As the presidential campaign progresses through the spring and summer and into the fall, we are likely to hear, as we have already heard, the claim that the brave people who came to these shores 400 years ago did so in order to escape religious persecution and to be free to worship in a manner dictated by their consciences rather than by the state.
Bloody religious wars in Europe and sometimes violent persecution of dissenters in England form the backdrop of the colonization of America.
The Puritans of Massachusetts are a well-known example of people who braved the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic in search of a place where they could exercise their faith freely. So are the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania and the French Huguenots who fled in Europe after the Edict on Nantes in 1689.
But the reasons people had for leaving hearth and home and risking life and limb and coming to the American colonies were complex and often had little or nothing to do with religious persecution or religious freedom.
Consider the case of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth. Unlike the Puritans, they had given up on purifying the Church of England. In 1608 they "separated" from the Church of England and England itself (hence the name Separatists) by going into exile in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands offered the Separatists a degree of religious liberty they had never known. But economic conditions were harsh. The only jobs available to them were low-paying and labor-intensive. Plus, the truce between Spain and the Netherlands was due to end in 1621. William Bradford, later governor of Plymouth Plantation, said "there was nothing but beating of drums and preparing for war." He worried that "the Spaniard might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine as sore here as there."
In "Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647" Bradford listed the reasons the Separatists left Holland for America aboard the Mayflower. He did not mention their desire to practice their faith as they pleased, and for a good reason: If being free to worship as they pleased was their main concern, they could have remained in Holland, where they had lived and worshipped freely and in peace for 12 years.
When we consider the southern colonies, it becomes even clearer that the reasons people had for coming to the New World were complex and often had little or nothing to do with religious persecution or freedom of religion.
How could one claim that the people who settled Jamestown were motivated by a desire to escape religious persecution and to break free from the established Church of England when one of the first things they did was to erect a cross, build a makeshift outdoor church and celebrate communion following the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England led by the Rev. Richard Hunt, an Anglican priest?
By 1624 the Church of England — from which the Puritans of Massachusetts had fled — was the established church of Virginia. In the following century it was established down the Eastern Seaboard.
Historians give various reasons for why people came to Carolina in the 1600s; a desire to practice their faith freely is one item on the list, but only one. People also came because they were fleeing cold winters, war, poverty, high rent, unemployment and heavy taxes in their own countries.
For the next 400 years, millions of people followed in the steps of those early settlers, including my great-grandparents, who came from England in the mid-19th century. Some — a few, comparatively speaking — were fleeing religious persecution; others were seeking political asylum. But I suspect that most of them came for the same reason many of those 17th century settlers came — to make a better life for themselves and their families.
That is the reason people continue to come, whether the barrier they cross is the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean or the Rio Grande River.
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