Cambridge Agreement

Cambridge Agreement (1629). An agreement between the shareholders of the Massachusetts Bay Company, signed on August 29, 1629, in Cambridge, England.

Under its terms, those who intended to emigrate to the New World could purchase shares held by those shareholders who wanted to remain home. Thus the agreement was a precursor to the foundation of Boston, Massachusetts. [In 1620, the Charter of New England established the Council for New England as a Joint Stock Company.]

The Cambridge Agreement stipulated that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would be under local control in New England, rather than controlled by a corporate board based in London. Not all the shareholders of the Company had any intention of emigrating, despite their Puritan sympathies.

In return for guaranteeing local control over the colony, the non-emigrating shareholders were bought out by the emigrating shareholders. John Winthrop led the Company’s emigrating party following these negotiations and was elected Colonial Governor in October 1629.

The agreement guaranteed the Massachusetts Colony would be self-governing, answerable only to the English Crown. The Colony and the Company then became, to all intents and purposes, one and the same. Winthrop’s Puritans carried this Charter across the Atlantic arriving on the Arabella at America in 1630

The twelve Signatories included John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, as well as William Vassall (who moved to Barbados to establish a slave-labor sugar plantation. He was among the Caribbean’s leading planters, holding more than 3,865 people as slaves before Britain abolished slavery in 1833) and John Humphrey (who left the Colony to help settle The Bahamas in the late 1640s).