ulated the ambitions of politicians and merchants, created local interests,
and made possible thoughts of autonomy. The course these events might
have taken under other circumstances is, of course, speculative; what did
happen was that as the colonies grew, England was virtually cut off from
America for a whole generation, because in the late 1620s, England drifted
toward chaos. Then, from roughly 1640 to 1660, it was the scene of a reli-
gious revolution, which was compounded by a clash between the king and
Parliament that erupted in civil war; this was followed by wars with Ireland,
Scotland, and the Netherlands; and the country was then reconstituted
under a new form of quasi-republican government. No one in England had
time for the distant and as yet not very important American colonies.
Meanwhile, the colonists embarked upon programs, acquired habits,
and developed capacities that would shape events far beyond the restora-
tion of the monarchy in 1660 and, in sum, would constitute a virtual seven-
teenth-century revolution. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the
revolution came about, what happened in the several colonies, and what
the effects were to be for the future. I turn first to Massachusetts where it
began, where it reached its high-water mark, and where its legacy was most
evident.
In 1629 the newly incorporated Massachusetts Bay Company had
acquired a patent for lands stretching “from the Atlantick and Westerne Sea
and Ocean on the Easte Parte, to the South Sea [Pacific] on the West
Parte”—that is, far beyond anything even claimed by Britain and across
territories which were being claimed by France and Spain. This territory
was nearly the size of western Europe. The company also was awarded an
extremely permissive royal charter constituting it “one Body corporate and
politique [for] the Government of the People there.” In Massachusetts,
unlike the other colonies, the “proprietary” company was owned by the
colonists, who as “Dissenters” were motivated by a sense of alienation from
England and as “Puritans” were motivated by a mission to create an
entirely new kind of society. In their scheme, the king and Parliament had
no role—that is, except for the first act: they had granted Massachusetts vir-
tual independence.
The leaders of the new colony moved immediately to effect that inde-
pendence. In October 1630 eight senior Puritans named themselves “mag-
128 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA