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CHAPTER VI

NEW ENGLAND AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

During the years that the Pilgrims had thus been struggling to found a tiny commonwealth on an inhospitable bit of the long American coast-line, events had been moving rapidly on the more crowded stage of the Old World. In France, the power of the Huguenots had been hopelessly crushed by the fall of Rochelle in 1628; while in England, affairs were evidently approaching a crisis, due to the incompetence of the government of Charles, with its disgraceful military failures abroad, and its illegal financial exactions at home. No one was safe from the ruin of his fortune or the loss of his freedom. The nobility and gentry, subject to the imposition of forced loans, faced imprisonment if they refused to pay; and those below the rank of gentleman were the unwilling hosts of a horde of ruffians, the unpaid and frequently criminal soldiery returned from unsuccessful foreign ventures, and billeted upon them by the government. The laws against Catholics were largely suspended to please the Queen, who was of that faith, and the prospects were daily growing darker for the Puritan and patriot elements, both within and without the Church. Religious toleration as an avowed governmental policy was not, as yet, seriously considered by any considerable body of men outside of Holland, the notable example of which country had failed to influence England, where the control of the church was evidently passing into the hands of Laud and his party. The time had thus come when the King must face a united opposition of the soundest men in the country—of those who feared alike for their property, their liberty, and their religion.

The formation of the Puritan party, drawing into its fold men animated by any or all of these motives, in varying proportions, coincided with the beginning of the great increase in

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emigration to Massachusetts, which was to carry twenty thousand persons to the shores of New England between 1630 and 1640. But if attention is concentrated too exclusively upon the history of the continental colonies in North America, and, more particularly, of those in New England, the impression is apt to be gained that this swarming out of the English to plant in new lands was largely confined to Massachusetts and its neighbors, and to the decade named. The conclusion drawn from these false premises has naturally been that Puritanism, in the New England sense, was the only successful colonizing force. We do not wish to minimize the value of any deeply felt religious emotion in firmly planting a group of people in a new home. Such value was justly recognized by one of the wisest practical colonizers of the last century,¹ who was not himself of a religious temperament, but who, to secure the firm establishment of his colony, would “have transplanted the Grand Lama of Tibet with all his prayer wheels, and did actually nibble at the Chief Rabbi.”² The Puritan colonies, nevertheless, not only were far from being the only permanent ones, but themselves were not always equally successful; and it is well to point out that many elements, besides peculiarity of religious belief, entered into the success of the New England colonies, as contrasted with the conspicuous failure of the Puritan efforts in the Caribbean.

At the beginning of the increased emigration to Massachusetts, colonizing, indeed, had ceased to be a new and untried business. To say nothing of the numerous large and small French, Dutch, and Spanish settlements firmly established in the New World, and the English already planted on the mainland, the latter nation had successfully colonized the islands of Bermuda in 1612, St. Kitts in 1623, Barbadoes and St. Croix in 1625, and Nevis and Barbuda three years later. By the time John Winthrop led his band to the shores of Massachusetts Bay, besides the five hundred Dutch in New

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Illustration Facing Page 120: Streams of Emigration from England, 1620 to 1642.

Amsterdam, ten thousand Englishmen were present, for six months of each year, in Newfoundland, engaged in the fisheries there; nine hundred had settled permanently in Maine and New Hampshire; three hundred within the present limits of Massachusetts; three thousand in Virginia; between two and three thousand in Bermuda; and sixteen hundred in Barbadoes; while the numbers in the other colonies are unknown.¹ The figures are striking also for the year 1640, or slightly later, at which date the tide is too often considered as having flowed almost wholly toward the Puritan colonies of New England for the preceding ten years. The number in Massachusetts at that time had risen to fourteen thousand, in Connecticut to two thousand, and in Rhode Island to three hundred. Maine and New Hampshire however, contained about fifteen hundred, Maryland the same number, Virginia nearly eight thousand, Nevis about four thousand, St. Kitts twelve to thirteen thousand, and Barbadoes eighteen thousand six hundred. There are no contemporary figures for Barbuda, St. Croix, Antigua, Montserrat, and other settlements.² At the end, therefore, of what has often been considered a period of distinctly Puritan emigration, we find that approximately only sixteen thousand Englishmen had taken their way to the Puritan colonies, as against forty-six thousand to the others; which latter figure, moreover, is undoubtedly too low, owing to the lack of statistics just noted. Nor does the above statement take into account the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated to Ireland during the same period, and whose motives were probably similar to those animating the emigrants to the New World, however different their destinations may have been. There had, indeed, been a “great migration,” resulting in an English

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population in America and the West Indies, by 1640 or thereabout, of over sixty-five thousand persons; but it is somewhat misleading to apply the term solely to the stream of emigrants bound for the Puritan colonies, who were outnumbered three to one by those who went to settlements where religion did not partake of the “New England way.” Although young John Winthrop might write of his brother that it “would be the ruine of his soule to live among such company” as formed the colony of Barbadoes in 1629,¹ nevertheless, the population of that island had risen to nearly nineteen thousand in another decade, whereas that of Massachusetts had reached only fourteen thousand.

