Unit 2: Colonial America

1755-1775

Plymouth Colony

Plymouth Colony Lesson Plan | Grades 7-12

Listen to the audio version.

A Grim Beginning at Plymouth

The place that was soon to be transformed into Plymouth Plantation was hardly anything to write home about. A sandy beach, dense forest, rocky soil, and a harbor too shallow for even a small ship like the Mayflower to sail into. If the Pilgrims needed to resupply they would be forced to row a mile out to Cape Cod Bay. But at least the place had fresh water and no sign of hostile Indians. For now...

But what gets left out of this saga is that a ragged bunch of religious nonconformists had chosen to set up their colony in the midst of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Naturally, the Pilgrims had no way of knowing that their new home was on the very spot where a plague, introduced by English fishermen, had killed off 90% of the native Pawtuxet people.

The Pilgrims didn’t even have to dig to find the gruesome evidence. The bones, long picked clean by predators, were still lying right there on the beach. The survivors had left in such a hurry they hadn’t bothered to bury their dead. After poking around for a bit, William Bradford led the Pilgrims in a quick prayer and then got down to work. But you can excuse the Pilgrims for being callous. Death was now stalking them.

Here they were, December 21, 1620, facing a wilderness full of wild animals and strange people they called “savages”. Up until they landed, the Pilgrims had been lucky having not lost a single soul crossing the Atlantic but their luck had run out. A lack of food and fresh water were beginning to take their toll. Every day since landing, someone else had died-- including William Bradford’s wife, Dorothy who fell overboard and drowned. Some suggest that she committed suicide, unable to bear the isolation of their new home.

The Mayflower was turned into a makeshift hospital as patients fell ill from colds, pneumonia and even worse scurvy-- a potentially fatal illness caused by vitamin C deficiency. If they didn’t find food and shelter fast the Plymouth crew would likely end up as a grisly reminder of the dangers that all first colonists faced.

Listen to the audio version.

Why the Pilgrims Came to America

Before history dubbed them “Pilgrims,” they were known as Separatists—a group determined to split from the Church of England and build their own religious community. Persecuted at home, they fled first to Holland and then took the bigger leap across the Atlantic.

On November 11, 1620, their ship, the Mayflower, anchored off Cape Cod—about 250 miles north of the Hudson River, where their charter permitted them to settle. This mistake left them without legal authority. Earlier English attempts like Roanoke (1585) and Popham (1607) had failed completely, while Jamestown barely survived its “starving time” in 1609. Plymouth could easily go the same way.

Establishing a colony was expensive. The Separatists scraped together funds through a loan of £1,700 from a group called the Merchant Adventurers—a massive sum for the time. In exchange, the settlers signed an indenture contract: for seven years they would work four days a week hunting, fishing, and trading furs, after which the colony and their homes would belong to them outright.

But just before departure, the Merchants pulled a bait-and-switch. They rewrote the deal to demand six days of labor and forced the addition of 61 “Strangers”—single men with no ties to the Separatists’ religious mission. Overnight, the Saints became a minority among their own passengers. The voyage turned tense. The Saints, devout family types who spent free time in Bible study, clashed constantly with the Strangers, who preferred drinking, gambling, and mocking the Saints’ strict Sabbath. Picture an Amish settlement sharing space with a biker gang, and you get the idea.

By the time they reached Cape Cod, a power struggle loomed. The Saints wanted a Puritan “city on a hill,” while the Strangers sought land, wealth, and freedom from religious rules. To prevent a complete split, William Brewster and other leaders drafted the Mayflower Compact. Signed in the cabin of the ship, it committed all the men to follow laws made for the good of the colony. Simple but effective, it became the first model of self-government in the New World and kept Plymouth from collapsing before it even started.

The only person to die on the Mayflower voyage was a member of the crew who had taunted the seasick passengers. The Pilgrims believed that God had punished him for his attitude.

Listen to the audio version.

Plymouth Colony almost ended before it began. That first winter of 1620–21 was brutal. The Pilgrims had brought little extra food, expecting to trade with local tribes, but their only corn came from a stash they had taken from a nearby village. Disease had already weakened Native communities, and the Pokanoket kept their distance from the strangers.

By spring, half of the original 102 Pilgrims were dead—victims of hunger, sickness, and exposure. Only seven of nineteen planned houses had been built, and the few still healthy spent their days nursing the sick. Compared to the horrors of Jamestown, the Pilgrims avoided cannibalism, but survival was far from certain.

When storms finally broke on December 23, work crews began felling trees and dragging logs to the settlement. After two weeks, they managed to raise their first house—rough walls sealed with mud, parchment windows, and a hole in the roof for a chimney. Crude as it was, it gave them shelter against the freezing winds.

