Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 Witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.archive.org/details/connecticutstudyOOjolinricli Pt. Judith I _ Watch Hil! C-JX^ ISLAND p, £ L O C\k I 8 L A N D SOUND { ^ pMontauk Pt. A -^- CONNECTICUT TO ACCOMPANY ALEXANDER JOHNSTON'S CONNECTICUT in AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS. 10 5 10 20 30 t ^-4 U-l U4 ' l-f U-l ■ I . ■ I ■ i Scale of Statute Miles. Sllmencan Commontoeaftli^ CONNECTICUT A STUDY OF A COMMONWEALTH-DEMOCRACY ALEXANDEE JOHNSTON PROFESSOR OF JURISPRUDENCE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY LH PRINCETON CO£lEGE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1896 t;:^"^ ^.5'/ Copyright, 1887, By ALEXANDER JOHNSTON. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. To TIMOTHY DWIGHT, PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY. Theirs is a pure republic, wild, yet strong, A " fierce democracie," where all are true To what themselves have voted — right or wrong — And to their laws denominated " blue ; " If red, they might to Draco's code belong. A vestal State, which power could not subdue, Nor promise win, — like her own eagle's nest. Sacred, — the San Marino of the West. A justice of the peace, for the time being. They bow to, but may turn him out next year; They reverence their priest, but, disagreeing In price or creed, dismiss him without fear : They have a natural talent for foreseeing And knowing all things; and, should Park appear From his long tour in Africa, to show The Niger's source, they 'd meet him with — We know. They love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Would shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his majesty; A stubborn race, fearing and flattering none. Such are they nurtured, such they live and die. Fitz-Greene Halleck. PEEFAOE. This volume is not meant to deal mainly with the antiquarian history of Connecticut, with the achievements of Connecticut men and women, or with those biographical details which so often throw the most instructive side-lights on local his- tory. These fields have been explored so thor- oughly by abler hands that it would be presump- tion for the writer to enter them, unless to take advantage of the materials thus stored up. The volume is one of a " Commonwealth Series," and it aims to take the history of Connecticut from another side. Its purpose is to present certain features in the development of Connecticut which have influenced the general development of the State system in this country, and of the United States, and may be grouped as follows : — I. Connecticut's town system was, by a fortu- nate concurrence of circumstances, even more in- dependent of outside control than that of Massa- chusetts; the principle of local government had here a more complete recognition ; and, in the form in which it has done best service, its begin- ning was in Connecticut. viii PREFACE. II. The first conscious and deliberate effort on this continent to establish the democratic princi- ple* in control of government was the settlement of Connecticut ; and her constitution of 1639, the first written and democratic constitution on rec- ord, was the starting-point for the democratic de- velopment which has since gained control of all our commonwealths, and now makes the essential feature of our commonwealth government. III. Democratic institutions enabled the people of Connecticut to maintain throughout their colo- nial history a form of government so free from crown control that it became really the exemplar of the rights at which all the colonies finally aimed. IV. Connecticut, being mainly a federation of towns, with neither so much of the centrifugal force as in Rhode Island, nor so much of the cen- tripetal force as in other colonies, maintained for a century and a half that union of the democratic and federative ideas which has at last come to mark the whole United States. V. The Connecticut delegates in the conven- tion of 1787, by another happy concurrence of cir- cumstances, held a position of unusual influence ; the frame of their commonwealth government, with its equal representation of towns in one branch and its general popular representation in the other, had given them a training which ena- bled them to bend the form of our national con- PREFACE. ix stitution into a corresponding shape ; and the pe- culiar constitution of our congress, in the different bases of the senate and house of representatives, was thus the result of Connecticut's long main- tenance of a federative democracy. VI. The first great effort at westward coloniza- tion, in the Wyoming country, was managed by Connecticut through her traditional system of free towns ; and the example is enough to account for the subsequent power of this principle in the or- ganization of the great Northwest. VII. Individual capacity and energy, the natu- ral fruit of a democratic system, have enabled the people of Connecticut to survive and prosper un- der the industrial revolution of later times, and to show that a commonwealth almost without natural advantages, and forced to rely almost entirely on the conversion of foreign products into other forms, may reach the highest degree of prosperity through the individual mechanical genius of her people. For these reasons, the writer thinks that Con- necticut has a claim to a high place among char- acteristic commonwealths ; and that the antiqua- rian, biographical, and other features which usu- ally abound in State histories, should in this in- stance be made subordinate to the study of her democracy and its influences. So far as the usual details can be given, and as they illustrate the controlling features of the volume, they have been used ; but the volume is not bound to them. X PREFACE. Connecticut migration has been so great that it Las been necessary to resist an almost constant temptation to diverge to the influence of Connecti- cut men and ideas in Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and other commonwealths. How large that influence has been is not widely known. Hollister states that in 1857 a single county (Litchfield) had been the birthplace of thir- teen United States senators, twenty -two represen- tatives from New York, fifteen supreme court judges in other States, nine presidents of colleges and eighteen other professors, and eleven gover- nors and lieutenant-governors of States. The re- mark is attributed to Calhoun that he had seen the time when the members of congress born or educated in Connecticut lacked but five of being a majority. This must be taken with allowance, even if it were exact ; for by no means all those educated in Connecticut have done much to carry Connecticut characteristics elsewhere. But, with all allowance, the foreign influence of Connecti- cut has been extraordinary. One must sympa- thize with the astonishment of the Frenchman who, hearing that this and that distinguished man, though a resident of another State, was born in Connecticut, went to the library to find the loca- tion of the State, and found that it was " nothing but a little yellow spot on the map." If there be anything in the claims for the work of the Connec- ticut commonwealth, they must be still further PREFACE. XI strengthened by the influence which the children of the commonwealth have carried into all sorts of channels. The original scheme of the Series did not in- clude the feature of foot-notes for authorities, and the writer followed the plan of putting his author- ities into a bibliography. It has not seemed ne- cessary to alter the arrangement, and it has been retained as an essay toward a bibliography of the commonwealth for the further use of students.^ It is not meant to be implied that all, or nearly all, the books there named have been used exhaus- tively ; very many of them have merely been re- ferred to in order to keep the writer from going astray in matters on which their authors are au- thority and he is not. If he has, nevertheless, erred in these respects, he will feel under great obligations to those who will call his attention to the errors. The whole list is inserted in the hope that it may be of some preliminary service to those who shall further and more effectively pros- ecute the study of this commonwealth's great and honest work. The approaching year 1889 is the 250th anni- versary (or, to adopt the modern phrase, the quar- ter-millennial) of the Constitution of 1639, which seems to the writer the most far-reaching political work of modern times, and from which he con- ceives there are direct lines of communication run- ning down to all the great events which followed, ^ See Appendix, p. 397. xil PREFACE, — to commonwealth organization and colonial resistance, to national independence and federa- tion, to national union and organization, and even to national self-preservation and reconstruction. During the same year the nation will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the inaugura- tion of its Constitution, to whose essence and ex- pression Connecticut contributed so largely. This volume has been written in the hope that it may aid in widening the appreciation of Connecticut's first constitution, so that its birthday shall not pass without its fair share of remembrance. Princeton, N. J., May 1, 1887. CONTENTS. ♦ CHAPTER I. PAGE The Physical Geography of Connecticut 1 CHAPTER n. Jurisdiction of the Connecticut Territory .... 7 CHAPTER III. The First Settlements of Connecticut 14 CHAPTER IV. The Indians of Connecticut 26 CHAPTER V. The Pequot War 34 CHAPTER VI. The Connecticut Colony 56 CHAPTER VII. The New Haven Colony 83 CHAPTER VIII. The Saybrook Attempt and its Failure 108 CHAPTER IX. Connecticut until the Union 120 CHAPTER X. The Two Colonies until the Union 143 CHAPTER XI. The Charter and the Union 163 XIV CONTENTS, CHAPTER XII. The Commonwealth. 1662-1 7G3 192 CHAPTER XIII. Ecclesiastical Affairs. 1636-1791 220 CHAPTER XIV. Financial Affairs. 1640-1763 248 CHAPTER XV. Commonwealth Development. — Wyoming and the Western Reserve 265 CHAPTER XVI. The Stamp Act and the Revolution 285 CHAPTER XVII. The Adoption of the Federal Constitution .... 315 CHAPTER XVIII. Industrial Development 328 CHAPTER XIX. Connecticut in the War for the Union 374 CHAPTER XX. Conclusion 385 APPENDIX. The Constitution of 1639 389 Bibliography 397 The Governors of Connecticut 401 Index 403 Note. — The seal on the title-page is a f ac-simile of that which appears on the title-page of the first revision of the laws of Con- necticut, made in 1672 and published at Cambridge, Massachu- setts, by S. Green in 1673. A discussion of the seals of Connec- ticut will be found in the Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, I. 251. CONNECTICUT. CHAPTER I. THE PHYSICAL GEOGEAPHY OF CONNECTICUT. The story of the commonwealth of Connecticut is one which is not strongly marked by the ro- mantic element. Here are ,no witchcraft delu- sions or persecuted Quakers, no doughty paladins or high-souled Indian maidens, no drowsy burghers or wooden-legged governors, — only laborious and single - minded men building a new state on a new soil, exemplifying in the process the ten- dency of their race, when placed in a wilderness, to revert to the ancestral type of civil government, ignoring the excrescences which centuries have bred upon it. The record of their work need not lose value from its simplicity. Connecticut is the furthest southwest of the little group of six American commonwealths to which the popular name of New England has been attached. It is of oblong shape, its northern and southern boundaries being about eighty-eight and one hundred miles long respectively, and its 2 CONNECTICUT. eastern and western boundaries forty-fiv6 and '■ seventy-two miles. The northern and eastern boundaries are nearly straight lines east and west, and north and south, respectively. The western boundary is irregular %t the southern extremity. The irregularities will be considered more fully hereafter, as they are the embodied mementos of certain steps by which the material form of the commonwealth was built up. The irregular south- ern coast is washed by the waters of Long Island Sound, beyond which lies the island which nature, confirmed by law, assigned to Connecticut, though the greed of the house of Stuart, superior to both law and nature, transferred it permanently to New York. The area of Connecticut is 4,990 square miles, about one third that of Denmark and not quite one half that of the Netherlands. The trend of the rivers will indicate the general nature of the surface of the commonwealth, which is a succession of north and south hill ranges, separated by river valleys. The great central valley, about twenty miles in width, is drained by the river Connecticut as far south as Middletown, where the stream, forcing an outlet between two encroaching cliffs, pursues its way to the Sound at Saybrook, while the valley extends southwest to New Haven. This central valley, the seat of the early colonization, has an ideal agricultural soil, a deep, rich loam, as far south as the point where the river leaves it; thence to New Haven it is PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF CONNECTICUT. 3 more sandy and less profitable. The smaller and more broken valleys of the eastern part of the commonwealth, the former " Pequot Country," where the hill summits are not of great elevation, attracted the early settlers through their advan- tages for grazing : their water power has since proved a greater source of wealth from manufac- tures. The western part of Connecticut is even more broken than the eastern, and the sharp and ragged character of the hill-range summits make them a somewhat greater obstacle to east and west travel. Rough as is the general surface of the State, its highest point, Bear Mountain in Salis- bury, is 2,354 feet above sea-level. Agriculture, in its various fornis, was the first inducement to settlement ; but the settlers soon found that the soil contained metals. Of these, iron alone was profitable ; the manufacture of nails of all sizes was for a long time the principal home industry for the colonists in their leisure hours. Much of the iron used for the weapons of the Rev- olution came from Connecticut ; and its hematite ore still furnishes the best iron of its class in the country. Copper and lead exist in sufficient amount to lure a never-ending stream of adventurers into financial difficulties. The copper mines of Sims- bury (now in East Granby) were discovered about 1705, ruined a number of successive pro- prietors, and were finally made the state prison. They furnished the material for the " Granby 4 CONNECTICUT. coppers," coined in 1737, and for otlier coins, in- cluding the first United States coinage. There is even an ignis fatuus of gold and silver. The rocks of Connecticut have proved richer than a gold mine to those who have developed them. Lime- stone, marble, brown-stone, and flagging- stone are found in excellent quality and unlimited amount, and a large portion of the State leaves its borders annu- ally in this form of export. The suppl}^ of feldspar and other minerals has been developed as sharper demand for them has arisen. The beautiful southern shore of Connecticut, which holds countless pictures in every mile of its extent, has many harbors, and one, that of New London, has advantages beyond the others. There was not, however, in early years, sufficient agri- cultural wealth or other material support behind these harbors to build up any great foreign trade, beyond a moderate export of mules, live stock, and some food products to the West Lidies ; and, in later years, the railroad has been a channel sufficiently capacious to provide for the outflow and inflow of the wealth in whose production it has been so essential a factor in Connecticut. The time will come when the harbors of Connecticut will be a necessary vent for foreign trade, but it has not yet come. To an intending English colonist in 1630, con- sidering this oblong as an unbroken wilderness, there would have been in it two points of great PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF CONNECTICUT, 5 material advantage. One was the upper valley of the Connecticut, with its rich soil, its broad mead- ows, and its capacity for kixuriant vegetation ; and this garden spot was the breach to which the first assaulting party naturally directed its course. The other was the inviting haven at the mouth of the Thames River, apparently designed by nature for the site of a great commercial city ; and this was seized during the first decade. There were other minor advantages in other parts of the ter- ritory, such as the trade with the Indians for skins, or the pursuit of the fish with which Connecticut's waters and shore have always been stocked ; but these two spots, the upper Connecticut Valley and the site of the present city of New London, were those to which material interests most strongly turned the first immigration. Succeeding com- panies, finding these spots occupied, were filtered through them into the surrounding portions of the territory. Material