Old Colony vs. Bay Colony I: or, Newe-England Terminology

   Recently, I've noticed that even among my colleagues who are American historians, there is very little sense of the niceties and quirky particularities of early New England history. So I thought I'd provide a brief primer.


   So, early New England, or, Norumbega, to the eastern Algonquian peoples -- Wampanoag, Narragansett, Massachusett, Abenaki, Nipmuc, Pequots, and many others -- who lived here during the Era of Contact, did not resemble the current system of six sovereign, though federally united, states. Instead, a patchwork of polities, English and Indian, along with outposts of New France and New Amsterdam, covered this rocky, hilly, and chilly land (and almost preternaturally abundant waters).


   So, when I refer, in my profile, to my homeland as being "the Old Colony", this does not mean Massachusetts Bay. The Old Colony is Plymouth Colony, which was an independent colony from 1620 through 1691 (thus being a decade older than Massachusetts), with its own governor, its own legislature, its own legal system, and its own military. Today, the region commonly known as Southeast Massachusetts -- the counties of Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable -- is essentially the Old Colony. The only thing it lacked was a legal charter. The Pilgrims, after being blown off course by an autumn gale (probably a hurricane), had landed outside the area patented to them from the Plymouth Company, which was at the mouth of the Hudson. Instead they landed on the hospitable shores (irony alert) of Cape Cod in late November. The most important thing was to get a settlement started immediately, as it was already wintry. However, the fact that they were in lands over which no European state ruled made the colonists nervous; thus, the signing, in Provincetown Harbor, of the famous Mayflower Compact, agreeing that they were "a body politick".


   The only problem was that this had no legal force in the eyes of their sovereign, the English Crown. But, isolated for most of the 17th century by the British Isles' epochal political upheavals, the small colony made relatively lackadaisical effort to obtain a charter. It was poorer and far less populous than its immediate neighbor, Massachusetts Bay, so it had fewer resources to invest in such an effort. Moreover, it lacked internal coherence and the expansionist spirit of its Puritan -- as in, purifying the Church of England -- neighbor. Interesting enough, though, the more radical Protestantism of Plymouth dominated its colony far less than the marginally more moderate Puritanism of Massachusetts Bay. There were demographic realities behind this somewhat greater pluralism: the "Pilgrim Fathers" were actually a mixture of ultra reformed Protestants, on the one hand, called the Separatists (so called because of their belief that the Church of England was so wicked that only full separation from it was acceptable), or "the Saints" as they called themselves; and on the other hand, a motley crew of adventurers, rolling stones, weirdos and young men on the make, labelled "the Strangers" by their more religious confreres. This forced a kind of de facto pluralism in the colony that was absent in its more orthodox neighbor from 1630, Massachusetts Bay, or the offspring of Massachusetts, Connecticut, from 1636.


    However, after the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688, the new regime sought to regularize the colonial order. Plymouth's lack of a charter now became a major problem, and the colony lacked the influence to successfully obtain one. For a time, even ethnic and religious polyglot New York (an English possession since 1664) made a play for the Old Colony and its valuable offshore islands, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard (both a kind of Quaker-Algonquian borderland). However, the strong affinity of the Plymouth settlers for their ethnic, geographic, and religious  neighbors meant that the colony was incorporated into a new Royal Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, with a governor directly appointed from London, but with a legislature that remained the most democratic in the New World. Thus, not only did Plymouth never obtain its Charter, but Massachusetts lost its original Charter, by which it had elected its own governors, along with other ancient liberties.


     Of the then 12 colonies in British America, only Rhode Island and Connecticut kept their original charters (cf. "The Charter Oak", where it was hidden from Stuart absolutists, on Connecticut's state quarter.) Indeed, Rhode Island kept going under its original 17th century charter into the 1840s (!), when a political revolution, Dorr's Rebellion, forced radical change.


     Well, if you've stuck with  me this far, you'll be excited to know that the next installment will cover the differences between the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven, which were separate in the 17th century.