After the founding of early Massachusetts towns during the Great Migration of the 1630s, the next major expression of the Puritan ideology of mobility was, oddly enough, a massive repatriation to England triggered by the onset of the Civil War. Some New Englanders wished to fight for the Parliamentary cause, while university-educated men were attracted by ministerial opportunities which suddenly opened for Puritans in the old country. Perhaps one-fourth of colonists with a university degree, and a larger percentage of the early graduates of Harvard College, returned to England, creating a “brain drain” from New England as the Great Migration sputtered to a halt.

Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cobler of Aggawam, written in Massachusetts but published as Ward returned to England in 1647, reflected this new development in the ideology of mobility. In his Magnalia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather labeled Ward “our St. Hilary,” referring to the hilarity of Ward's humorous and highly original writing style, which has earned Ward 606 citations in the online Oxford English Dictionary. However, Mather would also have been aware that St. Hilary of Poitiers had been exiled to Phrygia for four years because of his intransigent opposition to Arianism— applying this to Ward's case, Mather implied that his hatred of Arminianism propelled Ward to New England. In the Simple Cobler, Ward supported the necessity of the Great Migration, speaking of those who “necessarily abide beyond Jordan, and remaine on the American sea-coasts,” and encouraging those “whom necessity of Conscience or condition thrusts out [of England] by head and shoulders” to come to New England. On the other hand, he declared that “it ill becomes Christians anything well-shod with the preparation of the Gospel, to meditate flight from their deare Countrey upon these disturbances,” that is, the Civil War. Ward went so far as to argue “that no man ought to forsake his own Country, but upon extraordinary cause, and when that cause ceaseth, he is bound in conscience to return if he can.”

This may seem to have undermined the original premise of the Puritan ideology of mobility as it unfolded in New England, namely that the health of an existing social body might require the removal of part of that body in order to form a new, and presumably permanent, communal body.