Plymouth Colony

Plymouth Colony (sometimes spelled Plimouth) was the first permanent English colony in New England, founded in 1620, and the third permanent English colony in America, after Newfoundland and the Jamestown Colony. It was settled by the passengers on the Mayflower at a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement served as the capital of the colony and developed as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of what is now the southeastern portion of Massachusetts; it was approximately coterminous with the combined territories of Plymouth, Barnstable, and Bristol Counties, all of which were originally established by the General Court of the Plymouth Colony. Many of the people and events surrounding Plymouth Colony have become part of American folklore, including the American tradition of Thanksgiving and the monument of Plymouth Rock. were part of a congregation led in America by William Bradford and William Brewster. They began to feel the pressures of religious persecution by the Church of England while still in the English village of Scrooby, near East Retford, Nottinghamshire.

In Leiden, the congregation gained the freedom to worship as they chose, but Dutch society was foreign to them. Scrooby had been an agricultural community, whereas Leiden was a thriving industrial center, and they found the pace of life difficult. The community remained close-knit, but their children began adopting the Dutch language and customs, and some also entered the Dutch Army. They were also still harassed by the English Crown: English authorities came to Leiden to arrest William Brewster in 1618 after he published sharp criticism of the King of England and the Anglican Church. Brewster escaped arrest, but the events spurred the congregation to move farther from England. The Plymouth land patent allowed them to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River. They obtained financial backing through the Merchant Adventurers, a group of businessmen who sought to profit from the colony once the Pilgrims began working to repay their debts. The Mayflower was purchased in London. The original captains were Captain Reynolds for Speedwell and Captain Christopher Jones for Mayflower. Other passengers joined the group in Southampton, including William Brewster, who had been in hiding for the better part of a year, and a group known to the Leiden congregation as "The Strangers", extra workers and staff largely recruited by the Merchant Adventurers. The term was also used for many of the indentured servants who paid for their passage by binding themselves to a period of service.

Among the Strangers were Myles Standish, who was the colony's military leader; Christopher Martin, who had been designated by the Merchant Adventurers to act as shipboard governor during the trans-Atlantic trip; and Stephen Hopkins, a veteran of a failed colonial venture that may have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The departure of the Mayflower and Speedwell was beset by delays, including further disagreements with the Merchant Adventurers. A total of 120 passengers finally departed on August 5: 90 on the Mayflower and 30 on the Speedwell. The seas were not severe during the first month on the Atlantic, but in the second month the ship was badly shaken by strong north-Atlantic winter gales, causing leaks from structural damage. There were many hardships and dangers throughout the trip, including seasickness and the bending and cracking of a main beam of the ship. One death occurred, that of William Button. Cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi made one of the earliest maps of New England , but he erroneously identified Cape Breton with the Narragansett Bay and completely omitted most of the New England coast. European fishermen had also been plying the waters off the New England coast for much of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Frenchman Samuel de Champlain had explored the area extensively in 1605. He had specifically explored Plymouth Harbor, which he called "Port St. Louis," and he made an extensive and detailed map of it and the surrounding lands. He showed the Patuxet village (where the town of Plymouth was later built) as a thriving settlement. but a recent analysis suggests it was a lesser-known disease called leptospirosis. The absence of any serious Indian opposition to the Pilgrims' settlement may have been pivotal to their success and to English colonization in America.

Popham Colony, also known as Fort St. George, was organized by the Plymouth Company (unrelated to Plymouth Colony) and founded in 1607 on the coast of Maine. Beset by internal political struggles, sickness, and weather problems, it was abandoned in 1608.

Captain John Smith of Jamestown had explored the area in 1614 and is credited with naming the region New England. He named many locations using approximations of Indian words. He gave the name "Accomack" to the Patuxet settlement on which the Pilgrims founded Plymouth, but he changed it to New Plymouth after consulting Prince Charles, son of King James. A map published in his 1616 work A Description of New England clearly shows the site as "New Plimouth." The location was chosen largely for its defensive position. The settlement would be centered on two hills: Cole's Hill, where the village would be built, and Fort Hill, where a defensive cannon would be stationed. Also important in choosing the site was the fact that the prior villagers had cleared much of the land, making agriculture relatively easy. Fresh water for the colony was provided by Town Brook and Billington Sea. There are no contemporaneous accounts to verify the legend, but Plymouth Rock is often hailed as the point where the colonists first set foot on their new homeland.

