July 16, 2024 • 50 mins
The founding of New England by the Puritans is quite a story. Today, we dive into who those people were.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here
and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
You think that you every time, doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh? Sure? After sixteen years it didn't think much for me.
Didn't get a giggle from you.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
That's good. I like it because it should have gone
the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
The giggle in me from me because of you, I
put a giggle in you. Oh ooh, we about that fresh.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Speaking of fresh, Chuck, you probably would not have just
said that were you not born an American.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
It was America not founded by essentially the most radical element,
extremist element that England had to offer at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Wow, nice work, look at you.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Thanks. That's all we need to say about their backstory.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Jerk, Well, I can sum it up in three sentences.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Let's hear what you got.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, we're talking about Puritanism and getting into just you know,
English puritanism is a a big ball of wax, very detailed,
and it's very easy to get in the weeds. We're
going to concentrate more on the Puritans, or at least
my charge to Olivia. I was like, you know what,
I think it was a Massachusetts at the time when
(01:34):
we were doing our show in Medford, and I was like,
what's up with this place, Massachusetts? And what was up
with the Puritans?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Why, like Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, so we're not going to go like super into
detail about their formation, but we will talk a little
bit about that right now. And my first sentence and
then you can just take over is who's a pure
the Puritans were And who they were was a group
of extreme, far extreme Protestants, and it was a movement
(02:09):
that came out of the fact that they were like, hey,
England's been reformed the Church of England. We don't want
any sniff of Catholicism around anymore. So we're going to
go hard, hard, toward the most extreme version of Protestantism
that you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, and you can make a case that the Puritans
would not have existed had England not broken with the
Catholic Church informed its own Church of England. Right, But
these people are like, no, like, we're not going far enough.
We need to just be completely off the rolls, make
our own thing. And like you said, like there was
this is a thick, thick period of English history from
(02:47):
like the fifteen thirties to the sixteen sixties something like that.
Like a lot happened during that time, and the Puritans,
like they either responded to it or were shaped by
it in some way, shape or form. But you can
kind of sum the whole thing up is that there
was a lot of changing of hands of power from
monarchs to people who staged coups, and sometimes the Puritans
(03:11):
were deeply persecuted, sometimes brutally. Other times they were the
ones in charge and they would brutalize other people. And
it was enough that it shook loose some of the
more radical groups of Puritans, of Puritans who either wanted
to reform the Anglican Church to be more Puritan, or
(03:33):
decided the Anglican Church couldn't be reformed and that they
should go off and form their own mini churches. It's
called congregationalism. So the upshot is things were just in
such upheaval that it shook some groups loose. Some moved
to Holland, and some ended up moving to North America
because stuff was just so crazy back in England at
the time.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, they were basically like, hey, we can go over there.
This was in sixteen oh eight, and it was a
group of separatists. You were talking about these Congregationalists, they
were separatists. They wanted to sort of branch off. You know,
if you saw the movie The Vivich, remember that one. Yeah,
that's kind of what we're talking about. These people that
(04:12):
set up their own shops and were like, hey, we
can just go out here on our own and be
as radically Protestant as we can be, because you know,
we're based in Calvinism. We believe in predestination. We think
that there are chosen few that are designated to go
to heaven, and you're either one of those people or
(04:35):
you're not. There's really nothing you can do about that.
And we've gotten ministers that are going to decide if
you've gone through a real religious conversion or not. And
the other thing we should point out too, is that
the actual term puritan that didn't come along until the
fifteen sixties, and it was like an insult, right it was.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I saw it described as I think in the New
World Encyclopedia that you could you could considered calling somebody
like uptight or high strung, or like just a worry
ward or something today. That's kind of what they were
calling Puritans back then. The Puritans call themselves sints if
that says enough to you about what they thought about themselves.
(05:16):
But Puritan was kind of a put down because the people,
the other people in the Anglican Church who were like,
things are fine, you guys are really nitpicking here. You're
up in arms about some really dumb stuff like people
burning incense during church services, like just stuff that doesn't matter,
and the Puritans were like, it does matter because that
(05:37):
is Satan's way of corrupting us.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and it's funny too. One of the other things
that keeps coming up, it seems like they really got
stuck on, was like can you talk to God directly?
Can you pray or not? Or do you have to
go through official channels of people higher up in this religion. Yeah,
And it seemed like that was a fight, like on
and off again for a long time, as people saying like, no,
(06:01):
we think you can, like you don't need to be special,
you can pray and talk to God, and other people
are like, no, that splasts with me, I know.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
And you just touched on something that's kind of at
the heart like this was the great Puritan struggle because
one of the reasons for breaking with the Church and
getting as far away from is because the Church was like,
to get through God, you go through us, Priest, Bishop,
cardinal Pope, like, that's the way you go to get
to God. You can't do it yourself. You need the church,
and by the way, give us a bunch of money.
And the Puritans hated that. So they did believe that
(06:31):
like a congregation could take care of itself, and that
the minister could help people. But really you just needed
to know what it said in the Bible and live
your life accordingly and hope that you were one of
the saved who were going to make it into heaven.
That was their whole way. Yet they were also a
deeply elitist group, where the wealthier you were, the more
(06:54):
that meant you were favored by God, and so by association,
if you were poor, were poverty stricken, yeah, that must
mean you had some sort of moral failing, right, And
if that's not essentially the basis of America till today,
I don't know what is.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's really funny, well not funny, it's sad, but
you know what.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I mean, I know exactly what to me.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
So I mentioned the group of separatists that in sixteen
oh eight they came from a village in Yorkshire called Screwby.
You mentioned they moved to Holland, and then about twelve
years later a little more than one hundred of them
went to Plymouth Rock and founded that colony here in
North America. And again with the idea they're going to
create this great community where they can be English, they
(07:40):
don't have to compromise what they believe in. These were
the people in the Mayflower who a lot of them died.
They had that first Thanksgiving. I didn't have Christmas though, right.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
No, the Puritans hated Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
They did.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They didn't like I always thought it was because I
saw somebody explain it that it's not in the Bible.
If it wasn't in the Bible, it was Satanic, right,
And so of course they didn't mention Christmas in the Bible.
But I also saw a more reasonable explanation is that
I think we talked about this Christmas at the time
was a drunken, rabble rousing occasion where almost like you know,
(08:17):
Halloween can get to be like today. That's kind of
what Christmas was like, so, of course they hated Christmas.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, because no one drinks around Christmas now.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
No everybody observes it puritanically.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
In sixteen thirty, if we jump ahead just a little bit,
this is when and this is the sort of the
money stuff I was after. This is when the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was founded. It was another group from England
led by a guy named John Winthrop, who was kind
of a well heeled attorney. He was a gentry member,
which means he was sort of just below nobility, but
(08:52):
you know, very highly respected class of people, which you know,
as you'll see, comes like you were saying, comes to
be thing that the Puritans were known for. And when
we think about Puritans in this country generally, we're thinking
about the people that came over with John Winthrop the
founding of Massachusetts, not the Pilgrims, not separatists, because they
(09:17):
weren't like, hey, we don't want anything to do with
the Church of England, but they were still Congregationalists.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah. So, yes, the Puritans and the Pilgrims were for
all intentsive purposes, separate groups. They lived separately. They were
both They were both reformists, Calvinists who wanted the Anglican
Church to either get further away from Catholicism or split
from the Anglican Church altogether. So the best way the
rule thumb to understand both groups is the Pilgrims would
(09:45):
have found the Puritans ungodly and satan like. That's how
radical the Pilgrims were. The most radical of all of
the separatists, or of all of the reformists of the
Anglican Church. Ts were definitely they would look down on
us today. The Pilgrims would have just run in terror
if they saw any of us today. The pure Tins
(10:07):
would just look down on us, and they would recognize
it themselves in us, I think.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
A little right too. Yeah, totally, yeah, And we'll get
to some of that a little bit later. But the
other thing is that they had a lot more money
than the Pilgrims did. They had a lot more financing
and resources. There were also about ten times as many,
think about a thousand people came over in that first group,
and they weren't they were just looking to set up
(10:31):
an idealize society over there. They weren't like fleeing England
or anything. But they were also they didn't want like
freedom of religion. At the same time, they were still
like super puritanical. But Winthrop, you know, you've heard the
very famous sermon about the colony being the city on
the hill. That was from Winthrop when he was talking about,
(10:52):
you know, metaphorically, we're who everyone's going to look up to.
So we got to set a good example and lead
really godlike lives.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, we don't want this thing to fail because everybody's
watching us, so better act like Puritans essentially exactly. And
one of the ways they did that also is that
they would all keep a close eye on one another.
Because there's one other thing to to understand about the Puritans.
They believed, quite literally, Satan was walking among us and
(11:20):
took an active interest in each individual's vices, desires, all
that stuff. And if you were weak, if you didn't
have your guard up at all times and live a
very godly life, you could be corrupted and God would
kill you and send your send your soul to hell.
That was the stakes of what these Puritans were living
(11:40):
with on a daily basis. So the best way to
root out Satan before he can really get a foothold
in a colony is to watch everybody down to the
family level. Family members would watch each other for signs
that Satan was corrupting them.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, that's the vivit.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah exactly. That definitely is portrayed in that for sure.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, don't turn your back on that. Billy goat.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Fun time, Joseph for something.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
No, what was it? Something black, Freddie Fosblayer, fun time Black,
I don't know, something like that. These are the moments
where people are screaming at it's in their cars or whatever.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Apparently it's anecdotally. What do you mean, don't you remember?
