

American books were harshly reviewed in England. Americans were painfully aware of their excessive
dependence on English literary models. The search for a native literature became a national obsession.
As one American magazine editor wrote, around 1816, "Dependence is a state of degradation fraught
with disgrace, and to be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can ourselves produce is to add to
the crime of indolence the weakness of stupidity."
Cultural revolutions, unlike military revolutions, cannot be successfully imposed but must grow from
the soil of shared experience. Revolutions are expressions of the heart of the people; they grow
gradually out of new sensibilities and wealth of experience. It would take 50 years of accumulated
history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of
American writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily
Dickinson. America's literary independence was slowed by a lingering identification with England, an
excessive imitation of English or classical literary models, and difficult economic and political
conditions that hampered publishing.

Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine patriotism, were of necessity self-conscious, and they
could never find roots in their American sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolutionary generation
had been born English, had grown to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated English modes of
thought and English fashions in dress and behavior. Their parents and grandparents were English (or
European), as were all their friends. Added to this, American awareness of literary fashion still lagged
behind the English, and this time lag intensified American imitation. Fifty years after their fame in
England, English neoclassic writers such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift,
Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson were still eagerly imitated in America.

Until 1825, most American authors paid printers to publish their work. Obviously only the leisured and
independently wealthy, like Washington Irving and the New York Knickerbocker group, or the group
of Connecticut poets known as the Hartford Wits, could afford to indulge their interest in writing. The
exception, Benjamin Franklin, though from a poor family, was a printer by trade and could publish his
own work.

Charles Brockden Brown was more typical. The author of several interesting Gothic romances, Brown
was the first American author to attempt to live from his writing. But his short life ended in poverty.

The lack of an audience was another problem. The small cultivated audience in America wanted well-
known European authors, partly out of the exaggerated respect with which former colonies regarded
their previous rulers. This preference for English works was not entirely unreasonable, considering the
inferiority of American output, but it worsened the situation by depriving American authors of an
audience. Only journalism offered financial remuneration, but the mass audience wanted light,
undemanding verse and short topical essays -- not long or experimental work.

The absence of adequate copyright laws was perhaps the clearest cause of literary stagnation. American
printers pirating English best-sellers understandably were unwilling to pay an American author for
unknown material. The unauthorized reprinting of foreign books was originally seen as a service to the
colonies as well as a source of profit for printers like Franklin, who reprinted works of the classics and
great European books to educate the American public.

Printers everywhere in America followed his lead. There are notorious examples of pirating. Matthew
Carey, an important American publisher, paid a London agent -- a sort of literary spy -- to send copies
of unbound pages, or even proofs, to him in fast ships that could sail to America in a month. Carey's
men would sail out to meet the incoming ships in the harbor and speed the pirated books into print
using typesetters who divided the book into sections and worked in shifts around the clock. Such a
pirated English book could be reprinted in a day and placed on the shelves for sale in American
bookstores almost as fast as in England.

Because imported authorized editions were more expensive and could not compete with pirated ones,
the copyright situation damaged foreign authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, along
with American authors. But at least the foreign authors had already been paid by their original
publishers and were already well known. Americans such as James Fenimore Cooper not only failed to
receive adequate payment, but they had to suffer seeing their works pirated under their noses. Cooper's
first successful book, The Spy (1821), was pirated by four different printers within a month of its
appearance.
Ironically, the copyright law of 1790, which allowed pirating, was nationalistic in intent. Drafted by
Noah Webster, the great lexicographer who later compiled an American dictionary, the law protected
only the work of American authors; it was felt that English writers should look out for themselves.

Bad as the law was, none of the early publishers were willing to have it changed because it proved
profitable for them. Piracy starved the first generation of revolutionary American writers; not
surprisingly, the generation after them produced even less work of merit. The high point of piracy, in
1815, corresponds with the low point of American writing. Nevertheless, the cheap and plentiful supply
of pirated foreign books and classics in the first 50 years of the new country did educate Americans,
including the first great writers, who began to make their appearance around 1825.

Chapter 2: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820

8.1. THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality

rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative
government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of
justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America's "first great man of
letters," embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality. Practical yet idealistic, hard-working
and enormously successful, Franklin recorded his early life in his famous Autobiography. Writer,
printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the most famous and respected private
figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America, a poor democrat born in an
aristocratic age that his fine example helped to liberalize.