If, in addition, we recall the fact that, approximately, not more than one in five of the adult males who went even to Massachusetts was sufficiently in sympathy with the religious ideas there prevalent to become a church member, though disfranchised for not doing so, we find that in the “great migration” the Puritan element, in the sense of New England church-membership, amounted to only about four thousand persons out of about sixty-five thousand. In the wider sense, indeed, Puritanism, in its effect on legal codes and social usages, is found present, in greater or less degree, in almost all the colonies, island and mainland, but the influence of the form that it took in New England was to be wholly disproportionate upon the nation which evolved from the scattered continental settlements.

If, however, we shift from our usual point of view and, instead of studying the English emigration of the time in the light of the leaders who reached New England, consider the great body of those who left the shores of England, we shall have to account for those fourteen emigrants out of every fifteen, who, although willing to leave their homes and all they had held dear, yet shunned active participation in the Bible Commonwealths. It is evident that other causes, besides the quarrels in the Church and the tyranny of Laud, must have been operative on a large scale, to explain the full extent of the

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movement. It seems probable that the principal cause that induced such an extraordinary number of people, from the ranks of the lesser gentry and those below them, to make so complete a break in their lives as was implied by leaving all they had ever known for the uncertainties of far-off lands, was economic. They came for the simple reason that they wanted to better their condition. They wanted to be rid of the growing and incalculable exactions of government. They wanted to own land; and it was this last motive, perhaps, which mainly had attracted those twelve thousand persons out of sixteen thousand who swelled the population of Massachusetts in 1640, but were not church members; for the Puritan colonies were the only ones in which land could be owned in fee simple, without quit-rent or lord, and in which it was freely given to settlers.¹

The local sources in England of the great migration, and the relations of that movement to local economic conditions, have not received adequate treatment as yet, and the subject is somewhat obscure; but apparently it was the eastern and southeastern counties that furnished the main supply of immigrants for the New World. It was in these counties that the artisans from Flanders had sought refuge, when driven abroad by Alva, as well as the Huguenots from France. In these counties, also, the enclosures, which were of such farreaching economic influence, had taken place earlier than elsewhere, while wages there showed a lower ratio to subsistence than in the north.² The special area in which the inhabitants were most disposed to seek new homes was that around the low country draining into the Wash; and throughout the early seventeenth century economic and agrarian agitation was notably

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constant in that particular region,¹ the period of heaviest emigration—that between 1630 and 1640—marking, perhaps, its years of greatest economic readjustment and strain. The rise in rents and land-values had, indeed, been enormous during the preceding half-century.² But this agricultural prosperity had been so closely bound up with the great expansion of the cloth industry, that in this section it may be said to have been wholly dependent upon it.³ From 1625 to 1630, however, the business of the clothiers suffered a very severe decline, which continued for some years, and the effects of which were very marked in the agricultural industries as well.⁴ In Norwich, for example, the Mayor and Aldermen complained that, owing to the dearth of food, and to the great increase of unemployment due to bad trade conditions, the amount necessary for poor relief had to be doubled.⁵ Moreover, as is always the case in periods of great economic alteration, the change had not affected all classes in the community alike. The yeomanry, who were less influenced by the rapidly rising scale of living, and so could save a much larger proportion of their increased gains from the high agricultural prices, were improving their position at the expense of the gentry.⁶ Enterprising traders, in the cloth and other industries, who had acquired fortunes, but who naturally were not of the old families, were pushing in and buying country estates, and, like all nouveaux riches, were asserting their new and unaccustomed

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position by raising the scale of living.¹ Many of the gentry, on the other hand, unable to adjust themselves to the new economic conditions or to take advantage of them, and yet unwilling to give up their comparative position in the county, found themselves “overtaken,” as a contemporary writer says, “with too well meaning and good nature,” and so were “inforced sometimes to suffer a revolution” in their domestic affairs.² About the years of the emigration, however, there seem to have been financial difficulties and economic unrest among all the classes, due to the immediate crisis in the cloth trade, as well as to the more general conditions of the time.

The district in which these economic changes were at work was also the one in which Puritanism had taken its strongest hold, and the leaders both of the Puritan movement at home and of colonization abroad “formed a veritable clan, intimately bound together by ties of blood, marriage, and neighborhood, acting together in all that concerned colonization or the one hand and autocratic rule on the other.”³ We have already seen, in an earlier chapter, how the trading companies had brought into working contact the great nobles, city merchants, and country gentlemen, and accustomed them to act together as, perhaps, nothing else could have done, thus paving the way for the formation of the Puritan party.