I think there was a listener mail that Kate, you
were trying to think of a word, and it was anecdotal.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, I gotcha. I think maybe before
we break, we'll just say this that we also have
to talk about the finances of this. It was it
was a Puritanical group and it was all about religion,
but they also had to make money. So technically the
colony was founded by a company, the Massachusetts Bay Company,
(12:49):
which was a stock venture that traded fur. They traded fish,
and they had shareholders and it was you know, it
was a business.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
It was, but this is how the Puritans retained control
of it. The joint owners, the joint stockholders of that
company were the ones who voted on who ran things
in the colony. But it just so happens that the
owners of the stock were exclusively people who lived in
that colony. All of those people were Puritans, and so
(13:19):
they were able to keep the dream alive of this
city on a hill because they held complete power over
this company and all of its doings.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, they were the voting shareholders.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Yeah, but it is important to remember too they ran
a successful company. Because we're elitist. They were elitist religious people.
It's very it's I want to say it's bizarre, but
it's not at all bizarre. It's very common, I think.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Actually, yeah, all right, so let's take that break and
we'll talk about what life was like there in Massachusetts
early on, right after this.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So when the people first arrived in Massachusetts, when the
settlers that were led by John Winthrop, they hit Salem first,
they met with some people who had kind of spread
out from Plymouth, and they were like, you guys are
a little too high strung even for us, So we're
gonna go found Boston, which apparently is named after a
(14:45):
town in Lincolnshire, in England, where a lot of the
people were from, and Winthrop was. They were like, you're
the governor. You're the guy you let us over here.
You gave a great lay sermon. No one's ever heard
anything better than what you just said. In fact, so
why don't you become governor? And he kept getting elected
and re elected and reelected because they had annual elections.
It wasn't every like two or four years, but even
(15:07):
still he was like, hey, guys, I think somebody else
should take a turn too. I don't want to accidentally
become king of the Massachusetts Bay Company, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Yeah, which was I don't know, maybe a little bit surprising.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
It was. But another thing that's surprising too is these
people are immediately removed from England, where there is a
monarch in charge, the king, that has absolute authority over
there in their lives, and these guys are holding annual
elections for their leader who directly helps them run their
own town. That's bizarre. But that's also the seating of
(15:44):
American democracy too.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah, absolutely, which I'm sure they it was pretty radical
for them at the time. All Right, So they are Massachusetts.
They're farming, nothing huge, but they're farming, they're fishing, they're
milling life, they're building boats and ships. The population is
really really growing kind of all over New England at
(16:07):
that time, because they just started spreading out. They would
go found another town, then another town. Let's go to
Rhode Island, let's go to Maine, and they said, what
are those places even They said, well, we'll come up
with the names later. But follow was in the seaside, lovely. Yeah,
just come this way and if you were a one
of the first people there, you were known as a proprietor.
(16:27):
You would get a little bit of land. The religion
again was still central to all this stuff in every
town that they were still you know, laser focused on that.
But it was really really growing fast. And one of
the reasons was because King Charles the First dissolved parliament
in sixteen twenty nine. So all these Puritan reformers who
(16:50):
were working in England to try and change the state
of the church there had no like a recourse. They
were like, well, we've been kicked out of Parliament, so
let's go to this new world, I guess. And about
twenty thousand of them moved there between sixteen twenty nine
and sixteen forty when Parliament got back together.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
I know, in a decade their numbers grew about twenty
four give flux of people. Yeah yeah. And in that
twenty year period there was like there a lot happened
in England as well. And that was also not just
the reason why a bunch of Puritans showed up, because
there was you know, the monarchy was toppled and there
was civil war and all that, but that also led
(17:32):
to the fleeing essentially from the UK of well it
was in the UK at the time, but the Scottish,
the Irish, other English World Puritans, French immigrants, they all
showed up and they were like, hey, stuff really off
chain back in England, and you know what will eventually
(17:53):
be the UK. So we're going to come here and
hang out with you guys, but we're not Puritans, so
don't put that stuff on us. You keep your hang
ups to yourself. And the Puritans kind of scratched their
van Dyke beards for a second and they said, you
know what, you look like somebody who could make me
a lot of money. Welcome aboard. And so Massachusetts grew
(18:14):
not just spiritually when all of the other Puritans showed up.
But economically it really started to make inroads because a
lot of labors showed up, a lot of craftsmen showed up,
and merchants showed up too, who were like, Hey, I've
got connections back in England that can get a stuff
we need or who will buy the stuff that we're making,
and it started to thrive pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Around that time, they also scratched their Vandyke beards and said,
wait a minute, we thought off the chainment that was good.
I guess just shut up. Don't say anything about that.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
At least I didn't say off the hook. They would
have been like, what are you talking.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Exactly like people remain on hooks. So while this is
going on, let's say this is what sixteen thirty six,
the colony of Connecticut was founded by a guy named
John Hooker. He was a pastor and what would later
be Cambridge. But he got a commission from the General
(19:11):
Court of Massachusetts go found Connecticut. So that happened, and
then Rhode Island. There were actually Puritan dissidents that founded
Rhode Island, and basically every part of New England was
founded under some sort of religious pretense, except for New Hampshire,
which is kind of interesting I think, like I think
(19:33):
you can still see remnants of that stuff today and
how New England is.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, like I think the New Hampshire state license plate
says Satan's country, right, actually says live free or die.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Oh well, yeah, there you have it.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
So this whole venture is starting to really kind of cook.
Between sixteen thirty and before the sixteen hundreds were out,
it just really established itself. They were spreading out so
much like you said, they were founding new colonies that
were seeded from the original Massachusetts Bay colonies. The Pilgrims
were like, nobody likes us, No one's joining our ranks.
(20:14):
We're actually losing people now. Yeah, we had the first
murder among Europeans in North America. Here can we come
join you? And actually there's a big, big argument in
a debate and a schism I think in Plymouth who
like the practical leaders were like, guys, we're not gonna
make it unless we join up with Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
The other ones were like they're not godly enough. And
I think the people who thought they weren't godly enough
lost out, and so Plymouth was taken into is absorbed
into Massachusetts in sixteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
That's right. So we talked a little bit about what
was going on there as far as the kind of
things they were doing, fishing and lumbering and farming a
little bit. But like day to day life, the two
most important things were going to church and going to school.
If there's one thing we can credit Puritanism with is
(21:08):
the fact that they put a lot of weight and
importance on schooling everybody and making sure everybody could read,
so everybody could read the Bible.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
That's another legacy of Puritans that's still around today and
that's super American. Is public Educationah, like a very extensive
government overseen like educational system. That's what the Puritans set up.
They actually passed an act, the Old Diluter Satan Act, Yeah,
(21:41):
of sixteen forty seven, which I looked it up. I
couldn't find that it was ever repealed, so it's technically
still on the books in Relachusetts. Yeah. But it basically said,
if you have a town of fifty families, up to
fifty families, you have to hire a school master. That's
just law. Now, if you have one hundred families or more,
you have to actually build your own grammar school. And
(22:04):
if you're the head of household, not only do your
kids have to go to school, you have to make
sure that your servants' kids are educated too.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
That's right, little kids. What would be like, I guess
sort of kindergarten to first grade. Second grade ed age
would go to what was called a dame school. Usually
an older woman of the community would run that one.
Then they had the secondary schools. If you were from
a wealthier family, you would go there to learn stuff
to prepare you for more education. And if you're like,
(22:33):
what are you talking about more education, this is sixteen
thirty six, guys. We're talking about a little college called
Haavid because in sixteen thirty six some leaders in the
Puritan community established the college to educate the clergy there,
and it was renamed Harvard a few years after that
(22:54):
after Puritan minister John Harvard, after he said, Hey, I
got a lot of land here, I have a valuable estate,
I have this incredible library. It's all yours, And so
they named the college Harvard, and eventually that town would
become Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yes, so, yeah, they named it Cambridge because John Harvard
and a lot of the other leaders had gone to
school at Cambridge, which was producing clergy as well. So
that's pretty interesting. And I've noticed before on Harvard's little
logo it does say sixteen thirty six, and that's quite
a claim to fame. In the United States, I've noticed
that not a lot of things go back to sixteen
(23:31):
thirty six in the US. So hats off to Harvard,
as they say, as they say in the Dame Schools.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Not hats off to Harper. No, led Zeppelin wasn't.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
That Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that's the one that
starts out so weird.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah, it was a weird song, good one. So all right,
like we kind of beat around the bush a little
bit about who the like, how pure channical they were.
You you say that a Pilgrim would look at a
Puritan like they were like a modern day American, you know,
or something like that. Yeah, in our modern eyes, we
(24:10):
think the Puritans were just really you know, like you said,
the the derogatory name, they were uptight, they didn't have
any fun, they were dour, but that that's really not
necessarily true. That's kind of the popular trope in the
media portrayal. But they had it was all about money,
like Once people started making money and there was class division,
(24:32):
they were people wanted to show it off, and they
were like, all right, well, let's let's pass some laws
here that says, you know, you don't have to wear
gray and black all the time. You can. You can
splash a little color on your house and on your clothing,
and you can. You can wear those things that you
can afford to buy and show them off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah, why shouldn't you show if your k new Cadillac buggy,
that shows that God clearly favors you over your neighbors.
Exactly should, but only if you an economic or social elite.
If you're not, if you're a peasant, or you're just
not favored by God, you have to dress in those
great clothes that we used to all have to wear. Yeah,
(25:10):
that was a big change, and that happened in just
a couple of decades. What about sex?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Is that sex?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Oh? My god? So they did not like extramarital sex.