interests, however, were far from being the only or controlling incentives to settlement. The New Haven company deliberately passed by the Thames River and sacrificed its preeminent commercial advantages, which must have been sufficiently evident to the shrewd merchant who was at the head of the enterprise ; and it is at least not an improbable notion that the sacrifice was grounded in the desire to give religion a place of recognized and permanent superiori|^to commerce f9^ OF THB ' ^ ^ « UNIVERSITY I 6 CONNECTICUT. in the new settlement. The first break from Mas- sachusetts into the Connecticut Valley was gov- erned by religious, as it was actuated by material, motives. To the Connecticut settler, religion was an essential part of daily life and politics, and logic was an essential part of religion. Town and church were but two sides of the same thing. Differences of opinion there must be, in church as well as in town matters ; and, when the respective straight lines had diverged sufficiently, a rupture became inevitable. The minority, unwilling to resist the majority or to continue in illogical union with it, preferred to begin a new plantation, even in a less hospitable location. Thus, every reli- gious dispute usually gave rise to a new town, un- til the faintest lines of theological divergence were satisfied ; while the original disputants, finding that a distance of even a few miles was enough to soften down differences which once seemed intol- erable, were able to live together in congregational unity and harmony. These three — Hartford, New Haven, and New London, and mainly the two former — were thus the openings through which immigration flowed in, and, under natural pressure, was distributed over the whole territory, even those less inviting por- tions of it which would have waited longer for settlement but that the pressure from behind made distribution easier than return. CHAPTER 11. JUEISDICTION OF THE CONNECTICUT TERRI- TORY. The claim of England to the jurisdiction of the territory included in Connecticut rested on the discoveries of the Cabots in 1497, and more espe- cially in 1498. This claim, however, was allowed to lie dormant until the organization of the Lon- don and Plymouth companies in 1606, when the territory now in Connecticut was included in the grant to the Plymouth Company. No effort was made to reduce this territory to possession. The Dutch were allowed to plant a colony at New Am- sterdam, and the only white men who adventured on Long Island Sound were occasional Dutch skippers. The first of these was Adrian Blok, who in i614 found the mouth of the Connecticut River, and explored the river as far north as the present site of Hartford. As the tides affect the Connecticut much less than they do the Hudson, the Dutch naturally gave the former the name of Varsche (or Fresh) River. Blok was merely a dis- coverer, and he sailed on to Narragansett Bay, leaving but a geographical impress on the terri- tory, whose importance to the Dutch lay only in its trade in peltries. .8 CONNECTICUT. In 1620, and without the original permission of the Plymouth Company, English immigration fixed its first grip on the New England territory. The Plymouth Company itself did none of the work of colonization. It gave or sold patents for colonies, and, after a reorganization, gave up its imbecile existence in 1635, and returned its charter to the king, having first carefully divided up the soil among its own members. The allotments which are of interest in our subject were those of the Duke of Richmond and the Earl of Carlisle, between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers ; and those of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Marquis of Plamilton, between tlie Connecticut River and Narragansett Bay. None of these grants was ever asserted or made troublesome to the colonists, with the exception of the Hamilton grant. The common story in our histories is that the Council of Plymouth in 1630 granted the territory now in Connecticut to the Earl of Warwick, and that he, in 1631, transferred it to Viscount Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and others, who were dis- posed to establish another Puritan colony in New England. They were detained in England by the approach of civil war ; but their agents, Winthrop at Boston and Fenwick at the mouth of the Con- necticut River, maintained their claims, and gave the settlers in the upper Connecticut Valley either a private or a tacit permission to enter their do- main. In 1662, with the consent of the surviving JURISDICTION OF CONNECTICUT TERRITORY. 9 patentees, the jurisdiction was transferred to the Connecticut colony, which could thus claim un- broken continuity of title from the beginning of English colonization in America. The insistence of Connecticut authorities on this chain of evidence was undoubtedly due in great measure to the desire to make out a title paramount to anything which the rival New Haven colony could offer, and to put the New Haven colonists into the legal position of original trespassers, whose defect of title could never be cured after the grant of the charter»in 1662. Even after this result had been attained, and New Haven had submitted to incorporation with Connecticut, another motive to continue the old claim was found in the claims of the Hamilton family and the colony's desire to antedate them with its own. The story above given made out an admirably harmonious title from beginning to end ; and it was natural that it should become the official Con- necticut account. The foundation of the whole account, the grant to Warwick, is altogether mythical ; no one has ever seen it, or has heard of any one who claims to have seen it. It is not mentioned even in the grant from Warwick to the Say and Sele patentees in 1631. In that document, " Robert, Earl of Warwick, sendeth greeting in our Lord God ever- lasting to all people unto whom this present writ- ing shall come." He "gives, grants, bargains, 10 CONNECTICUT. sells, enfeoffs, aliens, and confirms" to the Viscount Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, John Pym, John Hampden, and others, the soil from the Narragan- sett River to the Pacific Ocean, and all jurisdic- tion " which the said Robert, Earl of Warwick, now hath or had or might use, exercise, or enjoy." What jurisdiction he had, or whence he had ac- quired it, he is careful not to say ; the deed is a mere quitclaim, which warrants nothing, and does not even assert title to the soil transferred. In the Hamilton grant, on the contrary, the claim of title is carefully and fully stated. Why the War- wick transaction took this peculiar shape, why Warwick transferred, without showing title, a ter- ritory which the original owners granted anew to other patentees in 1635, are questions which are beyond conjecture. It is evident, however, that the New Haven colonists were until 1662 on an absolute equality with their brethren of Connecti- cut ; that all were legally trespassers ; and that the charter of 1662 could have no retroactive effect in validating the Say and Sele title, for that was a nullity. The charter of 1662 is the only legal title of Connecticut ; the only legal titles prior to it, the grants of 1635, were barred by pre- scription before the Hamilton heirs undertook to prosecute their claim. In yielding to the final junction. New Haven yielded to royal power, not to a better title enforced by law. The jurisdiction of Connecticut had a far better JURISDICTION OF CONNECTICUT TERRITORY. 11 title than could have been conferred by any charter ; and the titles of both Connecticut and New Haven stood on exactly the same footing. In 1630 the territory was a wilderness. The king of England had laid claim to it by virtue of the undisputed fact that Sebastian Cabot might possibly have caught a distant glimpse of it as he passed by the coast more than a century before. The king granted it to a company which had not yet either settled or granted it. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War in England, the territory was reduced to possession by immigrants, who quieted the claims of the Indians by contract, and enforced the con- tract by public force. The Civil War and its con- sequences upon royal authority lasted long enough to cover the time which Imman law takes as a title by prescription. When Charles II. returned, who could show a better title to the soil of Connecticut than the colonists themselves ? This could cover, at the best, only the title to the soil ; the civil jurisdiction is of more impor- tance. The first settlements, at Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield, were an irruption of subjects of the king of England into an unorganized and un- occupied territory, very much like the first settle- ments in the territory of Iowa, more than two centuries later. But there was one very great difference between the two cases : the Iowa settle- ment was an irruption of individuals ; the Con- necticut settlement was an irruption of organized 12 CONNECTICUT. towns. In Massachusetts, the original towns, or " plantations," were hardly to be taken as organ- ized governments ; and the advent of the charter government reduced them, and subsequent towns as well, to a condition of subordination. In Con- necticut, three fully organized Massachusetts towns passed out of the jurisdiction of any com- monwealth, and proceeded to build up a common- wealth of their own ; while in New Haven the original town and its successive allies entered their new locations without ever having owned connection with any commonwealth since leaving England. The commonwealth jurisdiction of Con- necticut is peculiar in that it was the product, in- stead of the source, of its town system. As a commonwealth, Connecticut has never lost the characteristics due to its origin. Although the commonwealth, by the royal charter of 1662, obtained a legal basis independent of the towns and superior to them in law, the towns have re- tained a marked individuality, and the common- wealth a narrowness of function, which indicate the original relations of both. When Connecticut undertook to push her claims in Wyoming and in Ohio, the instrument to which she instinctively turned was the town system, rather than the com- monwealth. And she still is, in many respects, a congeries of towns, though the commonwealth spirit has grown stronger with the years. Curious and worthy of study as is the New England town JURISDICTION OF CONNECTICUT TERRITORY. 13 system, there are few phases of it more worthy of study than the manner in which, in Connecticut, it succeeded in creating a commonwealth body for itself ; in pushing back the asserted boundaries of its neighbors ; and at last, when the royal power could no longer be evaded, in using the royal power to round out and complete its own form, as it could not have done itself without a fratricidal struggle with a sister colony. CHAPTER III. THE FIEST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT. DUEING the ten years after 1620, the twin col- onies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay had been fairly shaken down into their places, and had even begun to look around them for opportunities of extension. It was not possible that the fertile and inviting territory to the southwest should long escape their notice. In 1629, De Rasieres, an en- voy from New Amsterdam, was at Plymouth. He found the Plymouth people building a shallop for the purpose of obtaining a share in the wampum trade of Narragansett Bay ; and he very shrewdly sold them at a bargain enough wampum to supply their needs, for fear they should discover at Nar- ragansett the more profitable peltry trade beyond. This artifice only put off the evil day. Within the next three years, several Plymouth men, in- chiding Winslow, visited the Connecticut River, '' not without profit." In April, 1631, a Connecti- cut Indian visited Governor Winthrop at Boston, asking for settlers, and offering to find them corn and furnish eighty beaver skins a year. Win- throp declined even to send an exploring party. In FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT. 15 the midsummer of 1633, Winslow went to Boston to propose a joint occupation of the new territory by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay ; but the latter still refused, doubting the profit and the safety of the venture. Three months later, Plymouth undertook the work alone. A small vessel, under command of William Holmes, was sent around by sea to the mouth of the Connecticut River, with the frame of a trading house and workmen to put it up. When Holmes had sailed up the river as far as the place where Hartford was afterward built, he found the Dutch already in possession. For ten years they had been talking of erecting a fort on the Varsche River ; but the ominous and repeated appearance of New Englanders in the territory had roused them to action at last. John Van Corlear, with a few men, had been commissioned by Gover- nor Van Twiller, and had put up a rude earth- work, with two guns, within the present jurisdic- tion of Hartford. His summons to Holmes to stop under penalty of being fired into met with no more respect than was shown by the commandant of Rensselaerswyck to his challengers, according to the veracious Knickerbocker. Holmes declared that he had been sent up the river, and was going up the river, and furthermore he went up the river. His little vessel passed on to the present site of Windsor. Here the crew^ disembarked, put up and garrisoned their trading house, and then 16 CONNECTICUT. returned home. Plymouth had at least planted the flag far within the coveted and disputed terri- tory. In December of the following year, a Dutch force of seventy men from New Amsterdam ap- peared before the trading house to drive out the intruders. He must be strong who drives a Yan- kee away from a profitable trade ; and the attitude of the little garrison was so determined that the Dutchmen, after a few hostile demonstrations, de- cided that the nut was too hard to crack, and withdrew. For about twenty years thereafter, the Dutch held post at Hartford, isolated from Dutch support by a continually deepening mass of New Englanders, who refrained from hostilities, and waited until the apple was ripe enough to drop. With respect to the claims of the Indians, the attitudes of the two parties to the struggle were di- rectly opposite. The Dutch came on the strength of purchase from the Pequots, the conquerors and lords paramount of the local Indians. Holmes brought to the Connecticut River in his vessel the local sachems, who had been driven away by the Pequots, and made his purchases from them. The English policy will account for the unfriendly dis- position of the Pequots, and, when followed up by the tremendous overthrow of the Pequots, for Con- necticut's permanent exemption from Indian dif- ficulties. The Connecticut settlers followed a FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT. 17 straight road, buying lands fairly from the Indians found in possession, ignoring those who chiimed a supremacy based on violence, and, in case of re- sistance by the latter, asserting and maintaining for Connecticut an exactly similar title, — the right of the stronger. Those who claimed right received it ; those who preferred force were ac- commodated. One route to the new territory, by Long Is- land Sound and the Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633, by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years afterward. He found his way westward to the Connecticut River, and brought back most appetizing accounts of the upper Connecticut Valley ; and his reports seem to have suggested a way out of a serious dif- ficulty which had come to a head in Massachu- setts Bay. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its great- est poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight Massa- chusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and New- town (now Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several occasions ; and the assigned reasons are apparently so frivolous as to 2 18 CONNECTICUT. lead to the suspicion that some fundamental differ- ence was at the bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were " new-comers," and this slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement, in 1633, of a num- ber of strong men at these three towns, notably Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dor- chester, Watertown, and Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling : the two former led the way, in October, 1633, in establish- ing town governments under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less, the fun- damental feature of Massachusetts policy, — the limitation of office-holding and the elective fran- chise to church-members. The three towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposi- tion, a position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the circumstances. The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were War ham and Maverick ; of Newtown, Hooker and Stone ; of Watertown, Phillips. Haynes of New- town, Ludlow of Dorchester, and Pynchon of Roxbury, were the principal lay leaders of the half-formed opposition. Some have thought that Haynes was jealous of Governor Winthrop, Hooker of Cotton, and Ludlow of everybody. But the opposition, if it can be fairly called an opposition, was not so definite as to be traceable to any such personal source. The strength which marked the FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT, 19 divergence was due neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and charac- ter which marked the leaders of the minority. Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone were of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Hooker began to preach at Chelmsford in 1626, and was silenced for non-conformity in 1629. He then taught school, his assistant being John Eliot, afterward the apostle to the Indians ; but the chase after him became warmer, and in 1630 he retired to Holland and resumed his preaching. In 1632, he and Stone came to New England as pastor and teacher of the church at Newtown ; and the two took part in the migration to Hartford. Here Hooker became the undisputed ecclesiastical leader of Connecticut until his death in 1647. John Warham and John Maverick, both of Exeter in England, came to New England in 1630, as pastor and teacher of Dorchester. Maverick died while preparing to follow his church, but Warham set- tled with his parishioners at Windsor, and died there in 1670. George Phillips, also a Cambridge man, came to New England in 1630, as pastor of the church at Watertown. He took no part in the migration, but lived and died at Watertown. Fate seems to have determined that Wendell Phil- lips should belong to Massachusetts. Roger Ludlow was Endicott's brother-in-law. He came to New England in 1630, and settled at Dorchester. He was deputy governor in 1634, 20 CONNECTICUT. and seems to have been " slated," to use tlie modern term, for the governorship in the follow- ing year. But this private agreement among the deputies was broken, for some unknown reason, by the voters, who chose Haynes, perhaps as a less objectionable representative of the opposition. Ludlow complained so openly and angrily of the failure to carry out the agreement that he was dropped from the magistracy at the next election. He went at once to Connecticut, and was deputy governor there in alternate years until 1654. Incensed at the interference of New Haven to prevent his county, Fairfield, from waging an in- dependent warfare against the Dutch, he went to Virginia in 1654, taking the records of the county with him. It is not known when or where he died. Pynchon, the third lay leader of the oppo- sition, took part in the migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, founding the town of Springfield. At the May session of the Massachusetts Gen- eral Court in 1634, an application for "liberty to remove" was received from Newtown. It was granted. At the September session, the request was changed into one for removal to Connecticut. This was a very different matter, and, after long debate, was defeated by the vote of the Assistants, though the Deputies passed it. Various reasons were assigned for the request to remove to Con- necticut, — lack of room in their present locations, FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT. 21 the desire to save Connecticut from the Dutch, and " the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither ; " but the last looks like the strongest reason. In like manner, while the arguments to the contrary were those which would naturally suggest themselves, the weakening of Massachu- setts, and the peril of the emigrants, the conclud- ing argument, that ''the removing of a candle- stick " would be " a great judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession was the result of discord between two parties. Haynes was made governor at the next General Court. Successful inducements were offered to some of the Newtown people to remove to Boston, and some few concessions were made. But the migration which had been denied to the corporate towns had probably been begun by individuals. There is a tradition that some of the Watertown people passed this winter of 1634-5 at the place where Wethersfield now stands. In May, 1635, the Massachusetts General Court voted that lib- erty be granted to the people of Watertown and Roxbury taTCMove themselves to any place within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. In March, lp36, the secession having already been accom- plished, the General Court issued a " Commission to Several Persons to govern the people at Con- necticut." Its preamble reads : " Whereas, upon some reasons and grounds, there are to remove from this our Commonwealth and body of the 22 CONNECTICUT. Massachusetts in America divers of our loving friends and neighbors, freemen and members of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and other places, who are resolved to transport themselves and their estates unto the river of Connecticut, there to reside and inhabit ; and to that end divers are there already, and divers others shortly to go." This tacit permission was the only authorization given by Massachusetts ; but it should be noted that the unwilling permission was made more gracious by a kindly loan of cannon and ammuni- tion for the protection of the new settlements. If it be true that some of the Watertown peo- ple had wintered at Wethersfield in 1634-5, this was the first civil settlement in Connecticut ; and it is certain that, all through the following spring, summer, and autumn, detached parties of Water- town people were settling at Wethersfield. Dur-- ing the summer of 1635, a Dorchester party ap- peared near the Plymouth factory, and laid the foundations of the town of Windsor. In October of the same year, a party of sixty persons, includ- ing women and children, largely from Newtown, made the overland march and settled where Hart- ford now stands. Their journey was begun so late that the winter overtook them before they reached the river, and, as they had brought their cattle with them, they found great difficulty in- getting everything across the river by means of rafts. FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTICUT. 23 It may have been that the echoes of all these preparations had reached England, and stirred the tardy patentees to action. Daring the autumn of 1635, John Wintlirop, Jr., agent of the Say and Sele associates, reached Boston, with authority to build a large fort at the mouth of the Connecticut Rjver. He was to be " Governor of the River Connecticut " for one year, and he at once issued a proclamation to the Massachusetts emigrants, asking " under what riglit and preference they had lately taken up their plantation." It is said that they agreed to give up any la^nds demanded by him, or to return on liaving their expenses re- paid. A more dangerous influence, however, soon claimed Winthrop's attention. Before the winter set in, he had sent a party to seize the designated spot for a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. His promptness was needed. Just as his men had thrown up a work sufficient for defense and had mounted a few guns, a Dutch ship from New Amsterdam appeared, bringing a force in- tended to appropriate the same place. Again the Dutch found themselves a trifle late ; and their post at Hartford was thus finally cut off from effective support. This was a horrible winter to the advanced guard of English settlers on the upper Connecti- cut. The navigation of the river was completely blocked by ice before £he middle of November ; and the vessels which were to have brought their 24 CONNECTICUT winter supplies by way of Long Island Sound and the river were forced to return to Boston, leaving the Avretched settlers unprovided for. For a little while, some scanty supplies of corn were obtained from the neighboring Indians, but this resource soon failed. About seventy persons straggled down the river to the fort at its mouth. There they found and dug out of the ice a sixty-ton ves- sel, and made their way back to Boston. Others turned back on the way they had come, and strug- gled through the snow and ice to ''the Bay." But a few held their grip on the new territory. Subsisting first on a little corn bought from more distant Indians, then by hunting, and finally on ground-nuts and acorns dug from under the snow, they fought through the winter and held their ground. But it was a narrow escape. Spring found them almost exhausted, their unsheltered cattle dead, and just time enough to bring neces- sary supplies from home. The Dorchester people alone lost cattle to the value of two thousand pounds. The Newtown congregation, in October, 1635, found customers for their old homes in a new party from England ; and in the following June Hooker and Stone led their people overland to Connecticut. They numbered one hundred, with one hundred and sixty head of cattle. Women and children were of the party. Mrs. Hooker, who was ill, was carried on a litter ; and the jour- /^ V* OF THK '^ ^ i UNIVERSITY I FIRST SETTLEMENT^^^Q^^i^^i^^P^. 25 ney, of " about one hundred miles," occupied two weeks. Its termination was well calculated to dissipate the evil auguries of the previous winter. The Connecticut Valley in early June ! Its green meadows, flanked by wooded hills, lay before them. Its oaks, whose patriarch was to shelter their charter, its great elms and tulip-trees, were broken by the silver ribbon of the river; here and there were the wigwams of the Indians, or the cabins of the survivors of the winter ; and, over and through all, the light of a day in June welcomed the new-comers. The thought of aban- doning Connecticut disappeared forever. During the summer of 1636, the body of the church at Dorchester settled at Windsor, having Warham as its pastor. Maverick had died before the removal was completed. The Watertown people also completed their removal, having Henry Smith as pastor, Phillips remaining behind. Pyn- chon, with eight companions, settled at Springfield, just north of the boundary between Massachusetts and Connecticut. When the spring of 1637 had fairly opened, there were about eight hundred persons within the present limits of Connecticut, two hundred and fifty of whom were adult males and fighting men. Perhaps the " strong bent of spirit " to remove to a commonwealth where indi- viduality was not to be sacrificed to " steady hab- its " was not entirely confined to Newtown, Wa- tertown, and Dorchester. CHAPTER IV. THE INDIANS OF CONNECTICUT. The aborigines of Connecticut did not differ from other New England Indians so much as to demand any extended notice. They were not nu- merous ; tfle lowest and most probable estimate of their numbers is six or seven thousand, and the highest twenty thousand. The northeastern sec- tion of the territory was inhabited by the Nip- munks. The upper Connecticut separated the Tunxis Indians on its western banks from the Podunks on the eastern. To the south of both were the Wangunks. New Haven is now in the centre of the former territory of the Quinnipiacks. To the west of the Quinnipiacks were the Paugus- setts, and to the west of them a great number of scattered tribes, known generally by the names of their respective sachems or of the English towns in which they dwelt. All these tribes were alike unclean in their habits, shiftless in their mode of life, and much addicted to po wo wing, devil-worship, and darker immoralities, if we may trust the possibly hasty and prejudiced accounts of the early Puritan ob- THE INDIANS OF CONNECTICUT. 27 servers. The Indian rule, that all work is to be done by the women, was enforced in its full rigor ; but the correlative virtue of prowess in war was not so prominent in the men, who were rather prone to shout at a distance than to expose their lives to the hazards of battle. They had, how- ever, developed military science so far as to have become acquainted with the rudiments of fortifi- cation. It is not easy to say how far their con- structions deserved the name of forts, but they were numerous, and were an advance on the ordi- nary Indian methods of fighting. The Connec- ticut Indians were indebted for the advance, not to natural genius, but to their chronic terror of their lords or enemies, the Mohawks. The Five Nations of Iroquois in central New York had become the leading Indian power of eastern North America. Its original five mem- bers, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayu- gas, and Senecas, were increased by the addition of the Tuscaroras from North Carolina in 1712, and the confederacy was thereafter known as the Six Nations ; but, at all periods of its history, the Mohawks were so emphatically the leading mem- ber that their name was regularly put by synec- doche for the whole. The Connecticut Indians, at any rate, never stopped to discriminate mi- nutely between the various branches of the Six Nations, but, on the appearance of any of them, promptly fled with the panic-stricken cry, '' The 28 CONNECTICUT. Moliawks are coming ! " There seems to have been hardly the thought of resistance, when, every year, two elders of the Mohawks appeared in Connecticut, passing from village to village, col- lecting tribute, and announcing the edicts of the great council at Onondaga. To this exercise of supremacy they seem to have made but one excep- tion, the kindred tribe of the Pequots. The Indians of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and probably Massachusetts, were originally of one blood, perhaps divided into a few strong tribes. A few years before the arrival of the English, ac- cording to tradition, a sept of the Mohegan blood from New York, crossing the Hudson and moving eastward to the Connecticut River, passed south- ward and conquered a permanent home for them- selves on the shore of Long Island Sound, in the southeastern part of the present State. This ir- ruption split the Indian population into two parts. To the east of the Pequots were the Narragan setts, the powerful tribe of Miantonomoh and Canonchet, dwelling in Rhode Island, but claiming still some portion of the soil of Connecticut. They were sufficiently intact to make head against the Pe- quots, and waged continual war with them ; but, lacking the ferocity and fervor for war which war* a Pequot characteristic, they had difficulty in maintaining their position. To the west of the Pequots, the pressure of the strangers on one side. and the Mohawks on the other ground up the THE INDIANS OF CONNECTICUT. 