In addition to this foundation, the leaders were united by ties based upon social and blood-relationship, many of which were of great importance in the affairs of both Old and New England. Among many such, we may note that John Endicott was a parishioner of the Reverend John White, who was interested in the Cape Ann fishing company with John Humphrey. Humphrey, in turn, was a brother-in-law of the Earl

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of Lincoln, one of the most earnest of the Puritan peers, and son-in-law of Viscount Say and Sele. Lincoln’s other brothers-in-law were Isaac Johnson and John Gorges, the latter a son of Sir Ferdinando. Lincoln’s steward, Thomas Dudley, was a parishioner of John Cotton. The Earl of Holland was a brother of the Earl of Warwick, who was the leader of the Puritans. The latter’s interests in Parliament were attended to by Lord Brooke, while his man of business was Sir Nathaniel Rich. The Riches and the Barringtons were neighbors and close friends. Lady Joan Barrington, who was a correspondent of many of the New England emigrants, was an aunt of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, and Roger Williams at one rime applied for the hand of her niece. Many of these were deeply interested in the attempt to found a Puritan colony in the Caribbean, as were also Gregory Gawsell, John Gurdon, and Sir Edward Moundeford, who were all three country neighbors and intimate friends of John Winthrop and his family circle.¹

At the time that our story has now reached, there were two projects for Puritan settlement in which members of this clan were particularly interested, that of the island of Old Providence in the Caribbean Sea, and that of the remnants of the Cape Ann fishing attempt, which was mentioned in the preceding chapter. The latter somewhat ill-judged effort, in 1623, to combine as a single enterprise an agricultural colony on land and a fishing business at sea, had been abandoned two years later, with a loss of £3000.² Most of the men had been withdrawn, but Roger Conant, with a few others, decided to remain in America, transferring their homes to the location of what was in a few years to be known as Salem. Thinking that something might still be saved from the wreck, a few of the Adventurers in England plucked up courage, and having interested fresh capitalists, including Thomas Dudley, secured the services of John Endicott as local governor, and, in 1628,

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were granted a patent from the Council for New England.¹ The Puritan character of the new undertaking would be sufficiently evidenced by the names of White and his parishioner Endicott, Humphrey, and Dudley, did we not know also that the Earl of Warwick, who seven years before had secured the patent for the Pilgrims, now acted in obtaining that for the New England Company.² Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to whom Warwick applied, gave his consent, provided that the new patent should not be prejudicial to the interests of his son Robert, and distinctly stated that the new colony was to found a place of refuge for Puritans.³ The grant, which extended from three miles north of the River Merrimac to three miles south of the Charles, conflicted with that bestowed on Gorges and Mason in 1622, as well as with that of Robert Gorges of similar date. As the same limits were confirmed in the royal charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay in 1629, the seeds of future discord were sown in these conflicting titles.⁴

Endicott was at once dispatched, with a few followers, to take possession, and to prepare the way for a larger body to be sent in the succeeding year. The little band, with which he arrived in September, 1628, together with the old settlers already on the spot, made up a company of only fifty or sixty people, most of whom seem to have done little but “rub out the winter’s cold by the Fire-side,” “turning down many a drop of the Bottell, and burning Tobacco with all the ease they could,” while they discussed the progress they would make in the summer.⁵ There was, however, much sickness among them, which may have accounted in part for their

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close hearth-keeping. From what we know of Endicott’s harsh manners and lack of wisdom in dealing with delicate situations, it may be assumed that his superseding of Conant in the office of local governor was not made more palatable by any grace in his announcement of the fact; and, in any case, ill-feeling developed between the old and new planters. This, however, was smoothed over by Conant’s own tact, and affairs were adjusted “so meum and tuum that divide the world, should not disturb the peace of good christians.”¹ Morton, owing to his unsympathetic neighbors, the Pilgrims, was temporarily in England, and so absent from his crew at Merry Mount; but Endicott promptly visited that very un-Puritan and somewhat dangerous settlement, and having hewn down the offending May-pole, “admonished them to look ther should be better walking.”² It is possible that, before winter set in, preparations may have been made for a second settlement at Charlestown to forestall the claims of Oldham in that locality.³

Endicott’s whole mission at this time, indeed, seems to have been merely to prepare the way for others; and in the following year, six ships were dispatched, carrying over four hundred people, with cattle and additional supplies.⁴ Four clergymen, including Skelton and Higginson, were also sent, for the spiritual welfare of the colony, and the conversion of the Indians, which latter object, at this stage of the enterprise, was officially declared to be the main end of the plantation.

Meanwhile, the number of those in England interested in the venture continued to grow, and a royal charter, under the broad seal, was granted March 4, 1629, in the names of Sir Henry Rosewell, Sir John Younge, Thomas Southcott, John Humphrey, John Endicott, and their associates, the total

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Illustration Facing Page 128: An Original Share in the Massachusetts Bay Company

membership of the company being about one hundred and ten.¹ The grant followed somewhat closely that received by the Virginia Company in 1609, the patentees being joint proprietors of the plantation, with rights of ownership and government similar to those enjoyed by the earlier London Company. A General Court, to meet quarterly, was provided for, and annually, at the Easter session, this court was to elect a governor, deputy governor and a board of assistants, consisting of eighteen members. By an important clause, six of the latter, together with the governor or his deputy, constituted a quorum, and were therefore required to be present at the sittings of the court. The General Court, consisting of the members of the Company, known as freemen, was also given the power to add to its number, and to make such necessary laws and ordinances as should not be repugnant to the laws of England. The first governor was Mathew Cradock, with Thomas Goffe as deputy, the Assistants including Sir Richard Saltonstall, Isaac Johnson, John Humphrey, John Endicott, Increase Nowell, Theophilus Eaton, and John Browne. It was this charter of a proprietary company, skillfully interpreted to fit the needs of the case, and constantly violated as to its terms, which formed the basis of the commonwealth government of Massachusetts for over half a century.