They were not big fans of same sex relationships.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
They didn't even like masturbation. So you'd think, of course, like,
I mean, they're famous for the scarlet letter. These are
the people who branded hester Prynne with the scarlet letter.
At least we put it on our clothing, right, Yes,
they did. That was a real thing. Nathaniel Hawthorne did
not lie. But I think as a modern group we've
kind of extrapolated that to mean that they did not
(25:50):
like sex at all. Like you, they would just be
like some guy who followed people around and like hit
him with the switch whenever they thought about sex or something.
That's actually the opposite of what they were.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Like, yeah, apparently you were if you were married. They
were like, hey, you go make kids, and even if
you're not making kids, you go and do that dirty deed.
I believe the the quote was it would bond couples
together with good will and delight. And they talked about
the duty of desire to like not withhold sex from
(26:22):
your partner, and they would even turn a blind eye
to premaral sex with his which is really shocking to
hear this, but they'd be like, hey, if you're in there,
you're not married yet, don't worry about it. Do your thing,
but if you get pregnant, you better get married really
quickly and not tell everyone that this happened first exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
So that was a big one. I didn't know that
that they were into sex.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Did not know that or the drinking thing either.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
No, that's another thing too. You would think that they
were all teetotalers, and they were not. In fact, they
drank about twice as much as we drink, yeah, by
gallons of alcohol pure alcoholic, which apparently is how they
measure drinking over the years, right. Yeah, So they would
drink all day long, morning, noon, night. They drank the
(27:10):
entire time, but you had to hold your liquor because
being drunk was not okay, And I don't think it
was like something they would execute you for, but it
was very much frowned upon. But drinking. Go ahead and
drink all day long, keep a nice little buzz going.
But that's it.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, I get the feeling. I get the feeling. You
had to be pretty drunk to get that scorn. Okay,
So I like you had to really cross the line,
right exactly. But I think it was hard for them
because they could hold their liquor. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So in seventeen ninety, the average American drank and estimated
six gallons of pure alcohol per year. That's seventeen ninety.
We're thinking that probably did not change much like go
up or down from one hundred or so years before that,
it started to go down in the nineteenth century, right,
(28:01):
So six gallons Today, in twenty twenty one, the average
American drinks two point eighty three gallons of pure alcohol year,
so twice as much the Puritans were drinking than we do.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Wow, have being premarital sex. They're drinking all day long. Yep,
no wonder, they're having premarital sex. They're drinking all day long.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Sure, what else are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah? Exactly. So when it comes to the women in
these societies, it was a patriarch like there's no getting
around that. And women didn't have a lot of legal
rights at the time, no getting around that. But depending
on which congregation or which community you were in, there
may be women in that town that had more say
(28:44):
over others in what was important in that town, which
was the church, which was what was being preached, the
sermons that the children were hearing. Sometimes they would even
be able to lead those sermons, which was pretty.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Radical for the time, right, Yeah, for sure, And I
mean like it was very patriarchical, but I read that
the Puritans did have respect, especially colonial Puritans in New
England had a lot of respect for women for their
domestic abilities.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, because they.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Did a lot of stuff just to keep a homegoing,
and then also because they would go through childbirth. So
like there was a lot of respect for women in
that sense. But the men or the oldest son were
clearly the head of the household.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, of course, yeah, they and then that we talked
about this in our Salem Witch Trials episode. But you know,
the reason that was such a big deal is because
it was a big deal. It wasn't. The idea that
the Puritans were all over the place trying to drown
and burn witches just wasn't true. Salem was a pretty
(29:49):
exceptional incident even for the time. It was a big
controversial thing and a pretty unusual thing. So if you
have it in your head that Puritans were just like,
you know, there's wait burner, it really wasn't like that.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
No, no, no, it was Remember I think we talked
a lot like Salem was super isolated. Yeah, because they
were the most puritanical and the most dour, and they
just kind of cracked. I think, if I remember correctly,
that was a good episode. Yeah, was that a two parter?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
I don't either. It was a good episode or episodes.
That's right, you want to take.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
A break, Yeah, let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Okay, we're gonna take a break.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
All right, let's do it, all.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Right, softy jaw.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Soft all right.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
So here's the deal. If you were in one of
the puritanical communities, they did not like people who went
up against them too hard. If you went up against
them too hard and we're a little too outspoken about
how things were being done, you probably found yourself leaving
(31:22):
and being ousted. And a couple of pretty notable people
that happened to was a guy named Roger Williams and
a woman named Anne Hutchison. Williams was a minister. He
was educated in Cambridge, not the American Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Right, Yeah, that's what they call that town.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Yeah, the American Cambridge, New Cambridge. He came to Boston
in sixteen thirty one, moved around a bit. He seemed
to be a little bit of a rabble rouser. He
wasn't sort of content to just put his head down
and go along with everything everyone said. And that was
a problem. That was a big problem at the time. Actually,
when it came to how they were their approach to
(32:03):
dealing with the local indigenous Native American population.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, he was kind of an idealized Puritan. He believed
in the separation of church and state, which is something
that Puritans are either credited with establishing in America or
are criticized for not having done. It just depends on
which article you're reading at the time, right, But he
was definitely in favor of the separation of church and state.
(32:27):
And he also was in favor of treating the Native
Americans who they shared this area with respectfully, not just
taking their land because the crown said they could, but
like negotiating with them, like dealing with them fairly, to
like purchase land, and in fact he did. He purchased
a large tract of land from the Narraganset I think,
and ended up founding Rhode Island. Those are I mean,
(32:49):
Rhode Island's a small state, but it's a pretty big
tract of land in general.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Huge tract of plant m But Rhode Island was open
for business. They were like, Hey, if you're a Quaker,
come on over. If you're a Baptist or an Anabaptist,
come on over.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
You want to learn design come on over.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, basically, anyone who wasn't a Puritan was welcome there.
They weren't welcome in Massachusetts. He himself converted in sixteen
thirty nine to Baptism, and the very first Baptist church
in America is right there or I'm not sure if
still they're not actually, but right there in Providence.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
I don't think they tear stuff down in Providence, so
it's probably like everything that Lovecraft wrote about is basically
still there.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, there's a sign there that says Providence first Baptist
and then in parentheses, No, really first Baptist.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So the other person you mentioned was Ann Hutchinson, and
there were also tons of dissenters, but these two are
the famous, most famous, I should say. And Anne Hutchinson
is very famous because she was about as outspoken as
a person could get, not just in her time, but
in any time, Like she just did not take any guff.
She was an incredibly intelligent and compassionate midwife, and she
(34:06):
had some sort of holy conversion herself. Like if anybody
went through a conversion, it was probably Anne Hutchinson. But
she started out as a follower of the minister John Cotton,
who was the father in law of Increased Mather, grandfather
of Cotton Mather, and initially John Cotton had to flee
England because he was being persecuted for his beliefs. But
(34:29):
then as Anne Hutchinson kind of broke with him and
became a little more of a firebrand and a dissident,
he ended up turning on her with John Winthrop and
she was ostracized. She was excommunicated from Massachusetts for behaving
in a manner not comely for her sex. That was
a quote, if you've never really heard me talk before,
(34:49):
I don't talk like that.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
I've known you for a long time, never heard you
say the word comely until just now.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
So she was actually preaching like you, Sa said. She
went through that conversion and she was preaching the Holy Spirit,
and she was saying she was one of those people
that were like, hey, you get a direct line to
God in the Holy Spirit. You can talk to God,
and anyone can get this personal connection to God. Anyone
can go to Heaven. It doesn't matter if you're a sinner,
(35:20):
it doesn't matter what kind of a relationship you have
with the church. It's it's a personal and this is
what you know, I got growing up with what the
Baptists really think about these days. Well, and I guess
all along was that it's a very personal relationship you
have with God. You don't need to go to a
church even necessarily. You just have that personal relationship and
(35:44):
you can pray directly to God. You got an open line.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Yeah, that's a very Protestant way of looking at things.
It's like the antithesis of the Catholic way again. Yeah,
but Ann Hutchinson, she was basically like, you can, you
can banish me, but God's going to destroy this colony.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Famous quote.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, her famous quote was we're on a mission from.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
God, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
And it didn't come to pass. Massachusetts is still there.
But she went off and just kind of did her
own thing, and her family moved with her to Rhode Island.
Apparently her husband was extremely supportive and she was the
mother of fifteen, if not sixteen kids, and they all
moved to Rhode Island and Roger Williams said, welcome on in.
He said, why are you wearing sunglasses? It's nighttime?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Fifteen kids. That was good. Some other people, if you
want to talk about people that Massachusetts didn't want a round.
That was the Quakers. The Puritans didn't like them because
the Quakers were just too like, probably a little too
hippy dippy for them. They were all about following your
inner light again, having a direct line to Jesus, didn't
(36:51):
need religious officials. They thought the Quakers were weird, so
the Massachusetts colonies were like, we don't want you around here.
Sometimes it would get violent and ugly. I believe over
the course of a couple of years, four Quakers were hanged,
one of which was Mary Dyer. She was one of
the acolytes of Anne Hutchinson, who had, you know, eventually
(37:14):
obviously converted to Quakerism. But you know, things got so
bad among persecuting Quakers that King Charles the Second in
sixteen sixty one finally said, you guys got to stop
killing Quakers. This is not a good look.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
He's like, leave the Quakers alone.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
The thing that they hated about Quakers, though, was a Quaker.
