When the fleet of Puritan John Winthrop led the Great Puritan Migration from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, a utopian goal was pursued: to find a utopia in the New World that would serve as an example to the Old World. They didn't flee from England, they were on a ' wilderness side. ' "For we must remember," said Winthrop, who would later become Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor, "that wee will be like a city on a hill, the eyes of all men are upon us."
Of course, Winthrop's egalitarian objective was supremely unconcerned with those who lived in America already. For many, many thousands of years North America was a large region inhabited by (according to recent estimates) maybe ten to twelve million native Americans north of Rio Grande. How could the Puritans create a permanent bridgehead among so many? English fishermen visiting New England had already brought in the European disease bacilli in 1616, which, assuming epidemic proportions, had possibly annihilated half of the New England Indians, who had numbered 25,000. "Their bones and skulls," wrote an Englishman, "made such a spectacle...... it seemed like a new Golgotha."
Instead of viewing this event as a tragic human disaster, the English generally regarded it as proof of God's wishes: that the land would be made empty for them. And then came second destruction, smallpox, soon after the arrival of the Puritans who killed thousands of more Indians in the early 1630s. In Mexico, where a population of perhaps twenty-five million had shrunk to less than one-twelfth of that number, what had happened over the past century was also happening around the Puritans.
Therefore the defeated local Indians with little opposition made room for the Puritans, and the Puritans, in effect, declared that since the land was not "occupied" or "owned," it could be properly seized. Moreover, the English said they were a "civilized" nation, and the Indians "do not include any property, have no settled dwelling, or stable cattle to develop the ground." So the Puritans simply moved in and settled down. They later made purchases from the Indians of large lands, but only to secure a "valid" title to the land, so that the Dutch of New Amsterdam (later New York City) could not.
Among the Puritans, there was a lot of talk of Christianizing the Indian and small groups of "praying Indians" were eventually formed into nearby villages. But unlike the Spaniards who came before them, the Puritans did not bring with them huge colonial forces to disperse among the Natives, but only enough ministers to meet the needs of the Puritans themselves. Massachusetts Bay Colony officials announced that the Indians in their territory were subject to the colony's rules and sought to control their moral behaviour. However, this quickly brought them into conflict with the Pequots, a strong and robust Indian tribe, and led them to the Pequot War of 1637, during which the tribe was almost wiped out. After that, there was peace for nearly forty years. As in Virginia before, so now in New England, Indians and Puritans remained biologically separate, and more or less in separate enclaves of their own.
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