Franklin was a second-generation immigrant. His Puritan father, a chandler (candle-maker), came to
Boston, Massachusetts, from England in 1683. In many ways Franklin's life illustrates the impact of the
Enlightenment on a gifted individual. Self- educated but well-read in John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury,
Joseph Addison, and other Enlightenment writers, Franklin learned from them to apply reason to his
own life and to break with tradition -- in particular the old-fashioned Puritan tradition -- when it
threatened to smother his ideals.

While a youth, Franklin taught himself languages, read widely, and practiced writing for the public.
When he moved from Boston to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin already had the kind of education
associated with the upper classes. He also had the Puritan capacity for hard, careful work, constant self-
scrutiny, and the desire to better himself. These qualities steadily propelled him to wealth,
respectability, and honor. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help other ordinary people become successful
by sharing his insights and initiating a characteristically American genre -- the self-help book.

About:

Poor Richard's Almanack (sometimes Almanac) was a yearly almanac published by Benjamin
Franklin, who adopted the pseudonym of "Poor Richard" or "Richard Saunders" for this purpose. The
publication appeared continually from 1732 to 1758. It sold exceptionally well for a pamphlet
published in the Thirteen Colonies; print runs reached 10,000 per year.

Franklin, the American inventor, statesman, and publisher, achieved success with Poor Richard's
Almanack. Almanacks were very popular books in colonial America, offering a mixture of seasonal
weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements. Poor Richard's Almanack
was also popular for its extensive use of wordplay, and some of the witty phrases coined in the work
survive in the contemporary American vernacular.

Franklin's Autobiography is, in part, another self-help book. Written to advise his son, it covers only
the early years. The most famous section describes his scientific scheme of self- improvement. Franklin
lists 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation,
cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates on each with a maxim; for example, the
temperance maxim is "Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation." A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put
the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself as the experimental subject.

To establish good habits, Franklin invented a reusable calendrical record book in which he worked on
one virtue each week, recording each lapse with a black spot. His theory prefigures psychological
behaviorism, while his systematic method of notation anticipates modern behavior modification. The
project of self-improvement blends the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility with the Puritan habit of
moral self-scrutiny.
Franklin saw early that writing could best advance his ideas, and he therefore deliberately perfected his
supple prose style, not as an end in itself but as a tool. "Write with the learned. Pronounce with the
vulgar," he advised. A scientist, he followed the Royal (scientific) Society's 1667 advice to use "a
close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all
things as near the mathematical plainness as they can."

Despite his prosperity and fame, Franklin never lost his democratic sensibility, and he was an important
figure at the 1787 convention at which the U.S. Constitution was drafted. In his later years, he was
president of an antislavery association. One of his last efforts was to promote universal public
education.

Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)

Another Enlightenment figure is Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an American
Farmer (1782) gave Europeans a glowing idea of opportunities for peace, wealth, and pride in America.
Neither an American nor a farmer, but a French aristocrat who owned a plantation outside New York
City before the Revolution, Crèvecoeur enthusiastically praised the colonies for their industry,
tolerance, and growing prosperity in 12 letters that depict America as an agrarian paradise -- a vision
that would inspire Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many other writers up to the present.

Crèvecoeur was the earliest European to develop a considered view of America and the new American
character. The first to exploit the "melting pot" image of America, in a famous passage he asks:
What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European,
hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a
family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French
woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations....Here individuals of all
nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause changes in
the world.

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLET: Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

The passion of Revolutionary literature is found in pamphlets, the most popular form of political
literature of the day. Over 2,000 pamphlets were published during the Revolution. The pamphlets
thrilled patriots and threatened loyalists; they filled the role of drama, as they were often read aloud in
public to excite audiences. American soldiers read them aloud in their camps; British Loyalists threw
them into public bonfires.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the first three months of its
publication. It is still rousing today. "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all
mankind," Paine wrote, voicing the idea of American exceptionalism still strong in the United States --
that in some fundamental sense, since America is a democratic experiment and a country theoretically
open to all immigrants, the fate of America foreshadows the fate of humanity at large.
Political writings in a democracy had to be clear to appeal to the voters. And to have informed voters,
universal education was promoted by many of the founding fathers. One indication of the vigorous, if
simple, literary life was the proliferation of newspapers. More newspapers were read in America during
the Revolution than anywhere else in the world. Immigration also mandated a simple style. Clarity was
vital to a newcomer, for whom English might be a second language. Thomas Jefferson's original draft
of the Declaration of Independence is clear and logical, but his committee's modifications made it even
simpler. The Federalist Papers, written in support of the Constitution, are also lucid, logical arguments,
suitable for debate in a democratic nation.

