Preface: Welcome to this quick recap of the history of immigration of US. Celebrating 250 years of USA.

On November 3, 1620, King James I issued a charter — a royal letters patent — creating a corporate body formally titled "the Council established at Plymouth in the County of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering, and governing of New-England in America." A charter of this kind did three things at once: it incorporated a company (gave it legal personality and "perpetual succession"). The charter gave the Council everything between 40° and 48° north latitude, and — in the language of the day — "from sea to sea," Atlantic to Pacific. In modern terms that band runs from roughly the latitude of Philadelphia up past Maine, and stretches clear across the continent, because the English had no idea how wide North America was. The King was granting a strip of a continent he had never seen, that he did not occupy, that was inhabited by Native nations who were not consulted — on the legal fiction that a Christian monarch could claim land by right of "discovery." Their fantasy was to carve the whole region into manors and estates and re-create a tidy, aristocratic, Anglican England on the other side of the ocean.

In seventeenth-century England, nobody simply "owned" land the way we think of it. All land ultimately belonged to the Crown, and everyone below held their land from someone higher up in a chain, in exchange for obligations. The basic unit was the manor: a lord's estate, worked by tenants who paid him rents and dues and answered to his own local manorial court. A "fief" was land held from a superior in return for service and loyalty. The old military version of this was "knight service" — hold land, owe the king soldiers. The milder version, the one used in the colonial charters, was called "free and common socage, as of the Manor of East Greenwich" — meaning you held your land for a fixed money rent (a "quitrent") rather than military service.

In 1620, The Council for New England was made up of about forty men who were nobles and landed gentry, not merchants — and, crucially, they were more interested in owning and developing land than in trade. Their plan was to carve the whole region into manors and fiefs and parcel them out among themselves. Each would become a lord of a great American estate, with English tenant-farmers beneath him paying rents, the whole structure owing allegiance up the chain to the Crown, and everyone worshipping in the established Church of England. So "aristocratic, Anglican England on the other side of the ocean" is precise: a conservative, hierarchical, top-down mirror of the Old World — not a refuge, not an experiment, not liberty.

The whole system depends on a large, deferential peasantry willing to farm someone else's land and pay rent for the privilege. But consider who was actually willing to cross a brutal, often fatal ocean to a wilderness: not compliant tenant-farmers content to remain tenants, but middle-class religious dissenters and people who wanted land of their own or freedom to worship their own way. The Council was offering people a chance to be somebody's tenant three thousand miles from home. Almost nobody wanted that. On top of the demand problem, the Council was chronically short of money and never successfully planted a colony of its own. And the ventures that did succeed — Plymouth in 1620, Massachusetts Bay in 1629 — were middle-class, self-governing, Nonconformist enterprises that took their charters directly from the Crown, bypassing the Council entirely and building exactly the kind of congregational, non-Anglican, locally-run society the gentry had wanted to prevent. The fantasy wasn't just impractical; it was being actively out-competed by its opposite.

1622/Sir Ferdinando Gorges

Gorges was a West Country military man, younger son of Somerset gentry, who'd been at the fighting since about nineteen — the Dutch revolt against Spain, then France fighting for Henry IV, wounded at the siege of Paris in 1589, knighted at the siege of Rouen in 1591. In 1596 he was made captain and keeper of the fort and castle at Plymouth (and of St Nicholas Island) — a defensive command, the man responsible for guarding England's western approaches against Spanish invasion. His identity was entirely martial. Two things then happened that left him, by around 1604, a soldier without a purpose. First, the Essex disaster: Gorges had been Essex's man — went with him to the Azores in 1597, to Ireland in 1599 — and was drawn into Essex's 1601 rebellion, then turned crown's evidence and testified against his own former commander, who was executed. (Essex, at trial, pointed at him: look at Sir Ferdinando, and judge whose testimony is truest.) Gorges was briefly imprisoned and lost his Plymouth post, salvaged only by Robert Cecil's patronage, and restored under James I in 1603. Second, the Anglo-Spanish war wound down in 1604. So here's a fort governor in a new peace, his profession idled, his reputation carrying the stain of a betrayal. A man primed for a second act.