29 Indians into that mass of petty tribes which has been referred to, none of which dared to offer re- sistance after the power of the Pequots had been once established, all being interested merely to es- cape the notice of their oppressors as far as pos- sible. Thus the Pequots, with but seven hundred fighting men, were able to overawe all the western tribes, while maintaining equal warfare with the Narragansetts, whose warriors are variously esti- mated at from one to five thousand. There are no annals of Indian diplomacy from which we may learn how the Six Nations and the Pequots avoided collision in the matter of supremacy over their tributaries; but it is not probable that either power was intent on establishing a right of ex- clusive extortion. Both were satisfied by the pay- ment of their respective tribute, and the Pequot irruption merely doubled the burden of the abori- ginal inhabitants. At the time of the English entrance to Connec- ticut, the grand sachem of the Pequots was Tato- bam, or Sassacus. One of his sagamores was Uncas, whose grandmother was the sister of the grandfather of Sassacus. Uncas had connected himself still more closely with the sachem's house by taking the daughter of Sassacus in marriage. He was Sagamore of Mohegan, the most impor- tant Pequot district. His courage, strength, and cunning were remarkable even among the Pe- quots ; and the relations between him and Sas* 30 CONNECTICUT. saciis soon became strained and finally broke. Un- able to resist the grand sachem, Uncas fled to the Narragansetts, was allowed to return, rebelled again, and was again defeated and fled. It was inevitable that the coming of the English should act as a wedge on this rift in the conquering tribe, and should make its downfall the surer. The Dutch had at first recognized the Pequots as lords paramount of the territory, and had made their purchases of land from them. But the Pe- quots, unable to restrain the savagery of their natures, had lain in wait for and killed some of their enemies at the Dutch trading-house, and had thus interfered very seriously with the course of trade. In retaliation, the Dutch had killed the father of Sassacus. Anxious to get rid of his troublesome neighbors, Sassacus had acquiesced in the invitation of Winthrop to furnish settlers for the Connecticut Valley. But when Holmes at last came, he brought back some of the old sa- chems, who had been expelled by the Pequots, and made his purchases of land from them. Further- more, a certain lewd and drunken ship-captain named Stone, from Virginia, having brought his vessel into the Connecticut River during the sum- mer of 1633, was taken for a Dutchman by the Pequots, who murdered him while he lay in a drunken sleep in his cabin. During the following year, Sassacus sent messengers who made a treaty with the government of Massachusetts Bay, by the THE INDIANS OF CONNECTICUT. terms of which many of the difficulties bet his tribe and the English were put out of sig The Pequots were to, allow the English to coloniz and trade within their borders ; were to give up the murderers of Stone ; and were to pay a tribute of wampum, a part of which was to be transferred by the English to the Narragansetts, so as to bring about a peace between these two ancient enemies without subjecting the haughty Pequot chief to the degradation of a personal appeal for cessation of hostilities. The terms were largely nominal. The English made no demand for those who had murdered Stone, and Sassacus paid none of the stipulated tribute and was asked for none. The murder of John Oldham, in 1636, first brought the English into collision with the Pe- quots. Oldham, with a crew of two boys and two Narragansett Indians, had been trading with a pinnace on the shore of the Pequot country, and had passed on to Block Island. Here he was killed by the Island Indians. The murder had hardly taken place when John Gallop, who was sailing from the Connecticut River to the east end of Long Island, found Oldham's vessel in posses- sion of Indians. He first fired duck-shot into the naked Indian crew until he had driven them under hatches, and then rammed Oldham's vessel until all but four of the Indians had jumped overboard and were drowned. Two surrendered, and he made sure of one of them by throwing him over- CONNECTICUT. X, As the sea was rising he took Oldham's .y into his vessel, and allowed the derelict to rift ashore with two of the Indians still in her hold. It is difficult to see how the Pequots were con- cerned in all this. But Governor Vane and his council, of Massachusetts Bay, in sending Endi- cott with an expedition to punish the Block Island- ers, assumed that the Pequots had harbored some of the murderers, and must be included in the punishment. No proof was offered to the in- dictment against the Pequots, who seem to have held the same place in the English mind that Habakkuk held in the Frenchman's, and to be "capable of anything." But Endicott gathered no laurels in his Pequot expedition. His fero- cious antagonists did not wish to fight, and could hardly be persuaded to fight. A few of them, and none of the English, were killed and wounded ; and the expedition, having satiated its wrath by burning the Indian wigwams and crops, returned to Boston. Enough had been done to range the Pequots against the English. As a choice of evils, Sassa- cus proposed to the Narragansetts a treaty of alli- ance against the foreigners, but this was thwarted by the influence of Roger Williams, who induced the Narragansetts to send ambassadors to Boston and conclude a treaty with the English. The Pe- quots were thus left to maintain alone their ancient THE INDIANS OF CONNECTICUT. 33 title, by courage, to their territory. They did not hesitate. The fort at Say brook, whose commander, Lieutenant Gardiner, had strongly disapproved Endicott's expedition, was first attacked. A forag- ing party was cut off, and several men were cap- tured and put to the torture. Other parties were similarly caught in ambuscades, and the fort was beleaguered through the whole winter. In the spring of 1637, the war was opened in the upper Connecticut Valley. The people of Wethersfield had agreed, in buying lands from Sequin, a friendly Indian, to allow him to remain within the town limits. The agreement was violated, and he was expelled. In revenge, he brought the Pequots down upon the little settlement. They almost took it by surprise, killed a number of the people, and inflicted considerable damage before they were driven off. Four days afterward, the successful Pequots sailed past the fort at Saybrook, waving the clothes of their victims and exhibiting two cap- tive girls. The Pequot war had fairly begun, and, in the nature of things, it could be ended only by the extermination of one party or the other. For this severe strain upon an infant colony, the Con- necticut colonists were indebted to the stupidity or willfulness of Governor Vane and his council. They must have appreciated Cromwell's subsequent es- timate of the governor. CHAPTER V. THE PEQUOT WAE. The Connecticut General Court met at Hart- ford May 1, 1637, the ninth meeting of that body which is on the records. It is not likely that it represented, as yet, more than eight hundred souls, though the proportion of fighting men in so young a colony must have been abnormally large. Its action was thorough-going. It resolved that there should be '' an offensiuc warr against the Pequoitt," and a draft of ninety men was ordered from the three towns, — forty-two from Hartford, thirty from Windsor, and eighteen from Wethersfield, — the whole to be under command of Captain John Mason, of Windsor. The minute distribution of the assessment of the requisition for stores upon the three towns, and the proviso that one half of the corn is to be baked into biscuit " if by any meanes they cann," are evidences of the poverty of the colony, and the resolution with which its rulers drove their demands upon its patriotism up to the highest possible point. It is certain that the people were nearly starving when they were thus called on for a full third of their able-bodied men. THE PEQUOT WAR. 35 Nine days after the call, May 10, the ninety men were ready, and, with seventy Mohegans under Uncas, who was thereafter the ally of the colonists, embarked on the river in three small vessels. Un- cas and his men soon found the voyage uncomfort- able, and begged to be allowed to make the trip to Saybrook by land. When Mason reached Say- brook, after five days of tedious sailing, he found Uncas there, exultant in the success of a battle with the Pequots, in which he had killed seven of his enemies and captured another, who had been living among the colonists as a spy. The spy could appeal to no law, civilized or savage, for safety ; but it is a repulsive business to read the punishment which was allowed to be inflicted. He was handed over to the mercy of Uncas and his Mohegans, who tortured and roasted him, and finally ate him. Lying wind-bound in front of the fort at Say- brook, Mason knew well that his motions were under the sharp eyes of Pequot scouts, and that his entry into the Thames River would find his enemies thoroughly prepared to meet him. Forti- fied by a council of war, and by an all-night prayer of the chaplain, Mr. Stone, he decided to disobey instructions, pass on to Narragansett Bay, and at- tack the Pequots from the eastward. The change of programme was no doubt watched carefully by the runners of Sassacus ; and when the three vessels had passed the only available landing place 86 CONNECTICUT, in the Pequot country, tbe Thames or Pequot River, the doomed tribe abandoned itself to a sense of triumphant security : the white men had not dared attack them after all, but had chosen the less formidable Indians of Block Island or the Bay as the objects of their revenge. The danger had passed them by. On Saturday, May 30, the little squadron came to anchor in Narragansett Bay, too late in the afternoon to effect anything that day. It is a witness of their conscientious exposition of the Puritan theory that the urgent need for prompt action in order to gain the advantage of a sur- prise could not induce them to devote Sunday to that purpose ; and then an unfavorable wind kept them from landing until Tuesday night. March- ing at once to the village of Miantonomoh, the Narragansett chief. Mason demanded his assistance against their common enemy. The chief consid- ered their enterprise a most laudable one, but thought the English too few to deal with such " great captains " as the Pequots. All that could be obtained was permission to pass through the Narragansett country, but a number of individual volunteers from the surrounding Indians joined the troops on their march. A few days' waiting would have increased their force by a Massachu- setts reinforcement under Captain Patrick, which had already reached Providence ; but Mason bal- anced the advantage of surprise against this in- THE PEQUOT WAR. 37 crease of force and pushed on. Thirteen men were sent back with the vessels to meet the main body at the Pequot River ; and the army now con- sisted of seventy-seven Englishmen, Uncas's Mohe- gans, and about two hundred exceedingly doubtful Narragansett auxiliaries, who were present rather as spectators and critics than as fighting men. One day's march carried the expedition nearly across the present State of Rhode Island, and on the next morning the eagerness of the Narragan- sett auxiliaries to act as a rear guard proved that the trail was becoming uncomfortably warm. Toward evening, when just north of the present town of Stonington, Mason called a halt, and was told by the Narragan setts that they were now close to one of the two great Pequot forts ; the other, the chief residence of Sassacus, being sev- eral hours' journey further on. Camp was formed, and the men slept on their arms, their outposts having been pushed near enough to the fort to hear the revelry of the Indian garrison, which, lasted until midnight. Before daybreak, June 5, the men were up and on the march. Two miles of an Indian trail brought them to the foot of a swelling hill, still known as Pequot Hill, near Groton. Here Uncas was called on for explanations, as there were no signs of the Pequots. He told Mason that the fort was at the top of the hill before him, and that the Narragansetts at the rear had now fallen into a condition of abject fright. '* Tell 38 CONNECTICUT. them not to fly," said Mason, " but stand behind, at what distance they please, and see now whethei Englishmen will fight." Underbill with part of the men on the southerr slope, and Mason with the rest on the opposite side, stole cautiously up the hill. There were nc sentinels, and the garrison was still sound asleep As the assailants came within a rod of the pali- sade, there was a bark from an Indian cur withir it, and some Pequot warrior, perhaps starting uf from a dream, called out " Ovvanux ! Owanux ! ' (Englishmen.) Still there was no general alarm within the fort until the assaulting party fired 8 volley through the palisade, which was answered by a terrified yell from the awakened garrison, The piles of bushes which served for gates were torn down, and the English swarmed through intc the fort, but still the Pequots remained within their wigwams. Mason, after entering, stood in the main street and saw not an Indian in it to the other side of the fort. Every wigwam which was entered, however, became the stage for a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. Some of the Pequots began to shoot from the wigwam doors ; and Mason, shouting " We must burn them," touched a fire- brand to the mats which covered a neighboring hut. The fire, fanned by a rising northeaster, spread through the fort ; Underbill on the other side aided it with gunpowder ; and soon the at- tacking party was forced to hurry out of the fur- THE PEQUOT WAR. 39 nace heat. There was no such privilege for the 1 1.1 ted Peqiiots. In an hour, from four to six liiin- (Ired of them were roasted to death, seven being taken prisoners, and seven breaking through the line and escaping. From one hundred and fifty to two hundred of the Indians were warriors ; the rest were old men, women and children. It is true that two of Mason's party were killed, and about twenty wounded, in the whole struggle, but many of the recorded casualties bear strong testimony to the disadvantages under which the Indians fought. Some of the men were saved from arrow wounds by their neck-cloths : when so slight a buckler was sufficient, the force of the weapon could not have been very terrible. Sim- ilarly, a piece of cheese in the pocket of another was enough to intercept an arrow in its deadly flight. In recounting the subsequent attack upon the retreating party. Underbill contemptuously says that the Pequots fought with the Mohegans and Narragansetts in such a manner that neither would have killed seven men in seven years. The arrow was shot into the air at sucli an elevation as to drop on an adversary, if the adversary had not sufficient forethought to step out of the way ; and each arrow was retained until the result of its predecessor was ascertained. The English regu- larly avoided the weapon, then picked it up and broke it, and thus gradually exhausted the ammu- nition of the enemy. Savages though they were, 40 CONNECTICUT. it is pitiful to think of human beings, locked up in a fuinace by a circle of guns and keen-tempered swords, and forced to rely on such weapons as the fallacious Indian arrow. And yet to the last the Pequots crawled up to the paHsade and shot their impotent bolts at their inaccessible foe. Mason's thorough-going massacre of men, wo- men and children has been compared to Arnold's butchery at New London, long afterward, to Ma- son's manifest disadvantage, since Arnold at least did not burn the village, drive the women and children back into the flames, and roast them in the ashes of their homes. The comparison is un- fair. Arnold had not the slightest reason to ap- prehend from the women and children of New London such treatment as Mason knew that the Lidian squaws and children would mete out to his men if they were defeated and captured. In the gray of the opening morning, while Indian men and women, hardly to be distinguished from one another by their dress and appearance, were vying with one another in the ferocity of their resist- ance, it was practically impossible for Mason's men to make distinction. To say this is not to assert that they were under a controlling desire to make such a distinction. On the contrary, probably not a man of them but was there under the religious confidence that the Pequots were acting the part of the Canaanites in resisting the children of Israel, and that a similar fate was THE PEQUOT WAR. 41 their proper portion. In this they probably dif- fered from Benedict Arnold. Much as we may regret that Endicott's unpardonable raid had de- cided that Sassacus was to be the enemy of the colonists, and the disreputable Uncas their friend and ally, this decision, when reached, had no pos- sible result but the complete overthrow of the Pe- quots. It is easy to talk of sparing non-combat- ants, but not easy to apply it to a case in which the non-combatants insist on fighting to the death. Nevertheless, it is a truth that there is no feature in the history of the commonwealth which is more unpleasant reading than the conduct of the Pequot war from its causeless outbreak down to its con- clusion. Hiring some of his generous Narragansett allies to carry the wounded. Mason now began a retreat to his vessels, which were just sailing into what is now New London harbor, but half a dozen miles away. By this time, nearly the whole remaining power of the Pequot tribe had gathered at the ruins of the fort. The chroniclers calmly state the details of the ecstasy of rage into which the sight of their slaughtered comrades threw them ; they note with a curious interest, as if speaking of the almost human affection of a she -bear robbed of her whelps, how the Pequots stamped, shrieked, tore their hair, and finally rushed down the hill to charge the rear of the retiring column. But — alas for all excuses for the expedition ! — they also 42 CONNECTICUT. note that a rear guard of a dozen men was suffi- cient to repulse all the assaults of two tliirds of the whole Pequot power. The English force reached the vessels without difficulty, finding there Captain Patrick and the Massachusetts con- tingent. Putting the wounded on the ships, the uninjured men returned in triumph by land to Saybrook. The last council of the Pequot nation was held on the day following the capture of the fort. It is not difficult to imagine the feeling of the par- ticipants. They had proved, even to themselves, that it was impossible for them to resist the stran- gers in the field ; and it seems to have been as im- possible for them to conceive the notion of surren- der. Having first put to death every relative of Uncas within their reach, they came to a Roman resolution. The route by which they had origi- nally entered Connecticut was now blocked by the new English towns ; but there was a possible road of return along the Sound, where there were as yet no settlements. Burning their villages and crops, they set out on their desperate venture. Thirty of the men, with many of the women and children, soon abandoned it and returned to their old home, where they took refuge in a swamp. Toward the end of June, a Massachusetts party of one hundred and twenty men under Stoughton was guided to their hiding place by the Narragan- setts, who had not ventured to attack them, but THE PEQUOT WAR. 43 said they were '' holding them " for the English. The Pequots met their fate calmly and without resistance. All the men were put to death in cold blood with the exception of two, who prom- ised to guide the party to the hiding place of Sas- sacus ; and even these, proving unwilling to fulfill their bargain, were subsequently killed. Thirty- three of the eighty women were presented to the Indian allies ; the remainder were sent to Massa- chusetts and sold as slaves. The main body of the tribe pursued their march for the Hudson under Sassacus and Mononotto. While crossing the Connecticut, they came upon three white men in a canoe, killed them after a stout resistance, and hung their bodies on the trees upon the shore. After passing Saybrook, they were driven by lack of supplies to take a route close to the shore, in order to dig shell-fish. Such circumstances were not favorable for a forced march ; the daily journeys grew shorter ; and that keen-scented hound, Uncas, was on their track. Stoughton's men had joined Mason, and the com- bined force had taken ship at Saybrook to pursue by the Sound, while Uncas and his men searched the shore. Stragglers from the main body were occasionally met, and one incident will indicate their fate. Near Guilford, a Pequot chief with a few men was sighted. Escaping from view for a few minutes, the fugitives hid at the end of the cape which juts out from the eastern side of the 44 CONNECTICUT. harbor. Uncas searched the opposite side of the harbor, but sent part of his men to search the eastern cape. Driven from their refuge, the Pe- quots swam across the harbor and were shot as they landed by the Mohegans. Uncas cut off the head of the Pequot chief and lodged it in the branches of an oak, where it hung for years, giv- ing the place the local name of Sachem's Head. About the time when the pursuers had reached the place where the town of Fairfield w^as after- wards planted, a Pequot was captured who was found willing, in return for life, to engage to kill or betray Sassacus. He kept his agreement. He joined the main body, and, when suspected and forced to flee, brought back word that the main body of the Pequots had taken post in a swamp, the stronghold of a local sachem, near Greenfield Hill. The untiring pursuers set out at once for the place, some twenty-five miles away, found it, and undertook to surround the swamp. There were really two swamps, a larger and a smaller, separated by a neck of firm ground covered with bushes. After a hand-to-hand struggle, the be- siegers succeeded in cutting down the bushes and reducing the coverts to one, which their numbers were sufficient to surround efficiently. A call for surrender was then sent in. It was accepted by the local tribe on whose hospitality the Pequots had forced themselves, and by the women and children of the Pequots, so that the number of the THE FEQUOT WAR. 45 besieged was reduced from three hundred to one hundred. Those who were left were the picked men of the tribe. They saw before them the strangers who had suddenly flung them from their supremacy to their present position, and they had a savage preference of death to surrender. They rushed so furiously on the messenger that the English found difficulty in rescuing him. All night long they crept up to the border of the swamp and shot their ineffectual arrows at the besiegers ; and in the gray of the next morning they made their last burst for freedom. In a heavy fog they rushed on that part of the English line commanded by Patrick, and the fight at once be- came so furious that the rest of the English force had to be brought up to Patrick's assistance. In the confusion, about seventy of the hundred Pe- quots burst through and got off ; but many of them were found dead in the pursuit. The subsequent course of the survivors is not known. There is a tradition that they made their way to the moun- tainous region of western North Carolina, and that, forty years afterward, the intelligence of King Philip's war brought them or their children as far north as Virginia, on their way back to strike another blow at the English, when they were stopped by hearing of Philip's death. Sassacus and Mononotto had left their tribe before the swamp fight, either overwhelmed with unpopularity, or unable to spur the remainder of 46 CONNECTICUT, the tribe to the necessary celerity of movement. Their party of thirty or forty men escaped to the Mohawks ; but their new hosts put them all to death, sending their scalps to the English to relieve them from further anxiety. Only Mononotto es- caped, and it is not known what became of him. His wife, with her children, was among the cap- | tives at the swamp. It is pleasant to record that she had been very kind to the two captured Eng- lish girls, and that Governor Winthrop gave di- rections that she should be treated with corre- sponding kindness. All the prisoners, even in- cluding the wife of Mononotto, were made slaves, some being kept in Connecticut, and others sent to Massachusetts or the West Indies. They proved, however, most unsatisfactory slaves, and their servitude was in almost every case soon ter- minated by death. The downfall of the Pequots inured largely to the benefit of Uncas. Many of the original tribe took membership in the Mohegan branch, though some preferred to join the Narragansetts or the Long Island Indians. It was not long before the jealous Narragansetts called Uncas to account be- fore the equally jealous colonists for harboring Pequots to such an extent as to make his own power a source of possible danger. An investiga- tion showed that there were still at large some two hundred Pequots, half of which number were given to Uncas and the rest to the Narragansett THE PEQUOT WAR. 47 chiefs. Late in 1638, the delicate negotiation was closed by a treaty between the Connecticut dele- gates, Miantonomoh for the Narragansetts, and Uncas. The two high contracting Indian parties were to retain their respective Pequots, paying an annual tribute for them and incorporating them into their tribes. Connecticut was to have all the territory formerly occupied by the Pequots, and was to act as umpire in any quarrel between Un- cas and Miantonomoh. The former lords of the soil had disappeared, and the stranger had taken their place. The tripartite treaty of 1638 settled the su- premacy of the English for the future. Purchases of lands from the Indians went on with increasing frequency until prohibited by the general court in 1663. Even Uncas was unwary enough to make such transfers ; and in one of them, in 1640, in return for " five and a half yards of trucking cloth, with stockings and other things," he is said to have transferred to the commonwealth his whole territory, covering the whole northern por- tion of New London County, with the southern portion of Tolland and Windham counties. The Mohegans, however, insisted that the transaction was only a covenant to sell their lands to no white men without first giving the commonwealth an opportunity to buy, and their claims were a long- standing source of difficulty. Miantonomoh was not satisfied with the treaty 48 CONNECTICUT. of 1638. It is not probable that he would have been permanentl}^ satisfied with any treaty which left the parvenu Uncas in the position of a great chief. An attack made by Uncas upon a chief related to Miantonomoh furnished an opportune casus belli. With a discretion worthy of a more highly civilized monarch, Miantonomoh postponed the declaration of war to the more urgent neces- sity of making war. The whole power of the Narragansetts was secretly set in motion for the Mohegan country. Uncas was not asleep. His runners saw the host of the enemy crossing a ford, and carried the intelligence to their chief at his fort near the present city of Norwich. When the Narragansetts found the lair of the Mohegan chief, they found that they had to deal with the whole strength of his tribe, which he had had time to call in. Uncas had felt himself strong enough to ad- vance a few miles, though he had but half the force of his enemy, for he relied with confidence on the mingling of unscrupulous treachery and headlong courage which had been the Pequot title to the soil from the beginning. He signaled for a parley as soon as the Narragansetts came within hearing, and, meeting the Narragansett chief be- tween the lines, appealed to him to prevent a needless effusion of blood by a single combat of the leaders. Miantonomoh rejected the pi'oposal, perhaps with some contempt, and Uncas at once THE PEQUOT WAR. 49 gave the signal for which his men had been wait- ing, by dropping prone upon the ground. His men instantly poured a flight of arrows upon the Narragansetts, and followed it by a charge, which tineas rose and headed. The battle lasted but a moment ; the Narragansetts fled, almost without striking a blow ; and Miantonomoh, deserted by his people and over-weighted by an English corse- let, was caught, after a long chase, by Uncas and one of his sachems. The captive kept a stolid si- lence, refusing to beg for mercy, even by gestnre. The tender mercies of Uncas would doubtless have been swift to visit Miantonomoh but for one circumstance. The Rhode Island settlers were not forgetful of the benefits which they had re- ceived at the hands of the Narragansetts ; and one of them, Gorton, of Warwick, sent Uncas a violent message, threatening him with English vengeance if he injured Miantonomoh. Uncas, unable to dis- criminate clearly between English sectaries or to balance the respective power of white faces, carried his prisoner to Hartford for trial. The governor and magistrates referred him to the commissioners of the united colonies, who were to meet at Boston in the following September. Until then, Mianto- nomoh remained at Hartford. The commissioners, much as they dreaded Mian- tonomoh, did not see their way clear to condemning him to death. In the emergency they summoned into council five of the delegates to a synod then 50 CONNECTICUT. sitting at Boston. These counselors rode rough- shod over the scruples which had given pause to the lay mind. To them the Narragansett vras a Philistine, an Amalekite, who was of necessity- guilty. They decided that he must die, and the commissioners acquiesced in the decision. They directed the Connecticut authorities to give him up to Uncas for execution outside of the common- wealth's jurisdiction, to detail witnesses to see that all should be done in order, and to defend Uncas against any threatened vengeance for the act. The most shocking attendant circumstance is the fact that the announcement of the sentence was postponed until the Connecticut commissioners had safely reached Hartford, for the reason that Mian- tonomoh himself had given notice that his people intended to capture them on the way and hold them as hostages for his safety. It is no wonder that so dangerous a chief tain should find no mercy. The Narragansett chief was delivered to the custody of Uncas, two Englishmen joining the party to be witnesses to the execution. When the Mohegans had reached the scene of the battle near Norwich, Uncas gave a signal to his brother, Wa- wequa, whose place was just behind the captive. He at once sunk his hatchet into Miantonomoh's brain, and death followed instantly. Uncas de- voured a piece of flesh cut from the dead man's shoulder, declaring it the sweetest meat he had ever eaten. THE PEQUOT WAR. 51 I The only serious diflBculties with Indians there- after were in the southwest, and were really off- I shoots from the continual troubles between the j Dutch and the Indians. There were several mur- ders and savage assaults, the most notable victim being Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, who had settled near Stamford, and was killed, with some seventeen others, in a night attack by the Indians. The Narragansetts seem to have taken no concerted part in this border warfare. They had come to despair of making head against the whites ; and their hopes of revenge were con- centrated on Uncas and his tribe, upon whom they made repeated attacks. Their only results were renewed and increased fines and tribute imposed by the white supporters of Uncas. About 1658 these attacks ceased, and the Narragansetts re- signed themselves to their fate. The chiefs to whom Pequots had been assigned, and especially Uncas, were so greedy and tyran- nical in their rule that the conquered people began to drift away from them and form scattered and illegal communities. One or two of their new chiefs showed themselves good friends of the Eng- lish ; and in 1655 the New England commissioners, to Uncas's unconcealed disgust, consented to a re- organization of the Pequots into two tribes under chieftains of their own blood, Hermon Garret and Cassasinamon. In 1667 the colony established a reservation for Cassasinamon's tribe in the present 52 CONNECTICUT. township of Ledyard, near Groton ; and in 1683 a settlement was assigned to the other tribe in North Stonington. The original force of the Pequot has been persistent enough to carry their descendants, after a fashion, through the intervening years in which the subject tribes have disappeared. In 1850 the Ledyard settlement held 989 acres, and the North Stonington settlement 240, with a mon- grel population of twenty-eight and fifteen persons respectively. In 1880 the county of New London still held the largest proportion of the Connecti- cut " Indians," 147 out of a total of 255 in the State. As the record of Indian difficulties ends with the death of Miantonomoh, the record of Indian deca- dence begins. Individuals, under the tacit or ex- press authorization of the general court, bought lands of the Indian proprietors ; and the early town records begin with deeds given by a number of sachems, whose unutterable names are only a little less awe-inspiring than the hieroglyphics by which they are indicated, transferring their lands to whites for the pettiest considerations. Real property titles in the State are traced back to these Indian deeds. When a tribe had entirely gotten rid of the inheritance, its few remaining members drifted off to other parts of the country, or became a town charge as paupers. But the general court was careful so to limit these trans- fers as not to drive the few dangerous tribes to THE PEQUOT WAR. 53 desperation, and the good results were seen in the outbreak of King Philip's war in 1675. The Connecticut Indians left the colony free to bend all its energies to the assistance of the sister col- onies. Even the Pequots and Mohegans were faithful allies and soldiers, and enjoyed the Indian luxuries of seeing the final overthrow of the Nar- ragansetts, and of executing Canonchet, the son of Miantonomoh. Uncas died about 1683. Two of his alleged descendants were living in 1800. His tribe and its successive chiefs seem to have found a fatal fas- cination in the process of land transfer, which they never could master. Drunken sachems made trans- fers of land which was really the common property of the tribe ; or the tribe, having a well-founded apprehension of the sachem's weakness for strong drink, made clumsy attempts to make trust deeds of their lands to white men in whom they confided, while the trustees considered these instruments as transfers of the fee simple. The result was abun- dant litigation ; and some of the commonwealth diflBculties arising from it will be considered here- after. In 1721 a committee of the general court 3xamined and decided on these transfers, reserving some 5,000 acres to the Mohegans, and making the cract inalienable so long as a single Mohegan ihould survive. This arrangement was practi- ally confirmed by royal commissions in 1737 and 1743j on appeal by the Indians. The tribe sent 54 CONNECTICUT. many of its number into the American army dur- ing the Revohition, and some eighteen o-f them were killed. In 1786 a few of the survivors, with other Connecticut Indians, went to the Oneida country, in New York, and there established the Brothertown tribe. There remained to the tribe in 1850 some 2,300 acres of its reservation at Montville, with some sixty persons living on it, and about the same number scattered in other parts of the country. However we may discredit the accounts given by the first settlers of Indian immorality, it is im- possible to exaggerate their subsequent degrada- tion. Ignorant, poverty-stricken, unclean, drunken, and licentious to the lowest degree, the smaller Indian tribes disappeared with startling rapidity. In 1680 there were but five hundred warriors left in the whole colony. In 1774 there were only eight left in Greenwich, nine in Norwalk, and none in Stamford. There is not now a drop of pure Indian blood in the State. The so-called In- dians are the progeny of two centuries of irregular intercourse between Indians, negroes, mulattoes, and whites. Efforts have not been wanting to civilize or evangelize the race, but they have been of little avail. Pierson, Fitch, and Barber preached to them with hardly any perceptible result ; Gookin i and John Eliot entered the colony for the same purpose, but withdrew defeated; and the only THE PEQUOT