No single trait defined the New England settlers – and distinguished them from other English emigrants to the New World – more clearly than their self-conscious commitment to communalism. Aboard ship, strangers wove the strands of a common religious spirit and a common decision to emigrate (although a decision arrived at separately by individuals and families) into a web of community that sustained them in the face of a dangerous transatlantic voyage. The experience of the voyage would always be remembered as a shared one, and in a very real sense, the beginnings of New England society date less from the moment of the settlers' arrival in Boston or Salem than from the time of their departure from Southampton or Great Yarmouth. But shipboard communities were, in the end, temporary expedients created in response to a powerful but temporary event, and they disbanded upon arrival in New England. Once the settlers had landed, they soon embarked on the formation of new, permanent communities based on the principle of voluntary association.

Constructing new communities was an endeavor without precedent in the lives of the settlers; none of them had ever founded a town or village in England. Yet it is clear from their activities that there was a general, if unarticulated, consensus about how that process should be carried out. Settlement would be a corporate enterprise as groups of colonists voluntarily gathered together to establish towns, each with its church, where the spiritual and secular communities would be coterminous.