A fast-growing Boston eclipses the Pilgrim town as
New England's center, but the two colonies form close bonds,
both religious and commercial.
Plymouth's role as
the prime community and seaport of New England was drastically--and
in just a few years--changed by a rising tide of Puritan colonization
that began in 1628.
On Sept. 6, 1628 the 120-ton Abigail, which had left England about
11 weeks earlier, sailed past Cape Ann into the harbor of Naumkeag
(Salem). On board was the willful, austere John Endecott with some
40 colonists, along with cattle and supplies, come to prepare the way
for what would be larger contingents of settlers of the then embryonic
Massachusetts Bay Company.
Endecott preemptively took over the small, struggling pioneer settlement
initiated in Naumkeag by the Dorchester Company, a group from the west
of England that had been seeking since 1623 to establish a colony and
religious haven on Cape Ann. Endecott's backers had bought out the
company. At the time of Endecott's arrival the Naumkeag colony was
being run by a sturdy Puritan, Roger Conant [a teacher of mine, Helen
Conant, descendant of Roger Conant], who had arrived on his own in
Plymouth on the Anne in 1623, left the following year and went on to
found Naumkeag in 1626.
Happily, Endecott and Conant's "old settlers" were able to compose
their differences; and promptly, in gratitude, the Naumkeag plantation
was renamed Salem, a biblical word for peace.
By the winter of 1628-1629 Salem was suffering difficulties such as
the Pilgrims had experienced in their early years--privations and illness.
Many, including Endecott's wife, were fatally stricken.
Endecott appealed to Gov. Bradford for help, and he dispatched Plymouth's
only physician, Samuel Fuller, after which Endecott thanked Bradford
for his "kind love and care in sending Mr. Fuller amongst us."
This intercolony friendship would be long-lasting.
Plymouth's population of roughly 200 was exceeded in 1629 with the
arrival in Salem of six vessels with 406 settlers sent by the Massachusetts
Bay Company. These vessels brought the Puritans an impressive copy
of the new Massachusetts Bay charter that King Charles had approved
March 4, 1629, along with provisions, cows, goats, horses and "great
pieces of ordnance."
For the Pilgrims, there were some new settlers for whom Plymouth had
been waiting many years--about 45 of the Leyden congregation were among
the passengers on two of the vessels that arrived in Salem.
Their passage had been arranged through Isaac Allerton in London and
the cost was contentedly added to the Pilgrims debt. Among these Pilgrims
was 19-year-old Thomas Willet, who would ably serve the Plymouth colony
and would one day become the first English mayor of New York.
Fuller's influence on Salem's settlers was far more than medicinal.
Fuller had been a deacon since 1609 in Leyden, and in the zealous Endecott
he found an admiring supporter. Endecott even wrote to Bradford, in
May 1629, that Fuller had satisfied him "touching your judgments of
the outward form of God's worship. It is, as far as I can gather, no
other than is warranted by the evidence of truth."
Endecott lost no time in acting on this belief. On July 20, about a
month after the 1629 ship arrivals began, Endecott held "a solemn day
of humiliation" to select a pastor and a ministerial teacher. And he
picked Aug. 6 for another day of humiliation [fasting], to choose elders
and deacons and to hold ordinations.
Head winds prevented Gov. Bradford and other Plymouth leaders from
reaching Salem in time for the ordinations, but they got there to join
the feasting and to extend "the right-hand of fellowship."
Thus the first Congregational Church, in the manner Fuller had described
to Endecott, was organized in the Bay colony. The covenant adopted
by the settlers is still extant.
Among the clergy who came over in 1629 was a Separatist Cambridge University
graduate, Rev. Ralph Smith. After serving briefly as minister to a
small, straggling settlement at Nantasket (Hull) in outer Boston Harbor.
