#105 The Settlement of Massachusetts Bay

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Winthrop Fleet has arrived, but Salem is not what they had expected. John Winthrop leads an expedition to explore Massachusetts Bay, meets Samuel Maverick – whose descendants would be consequential in the world of sports – and William Blackstone (Blaxton), and decides to move the new immigrants to Charlestown, Boston, and other future towns in the region. The winter is brutal, but it makes the Puritan settlers resilient, and their hunger is relieved when the Lyon arrives on February 5, 1631, with new supplies and a minister named Roger Williams. All that and the origin of the Boston Common and a botanical puzzle concerning “snakeweed”!

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Selected references for this episode

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father

George Bancroft, History Of The United States Of America Volume 1

Thomas Hutchinson, The History of Massachusetts, from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628, Until the Year 1750

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

Gutierrezia sarothrae

William Blaxton (Blackstone)

Map of Boston in 1630, superimposed on today’s Boston

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 105.
0:11.1	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on February 13, 2023, in my bedroom closet in New Orleans.
0:21.9	On the small chance that you are new to the podcast,
0:25.4	we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States
0:29.3	from the beginning without presentism.
0:33.8	I must confess that I've been a bit on the struggle bus,
0:37.4	thinking through how best to tackle the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.
0:42.1	I've wrestled with talking about their first decade thematically instead of chronologically, which is the usual approach of the podcast.
0:51.2	One of the reasons is that a lot of the historical writing of the periods thematic,
0:55.5	looking at such things as theology, economic development, governmental development, and so
1:02.8	forth, rather than marching it through year by year. But that works better for books than for a
1:09.7	podcast.
1:19.5	I've settled instead on sort of a flexible chronological approach with lots of backing and filling as we move through that first decade.
1:23.4	We shall see together how well that works out.
1:31.3	The last chronological episode was number 103, the Winthrop fleet and the city on the hill. The Arbella, flagship of the fleet, had arrived in Salem on June 12th, 1630.
1:37.3	The other ships would straggle in over the next few weeks.
1:42.3	Winthrop found that Salem was in no condition to support the 700 or so
1:47.2	new colonists. 80 of the advance group had died the previous winter and food was scarce, even with
1:54.0	the supplies loaded on the ships. The situation was so dire that the surviving indentured servants
2:00.8	were released from their obligation to work because they could not be fed.
2:05.9	They would have to fend for themselves.
2:09.3	We concluded that episode with a quick overview of the dispersion of the new settlers around Boston.
	...

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