In his “Model of Christian Charity,” delivered in 1630, John Winthrop (1630) exhorted his brethren: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop made clear that having entered into a covenant with God, the colonists had a responsibility to “seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this, the care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, doth bind us.”

The early settlers of Massachusetts were Puritans on a religious mission. Leaving an England that they believed was losing its religious soul, they sought the freedom to pursue their religious beliefs in the New World. Some were fleeing persecution in England, and they constituted what would be a defining component of American immigration – refugees who were at risk of serious harm if they remained at home. In contrast to the settlers of Virginia, these colonists were not adventurers seeking their fortune or laborers welcomed solely as workers. Rather, as Theodore Dwight Bozeman (1988: 96) describes, their migration was rooted in “flight and escape from onerous conditions in England,” some economic but largely the “hanging threat of God's covenantal punishment upon an unreformed land.”