I guess dogma or whatever. If that's not a contradiction
in terms is that every single person alive has a
little bit of the Divine Spirit in them, which means
every single person alive is worthy of respect from every
other single person alive. And that really flies in the
(37:52):
face of that saved elitism that the Puritans based their
entire jam on. That was a big deal. They hated
Quakers for that. And also, you know the idea that
we're all equal that Quakers believe, that's not again, not
at all what the Puritans believe. They saw basically the
opposite of that, like I'm literally holier than now because
(38:13):
I'm richer than you. Essentially was a tenet of Puritanism
and one of the reasons why they still have a
bad name today is the Puritans went through such damaging
intolerance and persecution time after time in England, decade after decade,
and then they would just turn right around the moment
(38:33):
they had a measure of power and do it to
other groups that didn't agree with them. So they're remembered
as being like profoundly hypocritical as a group, largely because
of that.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah. Absolutely, should we finish up with a little bit
about the slave trade in Massachusetts? Sure, because I think
a lot of people are like, I think you're mistaken.
I think you're talking about the South.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
That pronounced Georgia.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, here's how it went down. And we should say
it was not a robust situation as far as enslaving
people in Massachusetts. That's a spoiler. But the lead up
into this was before the Mayflower got there. In sixteen twenty,
the Algonquin speaking people there in southern New England were
ravaged by and we've talked about this before about illness
(39:26):
that came over from Europe. I think it wiped out
like ninety percent of the population over a three year period.
And over in England, King James the first is like, see,
this is God basically saying this land belongs to you.
So he's killing all these people, you know, in the
name of God, so we can go over there and
(39:47):
have this land exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah. And John Winthrop echoed that, like that was kind
of the sentiment, like clearly God had cleared the land
for the English to take over. I mean, there's ninety
percent of your population in three.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Years as yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Yeah, if you're a Puritan, it's tough to not take
it like that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
So all of the Native Americans, even though their society
was completely upended. And I guess here's my chance to
mention fourteen ninety one again, because.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
It covers all of it's been a while.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
It has been a while, but I can't just not
mention it. Yeah, there were still healthy, robust tribes of
Native Americans in the area, and in this area, specifically
in central in southern what is now Connecticut, were the Peaquot,
and they essentially ran the show. There were others, the
Narragansett Mohegans, they were in the area too, but they
(40:42):
were subjugated by the Peacot. Peaquot who were in alliance
with the Dutch, and they controlled all of the fur
trading in the area. So they were a very substantial,
tough group. And the English essentially, as they tried to
push further and further south into Connecticut and below into
southern New England, they ran right into the pea Quot.
They're like, no, oh, this is our lan and you're
gonna have to stay up there. The English didn't like
(41:03):
that at all, and in fairly short order, the first
truly sustained conflict between the English and Native Americans was
what came to be known as the pea Quot War.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
That's right right there at the Connecticut Colony. They defeated
them pretty roundly, and that's basically how the what kicked
off enslavement of people because they got these the pea Quots.
The idea was, hey, let's get them far away from
(41:34):
their homeland. So they're in a far away place where
they have, you know, their will has been basically killed
to try and return to where they came from. They
have no help nearby because we've taken them far from home.
So they sent some of those peaquots to the West
Indies to trade for African enslaved people in return brought
(41:56):
them over and basically the same aim as you know
sending Africans to the colonies was like, well they're you know,
they're stuck over there now, and then now we have
your pequots and they're stuck over here. It was only
a few hundred enslaved people in the colonies, so, like
I said, it wasn't the most robust thing, nothing like
(42:17):
it was in the South, obviously, but just the idea
that you know, that kind of thing didn't happen up
there just wasn't true.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Right, No, absolutely, And that Peaquot war and the following
adoption of enslavement was a huge turning point for a
lot of like big wake up call for a lot
of the Puritans, because if you look at the original
seal of Massachusetts, there's a Native American on there, and
there's still one there today. But originally there was a
(42:43):
cartoon bubble where he was saying, come over and help us,
really and yes, and a lot of the a lot
of the Puritans who did arrive arrived with that aim.
They were coming like for the opportunity to save the
souls of this whole group of people had never been
exposed to God before, right, and now all of a
sudden the English had waged total war and slaughtered pea
(43:08):
Quat women and children, burned villages, and then shot people
who tried to escape. It was ugly during the Peaquot War.
So some people are like, what are we doing? Like
we need to have a reckoning about all this. And
I think the elite Puritans of the Massachusetts Colony kind
of came to these people and he said, I know
how you're feeling, Fellah, will make you feel any better
if we just start selling more timber instead of really
(43:30):
reflecting on what we've done here. And the guy kind
of like wiped a tear from his eye and sniff
a little bit. It's like, yeah, that'll make me feel
a little bit better, and they just kind of move
forward and establishing southern New England using those same tactics
from there on out. And I should say that I
got to chuck that up to the YouTube channel Boston History.
There's a Professor Allison who did a great little like
(43:52):
seven and a half minute video on that whole thing.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
So Puritanism declined eventually, gradually kind of like how society goes.
Things became a little less zealous as far as religion goes,
a little more open minded, little more changed with the times,
and that was kind of the end of Puritanism, or
at least you know, that kind of puritanism England. In
(44:18):
the sixteen eighties, they you know, really cracked down on
the independent politics and the colonies. They said, hey, you
got to have a freedom of religion over there if
you want to move forward and roll with the times.
But you know, Christianity still has plenty of those puritanical
aspects to it in New England and then as its spread,
(44:42):
you know throughout the rest of the colonies for.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Sure, Yeah, for sure. And there's still a huge legacy
of Puritanism today, which we've kind of peppered throughout the
whole episode. A sterling example as me an American born
man feeling completely fine with being holier than now towards
the Puritans. That's Puritanical in nature. Sure, so is intolerance
(45:07):
of others, a love of income inequality or at least
a respect of it among a lot of people. But
then there's also like a lot of really good stuff
that are chalked up to the Puritans too, like the
American work ethic, the idea that you can pull yourself
up from by your own bootstraps that came out of
colonial Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
For certain, they have the boot straps.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
They did, they had little well the buckles at least
pull yourself up by your breast buckles.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
We already talked about schooling and education.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, that was another big one too, that we can
thank them for thriftiness, not being wasteful, which I'm not
sure that that really survived into the twenty first century,
but that was a thing for a while in America,
drinking all day. Yeah, although funny enough, remember I said
that it started to take a downturn in the nineteenth century.
Those same descendants of the Puritans went through was known
(46:00):
as a Great Awakening and one of the things that
they took aim at was alcohol consumption. And so it's
funny that we associate looking down on alcohol consumption with Puritans,
but it is kind of descended from their descendants.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, yeah, Sarah, like we got this tailgating's getting out
of hand. Everybody, Right, Boy, that was a pretty good one.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
I've got one more thing. An American journalist who really
disliked Puritanism. His names hl Mencan, great journalist, and he
summed the whole thing up, I think quite nicely. He
very famously said Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone
somewhere may be happy.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Chuck said, that's good. I quoted hl Mencan. Obviously everybody
that customarily means listener males here.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, this is just a very sweet email. Occasionally we
read these from time to time when people are just
very very kind and show a kindness toward us. So
I'm going to read it. Hey, guys and Josh, Chuck,
Jerry Dave. By the way, I've been trying to compose
this email for over three years, but y'all have been
on such a role lately with topics that I feel
(47:14):
obligated to spill my grateful guts. I hope this isn't
verging into parasocial, But you guys have been with our
family for countless road trips, houseworks, sleepless nights, commutes, the
birth of our twins, twelve weeks in the nick you, weddings, vacations,
out of state, surgeries for our youngest. During a few
of our hospital trips, who are asked to fill out
a sign on the front door that said what our
(47:36):
child's name was and what they like or their favorite thing,
and it was always between stuff you should know and
blue And each time I told our nurses to put
stuff you should.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Know, that's high praise.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
It is high praise. I would have put bluey. Your
voices have had a soothing effect on all of us,
through monumental personal life events, through gut wrenching global catastrophes.
We got the audio version of your book and have
listened through the End of the World multiple times.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Nice, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
I haven't even listened to it multiple times.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Huh, that's okay. I don't expect it to.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Your book, movie, podcast, article recommendations carry loads of cloud,
as they are never anything short of exceptional. We have,
in turn, recommended you to many friends, family, students, healthcare workers,
comrades of all ages and walks of life. Thank you
for helping us cultivate an intellectually stimulating environment for our
young ones and inspiring us grown ups to remain flexible
(48:32):
and curious. You expand our understanding of the world as
it is, as it has been, and help us move
forward in humility towards creating a just and equitable future. Wow,
you've got the wrong email address here.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
They're like, this is SmartLess, right.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah, exactly. If I keep trying to say all the
nice things I think and feel about y'all and your show,
I'll be stuck editing this email for another three years.
Hope to see you in Chicago. Admiringly Nelson and Nelson
sent in pictures of their beautiful family, and I responded
and said, Hey, if you can come to Chicago for
(49:09):
this show, then we would love for you to be
our guests. And I haven't heard back yet, so well.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, it's a cute family. I saw that email too,
and I was heartwarmed by just.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
A wonderful thing. So and when we say be our guests,
that means free tickets, by the way, not just we're
going to give you a welcome afty buy tickets.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I also love Nelson wrote in parentheses after they signed it,
like Mendela or Muntz.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, hats off Nelson.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Thank you very much. That was a super kind sweet
email and we really appreciate it, I can say quite
confidently speaking for you as well, right, Chuck, absolutely, If
you want to be like Nelson and sent us a
super sweet email, you can bet we love that kind
of thing. Just wrap it up, spanking on the bottom
and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
(50:00):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here
and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
You think that you every time, doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh? Sure? After sixteen years it didn't think much for me.
