The Civil War

Founding date: In 1628, the foundation was laid for another colony in New England, by the name of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. The Massachusetts Bay Colony included the part of the present State of Massachusetts from the neighborhood of Boston northward. It was founded by Puritans, who, it will be remembered, had not separated wholly from the Church of England, but opposed many of its ceremonies. In the civil war with England they sided with the Parliament and were subjected to the same persecution as the Separatists. In 1628 a number of wealthy Puritans bought the territory from the Council of Plymouth, and, receiving a charter the following year from Charles I, sent small colonies across the Atlantic. Then the company itself followed, taking with it the charter and officers, thus gaining a colony in America that was wholly independent of England. Salem and some other small settlements had previously been made.

Purpose/goals: The earliest European explorers including the Norsemen, who may have reached Cape Cod made no apparent impact on these Algonkian groups, but in the wake of John and Sebastian Cabot's voyages fishermen from England, France, Portugal, and Spain began fishing off the Massachusetts coast. By the mid-16th century, they were regularly going ashore to process and pack their catch. Within 50 years, fur trading with the Indians was established. Permanent English settlement, which would ultimately destroy the Algonkian peoples, began in 1620 when a small band of Puritans left their haven at Leiden in the Netherlands to start a colony in the northern part of Virginia lands, near the Hudson River. Their ship, the Mayflower, was blown off course by an Atlantic storm, and they landed on Cape Cod before settling in an abandoned Wampanoag village they called Plymouth. Ten years later, a much larger Puritan group settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, some miles to the north in Salem. Between 1630 and 1640, about 20,000 English people, chiefly Puritans,...