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The first self-governing colony
In 1630, 1500 Puritans sailed for New England. Their charter had had a loophole allowing them to move the company to New England, making Massachusetts Bay the first colony completely governed from America (unbeknownst to the king). With 4 months to prepare for winter, they set about forming towns, and building temporary shelters. When winter came, some people waited out the cold in wigwams, others in tents, and others in holes in the ground. 200 people died, and 80 left, but the survivors were greeted with a ship full of supplies and an early spring. They could spend the next year building permanent towns and fortifications.
Transcript
Hi everyone, welcome back, and thanks for your patience last week! So, just a reminder, when we left off, John Endicott had just spent two years in Naumkeag, which he renamed Salem, relieving a previous group of Puritan settlers and preparing for the future settlers who were working to found a new colony – the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And, at the end of the episode, those future settlers did arrive, in a massive fleet, bringing with them the company’s charter.
The flagship of the fleet was the Arabella, named after Lady Arabella Fiennes, sister of the Earl of Lincoln, and related by marriage to Lord Saye and Sele, making her and her husband two of the highest-ranking passengers in the fleet. The Arabella was joined by 10 other ships, carrying in-total 1000 passengers, as well as livestock, provisions, and personal belongings.
Introduction
Bringing the charter was a big, big deal. The charter, itself, wasn’t particularly interesting. It specified that there would be four meetings a year attended by the stockholders, or “freemen,” and at the spring meeting, they’d choose the colony leadership – a governor, deputy governor, and eighteen assistants, which would later be known as magistrates. These people, known collectively as the general court, would meet every month to manage business matters, and they could admit new freemen, and make laws as long as those didn’t conflict with English laws.
Very simple, and on the surface very standard. The difference was that this charter didn’t specify a meeting location for the shareholders. Every other colonial or trading company charter specified an English city in which shareholder meetings would be held. Then, the governors and other officials would enforce the rules and maintain order in the colony, itself. For the Virginia Company of London, the specified city was London. For the Virginia Company of Plymouth, it was Plymouth. For the Massachusetts Bay Company, it was unspecified. After decades of trading and colonization companies which had been formed the same way, it was an assumption, taken for granted, and easy to overlook, especially if you were a completely overwhelmed, underexperienced king already entangled in numerous political disputes.
If you listened to the Virginia Company episodes in the Jamestown Series, you know what kind of drama could unfold with a politically active company holding its stockholder meetings in England, and by 1629, there could be no illusion that King Charles and the Puritans were in the middle of a conflict that wasn’t going away. The Earl of Warwick, who had indirectly granted the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter, had also been involved in the Virginia Company’s political battles. Staying in England would pull the Massachusetts Bay Colony into the middle of a heated political dispute. This could ultimately threaten the colony’s status as an independent entity, and its identity as a model society for Old World Protestants to follow. As the political situation got tenser, the king would inevitably start to scrutinize a colony formed and lead by some of his most active political opponents. It would be a weak point, a strategic disadvantage – a vulnerable asset that the king could attack in his fight with the Puritans. The colony, which they intended to use to strengthen their position in the political fight within England, could weaken it.
There were, however, a couple of downsides to moving the charter, and moving it wasn’t a unanimous decision. Some people noted that what they were doing was borderline illegal, and was contrary to the intent of the charter. Intended-governor Matthew Craddock wanted the settlement and company to operate separately, and also noted that moving the entire company to New England would leave it vulnerable to English threats like ownership disputes from rival colonist Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges had competing plans for colonization, and wasn’t sympathetic to the Puritans’ cause.
The early meetings of the Company, in the summer of 1629, took place at the home of the Earl of Lincoln, who was one of the people who had been jailed for opposing the forced loans in 1627. Thomas Dudley was there. He lived with Lincoln, and had also refused to pay and was suspected of harboring some other opponents of the loan.
On August 28, 1629, at Lincoln’s house, they debated whether to move the charter or not, and the next day they voted. At the vote, only 27 members out of a total of 125 were present to vote, and the motion passed.
King Charles wasn’t notified of this decision. He had already signed off on the royal charter, loophole included, and they weren’t inclined to inform him of their plan. It was also at these meetings that John Winthrop became involved with the colony. He wasn’t a part of the New England Company, but his son had pushed him to relocate the family to New England, and by October, when Craddock decided not to go to America as governor, Winthrop was elected to take his place. As such, he was in charge of all preparations for the trip, including picking the passengers.
Seven months later, the Winthrop Fleet set sail from docks in Southampton and Plymouth. By the end of the year, the 11 ships of that fleet would be joined by 6 more, meaning a total of 17 ships carrying 1500 people, along with horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, cats and fowl, all headed to New England in 1630.