Rev. Smith was late that year chosen and ordained as the first pastor
of the church in Plymouth, in much the same way Salem had organized
its church the prior summer. (The Pilgrims' faithful pastor, Rev. Robinson,
had died in Leyden March 1, 1625.)
Plymouth's ascendancy as New England's foremost port plainly declined
in June and July of 1630 with the arrival of Gov. John Winthrop with
the original Massachusetts Bay charter and eleven ships, 700 settlers
and tons of supplies--the largest fleet of colonists that had, up to
that time, set sail from England.
Actually, besides hundreds of sailors to man the ships, the overall
number of settlers would approximate 1000. In May, preceding Winthrop's
eleven ships, came two others from the west of England that brought
220 settlers, who would organize the town of Dorchester. And four more
ships would arrive later in the year. One of the last of these was
the Handmaid from London, which, before proceeding to Boston,
left 47 of its 60 passengers at Plymouth. These were the last of the
Leyden congregation brought over by the Pilgrims.
"As one small candle may light a thousand," said Bradford,
the light kindled by Plymouth "hath shone unto many, yea in some sort
to our whole nation. Let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the
praise."
Plymouth had long been seen as a beacon to other colonists. One of
our earliest historians, Rev. William Hubbard, wrote that the fame
of Plymouth,
"with the success thereof, was spread abroad" and encouraged investors.
Friendship continued to grow between Plymouth and Boston settlers;
they were more naturally companions than rivals. Religious convictions
had inspired both their emigrations, and their differences in religion
was mostly in their degree of Puritanism.
Winthrop and Bradford made visits to each other's colonies. They also
consulted on problems. An immediate, grievous one for Plymouth, a highly
law-abiding community, was how it should deal with its first murder,
which occured just a few weeks after Winthrop's arrival. (This was
in the very month--September 1630--that the Puritans rechristened "Trimountaine,"
naming it Boston in honor of Rev. Cotton, who came from Boston in Linconshire
[England].)
The violent and profane John Billington of London had waylaid a young
man in Plymouth after a quarrel, and shot him. Winthrop, said Bradford, "concurred
with them that he ought to die and the land be purged from blood." Billington
had been "found guilty of wilful murder by plain and notorious evidence...and
was for the same accordingly executed." It was the first of very few
executions in Plymouth.
Rampant illness and death, the common lot of America's pioneer plantations,
would be the tragic experience of Winthrop's colonists, too. Deputy
Gov. Thomas Dudley [I know his direct descendant, Tom Dudley] told
of the Puritans shock when the Arbella, Winthrop's flagship,
arrived in Salem on June 12, 1630. "We found the colony in a sad and
unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before;
and many of those alive weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst
them all hardly sufficient to feed them for a fortnight...."
In July Winthrop shifted his settlers to Charlestown. Salem, as Dudley
explained, had
"pleased us not." But sickness and mortality followed them. Plymouth's
Fuller, who had already treated the first settlers in Dorchester--where
he "let some 20 of these people blood"--also went to Charlestown.
"The sad news here,"
he wrote Bradford, "is that many are sick, and that many are dead.
The Lord in mercy look upon them! I can do them no good, for I want
(lack) drugs, and things fitting to work with."
When incoming ships brought word (for war was raging in Europe) that
there were "some French preparations against us,"
the newcomers built "dispersedly" on the Charles and Mystic rivers.
The building effort--"lest the winter should surprise us"--was interrupted
by illness. "Many died weekly," said Dudley, "yea, almost daily." It
might be said of them, as of "those of Plymouth," that "there is not
a house where there is not one dead, in some houses many."
As the Puritans' ships started back to Europe, "not much less than
a hundred (some think many more), partly out of dislike of our government,
which restrained and punished their excesses, and partly through fear
of famine...went from us..." Later, when Dudley learned that many of
those who left had died, he remarked, "We see there are graves in other
places as well as with us."
