The Puritans in America
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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. He's thinking to you every time, doesn't he? Oh, sure. After 16 years, it doesn't take much for me to get a giggle from you. That's good. I like that, because it should have gone the opposite.

The giggle in me, from me, because of you. I put a giggle in you. Oh, ooh. How about that? Fresh. Speaking of fresh, Chuck, you probably would not have just said that. Were you not born an American? Uh-huh. And was America not founded by essentially the most radical element of

extremist element that England had to offer at the time. Wow. Nice work. Look at you. Thanks. That's all we need to say about their backstory. You jerk. Well, I can sum it up in three sentences. All right, let's see what you got. Well, we're talking about Puritanism and

Getting into just, you know, English Puritanism is 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 Livia. I was like, you know what? I think I was in Massachusetts at the time when we were doing our show in Medford. Mm-hmm.

And I was like, what's up with this place, Massachusetts? And what was up with the Puritans? Why is everybody dressed like pilgrims? 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 the Puritans were and who they were was a group of extreme, um,

far extreme Protestants. And it was a movement 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. Yeah, and you can make a case that the Puritans would not have existed had England not broken with the Catholic Church and formed its own Church of England, right? But these people are like, no, we're not going far enough. We need to just be

off the rails, make our own thing. And like you said, like there was, this is a thick, thick period of English history from like the 1530s to the 1660s, something like that. Um,

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 were deeply persecuted, sometimes brutally persecuted.

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

Or 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. Yeah, they were basically like, hey, we can go over there. This was in 1608.

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 Vivitch, remember that one? Yeah. That's kind of what we're talking about. These people that set up their own shops and were like, hey, we can just go out here on our own and be as radically Protestant as

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 you're not. There's really nothing you can do about that. And we've got 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 1560s. And it was like an insult, right? It was. I saw it described as, I think, in the New World Encyclopedia that you could –

Consider 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 called themselves saints, if that says enough to you about what they thought about themselves. Right.

But Puritan was kind of a put down because the people, the other people in the Anglican church 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 is Satan's way of corrupting us.

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 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, long time is people saying like, no, 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's blasphemy. I know. 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 it is because the church was like, to get through God, you go through us. Right. 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 like a congregation could take care of itself and

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 that meant you were favored by God. And so by association, if you were poor or poverty stricken, that must mean you had some sort of moral failing. And if that's not essentially the basis of America still today, I don't know what is. Yeah, it's really funny. Well, not funny. It's sad. But you know what I mean. I know exactly what you mean.

So I mentioned the group of separatists that in 1608, they came from a village in Yorkshire called Scrooby. You mentioned they moved to Holland. And then about 12 years later, a little more than 100 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 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? No, the Puritans hated Christmas.

They did. They did. And 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, Halloween can get to be like today. That's kind of what Christmas was like. So, of course, they hated Christmas.

Yeah, because no one drinks around Christmas now. No, everybody observes it puritanically. In 1630, if we jump ahead just a little bit, this is when and this is 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, you know, very highly respected class of people. Right. Which, you know, as you'll see, comes, like you were saying, comes to be something that the Puritans were known for. Yeah. 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 weren't like, hey, we don't want anything to do with the Church of England, but they were still Congregationalists. Yeah, so yes, the Puritans and the Pilgrims were, for all intents and 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 of thumb to understand both groups is the pilgrims would have found the Puritans ungodly and satanic. Right.

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. And the Puritans 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 Puritans would just –

Look down on us. And they would recognize themselves in us, I think, a little bit too. Yeah, totally. 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 10 times as many. I think about 1,000 people came over in that first group.

And they weren't they were just looking to set up an idealized 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.

Yeah.

Because there's one other thing to understand about the Puritans. They believed, quite literally, Satan was walking among us and 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 soul to hell. That was the stakes of what these Puritans were living 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. Well, that's the vvitch. Yeah, exactly. That definitely is portrayed in that for sure. Yeah. Don't turn your back on that billy goat.

What was his name? Like Funtime Joseph or something? No, what was it? Something black. Freddy Fosbear? Funtime Black. I don't know. Something like that. These are the moments where people are screaming at us in their cars or whatever. Apparently it's anecdotally. What do you mean? Don't you remember? I think there was a listener mail that came. You were trying to think of a word and it was anecdotal. 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 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, which was a stock venture that traded fur. They traded fish and they had shareholders and it was, you know, it was a business.

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. Right. All of those people were Puritans. And so 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. Yeah. They were the voting shareholders. Right.

Yeah, but it is important to remember, too, they ran a successful company. Oh, sure. These were 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, 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. Bring stuff with Joshua and Sean.

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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. Yeah. So we're going to go found Boston, which apparently is named after a 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 led 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 reelected and reelected because they had annual elections. It wasn't every like two or four years. But even 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 Colony, you know?

