It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any
single, dominating motive, equally operative in all of the
colonies. Mrs. Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to
worship God" was measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth,
about whom she was writing. But the far more important Puritan
emigration to Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so much at
"freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy according to the
Scriptures. These men straightway denied freedom of worship, not
only to newcomers who sought to join them, but to those members
of their own company who developed independent ways of thinking.
The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from
missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a
commendable desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy
wish to escape a debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the
colonists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured servants.
Most of them belonged to the middle class. John Harvard was the
son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger
Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were university bred
and were natural leaders of men.

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of
the colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible
pressure upon their minds and to mould them into certain ways of
thinking and feeling. Without some perception of these modes of
thought and emotion a knowledge of the spirit of our literature
is impossible. Take, for instance, the mere physical situation of
the first colonists, encamped on the very beach of the wide ocean
with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their provisions were
scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new skies,
of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John Winthrop