In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management - a governor and 18 assistants - and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be 'a city on a hill' ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing). All freemen could vote once they proved that God had preordained them to enter heaven. Here was a symbol for the ages: early Americans turning a business charter into a constitution and voting stockholders into saints.

LRB 19 May 2005 | PDF Download