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Colony at Salem

47. The Puritans. While the Pilgrims were planting their home on the lonely American shore, the Puritans in England were being cruelly persecuted by Charles I. So great became their sufferings and dangers that the Puritan leaders decided to go to America, where they could worship as they pleased. Charles I, fortunately, gave them a very good charter. But even before this, some of the Puritans had already planted a colony at Salem.

JOHN WINTHROP

From a portrait painted by John Singleton Copley; reproduced by permission of the trustees of Harvard University

John Winthrop founded Boston, 1630

48. John Winthrop. The Puritan leaders elected John Winthrop governor of the new colony. In the spring of 1630, nearly ten years after the Mayflower sailed, more than seven hundred Puritans, in eleven ships, bade good-by to their beautiful English homes, crossed the ocean, and settled in what is now Boston.

John Winthrop, the leader and governor of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, the name given to the Salem and Boston settlements, was then about forty years old, and had been in college at Cambridge, in England. He was a man of high social position.

What the Puritans gave up

The Puritans who came with Winthrop were people of property, and not only parted from friends and kindred when they came to the wild shores of America, but both men and women gave up lives of comfort and pleasure for lives of suffering and hardship. In America, the men had to cut down trees, work in the fields, and fight Indians. Only brave men and women act in this way. But no one among them gave up more or was willing to suffer more than their leader. The people elected him governor almost every year until his death, in 1649.

Character of Winthrop

John Winthrop was a firm man with many noble qualities, and not once, while governor, did he do anything merely to please the people if he thought it wrong.

When a leading man in the colony sent him a bitter letter, he returned it saying that he did not wish to keep near him so great a cause of ill feeling. This answer made the writer Winthrop's friend. When food was scarce in the colony, Winthrop divided his last bit of bread with the poor, and worked with his laborers in the fields.

Many new towns in Massachusetts

While Winthrop was ruling the colony, hundreds of settlers came and settled many other towns around Boston, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony grew large in the number of its people. Later the old Plymouth Colony was united with it to form one colony. But these settlers did not always agree, especially in regard to religion and government.