ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the debates from the time suggest the residents of Massachusetts Bay were most concerned with questions of authority, not issues of control. It examines how different versions of puritan ideology led the colonists to debate the idea of authority. The book traces the way the colony's founders borrowed, only to modify, English institutions in the colony's earliest years in order to create a theocracy in which ultimate authority rested in God, not man. It demonstrates how, and why, that theocracy collapsed in the 1630s and 1640s, until the colony recreated its constitutional order, making itself a government of men, not God. The book presents an essay that reexamines familiar events and offers a reinterpretation of them. In the tight frame of its first twenty years, Massachusetts Bay dramatically altered its constitutional order.