Why Did the Pilgrims Come to America?

_Elsa_

‘While it’s popularly thought that the Pilgrims fled England in search of religious freedom, the separatists’ quest had ended more than a decade before they boarded the Mayflower. After departing England in 1608, the Pilgrims found sanctuary in the Dutch city of Leiden, where they were free to worship and enjoyed “much peace and liberty,” according to Pilgrim Edward Winslow.

“The Pilgrims actually had no reason to leave the Dutch Republic in order to go to America to seek religious toleration—because they already had it,” says Simon Targett, co-author of New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers. “Therefore, you have to look for other reasons as to why they might have risked the dangers of going across to the New World—and one of the big reasons was commercial.”

Like tens of millions of newcomers who would follow in their wake to America, the Pilgrims were economic migrants. After working for more than a decade in Leiden’s textile industry, the Pilgrims possessed little beyond their religious freedom. The former farmers lived in poverty, laboring long hours for low pay by weaving, spinning and making cloth. The Pilgrims’ economic hardship made it exceedingly difficult to convince their fellow separatists to join them in Leiden, no matter their religious rights. “Some preferred and chose the prisons in England rather than this liberty in Holland with these afflictions,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford recounted.

As the Pilgrims’ economic prospects further dimmed with the collapse of the wool market, the onset of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and the imminent end of a 12-year truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic threatened the tranquility of their safe haven. While the Pilgrim population dwindled, their fears swelled that the secular Dutch society that tolerated their religious beliefs also corrupted the morals of their children, causing them to turn away from their church and English identity. Bradford complained that “many of their children” were succumbing to Leiden’s “manifold temptations” and being “drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses.”

“The Pilgrims wanted their children to be English citizens, not Dutch citizens,” Targett says. “But if they were going to leave, they wouldn’t be able to go back to England because of religious reasons.” Pilgrim eyes, therefore, gazed across the Atlantic Ocean to America, where English merchants had been financing colonial settlements for decades. There they could freely worship, but also have greater economic stability and preserve their English identity. The Pilgrims also believed that the New World gave them the opportunity to evangelize to Native Americans and undertake, as Bradford wrote, “the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world.” (Source)

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Let’s continue - The Mayflower story

Start at the beginning – Tiffi co-authors the Mayflower Story