Great Migration

GREAT MIGRATION

GREAT MIGRATION. In March 1630, the Arbella set sail from Southampton, England, for America, thus beginning an unprecedented exodus of English men, women, and children to North America that lasted for ten years. Of the eighty thousand who left England between 1630 and 1640, approximately twenty thousand sailed to New England. The other emigrants sailed to the Chesapeake Bay region, the West Indies, and other areas.

Most but not all of the Great Migration immigrants to New England were Puritans from the eastern and southern counties of England who wanted to escape a situation they considered intolerable. King Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) dissolved Parliament and insisted on ruling England without interference. Archbishop William Laud, a staunch Anglican, began to purge the Church of England of Puritan members. Finally, a depression in the cloth industry caused economic stress in the counties where the Puritans lived. Hoping to flee this persecution and economic depression, the Puritans joined the ranks of those attempting to organize companies and obtain charters to establish colonies in the New World. The most successful of these companies, the Massachusetts Bay Company, received its charter from Charles I on 4 March 1629.

Although the Massachusetts Bay Company was organized as a joint-stock company, it had a dual purpose from the beginning. Some investors were interested in earning profits through trade, while others hoped to establish a colony that would provide a refuge for persecuted Puritans. Unlike the separatist Pilgrims who preceded them to the New World, the Puritans were nonseparating Congregationalists who hoped to reform the Church of England. Like the Pilgrims, however, they immigrated in family groups rather than as individuals. With the signing of the Cambridge Agreement in August 1629, twelve Puritan members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, led by the future governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, shifted the focus of the colony away from trade and in so doing secured a safe haven for Puritans in Massachusetts.

Less than a year after the signing of the Cambridge Agreement, Winthrop and approximately one hundred people set sail in the Arbella. The ship reached Salem, Massachusetts, in June 1630 and was soon joined by several more ships in the Winthrop fleet. The Puritans originally settled in Salem but relocated to Charlestown before finally founding a capital in Boston in October 1630. By the end of 1630, seventeen ships carrying close to two thousand passengers had arrived in Massachusetts. The Great Migration came to an abrupt halt in 1640, but by then almost two hundred ships carrying approximately twenty thousand people had left England for Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Pomfret, John E., with Floyd M. Shumway. Founding the American Colonies, 1583–1660. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Jennifer L. Bertolet

See also Cambridge Agreement ; Colonial Settlements ; Massachusetts Bay Colony ; Puritans and Puritanism .