The accession of two men so important as Winthrop and Dudley served to bring matters speedily to a crisis.  Their embarkation in April, 1630, was the signal for a general movement on the part of the English Puritans.  Before Christmas of that year seventeen ships had come to New England, bringing more than 1000 passengers.  This huge wave of immigration quite overwhelmed and bore away the few links of possession by which Gorges had thus far kept his hold upon the country.  In January, 1629, John Gorges had tried to assert the validity of his late brother’s claim by executing conveyances covering portions of it.  One of these was to John Oldham, a man who had been harshly treated at Plymouth, and might be supposed very ready to defend his rights against settlers of the Puritan company.  Gorges further maintained that he retained possession of the country through the presence of his brother’s tenants, Blackstone, Maverick, Walford, and others on the shores of the bay.  In June, 1629, Endicott had responded by sending forward some fifty persons from Salem to begin the settlement of Charlestown.  Shortly before Winthrop’s departure from England, Gorges had sent that singular personage Sir Christopher Gardiner to look after his interests in the New World, and there he was presently found established near the mouth of the Neponset river, in company with “a comly yonge woman whom he caled his cousin.”  But these few claimants were now at once lost in the human tide which poured over Charlestown, Boston, Newtown, Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester.  The settlement at Merrymount was again dispersed, and Morton sent back to London; Gardiner fled to the coast of Maine and thence sailed for England in 1632.  The Puritans had indeed occupied the country in force.

Here on the very threshold we are confronted by facts which show that not a mere colonial plantation, but a definite and organized state was in process of formation.  The emigration was not like that of Jamestown or of Plymouth.  It sufficed at once to make the beginnings of half a dozen towns, and the question as to self-government immediately sprang up.  Early in 1631 a tax of L60 was assessed upon the settlements, in order to pay for building frontier fortifications at Newtown.  This incident was in itself of small dimensions, as incidents in newly founded states are apt to be.  But in its historic import it may serve to connect the England of John Hampden with the New England of Samuel Adams.  The inhabitants of Watertown at first declined to pay this tax, which was assessed by the Board of Assistants, on the ground that English freemen cannot rightfully be taxed save by their own consent.  This protest led to a change in the constitution of the infant colony, and here, at once, we are introduced to the beginnings of American constitutional history.  At first it was thought that public business could be transacted by a primary assembly of all the freemen in the colony meeting four times in the year;