Volume 1, Chapter 19, The Founding of Massachusetts Bay
When the tiny band of separatists left England in 1608, the great bulk of English Puritans,
despite the persecutions of the early part of the reign of James I, were highly confident of their
future in England and of the potential for reform within the English church structure.
Why then the intense great migration only one generation later?
What had happened to sap the confidence of the English Puritans?
At the beginning of the 17th century, virtually all of England's export trade consisted of unfinished woolen cloths,
which were sent to the Netherlands for finishing and dyeing, and to be re-exported to the North for grain.
of Grain. In the decade following the conclusion of Peace with Spain in 1604, the woollen trade
and hence the English economy flourished. But parliamentary refusal to approve any further
taxes in protest against rising taxation as well as the persecution of Puritan clergy
led in 1614 to the Crown's dissolution of Parliament. In its search for revenue the
Crown then decided to create new monopolies and its meddling in the vital wool trade had
disastrous results. On the proposal of Alderman Cocaine of the Eastland Company the government
suspended the charter of the merchant adventurers and attempted monopoly in the export of
of Unfinished Cloth, and completely prohibited the export of unfinished cloth upon which
the prosperity of England rested. Instead, a new charter was granted to a syndicate of
Eastland Company and Levant Company merchants in a new company, the King's Merchant Adventures,
which had a legal monopoly of the export of finished and dyed cloth, half the profits
The English government failed to realize that the English were not technically equipped for
finishing and dyeing cloth.
The higher cost of finishing woolens in England left an open field for the emergence of a
new competitive cloth industry on the continent.
As a result, English woolen exports fell by a catastrophic one-third in two years, and
the repeal of the prohibition in 1616 could not succeed in reviving the cloth trade.
Not only did the tax-crippled English industry have to compete with the low-cost industry
of the continent, but the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 brought about a
The continent-wide debasement of currencies, a debasement that aided exports from the debasing
countries at the expense of such other countries as England.
Renewal of war in the Netherlands in 1622 further disrupted the vital market there,
and the result was a continuing Great Depression in England in the 20s, a depression and unemployment
concentrated particularly in the cloth-making centers of East Anglia and the West Country.
Fearful of rising political opposition sparked by the Depression, the government tried desperately
to relieve the victims of the Depression by maintaining wage rates at a high level and
keeping failing companies in operation.
The result was only to prolong and intensify the Depression the government was trying to
and Cure. Artificially high wage rates deepened unemployment in the clothing centers and imposed
higher cost on an already high-cost industry. Propping up of inefficient producers wasted
more capital and ruined their creditors, and the domination of inefficient monopoly companies
was tightened at the very time when the industry's salvation could only come from freer competition
and Escape from the Taxation and Regulation of Government.
The overcapitalized monopoly companies were especially hard hit by the Depression.
The East India and Muscovy companies defaulted to their creditors.
And the Virginia Company's difficulties resulting from the government's monopoly of tobacco
sales led to its dissolution, hence the Royal Assumption of Power over the Virginia Colony.
One growing light on the economic horizon was the exportation of the lightweight new
draperies produced free from government control and over which no monopoly company held sway.
Export trade in these new draperies was developing in southern Europe by the 1620s.
The contrast in the fortunes of the two branches of cloth trade was too great to be ignored.
The connection between free trade and economic growth and between privileges and decline
was becoming evident to contemporaries.
In successive parliaments, the representatives of the people demanded freedom in economic
and political affairs and the termination of the government's restrictions, monopolies
and taxes that had brought about the depression engulfing the country.
The government responded characteristically by imprisoning the opposition leaders such
as Sir Edwin Sandys and Lord Say and Seal for advocating free trade, radicalism and
interference with tax collection.
The Parliament of 1624 presented a list of grievances in protest against the moratoria
issued to debtors against their creditors, against the increases in government officials
and Taxes, Against Extraordinary Tariffs and Taxes, Against the Government's Use of Informers
and Enforcement of Regulations and Controls, and Against the Monopoly Trading Companies,
which were popularly regarded simply as gangs of thieves from the East India Company to
the Council for New England.
The Parliament concluded by passing the Act Against Monopolies, by which all monopolies
were outlawed and all proclamations furthering them prohibited.
Unlike the depression of the 1550s, which had led to the unquestioned creation of monumental
government controls over the economy, the depression of the 1620s witnessed an attempt
toward liberalization by removing the regulations that had caused the crisis.
The movement for the abolition of the government's monopolies and regulations became a major
were part of the 17th century constitutional struggle in England and had a significant
influence on the American colonists, whose migration was a fruit of the government's
controls. However clear the principles of liberalism had become, the struggle for their
realization in the 17th century had hardly begun. The accession of Charles I to the throne
England in March 1625 ushered in a period of conflict that was to span the mid-17th
century. The financial difficulties of the new government were greatly increased when
England decided to enter the Thirty Years War by attacking Spain in 1625.
