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Early Massachusetts is generally seen by scholars as “intolerant.” But this is to employ a misleading dichotomy between tolerant and intolerant societies which obscures the colonists’ understanding of themselves. They believed that their society instead successfully reconciled individual liberty and communal harmony through rational debate, social consensus, and the pursuit of truth. Their response to the Antinomian controversy is highly revealing in this context, demonstrating that they desired to persuade the aberrant back into the fold and that they reserved political intervention for when dissension had serious public implications. It was only those deemed irreconcilable who were ultimately excluded from the community. To approach the topic in this way is to resist the marginalisation of New England from the history of political and social thought by re‐evaluating the ends and actions of the colonists and by providing an important alternative perspective on the nature of toleration and its limits.

While there have been many important studies of English perceptions of the people they called ‘Indians’, all see, or at least imply, an unbridgeable chasm between the more positive descriptions and the seemingly more denigratory ones. Yet, the apparently vast differences between accounts actually converge under a more fundamental unity. Even if they sometimes disagreed over its exact implications, the English firmly agreed among themselves that the Indians were in fact fully human and rational and that the best proof of this was their conformity to the basic duties and precepts of the law of nature. Their often overstated disagreements were due to tensions within this understanding of humanity over the relative importance of reason and revelation for the affairs of the world. Regardless, from their early abortive ventures in Roanoke in the 1580s through to the so‐called ‘Massacre’ of 1622, the English enjoyed a consensus that the natives of Virginia had, at least in potential, a concept of the divine, language, civil society, and a reasonable amount of self‐control over their passions and appetites.

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Virginia was founded with a certainty of common humanity that had disastrous consequences for its native peoples. The English established Jamestown in 1607—in what was to become their first permanent settlement in America—with all the mixed motivations of benevolence and grasping desire of any colonial enterprise. Yet they firmly believed the peoples that they found there, whom they called Indians, were as human as themselves. Convinced that they possessed an absolute truth valid for all peoples in all times and places, they desired to embrace and mould these Indians into their own ideal vision of humanity. It was this inclusive embrace of the Indians, and not any cynical attempts to exploit them or to denigrate them as “other,” which led to the destruction of their way of life. The tragedy of the colony was due to the most benevolent of intentions.