The area where the colonists settled had been identified as "New Plymouth" in maps which John Smith published in 1614. The colonists elected to retain the name for their own settlement, in honor of their final point of departure from Plymouth, Devon.

First winter

thumb|right|The Landing of the Pilgrims, an 1877 portrait by [[Henry Bacon (painter)|Henry Bacon]]

On December 21, 1620, the first landing party arrived at the site of Plymouth. Plans to build houses, however, were delayed by bad weather until December 23. As the building progressed, 20 men always remained ashore on guard while the rest of the work crews returned each night to the Mayflower. Women, children, and the infirm remained on board the Mayflower, and many had not left the ship for six months. The first structure was a common house of wattle and daub, and it took two weeks to complete in the harsh New England winter. In the following weeks, the rest of the settlement slowly took shape. The living and working structures were built on the relatively flat top of Cole's Hill, and a wooden platform was constructed atop nearby Fort Hill to support the cannon that would defend the settlement.

During the winter, the Mayflower colonists suffered greatly from lack of shelter, diseases such as scurvy, and general conditions on board ship.

Samoset returned to Plymouth on March 22 with a delegation from Massasoit that included Squanto; Massasoit joined them shortly after, and he and Governor Carver established a formal treaty of peace after exchanging gifts. This treaty ensured that each people would not harm the other, that Massasoit would send his allies to negotiate with Plymouth, and that they would come to each other's aid in a time of war. Several of the graves on Cole's Hill were uncovered in 1855; their bodies were disinterred and moved to a site near Plymouth Rock. The celebration lasted three days and featured a feast of numerous types of waterfowl, wild turkeys, and fish procured by the colonists, and five deer brought by the Wampanoags.

After the departure of Massasoit and his men, Squanto remained in Plymouth to teach the Pilgrims how to survive in New England, such as using dead fish to fertilize the soil. For the first few years of colonial life, the fur trade was the dominant source of income beyond subsistence farming, buying furs from Natives and selling to Europeans.

In May 1622, a vessel named the Sparrow arrived carrying seven men from the Merchant Adventurers seeking a site for a new settlement in the area. Two ships followed shortly after carrying 60 settlers, all men. They spent July and August in Plymouth before moving north to found a settlement which they named Wessagussett (modern Weymouth). The Pilgrims lost the trade in furs which they had enjoyed with the local tribes, their main source of income to pay their debt to the Merchant Adventurers. The raid had disastrous consequences for the colony, as attested by William Bradford in a letter to the Merchant Adventurers: "we had much damaged our trade, for there where we had most skins the Indians are run away from their habitations."

