The Wages of the Covenant - The Charter

American Political History · Jun 22, 2021 · 14m

In the years after King Philip's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reformed itself with everything it had. The ministers had read the war as God's judgment on a backsliding people, and the way back to God's favor was repentance. So the colony searched its own soul, catalogued its sins, renewed its covenants. And while it did, three thousand miles away in Whitehall, a different threat was taking shape — one that had nothing to do with sin, and that no amount of reformation could touch.

This episode is about the charter: the 1629 document the founders had carried across the ocean and used to…