Some people made journey to the New World for religious reasons. Thus the word ‘pilgrims’ has a special meaning for Americans. To them it is a small group of English men and women who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the year of 1620 to find religious freedom. They are called Pilgrim Fathers, because they are seen as the most important of the founders of the future Unite States of America.
These people disliked the elaborate ceremonies and the rich decorations of the official Church of England, established by Henry VIII in the 1530s as a Protestant church, which nevertheless was still too much like the Catholic Church. They were called Puritans because they wanted the Church of England to become more plain and simple, or ‘pure’.
They were the followers of John Calvin’s ideas that each individual was directly responsible to God and thus e did not need the Pope or the priests to enable them to speak to God. Such ideas seemed to threaten the status of the king as head of the church, so when James I, who believed in the monarch’s divine power, became king of England in 1603 he began fining the Puritans and putting them to prison. To escape persecution, a small group of them left England for America on board the Mayflower in search for a new home and freedom. On December 21, 1620 they set up a camp at a place they named Plymouth.
With lack of food and unfavorable climate the ‘pilgrims’ had little chance of surviving. Before spring came, half of a hundred settlers were dead. But the Pilgrims were determined to survive. They built better houses and learned to fish and hunt. Friendly Amerindians gave them seeds of corn and showed them how to plant it. In November 1621 they sat down to eat together with the local Amerindians and to give thanks to God for enabling them to survive the hardships of their first year in America. Every year since then on the fourth Thursday in November Americans celebrate a holiday called Thanksgiving.
Other English Puritans followed the Pilgrims to America. Ten years later a much larger group of almost a thousand colonists made their settlement in Boston, which became prosperous from the start as more and more Puritans kept arriving. Many years later, in 1691, it combined with the Plymouth colony under the name of Massachusetts. The ideas of the Massachusetts Puritans had a lasting influence on American society, which was supposed to be ‘an ideal community for the rest of mankind to learn from’. The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that governments had a duty to make people obey God’s will. They passed laws to force people to attend church and laws to punish drunks and adulterers.
Those who disagreed that the same men should control both the church and government, like in Massachusetts, went south where they set up a new colony called Rhode Island. It promised its citizens compete religious freedom and separation of church and state. To this day this idea is very important in America. By the end of the 17th century a string of English colonies stretched along the east coast of North America.
In 1681 another colony of Pennsylvania (founded by William Penn) was set somewhat in the middle. W. Penn belonged to a religious group called Quakers, who refused to swear oaths or to take part in wars. His promise of religious freedom attracted many Irish, German and Dutch emigrants, later known as Pennsylvania Dutch.
New York had been previously called New Amsterdam, because it was settled by the Dutch in 1626, but in 1664 the English captured and re-named it. (*In the 1620s the Dutch settlers founded a colony called New Netherlands along the Hudson River, at the mouth of which lies Manhattan Island – the present site of New York City. An Amerindian people called Shinnecock (Шиннекок) used this island for hunting and fishing, though they did not live there. In 1626 Peter Minuit, the first Dutch governor of the New Netherlands, ‘bought’ Manhattan from the Shinnecock. He paid them about $ 24 worth of cloth, beads and other trade goods. Like all Amerindians, the Shinnecock believed that land belonged to all men. They thought that they were selling the Dutch the right to share Manhattan with themselves. But the Dutch, like other Europeans, believed that buying land made it their alone. These different beliefs about land ownership were to be a major cause of conflicts between Europeans and Amerindians for many years to come. And the bargain price that Peter Minuit paid for Manhattan Island became part of American folklore.)
In 1670 the English founded the new colonies of North and South Carolina. The last colony to be founded in North America was Georgia (in 1733).
By 1733 the English owned 13 separate colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. The colonies stretched from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south. Most people divided them into three groups, each having its own way of life and character.
In the far north was the New England group (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts) centered on Massachusetts. The nearest colonies to the south of New England were called the Middle Colonies (Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland), the biggest of which were New York and Pennsylvania. Most of the inhabitants were farmers, craftsmen and merchants. The southern colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, which made the third group, had wealthy landowners of large plantations with black slaves to work on them. All the English colonies in America shared a tradition of representative government, which means that in all of them people had a say in how they were governed. Each colony had its own government, with the governor chosen in most cases by the English king. To rule effectively these governors depended on the cooperation of assemblies elected by the colonists.
During the fifty years after 1733 settlers moved deeper into the continent. Making new settlements always began in the same way: cutting down the forests, clearing the land for building houses and farming. Fresh waves of settlers pushed the frontier (граница) steadily westwards. The frontier farms and villages were often separated by miles of unsettled land, which made the frontier communities rely on themselves only for almost everything they needed (clothing, tools, house building, etc); they even developed their own kind of music, entertainment, art and forms of religious worship. This frontier way of life created a special spirit and attitude – a strong belief that individuals had to help themselves and a need for them to cooperate with one another – strengthened the democratic feeling that people were equal and that nobody should have special rights and privileges.
(21st of December) 1620 – the voyage of the Mayflower (a group of English protestants arrived in America)
1621 – Thanksgiving day tradition was established (Thanksgiving day is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of July in November ever since 1621)
1664 – New York (previously owned by the Dutch and called New Amsterdam) was captured and renamed
1670 – the colonies of North and South Carolina were established
1681 – the colony of Pennsylvania was established
1691 – the colony of Massachusetts was established (it combined Plymouth and Boston)
1733 – the colony of Georgia was established