| December 1620 | 99

| April 1621 | 50

| November 1621 | 85

| July 1623 | 180

| May 1627 | 156

| January 1630 | almost 300

| 1640 | 1,020

| 1643 | approx. 2,000

| 1650 | 1,566

| 1660 | 1,980

| 1670 | 5,333

| 1680 | 6,400

| 1690 | 7,424

| 1691 | approx. 7,000

In November 1621, a Merchant Adventurers ship named Fortune brought 37 new settlers for Plymouth, unexpectedly and without many supplies, putting a strain on the resources of the colony. Among the passengers of the Fortune were several of the original Leiden congregation, including William Brewster's son Jonathan, Edward Winslow's brother John, and Philip Delano (originally "de la Noye"), an ancestor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The ship also carried a letter from the Merchant Adventurers chastising the colony for failure to return a first payment of trade goods with the Mayflower; but the Fortune sailed back laden with £500 worth of goods (equivalent to £ in 2010, or $ at PPP), more than enough to keep the colonists on schedule for repayment of their debt. However, the Fortune was captured by the French before she could deliver her cargo to England, creating an even larger deficit for the colony. They carried 96 new settlers, among them Leideners, including William Bradford's future wife Alice along with William and Mary Brewster's daughters Patience and Fear. Some passengers on the Anne were either unprepared for frontier life or undesirable additions to the colony, and they returned to England the next year. According to Gleason Archer, "those who remained were not willing to join the colony under the terms of the agreement with the Merchant Adventurers. They had embarked for America upon an understanding with the Adventurers that they might settle in a community of their own, or at least be free from the bonds by which the Plymouth colonists were enslaved. A letter addressed to the colonists and signed by thirteen of the merchants recited these facts and urged acceptance of the new comers on the specified terms." The new arrivals were allotted land in the area of the Eel River known as Hobs Hole, which became Wellingsley, a mile south of Plymouth Rock.

In September 1623, another ship arrived carrying settlers destined to refound the failed colony at Weymouth, and they stayed temporarily in Plymouth. In March 1624, a ship arrived bearing some additional settlers and the first cattle. A 1627 apportionment of cattle lists 156 colonists divided into 12 lots of 13 colonists each. Another ship arrived in August 1629, also named Mayflower, with 35 additional members of the Leiden congregation. Ships arrived throughout the period between 1629 and 1630 carrying new settlers, though the exact number is unknown; contemporaneous documents indicate that the colony had almost 300 people by January 1630. In 1643, the colony had an estimated 600 males fit for military service, implying a total population of about 2,000. The estimated total population of Plymouth County was 3,055 by 1690, on the eve of the colony's merger with Massachusetts Bay. For comparison, more than 20,000 settlers had arrived in the neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1640 (the Great Migration), and the colonial population of all New England was estimated to be about 60,000 by 1678. Plymouth was the first colony in the region, but it was much smaller than Massachusetts Bay Colony by the time that they merged.

Military history

Myles Standish

Myles Standish was the military leader of Plymouth Colony from the beginning. He was officially designated as the captain of the colony's militia in February 1621, shortly after the arrival of the Mayflower in December 1620. He organized and led the first party from the Mayflower to set foot in New England, an exploratory expedition of Cape Cod upon arrival in Provincetown Harbor. He also led the third expedition, during which Standish fired the first recorded shot by the Pilgrim settlers in the event known as the First Encounter. Standish had training in military engineering from the University of Leiden, and it was he who decided the defensive layout of the settlement when they finally arrived at Plymouth. He also organized the able-bodied men into military orders in February of the first winter. During the second winter, he helped design and organize the construction of a large palisade wall surrounding the settlement. Standish led two early military raids on Indigenous villages: the raid to find and punish Corbitant for his attempted coup, and the killing at Wessagussett called "Standish's raid." The former had the desired effect of gaining the respect of the local natives; the latter only served to frighten and scatter them, resulting in loss of trade and income.

When it appeared that the war would resume, four of the New England colonies (Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth) formed a defensive alliance known as the United Colonies of New England. Edward Winslow, already known for his diplomatic skills, was its chief architect. His experience in the United Provinces of the Netherlands during the Leiden years was key to organizing the confederation. John Adams later considered the United Colonies to be the prototype for the Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at a national American government. Of specific concern was the founding of the town of Swansea, located only a few miles from the Wampanoag capital at Mount Hope. The General Court of Plymouth began using military force to coerce the sale of Wampanoag land to the settlers of the town.

The proximate cause of the conflict was the killing of a Praying Indian named John Sassamon in 1675. Sassamon had been an advisor and friend to Philip before Sassamon's conversion to Christianity had driven the two apart. and in Plymouth the local magistrates reclaimed power.

