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The Massachusetts Bay Colony: A City Upon a Hill

In April of 1630, a crowd of Puritans gathered at a dock in Southampton, England, and listened to a sermon. They were about to leave everything they knew — their homes, their neighbors, the green fields of East Anglia and Lincolnshire — and sail for a place most of them had never seen. The minister, Reverend John Cotton of St. Botolph’s Church, told them they were on a holy mission. They were to carry the true faith into the wilderness, and they were to bring the Native peoples along with them into the light of Christ. It was a remarkable charge for a group of seasick commoners huddled on a dock, and Cotton himself thought well enough of it to stay home. He would follow them to Massachusetts three years later, once the worst of the hardship was done.

John Winthrop had already been thinking bigger than Cotton’s sermon. A lawyer and stockholder in the Massachusetts Bay Company, Winthrop had seen what happened to ventures that left their governing charter in London — the Virginia Company had been dismantled by the Crown when it became inconvenient. The Puritans would make no such mistake. Before the eleven ships of what became known as the Winthrop Fleet left England, the company voted to carry the charter itself across the Atlantic, tucked aboard the flagship Arabella. If the king wanted to quarrel with their administration, he would have to reach three thousand miles to do it.

Somewhere on that crossing — perhaps on a still evening, perhaps in the grip of a mid-Atlantic gale — Winthrop stood before his fellow passengers and delivered one of the most consequential speeches in American history. He called it “A Model of Christian Charity,” and it was less a celebration than a warning. They would be watched, he told them. The eyes of the whole world would be upon them. They must be as a city upon a hill — a phrase he drew from the Sermon on the Mount — bound together by love and mutual obligation. If they broke faith with God and with each other, they would become a cautionary tale for the ages. It was the kind of speech that was easy to invoke later, harder to live up to in the moment, and the Puritans would spend the next sixty years doing both.

The fleet reached Salem on June 12, 1630, and the dream met reality almost immediately. The existing settlement had no food to spare and not enough shelter. Several hundred people had died there over the previous winter. The newcomers went ashore and ate strawberries, which were in season and plentiful, and then learned that eighty of the three hundred settlers who had preceded them were already dead. Before December, they would lose another two hundred of their own number.

The survivors moved. A Cambridge classmate of Winthrop’s, a solitary Anglophone named William Blackstone, was already living on a peninsula the local Algonquin people called Shawmut. Blackstone had stayed on when his own failed settlement disbanded, growing vegetables and riding around on a bull. Hearing of Winthrop’s troubles from his Native American neighbors, he rode over and invited the Puritans to join him. They did. In September 1630, they named the place Boston, after the town most of them had come from in Lincolnshire, and began to build. Two years later it was made the colony’s capital. Blackstone, apparently having had enough of Puritans, sold them his remaining fifty acres — land that would eventually become Boston Common — and moved south to what is now Rhode Island.

The Shape of the Colony

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a charter colony, which meant its governor and General Court were elected by the colonists rather than appointed from London — an unusual arrangement that gave New England a degree of self-governance almost nowhere else in the colonial world enjoyed. The colonists took that arrangement seriously, almost jealously, and it would color everything that followed.

Religion and government were inseparable. Only full church members could vote or hold office, and full church membership was not easily granted. A prospective member had to appear before the congregation and offer a credible account of their spiritual transformation — a demanding, sometimes years-long process that not every sincere believer could navigate. The result was a community in which theological questions were also civic questions, and where challenging the minister was tantamount to challenging the government.

This was the world into which Samuel Stratton Sr. arrived sometime in the 1630s. He came from England, settled in Watertown, and set about the ordinary business of colonial life — farming, serving as surveyor, selectman, and constable, raising a family with his wife Alice Beebe Stratton. By all appearances, he was a steady, respected presence in his community. He was also, as it would turn out, a man who could not keep quiet when he believed an injustice had been done.

