APOLOGIES:  This page was initially titled The Puritans for those who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  This colony was my focus because when Mom and I began our research in the 1970’s we thought that it was the only colony to which our first ancestors immigrated from England:  We thought that John Bishop immigrated in 1628 and that Isaac Cummings followed in 1630.  But as my page – “Research Surprises” – has painstakingly demonstrated, we were wrong!

Through the remarkable site – FamilyResearch.org – I discovered that only Isaac Cummings was a member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that he only arrived in 1635.  Another surprise was the degree to which our Cummings ancestors were involved in the Salem Witch Trials. And an even bigger surprise was that our Bishop ancestors were never even in New England.  John Bishop immigrated to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia in 1638 with a land grant from the Crown to establish a tobacco plantation.  But the biggest surprise of all was that we do indeed have Mayflower ancestors – 12 in all.  And 10 of them survived that first horrific winter to thrive for many generations in Plymouth Colony.

So amazingly, our ancestors come from not one, but all three of the first significant British colonies in America.  And this has meant that my historical introduction to what was only supposed to be one colony, has had to get a whole lot longer.  So long in fact that our Mayflower history now requires its own story – especially due to the sheer volume of detailed information we have about each one of these ancestors.

And so this page will focus on only two of the colonies – Jamestown, the home of our first Bishop ancestors, and Massachusetts Bay, home to our first Cummings ancestors.  I’ll share the radically different reasons each colony was settled, as well as the small parts each of our early ancestors played in their development.

But be forewarned:  This is a very LONG page.  I could not help myself.  I was so fascinated and entertained by all that I learned that I couldn’t leave anything out.  But I’ve done my best to fill it with as much hilarity as these two, often absurd, colonial mindsets deserve.  And SO I do hope you’ll give it a go – maybe with a strong cup of joe – and early in the mo.  There are Two Easter Eggs waiting for you, if you do! 

Neither the noblemen nor the servants had even the most basic skills necessary for surviving in this hot and humid climate where diseases were easily transmitted through hoards of insects. Nor did they have farming skills for this unfamiliar terrain, nor the diplomatic or even military skills to deal with the less than welcoming indigenous population.  The Crown, however. anxious for financial return, repeatedly sent supplies and new settlers – despite there being no gold, a lack of any real farming success, and reports of high death rates from disease, starvation and violent interactions with the local native tribe.  

Only in 1612 when John Rolfe brought sweet and mild tobacco seed from the West Indies – highly sought after in the UK – did this crop begin to generate real profits.  And then, with the introduction of slave labour from Africa in 1619, Jamestown as a financial success took off.  

Jamestown is often considered the birthplace of Democracy.  But Plymouth Colony will mount a strong contest for this position – which we’ll explore in the Mayflower stories.  However, because Jamestown instituted America’s first representational government and because Virginia would later birth Thomas Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence – as well as George Washington – America’s Daddy, Jamestown continues to make this claim.  A more accurate account is that the House of Burgess was anything but democratic.  Jamestown, with its Crown charter, was under the strict control of King James, who only granted land to English noblemen – who were consequently the only ones who could vote or hold office. So when years later the Burgesses began to move against the Crown it was for the simple reason that that they wanted to call the shots.  And they definitely didn’t want to be paying the high taxes the king was demanding.  But they had no intention whatsoever of giving up the political power they enjoyed.

Important clarification before exploring this colony:  There were two distinct groups of Puritans – the Separatists and the Non-Separatists.  The Separatists wanted quite simply to separate completely from the Church of England.  Their strong opposition to both the Church and the Crown made England unsafe for them and so they escaped to Holland in 1608.  And then when even liberal Holland became unsafe they left for America, traveling on the Mayflower in 1620, and settling the small colony of Plymouth.  Our Mayflower ancestors come from this group of Puritans and we’ll learn more about them in Our Mayflower Story.  

The Non-Separatists wanted to remain a part of the Church, but they wanted to reform it, while still remaining loyal to the Crown – which begrudgingly tolerated them.  But with increasing political instability in England these Puritans also came under threat and so decided they could better reform the Church from the other side of the ocean, and so began a massive immigration in 1630 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the leadership of John Winthrop.  This is the colony to which our Cummings ancestors came.  And it is their story we’ll now explore.

