Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630): Winthrop and the Puritans

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was an English Puritan colony founded in 1630, when John Winthrop led a fleet of 11 ships carrying about 700 settlers to New England and founded Boston. It began the Great Migration, in which some 13,000 to 21,000 people crossed the Atlantic in a decade. Winthrop’s vision of a “city upon a hill” made the colony a model of godly government and a lasting symbol in American political life.

Background: Puritans under pressure

Puritans were English Protestants who believed the Church of England had not gone far enough in removing Catholic ceremonies and practices. Unlike the Separatists who sailed on the Mayflower, most did not want to leave the church but to purify it from within.

Under King Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, and his ally William Laud, who became Bishop of London in 1628, Puritan ministers faced growing pressure to conform. Charles also ruled without Parliament from 1629. Economic depression in the cloth-making regions of eastern England added to the sense that the country was in moral and material decline.

In March 1629 a group of Puritan merchants and gentry obtained a royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company. An advance party under John Endecott had already settled at Naumkeag, renamed Salem, in 1628. In August 1629, in the Cambridge Agreement, leading members promised to emigrate if the charter and government of the company moved with them to New England.

The Winthrop Fleet

John Winthrop, a lawyer and landowner from Groton in Suffolk, was elected governor in October 1629. In the spring of 1630 he led a fleet of 11 ships carrying about 700 men, women and children. The flagship Arbella sailed from near Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight in April 1630 and reached Salem on 12 June.

Either shortly before sailing or during the voyage, Winthrop wrote a lay sermon called A Model of Christian Charity. In it he urged the settlers to bind themselves together in love and mutual obligation, warning that “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us”. The phrase, taken from the Sermon on the Mount, meant that the colony’s success or failure would be watched by the whole Protestant world.

Finding Salem too small and short of food, the settlers spread out. They first gathered at Charlestown, where bad water and disease took a heavy toll. At the invitation of William Blaxton, a hermit-like clergyman who already lived on the Shawmut peninsula, many moved across the river. On 7 September 1630 the court of assistants named the new settlement Boston, after the Lincolnshire town from which several leading settlers came.

The first year was hard. Around 200 settlers died, and some returned to England. Supplies arriving in February 1631 saved the colony from famine.

A godly commonwealth

Because the charter had travelled with the settlers, the company’s General Court became the colony’s government. In 1631 the court ruled that only men who were members of a church could become freemen and vote. In 1634 the freemen of each town began to elect deputies to the General Court, and in 1641 the colony adopted the Body of Liberties, an early written code of rights and laws.

Each town was built around a Congregational church, in which members chose their own minister and admitted new members only after they described a personal experience of God’s grace. Ministers such as John Cotton were highly influential, but they could not hold government office. The magistrates enforced religious rules, including Sabbath observance and church attendance.

The colony valued education. Harvard College was founded in 1636 to train ministers, and a 1647 law required larger towns to maintain schools so that children could learn to read the Bible.

Land, Native peoples and the economy

The land the Puritans settled was home to the Massachusett, Pawtucket, Nipmuc and other Algonquian peoples, whose numbers had already been cut by the epidemic of about 1616–1619. A smallpox outbreak in 1633–1634 killed many more, and some colonists, including Winthrop, interpreted these deaths as God clearing the land for them.

The colony’s seal showed a Native man saying “Come over and help us”, presenting the venture as a mission, but little missionary work took place until the 1640s, when the minister John Eliot began preaching in the Massachusett language. Economically, the colonists farmed small family holdings and soon turned to fishing, timber, shipbuilding and trade with the West Indies, which made Boston a busy Atlantic port.

Dissent and conflict

The colony’s leaders believed unity was essential and saw religious error as a danger to the whole community. The minister Roger Williams, who argued that the state should not punish religious offences and questioned the colony’s claim to Native land, was banished in 1635 and went on to found Providence. In 1637–1638 Anne Hutchinson was tried and banished after the Antinomian controversy divided Boston.

Expansion into Native lands brought war. In the Pequot War of 1636–1638, Massachusetts and Connecticut forces with Native allies destroyed the Pequot nation. Later, Quakers who defied banishment were punished severely; four were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661, including Mary Dyer.

The Great Migration and after

The migration of 1630 opened a decade-long flow of settlers. Between 1630 and about 1640 an estimated 13,000 to 21,000 people came to New England. Unlike the young single men who dominated early Virginia, many arrived as families, often from the same English towns, which helped the colony grow quickly and stably.

The migration slowed sharply in the early 1640s, as the outbreak of the English Civil War gave Puritans hope of reform at home. Some colonists returned to fight for Parliament. Massachusetts spread new towns across the region and absorbed settlements in what are now New Hampshire and Maine.

The colony’s independent ways eventually alarmed the restored monarchy. In 1684 its charter was revoked, and in 1686 it was merged into the short-lived Dominion of New England. After the Glorious Revolution, a new charter of 1691 created the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which absorbed Plymouth Colony and replaced church membership with property as the test for voting.

The “city upon a hill” in later history

Winthrop’s sermon was little known for centuries; the surviving manuscript copy was first printed in 1838. In the twentieth century the phrase became a fixture of American political speech. President-elect John F. Kennedy quoted it in January 1961, and President Ronald Reagan often spoke of a “shining city upon a hill”.

Historians caution that Winthrop meant something different from modern ideas of national greatness. His point was a warning: if the colony failed in its covenant with God, it would become a byword and a shame before the world.

Timeline

• 1628: John Endecott leads an advance party to Salem.
• 1629, March: Charles I grants the Massachusetts Bay Company its charter.
• 1629, August: The Cambridge Agreement commits leaders to move the charter to New England.
• 1630, April: The Winthrop Fleet sails from England.
• 1630, 12 June: The Arbella reaches Salem.
• 1630, 7 September: The settlement on the Shawmut peninsula is named Boston.
• 1636: Harvard College is founded.
• 1684: The colony’s charter is revoked.
• 1691: A new charter creates the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Why it matters

The Massachusetts Bay Colony shaped New England’s towns, churches, schools and self-government, and Boston became one of the leading cities of British America. Its mix of high ideals, intolerance of dissent and conflict with Native peoples makes it central to understanding the origins of the United States.