JOHN WINTHROP, THE FOUNDER OF BOSTON; JOHN ELIOT, THE GREAT ENGLISH MISSIONARY; AND KING PHILIP, AN INDIAN CHIEF THE EQUAL OF THE WHITE MAN
Colony at Salem
47. The Puritans. While the Pilgrims were planting their home on the lonely American shore, the Puritans in England were being cruelly persecuted by Charles I. So great became their sufferings and dangers that the Puritan leaders decided to go to America, where they could worship as they pleased. Charles I, fortunately, gave them a very good charter. But even before this, some of the Puritans had already planted a colony at Salem.
JOHN WINTHROP
From a portrait painted by John Singleton Copley; reproduced by permission of the trustees of Harvard University
John Winthrop founded Boston, 1630
48. John Winthrop. The Puritan leaders elected John Winthrop governor of the new colony. In the spring of 1630, nearly ten years after the Mayflower sailed, more than seven hundred Puritans, in eleven ships, bade good-by to their beautiful English homes, crossed the ocean, and settled in what is now Boston.
John Winthrop, the leader and governor of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, the name given to the Salem and Boston settlements, was then about forty years old, and had been in college at Cambridge, in England. He was a man of high social position.
What the Puritans gave up