nd suffering set in.
Commodities grew scarce, prices rose, many colonists returned to England
leaving debts behind, and as yet the colony produced no staples to
exchange for merchandise from the mother country. Some of the settlers,
discouraged, went to the West Indies; others, fleeing for fear of want,
found their way to the Dutch at Long Island. Pressure was brought to
bear at various times to persuade the people to migrate elsewhere as a
body, to Old Providence and Trinidad in the Caribbean, to Maryland, and
later to Jamaica; but these attempts proved vain. The Puritan was
willing to endure hardship and suffering for the sake of civil and
religious independence, but he was not willing to lose his identity
among those who did not share his faith in the guiding hand of God or
who denied the principles according to which he wished to govern his
community. At first the leaders of the migration were Nonconformists not
Separatists. Francis Higginson, Endecott's minister at Salem, had
declared in 1629 that they did not go to New England as separatists from
the Church of England but only as those who would "separate from the
corruption in it"; and Winthrop used "Easter" and the customary names of
the months until 1635. But the Puritans became essentially Separatists
from the day when Dr. Samuel Fuller of Plymouth persuaded the Salem
community, even before the company itself had left England, to accept
the practices of the Plymouth Church. Each town consequently had its
church, pastor, teacher, and covenant, and became an independent
Congregational community--a circumstance which left a deep impress upon
the life and history of New England.

The government of the colony was never a democracy in the modern sense
of the term. At first in 1630, control was assumed by the governor and
his assistants, leaving but little power in the hands of the freeman;
but such usurpation of power could not last, and in 1634 the freemen
were given the right to elect officials, to make and enforce laws,
raise money, impose taxes, and dispose of lands. Thus was begun the
transformation of the court of the company into a parliament, and the
company itself into a commonwealth. So self-sufficient did the colony
become in these early years of its history that by 1646 Massachusetts
could assert that it owed only allegiance to England and was entirely
independent of the British Parliament in all matters of government, in
which affairs under its charter