Growth and Its Costs

By 1640, more than forty thousand English colonists had made the crossing. Coastal communities grew crowded, and settlers pushed inland, founding town after town across Massachusetts and into the rest of New England — Concord, Dedham, Sudbury, Haverhill, Cambridge. Each village followed roughly the same pattern: houses arranged around a common, a meetinghouse at the center, fields distributed to families by the town. In 1643, the four New England colonies — Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven — formed a military alliance to defend against Native attacks and European rivals.

The Puritans were remarkably serious about education, driven by the belief that every person needed to read the Bible for themselves. Boston Latin School opened in 1635, the oldest public school still operating in the United States. Harvard College was founded in 1636 in what was then called Newtowne, later renamed Cambridge. In 1647 the colony passed the Old Deluder Satan Act — named, with characteristic Puritan directness, after the force it was meant to foil — requiring every town of more than fifty households to establish a school. It was the first compulsory education law in North America.

The colony’s original seal depicted a Native American man saying “Come over and help us” — an expression of the Puritan missionary impulse. The reality of contact was something else entirely. By 1650, roughly ninety percent of the Native people of New England had died from epidemic disease. The survivors watched their land pass steadily to English settlers, their cultures suppressed and their autonomy eroded. It was a dispossession unfolding in plain sight, and it would have consequences that the colony had not yet begun to reckon with.

The Witch at Gallows Hill

In the meantime, trouble of a different kind arrived from within the community itself. Samuel Stratton Sr. had been in Watertown long enough to know his neighbors — and to form opinions about how they were treated. In 1648, the colony hanged its first accused witch.

Margaret Jones was a midwife and healer from Charlestown. Some of her patients had accused her of bewitching them; she was examined, convicted, and executed at Gallows Hill in Boston. The case was not unusual in the context of the times — witch accusations had been a feature of English life for generations, and the Puritan belief in the Devil’s active presence in the world made the colonies fertile ground for them. What was unusual was what Samuel and Alice Stratton did next.

Samuel declared publicly that Jones “Died wrongfully, and was no witch and that the magistrates would doe anything for bribes.” Alice told anyone who would listen that Jones “dyed wrongfully and was no more a witch than she was.” In the moral universe of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this was not merely an opinion. It was an accusation against the court, against the ministers, against the structure of authority itself. The county court at Cambridge wasted little time. On October 30, 1649, Samuel and Alice were ordered to appear before the public assembly at Watertown, pay a fine of five pounds, and formally acknowledge their offense against the commonwealth.

They would not fully recant. They acknowledged, with careful language, “the mercy of the magistrates” — but stated they remained “of the same mind” about the charges. Samuel was fined an additional five pounds the following April. Historical accounts note that the Strattons were “nearly suspected themselves” of witchcraft for their defiance — a pointed reminder of what the next rung of accusation could mean.

Samuel and Alice Stratton were not, by temperament or theology, typical strict Puritans. They were people willing to say a true thing in public at a time when saying it carried a price. They did this more than four decades before the Salem witch trials, when the machinery of accusation had not yet consumed an entire community and the consequences of dissent were still fines and public humiliation rather than the gallows.

Their defense of Margaret Jones did not save her. But in 2025, more than 375 years later, Massachusetts legislators introduced House Bill 1927 to formally exonerate Jones and seven other pre-Salem witch trial victims. Samuel and Alice Stratton’s defiance was cited in testimony before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. The record had not been forgotten.

A Question of Labor

The same independent streak that led Samuel to speak up for Margaret Jones was visible, in a quieter register, in the way he managed his household in the years that followed. The colony’s economy ran on labor — and labor was always scarce, always something to be extracted from some category of person who had little power to refuse.

In 1641, Massachusetts had become the first North American colony to legalize slavery through a provision in the Body of Liberties. Beginning in 1644, Boston merchants joined the Triangle Trade, importing enslaved Africans, selling them in the West Indies, and returning with cane sugar for rum and molasses. Wealthy households within Massachusetts purchased enslaved people for domestic work. The institution persisted until Massachusetts effectively abolished it through its 1780 state constitution, and the Quock Walker case of 1783 confirmed that abolition in court.