The size of the fleet was a calculated decision. After more than two decades of planting colonies, they knew that the small scale of earlier ventures had caused a lot of the early struggles, and even more importantly, this was the first group of colonists with enough money to address the problem. Only 11% qualified as gentry, but the rest – apart from the quarter who were indentured servants hired for their skills – were affluent middle class. They were literate, they had property, and they had money to spare. Essentially everyone who wasn’t an indentured servant had paid their own passage, and almost everyone had come with relatives, if not as part of a complete family. Many of the families were related to each other, and poorer people were actively discouraged from coming. Most lower class people didn’t adhere to Puritan beliefs, though, and in fact a couple years later, Richard Saltonstall would comment that it was odd that the “meaner people should be so backward.” Still, both Winthrop and Dudley insisted that the people who moved be able to provide for themselves, and the cost of moving was 50 pounds for the worst accommodation, and 60-80 for minimal comforts. The average farmer earned 3-4 pounds per year above what he needed to survive, and the average yeoman could save closer to 20 pounds a year. This meant costs alone automatically made it impossible for ordinary people to move to New England, and recruitment efforts were directed exclusively at people with money. Winthrop was even reluctant to allow his son to send over his own Puritan servants. They didn’t want people dragging them down, spiritually or materially.
The other thing that’s worth noting about this group is that they were, as you can expect and as I think I have noted in previous episodes, overwhelmingly townspeople. They were an urban group, with a third coming from market towns and another third from large towns. Only a handful came from London, though. Less than a quarter had been primarily employed in agriculture, and two thirds had been engaged in some sort of skilled, urban trade. The rural types had lived in manorial villages, and virtually none had lived on individual farms. This was, of course, pretty standard for East Anglian society, and so it could be expected. 60% of the colonists came from a 20 mile radius around one East Anglian town, and most of the rest from pretty close. A few came from the West Country. One single congregation came from Yorkshire, thanks to an East Anglian missionary. Most of the non-East Anglians had East Anglian connections, but as we’ll see, the English geographic divisions would soon lead to both ideological and geographic divisions in the New World.
This was the fleet that was so big that they mistook the tail end of the expedition for French pirates, only realizing their mistake after loading all their cannons and guns. Two months after leaving, they landed at Salem. The first thing they did was go ashore and eat the plentiful strawberries. Then, they pitched their tents, and met with Endicott, who told them that the Narragansetts were planning to exterminate the English, and that 80 people had died the previous winter, with the remainder being weak and sickly. They didn’t have enough corn to last another two weeks, and everything else had run out. They’d even been forced to give their servants their liberty so that they could figure out how to fend for themselves, even though they’d cost 16-20 pounds a head. Fortunately, they’d brought food, and the Narragansett attack was a nonissue. Then, Winthrop, Dudley, Isaac Johnson and pastor John Wilson framed and signed the covenant of the First Church in Boston.
A couple weeks later, settlers started to scatter and set up different plantations. They only had 3-4 months to protect themselves from the coming winter. There were already plenty of people living in New England at this point, but the new charter gave the new settlers the right to the land. People who fit into society could stay, but fundamentally it was Winthrop’s decision. They didn’t have the right to the land anymore. So, Endicott stayed at Salem, Roger Ludlow and Edward Rossiter pitched at Dorchester and absorbed the several families already living there. Richard Saltonstall founded Watertown. William Pynchon founded Roxbury. Others founded Medford and Mystick. Each site picked its minister and set up its church, and spent the rest of the summer and fall building.
Winthrop took a group of settlers to Charlestown, about 20 miles away, took look for a location for their future capital. They knew enough about the location to know that they wanted it to be relatively near to what’s now Boston. Even before the Pilgrims had arrived, sailors had that area as a perfect place for a major city, the Pilgrims had agreed, and some of Endicott’s men had already moved there the previous year.
At first, they pitched on the north side of the river, but when Winthrop blamed the water for the illness which started spreading through the camp, they relocated to the south side, at what’s now Boston. A man named Mr. Blaxton had already claimed that area. He told the Puritans that, while he wasn’t a fan of the Bishops, he also didn’t like the Puritans and religious nonconformists. This wasn’t a satisfactory answer, so he couldn’t settle with the Puritans. He saw the futility of fighting them, and voluntarily relocated south to what’s now Providence.
So, each group of colonists in their new settlement location, they started to prepare for winter. Winthrop and the other leaders would live in a house that had already been constructed, while the others built temporary shelters to get them through the winter, and in spring they’d determine a final settlement location and build a fortified town there. Some of these shelters included caves which had been dug into hillsides, and cellars covered with thatched roofs. A couple made wigwams or built frame houses. They also started looking for corn and other foods to boost their food supplies. They’d arrived in the middle of summer, and New England only has a four month growing season, and bringing enough food to get 1500 people through months of winter was impossible.