By February, the colony had grown to a single row of houses, laid out with defense in mind. Nineteen homes were planned along the main street, with alleys and a wooden platform for cannons overlooking the bay. The Pilgrims weren’t preparing for Native attacks as much as for European rivals. The French and Dutch had competing claims in North America, and the settlers knew their tiny outpost would have to fight for survival on more than one front.

Surviving the First Winter at Plymouth Colony

One of the first buildings that the Pilgrims threw up was their meeting house which served as part church, part city-hall, part community center.

The original town of Plimoth Plantation is long gone. But a replica village gives us an authentic window into what life looked like back in the days when Puritans ran New England.

Fire was a constant threat when your entire community was made of wood. All colonial homes kept their kitchens separated from the main house for this reason. But outbreaks were all too common in colonial America.

Listen to the audio version.

Samoset, Squanto, and Massasoit: How Native Allies Saved the Plymouth Colony

From the moment they landed in November, the Pilgrims lived with the constant fear of an Indian attack. They had already been ambushed once—right after digging up corn that didn’t belong to them—and since then the woods around Plymouth had gone strangely quiet. A few distant sightings, but no contact. For Native groups in the area, avoiding the pale strangers made sense. These newcomers looked like the same people who had brought smallpox years earlier, and now they were setting up camp on top of an old burial ground. Not exactly a warm welcome.

But March 16 was different. A lone Native man appeared, walking straight into Plymouth. Women and children were hurried into the Common House while the men reached for their guns. The visitor didn’t flinch. He stopped, raised his hand in salute, and greeted them with a crisp, “Welcome, Englishmen!” The Pilgrims must have been stunned. His name was Samoset, and that night he sat by their fire, eating duck, drinking, and giving them their first crash course in New England geography.

Samoset explained that the land they were squatting on belonged to the Pokanoket, led by Chief Massasoit. Unlike other tribes devastated by disease, the Pokanoket had actually grown stronger, filling the vacuum left by weaker neighbors. Massasoit now faced a choice: wipe out the settlers before they became a threat, or find a way to use them to his advantage. He knew the English were unpredictable—just a year earlier, one crew had slaughtered a Pokanoket village without cause. But Massasoit also had counsel from an unlikely source: Squanto, a man who convinced him the Pilgrims could be allies against the Narragansett, the Pokanokets’ biggest rival.

Religion also played a role. For months, Massasoit had sought help from shamans, asking them to use magic to drive the foreigners away. When nothing worked, he came to believe the strangers must possess stronger spiritual power. Combined with Squanto’s political advice, Massasoit chose to strike a deal instead of a blow.

When the Pilgrims and Pokanoket finally met, gifts were exchanged, speeches were made (with Squanto translating), and a defensive pact was sealed. The Pilgrims had gained their first allies in the New World—and, more importantly, a chance at survival. Squanto showed them how to plant corn using fish as fertilizer, how to catch lobster, and how to gather oysters. Without him, Plymouth might not have made it through the year.

Listen to the audio version.

Why it Matters

The Pilgrims weren't the first English settlers to come to the New World, and they weren't even the first successful settlement either. So why do we devote so much time to their story? The Pilgrims were the first wave of a new type of colonist. In contrast to the isolated plantation culture of the South, the New England colonies grew up around small farming communities and towns. Their towns grew into cities like Boston, Hartford, and Providence which by the 19th century had become centers of the industrial revolution--turning southern cotton into expensive cloth.

The Puritans who came to New England were more educated than the average colonist. It was New England that passed America’s first laws for public schools. Harvard and Yale--big Ivy League schools today, got their start as Puritan colleges that trained their boys in medicine, law, and religion. It was in New England where colonists got to elect their local leaders and judges. It was in New England where the revolt over “”big government” led to the American Revolution.

Basically, you could say that the New England way of life shaped modern America. The entire American Civil War was nothing more than a contest between two ways of life. The plantation slave society that began in Jamestown and the industrial urban America that was planted in Plymouth back in 1620. It took 600,000 deaths but the Civil war decided which of these two cultures would go on to shape the modern United States

Digging Deeper

Use the article to answer the questions below.

Why did the Pilgrims decide to leave England and start the Plymouth Colony?
What were the biggest problems the Pilgrims faced during their first year in Plymouth?
What was the Mayflower Compact and why did the Pilgrims create it?
How did Native Americans like Samoset, Squanto, and Massasoit help the Pilgrims survive?

Copy and paste the questions onto a Word or Google Doc