Why did the Puritans leave England to create a New England?
New England: The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies-To the north, a settlement very different from Virginia was established in 1620. A religious group known as Pilgrims established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620. While still aboard their ship, these Pilgrims wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, in which they agreed to cooperate with one another by obeying laws framed "for the general good of the colony."
These Pilgrims were part of a Protestant sect known as Puritans. All Puritans, including the Pilgrims, believed that the official Church of England had become corrupted, and they hoped to "purify" it by emphasizing the Bible rather than ritual as the basis for religion. Their religious feelings had led the Pilgrims to flee England for Holland, from where they then traveled to North America. There, the Pilgrims hoped to establish a society in which settlers lived according to their understanding of Christianity. Theirs was a demanding faith. It accepted Swiss theologian John Calvin's doctrine of predestination, which meant that God had already determined whether each person was saved or damned. While these Pilgrims strove to be good and devout, they also believed that their actions could not affect their salvation.
While early settlers in the Chesapeake hoped to become wealthy, the Pilgrims hoped to create a Christian utopia in a land that they soon called New England. They were separatists, who believed that the Church of England was so corrupt that they could create their model of a Christian society only by leaving it entirely. Like the Virginia colonists, these English settlers were assisted by the local Indians, the Wampanoag, who helped the Pilgrims adjust to their new environment. At harvest time in 1621, the Pilgrims were grateful to have survived their first year, and so celebrated Thanksgiving with their Indian neighbors. By 1622, however, Pilgrims and Indians began fighting against one another.
A later group of settlers, from a different part of the Puritan movement, were much larger and more influential than the Plymouth Pilgrims. Four hundred of these Puritans began to arrive in North America in 1629. While aboard their ship, the Arbella, in 1629, John Winthrop, a minister who had been elected governor of the new colony, preached perhaps the most famous sermon in American history. This was A Model of Christian Charity, in which he referred to the Puritans' effort to create a Christian society as "a city upon a hill." According to Winthrop, the entire world was watching the Puritans' effort, which would provide a model of a perfected Christian society for other people to copy.
Nearly twenty thousand settled during the Great Puritan Migration of the 1630s and 1640s. They founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which included the town of Boston. These Puritans also thought that the Church of England had corrupted the Christian faith, but believed that it could still be reformed. They objected to the Church of England's hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, and insisted that individual congregations should be independent and govern themselves. As a result, they were commonly called Congregationalists.
The Great Migration added greatly to tensions with nearby Indians. In 1637, Puritans and Indians fought the Pequot War. In a notorious incident during that war, Puritan men massacred some six hundred women, children, and elderly by surrounding and torching an Indian village along the Mystic river.