be confirmed.”39
Many presbyterians, congregationalists, and independents—particularly among the clergy—refused to accept the Parliament’s realignment of the Church of England. Approximately three hundred thousand laypersons and one-fifth of the clergy withdrew from the Church of England and formed separate dissenting denominations.40 The Parliament tolerated the new groups but adopted the Clarendon Code to limit their privileges. The code’s Five Mile Act, for example, forbade dissenting ministers from living within five miles of any town or parish in which they had served.
The strategy led to a decline in the number of dissenters in England; there were only fifty thousand left in 1750.41 It provided, however, an increased motivation for dissenting emigration to the colonies, where the provisions of the Clarendon Code were not systematically enforced. The puritans in Massachusetts, for example, retained rights and privileges under their royal charter, despite the fact they organized as a denomination (the Congregational Church) outside of the Church of England. Charles II, moreover, granted a new royal charter to Congregationalists in the Connecticut Valley (1662). The Church of England, a majority church at home, was soon outnumbered more than three to one by dissenters in the colonies. Only in Virginia, Bermuda, and a few British possessions in the Caribbean was the Church of England established by law, and even they were slow to enforce Parliament’s new religious legislation. As late as 1686, a Virginia vestry, for example, elected a rector who had not complied with the requirement for episcopal ordination.42
The Restoration did not, however, finally settle the religious debate in England. The Parliament was strongly episcopal in sentiment, but both Charles II and his brother James II (King, 1685–88) were deeply attracted to Roman Catholicism. Charles II made a deathbed profession to Rome, and James followed an open Roman Catholic policy. When James II introduced Roman Catholic worship at the universities, put Roman Catholics at the head of the army, and arrested seven bishops of the Church of England, the Parliament rebelled against him (the Glorious Revolution, 1688).
Charles and James had pursued their religious goals in a way that contributed to the growth of Presbyterian, Congregational, and other dissenting groups in the colonies. Believing that granting toleration to dissenting Protestants in the colonies was the first step toward toleration of Roman Catholics, Charles renewed the charter of Baptists in Rhode Island (1663) and granted a charter to Quaker William Penn for Pennsylvania (1681). In addition, he made no provisions for the establishment of the Church of England in the charters for the Carolinas (1663) or the territory in New Jersey and New York (1664) that the English had taken from the Dutch. In the year before he was removed from the throne, James attempted to follow his brother’s colonial policy with a Declaration of Indulgence, which would have removed legal penalties against dissenting Protestants and Roman Catholics in England itself. During Charles II’s reign, Presbyterians emigrated in increasing numbers to New York and New Jersey, where neither the Church of England nor the Congregational Church was established and where the Dutch Calvinists, who predated the English, represented a theological tradition similar to their own. By the next century, English, Scottish, and Irish Presbyterians would prove as numerous in the British colonies on the American mainland as members of the Church of England.
By the time that James II responded to the rebellion engineered by Parliament by abandoning the English throne in 1688, the American colonies on the mainland were well on their way to becoming the most denominationally diverse territory on earth. The Church of England; the Society of Friends (Quakers); and the Congregational, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches all had their spheres of influence. The colonists had lost forever the religious simplicity of the first colonies in Virginia and Bermuda.
The religious disagreements that colonists brought with them from England contributed to the zeal and the excitement of the competing religious enclaves. The same disagreements, however, resulted in an intolerant attitude toward others. In one sense the colonists were simply mimicking the actions of the British toward them. When the English authorities paid attention to the religious life of this diverse group of colonists, it was most often for negative reasons. In 1638 Archbishop Laud proposed sending a colonial bishop, not to Virginia or Bermuda where episcopal sympathies were strong, but to New England where such a bishop might be used to replace congregational polity.43 Oliver Cromwell would likewise send a delegation with military authority not to friendly territory, but to Virginia and the Barbados in order to convince the colonists there to abandon the Book of Common Prayer with its petitions for the king and royal family, and to Maryland in order to replace the Roman Catholic proprietor.44
The colonists’ record was hardly better than that of their motherland. In 1643, Virginia’s legislature banned all who were not members of the episcopal party from the colony. Groups of Maryland Protestants led armed insurrections against the Roman Catholic gentry (1655–58 and 1689). Massachusetts authorities executed four Quakers for heresy (1659–61) and nineteen residents of Salem for witchcraft (1692). The various groups of colonists had won for themselves the control of their own religious lives, but they were unwilling to grant the same privilege to minorities within their midst.
Indentured and Enslaved Servants
The restoration of Charles II in 1660 contributed to a process already underway of legalizing life-long servitude for Africans. English colonists had relied upon the labor of servants from the beginning of colonization. During much of the seventeenth century the majority of that labor was provided by European servants, who at least theoretically contracted voluntarily to labor for a set number of years in exchange for the cost of passage to the New World.45 Even in Massachusetts—the colony with the highest percentage of free labor—about one-quarter of early emigrants were indentured servants. Elsewhere the percentages were higher. In Virginia and Maryland, for example, about three-quarters of early British emigrants were servants. Barbados had the highest percentage of enslaved labor in the first half of the century, but even there English indentured servants were more important economically than were enslaved Africans or Native Americans before the 1660s.46
There were, however, enslaved Native Americans and Africans from early on. The first African and Native American servants reached Bermuda by 1616. Dutch traders brought enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619. The colony in Barbados included enslaved persons from its founding in 1627.47
While the conditions of these early indentured and enslaved servants were far from ideal, the contours of servitude were not yet fixed prior to 1660. Members of both groups were called servants in the first half of the century, with the term slave only becoming common for those in involuntary servitude in the second half of the century.48 Farmers worked in the fields beside their indentured and enslaved servants, slept in the same rooms, and at times shared the same beds.49
At least some of the colonists would have been aware that involuntary servitude was a condition from which Europeans were not immune. By some recent estimates, Muslim raiders on the Barbary Coast enslaved one to one and a quarter million Europeans between 1530 and 1780. Europeans also constituted a significant percentage of those enslaved by Ottoman Turks.50 Of