Yeah, which was, I don't know, maybe a little bit surprising. It was. But another thing that's surprising, too, is these people are immediately removed from England where there is a monarch in charge, a king that has absolute authority over their lives. And all of a sudden, 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 seeding of American democracy, too.

Yeah, absolutely. Which I'm sure they, it was pretty radical for them at the time. Mm-hmm.

All right. So they're in Massachusetts. They're farming. Nothing huge, but they're farming. They're fishing. They're milling lumber. They're building boats and ships. The population is really, really growing kind of all over New England at 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 us 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. You would get a little bit of land. The religion, again, was still central to all this stuff in every town that was 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 I dissolved Parliament in 1629. So all these Puritan reformers who were working in England to try and change the state of the church there had no recourse. They were like, well, we've been kicked out of Parliament. So let's go to this new world, I guess.

And about 20,000 of them moved there between 1629 and 1640 when Parliament got back together. I know. In a decade, their numbers grew about 24. That's amazing. That's a big influx of people. Yeah.

Yeah, and in that 20-year period, there was like – 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 to the fleeing essentially from the UK of – well, it wasn't the UK at the time, but the Scottish, the Irish, other English who weren't Puritans. Careful.

French immigrants, they all showed up and they're like, hey, stuff's really off the chain back in England and, you know, what will eventually 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 hangups 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, not just spiritually when all of those other Puritans showed up, but economically. It really started to make inroads because a lot of laborers showed up. A lot of craftsmen showed up. And merchants showed up, too, who were like, hey, I've got connections back here.

in England that can get us stuff we need or who will buy the stuff that we're making. And it started to thrive pretty quickly around that time. They also scratched her and Doug's beards and said, wait a minute, we thought off the chain meant that was good. They said, just shut up. Don't say anything about that. At least I didn't say off the hook. They would have been like, what are you talking about? Exactly. Like people remain on hooks.

So while this is going on, let's say this is what, 1636. The colony of Connecticut was founded by a guy named John Hooker. He was a pastor in what would later be Cambridge. But he got a commission from the general court of Massachusetts. Go found Connecticut. So that happened. And then Rhode Island was.

They 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. Right. Which is kind of interesting. I think like I think you can still see like remnants of that stuff today and how New England is. Yeah. Like I think the New Hampshire state license plate says Satan's country. Right. Yeah.

Actually, it says live free or die. Oh, well, yeah, there you have it. So this whole venture is starting to really kind of cook between 1630 and before the 1600s were out. It just really established itself. They were spreading out so much that, like you said, they were founding new colonies that were seeded from the original Massachusetts Bay colonies. The pilgrims...

We're like, nobody likes us. No one's joining our ranks. We're actually losing people now. We had the first murder among Europeans in North America here. Can we come join you? And actually, there was a big, big argument and a debate and a schism, I think, in Plymouth.

Like the practical leaders were like, guys, we're not going to make it unless we join up with Massachusetts. 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, was absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691. 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 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. Yeah.

That's another legacy of Puritans that's still around today and that's super American is public education. Yeah. Like a very extensive government overseen like educational system. That's what the Puritans set up. They actually passed an act.

The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647, which I looked it up. I couldn't find that it was ever repealed. So it's technically still on the books in Massachusetts. Yeah. But it basically said if you have a town of 50 families, up to 50 families, you have to hire a schoolmaster. That's just law now. If you have 100 families or more, you have to actually build your own grammar school. And 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. That's right. Little kids, what would be like, I guess, sort of kindergarten to first grade, second grade 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, what are you talking about more education? This is 1636, guys. We're talking about a little college called Harvard because in 1636, some leaders were

And the Puritan community established the college to educate the clergy there. And it was renamed Harvard a few years after that, 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. Yeah.

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 1636. And that's quite a claim to fame in the United States. I've noticed that. Not a lot of things go back to 1636 in the U.S. So hats off to Harvard, as they say. As they say in the Dame schools. Not hats off to Harper.

I said Harvard. No, Led Zeppelin. Wasn't that Hats Off to Harvard? Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's the one that starts out so weird. Yeah, that was a weird song. Good one, though. So, um...

All right. Like we kind of beat around the bush a little bit about who the like how puritanical they were. You you said 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 think the Puritans were just really, you know, like you said, the derogatory name, they were uptight pilgrims.

They didn't have any fun. They were dour. But that's really not necessarily true. That's kind of the popular trope in the media portrayal. Right. But they had it was all about money. Like once people started making money and there was class division, 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, OK,

You know, you don't have to wear gray and black all the time. You can splash a little color on your house and on your clothing, and you can wear those things that you can afford to buy and show them off a little bit. Yeah. Why shouldn't you show off your new Cadillac buggy that shows that God clearly favors you over your neighbors? Exactly. Of course you should. But only if you're an economic or social elite person.