The company, so organized, proceeded to arrange for a local government in Massachusetts, confirming Endicott as governor, and associating with him a council of thirteen. This was to include the three clergymen then there, the two Brownes, and two of the old planters, if the latter group should desire such representation. Efforts were made to conserve as equitably as possible the rights of those former settlers, and other instructions for the conduct of the company’s affairs were forwarded to Endicott a few weeks after the grant of the charter.²

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Writing home, at the end of the first summer, Higginson stated that on their arrival, they had found “aboute a half score houses, and a fair house newly built for the Governor,” and that, including the newcomers and old settlers, about three hundred people were planted in the colony, of whom two thirds were at Salem and the remainder at Charlestown.¹ “But that which is our greatest comfort and means of defence above all others,” he continued, “is that we have here the true religion and holy ordinances of Almighty God taught amongst us. Thanks be to God, we have here plenty of preaching, and diligent catechising, with strict and careful exercise.

As we noted in an earlier chapter, many writers have insisted greatly upon the rigid distinction between the Pilgrims, as Separatists, and the Puritans, as mere Nonconformists. Not only, however, were the members of the several communities by no means agreed as to what constituted Separatism and Nonconformity, but, in the American wilderness, such distinctions rapidly ceased to have any but a disputatious value, with, at intervals, political reverberations in England. The Pilgrims, at the time of their emigration from Holland, may have been strict Separatists or on the way to becoming mere non-Separatist Independent Puritans;² and the leaders of the churches of Massachusetts for many years denied any Separatism on their own part or that of the Pilgrims. John Cotton wrote categorically, in 1647, that “for New England there is no such church of the Separation at al that I know of.”³ On the other hand, many, of all shades of religious belief, refused to acknowledge this view of the matter. They found it impossible to answer Roger Williams’s query as to “what is that which Mr. Cotton and so many hundreths fearing God in New England walk in, but a way of separation?”⁴

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Indeed, in view of the open and patent facts, the only possible answer was the casuistical one of Cotton and the other leaders that they had separated, “not from the Churches in Old England, as no Churches, but from some corruptions found in them.”¹ As these corruptions were held to include the polity and ritual of the English Church, and as members of the New England churches, though they might listen to its preaching, were not allowed to be in communion with it, and as no Church of England services were permitted on New England soil, the point as to whether or not the New England Puritans were Separatists is a mere matter of terms. It depends upon the question how far a minority of any organization, social, political, or religious, can go in denying the validity of its ideas, in refusing to conform to its practices, and in not allowing them to be used, and still consider themselves as being in the organization. Opinions will always differ, and it is as impossible to decide to-day whether the Puritans became Separatists as it was for themselves and their critics to decide at the time.

The question of terms is not especially important, but the question of polity, as it was developed in the little church at Salem, is immensely so, for it undoubtedly gave a very great impetus to the growth of Congregationalism in Massachusetts, and, indeed, has been called “the chief point of departure in the ecclesiastical history of New England,” which was so inextricably interwoven with its political history. In no other part of the country has a more distinct and persistent type of thought and character been developed than in that section; and in this regard we have already noted the important influences of the geographic environment. But the impress of its institutional life was no less effective upon the minds of its people. It was not Puritanism alone that developed the type; for, we repeat, the Puritan strain may be traced in the legislation and social life of many of the English settlements, and the Puritanism of any individual to-day may derive quite as directly from an ancestral Bermudian, Georgian, Jamaican Commonwealth man, Carolinian Scotch Covenanter, or

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Pennsylvanian Ulsterite, as from a settler in Salem or Plymouth. But wherever we find Congregationalism, town government, and the village school, we may trace the triple influence straight to New England.

It is impossible to say what may have been the precise ideas as to church government held by the groups which emigrated with Endicott and in the following year, but the evidence seems clear that, at least as far as Endicott was concerned, they were identical with those of the Pilgrims, or were unconsciously derived from them after arrival. Dr. Fuller, who visited Salem during the sickness of the first winter, was not only a physician but a deacon of the Plymouth church. With him Endicott discussed the question of church polity, and, as a result, wrote to Governor Bradford that “I am by him satisfied touching your judgments of the outward forme of Gods worshipe. It is, as farr as I can gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth, and the same which I have proffessed and maintained ever since the Lord in mercie revealed him selfe unto me.”¹ A few weeks later, after the arrival of Skelton and Higginson, the Salem church was organized, with the former as pastor, and the latter as teacher, the members being united by a church covenant, which became one of the essential features of the New England church system.² In that system, every local church was independent, choosing and ordaining its own pastor, teachers, and ruling elders, and was composed of such Christians only as could satisfy the other church members of their converted state.³ “The stones that were to be laid in Solomon’s temple,” wrote Cotton, with characteristic far-fetched use of Old Testament texts, “were squared and made ready before they were laid in the building . . . and, wherefore so, if not to hold forth