WAR. 65 effort which ever came to anything like success met it outside of Connecticut. Eleazar Wheelock began preaching at Lebanon in 1735. In 1762 his Indian school numbered twenty, and he went to England to raise funds for it, developing it into what became Dartmouth College. Among his Connecticut pupils he had received in 1743 a Mo- hegan aged twenty, who took the name of Samson Occom. After an irregular education and service as teacher on Long Island and elsewhere, Occom was ordained in 1759 by the presbytery of Suffolk, L. I., and became a successful preacher. He stands out as about the only civilized product of Connecticut Indian origin ; and even he occasion- ally relapsed into intoxication, to his own bitter repentance. He made a part of the Brothertown tribe, and died among its members in 1792. There is little room or excuse for romance in the Indian history of the commonwealth ; and it has seemed best to bring it down to its conclusion at once, in order to confine the subsequent story of the commonwealth to the history of the dom- inant race. CHAPTER VL THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. When the Pequot war broke out, there were but three English settlements within the present area of Connecticut. Leaving Massachusetts, the Connecticut River flows to the southwest and then to the southeast, forming two sides of a very ob- tuse and irregular angle. At the apex of this angle, and on the western side of the river, was planted the town of Newtown (the present capital city of Hartford). On the same side of the river were Dorchester (Windsor), a few miles above Hartford, and Watertown (Wethersfield), a few miles below Hartford. To the north, and just be- yond the Massachusetts boundary line, was Aga- wam (Springfield), Pynchon's settlement; but it was not known for some years whether it was in or beyond the jurisdiction of the mother colony. Until this was ascertained, this town was taken and deemed to be a part of Connecticut. The first settlers had no notion of leaving government behind them when they left Massachusetts. The migration took place under direction of eight persons, headed by Roger Ludlow and William THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 57 Pynchon, acting under the commission from the Massachusetts General Court, which was to be in force for only one year. By the time it expired, the new colony had begun its own system of gov- ernment. The meeting of the first legislative body, the " Corte," was held at Newtown, April 26, 1636. The three migrating towns at first retained even their Massachusetts names, and this inchoate com- monwealth government was little more than a consequence of the Massachusetts commission. It was not until February 21 of the next year that the name of Hartford was substituted for that of Newtown, that of Wethersfield for Watertown, and that of Windsor for Dorchester. The name of Hartford was probably meant to commemorate the birthplace of Mr. Stone, Hertford, near Lon- don. Windsor was taken from its English nam.e- sake ; and Wethersfield was named from Wethers- field in Essex, England, the birthplace of one of the leading men of the settlement, John Talcott, commonly called " Tailcoat " in the records. For a year the court met at the three towns in turn, two magistrates from each town making up its number, except when Pynchon was present and raised the number to seven. Like all the com- monwealth legislatures of New England, this one exercised both legislative and judicial functions, taking from the latter its title of the " Corte," afterwards the " General Court," as in the Massa- 58 CONNECTICUT. chn setts charter. For the first year its proceed- mgs were confined to the prevention of the trade in muskets with the Indians, the enforcement of military drill, the regulation of swine and other animals, the appointment of constables, some pro- bate business, and one suit at law, that of a land claimant against the people of Wethersfield. On May 1, 1637, the legislature, now first called the General Court, met at Hartford in a form more fitting for a separate commonwealth. In addition to the six magistrates there were now present nine " committees," or deputies, three from eacli town. Hooker, in his letter to Winthrop, states that the '' committees " were chosen by the towns ; that they met at Hartford, elected the six magis- trates, and gave them an oath of office. The mi- gratory commission from Massachusetts was thus supplanted by a new government, deriving its authority directly from the towns.. In the dis- tinction between deputies and magistrates, slight at first, there was the germ of the commonwealth's subsequent bi-cameral system. Springfield was represented occasionally during 1637-38, and her affairs were considered to be under the jurisdiction of the new colony. For the next two years Spring- field is neither represented nor referred to, the general court confining its attention to the other three towns. On June 2, 1641, the Massachusetts General Court recognized Springfield, on petition therefrom, as one of its towns, and appointed com- THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 59 niissioners to define the boundary line between the two colonies. The General Court, under its new constitution, at once assumed a wider range of action. Its first meeting declared war against the Pequots ; its second, June 2, 1637, ordered a draft of thirty men *'to sett downe in the Pequoitt Countrey and River in place convenient to mayntaine o^ right y* God by Conquest hath given to vs." At the meeting June 26, it was decided that Haynes and Ludlow should " parle with the bay [Massachu- setts] about o' settinge downe in the Pequoitt Countrey." For Massachusetts had advanced a claim to the Pequot soil, based partly on the ex- ceedingly hazy geography of the time, and partly on conquest ; while Connecticut had a keen per- ception that this section was essential to her com- monwealth's development, and meant to hold it. In the end her determination prevailed, and she still keeps the Pequot country. It would hardly be too strong to say that the establishment of the town and of the church was coincident : the universal agreement in religion made town government and church government but two sides of the same medal, and the same persons took part in both. In fact, the three orig- inal settlements had entered the new territory not only as completely organized towns, but as com- pletely organized churches, only one (Watertown) having left its minister behind. The original 60 CONNECTICUT. church of Watertown is therefore still in Massa- chusetts ; the original churches of Cambridge (Newtown) and Dorchester are now in Hartford and Windsor. For nearly a century (until 1727) the same persons in each town discussed and de- cided ecclesiastical and civil affairs indifferently, acting as a town or a church meeting. The same body laid the taxes, called the minister, and pro- vided for his salary. When the gradual recogni- tion of other sects reduced the Congregational order from its exclusive to a merely predominant position in the commonwealth, a trace of the old system remained in the Congregational churches in the dual control of the " church and society " in each congregation, — the former, composed of church-members, having ecclesiastical jurisdiction ; the latter, composed of pew-holders and contribu- tors, having a financial and administrative control, and joint action of the two being usually neces- sary. The " society " represents the former town meeting. The Connecticut churches agreed with those of Massachusetts in their Congregational system ; and their pastors and teachers were called upon again and again to make the journey through the wilderness to Boston, in order to take part in the synods made necessary by the vexed questions of Puritan belief and practice. Connecticut, how- ever, did not agree with Massachusetts in making church-membership a prerequisite to voting and | holding office. In this omission, it maintained THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 61 t!iG complete independence both of its churches and of its towns ; but it gave rise to many of its subsequent ecclesiastical difficulties. It was largely a dispute on this point that had sent the first set- tlers into the wilderness, and the original three towns would undoubtedly have insisted on local freedom in this respect. When new towns were formed, offshoots from the first three, it was nat- ural in the eyes of both town and colony that this freedom should be continued to them, and none of them desired any ecclesiastical restriction on the right of suffrage. Those who desired such an ar- rangement went into the New Haven jurisdiction, of which it was an essential part. The independence of the town was a political fact which has colored the whole history of the commonwealth, and, through it, of the United States. Even in Massachusetts, after the real be- ginning of government, the town was subordinate to the colony ; and, though the independence of the churches forced a considerable local freedom there, it was not so fundamental a fact as in Con- necticut. Here the three original towns had in the beginning left commonwealth control behind them when they left the parent colony. They had gone into the wilderness, each the only organized political power within its jurisdiction. Since their prototypes, the little tuns of the primeval German forest, there had been no such examples of the perfect capacity of the political cell, the ''town," 62 CONNECTICUT. for self-government. In Connecticut it was the towns that created the commonwealth ; and the consequent federative idea has steadily influenced the colony and State alike. In Connecticut, the governing principle, due to the original constitu- tion of things rather than to the policy of the commonwealth, has been that the town is the re- siduary legatee of political power ; that it is the State which is called upon to make out a clear case for powers to which it lays claim ; and that the towns have a primd facie case in their favor wherever a doubt arises. All this is so like the standard theory of the relations of the States to the federal government that it is necessary to notice the peculiar exact- ness with which the relations of Connecticut towns to the commonwealth are proportioned to the re- lations of the commonwealth to the United States. In other States, power runs from the State up- wards and from the State downwards ; in Connec- ticut, the towns have always been to the common- wealth as the commonwealth to the Union. It was to be the privilege of Connecticut to keep the notion of this federal relation alive until it could be made the fundamental law of all the common- wealths in 1787-89. In this respect, the life prin- ciple of the American Union may be traced straight back to the primitive union of the three little settlements on the bank of the Connecticut River. All this, however, may be left to the THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 63 chapter on the Convention of 1787. The point in question here is the introduction of the democratic element into the American system, and the claims of Connecticut to the credit or responsibility for it. The first constitution of Connecticut — the first written constitution, in the modern sense of the term, as a permanent limitation on governmental power, known in history, and certainly the first American constitution of government to embody the democratic idea — was adopted by a general assembly, or popular convention, of the planters of the three towns, held at Hartford, January 14, 1638 (9). The common opinion is that democ- racy came into the American system through the compact made in the cabin of the Mayflower, though that instrument was based on no political principle whatever, and began with a formal ac- ' knowledgment of the king as the source of all authority. It was the power of the crown " by virtue " of which " equal laws " were to be en- acted, and the " covenant " was merely a make- shift to meet a temporary emergency: it had not a particle 'of political significance, nor was democracy an impelling force in it. It must be admitted that the Plymouth system was acci- dentally democratic, but it was frorcL thn ab^e»ca, of any great need for govei:qamenl7f^r for care to preserve homogeneity in religion, not from po- litical purpose, as in Connecticut. It was a pas- 64 CONNECTICUT. sive, not an active system ; and it cannot be said to have influenced other American common- wealths. Another though less prevalent opinion is, that the first democratic commonwealth was the mother colony of Massachusetts Bay. The intensely democratic feeling subsequently devel- oped in Massachusetts has been reflected on her early history, and has given it a light which never belonged to it. On the contrary, it is not difficult to show that the settlement of Connecticut was it- self merely a secession of the democratic element from Massachusetts, and that the Massachusetts freemen owed their final emancipation from a the- ocracy to the example given them by the eldest daughter of the old commonwealth. He who studies carefully the history of Massa- chusetts from 1629 until 1690 will see that there was a constant struggle in that colony between two conflicting forces, and that its earlier phases were coincident and complicated with the Connec- ticut secession. The better blood of the colony was determined to establish a privileged class of some sort; and the bulk of the fi-eemen, instinc- tively inclined to democracy, found it difficult to resist the claims of blood, wealth, and influence, backed by the pronounced support of the church. For the ministers of the colony, in spite of their evidently conscientious wish to separate church and state, seem to have had no notion of the real boun- daries between the two, and were constantly in THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 65 favor of measures which tended straight to the establishment of an oligarchy. Whenever the dominant class desired to overcome the rising op- position of the commons, the readiest and surest means was to offer to submit the question to the j decision of the "elders," or ministers. The com- mons never ventured to refuse ; and the ministers J never failed to decide in accordance with the I wishes of the dominant class. The expressions of ! dissenting writers, as to the " spiritual tyranny " I in early Massachusetts, must be taken always with iyery large allowance. Ecclesiastical punishments i were not severe, according to the universal stand- ard of the times ; and the result of hostile research seems curiously inadequate to the indignation : which has been spent in it. But one must admit that the early Massachusetts system, whatever else it may have been, was not even meant to be a democracy. "Democracy," said Cotton, the spokesman of the dominant class, " I do not con- ceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth." The question appeared with the transfer of the charter government from England to Massachu- setts. The charter gave to the governor, eighteen assistants, and the freemen, assembled in a single chamber as the *^ great and general Court," the power of electing officers and making laws and ordinances. The domL^ant class of the colony was determined to restrict this general court. 