Peter Bulkeley

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Concord did not begin the way most Massachusetts Bay towns did, built up along the coast where ships could reach them. In 1635 Peter Bulkeley, a minister recently silenced in England for refusing to conform to Archbishop Laud's ceremonial requirements, led a party of settlers inland to a spot the Musketaquid people knew as Musketaquid, on the river of the same name. English families had already begun living on the land before any agreement with its inhabitants was reached. That agreement, worked out with the sachems Squaw Sachem, Tahattawan and others, came later, in 1636 or 1637 depending on the account: the Musketaquid granted the planting ground they had long worked in exchange for tools, cloth and wampum, a transaction the English described afterward as securing six miles square of land, and one that later writers have read very differently than the English settlers who recorded it did, since the Musketaquid understanding of what the exchange meant for their own continued presence on the land was not the same as the English one. The settlers named their new town Concord, for the peaceable terms of the arrangement as they saw it. It became one of the first inland towns in the colony, and Bulkeley served as its first minister until his death in 1659. Two centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his own Historical Discourse at Concord, delivered on the town's bicentennial in 1835, by naming Bulkeley first among the settlers who made the town.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony that Peter Bulkeley helped found had no separation between civil and religious authority in the modern sense: a minister's theological judgment could decide who was permitted to stay. That was the stake in 1637, when the colony's ministers appointed Bulkeley and Thomas Hooker to moderate a synod meant to settle the controversy stirred by Anne Hutchinson's preaching, her claim to direct revelation from the Holy Spirit and her charge that most of the colony's ministers preached a covenant of works rather than the covenant of grace she held John Cotton alone rightly taught. The synod, meeting at Newtown from the end of August 1637, worked through a long list of doctrinal errors it attributed to Hutchinson and her followers and condemned them. It did not itself try her. That happened separately, before the General Court that November and before her own congregation the following March, proceedings that ended in her excommunication and banishment from the colony. But the synod's findings gave the later proceedings their doctrinal footing, and the whole episode is remembered today less for the theology in dispute than for what it shows about a colony where doctrinal dissent and civil standing were never really separate questions, a history often read alongside the case for keeping them apart that later American constitutional practice made.