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that no members were to be received into the Church of Christ, but such as were rough-hewn, and squared, and fitted to lie close and levell to Christ and to his members?”¹

Although the church government was democratic in form, and thus of influence in fostering democratic beliefs as to government in general, it must be remembered that at probably no period during the life of the charter, did the number of church members include more than a very distinct minority of the population. Lechford’s statement, that three quarters of the people were outside the pale of the church in 1640, seems borne out by other testimony, and this proportion appears not to have been greatly changed till near the end of the century.² The influence of this democratic form of church organization, however, was clearly foreseen by King James in his dictum, “No bishop, no king”; and of even greater effect in its logical political consequence was the employment of the covenant. In defending its use in the church, Cotton, in the volume already quoted, was forced onto broader ground. “It is evident,” he wrote, “by the light of nature, that all civill Relations are founded in Covenant. For, to passe by naturall Relations between Parents and Children, and violent Relations between Conquerors and Captives; there is no other way given wherby a people (sui Juris) free from naturall and compulsory engagements, can be united or combined together into one visible body.”³

It is difficult to overestimate the influence which, in time, these two ideas, of a democratic church polity and a voluntary covenant as the only basis for a civil government, would come to exert upon those holding them; but for the moment, the result was the forcible expulsion from the community of two members who did not hold them. John and Samuel Browne, both men of good estate, the one a merchant and the other a lawyer, and both original patentees of the Company, had

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left England for Salem in the spring of 1629, with high recommendation to Endicott from the Company at home, as men much trusted and respected.¹ When the Salem church was organized, the two brothers, who were both on the council, objected, accusing the ministers of having become Separatists, which they denied. As the Brownes refused to give up the use of the prayer-book, and held private services with their followers, Endicott, either from personal feeling or from a real fear that the trouble would disrupt the colony, took a strong stand, and shipped them back to England.² There is no contemporary account of the details, and it is therefore as unwise, perhaps, to condemn Endicott, as it is unjustifiable to speak of the Brownes as “anarchical,” or, with an odd lack of humor, as “Schismatical.”³ Endicott was mildly censured by the Company in England, who wrote that they conceived that “it is possible some undigested councells have too sudainely bin put in execution, wch may have ill construccion with the state heere;” while the ministers were asked to clear themselves if innocent, or else to look back upon their “miscarriage wth repentance.” In time the Brownes seem to have been settled with satisfactorily on a cash basis.⁴

While progress was thus being made in the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay colony, another project for a Puritan settlement was rapidly taking form. After the dissolution of the Virginia Company, the quarrel between the Sandys and Warwick factions was continued in the courts of the Somers islands, or Bermuda Company, and its affairs were going from bad to worse, largely owing to the frequent changes in the person of the governor as the two factions succeeded each other in power at home. In April, 1629, Sir Nathaniel Rich received a long letter from Governor Bell, in regard to various matters, in the course of which he described two islands lying in the Caribbean, in either of which he thought one year would

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“be more profitable than seven years here,” and placed the disposition of both islands in Warwick’s hands.¹

It was a momentous time. Hardly more than a few days before, Parliament had been angrily dissolved by the King not to meet again for eleven years. Eliot, Selden, and seven other of the popular leaders had been committed to the Tower. In every direction, Puritans of distinction, and even such lesser men as John Humphrey and John Winthrop, were made to feel the hostility of the court. The recent successful colonization of St. Kitts and Barbadoes by the Earls of Carlisle and Marlborough, both members of the court party, and hostile to the Warwicks and Riches, combined with the flattering report of the new-found islands by Bell, induced Warwick, whose affairs had not been going well, to make an immediate counter-move. With Rich, Gawsell, and others, he provided £2000, and dispatched two ships for the Caribbean under letters of marque. They arrived at Providence about Christmas, the company beginning to make ready for the larger body which was to arrive in the spring, precisely as Endicott had done at Salem. “The aim and desire above all things,” wrote the promoters of the enterprise, “is to plant the true and sincere Religion and worship of God, which in the Christian world is now very much opposed.” At first, the utmost secrecy was maintained as to the real aims of Warwick and his associates; and it was only in December of the following year, after the main body of the colonists had already been planted, that letters-patent for the islands were procured from the King.²

There can be no doubt, however, that the matter was well known to Winthrop and others of those who were contemplating emigration in the summer of 1629. Not only was Gawsell a neighbor and friend of Winthrop, but all steps taken by the Massachusetts group seem to have been talked over with Warwick and Rich.³ John Winthrop, now in his forty-third year, who was living the life of a country squire at Groton, in