In 1605 Gorges was the commander (governor) of the royal fort at Plymouth, in Devon — the port where ships returning from the Atlantic came in. That posting is the accident of geography that made him the man these captives were delivered to, and it's the moment he became fixated on America. Before this he had a soldier's career; after it, his life was dominated by colonization schemes. In March 1605, a group of prominent English backers — including Thomas Arundell and the Earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare's patron), with Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham in the orbit — hired Captain George Waymouth to sail the coast of what's now midcoast Maine. The public cover story was another hunt for a Northwest Passage (Strait of Anián); the real mission was to scout a site for the first English colony on the mainland and gather intelligence on the people living there. Waymouth's crew reached the Georges Islands and Muscongus Bay, made contact with Eastern Abenaki people, and over several days built up trust the ordinary way — sign language, gifts, trade in metal goods.

They seized five of the men they'd been trading with, and carried them back to England along with their canoes and their bows and arrows — trophies and specimens as much as guides. We know their names because the voyage's chronicler, James Rosier, listed them: Tahánedo, described as a sagamore or commander; Amóret; Skicowáros (later anglicized as Skidwarres); Maneddo; and Sassacomoit. Rosier's own account records the trust turning to resistance as the men were detained. Modern Wabanaki accounts, unsurprisingly, frame this not as the benign "took some natives along" of the old textbooks but as treachery — a betrayal of hospitality that would poison Anglo-Wabanaki relations for years.

Because his command happened to sit at the port where Waymouth's ship came home, three of the five kidnapped Abenaki men were handed to him. The five captives were split up: Gorges took custody of some, Sir John Popham of the others (the usual telling is three to Gorges, two to Popham, though sources differ on exactly who went where). Gorges kept them, learned their language, and debriefed them — for years — on the geography of their homeland: the harbors, the rivers, the resources, the political map of which people controlled what (the region the Abenaki called Mawooshen). Gorges's entire expertise about a coast he never once visited was extracted from men he was holding against their will. In his own later account, Gorges credited these captives as the thing that, under God, gave life to all the English plantations that followed.

The captives were sent back as guides and go-betweens — Nahanada returned in 1606, Skidwarres with the 1607 colonists — on the theory that they'd smooth the way. Having seen how the English operated, they warned their own people rather than brokering for the settlers. Skidwarres slipped away into the woods; Nahanada, who had regained a leadership position, met the English coldly. The mistrust seeded by Waymouth's abductions helped doom the Popham Colony, which collapsed after a single hard winter. Had it survived, it would have predated both Jamestown's success and Plymouth, and Popham Beach might sit where Plymouth Rock sits in the national story. Instead it failed — and, tellingly, none of this stopped the practice. The English kept kidnapping people along this coast, most infamously when Thomas Hunt seized Tisquantum (Squanto) and others in 1614. Two of the men, Maneddo and Sassacomoit, were shipped back toward home in 1606, but the Spanish intercepted the vessel: Maneddo was lost, and Sassacomoit ended up wounded and imprisoned in Spain, eventually having to escape and make his own way back to England before he could ever get home.

He became a promoter of grand speculative schemes. Plymouth Company (1606), the Popham Colony (1607), the Council for New England (1620), the Mason grant (1622), the Maine charter (1639) — four decades of chartering, lobbying at court, financing fishing stations, and writing promotional tracts. And the character of this second career is worth noticing, because it's strange: He never once crossed the ocean. Forty years fixated on a coast he experienced only through other men's reports and his captives' testimony. He founded no permanent colony of his own, and most of his ventures failed. His actual legacy is having lit fuses under enterprises other people completed.

He insisted, over and over, that he wasn't in it for money. In his own words (modernized), he "dealt not as merchants or tradesmen are wont, seeking only to make my own profit" — his end was the "thorough discovery of the Country." He cast himself as a high-minded imperial visionary rather than a trader, and yet the vision was that feudal manor-world, and he died broke: he resigned Plymouth in 1629 in disgust after his garrison went three and a half years unpaid and his fort fell to ruin, raised cavalry for the King in the Civil War, and went down with the royalist cause in 1647. His grandson eventually sold Maine to Massachusetts for £1,250.

1622/John Mason

New Hampshire's founder of record is John Mason. He never traveled to New Hampshire. Mason had been registered at Oxford in 1602 as a man of Hampshire. When the Council for New England granted him his share of the coast in 1629, he named the tract between the Piscataqua and the Merrimack rivers New Hampshire, after that county.