If you're not, if you're a peasant or you're just not favored by God, you have to dress in those gray clothes that we used to all have to wear. Yeah. What about sex? That was a big change. And that happened in just a couple decades. Sex. What about sex? Is that what you said? Sex. Sex. Oh, my God. So they did not like extramarital sex. Yeah. They were not big fans of same-sex relationships. Nope. They didn't even like masturbation. Yeah.

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 put it on her clothing, right? They really did. 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 like sex at all. Like you, there'd just be like some guy who followed people around and like hit them with a switch whenever they thought about sex or something. Right. That's actually the opposite of what they were like.

Yeah, apparently that if 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. That dirty deed. I believe the the quote was it would bond couples together with goodwill and delight.

And they talked about the duty of desire to like not withhold sex from your partner. And they would even turn a blind eye to premarital 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. So that was a big one. I didn't know that, that they were into sex. They were freaks. Did not know that or the drinking thing either. 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 by gallons of alcohol, pure alcohol a year, which apparently is how they measure drinking over the years, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So they would drink all day long, morning, noon, night. They drank the 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. Yeah, I get the feeling you had to be pretty drunk to get that scorn.

Okay, so I saw— 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. So in 1790, the average American drank an estimated six gallons of pure alcohol per year.

That's 1790. We're thinking that probably did not change much, like go up or down from 100 or so years before that. It started to go down in the 19th century. Right. So six gallons today in 2021, the average American drinks 2.83 gallons of pure alcohol a year. So twice as much the Puritans were drinking than we do.

Wow. They're out there having premarital sex. They're drinking all day long. Yep. No wonder they're having premarital sex or drinking all day long. Sure. What else are you going to do? Yeah.

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 over others than.

And 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 radical for the time. Right.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, like it was very patriarchal, 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. Yeah. Because they did a lot of stuff just to keep a home going. 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. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. They, and then we talked about this in our Salem Witch podcast,

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 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 a witch burner. It really wasn't like that. 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? I don't remember. I don't either. It was a good episode or episodes. That's right. You want to take a break?

Yeah. Let's take a break. Okay. We're going to take a break. All right. Let's do it. All right. Stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.

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All right. So here's the deal. If you were in one of the puritanical communities,

Um, they did not like people who went up against them too hard. Uh, if you went up against them too hard and were a little too outspoken about how things were, were being done, you probably found yourself leaving and being ousted. And a couple of pretty notable people that happened to was a guy named Roger Williams and a woman named Ann Hutchison. Um, Williams was a minister. He was educated in Cambridge, not the,

Not the American Cambridge, right? Yeah, that's what they call that town. Yeah, the American Cambridge, New Cambridge. He came to Boston in 1631, 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. Yeah.

That was a big problem at the time, especially when it came to how they were their approach to dealing with the local indigenous Native American population. 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. But he was definitely in favor of the separation of church and state, 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 negotiating with them personally

like dealing with them fairly to like purchase land. And in fact, he did. He purchased a large tract of land from the Narragansett, I think, and ended up founding Rhode Island. I mean, Rhode Island's a small state, but it's a pretty big tract of land in general. Huge tract of land. Mm-hmm.

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. You want to learn design? Come on over. Yeah. Basically, anyone who wasn't a Puritan was welcome there. They weren't welcome in Massachusetts.

He himself converted in 1639 to baptism, and the very first Baptist church in America is right there, or I'm not sure if it's still there or not, actually, but right there in Providence. I don't think they tear stuff down in Providence, so it's probably there still. Like everything that Lovecraft wrote about is basically still there. Yeah, there's a sign there that says Providence, First Baptist, and then in parentheses, no, really, First Baptist. Right. Yeah.

So the other person you mentioned was Anne 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 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 Increase Mather, grandfather of Cotton Mather. And initially, John Cotton had to flee England because he was being persecuted for his beliefs.

But 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, I don't talk like that. I've known you for a long time. Never heard you say the word comely until just now. Yeah. So she was actually preaching. Like you said, she went through that conversion and she was she was preaching.

the Holy Spirit. And she was saying, you can, she was one of those people that were like, Hey, you get a direct line to God and 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, it doesn't matter what kind of relationship you have with the church.

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 –

A church even, necessarily, you just have that personal relationship and you can pray directly to God. You got an open line. Yeah, that's a very Protestant way of looking at things. It's like the antithesis of the Catholic way again. Yeah. But Anne Hutchinson, she was basically like, you can banish me, but God's going to destroy this colony. Yeah, he told me so. Yeah, her famous quote was, we're on a mission from God. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

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 15, if not 16 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. 15 kids. That was good.

