German principalities, and England; like the English dissenters, many
eventually found their way to the American colonies.
These actions by the French and English governments, in addition to
the general insecurity of life in the German states as a result of wars
between the powers, explain why so many members of the dissident com-
munities of Lutherans, Calvinists, Quakers, Anglicans, Puritans, and Mora-
vians came to America. Because they were to play so important a role in
America, their experiences are pertinent.
In England by 1629, the attempt by the Church of England, actively
supported by King Charles I, to destroy Puritanism had reached a level of
intensity that the Puritan leaders found intolerable. John Winthrop, later
governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote that England had become
“weary of her Inhabitants, so as man which is most precious of all the
Creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth they tread upon.” From
their leaders the call went out all over England for the Puritans to gather
their families, their animals, and other possessions; sell their property; and
take ship for the New World. Whole communities answered the call. In the
next year, seventeen ships sailed for Massachusetts in the vanguard of what
would become a flood of some 21,000 people.
Quite different from the exclusive and intolerant Puritans, the Quakers
were in practice what they called themselves, “Friends.” They were multi-
national in origin; whereas most Puritans came only from southern
England, many Quakers were Welsh and Irish. But like the Puritans, the
Quakers migrated because of religious persecution in the Old World. Their
meetings documented their travails in the Books of Sufferings.In addition
to physical abuse by their neighbors, they were prosecuted, were jailed, and
had their property seized by the government for refusing to pay taxes to the
government-recognized church from which they dissented. Marching to
their own drummers, the Quakers were sometimes treated as “sturdy beg-
gars and rogues,” arrested, and sent off as indentured servants to the New
World. The courts in England had no sympathy for them, and they got lit-
tle in America either. Both the Anglicans of Virginia and the Puritans of
Massachusetts drove the Quakers out, had them whipped, or even exe-
cuted them. Treated as pariahs in the established colonies, the Quakers too
felt the need to form a self-governing community. Their first significant set-
68 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA