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Already in 1628 before Royal confirmation of the charter in 1629, the Company sent John Endecott to New England with a small party of settlers who established themselves at the little village of Salem. In 1630 the government of the Company transferred itself to New England and, under the leadership of Governor John Winthrop, laid the foundations anew for the Massachusetts Colony when they settled in Boston in the fall.
The charter of the Company granted virtual self-rule. The Company had control over admission of freemen, full and absolute power and authority to correct, punish, and rule subjects settling in the territory comprised in their grant, and power to resist . . . by all fitting ways and means whatever all persons attempting the destruction, invasion, detriment or annoyance of the plantation. The Company, by charter to be ruled by a Governor, a Deputy Governor, and a General Court of assistants with the former elected by the latter and the latter by the freemen, was now made up of Puritan elements. It simply used the charter to establish in the New England wilderness the good society of their dreams.
The Puritans ideas of government and of religion were so closely connected both in theory and in practice that this early New England government has often been spoken of as a theocracy. Others have used the term oligarchy, and one of the early Puritan leaders described the system as a silent democracy in the face of a speaking aristocracy. Yet there were profoundly democratic principles embedded both in Puritan theory and in Puritan practice, principles that they only faintly understood at the time.
The Massachusetts Bay Puritans believed that, within the bounds of charity, one may distinguish the saints, i.e., the elect, from the damned. Two marks of sainthood were established: first, a religious mark, a work of grace in the heart and visible holiness; second, a civil mark, owning the covenant, i.e., signing the church covenant and agreeing to be bound by it. Obviously, the Puritans argued, if one may determine the saints within the community, then one should designate the saints to rule. Therefore suffrage was limited, not by property qualifications at first but by church membership, by visible sainthood. Because of this limitation, the clergy exercised a profound influence in New England life, but it was always an indirect influence. Never in Massachusetts Bay did a member of the clergy serve as governor of the Colony. Thus one had a kind of aristocracy imposed upon the community, but among the saints, those selected to be among the aristocracy, there was real democracy. Within the church, every male member had a vote, and every members vote was as important as any others. Shortly after arrival in Massachusetts, the franchise was extended to all male church members. Thus every church member was given the rights of stockholders in the Company and full political franchise without reference to property qualifications.
Partially because of the level of self-government available in Massachusetts, partially because of the continuing frustration of Puritan hopes and political troubles in England on the eve of the English Civil Wars, partially, and for a variety of other reasons, large numbers of Puritans migrated to Massachusetts in the first decade of settlement. Indeed, this is known as the Great Migration. Among these migrants were many well-educated men, far more than in any other colony of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and here was formed the first American college, Harvard College, in 1636. Here also the first printing in Anglo-America took place.
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