The Struggle for the Company

• Main Author: Staloff, Darren
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 1997
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195113525.003.0001; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51987265/isbn-9780195113525-book-part-1.pdf

Abstract According to Samuel Eliot Morison, the 120 patentees of the Dorchester Company of Adventurers, the first organized effort to colonize Massachusetts Bay, represented a fair sample of the leading elements of the Puritan movement in south-western England. Among them were landed gentry, who probably exerted the political influence necessary to procure the patent; merchant adventurers, who no doubt supplied the bulk of the £3,000 of initial joint stock; and, of course, representatives of the thinking class. This heterogenous membership was reflected in the range of purposes the colony was intended to serve. A permanent base for the Newfoundland and New England fishing industry, a bulwark against French (and therefore Roman Catholic) expansion, and a trading and evangelical outpost to the natives, Massachusetts was least of all intended as the site of a Bible commonwealth or Puritan re-public. Nonetheless, when John Winthrop reached the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the summer of 1630, he came with the avowed purpose of erecting just such a Puritan “city upon a hill.” The transformation of the projected colony from a source of mercantile profit to a holy commonwealth was the result of a dramatic shift of power within the Mas-sachusetts colonization movement. In the late summer of 1629, a group of well-organized East Anglian Puritan intelligentsia, with the aid of ministerial intellectuals and a handful of sympathetic merchants, seized control of the Massachusetts Bay Company. This power grab was perhaps the single most important event in the political history of Puritan Massachusetts. Having gained control of the mechanisms of government, the Puritan thinking class was able to retain its political dominance until the loss of the charter over half a century later.