Sometimes the town suffered from disease and famine. One day, when Governor Winthrop had divided his last cupful of cornmeal with a starving beggar, he appointed a day of fasting and prayer to God for food. On the very day set for this fast, a ship arrived from England with provisions, and the people had a feast instead. Another time when the people did not have enough to eat, an Indian chief named Chickataubot came and presented the governor with a great quantity of corn. As with the Indians, so with the white settlers at first, it was either feast or famine.
The people of Boston were kinder to the Indians than to the white men who failed to agree with them in religion. They banished the Baptists and hanged the Quakers. Besides Roger Williams, they drove out a good woman named Anne Hutchinson, because she argued too well against some of their beliefs. This gifted woman and her family were murdered and scalped by Indians in the log cabin in which they lived after they were banished from Boston.
Governor Winthrop finally sent for his wife and his other children. One of his sons became governor of Connecticut. John Winthrop was twelve times elected governor of Massachusetts. More than once he was chosen deputy governor. He was good to the poor and unfortunate. In this he was far in advance of his time. It was said that he kept his private purse open for the public. Once, when he found that a man was stealing wood from his pile, he laughed and said he would stop that. He did so by inviting the man to come in the daytime and help himself to all the wood he needed. But the man never came again.
Cotton Mather, one of the greatest of Boston preachers, said of Governor Winthrop that he was—
“The terror of the wicked, and delight of the sober, the envy of the many, but the hope of those who had any hopeful design in hand for the common good of the nation.”
ROGER WILLIAMS, A MINISTER WHO LIVED THE GOLDEN RULE
WHEN the Pilgrim Fathers left Europe in the clumsy little ship, the Mayflower, they came to America to have freedom to think and act as they believed right in matters of religion. Many men in England who wished to have their own religious beliefs were called Puritans because they wished to purify the Church of England from things which they thought were wrong. King James of England had announced that they must all worship in the ways of the Church of England or he would “harry them out of the land.”
Puritans and other people who would not conform to the service of the Church of England were called Nonconformists. The group of Nonconformists who went away from their own country in 1620, to come as strangers to America, were called the Pilgrims. They came to America in the Mayflower, and landed on a big boulder in the edge of the harbor at a place they named Plymouth. Companies of Puritans sailed from England a few years later and landed on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, some at Salem, and some at a place they named Boston, for another town in England. John Winthrop was the leader of this last company, and was made governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans soon found that there were some of their number who did not believe just as they did. It seems strange now that those who had come from England just to find a place where they could worship God in the way they saw fit could not let others do the same. They came to do what their consciences told them was right, but they would not let others think that any other way was right.
So when members of the Society of Friends, called Quakers, came, dressing differently and thinking it wrong to fight and treat the Indians cruelly, the Puritans sent them away. If the Quakers came back to Boston after being sent away, they were hanged on the Common. A man who did not think what his neighbors believed was likely to have a hard time of it. For any one to dress differently from others was considered a great offense. It was the same all over the world, especially in England. The first man who tried to wear a silk hat in London was chased through the streets. The mob battered his hat and tore his clothes, and he barely escaped with his life.