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Suffolk, and was a small office-holder under government, had been anxiously watching the course of affairs. Of a sensitive and deeply religious nature, strongly attached to the Puritan cause, he could not but regard the future with the greatest anxiety. “The Lord hath admonished, threatened, corrected and astonished us,” he wrote to his wife in May, 1629, “yet we growe worse and worse, so as his spirit will not allwayes strive with us, he must needs give waye to his fury at last. . . We sawe this, and humbled not ourselves, to turne from our evill wayes, but have provoked him more than all the nations rounde about us: therefore he is turninge the cuppe toward us also, and because we are the last, our portion must be, to drinke the verye dreggs which remaine. My dear wife, I am veryly persuaded, God will bringe some heavye Affliction upon this lande, and that speedylye.”¹ In addition to his fear that all hope of civil, as well as of even a moderate degree of religious, liberty was rapidly fading, Winthrop was also much troubled by the prospects for his personal social and financial position. A few months earlier, he had written to his son Henry, at that time a settler in Barbadoes, that he then owed more than he was able to pay without selling his land; and throughout all his letters and papers of the period runs the same strain of anxiety over money matters.² Although possessed of a modest estate, which, when subsequently sold, realized £4200,³ the demands of a large family, and the increased cost of living, were more than he could meet. In June, he was, in addition, deprived of his office under the Master of the Wards, and wrote to his wife that “where we shall spende the rest of or short tyme I knowe not: the Lorde, I trust, will direct us in mercye.”⁴

With the discussion then going on in Puritan circles as to Endicott’s settlement at Salem, and with his neighbors actively interested in the colony at Providence, it was natural that

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Winthrop should seriously consider the thought of emigrating, just at this time, a paper consisting of arguments for and against settling a plantation in New England was being circulated among the group of Puritans mentioned earlier in this chapter. The reasons given in favor of it were mainly religious and economic. The first dwelt upon the glory of opposing Anti-Christ, in the form of the French Jesuits in Canada, and of raising “a particular church” in New England while the second referred to the supposed surplus population at home, and to the standard and cost of living which had “growne to that height of intemperance in all excesse of Riott, as noe mans estate allmost will suffice to keepe saile with his aequalls.”¹

The document, which has come down to us in at least four different forms, was possibly drafted by Winthrop himself, though the evidence is only inferential, and it has also been attributed to the Reverend John White and others.² It is interesting to note that John Hampden wrote to Sir John Eliot, then in prison, for a copy of it.³ Whether or not Winthrop was the author, several copies, one of them indorsed “May, 1629,” contain memoranda of “Particular considerations in the case of J. W.,” in which he wrote that the success of the plan had come to depend upon him, for “the chiefe supporters (uppon whom the rest depends) will not stirr wthout him,” and that his wife and children are in favor of it. “His meanes,” moreover, he wrote, “heer are so shortened (now 3 of his sonnes being com to age have drawen awaie the one half of his estate) as he shall not be able to continue in that place and imployment where he now iss, his ordinary charg being still as great almost as when his meanes was double”; and that “if he lett pass this opportunitie, That talent wch God hath bestowed uppon him for publicke service is like to

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be buried.”¹ “With what comfort can I live,” he added in one version, “wth 7 or 8 servts in that place and condition where for many years I have spent 3: or 400 li yearly and maintained a greater chardge?”² The prospects in England, for his wife and children, lay heavily on his mind. “For my care of thee and thine,” he wrote to the former, after the die was cast, “I will say nothing. The Lord knows my heart, that it was one great motive to draw me into this course.”³

His judgment regarding the ending of the opportunity for a public career for such as himself in England was obviously wrong, as events developed there. The England which retained a Pym, a Hampden, an Eliot, and a Cromwell, may well have offered scope for the talents of a Winthrop. As our eyes are usually fastened on this side of the water, we are apt to think of the Pilgrims, Puritans, and other immigrants as starting their careers by coming here. We rarely consider them in the light of leaving behind them other possible careers in England. It is no disparagement of the courage with which they faced the wilderness, to think of them, for a moment, as Englishmen, abandoning their place in the struggle at home, and to consider the type of mind which thus preferred to exchange the simplifications of unpeopled America for the complexities of the situation in England. Is it, perhaps, altogether fanciful, to attribute, in slight part, that deeply ingrained feeling of Americans, that they, wish to have nothing to do with the problems of the world at large, to this choice of the founders in abandoning their place in the struggles of Europe for a more untrammeled career on a small provincial stage?

Winthrop’s reasons have been thus dwelt upon, because, in the motives given by him who was the purest, gentlest, and broadest-minded of all who were to guide the destinies of the Bay Colony, we presumably find the highest of those which animated any of the men who sought its shores. As we descend

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the scale of character, the religious incentives narrow and disappear, as does also the desire for honorable public service, and the economic factor alone remains.