Alongside slavery, indentured servitude shaped the colony’s labor economy from its earliest years. Indentured servants — most of them poor English or Scottish men — bound themselves by contract to a master for a fixed term, typically four to seven years, in exchange for passage to the New World, food, and shelter. At the end of their term they were promised “freedom dues”: sometimes land, sometimes tools or clothing, a stake to begin their own lives. The promise was real enough, but enforcement consistently favored the master.

In 1655, Samuel purchased the indenture of a Scotsman named Alexander Gordon, also recorded in court documents as “Gorthing.” Gordon was one of a group of Scottish laborers brought to New England under circumstances that at least some of them found deeply unjust. On May 23, 1655, a number of these Scotsmen petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts for their freedom, arguing that their conditions were unlawful. The court refused. Gordon’s indenture with Stratton required six years of faithful service and prohibited him from absenting himself, day or night, without his master’s permission. It was a document that left little to the imagination about the nature of the arrangement.

Yet even in this, Stratton was not a man without feeling. When he died, his will directed that his servant Thomas Cooper receive a cow — a modest bequest, but not nothing. In a world where servants were routinely left with whatever their masters chose to give or withhold, it was a gesture that distinguished him. It fit the pattern of a man who seemed, quietly and at cost, to believe in something more than what the law required of him.

Cracks in the Covenant

By the 1650s, the colony’s original religious architecture was showing strain. Many second-generation colonists — baptized as infants but never having undergone the formal conversion experience required for full church membership — found themselves in an awkward middle position. Their children could not be baptized. The church’s membership was shrinking relative to the growing population. In 1662, a synod of ministers adopted the Half-Way Covenant, allowing baptized children of church members to be counted as partial members even without a conversion experience, so that their own children could be baptized in turn. It was a practical compromise and a theological concession, and traditionalists denounced it as the beginning of the end of Puritan purity. They were not entirely wrong.

The colony’s tolerance for dissent had never been high, and it showed in the fates of those who pushed against the margins. Roger Williams, a minister who arrived in 1631, argued that the colonial government had no authority over individual conscience and that the colonists had no legitimate claim to land that belonged to the Native peoples by prior occupation. He was banished in 1635, fled south through a winter wilderness with the help of the Wampanoag, and founded Providence — the nucleus of Rhode Island, a colony that formally separated church from state and offered genuine religious toleration. Anne Hutchinson, a midwife and lay theologian who began holding popular Bible study meetings in Boston in 1634, argued that many of the colony’s ministers were preaching salvation through works rather than grace. Her theological challenge, compounded by her audacity as a woman speaking publicly on religious matters, alarmed the Puritan leadership. She was tried in 1637, convicted of heresy and sedition, excommunicated, and banished. She settled near present-day Pelham Bay in New York, where she and most of her family were killed in a Siwanoy raid in 1643.

The Puritans reserved particular venom for Quakers, who kept arriving in Massachusetts despite banishment, mutilation, and eventually the threat of execution. Between 1659 and 1661, four Quakers were hanged. King Charles II intervened in 1661 and prohibited corporal punishment — a rare instance of the Crown’s authority working in favor of the persecuted.

Samuel Stratton Sr. did not live to see the worst of what was coming. He made his will on December 19, 1672 — “being in sound memory and understanding, But near my Death” — and died on Christmas Day of that year, aged eighty. He was buried in the Old Burying Place in Watertown. His descendants spread across nearly every state in the Union. The Salem trials, when they came, vindicated nothing he had believed about witch accusations — except, perhaps, that the machinery of accusation had always been capable of consuming the innocent, and that someone had always needed to say so.

