Notes:BC1.AH.New England - the Great Emigration

2014/06/15 User:Jeff

The Massachusetts Bay Company

The Massachusetts Bay Company can be thought of as a subsidiary of New England. It was established by the Council for New England to develop a land grant received from the king in 1627.

• It was not founded for religious principle or reasons, it was a commercial venture.

Most of the founding associates were Nonconformists or Separatists with a few conforming to the Established Church.

• In 1629, control of the company was secured by the Nonconformists whose objectives were to plant a colony based on their religious objectives.

It is interesting to ponder why a government would insist on uniformity in religion. Some historians (Trevenlyan and Channing, for examples) attribute the reason to the need at the time to protect religion from foreign control. This can be understood by understanding the society and customs of the times. Religion had a larger influence over the actions of people than it does today and could turn a segment of society against the government and cause adherents to plot the overthrow of its leadership. Religion has to loosen its grip on society for toleration to exist.

But the pursuit of such uniformity came at the cost of freedom of conscious and freedom of action. So, given the English tradition of ever expanding freedom for the individual and group, it is no surprise that toleration had to come. But such a thing does not happen over night. The adventuresome people that came to America for religious reasons to found their own societies did not have toleration in mind. The early seekers of religious freedom came to secure the freedom of their own consciences and not to establish a haven for the religiously persecuted. They came, in the words of John Winthrop, to establish a "particular church" (Channing, Vol I page 329

John Winthrop

John Winthrop lead the emigration that founded Boston as part of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Winthrop recorded his reasons for emigrating.

• He wanted to establish a "bulwark against the kingdom of anti-Christ which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts."

"What can be a better work and more honorable and worthy a Christian than to help raise ansd support a particular church?"

• He considered England overpopulated.

People "the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth we tread upon . . and thus it is come to pass, that children, servants, and neighbors, especially if they be poor, are counted the greatest burdens, which if things were right would be the chiefest earthly blessing."

While on the other side of the Atlantic lay a continent that should not "lie waste without any improvement."

It must be realized that making a living - getting enough to eat and providing shelter and clothing - was much more difficult then.

• Winthrop also decried luxury and conspicuous consumption of the time characterized by a

"height of intemperance in all excess of riot, as no man's estate almost will suffice to keep sail with his equals."

• Winthrop came to America "to live under a due form of government, both civil and ecclesiastical." I.e., he and those traveling with him came to live in a place in which they would not offend either others or their own consciences. But it was not for tolerance. They wanted a place where the uniformity of religion was of their own type.
• Finally he was ambitious as were many others who emigrated. He felt that he would not find suitable employment for what he saw as his considerable talents, due to his religious nonconformity.

More important to the success of the Boston settlement was Winthrop's preparations. He made himself aware of the reasons for the failures and near tragic hardships of earlier settlements and planned against such an end as best he could.

The Cambridge Agreement and the grant

Mathew Craddock, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, proposed to the shareholders that government and control of the company should be transferred to those who were to emigrate to the colony. This was both different and far sighted.

• 4 weeks later a dozen men of substance met at Cambridge pledging that they were ready to emigrate on the condition that the government be legally turned over to them.

This was done and John Winthrop was elected the new governor.

• This agreement gave the management and government of the company to these dozen men. It did not establish a democratic colony. But that was to come

• The Massachusetts grant provided for the establishment of a corporation by the name of the "Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England."

A clause in the Massachusetts grant that was common in charters and grants (included in the 1609 Virginia Charter and in the New England Patent of 1620 and others) was that the grantees had the authority

"to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule" their settlers.

"to encounter, expulse, repel, and resist by force of arms, as well by sea as by land and all ways and means whatsoever" anyone invading their colony, and also

granting to all emigrants the same liberties and rights as if they were in England under the protection of the king.

The first fleet sails

11 vessels of the Massachusetts Bay Company set sail and arrived at Salem harbor after a relatively easy voyage on June , 1630.

• Salem was in dire straights. A previous group had arrived there a couple of years earlier. Many had died and the remaining were in poor health and spirits. So discouraging was it that many of Winthrop's group returned to England on the ships that brought them.
• Winthrop continued with his fleet to Boston harbor and disembarked.

It was a mild Fall, but a ferocious Winter. The settlement would have failed had not Winthrop had the foresight to send one of the ships back to England to return with supplies. It reached the colony in the middle of February 1931 with more passengers and needed supplies. Another ship arrived from Virginia with corn.

Boston had their own hard times, but it was nothing like what the first Virginian's had suffered.

Rapid growth

In 1633 the tide of emigration rose. In May, 1634, Winthrop estimated the population of Massachusetts at 4 thousand people. The pace of emigration alarmed some English authorities who feared that it would harm the economy at home. But they could not stem the tide. They had larger issues on other fronts.

• Massachusetts outgrew all other colonies.

In the summer of 1633, almost 40 ships arrived at Massachusetts.

In 1643, Massachusetts Bay had a population of over 16,000 and had more people than the rest of the English colonies combined.