Didn't get a giggle from you.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
That's good. I like it because it should have gone
the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
The giggle in me from me because of you, I
put a giggle in you. Oh ooh, we about that fresh.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Speaking of fresh, Chuck, you probably would not have just
said that were you not born an American.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
It was America not founded by essentially the most radical element,
extremist element that England had to offer at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Wow, nice work, look at you.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Thanks. That's all we need to say about their backstory.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Jerk, Well, I can sum it up in three sentences.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Let's hear what you got.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, we're talking about Puritanism and getting into just you know,
English puritanism is a a big ball of wax, very detailed,
and it's very easy to get in the weeds. We're
going to concentrate more on the Puritans, or at least
my charge to Olivia. I was like, you know what,
I think it was a Massachusetts at the time when
(01:34):
we were doing our show in Medford, and I was like,
what's up with this place, Massachusetts? And what was up
with the Puritans?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Why, like Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, so we're not going to go like super into
detail about their formation, but we will talk a little
bit about that right now. And my first sentence and
then you can just take over is who's a pure
the Puritans were And who they were was a group
of extreme, far extreme Protestants, and it was a movement
(02:09):
that came out of the fact that they were like, hey,
England's been reformed the Church of England. We don't want
any sniff of Catholicism around anymore. So we're going to
go hard, hard, toward the most extreme version of Protestantism
that you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, and you can make a case that the Puritans
would not have existed had England not broken with the
Catholic Church informed its own Church of England. Right, But
these people are like, no, like, we're not going far enough.
We need to just be completely off the rolls, make
our own thing. And like you said, like there was
this is a thick, thick period of English history from
(02:47):
like the fifteen thirties to the sixteen sixties something like that.
Like a lot happened during that time, and the Puritans,
like they either responded to it or were shaped by
it in some way, shape or form. But you can
kind of sum the whole thing up is that there
was a lot of changing of hands of power from
monarchs to people who staged coups, and sometimes the Puritans
(03:11):
were deeply persecuted, sometimes brutally. Other times they were the
ones in charge and they would brutalize other people. And
it was enough that it shook loose some of the
more radical groups of Puritans, of Puritans who either wanted
to reform the Anglican Church to be more Puritan, or
(03:33):
decided the Anglican Church couldn't be reformed and that they
should go off and form their own mini churches. It's
called congregationalism. So the upshot is things were just in
such upheaval that it shook some groups loose. Some moved
to Holland, and some ended up moving to North America
because stuff was just so crazy back in England at
the time.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, they were basically like, hey, we can go over there.
This was in sixteen oh eight, and it was a
group of separatists. You were talking about these Congregationalists, they
were separatists. They wanted to sort of branch off. You know,
if you saw the movie The Vivich, remember that one. Yeah,
that's kind of what we're talking about. These people that
(04:12):
set up their own shops and were like, hey, we
can just go out here on our own and be
as radically Protestant as we can be, because you know,
we're based in Calvinism. We believe in predestination. We think
that there are chosen few that are designated to go
to heaven, and you're either one of those people or
(04:35):
you're not. There's really nothing you can do about that.
And we've gotten ministers that are going to decide if
you've gone through a real religious conversion or not. And
the other thing we should point out too, is that
the actual term puritan that didn't come along until the
fifteen sixties, and it was like an insult, right it was.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I saw it described as I think in the New
World Encyclopedia that you could you could considered calling somebody
like uptight or high strung, or like just a worry
ward or something today. That's kind of what they were
calling Puritans back then. The Puritans call themselves sints if
that says enough to you about what they thought about themselves.
(05:16):
But Puritan was kind of a put down because the people,
the other people in the Anglican Church who were like,
things are fine, you guys are really nitpicking here. You're
up in arms about some really dumb stuff like people
burning incense during church services, like just stuff that doesn't matter,
and the Puritans were like, it does matter because that
(05:37):
is Satan's way of corrupting us.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and it's funny too. One of the other things
that keeps coming up, it seems like they really got
stuck on, was like can you talk to God directly?
Can you pray or not? Or do you have to
go through official channels of people higher up in this religion. Yeah,
And it seemed like that was a fight, like on
and off again for a long time, as people saying like, no,
(06:01):
we think you can, like you don't need to be special,
you can pray and talk to God, and other people
are like, no, that splasts with me, I know.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
And you just touched on something that's kind of at
the heart like this was the great Puritan struggle because
one of the reasons for breaking with the Church and
getting as far away from is because the Church was like,
to get through God, you go through us, Priest, Bishop,
cardinal Pope, like, that's the way you go to get
to God. You can't do it yourself. You need the church,
and by the way, give us a bunch of money.
And the Puritans hated that. So they did believe that
(06:31):
like a congregation could take care of itself, and that
the minister could help people. But really you just needed
to know what it said in the Bible and live
your life accordingly and hope that you were one of
the saved who were going to make it into heaven.
That was their whole way. Yet they were also a
deeply elitist group, where the wealthier you were, the more
(06:54):
that meant you were favored by God, and so by association,
if you were poor, were poverty stricken, yeah, that must
mean you had some sort of moral failing, right, And
if that's not essentially the basis of America till today,
I don't know what is.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's really funny, well not funny, it's sad, but
you know what.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I mean, I know exactly what to me.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
So I mentioned the group of separatists that in sixteen
oh eight they came from a village in Yorkshire called Screwby.
You mentioned they moved to Holland, and then about twelve
years later a little more than one hundred of them
went to Plymouth Rock and founded that colony here in
North America. And again with the idea they're going to
create this great community where they can be English, they
(07:40):
don't have to compromise what they believe in. These were
the people in the Mayflower who a lot of them died.
They had that first Thanksgiving. I didn't have Christmas though, right.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
No, the Puritans hated Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
They did.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They didn't like I always thought it was because I
saw somebody explain it that it's not in the Bible.
If it wasn't in the Bible, it was Satanic, right,
And so of course they didn't mention Christmas in the Bible.
But I also saw a more reasonable explanation is that
I think we talked about this Christmas at the time
was a drunken, rabble rousing occasion where almost like you know,
(08:17):
Halloween can get to be like today. That's kind of
what Christmas was like, so, of course they hated Christmas.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, because no one drinks around Christmas now.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
No everybody observes it puritanically.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
In sixteen thirty, if we jump ahead just a little bit,
this is when and this is the sort of the
money stuff I was after. This is when the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was founded. It was another group from England
led by a guy named John Winthrop, who was kind
of a well heeled attorney. He was a gentry member,
which means he was sort of just below nobility, but
(08:52):
you know, very highly respected class of people, which you know,
as you'll see, comes like you were saying, comes to
be thing that the Puritans were known for. And when
we think about Puritans in this country generally, we're thinking
about the people that came over with John Winthrop the
founding of Massachusetts, not the Pilgrims, not separatists, because they
(09:17):
weren't like, hey, we don't want anything to do with
the Church of England, but they were still Congregationalists.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah. So, yes, the Puritans and the Pilgrims were for
all intentsive purposes, separate groups. They lived separately. They were
both They were both reformists, Calvinists who wanted the Anglican
Church to either get further away from Catholicism or split
from the Anglican Church altogether. So the best way the
rule thumb to understand both groups is the Pilgrims would
(09:45):
have found the Puritans ungodly and satan like. That's how
radical the Pilgrims were. The most radical of all of
the separatists, or of all of the reformists of the
Anglican Church. Ts were definitely they would look down on
us today. The Pilgrims would have just run in terror
if they saw any of us today. The pure Tins
(10:07):
would just look down on us, and they would recognize
it themselves in us, I think.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
A little right too. Yeah, totally, yeah, And we'll get
to some of that a little bit later. But the
other thing is that they had a lot more money
than the Pilgrims did. They had a lot more financing
and resources. There were also about ten times as many,
think about a thousand people came over in that first group,
and they weren't they were just looking to set up
(10:31):
an idealize society over there. They weren't like fleeing England
or anything. But they were also they didn't want like
freedom of religion. At the same time, they were still
like super puritanical. But Winthrop, you know, you've heard the
very famous sermon about the colony being the city on
the hill. That was from Winthrop when he was talking about,
(10:52):
you know, metaphorically, we're who everyone's going to look up to.
So we got to set a good example and lead
really godlike lives.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, we don't want this thing to fail because everybody's
watching us, so better act like Puritans essentially exactly. And
one of the ways they did that also is that
they would all keep a close eye on one another.
Because there's one other thing to to understand about the Puritans.
They believed, quite literally, Satan was walking among us and
(11:20):
took an active interest in each individual's vices, desires, all
that stuff. And if you were weak, if you didn't
have your guard up at all times and live a
very godly life, you could be corrupted and God would
kill you and send your send your soul to hell.
That was the stakes of what these Puritans were living
(11:40):
with on a daily basis. So the best way to
root out Satan before he can really get a foothold
in a colony is to watch everybody down to the
family level. Family members would watch each other for signs
that Satan was corrupting them.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, that's the vivit.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah exactly. That definitely is portrayed in that for sure.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, don't turn your back on that. Billy goat.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Fun time, Joseph for something.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
No, what was it? Something black, Freddie Fosblayer, fun time Black,
I don't know, something like that. These are the moments
where people are screaming at it's in their cars or whatever.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Apparently it's anecdotally. What do you mean, don't you remember?
