When I hear the term “New England,” I automatically picture a beautiful land that was filled with natives and Europeans who worked together. I picture Europeans who supported each other. I also picture colonists who were free from all persecutions for their religion. I saw them as people who understood and accepted outsiders unlike the Chesapeake colonies. Prior to reading the textbook, I knew that the colony in Massachusetts was home to the first Puritans. It was called the Plymouth Colony. Also, I knew that while on board the Mayflower, men signed the Mayflower Compact. I knew that this agreement was made to insure that the Puritan’s would all work together as a community. In all, I assumed that because of the Mayflower Compact, everyone in the New Colony tolerated new ideas and opinions from colonists and natives.
From reading chapter 3, my perception of Puritan colonists’ interactions together changed. I learned about the intolerance the Puritans had to differing opinions to the Protestant faith. When Roger Williams, a minister, questioned Governor Winthrop about topics like taking native lands and complete separation from the Church of England, he was banished (http://www.rogerwilliams.org/biography.htm). In another example of intolerance, Anne Hutchinson was also banished. She “challenged male authority” when she gave the idea that
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I learned that Puritans claimed land that belonged to the natives just as other European settlers. This increasingly became a problem as the Puritans further disrupted the native lifestyle (Corbett 83). Further, the Puritans attempted to convert the natives to Protestantism Christianity just as the settlers in attempted to convert the natives to Catholic Christianity. To sum it up, “the Puritans often treated Native Americans with a brutality equal to that of the Spanish conquistadors and Nathaniel Bacon’s frontiersmen” (Henretta