As far back as 1623, David Thompson had founded a settlement at Rye on the Piscataqua, the
nucleus of what was to become New Hampshire. In 1639 Hooker's Hartford joined with two
other Puritan-dissenter townships, Windsor and Wethersfield, to form what they called the
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Neither they nor Davenport's New Haven had royal
charters, but they constituted in effect a separate colony. From the 1620s there were further
settlements up the coast in what was to become Maine, set up by dissenting fishermen. Annual
new fleets from England reinforced all the areas of settlement. Between 1630 and 1660 about
20,000 Puritans came out, with Massachusetts and Connecticut forming the core area of
settlement. This was characterized by what have been called Christian, utopian, closed and corporate communities.’ Some settlements were formal. New Haven had nine squares, the central square being a market-place, eventually occupied by the meetinghouse, court-house, schoolhouse, and jail. An early map survives of Wethersfield, one of the first of the Connecticut towns, showing houselots, adjacent field-lots, then outlying strips. Some of these early colony-towns were abandoned. But the vast majority survived with continuous occupation to this day. The fact is, the Puritans were successful settlers. They were homogeneous in belief, literate-they could read the many and often excellent printed pamphlets advising colonists-and skilled. Most of them were artisans or tradesmen, some were experienced farmers, and there was a definite sprinkling of merchants with capital. They came as families under leaders, often as entire congregations under their minister. Their unit-plantation was of several square miles, with an English-style village in the middle (in New England called a town), where all had houses, then lands outside it. There was, from the start, no egalitarianism. The free-enterprise investment system ensured that leaders and largest investors got bigger units. There was no symmetrical uniformity or pattern since the countryside was rugged and varied, and there was a universal pragmatism in adapting to the physical features of the place. When more space was needed, the congregation met and decreed a formal move to found a new township. This was the New England equivalent of an Old England village-but with no manor-house and tenant cottages. Virtually everyone came from England and Wales. The religious exclusivity of the original settlements rarely lasted more than a decade or so, with dissenters being expelled. Gradually, Anglicans, Baptists, and even Quakers were allowed to settle. Wealth-gaps widened in the second and third generation, rows and splits weakened church authority, the social atmosphere became more secular and mercantile, and the Puritan merged into the Yankee,a race whose typical member is eternally
torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.’
Even Catholics were soon living in America in organized communities. This was the work of the
Calvert family. George Calvert, born in 1597, was an energetic Yorkshireman who became
James I's Secretary of State and did some vigorous `planting' in Ireland as well as investing
largely in the East India Company and the Virginia Company. When he became a Catholic in
1625 he retired into private life, but James made him a peer, Lord Baltimore, and encouraged
him to found a colony for his fellow-papists. He looked at Newfoundland twice, but decided it
was too cold. Then he visited Jamestown, but felt unable to sign the Protestant Oath of
Supremacy there. In the end Charles I gave him a charter to settle the northern Chesapeake area.
It was left to his son Cecil, 2nd Baron Baltimore, to organize the actual settlement in 1633. He
recruited seventeen younger sons of Catholic gentry to lead and finance the expedition, taking
with them about 200 ordinary settlers, mostly Protestants, some of them married, a few farmers.
They had two ships, the Ark, 350 tons, and the Dove, a mere pinnace, but both armed to the teeth.