The English government had remained behind the scenes in the early phases of the war,
acting through diplomacy and subsidies, despite the pressure of Puritan opinion for greater
aid to the Calvinist forces of Germany, which had gone to war with Austria and to the United
Provinces, which had renewed the war with Spain and had suffered heavy defeats by the
two Habsburg powers.
When the English government intervened in an alliance of the Lutheran powers of Northern
in Europe with the anti-Hapsburg Catholic powers of Southern Europe, it tried to use
the excitement of war preparations as a convenient means of gaining taxes from Parliament. However,
the Parliament refused to be stampeded by the crisis of European Protestant fortunes
and refused to vote taxes until the government had redressed grievances, especially in church
reform. For the major authority in government on ecclesiastical matters was Reverend William
Laude, Archbishop of Canterbury, who strongly opposed Puritanism in doctrine and in practice,
and who had embarked upon a policy of eliminating all churchmen suspected of Puritan sympathies
and promoting those whose theology and devotions the Puritans considered Catholic in origin.
The persecution of the Puritan clergy was matched by imprisonment of the press leaders and of merchants who refused to pay the taxes that Parliament had refused to approve.
Moreover, the people were conscripted or had soldiers quartered in their homes if they refused to pay these taxes.
It was this climate of increasing religious and political persecution placed on top of the continuing economic depression that led the Reverend John White, a mildly Puritan minister from Dorchester and founder of the Dorchester Company, to revive the project of a settlement on the coast of New England.
of England. A settlement was projected to form a colony of West Country Puritans who would find refuge without having to submit to the tyranny of the religious and social conformity of the separatists at Plymouth.
Surely if the relatively humble separatists could succeed in America, the far wealthier and more powerful Puritans could succeed all the more.
The old Dorchester Company was bankrupt, but in 1628 White formed the New England Company
with other Puritans and with old Dorchester Associates and secured a grant from the Council for New England
of all the land between three miles south of the Charles River, which runs through Boston,
and three miles north of the Merrimack, now the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.
Immediately, John Endicott and a major financier of the company, Matthew Craddock, were sent out, with settlers, to take control of the Naumkeeg settlement, by then renamed Salem, and for Endicott to supersede, Conant, as governor.
John Endicott's idea of rule was that God had chosen him as a fit instrument for establishing a new canine for the chosen people, by rooting out all lesser folk, red and white, preferably by means of the pillory and the whipping post.
His major struggle was to cripple the livelihood of the old settlers by prohibiting their tobacco culture and beaver trade, turning these over to the New England Company.
The old planters could only protest in vain that they were becoming slaves to a monopoly company.
During the spring of 1629, still harder-lying Puritans immigrated to the New England colony,
and their ministers established a quasi-separatist church based on a congregational covenant.
Old planters, who refused to go this far from the Church of England and embrace the covenant,
Many of the old planters expelled from Salem by Endicott moved to Reverend William Blackstone's settlement at Boston and Charlestown.
Migration under the New England Company was small, but the rush of events soon intensified Puritan desires to seek a haven in the New World.
Migration under the New England Company was small, but the rush of events soon intensified
Puritan desires to seek a haven in the New World.
Having added a war against France in 1627 to the conflict with Spain, the Crown was
obliged to call Parliament into session to provide financing for the war effort.
Parliament took the occasion to present a petition of its grievances to be met before voting
taxes for the King's adventures. The Petition of Right, June 1628, denounced taxation without
consent of Parliament, arbitrary arrest without benefit of habeas corpus, and the quartering
of the government's soldiers upon the people. Insistence upon these libertarian demands
before Supply of Revenue led to the King's dissolution of Parliament in March 1629 and
to the Crown's arrest of the leaders of the opposition. Thus, English Puritans faced the
gloomy prospect of greatly intensified repression at home, at the hands of the absolute royal
and its prerogative courts of the High Commission and the Star Chamber.
Puritan gloom was further deepened by the aggravated plight of their fellow Calvinists on the European continent.
England's military operations against France and Spain had failed,
especially in trying to relieve the French Huguenots, Calvinists, besieged by the French Crown at La Rochelle.
The Eugenots were forced to surrender to the French forces in October 1628.
Early the following year, the Protestant powers in Germany concluded a humiliating peace,
issuing from the almost uninterrupted string of losses they had suffered in the first decade of the Thirty Years' War.
Finally, the Calvinist United Provinces in the Netherlands were undergoing serious losses at the hands of the Spanish Army.
Thus, everywhere in Europe, the Catholic powers were triumphant and the Protestants suffering losses.
