[Sidenote:  Company of Massachusetts Bay.] The government of Massachusetts is descended from the Dorchester Company formed in England in 1623, for the ostensible purpose of trading in furs and timber and catching fish on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.  After a disastrous beginning this company was dissolved, but only to be immediately reorganized on a greater scale.  In 1628 a grant of the land between the Charles and Merrimack rivers was obtained from the Plymouth Company; and in 1629 a charter was obtained from Charles I. So many men from the east of England had joined in the enterprise that it could no longer be fitly called a Dorchester Company.  The new name was significantly taken from the New World.  The charter created a corporation under the style of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England.  The freemen of the Company were to hold a meeting four times a year; and they were empowered to choose a governor, a deputy governor, and a council of eighteen assistants, who were to hold their meetings each month.  They could administer oaths of supremacy and allegiance, raise troops for the defence of their possessions, admit new associates into the Company, and make regulations for the management of their business, with the vague and weak proviso that in order to be valid their enactment must in no wise contravene the laws of England.  Nothing was said as to the place where the Company should hold its meetings, and accordingly after a few months the Company transferred itself and its charter to New England, in order that it might carry out its intentions with as little interference as possible on the part of the crown.

Whether this transfer of the charter was legally justifiable or not is a question which has been much debated, but with which we need not here vex ourselves.  The lawyers of the Company were shrewd enough to know that a loosely-drawn instrument may be made to admit of great liberty of action.  Under the guise of a mere trading corporation the Puritan leaders deliberately intended to found a civil commonwealth in accordance with their own theories of government.

[Sidenote:  Government of Massachusetts; the General Court] After their arrival in Massachusetts, their numbers increased so rapidly that it became impossible to have a primary assembly of all the freemen, and so a representative assembly was devised after the model of the Old English county court.  The representatives sat for townships, and were called deputies.  At first they sat in the same chamber with the assistants, but in 1644 the legislative body was divided into two chambers, the deputies forming the lower house, while the upper was composed of the assistants, who were sometimes called magistrates.  In elections the candidates for the upper house were put in nomination by the General Court and voted on by the freemen.  In general the assistants represented the common or central power of the colony, while the deputies represented the interests of popular self-government.  The former was comparatively an aristocratic and the latter a democratic body, and there were frequent disputes between the two.