Three years after his death, the resentment that had been building for decades between the colony’s settlers and its Native peoples finally broke open. In the summer of 1675, Metacom — called King Philip by the English — forged a coalition of Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett peoples and launched attacks on colonial settlements across the region. Over fourteen months, King Philip’s War became the bloodiest conflict per capita in American history. More than six hundred English colonists were killed and fifty-two of ninety colonial towns were attacked, twelve of them destroyed entirely. The toll on Native peoples was worse. Thousands of warriors died in combat; thousands more women and children were killed in retaliatory raids or died of disease and exposure. The Narragansett were nearly annihilated in December 1675, when English forces burned their winter encampment in present-day Rhode Island in what became known as the Great Swamp Massacre. Metacom was killed in August 1676. The Native Americans who survived either fled westward or surrendered, and many of those who surrendered were sold into slavery. Southern New England was, after 1676, English in a way it had never quite been before.

The Fall of the Charter and the Fever of 1692

The colony spent decades testing how far it could push the Crown before the Crown pushed back. After Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, royal commissioners came in 1664 and again in 1676 to reform the colony’s administration; both times, the colonists rebuffed them with little immediate consequence. But in 1684, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter was finally revoked for accumulated violations — establishing religious law, discriminating against Anglicans and Quakers, operating an illegal mint. In 1686, King James II merged all the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England and appointed Sir Edmund Andros as governor. Andros dissolved the General Council, banned town meetings, and imposed new taxes. He was enormously unpopular and had made himself so efficiently.

When news reached Boston in April 1689 that James II had been overthrown in the Glorious Revolution, a mob formed quickly and expelled royal officials. The old Puritan leadership was briefly restored to power. A new charter arrived in 1691, uniting Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Maine into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, with a royal governor and elected assembly. It removed religious qualifications for voting, extended toleration to other Protestants, and pulled the colony closer to direct Crown control.

For the Puritan community, the new charter was a kind of existential blow. The “city upon a hill” — the covenant community bound together by shared faith and self-governance — was being dismantled by legal decree. The sense of threat was real, and it combined with something else already present in the culture: the theological conviction that the Devil walked among them, that hidden enemies could corrupt a community from within, that the shape of evil was often the shape of a neighbor.

In the winter of 1691 and 1692, in Salem Village — a farming community inland from Salem proper, simmering with its own local feuds and economic grievances — a group of young girls began exhibiting strange behavior and accusing local women of bewitching them. The accusations spread. By the time the crisis burned itself out in 1693, more than two hundred people had been accused. Nineteen were hanged. Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death under heavy stones over two days. At least five others died in prison.

Governor William Phips dissolved the special witch court in October 1692 and released the remaining prisoners the following year. In 1706, accuser Ann Putnam Jr. made a public apology to the families of the executed. In 1711, the Massachusetts General Court passed a bill reversing many convictions and compensating survivors’ families. Salem 1692 had begun as theology and ended as catastrophe, and the colony knew it.

Trade, Revolution, and the Colony’s End

The colony that had been ideologically suspicious of commerce became, in time, deeply commercial. An economic depression in 1640 pushed colonists toward export — beef, fish, lumber — to Europe and the West Indies. By the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts Bay had grown into one of the most prosperous colonies in North America.

It was that prosperity, ultimately, that brought the colony into conflict with the empire that had shaped it. After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, Britain faced financial ruin and turned to the colonies as a source of revenue. The Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and the Tea Act of 1773 arrived in succession, each more resented than the last. The Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773 became rallying points for colonial resistance. In the countryside west and north of Boston, the anger was particular and personal. Men like Francis Stratton of Chelmsford — a farmer and militia sergeant who had served in the French and Indian Wars, now approaching sixty — had spent their lives inside the compact the old charter represented: self-governing, self-taxing, beholden to no parliament three thousand miles away. The new impositions were not merely inconvenient. They were a violation of something foundational.