As the Puritan leader John Winthrop concluded during 1629,
all other churches in Europe are brought to desolation and it cannot be but the like judgment is coming upon us.
A secure sanctuary in America seemed to be vital for Puritan survival.
and Tribal. Seeing their plight, the Puritans were able to persuade Charles I to grant a
royal charter in March 1629 to the Massachusetts Bay Company, the more powerful successor of
the New England Company. Coincidentally, the charter was granted just four days after King
Charles' dissolution of Parliament. The old unincorporated company had now become an incorporated
Body-Politik, with power to govern its granted territory. The old grant of land was reconfirmed.
The new company was to appoint the governor, deputy governor, and council, and make laws
for its settlers. The company promptly sent out a fleet of colonists to Salem. With the
arrival of this fleet, Salem immediately attained to a larger size than the decade-old Plymouth
By 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony totaled a little over 500 people.
Massachusetts Bay Company and Colony, however, developed far more rapidly than their founders
had foreseen, thanks to the unexpectedly overwhelming interest in emigration among the Puritans
of East Anglia.
The East Anglians were the most numerous and most extreme of the English Puritans, reaching
virtually the point of separatism from the Church of England.
As dedicated Puritans, the East Anglians had been embittered by Archbishop Laud's anti-Puritan
movement within the Church of England and by widespread growth of a liberal Dutch theology
in the universities and among the upper classes, a theology stressing free will and religious
and Distoloration. Such doctrines were highly suspect to the Calvinist Puritans bent upon
predestination and extirpation of heresy. For a long while, however, the East Anglians
had been indifferent to the emigration movement, for East Anglia had not been as widely hit
by the Depression of the 1620s as had the West Country and other manufacturing centers
The reason for the relative prosperity was that East Anglia was the center for the production
of the lighter new draperies, which had not been crippled by taxation, monopoly privilege
or stringent state regulation. However, the wars with France and Spain interrupted the
markets for East Anglian textiles while moving the state in its frantic search for revenue
to bring taxes and controls upon the new drapery industry.
Production of new draperies in East Anglia dropped by a startling two-thirds between
1628 and 1631, and tens of thousands of spinners and weavers were thrown out of work, increasing
the poor tax burdens upon the country farmers and gentry.
Injustice and disorders by the workmen made things still worse. They led the government
to impose further taxes and minimum wage rates upon the manufacturers to force merchants
to buy textiles and to prohibit export competition with the monopoly companies. With sudden economic
distress and injustice added to unwelcome political and religious trends, the Puritans
A decisive conference of Puritans took place at the Puritan's Intellectual Center, Cambridge University, at the end of August 1629.
In the Cambridge Agreement, a group of Puritan leaders from East Anglia agreed to join the Massachusetts Bay Company and to immigrate to America
if the officers were to be chosen solely from immigrants to New England
and if the company charter were to be carried with them to the New World.
Moreover, the Puritan stockholders remaining in England agreed to sell
all their shares in the company to the immigrants.
The Massachusetts Bay Company could now be completely located in New England
as a self-governing Puritan colony.
This was a legal action
Because the Puritans had cleverly persuaded the King not to specify the location of the
Company in the Charter.
John Winthrop, a leading East Anglican attorney, was appointed Governor of the Company, and
John Humphrey, brother-in-law of the highly influential Earl of Lincoln, Deputy Governor.
When Humphrey decided to remain in England, he was replaced by Thomas Dudley, the steward
of the Earl of Lincoln.
Although the Rev. John White did send some West Country Puritans to Salem during 1630,
the vast bulk of the Great Puritan exodus of the 1630s, the Great Migration, came from
East Anglia. It must be noted that by no means all of the great wave of Puritan emigrants
from East Anglia in the 1630s chose to go to Massachusetts Bay. A greater number moved
The Great Migration of Puritans began immediately, and 17 ships sailed from England in 1630 alone.
They settled not only in Salem, but all along the Massachusetts coast, founding such towns
as Watertown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Medford and Newtown, later Cambridge.
In the 1630s, from 20,000 to 25,000 people immigrated to Massachusetts.
By 1640, 9,000 remained, deducting emigration from Massachusetts back home or to other lands,
while only 1,000 people lived in Plymouth.
Thus, by 1630, the two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, had managed
to win for themselves virtual self-governing status, independent of English control.
Like Virginia, the New England colonies began as chartered companies. But the Virginia Company
continued to rule the colony from England, being finally expropriated and superseded
by the Crown in 1620. The New England settlements, in contrast, were strongly impelled by religious
by religious motives. Hence the Plymouth Pilgrims and Separatists were only loosely controlled by the parent company and soon bought out that company completely, while the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Company transferred itself to and completely blended with the colony in America.