66 CONNECTICUT. which the superior numbers of the freemen could control, to the functions of a mere electing body, leaving to the assistants, what the charter did not give them, the duties of making and enforcing laws. The first meeting of the Court of Assist- ants in Massachusetts made the support of the clergy a commonwealth matter ; the second as- sumed control of the admission of inhabitants to the towns ; and, early in 1632, the settlement of town boundaries, and the control of town inter- ests, were assumed by the assistants without any authority, either from the charter or from the towns. Secular and ecclesiastical influences were strong enough to induce the freemen, in 1630, to confirm the usurped powers of the Court of Assist- ants ; and this was followed in the next year by the exclusion of all but church-members from " the liberties of the Commonwealth," that is, from voting. So wide was the effect that Hut- chinson asserts, and Judge Story approves the esti- mate, that five-sixths of the people were still dis- franchised as late as 1676. The whole system was upheld by Governor Winthrop of Massachu-- setts, in a letter to Hooker, on the ground that it was unwarrantable and unsafe to refer matters "of counsel or judicature" to the body of the people, because '-' the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." The people, or that better part of them who should be admitted to vote, were to choose THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 67 tlie Court of Assistants ; but that wiser body was to make the laws and enforce them. Such a system was certain to arouse dissatisfac- tion ; and a due regard to the fact will make it easier to understand why the Massachusetts char- ter was finally lost so tamely. Dissatisfaction, to the honor of the Massachusetts freemen, first took the shape of assertion of local liberty, of town freedom rather than of individual freedom. There were attempts at independent town action before 1634 ; but the curious and perhaps significant fact is that nearly all of them took place in the three .towns which afterwards made up the Connecticut secession. The towns in 1634 informally sent two deputies each to Boston to get a sight of the pa- tent. The sight was enough to expose the usur- pation of the assistants ; and at the general court in May the freemen would make no elections un- til their deputies had been recognized as a factor in the government. Nevertheless, influence, and particularly that of the ministers, was still strong enough to secure the passage of an act, the very next year, constituting a council for life, consisting at first of three members, but meant to be larger in future. There is every indication of an organ- ized design to establish an hereditary order, or at least a life privilege for certain classes, in order to attract influential and wealthy immigrants from the mother country; but luckily Massachusetts freemen knew how to cut the knot. When it 68 CONNECTICUT. was proposed in 1639 to give the governor a life' tenure, the freemen answered by taking all "mag- istratical" powers from the council, and that body died the death soon after. Time would fail in telling the further details of the struggle, — the success of the deputies in maintaining that share in the government which the charter had not given them ; the efforts of the assistants to secure the " negative voice," by which they were to have a veto on the deputies ; the famous " sow business," which convulsed the colony, and brought the " negative voice " into common disrepute ; and the final compromise in 1644, by which the introduc- tion of a bi-cameral system gave both the assistants and the deputies a negative voice. All these be- long to Massachusetts history, and were the efforts of democracy to get its head out of water. In every point, the ministers had been on the side of the assistants. The latter had always been willing to refer every disputed question to the el- ders, and had always been supported. The stand- ing grievance had been that the assistants would not admit the right of the general court (which really meant the deputies, or the freemen whom they represented) to adopt a body of laws as a permanent limitation on the judicial powers of the assistants ; they wished to decide every case " on its own merits." Winthrop himself acknowledged, in 1639, that the people '^ had long desired a body of laws, and thought their condition very unsafe I THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 69 t j while so much power rested in the discretion I of magistrates ; " and he adds the very credible note that the magistrates and some of the minis- ters were " not very forward in this matter." In I December, 1641, a brief code of laws was extorted I by the freemen ; but it left great blanks, which I the assistants still persisted in filling as they saw fit. In 1645 the elders formally declared that the freemen were to choose the assistants, but that the authority of the latter was not derived from the freemen or to be limited by them, and that they were to decide according to the word of God in the absence of express law. The deputies yielded ; and it was not until 1649 that they at last secured a complete code of laws. Reference has already been made to the patent differences between the three migrating towns and the five which they left behind them, and to the probability that there was some political difference to account for them. A regard to the coincident struggle agaiiist class power in Massachusetts will ; make it still more probable that the migrating towns were simply those which did not choose to continue the struggle longer at home, but pre- ferred to establish a more democratic system for themselves in the wilderness, and without any charter. Hooker was undoubtedly the strength \ of the migration ; and he had been so notoriously opposed to Cotton in the old colony that it would be reasonable to presume that he differed toto coelo 70 CONNECTICUT. from Cotton's views as to democracy. In answer- ing the letter of Winthrop mentioned above, he is evidently cautious, and unwilling to provoke an argument; but he dissents from Winthrop'a entire position, and says : «' In matters of greater consequence, which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact busi- nesses which concern all, I conceive, under favor, most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole." The difference between him and Winthrop is marked ; and it would not be difficult to say, from these two letters, which of them held the seed from which sprang the modern American commonwealth. Again, the first step of the Con- necticut settlers was to secure what their Massa- chusetts brethren were still struggling for — pop- ular control of legislation. Codes of laws were merely tlie symbol : democracy wanted the recog- nition of the deputies, the direct representatives of the towns, as a factor in the government ; and this was secured by the constitution of 1639. It even provided a way by which the deputies, if the gov- ernor and the " magistrates " (answering to the Massachusetts title of '•' assistants ") refused to call them together, might meet and organize a supreme legislature without their associates., — a provision wholly inexplicable without a careful regard to tlie contemporary struggle in Massachusetts. Here the evidence that government ''of the people, by the people, for the people," first took THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 71 shape in Connecticut, and that the American form of commonwealth originated here, and not in Mas- sachusetts, Virginia, or any other colony, might \\ ell stop. The case in favor of Hooker, however, lias now an impregnable basis, which was wanting wiien the standard histories of the commonwealth were written. His letter to Winthrop might be made the foundation of the claim that he had sup- plied the spirit of the Connecticut constitution ; and yet the basis is an unsatisfactory one. It is evident enough that the complete popular control over government which was the characteristic of the new Connecticut system was neither familiar nor welcome at the time in the other Puritan com- monwealth ; but the letter alone is not enough to establish a connection of this fact with Hooker. All this time there has been in existence an abstract of a sermon of Hooker's, preached at Hartford, May 81, 1638, some seven months before the framing of the constitution. Henry Wolcott, Jr., of Windsor, had been in the excellent Puritan habit of taking notes of the sermons to which he listened, and he had left behind him a MS. volume of abstracts of Hooker's sermons. Among them was this sermon. Dr. J. H. Trumbull saw its im- portance and deciphered its short-hand characters. Any one who will read this abstract, and try to imagine the way in which the writer of the letter to Winthrop must have clothed this skeleton with flesh and blood, and the effect on his hearers, will 72 CONNECTICUT. appreciate its importance in American history. If the germ is potentially the whole development, this is the most important profession of political faith in our history. It is as follows : — Deut. i. 13. — Take you wise men, and understand- ing, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you. Captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, over fifties, over tens, etc. Doctrine, I. That the choice of pubHc magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance. II. The privilege of election, which belongs to the people, therefore must not be exercised according to their humours, but according to the blessed will and law of God. III. They who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them. Reasons, 1. Because the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. 2. Because, by a free choice, the hearts of the people will be more inclined to the love of the persons chosen and more ready to yield obedience. 3. Because of that duty and engagement of the people. Uses. The lesson taught is three-fold : — 1st. There is matter of thankful acknowledgment in the appreciation of God's faithfulness towards us, and the permission of these measures that God doth command and vouchsafe. 2dly. Of reproof — to dash the councils of all those that shall oppose it. THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 73 3dly. Of exhortation — to persuade us, as God hath given us liberty, to take it. And, lastly, as God hath spared our lives, and given us them in liberty, so to seek the guidance of God, and to choose in God and for God. Here is the first practical assertion of the right of the people not only to choose but to limit the powers of their rulers, an assertion which lies at the foundation of the American system. There is no reference to a "dread sovereign," no reserva- tion of deference due to any class, not even to the class to which the speaker himself belonged. Each individual was to exercise his rights " according to the blessed will and law of God," but he was to be responsible to God alone for his fulfillment of the obligation. The whole contains the germ of the idea of the commonwealth, and it was devel- oped by his hearers into the constitution of 1639. It is on the banks of the Connecticut, under the mighty preaching of Thomas Hooker and in the constitution to which he gave life, if not form, that we draw the first breath of that atmosphere which is now so familiar to us. The birthplace of American democracy is Hartford. From early times, certainly since 1656, Con- necticut has placed upon her common seal vines, to represent her towns, at first three for the origi- nal towns ; then one for each town ; then, as the towns became more numerous, the original three again. The stripes on the flag of the United 74 CONNECTICUT, States, increased to fifteen until after the war of 1812, are a curious parallel. With the vines was the significant motto of the commonwealth, at first on a scroll held by a hand coming out of a cloud, afterwards on a scroll below the vines : qui TRANSTULIT SUSTINET. The motto was not meant as the record of an historical fact alone, or as an exclusion of the agency of man from the attainment of liberty. The spirit, if not the trans- lation, of it is in the third of Hooker's " Uses " of his lesson, his " exhortation — to persuade us, as God hath given us liberty, to take it." This his flock proceeded to do in their constitution. In the preamble, the inhabitants and residents of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, desiring to establish an orderly and decent government according to God, associated and conjoined them- selves to be as one public state or commonwealth, for the purposes of maintaining and preserving the liberty and purity of the gospel, the discipline of the churches, and the orderly conduct of civil affairs according to law. There is no mention or hint of royal, parliamentary, or proprietary author- ity in any part of the constitution, or in the forms of oaths for governor, magistrates, and constables which make an appendix to it. The ecclesiastical excrescence upon it, probably inevitable at the time, bvit absolutely contrary to the spirit of the whole instrument, was to remain and trouble the commonwealth until the political system came fully up to its own original standard in 1818. THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 75 The constitution gave the general court power to " admit of freemen ; " but the right of suffrage was given unequivocally, by a subsequent addition to the first section, to admitted freemen who had taken the oath of fidelity to the commonwealth ; and in 1643, to settle the matter, the court declared that it understood by " admitted inhabitants " those who had been admitted by a town. The towns, therefore, retained complete political con- trol of their own affairs. No attempt was made to define the powers of the towns, for the reason that they, being preexistent and theoretically in- dependent bodies, had all powers not granted to the commonwealth. To avoid any possible ques- tion, the general court, at its meeting in the follow- ing October, passed a series of orders, securing to the towns the powers of selling their lands ; of choosing their own officers ; of passing local laws with penalties ; of assessing, taxing, and distrain- ing for nonpayment ; of choosing a local court of three, five, or seven persons, with power to hea'fy^^^ and determine causes arising between inhabitants '[y of the town, and involving not more than forty shillings ; of recording titles, bonds, sales and mortgages of lands within the town ; and of man- aging all probate business arising within the town. The really new point introduced by the " orders " was the direction to the towns to choose certain of their chief inhabitants, not exceeding seven, to act as magistrates. Out of this grew rapidly the 76 CONNECTICUT. executive board of the towns known as " select- men," who have ever since held ahnost a dictator- ship in their towns during the intervals between meetings of their towns, limited by the force of public opinion, by commonwealth statutes, and by personal responsibility. These orders are often called an " incorporation " of the towns by the general court. The word can hardly be defended. All these privileges belonged to the towns already ; and the orders of October 10, 1639, are much more like the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, a Bill of Rights, originating in the jealousy of the political units. Indeed, there is hardly a step in the proceedings in Con- necticut in 1639 which does not tempt one to di- gress into the evident parallels in the action on the national stage one hundred and fifty years later. Like causes produced curiously similar effects. Each town was to choose annually, by vote of the freemen, four persons as deputies to the gen- eral court, unless the number of towns should in- crease so as to make a reduction necessary. Each year there was to be a court of election on the second Thursday of April (afterwards changed to May), to choose a governor and six magistrates. The choice of magistrates was limited to those nominated at some preceding session of the court, each town making not more than two nominations, and the general court adding as many as it chose. At the court of election, the freemen brought in THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 77 paper ballots stating their choice for governor for the following year, a plurality vote electing. It seems to have been the intention to make this election a pure democracy, in which each voter gave in his ballot in person. As population spread further from Hartford, the custom of sending bal- lots by proxies must have grown up ; for the court order of 1660, which proposed a change in the governor's term of office, suggested to the '-'• remote Plantations, that use to send Proxies at the elec- tion, by their Deputies," that they should vote on their ballots for or against the proposed repeal. After 1670, the regulations adopted by the assem- bly, to govern the manner of taking these proxies, amounted practically to election laws, to be en- forced by the town selectmen. The governor was to be a church-member, and originally no one was to be chosen to the office two years in succession. In 1660, the general court, desiring to retain John Winthrop, Jr., as governor, proposed to the free- men to abolish the restriction of reelection, and the freemen did so. The six magistrates were the germ of the fu- ture senate of the commonwealth, but at first they can hardly be considered a separate chamber. Their " magestraticall powers " were quite unde- fined, and, until the charter, may be taken to cover not only judicial functions, but such duties as the general court saw fit to add thereto from time to time. In general, they were district T^ CONNECTICUT. judges, meeting from time to time in bank, with * legislative powers when joined by the governor and deputies. At the court of election, the sec- retary for the time being read the nominations for the oihce of magistrate in the order in which they had been given him. As each was read, the freemen handed in either blank ballots counting against the candidate, or ballots containing his name and counting for him. The balloting con- tinued until six names had obtained a majority of the votes cast. If six magistrates were not thus obtained, the number was filled up by taking those names which had received the largest number of votes in their favor. On the second Thursday of September, the gov- ernor, magistrates, and deputies were to meet as a general court, " for makeing of lawes," other- wise expressed by the phrase " to agitate the af- faires of the commonwealth." This body was to pass laws of general interest, to dispose of unap- propriated lands, to act as a court of last resort, to decide on the amount of taxation, and to appor- tion it among the towns on