The return of self-rule to Plymouth Colony was short-lived, however. A delegation of New Englanders led by Increase Mather went to England to negotiate a return of the colonial charters that had been nullified during the Dominion years. The situation was particularly problematic for Plymouth Colony, as it had existed without a formal charter since its founding. Plymouth did not get its wish for a formal charter; instead, a new charter was issued combining Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and other territories including Maine. The official date of the proclamation was October 17, 1691, legally ending the existence of Plymouth Colony, though it was not put into force until the arrival of the new royal governor Sir William Phips inaugurated the Province of Massachusetts Bay on May 14, 1692. The last official meeting of the Plymouth General Court occurred on June 8, 1692. The Pilgrims distinguished themselves from another branch of Puritans in that they sought to separate themselves from the Anglican Church, rather than reform it from within. It was this desire to worship from outside of the Anglican Communion that led them first to the Netherlands and ultimately to New England.

Each town in the colony was considered a single church congregation; in later years, some of the larger towns split into two or three congregations. Church attendance was mandatory for all residents of the colony, while church membership was restricted to those who had converted to the faith. In Plymouth Colony, it seems that a simple profession of faith was all that was required for acceptance as a member. This was a more liberal doctrine than the congregations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where it was common to conduct detailed interviews with those seeking formal membership. There was no central governing body for the churches. Each individual congregation was left to determine its own standards of membership, hire its own ministers, and conduct its own business. Church membership was socially vital. Education was carried out for religious purposes, motivated by a determination to teach the next generation how to read the Bible. The laws of the colony specifically asked parents to provide for the education of their children, "at least to be able duly to read the Scriptures" and to understand "the main Grounds and Principles of Christian Religion."

Marriage and family life

Edward Winslow and Susanna White both lost their spouses during the harsh winter of 1620–1621, and the two became the first couple to be married in Plymouth. Governor Bradford presided over the civil ceremony.

Childhood, adolescence, and education

Children generally remained in the direct care of their mothers until about the age of 8, after which it was not uncommon for the child to be placed in the foster care of another family.

The colony offered nearly all adult males potential citizenship. Full citizens, or freemen, were accorded full rights and privileges in areas such as voting and holding office. To be considered a freeman, adult males had to be sponsored by an existing freeman and accepted by the General Court. Later restrictions established a one-year waiting period between nominating and granting of freeman status, and also placed religious restrictions on the colony's citizens, specifically preventing Quakers from becoming freemen.

{| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right:1em"

|+ Governors of Plymouth Colony

! Dates

! Governor

| 1620

| John Carver

| 1621–1632

| William Bradford

| 1633

| Edward Winslow

| 1634

| Thomas Prence

| 1635

| William Bradford

| 1636

| Edward Winslow

| 1637

| William Bradford

| 1638

| Thomas Prence

| 1639–1643

| William Bradford

| 1644

| Edward Winslow

| 1645–1656

| William Bradford

| 1657–1672

| Thomas Prence

| 1673–1679

| Josiah Winslow

| 1680–1692

| Thomas Hinckley

The colony's most powerful executive was its Governor, who was originally elected by the freemen but was later appointed by the General Court in an annual election. The General Court also elected seven Assistants to form a cabinet to assist the Governor. The Governor and Assistants then appointed Constables who served as the chief administrators for the towns, and Messengers who were the main civil servants of the colony. They were responsible for publishing announcements, performing land surveys, carrying out executions, and a host of other duties. In 1625, the settlers had repaid their debts and thus gained complete possession of the colony. The colony was a de facto republic, since neither an English company nor the King and Parliament exerted any influence – a representative democracy governed on the principles of the Mayflower Compact ("self-rule").

Laws

As a legislative body, the General Court could make proclamations of law as needed. These laws were not formally compiled anywhere in the early years of the colony; they were first organized and published in the 1636 Book of Laws. The book was reissued in 1658, 1672, and 1685.

thumb|upright|Plymouth Colony seal

Official seal

The seal of the Plymouth Colony was designed in 1629 and is still used by the town of Plymouth. It depicts four figures within a shield bearing St George's Cross, each carrying the burning heart symbol of John Calvin. The seal was also used by the County of Plymouth until 1931.