Chapter 2: Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820

8.2. NEOCLASSISM: EPIC, MOCK EPIC, AND SATIRE

Unfortunately, "literary" writing was not as simple and direct as political writing. When trying to write
poetry, most educated authors stumbled into the pitfall of elegant neoclassicism. The epic, in particular,
exercised a fatal attraction. American literary patriots felt sure that the great American Revolution
naturally would find expression in the epic -- a long, dramatic narrative poem in elevated language,
celebrating the feats of a legendary hero.

Many writers tried but none succeeded. Timothy Dwight (1752- 1817), one of the group of writers
known as the Hartford Wits, is an example. Dwight, who eventually became the president of Yale
University, based his epic, The Conquest of Canaan (1785), on the Biblical story of Joshua's struggle to
enter the Promised Land. Dwight cast General Washington, commander of the American army and
later the first president of the United States, as Joshua in his allegory and borrowed the couplet form
that Alexander Pope used to translate Homer. Dwight's epic was as boring as it was ambitious. English
critics demolished it; even Dwight's friends, such as John Trumbull (1750-1831), remained
unenthusiastic. So much thunder and lightning raged in the melodramatic battle scenes that Trumbull
proposed that the epic be provided with lightning rods.

Not surprisingly, satirical poetry fared much better than serious verse. The mock epic genre encouraged
American poets to use their natural voices and did not lure them into a bog of pretentious and
predictable patriotic sentiments and faceless conventional poetic epithets out of the Greek poet Homer
and the Roman poet Virgil by way of the English poets.

In mock epics like John Trumbull's good-humored M'Fingal (1776-82), stylized emotions and
conventional turns of phrase are ammunition for good satire, and the bombastic oratory of the
revolution is itself ridiculed. Modeled on the British poet Samuel Butler's Hudibras, the mock epic
derides a Tory, M'Fingal. It is often pithy, as when noting of condemned criminals facing hanging:

No man e'er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law.

M'Fingal went into over 30 editions, was reprinted for a half- century, and was appreciated in England
as well as America. Satire appealed to Revolutionary audiences partly because it contained social
comment and criticism, and political topics and social problems were the main subjects of the day. The
first American comedy to be performed, The Contrast (produced 1787) by Royall Tyler (1757-1826),
humorously contrasts Colonel Manly, an American officer, with Dimple, who imitates English
fashions. Naturally, Dimple is made to look ridiculous. The play introduces the first Yankee character,
Jonathan.

Another satirical work, the novel Modern Chivalry, published by Hugh Henry Brackenridge in
installments from 1792 to 1815, memorably lampoons the excesses of the age. Brackenridge (1748-
1816), a Scottish immigrant raised on the American frontier, based his huge, picaresque novel on Don
Quixote; it describes the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his stupid, brutal, yet appealingly
human, servant Teague O'Regan.

Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Regan, His
servant is a rambling, satirical American novel by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Pittsburgh writer,
lawyer, judge, and justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The book was first published in 1792.

The hero, Captain John Farrago, is a frontier Don Quixote who leaves his Western Pennsylvania farm
on a whim, to "ride about the world a little, with his man Teague at his heels, to see how things were
going on here and there, and to observe human nature".

The book is arguably the first important work of fiction about the American frontier and called "to the
West what Don Quixote was to Europe". It first appeared in 1792 in two parts, and the third and fourth
sections of the book appeared in 1793 and 1797, and a revision in 1805, with a final addition in 1815.
Henry Adams called it "a more thoroughly American book than any written before 1833."

1.2 POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

One poet, Philip Freneau, incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism and escaped the
imitativeness and vague universality of the Hartford Wits. The key to both his success and his failure
was his passionately democratic spirit combined with an inflexible temper.

The Hartford Wits, all of them undoubted patriots, reflected the general cultural conservatism of the
educated classes. Freneau set himself against this holdover of old Tory attitudes, complaining of "the
writings of an aristocratic, speculating faction at Hartford, in favor of monarchy and titular
distinctions." Although Freneau received a fine education and was as well acquainted with the classics
as any Hartford Wit, he embraced liberal and democratic causes.
As a poet and editor, Freneau adhered to his democratic ideals. His popular poems, published in
newspapers for the average reader, regularly celebrated American subjects. "The Virtue of Tobacco"
concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the southern economy, while "The Jug of Rum" celebrates
the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a crucial commodity of early American trade and a major New
World export. Common American characters lived in "The Pilot of Hatteras," as well as in poems about
quack doctors and bombastic evangelists.