The Journal of American History
thus bringing me within four generations of the event, and I feel a personal interest in calling attention to the importance of the action.
The English Charter, which was granted on March 9, 1629, to the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay,—inhabitants of Boston, Salem, Ipswich, Beverly, Gloucester, and other neighboring towns with good old English names,—was remarkably liberal in its terms in very many respects. Puritan influence prevailed at headquarters in London, and the leading idea of those who procured the Charter was to furnish a safe home to the Puritan Independents or Congregationalists, although it was hoped that mines of precious metals might be discovered, or that the pine forests and the fisheries might yield some return to the Chartered Corporation of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The settlers were given the right to make their own laws, elect their own Legislature and Governor, to make war, if necessary, in their own defense, and to exercise all of the privileges of Englishmen.
James I was King of England, but, between the granting of the Charter and the year 1687, successive changes occurred, from James I to Charles I, who was sent to the scaffold by theCromwellians in 1649, then to Cromwell himself, then to Charles II, and finally, in 1685, to James II. The New England Puritans placed their chief dependence, for the keeping of their liberties, on that sacred charter under which they could, in Massachusetts, at least, keep watch and ward over as much British territory as that paper protected on their own side of the Atlantic Ocean.
During the great immigration of Puritans, which occurred mainly from 1631 to 1640, the population of Massachusetts Bay was increased by over twenty thousand souls, bringing with them property and money to the amount of one million dollars. When the English Puritans began to acquire the strength at home which culminated when Oliver Cromwell came into power, the tide of immigration actually turned backward to Old England, and quite a number of Cromwell's ablest officers and assistants were Puritans returned from Massachusetts.
During all of this time, however, the ruling element in the Colony was the Massachusetts Congregational Church, which held fast to its faith and jealously guarded its rights under the Charter with a watchfulness that is to us astonishing. We have no space here to follow the famous struggle between the British Government and the Colonists during the years between 1630 and 1680, which consolidated the advocates of liberty and home rule to an extent which we of the present find it impossible to understand.
The Colony kept jealous and zealous agents in London much of
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