I think there was a listener mail that Kate, you
were trying to think of a word, and it was anecdotal.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, I gotcha. I think maybe before
we break, we'll just say this that we also have
to talk about the finances of this. It was it
was a Puritanical group and it was all about religion,
but they also had to make money. So technically the
colony was founded by a company, the Massachusetts Bay Company,
(12:49):
which was a stock venture that traded fur. They traded fish,
and they had shareholders and it was you know, it
was a business.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
It was, but this is how the Puritans retained control
of it. The joint owners, the joint stockholders of that
company were the ones who voted on who ran things
in the colony. But it just so happens that the
owners of the stock were exclusively people who lived in
that colony. All of those people were Puritans, and so
(13:19):
they were able to keep the dream alive of this
city on a hill because they held complete power over
this company and all of its doings.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, they were the voting shareholders.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Yeah, but it is important to remember too they ran
a successful company. Because we're elitist. They were elitist religious people.
It's very it's I want to say it's bizarre, but
it's not at all bizarre. It's very common, I think.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Actually, yeah, all right, so let's take that break and
we'll talk about what life was like there in Massachusetts
early on, right after this.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So when the people first arrived in Massachusetts, when the
settlers that were led by John Winthrop, they hit Salem first,
they met with some people who had kind of spread
out from Plymouth, and they were like, you guys are
a little too high strung even for us, So we're
gonna go found Boston, which apparently is named after a
(14:45):
town in Lincolnshire, in England, where a lot of the
people were from, and Winthrop was. They were like, you're
the governor. You're the guy you let us over here.
You gave a great lay sermon. No one's ever heard
anything better than what you just said. In fact, so
why don't you become governor? And he kept getting elected
and re elected and reelected because they had annual elections.
It wasn't every like two or four years, but even
(15:07):
still he was like, hey, guys, I think somebody else
should take a turn too. I don't want to accidentally
become king of the Massachusetts Bay Company, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Yeah, which was I don't know, maybe a little bit surprising.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
It was. But another thing that's surprising too is these
people are immediately removed from England, where there is a
monarch in charge, the king, that has absolute authority over
there in their lives, and these guys are holding annual
elections for their leader who directly helps them run their
own town. That's bizarre. But that's also the seating of
(15:44):
American democracy too.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah, absolutely, which I'm sure they it was pretty radical
for them at the time. All Right, So they are Massachusetts.
They're farming, nothing huge, but they're farming, they're fishing, they're
milling life, they're building boats and ships. The population is
really really growing kind of all over New England at
(16:07):
that time, because they just started spreading out. They would
go found another town, then another town. Let's go to
Rhode Island, let's go to Maine, and they said, what
are those places even They said, well, we'll come up
with the names later. But follow was in the seaside, lovely. Yeah,
just come this way and if you were a one
of the first people there, you were known as a proprietor.
(16:27):
You would get a little bit of land. The religion
again was still central to all this stuff in every
town that they were still you know, laser focused on that.
But it was really really growing fast. And one of
the reasons was because King Charles the First dissolved parliament
in sixteen twenty nine. So all these Puritan reformers who
(16:50):
were working in England to try and change the state
of the church there had no like a recourse. They
were like, well, we've been kicked out of Parliament, so
let's go to this new world, I guess. And about
twenty thousand of them moved there between sixteen twenty nine
and sixteen forty when Parliament got back together.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
I know, in a decade their numbers grew about twenty
four give flux of people. Yeah yeah. And in that
twenty year period there was like there a lot happened
in England as well. And that was also not just
the reason why a bunch of Puritans showed up, because
there was you know, the monarchy was toppled and there
was civil war and all that, but that also led
(17:32):
to the fleeing essentially from the UK of well it
was in the UK at the time, but the Scottish,
the Irish, other English World Puritans, French immigrants, they all
showed up and they were like, hey, stuff really off
chain back in England, and you know what will eventually
(17:53):
be the UK. So we're going to come here and
hang out with you guys, but we're not Puritans, so
don't put that stuff on us. You keep your hang
ups to yourself. And the Puritans kind of scratched their
van Dyke beards for a second and they said, you
know what, you look like somebody who could make me
a lot of money. Welcome aboard. And so Massachusetts grew
(18:14):
not just spiritually when all of the other Puritans showed up.
But economically it really started to make inroads because a
lot of labors showed up, a lot of craftsmen showed up,
and merchants showed up too, who were like, Hey, I've
got connections back in England that can get a stuff
we need or who will buy the stuff that we're making,
and it started to thrive pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Around that time, they also scratched their Vandyke beards and said,
wait a minute, we thought off the chainment that was good.
I guess just shut up. Don't say anything about that.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
At least I didn't say off the hook. They would
have been like, what are you talking.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Exactly like people remain on hooks. So while this is
going on, let's say this is what sixteen thirty six,
the colony of Connecticut was founded by a guy named
John Hooker. He was a pastor and what would later
be Cambridge. But he got a commission from the General
(19:11):
Court of Massachusetts go found Connecticut. So that happened, and
then Rhode Island. There were actually Puritan dissidents that founded
Rhode Island, and basically every part of New England was
founded under some sort of religious pretense, except for New Hampshire,
which is kind of interesting I think, like I think
(19:33):
you can still see remnants of that stuff today and
how New England is.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, like I think the New Hampshire state license plate
says Satan's country, right, actually says live free or die.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Oh well, yeah, there you have it.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
So this whole venture is starting to really kind of cook.
Between sixteen thirty and before the sixteen hundreds were out,
it just really established itself. They were spreading out so
much like you said, they were founding new colonies that
were seeded from the original Massachusetts Bay colonies. The Pilgrims
were like, nobody likes us, No one's joining our ranks.
(20:14):
We're actually losing people now. Yeah, we had the first
murder among Europeans in North America. Here can we come
join you? And actually there's a big, big argument in
a debate and a schism I think in Plymouth who
like the practical leaders were like, guys, we're not gonna
make it unless we join up with Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
The other ones were like they're not godly enough. And
I think the people who thought they weren't godly enough
lost out, and so Plymouth was taken into is absorbed
into Massachusetts in sixteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
That's right. So we talked a little bit about what
was going on there as far as the kind of
things they were doing, fishing and lumbering and farming a
little bit. But like day to day life, the two
most important things were going to church and going to school.
If there's one thing we can credit Puritanism with is
(21:08):
the fact that they put a lot of weight and
importance on schooling everybody and making sure everybody could read,
so everybody could read the Bible.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
That's another legacy of Puritans that's still around today and
that's super American. Is public Educationah, like a very extensive
government overseen like educational system. That's what the Puritans set up.
They actually passed an act, the Old Diluter Satan Act, Yeah,
(21:41):
of sixteen forty seven, which I looked it up. I
couldn't find that it was ever repealed, so it's technically
still on the books in Relachusetts. Yeah. But it basically said,
if you have a town of fifty families, up to
fifty families, you have to hire a school master. That's
just law. Now, if you have one hundred families or more,
you have to actually build your own grammar school. And
(22:04):
if you're the head of household, not only do your
kids have to go to school, you have to make
sure that your servants' kids are educated too.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
That's right, little kids. What would be like, I guess
sort of kindergarten to first grade. Second grade ed age
would go to what was called a dame school. Usually
an older woman of the community would run that one.
Then they had the secondary schools. If you were from
a wealthier family, you would go there to learn stuff
to prepare you for more education. And if you're like,
(22:33):
what are you talking about more education, this is sixteen
thirty six, guys. We're talking about a little college called
Haavid because in sixteen thirty six some leaders in the
Puritan community established the college to educate the clergy there,
and it was renamed Harvard a few years after that
(22:54):
after Puritan minister John Harvard, after he said, Hey, I
got a lot of land here, I have a valuable estate,
I have this incredible library. It's all yours, And so
they named the college Harvard, and eventually that town would
become Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yes, so, yeah, they named it Cambridge because John Harvard
and a lot of the other leaders had gone to
school at Cambridge, which was producing clergy as well. So
that's pretty interesting. And I've noticed before on Harvard's little
logo it does say sixteen thirty six, and that's quite
a claim to fame. In the United States, I've noticed
that not a lot of things go back to sixteen
(23:31):
thirty six in the US. So hats off to Harvard,
as they say, as they say in the Dame Schools.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Not hats off to Harper. No, led Zeppelin wasn't.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
That Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that's the one that
starts out so weird.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah, it was a weird song, good one. So all right,
like we kind of beat around the bush a little
bit about who the like, how pure channical they were.
You you say that a Pilgrim would look at a
Puritan like they were like a modern day American, you know,
or something like that. Yeah, in our modern eyes, we
(24:10):
think the Puritans were just really you know, like you said,
the the derogatory name, they were uptight, they didn't have
any fun, they were dour, but that that's really not
necessarily true. That's kind of the popular trope in the
media portrayal. But they had it was all about money,
like Once people started making money and there was class division,
(24:32):
they were people wanted to show it off, and they
were like, all right, well, let's let's pass some laws
here that says, you know, you don't have to wear
gray and black all the time. You can. You can
splash a little color on your house and on your clothing,
and you can. You can wear those things that you
can afford to buy and show them off a little bit.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Yeah, why shouldn't you show if your k new Cadillac buggy,
that shows that God clearly favors you over your neighbors.
Exactly should, but only if you an economic or social elite.
If you're not, if you're a peasant, or you're just
not favored by God, you have to dress in those
great clothes that we used to all have to wear. Yeah,
(25:10):
that was a big change, and that happened in just
a couple of decades. What about sex?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Is that sex?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Oh? My god? So they did not like extramarital sex.
