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84 PERIOD 2 Colonial America amid Global Change: 1607–1754

Pilgrims king’s conversion to Protestantism, the Church of England retained many Catholic
Also known as Separatists, practices, which is why groups such as the Pilgrims and, later, the Puritans — who
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
a group of English religious would go on to colonize New England during the seventeenth century — also attracted
dissenters who established followers.
a settlement at Plymouth,
Massachusetts, in 1620.
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Puritans
Radical English Protestants ■ How did competition and conflict between European nations change as a
who hoped to reform
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
the Church of England. result of the Protestant Reformation?
The first Puritan settlers
in the Americas arrived in
Massachusetts in 1630.
Pilgrims Arrive in Massachusetts

In Great Britain, critics of the Church of England formed a number of congregations
in the early seventeenth century, and some sought refuge in Virginia. In the 1610s, to
raise capital, the Virginia Company began offering legal charters to groups of private
investors, who were promised their own tract of land in the Virginia colony with mini-
mal company oversight. One such charter was purchased by a group of English Pilgrims
(also known as Separatists) who wanted to form a separate church and community in a
land untainted by other faiths. Unlike more mainstream Protestants, the Pilgrims aimed
to cut all connections with the Church of England.
Setting sail on the Mayflower from England in September 1620, the Pilgrims never
made it to Virginia. Blown off course by a storm, they landed far up the coast, north of
the Dutch in New Amsterdam. Because a religious community wholly separate from the
Church of England was more important to the Pilgrims than its specific location, they
decided to remain on the Massachusetts coast, establishing a permanent settlement at
Plymouth.
The Pilgrim Separatists who booked passage on the Mayflower in 1620 migrated as
organized households, each headed by an elder male church member and accompanied
by their families and servants. Finding themselves off course at Cape Cod in present-day
Massachusetts, the male heads of households, led by William Bradford, signed a pact to
form a “civill body politick” that followed the Separatist model of a self-governing reli-
gious congregation. In effect, the Pilgrims wrote and signed the first written constitu-
Mayflower Compact tion adopted in North America, the Mayflower Compact, before leaving the ship. They
Written agreement created by considered their agreement necessary because they settled in a region where they had
the Pilgrims upon their arrival no legal authority.
in Plymouth. It was the first After several forays along the coast of Cape Cod, the Pilgrims eventually located an
written constitution adopted uninhabited village surrounded by cornfields, where they established Plymouth. Uncer-
in North America.
tain of native inhabitants’ intentions, the Pilgrims were unsettled by sightings of Amer-
ican Indians. They did not realize that a smallpox epidemic in the area only two years
earlier had killed nearly 90 percent of the local Wampanoag population. Indeed, fevers
and other diseases proved far more deadly to the Pilgrim settlers than did the Wampa-
noag. By the spring of 1621, only half of the 102 English colonists from the Mayflower
remained alive.
Desperate to find food, the survivors were stunned when two English-speaking
American Indians — Samoset and Squanto — appeared at Plymouth that March. Both
had been captured as young boys by English explorers, and they now negotiated a frag-
ile peace between the Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag tribe. Although
concerned by the power of English guns, Massasoit hoped to create an alliance that
would assist him against his traditional native enemies, including the Massachusetts
tribe. With Wampanoag assistance, the surviving Pilgrims soon regained their health.

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