But fear not… the Calvinists had a clever work-around.  If you were one of God’s chosen you wouldn’t want to behave badly.  Therefore your good behaviour was evidence that you were indeed one of God’s chosen. At the same time ANY behavioural slip-up was proof you were not one of his chosen. My guess is that the question of who would decide what was good or bad behaviour was at the heart of this issue. For despite the purported goal of Calvinism to more closely adhere to the original teachings of Jesus, compassion and forgiveness didn’t seem to be a high priority.

If anything these Reformers seemed to resonate far more with the punitive hell, fire and brimstone nature of the Old Testament, than to any of Jesus’s teachings.  And this further suggests that the purported desire of these Calvinists to dispense with hierarchical authority, didn’t apply when it came to local civil governance.  In this domain social control, meaning strict conformity among adherents, was precisely what they were after – and markedly so among these Boston Puritans.

Moreover they had moved to a hostile territory where cooperation was of utmost importance for their very survival. So pretty quickly the concept of freedom to worship as one chose became far less important than social cohesion and conformity to a clearly defined set of behaviours.  Moreover the question of who would determine what was good or bad behaviour became for the first time a political one.  As a result, a great deal of personal freedom more or less flew out the window.  And one of the first freedoms to go was the issue of church attendance.  Non-attendance quickly became equated with evidence of not being one of God’s chosen. And worse, it was met with severe public shaming and even physical punishment. 

Here is an idealised depiction of John Winthrop delivering his famous “Shining City on a Hill” sermon upon the arrival of his ship the Arabella to Boston Harbon on June 12, 1630.   The theme of this sermon expressed the Non-Separatist intention of becoming a model of the reforms they wanted to see in the Church of England – in particular the granting to each individual the right to communicate directly with God without the interference of King or clergy.   But we’ll now learn more about the less savoury contents of Winthrop’s sermon when it came to the matter of establishing the social order for the new colony and, in particular, who would be in charge.

 The Importance of Education to the Puritans.  

Education had long been of high value among Puritans and the majority of those who first came to the colonies had been formally educated in England.  The primary motivation for literacy was to be able to read the Bible, but the benefits of such skills to these colonists was equally fundamental in their ability to organise themselves, and work cooperatively to set up a functioning government and economy.  So it’s of little surprise that in 1636 – a mere 6 years after the arrival of the Puritans to Boston – that Harvard University was founded.  

This was in sharp contrast to the majority of immigrants to the southern colonies – most of whom were poor and illiterate.  Most had come as indentured servants and would often die from disease and overwork long before they could receive the freedom and plot of land promised to them for their seven years of hard labor.  Certainly no attempt was ever made to educate these immigrants just as education would be denied to the black slaves who followed them.  It was only when Southern land owners began seeing how financially successful the northern colonists were becoming that they began educating their own children – sending them to institutions of higher learning in the North and eventually establishing their own.  William and Mary was only founded in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1693 under a royal charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II – nearly 60 years after Harvard.

Ironically literacy would be instrumental in both the early success of the Puritan colonies, as well their ultimate decline, for the simple reason that you cannot teach people to read and then expect them not to think.  And think critically they did, so it wasn’t long before serious rifts among the Puritans began to form.

More than a century later Jefferson would base his doctrine of separation of Church and State on the ideals of Roger Williams. But sadly, few of our Cummings ancestors exhibited any of these admirable qualities until long after the horrors of the Salem Witch Trials, when one of our Mayflower descendants – Lovina Caldwell – married Isaac Jennings Cummings and gave birth to Lola’s grandfather, Albert Webster Cummings, whose Methodist ministry echoed so many of Roger Williams values.

Likewise, Jefferson might have paid greater attention to Williams treatment of America’s indigenous tribes, who had in so many ways helped the earliest colonial settlers survive at all, and in exchange for so very little, only to eventually be driven from nearly all of their lands and massacred nearly out of existence.  I’ll more fully explore the relationship between the indigenous population and the Puritans in OUR MAYFLOWER STORY, where I’ll share both detailed stories about their interactions, as well as the mental gymnastics employed by so many Puritans to justify their often barbarous treatment of these native tribes.  And this kinda leads us directly to . . .

