Nevertheless, by the organization thus effected, the benumbing influence of the Calvinistic faith upon the intellectual life of New England was fully established, and the deaths of John Winthrop and John Cotton, which happened not long after, were the forerunners of what Charles Francis Adams styles the “glacial period of Massachusetts."[6] Both Winthrop and Cotton were believers in aristocracy in state and church, but the bigotry of Winthrop was relieved by his splendid business capacity and that of Cotton by his comparative gentleness and tenderness of heart.

“Their places were taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever breathed"[7]—­John Endicott, who was governor for thirteen out of fifteen years following Winthrop’s death, and John Norton, an able and upright but narrow and intolerant clergyman.  The persecuting spirit which had never been absent in Massachusetts reached, under these leaders, its climax in the wholesale hanging of Quakers and witches.

In the year of Cotton’s death (1652), which was the year that Virginia surrendered to the Parliamentary commissioners and the authority of the English Parliament was recognized throughout English America, the population of New England could not have been far short of fifty thousand.  For the settlements along the sea the usual mode of communication was by water, but there was a road along the whole coast of Massachusetts.  In the interior of the colony, as Johnson boasted, “the wild and uncouth woods were filled with frequented ways, and the large rivers were overlaid with bridges, passable both for horse and foot."[8]

All the conditions of New England tended to compress population into small areas and to force the energies of the people into trade.  Ship-building was an early industry, and New England ships vied with the ships of Holland and England in visiting distant countries for commerce.[9] Manufacturing found early encouragement, and in 1639 a number of clothiers from Yorkshire set up a fulling-mill at Rowley.[10] A glass factory was established at Salem in 1641,[11] and iron works at Lynn in 1643,[12] under the management of Joseph Jenks.  The keenness of the New-Englander in bargains and business became famous.

In Massachusetts the town was the unit of representation and taxation, and in local matters it governed itself.  The first town government appears to have been that of Dorchester, where the inhabitants agreed, October 8, 1633, to hold a weekly meeting “to settle and sett down such orders as may tend to the general good."[13] Not long after a similar meeting was held in Watertown, and the system speedily spread to the other towns.  The plan of appointing a body of “townsmen,” or selectmen, to sit between meetings of the towns began in February, 1635, in Charlestown.[14]

The town-meeting had a great variety of business.  It elected the town officers and the deputies to the general court and made ordinances regarding the common fields and pastures, the management of the village herds, roadways, boundary-lines, fences, and many other things.  Qualified to share in the deliberations were all freemen and “admitted inhabitants of honest and good conversation” rated at L20 (equivalent to about $500 to-day).[15]