Together, they have been marketed with such persuasive repetition that we have ceased to doubt their importance or make a distinction between them.īut there were genuine differences in how they viewed the world. In the maw of American myth, Pilgrims and Puritans have melded and congealed in memory they endure, branded in the strands of our cultural DNA. This ruling elite carried piety on their shoulders and paranoia tucked into their high stockings, distinctive for their pinched lips and the injustices they inflicted on others. They established towns around Boston and forged a theocracy of magistrates and Congregational clergymen to control the growing population. They overwhelmed the same Native Americans so helpful to Mayflower survivors. They introduced New England to a lingering burden of guilt and existential angst. They branded the land with the Protestant Ethic. Massachusetts Puritans set the intellectual tone of the country for three centuries. Intent on creating a City upon a Hill and a New Jerusalem in North America, Bay Colony leaders demanded strict conformity in religious belief and practice. Nevertheless, Puritans were infinitely more influential in providing the pitch and tenor for the colonies than the Pilgrims: more numerous, more literate, more controlling. Fear of further repression quickened decision-making and, by 1640, New England colonies would be home to nearly 20,000 mostly Puritan immigrants.ĭespite doctrinal differences, the two communities were not hostile to one another because, with boatloads of the godly arriving, the Bay Colony was steadily becoming more Separatist (even though Winthrop denied it) by the year. They were fleeing the royal wrath of King Charles I and Bishop William Laud, who were escalating persecution of dissidents.įor those who believed in simple Sunday services based on the Bible, without the intrusion of Roman rituals, it was time to leave. In 1630, John Winthrop led some 1,000 English Puritans in the initial wave of the Great Migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, north of Plymouth. These Puritans remained at home during the 1620s and, through participation in Parliament, tried to prod the Stuart kings toward toleration. The far larger group, those we know as Puritans or Nonseparating Episcopalians, reluctantly retained attachment to the English Church but were determined to cleanse it of remnants of Roman Catholicism. Around a hundred Separatists left England in 1607-08 in search of religious freedom in the Netherlands many of them later migrated to America in 1620 aboard Mayflower. Their desertion was an ecclesiastical insult to the king as head of the Anglican Church and a crime punishable by jail or death. While both followed the teaching of John Calvin, a cardinal difference distinguished one group from the other: Pilgrims were Puritans who had abandoned local parishes and formed small congregations of their own because the Church of England was not holy enough to meet their standards. Pilgrims and Puritans were Protestants who differed in degree. He was playing a parlor pastime, but her answer confirms the confusion most of us have in sorting out New World newcomers, their sartorial choices and the myths they fostered-particularly concerning the origins of Thanksgiving. My friend said, "It's a bit more complicated than that." She squirmed and, after a moment, sputtered: "They're both English, aren't they? Big black hats with broad brims. A benign smile filled his face as the woman to his right, a successful business executive, suddenly found herself in a predicament similar to that of the lepidopterist's mounted butterfly. One night I eavesdropped when he posed the question. At dinner parties, after exhausting insignificant chatter, he would lean conspiratorially to his table companion and ask, "Can you tell me the difference between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?" An elderly man I knew in Newport, Rhode Island, relished social gamesmanship.
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