Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Map: ‘The South part of New-England, as it is Planted this yeare, 1634’
- Map: New England, c. 1660
- Timeline
- Introduction
- Life-stories from early New England
- Appendix 1 Settlers leaving New England before 1640
- Appendix 2 Settlers visiting England, 1640–1660
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Map: ‘The South part of New-England, as it is Planted this yeare, 1634’
- Map: New England, c. 1660
- Timeline
- Introduction
- Life-stories from early New England
- Appendix 1 Settlers leaving New England before 1640
- Appendix 2 Settlers visiting England, 1640–1660
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Some have observed that since the year 1640, more persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither …
Increase Mather, A brief relation of the state of New England, from the beginning of that plantation to this present year
(London, 1689)The stories of those who went over to New England but did not stay are at odds with the onward march of American history. They have largely been overlooked. Yet the newly-built Harvard College saw almost half its graduates sail away to England before 1660. Of the godly preachers who left England in the ‘Great Migration’ of the 1630s – inspiring members of their congregations to emigrate too – around a third abandoned their flocks after 1640 and returned home. Among the population at large, perhaps as many as a quarter of New England's earliest settlers sailed back across the Atlantic: not only the Harvard graduates and ministers (for whom the hardest evidence survives), but also magistrates, merchants, religious and political dissidents, widows and children, servants, apprentices, military men, surgeons, shoemakers and shopkeepers. Some set a course for home within weeks or months; many more packed their bags after ten or twenty years. Their life-stories undermine the traditional understanding of the Great Migration as a one-way ticket across the Atlantic.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Abandoning AmericaLife-Stories from Early New England, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013