There remained two problems. First, the settlers consisted of two distinct groups: the Separatists, united by their religious beliefs, and the others (whom the Separatists called “Strangers”) united by nothing more or less than a desire for commercial success. Second, neither group had a legal right to settle in the region, which was beyond the boundary of their charter. While riding at anchor, the two groups drew up the “Mayflower Compact”—in effect, the first constitution written in North America-in which they all agreed to create a “Civil Body Politic” and abide by laws created for the good of the colony.

The settlers probed for a good place to land and soon discovered Plymouth Harbor, on the western side of Cape Cod Bay. They set foot on shore-supposedly on a rock now carved with the year 1620—on December 21, with the main body of settlers disembarking on December 26. They could hardly have picked a less favorable time and place for their landing. A bitter New England winter was already under way, and the site boasted neither good harbors nor, given its flinty soil, extensive tracts of fertile land. As at Jamestown, people began to die: during the first winter, more than half of them. But these settlers were also very different from their earlier Jamestown counterparts. They were neither moneyed gentlemen, on the one hand, nor indentured servants on the other. Most were yeoman farmers, hard workers who were by right and inclination free.

From their number emerged a succession of able leaders, including John Carver (ca. 1576-1621), the first governor of Plymouth Colony; William Bradford (1590-1657), governor for more than 30 years and the colony’s most able early historian, the author of History or Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647; William Brewster (1567-1644); Edward Winslow (1595-1655), the colony’s indispensable diplomat, who negotiated a treaty with local Indian chief Massasoit, established vital fur-trading enterprises, and managed relations with England; and Myles Standish (ca. 1584-1656), a professional soldier who served as the colony’s military adviser, established its defenses, negotiated with Indians, represented the interests of Plymouth in England (1625-26), and was a founder of Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1632. But even able leadership would have failed to bring the colony through the first dreadful winter without the aid and succor of the neighboring Wampanoag Indians. Two in particular, Squanto (a Pawtuxet living among the Wampanoags) and Samoset (an Abnaki), gave the Pilgrims hands-on help in planting crops and building shelters. Samoset introduced the settlers to Massasoit, principal leader of the Wampanoags, and Squanto served as interpreter between the chief and the Pilgrim leaders. Throughout his lifetime, Massasoit (that was what the English called him; his Indian name was Wawmegin, “Yellow Feather”) treated the settlers as friends.

Inspired by the success of the settlement of Plymouth (and overlooking the hardships involved in it), another group of Puritans—these only somewhat less radical than the Pilgrims—landed at Massachusetts Bay in five ships in 1630. Eleven more ships arrived the next year. Under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint stock trading organization chartered by the English crown in 1629, 20,000 immigrants, mostly Puritans, would arrive by 1642, authorized to colonize a vast area extending from three miles north of the Merrimack River to three miles south of the Charles River. Led by John Winthrop, the new Massachusetts Bay Colony was centered in a city called Boston, and it soon prospered.

The Puritans wanted to create in the New World a new center of right religion, to build what their sermons (with reference to the Old Testament) frequently called a “city on the hill”—a place of holiness that would be an example for all humankind. Toward this end, the Puritans laid great emphasis on family life and, in particular, on the education of children as well as the education of a class of clergymen sufficiently learned to interpret the Scriptures as authentically as possible. For the Puritans intended to guide their actions by an intensive interpretation of the Bible, since they saw themselves as living out a kind of Biblical allegory and prophecy in which they were on an “errand into the wilderness,” chosen by God to build the “New Jerusalem.” The most immediate practical effects of these beliefs were the creation of Boston’s High and Latin Schools as early as 1635, and Harvard College the very next year. Moreover, the Puritan character rapidly evolved into an unlikely combination of a limitless appetite for brilliant religious disputation and flinty intolerance of nonconforming beliefs. Needless to say, although they were smart folks, you wouldn’t want to spend a cocktail evening with one.

One of the most brilliant masters of religious disputation was the Reverend Roger Williams (ca. 1603-1683), who immigrated from England to Boston in 1631. He declined an offer to become minister of the first Boston congregation because it had not formally separated from the Anglican Church. Instead, Williams moved first to Salem, then to Plymouth, and back to Salem. In each place, he was criticized for his “strange opinions,” which included a conviction that the lands chartered to Massachusetts and Plymouth belonged by right to the Indians, that a civil government could not enforce religious laws, and that religion itself ultimately rested on profoundly individual conscience and perception. Ordered by the Puritan hierarchy to change his views, Williams refused and was finally expelled from the colony by the Massachusetts General Court in October 1635. He and a handful of followers found refuge in January 1636 among the Indians on Narragansett Bay. At the head of that bay, Williams purchased from his protectors a small tract and founded a town he called Providence-the first settlement in Rhode Island.

During the next four decades, Williams welcomed to Rhode Island those of all persuasions. In 1644, during the English Civil War, he secured a patent for the colony from the Puritan-controlled Parliament, and he established a genuinely representative government founded on the principle of religious freedom. Williams returned to England again, where he successfully defended his colony’s grant against the onslaught of Puritan objections, and after the restoration of Charles II to the British throne, he secured a royal charter in 1663, sanctioning the liberal institutions he had created.

The founding and survival of heterodox Rhode Island made it clear to the Puritans that their “city on a hill” would not stand alone in America. In yet another colony, the interests of a group even more repugnant to the Puritans were taking root.

In 1632, King Charles I of England, under siege from the Puritan faction that would soon overthrow him, granted the Roman Catholic George Calvert, First Baron Baltimore a charter to settle North American lands between the 40th parallel and the south bank of the Potomac. The First Baron Baltimore died before the papers were executed, and the charter passed to his son Cecil Calvert, Second Baron Baltimore. In November 1633, 200 Catholic colonists set sail from England in the Ark and the Dove, which landed on March 24, 1634, on an island at the mouth of the Potomac they named Saint Clement (it is now called Blakistone Island). The colonists purchased the Indian village of Yaocomico and called it St. Mary’s (it is present-day St. Mary’s City), which served for the next 60 years as the capital of the colony. Under Lord Baltimore’s direction, in 1649, the Colonial Assembly passed the Act Concerning Religion, the first law in the American colonies that explicitly provided for freedom of worship-although it applied only to Christians.