In July, a few weeks after Winthrop lost his office, Isaac Johnson, a brother-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln, wrote to Emanuel Downing, a brother-in-law of Winthrop, asking there to meet at Sempringham, the Earl’s seat in Lincolnshire, whither they both went on the 28th.¹ There they undoubtedly met Dudley, Johnson, Humphrey, and others of that family and social group. All those gathered there, so far as we know, were keenly interested in the project for Massachusetts. As they were also in close touch with Warwick, Rich, and others of those who were just at the moment planning to send out the colony to Providence in September, it is probable that both places were considered, and Warwick continued for years to urge Winthrop and his group to move to the southern colony. The decision, however, was in favor of Massachusetts; and, a few weeks later, on August 26, Saltonstall, Dudley, Johnson, Humphrey, Winthrop, and seven others, signed an agreement by which they bound themselves to be ready, with their families and goods, by the first of the following March, to embark for New England, and to settle there permanently.²

There was one clause in the agreement, of incalculable importance. “Provided always,” so it read, “that before the last of September next, the whole Government, together with the patent for the said plantation, be first, by an order of court, legally transferred and established to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said Plantation.”³ Possibly as a result of consultation with the Cambridge signers, Governor Cradock, at a meeting of the court of the Company a month earlier, had read certain propositions, “conceived by himself,” which anticipated this condition. They seem

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to have struck those present as serious and novel, and of such importance in their possible consequences as to call for deferred consideration in great secrecy. The matter was brought up at a number of successive meetings, and it was only after much debate, objections on the part of many, and the taking of legal advice, that the court finally voted that the charter and government might be removed to America.¹ By such transfer, and the use made of the charter in New England, what was intended to be a mere trading company, similar to those which had preceded it, became transformed into a self-governing commonwealth, whose rulers treated the charter as if it were the constitution of an independent state. Such an interpretation could not legally be carried beyond a certain point, and the attempt was bound to break down under the strain.

The step, in its far-reaching consequences, was one of the most important events in the development of the British colonies, but its story remains a mystery. It was a completely new departure, but may have been suggested to the leaders by the act of the Pilgrims in buying out their English partners and thus in effect, though without any legal authority, constituting themselves a self-governing community. There has been much discussion as to whether the absence in the original charter of any words indicating that the corporation was to remain in England was due to accident or design. It is impossible to prove the point either way, for Winthrop’s statement, of somewhat uncertain application and written many years later, does not seem conclusive against the other facts and probabilities.² The proceedings at the meetings of the court show clearly, at least, that many of the most active patentees had had no inkling of any such conscious alteration of the document at the time of issue, nor does it seem likely that Charles I would have knowingly consented. If the

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charter were intentionally so worded as to create “the Adventurers a Corporation upon the Place,”¹ for the purpose the wording was later made to serve, then such of the leaders as arranged the matter consciously hoodwinked both the government and many of their own associates.

At length, however, the consent of the patentees was obtained, after their counsel had approved the legality of the step; and in October, in contemplation of the removal of the government to America, Winthrop was elected Governor, and Humphrey, Deputy, in place of those who were to remain behind.² Eight months later, in the early summer of 1630, Winthrop and a band of between nine hundred and a thousand immigrants landed in America, and settled what were later known as the towns of Charlestown, Boston, Medford, Water town, Roxbury, Lynn, and Dorchester.³ Eighty of the inhabitants already planted at Salem under Endicott had died during the winter, and of those who formed the present settlements, about two hundred succumbed between the time of leaving England and the end of December, including Johnson, his wife the Lady Arbella, the Reverend Mr. Higginson, and other important members of the colony.⁴

The settlers, apparently, did not have time to house themselves properly before winter came on, and many, particularly of the poor, had to face the icy winds of a New England January with no better shelter than a canvas tent.⁵ Provisions, even in England, were exceedingly scarce and dear that year, partly, some claimed, because of the large quantities taken out by emigrants to New England and the other plantations.⁶ Massachusetts had evidently not received her share,

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if such had been the case, and famine soon faced the settlers, who were forced to live partly on mussels and acorns.¹ Even upon their arrival in the summer, food had been so scarce that they had been forced to give their liberty to a hundred and eighty servants, entailing a loss of between three and four hundred pounds.² The cold, which had held off until December 24, suddenly came on in extreme severity, and “such a Christmas eve they had never seen before.” The contrast with the Christmas Day which the Warwick settlers were passing at Providence, in the Caribbean, was complete; and Humphrey and Downing, who were in frequent conference with the earl and with Rich, kept writing to advise Winthrop to move the colony farther south, if only to the Hudson River.³ At a critical moment, the ship Lion, which Winthrop had had the foresight to send at once to England for provisions, arrived with a new supply; but so deep was the discouragement, that many returned in her to the old home, never to come back. Others, however, were of sterner stuff, and took passage in the same boat to fetch their families.⁴

At last the winter passed, and with the summer came renewed hope. The public business had been temporarily managed by the Assistants only, and the first General Court was not held until October. At that session the charter was violated in an important point, in that the freemen relinquished their right to elect the governor and the deputy. Thereafter, it was ruled, these were to be elected by the Assistants only, with whom they were to have the power of making laws and appointing officers.⁵ The extent of this limitation of the right of election, which was revoked, however, at the next General Court, is evident from the fact that in March, in contemplation of the probability of there being less than

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nine Assistants left in the colony, it was agreed that seven should constitute a court. In fact, the charter was continually violated in that regard, as the number of Assistants, for over fifty years, was never more than about one half of the required eighteen.¹

The Assistants, into whose hands the control of the government now passed, were probably a majority of the entire voting population of the colony. According to the terms of the charter only members of the Company, or the so-called freemen, had the right to vote at its meetings. After the “sea-change” which was presumed to have altered that document into “something rich and strange” in the way of political constitutions, those meetings became the political assemblies of the colony, and the freemen of the Company became the only enfranchised voters of the state. While two thousand persons were settled in Massachusetts about the time of that October meeting, it is probable that not more than sixteen to twenty members of the Company had crossed the ocean, of whom a number had returned or died.² If the charter were indeed the written constitution of a state, it was unique among such instruments in that it thus limited all political rights, in a community of two thousand persons, to a tiny self-perpetuating oligarchical group of not more than a dozen citizens. Ninety-nine and one half per cent of the population was thus unenfranchised and unrepresented, and even denied the right of appeal to the higher authorities in England.

