As long as hundreds of emigrant families disembarked at New England ports each year, the region's economic survival seemed assured. The newcomers' stores of goods, reserves of cash, and lines of credit with English merchants added wealth to a colonial economy that could not depend upon the lucrative staple crops that supported British settlements in other parts of North America. Thus New England's early prosperity was intimately tied to the annual appearance of emigrant ships; inhabitants regularly flocked to port towns in order to exchange their small agricultural surpluses for whatever scarce manufactured goods and even scarcer currency newcomers willingly relinquished. Once emigration ceased with the coming of the English Civil War, however, the precariousness of such economic arrangements was fully revealed and New England suffered its first economic depression. The flow of specie dried up, and prices for all sorts of local commodities – particularly land, cattle, and corn – plummeted. The crisis put many people into “an unsettled frame of spirit” and tested the ability of leaders to discern divine approbation in what must have seemed at least an equivocal judgment on their success in building a Christian commonwealth. If New England were to survive, it would have to sell something other than its reputation for piety.

New England's economic problems were exacerbated by the fact that, unlike other British colonies, the region produced little that consumers in the home country wanted to buy.