Open warfare began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

Before dawn on April 19, the roads of Middlesex County were alive with riders and bells. Francis Stratton, fifty-nine years old, answered the alarm from Chelmsford. He stood with the men of his county at Meriam’s Corner, along the road the British column would have to travel on its retreat from Concord. When the battered redcoats came — their formation ragged, flankers scrambling — the militia behind those stone fences made them pay for every yard. By the time the British reached Charlestown, they had taken nearly three hundred casualties. The farmers of Middlesex County had fired a great many of the shots.

Twenty miles south, in Warren, Worcester County, Francis’s son John heard the news from Lexington and Concord within days. At twenty years old, John had settled in Warren to work a small plot of land and learn the cooper’s trade. He mustered with his Worcester County regiment — Colonel Nathan Sparhawk’s 7th Worcester County Militia — and in the late summer of 1776 was called up for extended service with the Continental Army. Sparhawk’s Regiment marched for New York, arriving too late for the desperate battles that drove Washington’s army from Long Island and Manhattan, but in time for the grinding retreat through New Jersey. By December, John was part of the shattered army in Pennsylvania, watching the cause seem to teeter. Then came the Christmas night crossing of the Delaware, the victories at Trenton and Princeton, and the long winter at Morristown, where Washington’s army rebuilt itself in frozen huts, on thin rations, on discipline and stubbornness, into something harder and more professional than the militia that had stumbled into war the year before.

In August 1777, Sparhawk’s Regiment was called up again — this time to stop British General John Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada. Burgoyne had taken Fort Ticonderoga and was pushing south toward Albany, threatening to split New England from the rest of the colonies. The situation was serious enough that militia units were being summoned from across Massachusetts. John Stratton did not answer the muster. The reason went unrecorded — illness, perhaps, or some necessity at home; his wife had given birth to a son the previous autumn. In his place came Francis Stratton, sixty-one years old, carrying a private’s pack and wearing a private’s insignia rather than the sergeant’s rank he had earned in an earlier war. He had reduced his rank voluntarily to fill his son’s place. The officers knew him by reputation. He marched north with men half his age and kept their pace.

The regiment arrived in Vermont in time to witness the aftermath of General John Stark’s victory at Bennington on August 16, where Burgoyne had lost nearly a thousand men and critical supplies. Then Sparhawk’s Regiment pushed on to Saratoga, joining the American army assembling under General Horatio Gates to tighten its grip on the British position. Francis fought at Freeman’s Farm on September 19 and at Bemis Heights on October 7 — two engagements that left Burgoyne’s army surrounded, starving, and without options. On October 17, 1777, Burgoyne surrendered his entire force — nearly six thousand men — to Gates. It was the turning point of the war, the victory that convinced France to enter on the American side and shattered Britain’s strategy of dividing the colonies. Sparhawk’s Regiment was disbanded the following day. Francis shouldered his musket and began the long walk home to Chelmsford — the same musket, in all likelihood, that he had carried at Meriam’s Corner two years before.

The American Revolution, which the Massachusetts Bay Colony had in some sense been building toward since the moment it carried its charter across the Atlantic to keep the king’s hands off it, concluded in 1783 with British recognition of American independence. The city upon a hill had become something Winthrop could not quite have imagined — a nation, argumentative and sprawling and imperfectly free, that had grown out of everything the colony had built and broken and survived. Among those who had helped build it, from its earliest decades to its final battle, were the Strattons of Watertown and Chelmsford and Warren: Samuel, who had spoken for the wrongly condemned when the cost of speaking was real; Francis, who had stood at the first shots and at the deciding battle of a revolution that lasted eight years; and John, whose son — named Francis, for the grandfather who had marched north in his place — grew up in a country that belonged, at last, to itself.

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This history traces the Massachusetts Bay Colony from its founding in 1630 through the American Revolution of 1783, with the Stratton family — Samuel Stratton Sr. in Watertown, Francis Stratton in Chelmsford, and John Stratton in Warren — woven through the record at each generation’s turning point. Samuel Stratton Sr. (c. 1592–1672) was the earliest traced ancestor of the Stratton line documented on this site.

 

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