Freemen, religion and representative government

The most precious commodity to the efforts to settle America and establish a critical mass of commerce was people. A colony charter might be granted to a group of highly principled company leaders who had their own vision of how to govern and which form of church was to be established in within their grant, but they encountered the problem of having to bend to the wishes of the settlers on numerous occasions.

Otherwise, people would not emigrate in sufficient numbers, or, in the case of those already in America, they might pick up and move to a neighboring colony that suited them better. This was the case on Massachusetts Bay.

• It had been John Winthrop's intention to establish a "particular church" along the lines of his own nonconformist views. However, the influence of conditions in the American wilderness had their own effect.
• By the time that Massachusetts Bay had reached a population of 2000, there were only 12 members of the Massachusetts Bay Company living there and governing them.

Of the 12 were the governor, assistants, and "freemen".

"Freeman" referred to a member of the company. The governor, assistants and freemen, possessed by grant from the king, the authority to govern the rest.

They had voted themselves the authority to act as magistrates. They had no laws prepared for Massachusetts Bay, but they had knowledge of English Common Law and Mosaic law and elected to govern using those. (Channing (page 340) quotes Massachusetts Colony Records.) This proved effective enough, but the law of the wilderness took somewhat immediate effect.

• In 1630, 109 applied to the Great and General Court (the ruling body of the Company) for admission to the freedom of the corporation.

The problem for Winthrop and the Company was how to satisfy the request (which they thought necessary lest they loose people to New England to the north or New Plymouth to the south) without relinquishing too much control lest they dilute their purpose to establish their "particular church". According to Channing (page 341), they saw themselves in the roles of Moses and Aaron.

• They granted the request in 1631 with limitations:

The added freemen could elect assistants but not participate in governing directly. The number of assistants was to be kept small in the belief that only leading men would be elected - probably a safe bet in those days.

In future, only men that were members of the churches in the colony would be granted these privileges.

• The new freemen requested a copy of the grant and discovered that the governor and assistants had reserved more authority for themselves and granted less to them than was written down. This changed the game somewhat.

Upon learning that, as freemen in the Company, they had the same authority as the original freemen, they established a representative system.

• To counter the ability of freemen living near Boston to control the government by virtue of convenience to attend General Court meetings, those living further away deputed representatives to attend the General Court. This system was ultimately approved by the General Court.
• The authority of the assistants was, thereby, greatly diluted, which gave rise to a lot of political maneuvering on their part. But Massachusetts transitioned from being ruled by a small group of original company members to an aristocratic republic, much more independent from England.

It was aristocratic in that the number of freemen voters still remained relatively small. They were the more influential colonists and they were members of the Massachusetts churches. In fact, general democracy was not the intent of any of them.

• The system of representatives evolved into a proxy system that allowed all the freemen to vote by giving their proxy to their representatives.

This then evolved into a true voting system of being able to cast votes in their own towns. From this a system of caucuses, nominations, and secret balloting soon also evolved.

• The colonial government seated in Boston seems to be the first truly representative colonial government.

Nonetheless, and contrary to the charter, Winthrop and associates exercised much personal authority by discouraging (sometimes by imprisonment) appeals to England and banished those they considered a threat to their "Bible Commonwealth."

Dissenters and Exiles

(Title taken from Channing Vol. I, chapter XIII)

Channing writes an interesting chapter about the more interesting and significant dissenters in Massachusetts Bay. We give a very brief summary of its lessons below as we judge them relevant to American civic heritage. We have posted a photocopy of the chapter here for the curious.

Channing makes a few points (some subtle and some overt) about authoritarian leadership at that time in America's history

• There were dissenters, some of them articulate and influential for brief periods. But they were out of the mainstream.
• Leadership at Boston and at Plymouth represented the preponderance of public opinion in their settlements.

And that opinion, for the most part, followed the vision of John Winthrop for a "Bible Commonwealth" and a "particular church."

• There was no middle ground. Toleration was not an option at that point in time. And either the dissenters were to be tolerated and allowed to proselytize and criticize authority, or they were to be banished.
• Leadership held the power and won the struggles presented by the likes of Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Robert Child.

• Williams is hard to judge from what historians say about him. They make him out to be an a high strung and somewhat inconsistent radical. But his own writings seem prescient. For example,

he wrote that the state had no right to dictate that anyone "Go to the religious services provided by the state or be punished."

and regarding the authority of Maryland magistrates: "but to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties belongeth not to them."

This is the sort of thing that we have taken for granted since the writing of our constitution.

• In the cases cited in Channing's chapter, he describes a society and its leadership that is not so much consciously intolerant (though it is) as it has sprung form a heritage that does not separate church and state, but sees them tied up together. It subscribes to a specific form of worship and sees in toleration a threat to order.

• It should be realized that even at that time (1640s), success and survival in the colonies were not a sure thing, and it can be expected that order was valued above almost all else.
• In every case cited by Channing, the dissenters were vanquished even though they enjoyed a level of influence for some time.

It was largely by Massachusetts dissenters that the southern New England colonies that became Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded. The story is continued in Southern New England.

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