Geography

Boundaries

thumb|left|1677 map of New England by [[William Hubbard (clergyman)|William Hubbard showing the location of Plymouth Colony. The map is oriented with west at the top.]]

Without a clear land patent for the area, the settlers settled without a charter to form a government and, as a result, it was often unclear in the early years what land was under the colony's jurisdiction. In 1644, "The Old Colony Line" – which had been surveyed in 1639 – was formally accepted as the boundary between Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth.

The situation was more complicated along the border with Rhode Island. Roger Williams settled in the area of Rehoboth in 1636, near modern Pawtucket. He was forcibly evicted in order to maintain Plymouth's claim to the area. Williams moved to the west side of the Pawtucket River to found the settlement of Providence, the nucleus for the colony of Rhode Island, which was formally established with the "Providence Plantations Patent" of 1644. Various settlers from both Rhode Island and Plymouth began to settle along the area, and the exact nature of the western boundary of Plymouth became unclear. The issue was not fully resolved until the 1740s, long after the dissolution of Plymouth Colony itself. Rhode Island had received a patent for the area in 1693, which had been disputed by Massachusetts Bay Colony. Rhode Island successfully defended the patent, and a royal decree in 1746 confirmed Rhode Island's territory along the eastern shore of the Narragansett Bay, including the mainland portion of Newport County and all of modern Bristol County, Rhode Island. The border itself continued to be contested by Massachusetts, first as a colony and later as a state, until as late as 1898, when the boundary was settled and ratified by both states.

Counties and towns

thumb|right|1890 map of Barnstable County, Massachusetts, showing the location and dates of incorporation of towns

For most of its history, the town was the primary administrative unit and political division of the colony. Plymouth Colony was not formally divided into counties until June 2, 1685, during the reorganization that led to the formation of the Dominion of New England. Three counties were composed of the following towns.

Barnstable, the shire town (county seat) of the county, first settled in 1639 and incorporated 1650.
Sandwich, first settled in 1637 and incorporated in 1639.
Rehoboth, first settled in 1644 and incorporated in 1645. Nearby to, but distinct from the Rehoboth settlement of Roger Williams, which is now the town of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Bridgewater, purchased from Massasoit by Myles Standish, and originally named Duxburrow New Plantation, it was incorporated as Bridgewater in 1656. They used such terms to indicate their place as God's elect, as they subscribed to the Calvinist belief in predestination.

In addition to the Pilgrims, the Mayflower carried "Strangers," the non-Puritan settlers placed on the Mayflower by the Merchant Adventurers who provided various skills needed to establish a colony. This also included later settlers who came for other reasons throughout the history of the colony and who did not adhere to the Pilgrim religious ideals. Besides cattle, there were also pigs, sheep, and goats raised in the colony.

Overall, there was little cash in Plymouth Colony, so most wealth was accumulated in the form of possessions. Trade goods such as furs, fish, and livestock were subject to fluctuations in price and were unreliable repositories of wealth. Durable goods represented an important source of economic stability for the residents, such as fine wares, clothes, and furnishings. To that point, the colony's economy had been entirely dependent on barter and foreign currency, including English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and counterfeit coins. In 1661, after the restoration of the monarchy, the English government considered the Boston mint to be treasonous. However, the colony ignored the English demands to cease operations until at least 1682, when Hull's contract expired, and the colony did not move to renew his contract or appoint a new mint master. The coinage was a contributing factor to the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter in 1684.

Legacy

The events surrounding the founding and history of Plymouth Colony have had a lasting effect on the art, traditions, mythology, and politics of the United States of America, despite the colony's short existence of less than 72 years.

Art, literature, and film

right|thumb|Front page of William Bradford's manuscript for [[Of Plimoth Plantation]]

The earliest artistic depiction of the Pilgrims was actually done before their arrival in America; Dutch painter Adam Willaerts painted a portrait of their departure from Delfshaven in 1620.

thumb|right|Embarkation of the Pilgrims by [[Robert W. Weir]]

Several contemporaneous accounts of life in Plymouth Colony have become both vital primary historical documents and literary classics. Of Plimoth Plantation (1630 and 1651) by William Bradford and Mourt's Relation (1622) by Bradford, Edward Winslow, and others are both accounts written by Mayflower passengers that provide much of the information which we have today regarding the trans-Atlantic voyage and early years of the settlement.