He was born at King's Lynn, Norfolk, in 1586. In 1610 he commanded a small naval force sent by James I to help bring the Hebrides under English-speaking control; he was granted fishing rights in the northern seas in return. From 1615 to 1621 he served as governor of the English colony at Cuper's Cove in Newfoundland, where he surveyed the island and produced the first known English map of Newfoundland, published in 1625, and wrote a tract, A Briefe Discourse of the New-found-land (1620), promoting Scottish settlement.

Mason returned to England in 1621. Through his association with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the most influential member of the Council for New England, whom he had come to know in connection with the Newfoundland fisheries, he entered New England colonization. In 1622 the two received a joint patent from the Council for the territory between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers. In 1629 they divided it along the Piscataqua, and Mason took the southern portion. He became a member of the Council for New England in 1632. In his final years Mason was among the opponents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He and Gorges were involved in the effort to have the Massachusetts charter revoked, and his appointment as vice-admiral was connected to the enforcement of royal control over New England.

The Massachusetts Bay charter (confirmed 1629) granted land up to three miles north of the Merrimack, and the colony read that boundary aggressively, pressing into ground that Gorges and Mason held by their own earlier patents — Mason in New Hampshire, Gorges in Maine. In 1629 the company voted to move the charter and the company government physically to New England, so that the colony elected its own governor and officers and answered, in practice, to no one across the ocean. To Gorges — whose whole vision was of colonies kept under tight royal control from above — a self-governing Puritan commonwealth was exactly the thing that had to be stopped.

The reorganization was to install Sir Ferdinando Gorges as Governor-General of New England — a royal governor sent to bring all the colonies, Massachusetts above all, under direct Crown authority. Mason's appointment as the first vice-admiral of New England belonged to this same scheme; the vice-admiralty was the office through which royal and naval authority would be enforced on the water. Mason was also the most energetic and best-financed of the anti-Massachusetts proprietors, the one with the practical naval and logistical capacity to make a governor-general's arrival mean something.

The ship built to carry Gorges and his authority across the Atlantic broke apart on launching. Then, in December 1635, Mason died — removing the effort's most active and solvent proprietor at the moment it needed force behind it. Gorges, by then an old man and short of money, could not carry it alone. And England itself was sliding toward the crises of the late 1630s and the Civil War, which consumed the Crown's attention.

Mason died owning New Hampshire on parchment, but he had never governed it, and after his widow gave up managing the property the settlers occupied and improved the land as their own. During the heir Robert Tufton Mason's minority, the New Hampshire towns petitioned in 1641 to be governed by Massachusetts, which claimed the area lay within its own patent. So for decades the land the Masons "owned" was administered by another colony and lived on by people who treated their farms as theirs. Every attempt to enforce the claim was really an attempt to close that gap — to turn a title into rent and obedience — and it kept failing.

Robert Tufton Mason, the founder's grandson (who took the Mason surname under the will), was the one who revived the claim in earnest. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, he pressed it in England. Crown law officers ruled more than once that his title to the soil was valid; Massachusetts's own justices countered that it was worthless. The Crown had its own reason to listen: it wanted a lever against self-governing Massachusetts, and Mason's claim was a useful one. That pressure fed directly into the 1679 decision to make New Hampshire a separate royal province — the settlement of the Mason question was bound up with the province's creation.

Once the royal province existed, Mason tried to convert his recognized ownership into income, demanding that settlers who had held their farms for decades take leases from him and pay quitrents. Under Governor Edward Cranfield the provincial courts were arranged to favor him, and Mason won a run of judgments (the records show Mason v. Vaughan, Mason v. Wiggin and Nutter, verdicts against William Vaughan through 1686). But the judgments were essentially uncollectible — juries and townsmen resisted, and no one actually paid. Robert Tufton Mason died in 1688 with a stack of paper victories and little revenue.

On January 30, 1746, John Tufton Mason — sixth in descent from the original proprietor, and by then a Boston-born man — conveyed the entire Mason claim to a syndicate for £1,500. They were not neutral investors. They were the Portsmouth ruling class, and they were interlocked by blood, marriage, and office with the royal governor, Benning Wentworth. The purchase was held in fifteen shares: Theodore Atkinson (the governor's brother-in-law) held three, Mark Hunking Wentworth (the governor's brother) held two, and ten others one each — Richard Wibird, John Moffatt, Samuel Moore, Jotham Odiorne, Joshua Peirce, Nathaniel Meserve, George Jaffrey, John Wentworth, Thomas Wallingford, Thomas Packer. Contemporary and later accounts describe them plainly as a group of wealthy insiders, most related to Governor Wentworth and nearly all related to one another. In practice, the provincial oligarchy buying the colony's own land title cheap and keeping it in the family.