According to the Massachusetts Bay Charter, the governor, deputy governor, and council of assistants were to be elected by the whole body of stockholders or freemen.
This sounds highly democratic on paper, but the stumbling block was that only 12 stockholders migrated to America, and all were officers of the colony.
Since any new Freeman had to be selected by the existing Freeman, the natural tendency was to perpetuate a closed oligarchy and to select few new members.
Rumblings of popular resistance occurred as early as the fall of 1630, when 109 settlers petitioned to be made Freeman of the company.
The Freeman gave in to this request but completely vitiated its effect by mendaciously claiming that the Charter had put all power into the hands of the Council of Assistants who could choose the Governor and Deputy Governor and make all the laws.
Moreover, the Assistants were to hold office permanently on good behavior.
The only function of the Body of Freeman, it was alleged, was filling vacancies in the Council.
By thus failing to show the Freeman the text of the Charter, a dozen Puritan oligarchs managed to keep absolute control of the colony's affairs for great lengths of time.
In addition, though in violation of the Charter, only Puritans were admitted to the Body of
Freeman, thus ensuring domination of the churches and the broad body politic by the church elders.
From the beginning, the authorities had trouble from the newly burgeoning smaller towns. At the
beginning of 1631, a tax of sixty pounds was levied upon each settlement to pay for frontier
The Great Old English Ground that no community may be taxed without its own consent.
As the Watertown protesters eloquently declared, it was not safe to pay monies after that sort,
for fear of bringing themselves and posterity into bondage.
Here was the first tax strike in America, long anticipating the episode in Surrey, Virginia.
In 1632, the government bowed to the strike after an apology was extracted from the resistors
and the freemen assumed the power to elect the governor and the assistants, though the
governor had to be chosen from the ranks of the assistants, and also to make tax levies.
Or rather, this power was assumed by the representatives of the freemen, direct democracy now being
held impractical in the large colony.
And two deputies were elected from each town in Massachusetts.
For over a decade, the deputies and the assistants sat in the same house of the legislature,
the general court, but then separated into two houses of that court.
In the following year, political conflicts intensified in the colony as opinion polarized
two camps. Thomas Dudley, backed by the elders, accused Governor Winthrop of leniency and
of being negligent in instituting the absolute and complete tyranny of the Lord Brethren.
Dudley called, characteristically, for heavier fines, severe whippings, more frequent banishments.
On the other hand, many of the free men continued to grow restive at the oligarchic rule, and
the leading Puritan divine, Rev. Thomas Hooker, arrived in Massachusetts to stand aghast and
protest at the tyranny of the colony's magistrates.
The struggle came to a head in 1634. A paper by Israel Stroughton denounced the government
oligarchy for monopolizing power. They made the laws, disposed lands, raised monies, punished
offenders and so forth at their discretion. Neither did the people know the portent. The
magistrates responded by burning the paper, but the argument would not thus be stifled.
Finally, a committee from each of the eight towns in Massachusetts Bay sent representatives
to insist on the opening of the hitherto secret charter for the colony.
When they then discovered that the law-making power was fully and legally vested in the
free men rather than in the assistants, the general court from then on assumed full jurisdiction
for the making of laws.
The magistrates made sure, however, that not the total body of freemen, but the more malleable
deputies in the general court were actually to make the laws.
For a while, the general court, especially the deputies in the lower house, was furious
at the lengthy betrayal, and led by Israel Staunton as Speaker of the Deputies, it deposed
George Winthrop as governor and levied fines on some of the assistants.
But the number of free men was still restricted to Puritan church members by an Act of 1631
and a law five years later prohibited any new churches from existing in the colony without
securing the consent of the authorities.
The loosening of the oligarchic rule in Massachusetts was therefore not very great.
Indeed Dudley, who had replaced Winthrop as governor, quickly prohibited Stoughton from
any public office for a three-year period. Soon the General Court was all too happy to
return Winthrop to office and depose Dudley.
A threat of English overlordship vanished in 1635 upon the dissolution of the Council
for New England. The Council had failed financially. Its doom had been assured when its fishing
The crown, indeed, was thinking along similar lines. England was getting very worried about
The Lord's Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General
In 1634, the Lord's Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General
as Privy Council Committee under the chairmanship of the formidable Archbishop Laude
moved firmly against the colony.
Authorized to control the colonies as well as emigration,
the Commission moved in the spring of 1635
to revoke the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The English courts severely rebuked the officer of the Massachusetts colony for not appearing
at the trial and decided to revoke the colony's charter in 1637.
Massachusetts prepared to arm to repel an English attack, but it was saved from such
a confrontation by the beginnings of the Puritan Revolution the following year, a revolution
A generation that hopelessly distracted the English government from Massachusetts affairs for fully a generation.