For in the same way that the Puritans had to do some serious cerebral acrobatics to justify their habitual slaughtering of the indigenous population, so were they equally successful in readjusting their values from the spiritual to the material as their financial successes grew. Understanding what brought about such enormous successes is both complex and fascinating.  On the one hand the Puritan work ethic – an idle hand is the devil’s playground – provided a firm base for their success.  And adding to that was the Puritan aversion to ostentatious displays of wealth. Remember they’d left both the Catholic church and then the even the Church of England in opposition to the opulence – the pomp and circumstance of both.  So when the Puritan settlers began making profits, but were unable to allow themselves luxuries, they did what any reasonable Puritan would do… they reinvested their profits, leading to an ever-increasing accumulation of wealth.  And just as good behaviour had become for the Puritan’s proof of being one of God’s chosen, so financial success likewise came to be considered at minimum proof of His approval.  

But perhaps the greatest contributing factor to the settlements’ tremendous financial growth was the confluence of the poor quality of New England soil – too poor for anything but the most basic foodstuffs – at the same time that the global economy was disassociating wealth from land ownership, resulting from the rapid expansion of European exploration and the trade of goods.  So as a matter of survival the Puritans had to enlist their well-educated ingenuity towards other means of creating income.  And as many of these first settlers were already skilled craftsmen and experienced entrepreneurs, in addition to being literate, hard-working and good at accumulating and reinvesting capital, it wasn’t long before New England became the centre of America’s fast-growing industrial economy.  

It cannot however be understated the wealth of resources these clever and hard working colonists had to work with – the lucrative beaver skin trade, fishing and the timber from vast hard wood forests.  Timber was initially used to build almost everything the colonists needed and was also marketed in the UK and the West Indies.  But the real wealth came from ship building, followed by the cycle of international trade of both goods and slaves – between the northern colonies, England, Europe, Africa and the southern colonies.  For while slavery was generally looked down upon in the northern colonies, making money from carrying them from Africa to the southern colonies was not.
 

For Your Amusement 

To get some sense of the minds at work in getting the first colonies off the ground, here are two documents – the first of which describes a common joint-stock contract necessary for establishing a colony, and the second details the extensive list of items the settlers were expected to bring with them in order to survive the first year – a list the Jamestown settlers would have done well to possess.  

It’s especially fun to note that the joint-stock contract described below is quite possibly the one created for the Mayflower passengers’ plan to settle the Hudson Bay Colony.  For it includes the name – William Mullins – one of our Mayflower ancestors.  

It’s important to remember that the Puritans frowned on nearly any kind of pleasure – so much so that at one point the High Court had the Psalms re-written in plainer language, because they were considered too poetic.  So it was quite a feat for Ann to write at all, let alone in such a way that she would not further ruffle any feathers.  Therefore much of the content of her work was in high praise of God and her gratitude for her subservient position as wife and mother.  But within her work there was no shortage of thinly disguised ironic messages which on surface appeared to support the notion that a woman’s role was better served with a needle in hand than a pen – while demonstrating with the sophisticated complexity of her poetry her obvious intelligence and talent.  

We can thank her brother-in-law who – recognising her extraordinary talent, but unbeknownst to her – took a collection of her poems to London and had them published.  They were highly received in London almost immediately, and not long after in the colonies.  So before her death she would gain the distinction of being the first published female poet in America. 

By the time Anne Bradstreet died in 1672, all those who wanted a freer and more compassionate life than the General Court would allow had left.  While those who remained succumbed to greater and greater restrictions.  Winthrop’s dream that they would create a “shining city on a hill” never materialised and those who remained seemed to clutch ever more fervently to the Old Testament hell, fire and brimstone interpretation of the Bible – making them ripe for the horrors of the Salem Witch Trails to come.  And when we explore the trials we’ll have to face the shame regarding the roles some of our Cummings ancestors played in them.  But we can also witness a kind of redemption through the blending of the Cummings line with that of Mary Towne Easty’s, which will explore with Mary’s story and her role in the trials.

But before we turn to the trials we need to complete our exploration of the three British colonies we are heir to by looking at our connection to the Mayflower passengers and the Plymouth Colony they created.