Pilgrim Fathers, Virginia Company, colony, settlers of Massachusetts, Catholicism, Plymouth, Mayflower, democratic government, African slaves, social mobility, freedom, Massachusetts bay
One of the first misconceptions is that the Pilgrims Fathers were the first English settlers of the New World. Actually, the Virginia Company sent a group of miners looking for gold in Virginia. They did not find any, and most of the colonists starved to death in the first winter (most colonists were miners, so there were not enough farmers to feed the colony). However, they started planting tobacco, a very profitable enterprise, and this led to the arrival of many more settlers to North America. Some of these were the well-known settlers of Massachusetts bay, the so-called Pilgrims Fathers.
[...] They arrived only few weeks the start of winter, bringing few farm animals with them. Haf of them died during that winter, and the few that survived did so only because the local natives provided them with food, taught them how to grow corn. The next year the pilgrims made a big feast for the locals, in order to thank them for the help they had received, which the pilgrims took as a sign of God's help. Most natives were killed by disease shortly afterwards, and contacts between settlers and natives became much less cordial. [...]
[...] Massachusetts enjoyed instead more rights, as well as social-religious cohesion. The puritans shared the idea that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one": individualism was frowned upon, and there were early attempts to form a democratic government. That did not mean the pilgrims enjoyed equality: only church members could take part in the decision-making processes, and shortly afterwards, since the 1640s, they started to import African slaves. Nowadays Americans think that the modern United States were founded by pioneers of freedom, but this is not quite accurate: the first colony was about money, gold digging at first and tobacco growing afterwards. [...]
[...] However, they started planting tobacco, a very profitable enterprise, and this led to the arrival of many more settlers to North America. Some of these were the well-known settlers of Massachusetts bay, the so-called Pilgrims Fathers. They were puritans, a religious sect that believed the Anglican Church to be too corrupt and too similar to Catholicism. They were persecuted in England because of their criticism of the Church, so fled to the Netherlands, and then decided to found a colony in America. [...]
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