They were not big fans of same sex relationships.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
They didn't even like masturbation. So you'd think, of course, like,
I mean, they're famous for the scarlet letter. These are
the people who branded hester Prynne with the scarlet letter.
At least we put it on our clothing, right, Yes,
they did. That was a real thing. Nathaniel Hawthorne did
not lie. But I think as a modern group we've
kind of extrapolated that to mean that they did not
(25:50):
like sex at all. Like you, they would just be
like some guy who followed people around and like hit
him with the switch whenever they thought about sex or something.
That's actually the opposite of what they were.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Like, yeah, apparently you were if you were married. They
were like, hey, you go make kids, and even if
you're not making kids, you go and do that dirty deed.
I believe the the quote was it would bond couples
together with good will and delight. And they talked about
the duty of desire to like not withhold sex from
(26:22):
your partner, and they would even turn a blind eye
to premaral sex with his which is really shocking to
hear this, but they'd be like, hey, if you're in there,
you're not married yet, don't worry about it. Do your thing,
but if you get pregnant, you better get married really
quickly and not tell everyone that this happened first exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
So that was a big one. I didn't know that
that they were into sex.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Did not know that or the drinking thing either.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
No, that's another thing too. You would think that they
were all teetotalers, and they were not. In fact, they
drank about twice as much as we drink, yeah, by
gallons of alcohol pure alcoholic, which apparently is how they
measure drinking over the years, right. Yeah, So they would
drink all day long, morning, noon, night. They drank the
(27:10):
entire time, but you had to hold your liquor because
being drunk was not okay, And I don't think it
was like something they would execute you for, but it
was very much frowned upon. But drinking. Go ahead and
drink all day long, keep a nice little buzz going.
But that's it.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, I get the feeling. I get the feeling. You
had to be pretty drunk to get that scorn. Okay,
So I like you had to really cross the line,
right exactly. But I think it was hard for them
because they could hold their liquor. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So in seventeen ninety, the average American drank and estimated
six gallons of pure alcohol per year. That's seventeen ninety.
We're thinking that probably did not change much like go
up or down from one hundred or so years before that,
it started to go down in the nineteenth century, right,
(28:01):
So six gallons Today, in twenty twenty one, the average
American drinks two point eighty three gallons of pure alcohol year,
so twice as much the Puritans were drinking than we do.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Wow, have being premarital sex. They're drinking all day long. Yep,
no wonder, they're having premarital sex. They're drinking all day long.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Sure, what else are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah? Exactly. So when it comes to the women in
these societies, it was a patriarch like there's no getting
around that. And women didn't have a lot of legal
rights at the time, no getting around that. But depending
on which congregation or which community you were in, there
may be women in that town that had more say
(28:44):
over others in what was important in that town, which
was the church, which was what was being preached, the
sermons that the children were hearing. Sometimes they would even
be able to lead those sermons, which was pretty.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Radical for the time, right, Yeah, for sure, And I
mean like it was very patriarchical, but I read that
the Puritans did have respect, especially colonial Puritans in New
England had a lot of respect for women for their
domestic abilities.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, because they.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Did a lot of stuff just to keep a homegoing,
and then also because they would go through childbirth. So
like there was a lot of respect for women in
that sense. But the men or the oldest son were
clearly the head of the household.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, of course, yeah, they and then that we talked
about this in our Salem Witch Trials episode. But you know,
the reason that was such a big deal is because
it was a big deal. It wasn't. The idea that
the Puritans were all over the place trying to drown
and burn witches just wasn't true. Salem was a pretty
(29:49):
exceptional incident even for the time. It was a big
controversial thing and a pretty unusual thing. So if you
have it in your head that Puritans were just like,
you know, there's wait burner, it really wasn't like that.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
No, no, no, it was Remember I think we talked
a lot like Salem was super isolated. Yeah, because they
were the most puritanical and the most dour, and they
just kind of cracked. I think, if I remember correctly,
that was a good episode. Yeah, was that a two parter?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
I don't either. It was a good episode or episodes.
That's right, you want to take.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
A break, Yeah, let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Okay, we're gonna take a break.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
All right, let's do it, all.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Right, softy jaw.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Soft all right.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
So here's the deal. If you were in one of
the puritanical communities, they did not like people who went
up against them too hard. If you went up against
them too hard and we're a little too outspoken about
how things were being done, you probably found yourself leaving
(31:22):
and being ousted. And a couple of pretty notable people
that happened to was a guy named Roger Williams and
a woman named Anne Hutchison. Williams was a minister. He
was educated in Cambridge, not the American Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Right, Yeah, that's what they call that town.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Yeah, the American Cambridge, New Cambridge. He came to Boston
in sixteen thirty one, moved around a bit. He seemed
to be a little bit of a rabble rouser. He
wasn't sort of content to just put his head down
and go along with everything everyone said. And that was
a problem. That was a big problem at the time. Actually,
when it came to how they were their approach to
(32:03):
dealing with the local indigenous Native American population.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, he was kind of an idealized Puritan. He believed
in the separation of church and state, which is something
that Puritans are either credited with establishing in America or
are criticized for not having done. It just depends on
which article you're reading at the time, right, But he
was definitely in favor of the separation of church and state.
(32:27):
And he also was in favor of treating the Native
Americans who they shared this area with respectfully, not just
taking their land because the crown said they could, but
like negotiating with them, like dealing with them fairly, to
like purchase land, and in fact he did. He purchased
a large tract of land from the Narraganset I think,
and ended up founding Rhode Island. Those are I mean,
(32:49):
Rhode Island's a small state, but it's a pretty big
tract of land in general.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Huge tract of plant m But Rhode Island was open
for business. They were like, Hey, if you're a Quaker,
come on over. If you're a Baptist or an Anabaptist,
come on over.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
You want to learn design come on over.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, basically, anyone who wasn't a Puritan was welcome there.
They weren't welcome in Massachusetts. He himself converted in sixteen
thirty nine to Baptism, and the very first Baptist church
in America is right there or I'm not sure if
still they're not actually, but right there in Providence.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
I don't think they tear stuff down in Providence, so
it's probably like everything that Lovecraft wrote about is basically
still there.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, there's a sign there that says Providence first Baptist
and then in parentheses, No, really first Baptist.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So the other person you mentioned was Ann Hutchinson, and
there were also tons of dissenters, but these two are
the famous, most famous, I should say. And Anne Hutchinson
is very famous because she was about as outspoken as
a person could get, not just in her time, but
in any time, Like she just did not take any guff.
She was an incredibly intelligent and compassionate midwife, and she
(34:06):
had some sort of holy conversion herself. Like if anybody
went through a conversion, it was probably Anne Hutchinson. But
she started out as a follower of the minister John Cotton,
who was the father in law of Increased Mather, grandfather
of Cotton Mather, and initially John Cotton had to flee
England because he was being persecuted for his beliefs. But
(34:29):
then as Anne Hutchinson kind of broke with him and
became a little more of a firebrand and a dissident,
he ended up turning on her with John Winthrop and
she was ostracized. She was excommunicated from Massachusetts for behaving
in a manner not comely for her sex. That was
a quote, if you've never really heard me talk before,
(34:49):
I don't talk like that.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
I've known you for a long time, never heard you
say the word comely until just now.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
So she was actually preaching like you, Sa said. She
went through that conversion and she was preaching the Holy Spirit,
and she was saying she was one of those people
that were like, hey, you get a direct line to
God in the Holy Spirit. You can talk to God,
and anyone can get this personal connection to God. Anyone
can go to Heaven. It doesn't matter if you're a sinner,
(35:20):
it doesn't matter what kind of a relationship you have
with the church. It's it's a personal and this is
what you know, I got growing up with what the
Baptists really think about these days. Well, and I guess
all along was that it's a very personal relationship you
have with God. You don't need to go to a
church even necessarily. You just have that personal relationship and
(35:44):
you can pray directly to God. You got an open line.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Yeah, that's a very Protestant way of looking at things.
It's like the antithesis of the Catholic way again. Yeah,
but Ann Hutchinson, she was basically like, you can, you
can banish me, but God's going to destroy this colony.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Famous quote.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, her famous quote was we're on a mission from.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
God, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
And it didn't come to pass. Massachusetts is still there.
But she went off and just kind of did her
own thing, and her family moved with her to Rhode Island.
Apparently her husband was extremely supportive and she was the
mother of fifteen, if not sixteen kids, and they all
moved to Rhode Island and Roger Williams said, welcome on in.
He said, why are you wearing sunglasses? It's nighttime?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Fifteen kids. That was good. Some other people, if you
want to talk about people that Massachusetts didn't want a round.
That was the Quakers. The Puritans didn't like them because
the Quakers were just too like, probably a little too
hippy dippy for them. They were all about following your
inner light again, having a direct line to Jesus, didn't
(36:51):
need religious officials. They thought the Quakers were weird, so
the Massachusetts colonies were like, we don't want you around here.
Sometimes it would get violent and ugly. I believe over
the course of a couple of years, four Quakers were hanged,
one of which was Mary Dyer. She was one of
the acolytes of Anne Hutchinson, who had, you know, eventually
(37:14):
obviously converted to Quakerism. But you know, things got so
bad among persecuting Quakers that King Charles the Second in
sixteen sixty one finally said, you guys got to stop
killing Quakers. This is not a good look.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
He's like, leave the Quakers alone.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
The thing that they hated about Quakers, though, was a Quaker.
