America: a symbol of liberty and opportunity, a beacon of hope to the peoples of the world. More than any other nation, American has represented the tantalizing promise of an earthly paradise, a place where young people and families who were bold and adventurous enough could seek and find their fortunes; where pilgrims in search of spiritual life could hope to build heaven on earth.
A country of tension and contrast, where the clashing and coming together, the working out of so many immigrant strains has created a unique land, one which has been evolving for more than 300 years. As Walt Whitman wrote,
These states are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation,
But a teeming nation of nations.
Surely the discovery of a vast, virtually uninhabited continent must have fired the imaginations of 17th century men and women. To come to America in those days would be like going into outer space for us. At that time, no one could imagine that this continent would ever be filled, and the opportunity to go gave inspiration to great dreams, although to take advantage of such opportunity could involve risking everything, including one's life.
The first Americans came with two main preoccupations: a desire for spiritual freedom and the hope of material prosperity. Whichever impulse was behind them, the earliest immigrants to America's shores were sustained by a special kind of courage.
The Pilgrims, the earliest religious group to establish a permanent settlement in America at Plymouth, Massachusetts, came to establish a "city on a hill" to the glory of God. William Bradford, the first leader of the Plymouth colony, described their faith in his personal diary:
Being thus arrived in good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean…If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world…What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace?
The pilgrims needed much sustenance for their faith., having reached the Massachusetts coast at the beginning of winter, they faced starvation and sickness during their first winter. Again drawing on Bradford's journal, an entry dated 1650, 30 years after the first landing, accounts for the survivors of that first settlement:
Of these hundred persons which first came over in this first ship together, the greater half died in the general mortality, and most of them in two or three months' time. And for those which survived, though some were ancient and past procreation, and others left the place and country, yet of those few remaining are sprung up above 160 persons in this thirty years, and are now living in this present year 1650, besides many of their children which are dead and come not within this account.
Life in the new land was not easy, and the dream of faith necessitated
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