Province of Massachusetts Bay - Background

Background

Colonial settlement of the shores of Massachusetts Bay began in 1620 with the founding of the Plymouth Colony. Other attempts at colonization took place throughout the 1620s, but expansion of English settlements only began on a large scale with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628 and the arrival of the first large group of Puritan settlers in 1630. Over the next ten years there was a major migration of Puritans to the area, leading to the founding of a number of new colonies in New England. By the 1680s the number of colonies had stabilized at five: in addition to Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire all bordered the area. Massachusetts Bay was the most populous and economically significant, housing a sizable merchant fleet.

The colonies at times struggled against the local Indian population, which had suffered a serious decline in population (most likely at the hands of infectious diseases brought over by European traders and fishermen) prior to the arrival of the first permanent settlers. In the 1630s the Pequot tribe was virtually destroyed, and King Philip's War in the 1670s resulted in the expulsion, pacification, or killing of most of the Indians in southern New England. The latter war was also costly to the colonists of New England, putting a halt to expansion for several years.

Massachusetts and Plymouth were both somewhat politically independent from England in their early days, but this situation changed after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660. Charles sought closer oversight of the colonies, and to introduce and enforce economic control over their activities. The Navigation Acts passed in the 1660s were widely disliked in Massachusetts, where merchants often found themselves trapped and at odds with the rules. However, many colonial governments, Massachusetts principally among them, refused to enforce the acts themselves, and took matters one step further by obstructing the activities of the Crown agents themselves. The religiously conservative Puritan rulers of Massachusetts also refused to tolerate the Church of England, and yet at the same time were intolerant of other religious groups, banishing Baptists and executing Quakers who defied their banishment. These issues and others led to the revocation of the first Massachusetts Charter in 1684.

In 1686 Charles II's successor, King James II, formed the Dominion of New England, which ultimately joined all of the British territories from Delaware Bay to Penobscot Bay into a single political unit. The Dominion's governor, Sir Edmund Andros, was highly unpopular in the colonies, but was especially hated in Massachusetts, where he angered virtually everyone by enforcing of the Navigation Acts, vacating land titles, appropriating a Puritan meeting house as a site to host services for the Church of England, and his restriction of town meetings, among other sundry complaints. When James was deposed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, Massachusetts political leaders conspired against Andros, arresting him and other English authorities in April 1689. This led to the collapse of the Dominion, as the other colonies then quickly reasserted their old forms of government.

The Plymouth colony had never had a royal charter, so its governance had always been on a somewhat precarious footing. Massachusetts, however, was placed into constitutional anarchy by the uprising. Although the colonial government was reestablished, it no longer had a valid charter, as a result of which some opponents of the old Puritan rule refused to pay taxes, and engaged in other forms of protest. Provincial agents traveled to London where Increase Mather, representing the old colony leaders, petitioned new rulers William and Mary to restore the old colonial charter. When King William learned that this might result in a return to the predominantly entrenched religious rule, he refused. Instead, the Lords of Trade decided to solve two problems at once by combining the two colonies. Accordingly on October 7, 1691, they issued a charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and appointed Sir William Phips its governor.