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 seventeenth 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 reexported to the north for grain. In the decade following the conclusion of peace with Spain in 1604, the woolen 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 Cockayne of the Eastland Company, the government suspended the charter of the Merchant Adventurers (an attempted monopoly in the export 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 Adventurers, which had a legal monopoly of the export of finished and dyed cloth, half the profits of which were to be paid to the Crown.

The English government failed to realize that the English were not technically equipped for finishing and dyeing cloth; the higher costs 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 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 twenties, 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 cure: artificially high wage rates deepened unemployment in the clothing centers and imposed higher costs 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 Saye and Sele, 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 expenses, 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 part of the seventeenth-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 seventeenth century had hardly begun. The accession of Charles I to the throne in March 1625 ushered in a period of conflict that was to span the mid-seventeenth 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 Hapsburg powers. When the English government intervened in an alliance of the Lutheran powers of northern 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 Rev. William Laud, 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 opposition 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 Rev. 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. 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 Endecott and a major financier of the company, Matthew Cradock, were sent out, with settlers, to take control of the Naumkeag settlement—by then renamed Salem—and for Endecott to supersede Conant as governor.

John Endecott’s idea of rule was that God had chosen him as “a fit instrument” for establishing a new Canaan 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-line 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 were persecuted by Endecott as “libertines,” and some were deported to England, where the Rev. John White tried vainly to protect them. Many of the old planters expelled from Salem by Endecott moved to Rev. 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. 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. But 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 arrests 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 power 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 Huguenots 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.

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 politic 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 Colony (by 1630 the Massachusetts Bay colony totaled a little over five hundred 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 a widespread growth of a liberal Dutch theology in the universities and among the upper classes, a theology stressing free will and religious toleration. 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 in England. 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. Riots 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 of East Anglia were now ripe for mass emigration.

A decisive conference of Puritans took place at the Puritans’ 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 emigrants; 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 Anglian 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.* The Great Migration of Puritans began immediately, and seventeen 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). During 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 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 stumblingblock was that only twelve stockholders migrated to America, and all were officers of the colony. Since any new freemen had to be selected by the existing freemen, 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 freemen of the company. The freemen 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 freemen, it was alleged, was filling vacancies in the council. By thus failing to show the freemen 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 freemen, thus insuring 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 forts at Newtown. The inhabitants of Watertown promptly refused to pay the tax, assessed by the Council of Assistants, on 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 moneys 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 Surry, Virginia. In 1632 the government bowed to the strike—after an apology was extracted from the resisters 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.

During the following year, political conflicts intensifed 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, severer whippings, more frequent banishments.” On the other hand, many of the freemen continued to grow restive at the oligarchical 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 Stoughton denounced the government oligarchy for monopolizing power: “They made the laws, disposed lands, raised monies, punished offenders, etc. 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 lawmaking power was fully and legally vested in the freemen 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 Stoughton as speaker of the deputies, it deposed Winthrop as governor and levied fines on some of the assistants. But the number of freemen 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 monopoly off the English coast was disallowed by the Crown. Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his associates still tried to menace the colony by proposing that the territory of New England be parceled out to individual proprietors in the Council. Gorges also tried his best to have the Massachusetts charter revoked.

The Crown, indeed, was thinking along similar lines. England was getting very worried about the virtual independence of Massachusetts Bay. In 1634 the lords commissioners for Foreign Plantations in General, as Privy Council committee under the chairmanship of the formidable Archbishop Laud, 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 in the courts. 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 that hopelessly distracted the English government from Massachusetts affairs for fully a generation.

*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 to Barbados, other West Indian islands, and Ireland.