Benjamin Church wrote several accounts of King Philip's War, including Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War, which remained popular throughout the 18th century. An edition of the work was illustrated by Paul Revere in 1772. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God provides an account of King Philip's War from the perspective of Mary Rowlandson, an Englishwoman who was captured and held by Philip's tribe during the war. and frequently involves a family gathering with a large feast, traditionally featuring a turkey. Civic recognitions of the holiday typically include parades and football games. The holiday is meant to honor the First Thanksgiving, which was a feast of thanksgiving held in Plymouth in 1621, as first recorded in the book Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford, one of the Mayflower pilgrims and the colony's second governor.

The annual Thanksgiving holiday is a more recent creation. Throughout the early 19th century, the U.S. government had declared a particular day as a national day of Thanksgiving, but these were one-time declarations meant to celebrate a significant event, such as victory in a battle. The northeastern states began adopting an annual day of Thanksgiving in November shortly after the end of the War of 1812. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Boston's Ladies' Magazine, wrote editorials beginning in 1827 which called for the nationwide expansion of this annual day of thanksgiving to commemorate the Pilgrim's first feast. After nearly 40 years, Abraham Lincoln declared the first modern Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday in November in 1863. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress ultimately moved it to the fourth Thursday in November. After some sparring as to the date, the holiday was recognized by Congress as an official federal holiday in 1941.

Plymouth Rock

right|thumb|[[Plymouth Rock, inscribed with 1620, the year of the Pilgrims' landing in the Mayflower]]

One of the enduring symbols of the landing of the Pilgrims is Plymouth Rock, a large granodiorite boulder that was near their landing site at Plymouth. However, none of the contemporaneous accounts of the actual landing makes any mention that the Rock was the specific place of landing. The Pilgrims chose the site for their landing, not for the rock, but for a small brook nearby that was a source of fresh water and fish. a historical recreation of the original 1620 settlement; and the Wampanoag Homesite, which recreates a 17th-century Indian village. In America, Plymouth Colony initiated a democratic tradition that was followed by Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628), Connecticut Colony (1636), the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (1636), the Province of New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (1681). Roger Williams established Providence Plantations specifically as a safe haven for those who experienced religious persecution, thereby adding freedom of conscience to Plymouth's democratic model.

The Mayflower Society

The General Society of Mayflower Descendants, or The Mayflower Society, is a genealogical organization of individuals who have documented their descent from one or more of the 102 passengers who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. The Society was founded at Plymouth in 1897 and claims that tens of millions of Americans are descended from these passengers, and it offers research services for people seeking to document their descent.

Notes

References

Works cited

External links

Colonial America: Plymouth Colony 1620A short history of Plymouth Colony hosted at U-S-History.com, includes a map of all of the New England colonies.
The Plymouth Colony Archive Project A collection of primary sources documents and secondary source analysis related to Plymouth Colony.
Pilgrim ships from 1602 to 1638Pilgrim ships searchable by ship name, sailing date and passengers.
History of the Town of Plymouth 1620...Free Google eBook; PDF format

Plymouth Colony

First winter

Military history

Myles Standish

Marriage and family life

Childhood, adolescence, and education

Laws

Official seal

Geography

Boundaries

Counties and towns

Legacy

Art, literature, and film

Plymouth Rock

The Mayflower Society

See also

Monuments and other commemorations

Notes

References

Works cited

External links

First winter

Military history

Myles Standish

Marriage and family life

Childhood, adolescence, and education

Laws

Official seal

Geography

Boundaries

Counties and towns

Legacy

Art, literature, and film

Plymouth Rock

The Mayflower Society

See also

Locations related to Plymouth Colony

Monuments and other commemorations

Notes

References

Works cited

External links