domain of land granted to them, and engage in almost every kind of local economic enterprise. In short, it was a corporation knit together by ties of religious sympathy, endowed with abundant capital, and supplied with capable leadership in things economic, legal, and spiritual.
Though it had the general form of the recently extinguished Virginia Company, it differed from that concern in one vital particular; the seat of the corporation, the majority of the stockholders, and the charter of legality were all transferred to America. Instead of trying to plant and govern a colony beyond the sea, the Massachusetts Company came over itself to the scene of action, directed the labors of the planters, and participated immediately in every phase of the enterprise. It was in truth, therefore, an actual self-governing state set up in the New World.
In the spring of 1630, John Winthrop, at the head of a great band of Puritan gentlemen and yeomen, with their families and a goodly body of indentured white servants, sailed with a fleet of ships for the New World, thus beginning a general exodus that lasted for about two decades—the period of turmoil and revolution in England. During the year in which he granted the charter to the new corporation, Charles I began to rule his subjects without Parliament; and for eleven years he laid taxes, imprisoned objectors, and collected forced loans on his own authority. England seemed headed for a despotism.
Deprived of their voice in the House of Commons, the landed gentry of the middle rank, the yeomen, the merchants, and the artisans on whom the burden of the royal exactions fell, were now roused to revolutionary fervor. Those who belonged to the fighting school of the Cromwells and the Hampdens raised the standard of revolt, waged seven years of war, and finally brought the king to the scaffold at Whitehall. Others, despairing of freedom and victory at home, decided to migrate in search of liberty to the New World. They sold their estates, wound up their