Some other people, if you want to talk about people that Massachusetts didn't want around, 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 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 eventually obviously converted to Quakerism. But things got so bad among persecuting Quakers that King Charles II in 1661 finally said, you guys got to stop killing Quakers. This is not a good look. He's like, leave the Quakers alone. Yeah. The thing that they hated about Quakers, though, is...

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. Right.

And that really flies in the face of that saved elitism that the Puritans based their entire jam on. That was a big deal. They hated the 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 thou because I'm richer than you, essentially, was a tenet there.

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 they had a measure of power and do it to other groups that didn't agree with them. So they're remembered as being profoundly hypocritical as a group, largely because of that.

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.

He mispronounced Georgia. 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 1620, the Algonquin speaking people there in southern New England were ravaged.

By and we've talked about this before, about illness that came over from Europe. I think it wiped out like 90 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 have this land. Exactly. Yeah.

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 losing 90 percent of your population in three years is. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a Puritan, it's tough to not take it like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So all of the Native Americans, even though their society was completely upended, and I guess here's my chance to mention 1491 again because it covers all of this stuff. Man, it's been a while. 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 and southern of what is now Connecticut, were the Pequot tribes.

And they essentially ran the show. There were others, the Narragansett, the Mohegans. They were in the area too, but they were subjugated by the Pequot, 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 Pequot. They're like, no, this is our land. You're going to have to stay up there. The English didn't like 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 Pequot War. 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 Pequots. The idea was, hey, let's get them far away from their homeland. So they're in a faraway 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 Pequots there.

to the West Indies to trade for African enslaved people in return, brought 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 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. Right. No, absolutely. And that Pequot 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 cartoon bubble

Where he was saying, come over and help us. Really? Yes. And a lot of the Puritans who did arrive arrived with that aim. They were coming for the opportunity to save the souls of this whole group of people who had never been exposed to God before, right? Right.

And now all of a sudden the English had waged total war and slaughtered Pequot women and children, burned villages and then shot people who tried to escape. It was ugly during the Pequot 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 said, I know how you're feeling, fella. It won't make you feel any better if we just start selling more timber instead of really reflecting on what we've done here. And the guy kind of like wiped a tear from his eye and sniffed a little bit. He's like, yeah, that'll make me feel a little bit better. And they just kind of moved forward in establishing southern New England using those same tactics from there on out.

And I should say that I got to chalk that up to the YouTube channel Boston History. There's a Professor Allison who did a great little like seven and a half minute video on that whole thing.

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, a little more change with the times. And that was kind of the end of Puritanism, or at least, you know, that kind of Puritanism. England in the 1680s,

They, you know, really cracked down on the independent politics in the colonies. They said, hey, you got to have 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 it spread, you know, throughout the rest of the colonies, for 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 is me, an American-born man, feeling completely fine with being holier than thou toward the Puritans. That's Puritanical in nature. Sure. So is intolerance of others, right?

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 by your own bootstraps. That came out of colonial Massachusetts for certain. They had those bootstraps. They did. They had literal, well, the buckles at least. Pull yourself up by your brass buckles. Yeah.

We already talked about schooling and education. Yeah, that

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 21st 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 19th century. Those same descendants of the Puritans went through what was known 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 alcohol

looking down on alcohol consumption with Puritans, but it is kind of descended from their descendants. Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, we got to, this tailgating is getting out of hand, everybody. Right. Boy, that was a pretty good one. I've got one more thing. An American journalist who really disliked Puritanism, his name's H.L. Mencken, great journalist. And he summed the whole thing up, I think quite nicely. Yeah.

He very famously said, Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. That's good. Chuck said that's good. I quoted H.L. Mencken. Obviously, everybody that customarily means listener mail is here. 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. Okay. Hey, guys.

And Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, by the way. Sure. I've been trying to compose this email for over three years, but y'all have been on such a roll lately with topics that I feel 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, housework, sleepless nights, commutes, the birth of our twins, 12 weeks in the NICU, weddings, vacations, and more.

out-of-state surgeries for our youngest. During a few of our hospital trips, we were asked to fill out a sign on the front door that said what our child's name was and what they like or their favorite thing. And it was always between Stuff You Should Know and Bluey. And each time I told our nurses to put Stuff You Should Know. That's high praise. 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,

Nice. That's amazing. You haven't even listened to it multiple times. That's okay. I don't expect you to. Yeah.

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 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. I know. Has he got the wrong email address here? They're like, this is smartless, right? 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 this show, then we would love for you to be our guest. And I haven't heard back yet, so.

Yeah. It's a cute family. I saw that email, too, and I was heartwarmed by it. Just a wonderful thing. And when we say be our guest, that means free tickets, by the way, not just we're going to give you a welcome after you buy tickets. I also love Nelson wrote in parentheses after they signed it, like Mandela or Muntz. Yeah.

Hats off, Nelson. 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 send us a super sweet email, you can bet we love that kind of thing. Just wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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