Things began improving for the colony early in 1631 when the Lion,
which had been hastened back to Europe by Winthrop on this mission,
arrived in Boston Feb 9 with "fresh supplies of victuals." Its safe
arrival led to Feb 22's being set as "a general day of Thanksgiving
throughout the whole colony."
There was still another Thanksgiving Day that fall in a much better
off, indeed, a comfortably supplied colony. On Nov. 4, after the Lion
came again to Boston--this time with 60 passengers--Winthrop was able
to welcome his wife and their children. There was widespread joy despite
the death en route of the child whose birth had kept Margaret Winthrop
from traveling with her husband.
Compared to Plymouth, the Bay colony's growth in population was meteoric.
Fully 200 ships, with emigrants fleeing the dictatorial, disintegrating
rule of King Charles, arrived in Boston in the decade of the 1630's.
By 1635 the colony's population was 7000 (which Plymouth colony would
not approach until the late 1670's) and by 1640 the Bay had 16,000
settlers. [War is a great mover of populations and religious communities.]
Their arrival in the Bay, with many moving on into the interior, created
a highly profitable market. Telling of it, Bradford wrote: "It pleased
God in these times so to bless the country with such access and confluence
of people into it, as it was thereby much enriched, and cattle of all
kinds stood at a high rate for divers years together...Corn also went
at a round rate." And so did the English wheat they had started planting
in the Plymouth colony.
Boston, with its harbor far broader and deeper than Plymouth's, had
quickly become the New England center for trade, commerce and finance.
Plymouth, exchanging its cattle, corn and wheat, could more advantageously
obtain its English necessities in the Boston rather than English market.
When the London adventurers came to settling accounts with Plymouth,
one transaction was completed by Gov. Bradford's sending cattle to
Boston to settle an adventurers account with Gov. Winthrop.
Rev. Roger Williams, who was banished from the Bay colony in 1636,
had been in New England for five years and had resided in both Plymouth
and Boston. The clergyman--who with Winthrop's covert help, fled so
as to escape deportation to England--was certainly a firsthand and
unprejudiced observer when he described Boston, only five years after
its founding, as "the chief mart and port of New England. [And
this same Roger Williams went down to Rhode Island, obtained a charter,
and established Rhode Island with a Constitution which was a model
for the religious freedoms granted to us in The United States Constitution.
The total freedom of religion established in Rhode Island made possible
the founding of the first sabbatarian Church of God in Rhode Island
when Steven Mumford and his wife moved from London and the severe persecutions
being brought against Sabbatarians at that time in 1661. I believe
it was Roger Williams who founded the Baptist movement in America and its first
church, right in Rhode Island. The very language of William the Silent
of Holland granting religious tolerance in Holland was copied into
Roger Williams' constitution for Rhode Island.] [To learn more about these Sabbatarian Church of God believers (and Roger Williams) escape from England and their settling in Rhode Island, and then moving westward across America, log onto: http://www.unityinchrist.com/history/historycog1.htm ]
[If you are in the Boston area, be sure to pay a visit to Plimoth Plantation,
an interactive museum and recreation of the Plymouth Plantation as
it existed in the early 1620's. Check out their web site at: http://www.plimoth.org ]
To
quote a famous 1960’s tune, “The times, they are a changin”.
After September 11, 2001 we have all become aware of the fact that
the world has become a more dangerous place to live in, even within
the borders of the United States. September 11th should be a wake-up
call for all Christians and those who think they are Christians.
If you were to die today-tonight-would you be assured of your place
in God’s heavenly kingdom, a recipient of eternal life? The
words of the apostle Paul ring out across the centuries asking this
age-old question “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith;
prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus
Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates.” Dr. Charles F. Stanley
poses this same eternal question in his sermon “What Does It
Mean To Believe In Jesus”. And he gives three essential criteria
that will help you answer that question in your own personal life.
The assurance of your eternity is worth confirming. http://www.unityinchrist.com/faith/whatis.htm to
find out if “Jesus Christ is in you.”