, deputy-governor, and board of eighteen
assistants, with the final authority in the freemen assembled in general
court. The officers were elected by the freemen of the company, and
freemen were admitted to the company by the officers. The charter
originally provided for the "election of the Governor and officers here
in England"; but before it passed the seals the phrase was omitted:
"With much difficulty," says Winthrop, "we got it rescinded." The change
was of vital importance for those who were preparing to set up, as free
as possible from all outside authority, a "due form of Government both
civil and ecclesiastical." Since the charter did not require the
company's elections to be held in England, the freemen and officers had
but to remove to America to transform a commercial corporation into a
self-governing colony.

With this end in view, the offices of the company were transferred to
those who signified their intention of removing. In March, 1630, all
arrangements were completed, and over a thousand people, including the
governor and officers of the company, left England. When they landed at
Salem in June the prospect was so disheartening that some two hundred
returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who went on to
Boston Harbor two hundred died before December. The unfavorable reports
of those who returned discouraged migration for many months; but for ten
years after 1632 the repressive measures of Laud and Wentworth produced
a veritable exodus, so that in 1643 the population of Massachusetts Bay
is estimated to have been not less than sixteen thousand.

The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen
like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as
Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather.
During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the
former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates,
even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop
said, to "keep sail with their equals." The latter, excluded by their
Puritan and evangelical convictions from the profession for which they
were trained, turned to America as the most inviting field for service
among the elect of God. They were men of ability and conviction--"a
chosen company of men, picked out ... by no human contrivance, but by a
strange contrivance of God," to be the leaders of a chosen people.

Yet the