1622/New Hampshire

Thomson, a Scot with prior New England experience, held his own patent from the Council for New England (1622) — roughly 6,000 acres plus an island — financed by three merchants back in Plymouth, England (Abraham Colmer, Nicholas Sherwill, Leonard Pomeroy), bound by an indenture to run a profitable fishing-and-trading post for five years. His surviving indenture is held at the New Hampshire Historical Society. So the accurate framing is a contractor working for English investors under his own Council grant, not a Mason employee.

In the spring of 1623 Thomson landed at Odiorne's Point (Little Harbor, in present-day Rye, just below Portsmouth) with his wife, young son, and a few servants, and built Pannaway: a fortified house or "factory," and — the operative infrastructure — fish-drying stages and flakes. Pannaway wasn't very profitable. Thomson grew skeptical of the whole colonizing venture, and by about 1626 he abandoned it, moving to an island in Boston Harbor that still bears his name; he died around 1628.

Then, about fifteen years later, a very different kind of settler showed up. John Wheelwright (c. 1592–1679) was an English Puritan minister from Lincolnshire, Cambridge-educated (Sidney Sussex), who had lost his English parish and emigrated to Boston in 1636, where he was initially welcomed. His connection to the controversy is family: he was married to a sister of Anne Hutchinson's husband, which made him Hutchinson's brother-in-law. He arrived just as she was drawing hostile attention for her religious meetings.

Anne Marbury was born in July 1591 in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, the daughter of Francis Marbury, a clergyman and schoolteacher. In 1612 she married William Hutchinson, and the couple settled in Alford. During these years she followed the preaching of John Cotton at St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire. When Cotton emigrated to New England in 1633 under pressure from church authorities, the Hutchinsons followed the next year: in 1634 Anne, William, and their children sailed aboard the Griffin to New England, settled in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and were admitted to the Boston church.

Beginning around 1635, Hutchinson hosted weekly meetings in her home to discuss sermons. Attendance grew to some sixty to eighty people and came to include both men and women. In October 1636, John Winthrop recorded in his journal that she was spreading "two dangerous errors" concerning the Holy Ghost and sanctification — an entry generally marked as the start of the Antinomian, or Free Grace, Controversy. Over 1636 and 1637 she accused most of the colony's ministers, except John Cotton and John Wheelwright, of preaching a "covenant of works."

The dispute turned against her through 1637. In the May election, her ally Henry Vane lost the governorship to Winthrop, and the Boston magistrates who had supported her were voted out; Vane sailed for England that August, never to return. On August 30, 1637, a synod of ministers meeting at Newtown (Cambridge) condemned opinions associated with the controversy, including her home meetings. That November she was tried before the General Court at Newtown on charges that included traducing the ministers and disturbing the peace. During the trial she stated that she had received direct, immediate revelation from God and prophesied ruin upon the colony. She was convicted, sentenced to banishment, and held under house arrest through the winter. In March 1638 she was tried before the Boston church and excommunicated, with Cotton pronouncing against her, after which she left Massachusetts.

Later in 1638, Hutchinson went with her family and a group of followers to Aquidneck Island, in present-day Rhode Island, and helped establish the settlement of Pocasset, later named Portsmouth. John Wheelwright — her brother-in-law, banished in the same controversy — went north to New Hampshire and founded Exeter.After her husband's death in 1641, and amid concern that Massachusetts might extend its authority over the Rhode Island settlements, she moved in 1642 with her younger children into Dutch territory, near present-day Pelham Bay in what is now the Bronx, New York. In August or September 1643, she and most of her household were killed by Siwanoy people during Kieft's War. Her young daughter Susanna was taken captive and survived; the others in the household died.

Because of a general lack of government, the New Hampshire settlements sought the protection of Massachusetts. In 1641 they agreed to be governed from Massachusetts, on the condition that the towns kept self-rule and that church membership wasn't required for their voters (which it was in Massachusetts). The settlements were part of Massachusetts until 1679, sending representatives to Boston. Finally the king stepped in. In 1679, Charles II issued a charter making New Hampshire a separate province again, with John Cutt as its first president, ending Massachusetts's control. 🇺🇸