Such was the situation, brought about with full knowledge and intention, and as long as possible persisted in, by the Puritan leaders. Those leaders, as we have such clear proof in the case of the noblest of them, John Winthrop, seem to have come to Massachusetts with three distinct and clearly understood objects. They wished, first, to found and develop a peculiar type of community, best expressed by the term Bible-Commonwealth, in which the political and religious elements,

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in themselves and in their relations to one another, should be but two aspects of the same method of so regulating the lives of individuals as to bring them into harmony with the expressed will of God, as interpreted by the self-appointed rulers. Secondly, both as religious zealots, who felt that they had come into possession of ultimate truth, and as active-minded Englishmen, desirous of an outlet for their administrative energies, they considered themselves as the best qualified rulers and the appointed guardians for the community which they had founded. Lastly, having been largely determined by economic considerations in venturing their fortunes in the enterprise, they looked with fear, as well as jealousy, upon any possibility of allowing control of policy, of law and order, and of legislation concerning person and property, to pass to others.

In such a church-state, no civil question could be considered aside from its possible religious bearings; no religious opinion could be discussed apart from its political implications. It was a system which could be maintained permanently only by the most rigid denial of political free speech and religious toleration. Fortunately, however, it contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Apart from other factors, the church-covenant idea, brought by the Pilgrims, accepted by Endicott, and indorsed by the three churches formed by the Winthrop colonists, in 1630, at Dorchester, Charlestown, and Watertown, was the seed of a democratic conception of the state, which grew so persistently as to defy all efforts of its own planters to destroy it. The attitude of the two most influential Massachusetts leaders, lay and ecclesiastical, is not a matter of inference. “Democracy,” wrote Winthrop, after stating that there “was no such government in Israel,” is “amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” To allow it in Massachusetts would be “a manifest breach of the 5th. Commandment.”¹ “Democracy,” wrote John Cotton to Lord Say and Sele, “I do not conceive that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors

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who shall be governed?”¹ We have already quoted Gooch’s statement that “democracy is the child of the Ref ormation, not of the Reformers.” The democracy of Massachusetts, slow in developing, was the child of the churchcovenant and of the frontier, not of the Puritan leaders.

While the latter were thus attempting to found and maintain an aristocracy or oligarchy to guard a church polity which was unconsciously but implicitly democratic,² their position was rendered precarious at the very outset, and increasingly so as time went on, by the necessary presence in the colony of that large unenfranchised class which was not in sympathy with them. As we have seen, even under strong social and political temptation, three quarters of the population, though probably largely Puritan in sentiment and belief, persistently refused to ally themselves with the New England type of Puritan church. Their presence in the colony was undoubtedly due to economic motives, more especially, perhaps, the desire to own their lands in fee. It must also have been due to economic considerations on the part of the Puritan rulers. The planting of a Bible-Commonwealth might have been possible without these non-church members, but the creation of a prosperous and populous state was not, as was evidenced by statistics throughout its life. Even of the first thousand who came with Winthrop, it is probable that many were without strong religious motives; that few realized the plans of the leaders; and it is practically certain that the great bulk of them had never seen the charter.

Many of the more active soon wished to have some voice in the management of their own affairs; and at the October meeting of the General Court, one hundred and eight, including Conant, Maverick, and Blackstone among the old planters, requested that they be made freemen.³ It became evident to the dozen or so men who alone possessed the governing power, that some extension of the franchise would be necessary

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if the leading spirits among their two thousand subjects were not to emigrate again to other colonies, or to foment trouble at home. On the other hand, the extension of the franchise was, in their minds, fraught with the perils already indicated. The decision to extend the franchise, but to limit its powers, and to violate the terms of the charter by placing the election of the governor and deputy in the hands of the Assistants instead of the freemen, was probably the result of an effort to solve this problem. Before the next meeting of the General court in the following May, at which the new freemen were to be admitted, further thought had evidently been devoted to the question, and another solution arrived at. Winthrop was chosen Governor, not by the Assistants, as voted at the preceding meeting, but by “the general consent of the Court, according to the meaning of the patent”; and the momentous resolution was adopted that “noe man shall be admitted to the freedome of this body polliticke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same.”¹ The first attempt on the part of its unenfranchised subjects to secure a larger share of political liberty had resulted merely in establishing, more firmly than before, the theocratical and oligarchical nature of the government.

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