Massachusetts Bay Colony: The Charter Carried to Boston and Its Theocracy

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In 1629 a group of English Puritan investors won a royal charter for a joint stock company to settle Massachusetts Bay, and unlike other colonial charters it never said where the annual stockholders meeting had to be held. Facing persecution under King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud, the emigrating investors used the Cambridge Agreement to buy out partners who stayed in England, and in 1630 the Winthrop fleet carried more than 700 colonists and the charter itself across the Atlantic. John Winthrop called the colony a city upon a hill, but from 1631 only admitted church members could vote, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished, and the Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common in 1660.

Unable to grow cash crops in rocky soil, the colony turned to shipbuilding, fishing and timber, ignored the Navigation Acts by trading directly with Spain, Portugal and the West Indies, and in 1652 authorized silversmith John Hull to mint pine tree shillings. Its 1641 Body of Liberties, compiled largely by Nathaniel Ward, paired double jeopardy and protections for wives and children with legalized slavery and death for adultery and witchcraft. After the Restoration, Charles II sent Edward Randolph to audit the colony, the charter was revoked in 1684, Sir Edmund Andros ruled the Dominion of New England, and Bostonians jailed him in 1689. The 1691 charter tied the vote to property instead of church membership.

• By 1660 the colony's merchant fleet was estimated at more than 200 ships.
• A 1646 murder trial used the ordeal of touch, watching whether a corpse bled afresh when the suspect touched it.
• Sumptuary laws barred anyone with less than 200 pounds in assets from wearing silk or lace, and Christmas was banned.
• Increase Mather traveled to London to defend the old religious voting rules and failed.
• Thirteen U.S. presidents trace their patrilineal ancestry to the colony's original settlers.