Colonial Literature – Puritan Beginnings – Smith, Bradford, & Morton
Colonial Literature – Puritan Beginnings – Smith, Bradford, & Morton
1 Introduction to Literature of Colonial America
Jenifer Kurtz and Wendy Kurant
The literature of this section highlights the different groups who traveled from England to the new world. Some of these groups came for the purpose of practicing their religion freely, but many came for secular reasons. The Jamestown colony in Virginia (founded in 1607), a territory which originally included not only the current state of Virginia but also the northern parts of North Carolina up to the Long Island Sound in New York, was founded as a commercial venture. Those traveling on the Mayflower founded the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. This group represented a mix of goals, as some colonists wanted to build a religion separate from the Church of England—known as the Separatists—and some had commercial interests in the new world. This mix of interests was a motivating factor behind the Mayflower Compact. The most religiously focused early colony was that of the Puritans, a group of around 1000 Puritan refugees who settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Their desire was to purify the Church of England, and their colony consisted of a devout group of people (men, women, and children) who were dedicated to that goal.
Figure 1. Map of Colonial North America 1762
More colonies soon joined those in Massachusetts and Virginia. In 1632, Lord Baltimore (1605–1675) was given a charter for land north of the Potomac River. A Catholic, Baltimore established the colony of Maryland as a place of religious tolerance. A charter for the Carolinas, a territory which extended well beyond the modern borders of those states, was granted in 1663 and settlers established one of the first colonies under this charter near Charleston, South Carolina. In 1681, Pennsylvania was granted by King Charles II to William Penn (1644–1718) in repayment of a debt owed to Penn’s father. The colony became a refuge for members of the Society of Friends or Quakers, as Penn was a recent convert to the denomination. Georgia was the last of the original colonies. Founded in 1732, the colony was intended primarily as a bulwark between the English colonies to the north and the Spanish colonies to the south.
Native American Interactions
Certainly, this ongoing expansion of English colonies caused continual tension with the Native American tribes already occupying the territory. The Powhatan Confederacy, a union of tribes occupying the tidewater Virginia region, alternately collaborated with and fought against the Jamestown colony from its founding until 1645, when the English forced the confederacy to surrender and cede land. In New England, the Pequod War (1636–1638) was one of the first significant fights between the colonies in Massachusetts and the local tribes, pitting the Pequod tribe against the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies, the Narragansett tribe. The natives of New England continued