I guess dogma or whatever. If that's not a contradiction
in terms is that every single person alive has a
little bit of the Divine Spirit in them, which means
every single person alive is worthy of respect from every
other single person alive. And that really flies in the
(37:52):
face of that saved elitism that the Puritans based their
entire jam on. That was a big deal. They hated
Quakers for that. And also, you know the idea that
we're all equal that Quakers believe, that's not again, not
at all what the Puritans believe. They saw basically the
opposite of that, like I'm literally holier than now because
(38:13):
I'm richer than you. Essentially was a tenet of Puritanism
and one of the reasons why they still have a
bad name today is the Puritans went through such damaging
intolerance and persecution time after time in England, decade after decade,
and then they would just turn right around the moment
(38:33):
they had a measure of power and do it to
other groups that didn't agree with them. So they're remembered
as being like profoundly hypocritical as a group, largely because
of that.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah. Absolutely, should we finish up with a little bit
about the slave trade in Massachusetts? Sure, because I think
a lot of people are like, I think you're mistaken.
I think you're talking about the South.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
That pronounced Georgia.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, here's how it went down. And we should say
it was not a robust situation as far as enslaving
people in Massachusetts. That's a spoiler. But the lead up
into this was before the Mayflower got there. In sixteen twenty,
the Algonquin speaking people there in southern New England were
ravaged by and we've talked about this before about illness
(39:26):
that came over from Europe. I think it wiped out
like ninety percent of the population over a three year period.
And over in England, King James the first is like, see,
this is God basically saying this land belongs to you.
So he's killing all these people, you know, in the
name of God, so we can go over there and
(39:47):
have this land exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah. And John Winthrop echoed that, like that was kind
of the sentiment, like clearly God had cleared the land
for the English to take over. I mean, there's ninety
percent of your population in three.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Years as yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Yeah, if you're a Puritan, it's tough to not take
it like that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
So all of the Native Americans, even though their society
was completely upended. And I guess here's my chance to
mention fourteen ninety one again, because.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
It covers all of it's been a while.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
It has been a while, but I can't just not
mention it. Yeah, there were still healthy, robust tribes of
Native Americans in the area, and in this area, specifically
in central in southern what is now Connecticut, were the Peaquot,
and they essentially ran the show. There were others, the
Narragansett Mohegans, they were in the area too, but they
(40:42):
were subjugated by the Peacot. Peaquot who were in alliance
with the Dutch, and they controlled all of the fur
trading in the area. So they were a very substantial,
tough group. And the English essentially, as they tried to
push further and further south into Connecticut and below into
southern New England, they ran right into the pea Quot.
They're like, no, oh, this is our lan and you're
gonna have to stay up there. The English didn't like
(41:03):
that at all, and in fairly short order, the first
truly sustained conflict between the English and Native Americans was
what came to be known as the pea Quot War.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
That's right right there at the Connecticut Colony. They defeated
them pretty roundly, and that's basically how the what kicked
off enslavement of people because they got these the pea Quots.
The idea was, hey, let's get them far away from
(41:34):
their homeland. So they're in a far away place where
they have, you know, their will has been basically killed
to try and return to where they came from. They
have no help nearby because we've taken them far from home.
So they sent some of those peaquots to the West
Indies to trade for African enslaved people in return brought
(41:56):
them over and basically the same aim as you know
sending Africans to the colonies was like, well they're you know,
they're stuck over there now, and then now we have
your pequots and they're stuck over here. It was only
a few hundred enslaved people in the colonies, so, like
I said, it wasn't the most robust thing, nothing like
(42:17):
it was in the South, obviously, but just the idea
that you know, that kind of thing didn't happen up
there just wasn't true.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Right, No, absolutely, And that Peaquot war and the following
adoption of enslavement was a huge turning point for a
lot of like big wake up call for a lot
of the Puritans, because if you look at the original
seal of Massachusetts, there's a Native American on there, and
there's still one there today. But originally there was a
(42:43):
cartoon bubble where he was saying, come over and help us,
really and yes, and a lot of the a lot
of the Puritans who did arrive arrived with that aim.
They were coming like for the opportunity to save the
souls of this whole group of people had never been
exposed to God before, right, and now all of a
sudden the English had waged total war and slaughtered pea
(43:08):
Quat women and children, burned villages, and then shot people
who tried to escape. It was ugly during the Peaquot War.
So some people are like, what are we doing? Like
we need to have a reckoning about all this. And
I think the elite Puritans of the Massachusetts Colony kind
of came to these people and he said, I know
how you're feeling, Fellah, will make you feel any better
if we just start selling more timber instead of really
(43:30):
reflecting on what we've done here. And the guy kind
of like wiped a tear from his eye and sniff
a little bit. It's like, yeah, that'll make me feel
a little bit better, and they just kind of move
forward and establishing southern New England using those same tactics
from there on out. And I should say that I
got to chuck that up to the YouTube channel Boston History.
There's a Professor Allison who did a great little like
(43:52):
seven and a half minute video on that whole thing.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
So Puritanism declined eventually, gradually kind of like how society goes.
Things became a little less zealous as far as religion goes,
a little more open minded, little more changed with the times,
and that was kind of the end of Puritanism, or
at least you know, that kind of puritanism England. In
(44:18):
the sixteen eighties, they you know, really cracked down on
the independent politics and the colonies. They said, hey, you
got to have a freedom of religion over there if
you want to move forward and roll with the times.
But you know, Christianity still has plenty of those puritanical
aspects to it in New England and then as its spread,
(44:42):
you know throughout the rest of the colonies for.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Sure, Yeah, for sure. And there's still a huge legacy
of Puritanism today, which we've kind of peppered throughout the
whole episode. A sterling example as me an American born
man feeling completely fine with being holier than now towards
the Puritans. That's Puritanical in nature. Sure, so is intolerance
(45:07):
of others, a love of income inequality or at least
a respect of it among a lot of people. But
then there's also like a lot of really good stuff
that are chalked up to the Puritans too, like the
American work ethic, the idea that you can pull yourself
up from by your own bootstraps that came out of
colonial Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
For certain, they have the boot straps.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
They did, they had little well the buckles at least
pull yourself up by your breast buckles.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
We already talked about schooling and education.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, that was another big one too, that we can
thank them for thriftiness, not being wasteful, which I'm not
sure that that really survived into the twenty first century,
but that was a thing for a while in America,
drinking all day. Yeah, although funny enough, remember I said
that it started to take a downturn in the nineteenth century.
Those same descendants of the Puritans went through was known
(46:00):
as a Great Awakening and one of the things that
they took aim at was alcohol consumption. And so it's
funny that we associate looking down on alcohol consumption with Puritans,
but it is kind of descended from their descendants.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, yeah, Sarah, like we got this tailgating's getting out
of hand. Everybody, Right, Boy, that was a pretty good one.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
I've got one more thing. An American journalist who really
disliked Puritanism. His names hl Mencan, great journalist, and he
summed the whole thing up, I think quite nicely. He
very famously said Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone
somewhere may be happy.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Chuck said, that's good. I quoted hl Mencan. Obviously everybody
that customarily means listener males here.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, this is just a very sweet email. Occasionally we
read these from time to time when people are just
very very kind and show a kindness toward us. So
I'm going to read it. Hey, guys and Josh, Chuck,
Jerry Dave. By the way, I've been trying to compose
this email for over three years, but y'all have been
on such a role lately with topics that I feel
(47:14):
obligated to spill my grateful guts. I hope this isn't
verging into parasocial, But you guys have been with our
family for countless road trips, houseworks, sleepless nights, commutes, the
birth of our twins, twelve weeks in the nick you, weddings, vacations,
out of state, surgeries for our youngest. During a few
of our hospital trips, who are asked to fill out
a sign on the front door that said what our
(47:36):
child's name was and what they like or their favorite thing,
and it was always between stuff you should know and
blue And each time I told our nurses to put
stuff you should.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Know, that's high praise.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
It is high praise. I would have put bluey. Your
voices have had a soothing effect on all of us,
through monumental personal life events, through gut wrenching global catastrophes.
We got the audio version of your book and have
listened through the End of the World multiple times.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Nice, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
I haven't even listened to it multiple times.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Huh, that's okay. I don't expect it to.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Your book, movie, podcast, article recommendations carry loads of cloud,
as they are never anything short of exceptional. We have,
in turn, recommended you to many friends, family, students, healthcare workers,
comrades of all ages and walks of life. Thank you
for helping us cultivate an intellectually stimulating environment for our
young ones and inspiring us grown ups to remain flexible
(48:32):
and curious. You expand our understanding of the world as
it is, as it has been, and help us move
forward in humility towards creating a just and equitable future. Wow,
you've got the wrong email address here.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
They're like, this is SmartLess, right.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah, exactly. If I keep trying to say all the
nice things I think and feel about y'all and your show,
I'll be stuck editing this email for another three years.
Hope to see you in Chicago. Admiringly Nelson and Nelson
sent in pictures of their beautiful family, and I responded
and said, Hey, if you can come to Chicago for
(49:09):
this show, then we would love for you to be
our guests. And I haven't heard back yet, so well.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, it's a cute family. I saw that email too,
and I was heartwarmed by just.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
A wonderful thing. So and when we say be our guests,
that means free tickets, by the way, not just we're
going to give you a welcome afty buy tickets.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I also love Nelson wrote in parentheses after they signed it,
like Mendela or Muntz.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, hats off Nelson.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Thank you very much. That was a super kind sweet
email and we really appreciate it, I can say quite
confidently speaking for you as well, right, Chuck, absolutely, If
you want to be like Nelson and sent us a
super sweet email, you can bet we love that kind
of thing. Just wrap it up, spanking on the bottom
and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
(50:00):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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