As they settled down and prepared for winter, they held their first government meeting in America – known as a court of assistants. There, they appointed justices of the peace, made rules for future monthly court meetings, and started to figure out how to turn their bare-bones charter into a self-governing system. Now, not that much happened in the first meeting. Everyone was busy doing other things, and preparing for the first winter. It is, however, a good time to introduce, at the very least, Winthrop and Dudley, the governor and deputy governor. They were both puritans, and both leaders of the Bay Colony, but apart from that they were extraordinarily different.
Born in Suffolk, Winthrop was the grandson of one of the masters of the Clothworkers, one of the twelve major London craft guilds. His grandfather had bought some of the land sold during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, and contributed documents used in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Winthrop’s uncle had inherited the property, but ultimately left for Ireland and sold the manor to Winthrop, who left Cambridge and started raising a family there. He became a justice of the peace, but when given the option to found a Puritan community in New England, he joined the endeavor, temporarily leaving his pregnant wife and children behind in England.
In the grand scheme of New England Puritans, Winthrop was one of the most flexible and tolerant. He didn’t demand conformity as much as some of his colleagues, and was more willing to overlook variation in religious views and practices than people like Dudley and Endicott. I mean, he was still willing to push out Blaxton, a moderately anti-Bishop non-Puritan, but he was willing to have conversations with Puritans. On the other hand, he was very dedicated to strong centralized power, and government control over the economy. Unchecked market operations would be a corrupting influence in a Godly society, and preserving the social order was very important to Winthrop. He also felt it was important to lead by example, to be somewhat lenient in matters of justice, and was more willing than other leaders to give people food from his own supplies.
While Winthrop’s grandparents were Puritans living in land confiscated during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Thomas Dudley’s had been Catholics who fought Henry’s reformation. They’d left during Edward’s reign, and returned from Malta to help Mary I further the Catholic restoration, and then worked against Elizabeth. Dudley, however, was an orphan, and had been raised by a puritan cousin of his mother, whose last name was Purefoy – doubtless related to the Parliamentary leader and future regicide. Dudley ultimately joined the military to fight for Protestants on the Continent, and returned with enough connections to make money, earn political influence and send his son to Cambridge.
Dudley’s approach to Puritanism was more similar to Endicott’s than Winthrop’s. Because he was one of God’s elect, he was right. He knew what was theologically correct, and he would stamp out error. He knew the truth. He also felt it was important for leaders to maintain distance, and to show their status. Respect and obedience were key, not leading by example, so he built an expensive house which established his status. He believed in full application of the law, not leniency, and when he gave of his own food supplies, it was a loan, with interest expected.
As you can imagine, Winthrop and Dudley would butt heads in coming years. But, in August of 1630, they had better things to do. The most notable law that got passed in that first Court session was a wolf bounty. People would be paid an average month’s wage for each wolf they killed. It was the first such law passed by English in the New World and it’s yet another example of the new approach of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The small and gradually growing colonies in Virginia and Plymouth, and the isolated settlements that dotted Maine’s coast, had all been forced to adapt to their new surroundings. They melded with it, grew with it, and at times were victims of it, but not Massachusetts. The Bay Colony settlers were fully willing and mostly able to shape the new surroundings to their own will.
They couldn’t stop winter from coming, though, and work ceased completely in December. Protection from the cold would be the main priority over winter, though there were a few meetings in December to decide on a permanent site for the colony’s capital. In fall, a wave of sickness spread through the colony, killing both Arabella and her husband, as well as Edward Rossiter. When the next ship arrived, 80 people decided to return to England, and much to Winthrop’s dismay, they took back news of the illness and difficulties, which dissuaded future settlers from coming.
By the end of winter, 200 people had died of cold, illness or starvation. Some of the poorer people had had nothing more than a tent to shield them from the winter cold, and lots of people got scurvy. Much like the Wessagussett settlers, many were reduced to scrounging for clams and groundnuts. One of the poorer people went to Winthrop’s house to ask for help, but was turned away and told that their last batch of bread was in the oven.
Spring came, though, and with it came a fresh ship full of supplies. On February 5th, Captain Pierce brought his ship back to Massachusetts full of food and lemon juice to stop the scurvy outbreak. Provisions were distributed according to need, and the first Massachusetts Thanksgiving was held on February 22nd – a day they had initially appointed for a fast.
News from the 80 settlers who had returned did dissuade people from moving to New England over the course of the next year, but that was probably beneficial, because the colonists spent their time building their new towns, houses, and fortifications, and planting crops. Their houses were yet-again built in the East Anglian style. Interestingly, East Anglian houses were more wood-based than most English building styles, which also helped smooth the transition to New England life. They also began fishing, which served both as a source of food and a trade good.
50 years after settling Roanoke, a group of English settlers had applied all the hard-learned lessons of colonization, and created a strong, stable colony with minimal suffering.