the report of an ap- portionment committee on which each town was to be equally represented. In the little town republics, the ancient and honorable office of constable was the connecting link between commonwealth and town. The con- stable published the commonwealth laws to his town, kept the " publike peace " of the town and THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 79 commonwealth, levied the town's share of the commonwealth taxation, and went " from howse to howse " to notify the freemen of meetings of the general court, and of the time and place of elections of deputies thereto. " The parish," says Selden, " makes the constable ; and, when the constable is made, he governs the parish." He might even become the instrument of a legal rev- olution, in case the governor and magistrates re- fused to call the regular meetings of the general court, or, on petition of the freemen, a special meeting. In that case, the constitution provided that the freemen were to instruct the constables to order elections of deputies, who were to consti- tute a general court themselves, excluding the governor and magistrates. This power never was exercised, but it is an extraordinary feature in constitutional law. It was the Connecticut mode of ensuring recognition of the direct representa- tives of the towns. This constitution was the first conscious and deliberate attempt to found a commonwealth de- mocracy on this continent, and it lasted in reality until 1818, for the charter changed it in no essen- tial point. It was a system of complete popular control, of frequent elections by the people, and of minute local government. It remained, through- out confiscations, modifications, and refusals of charters in other colonies, the exemplar of the rights of self-government which all the English 80 CONNECTICUT. colonies gradually came to aim at more or less consciously. In later times the length of ser- vice of its officers was again and again cited by Jefferson to prove that, in a real democracy, an- nual elections were no bar to prolonged tenure of office. The first election of officers under the constitution was held April 11, 1639. John Haynes was chosen governor. Six magistrates were elected. One of the magistrates, Roger Lud- low, was chosen deputy governor; another, Ed- ward Hopkins, secretary; and another, Thomas Wells, treasurer ; and these and twelve deputies, or " committees," made up the general court. Until 1660, it was a tolerably steady rule that the governor of one year was the deputy governor of the next, and vice versa. In this period of about twenty years Haynes was governor eight times, and deputy governor five times ; and Hopkins was governor seven times, and deputy governor six times. In 1657 John Winthrop began his term of service as governor, which lasted, through the removal of the provision against reelection, for eighteen years, the longest term of service reached by any of Connecticut's chief magistrates. In the next century, Gurdon Saltonstall held the office for seventeen years, 1707-24, Nathan Gold hold- ing the office of deputy governor during all but the first year of SaltonstalFs term. Saltonstall was followed by Joseph Talcott, who also held the office of governor for seventeen years, 1724- THE CONNECTICUT COLONY. 81 41; having the same deputy governor, Jonathan Law, throughout his entire term. Law succeeded 'Talcott ; and thereafter, until 1818, the rule was that a governor held office until he died or refused to serve longer, when the deputy governor took his place for a like term. Jonathan Trumbull, senior, was governor, 1769-84 ; and his son, of the same name, held the office 1798-1809. Reelection to other offices was never prohibited, and long terms of service in them have been al- most too numerous for special mention. John Al- lyn, for example, became secretary in 1664 and held the office for twenty-eight years, influencing the policy of the colony strongly during the whole period. A more remarkable case is that of the Whitings, who held the office of treasurer for seventy years, — Joseph Whiting 1679-1718, and his son and successor, John Whiting, 1718-49. Even this family record was outdone by the Wyllyses in the office of secretary. Hezekiah Wyllys held the office 1712-35 ; his son and suc- cessor, George Wyllys, 1735-96 ; and Samuel Wyllys, George's son and successor, 1796-1810, the office having remained in the family but two years short of a century. Length of tenure was the rule in local offices as well. In the first two hundred and fifty years of its history, Hartford has had but twenty town clerks. One of them, John Allyn, held the office, by annual elections, for thirty-seven years, and another, George Wyllys, 82 CONNECTICUT. for fifty years. Cases of this kind were exceed- ingly common throughout the commonwealth. William Hillhouse, of New London, served in the general court for fifty-eight years, so that, as elec- tions to the lower house of that body were semi- annual, he was sent by his town to one hundred and sixteen successive sessions. It must be admitted that much of this perma- nency in democracy was due to the nature of the people ; but a large share ought to be credited to their institutions. Tlie people, fully satisfied with the complete control over the government which their constitution had secured to them, were con- tent to allow circumstances to develop the men best suited to government. At the same time, the intense personal interest felt by every citizen in the commonwealth gave all of them a common motive, sharpened their intelligence, united their force, and carried the commonwealth safely through storms which would otherwise have been fatal. So much, at least, Connecticut owes to the constitution of 1639. » CHAPTER VII. THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. The settlements of New Haven, Milford, and Guilford probably had their origin in closely con- nected movements at home, though they took place at different times. Every indication to be drawn from the records shows common character- istics of persons, methods, beliefs, and purposes. The two most prominent men in the New Haven party of settlers were John Davenport (otherwise Damport or Dampard) and Theophilus Eaton, both Londoners, at least by adoption. Davenport was a Coventry man, an Oxford student, curate of St. Lawrence Jewry, and vicar of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, London. His inclinations seem to have been at first those of a moderately Low Church man, in the modern sense ; but Laud's persecutions had converted him into a "danger- ous " Puritan by 1633, when he resigned and went to Holland. His acquaintance among Londoners of the middle class and of his own way of think- ing was extensive ; and it was from this class that the material strength of the New Haven settle- ment was drawn. Its leading representative was 84 CONNECTICUT. Theophilus Eaton, an Oxfordshire man by birth, and a London merchant of sufficient prominence to have served in some semi-diplomatic capacity at the Danish court. In some way now unknown, the tentacles of the movement had run out into York- shire, Hertfordshire, and Kent ; and these counties furnished the bulk of the purely agricultural pop- ulation. The Hertfordshire families seem to have tended to Milford, and the men of Kent to Guil- ford, while the Yorkshiremen found New Haven most congenial. The first or New Haven party of Settlers, mainly Londoners, with Davenport and Eaton as leaders, landed at Boston, July 26, 1637. The wealth, influence, and coherence of the party made it a desirable acquisition, and the Bay colony made every effort to settle it within the jurisdiction. Many reasons combined to make the efforts fruit- less. Theological disputes, notably the Hutchin- son controversy, had harassed Massachusetts ; and there was no great promise, to the critical eyes of the new-comers, of healing them. The peculiar- ity of Massachusetts, as distinguished from Con- necticut, was the supremacy of the commonwealth over the towns, of church - members over non- church-members, and of influential classes over the church-members. This constitution of affairs was not so objectionable to the Davenport and Eaton party, for they followed it closely in their own colony, as the fact that in Massachusetts THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 85 they would form only one or two towns, and would be under the control of the commonwealth, whereas they desired to he the commonwealth and control the subordinate civil divisions. They had no desire to assume the place of the common- wealth's opposition, from which the Connecticut settlers had just escaped. Again, they came to Boston at a time when the newly opened Connec- ticut territory was a common topic of conversa- tion ; and a " fine opening " has always been an almost irresistible temptation to the race. Fi- nally, the chase of the Pequots along the Connec- ticut coast toward New Netherland had taken place within a month of their arrival; and who could pass through the southern borders of Con- necticut in June without sounding their praises to bis friends at Hartford and the Bay ? The new- comers seem to have decided very quickly that they would not remain in Massachusetts ; that they would go to the new territory ; and that bheir settlement should be placed somewhere on the coast. In the autumn of 1637, Eaton, with some of his [party, explored the northern shore of Long Island Bound, and pitched on Quinnipiack, an Indian iistrict having a good harbor, as the best seat for L colony. A hut was built, and a few men were eft to try the winter climate by personal experi- 3nce. The rest of the party remained in various Massachusetts towns, and even increased their 86 CONNECTICUT. numbers by accessions from their neighbors. The venture had a commercial as well as a politico- religious aspect. Each of the " free planters " had invested stocks, varying from Eaton's <£ 3,000 down to the ordinary <£10 share. Some of these " free planters " never came to New Haven or New England, investing money only ; and, on the other hand, some Massachusetts men entered their names, and even promised their personal presence to the venture. The company set sail from Boston March 30, 1638. Quinnipiack was reached in about a fort- night; and the memorable first sermon was preached by Davenport, April 18, under an oak- tree, probably from Matt. iv. 1 : " Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil."- It is a pity that no note of the discourse has been preserved, for the obvious application of the text to the situation of the hear- ers, the constant temptation to consider every un- pleasant incident, or even the consequences of their own errors, as the intervention of their personal enemy and antagonist, the Devil, would go very far to explain or palliate many otherwise inex- plicable events in their history. Such incidents were not slow in coming. The season was so bad that the crops failed and had to be replanted ; and a violent earthquake, June 1, seemed sent to daunt their spirits and drive them out of the territory into which they had intruded THE NEW HAVEN COLONY, 87 If any of these things moved them, it was probably- only to a more stubborn resolution against Satanic power and Indian powowings. Their determina- tion to stand their ground was not relaxed. On the contrary, and as if to deal fairly even with their spiritual enemies, they went on to complete their title to the soil by purchase from the Indians. On November 24 and December 11, 1638, Daven- port, Eaton, " and others " bought the title from Momaugin and Montowese respectively, with their subordinate chiefs. Subsequent neighboring pur- chases made up, roughly speaking, the present county of New Haven, excluding the narrow strip on its northern border. For all this the price paid was one dozen each of coats, spoons, hatchets, hoes and porringers, two dozen knives, and four cases of French knives and " sizers " to one, and a dozen coats to the other, with a vague promise to both of protection against their enemies, and a reservation of the Indian right to hunt and fish on the ceded territory. Some may think that this was driving a sharp bargain with the adversary; but, all things considered, it must be admitted that the Indians received all that the territory was worth to them. The colony purchases did not stop here : pur- chase was the colony's consistent policy. The In- dian district of Wapoweage (subsequently Milford) was bought February 12, 1638 (9) ; Menunkatuck (Guilford), September 29, 1639 ; Rippovvams (Stamford), in July, 1640 ; and Yennicock (South- 88 CONNECTICUT, old, L. L), some time in 1640. These four plan- tations, subsequently developed into towns, with Branford, made up mainly of the purchase of De- cember 11, 1638, and the parent settlement of New Haven, finally constituted the New Haven com- monwealth. New parties entered the colony from England throughout the autumn and winter of 1638-39, so that there were three ministers present — Daven- port, Rev. Henry Whitefield, and Rev. Peter Prud- den, with congregations more or less organized ; and another. Rev. Samuel Eaton, a brother of Theophilus, who seems to have had no following. Homogeneous as this settlement was, there were evidently interests which would impel segregation, and it was decided that the Whitefield party should take Guilford, the Prudden party Milford, and Samuel Eaton Branford, if he could obtain settlers. The latter enterprise was a failure, and Eaton was a resident of New Haven for four years after 1640, then returning to England and dying there in 1664. The Milford and Guilford ventures v^ere successful during the summer ; and they were from the beginning so definite in organiza- tion that, though they were in New Haven in June, and afterwards followed the ecclesiastical and civil constitution then adopted, they did not in- trude upon the proceedings which led to it. More is known of the early topography and appearance of New Haven than of Hartford. I ^ v^ OF THK ' ^ ^ ! I UNIVERSITY j THE NEW HAVEN C^S^^^TCAUFOftH^^s?*^ Atwater and Lambert give maps of early New ; Haven and Milford. The houses of the early I leaders, at least, are pretty accurately described, I and something is known of their interiors. Con- temporaries were struck with the unaccustomed luxury of the New Haven houses. Some of them had tapestry hangings ; and Governor Eaton's had Turkey carpets, tapestry carpets and rugs. It is certain, at any rate, that the colony was spared many of the privations incident to most of the New England settlements ; and that, until the unhappy issue of the Delaware Bay settlement, which brought poverty into the colony, its affairs were unusually prosperous. Soon after their arrival at Quinnipiack, the Davenport and Eaton party had framed what was called a " plantation covenant." Nothing is known of its terms, except that it was short and simple, merely engaging that the Scriptures should govern their proceedings not only in the gathering and ordering of the church, but in the choice of magis- trates and other officers, the making and repeal of laws, the allotment of inheritances, and all other civil affairs. This, to be sure, furnished the lines on which the future constitution was to be con- structed. It had, also, peculiar effects which de- serve notice, though they may not be apparent on the surface. It practically abolished the excres- cences, such as entails and primogeniture, which had grown up on the English common law ; it 90 CONNECTICUT. was almost, if not quite, a declaration of indepen- dence ; and it made it certain that nothing short of direct and overmastering force could make the commonwealth anything but a republic. But it was yet without form or consistence ; and in spite of its Scripture provisions, the real work of consti- tution-making by the settlers did not begin until " They in Newman's barn laid down Scripture foundations for the town." The planters met June 4, 1639, in a large barn belonging to Mr. Robert Newman, to settle a con- stitution. Rev. Mr. Davenport opened the matter by preaching from Prov. ix. 1 : " Wisdom hath builded her house ; she hath hewn out her seven pillars." The application of the text to the busi- ness in hand was that, in a wise ordering of church or state, it was essential to rest on seven approved brethren, to whom the others were to be added. It is not difficult to see, on a general survey of the whole proceeding, what was the underlying pur- port of this proposition ; for, if the constitution of Connecticut looked of necessity to a government by the many, that of New Haven had as strong a disposition to secure government by the chosen few. After the service, Mr. Davenport submitted six " foundamentall orders " to the planters before him ; and as eacn was adopted by a show of hands, the whole became the constitution of New Haven. The orders were as follows : — i THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 91 1. That the Scriptures hold forth a perfect rule for men in their family, church and commonwealth affairs. 2. That the rules of Scripture were to govern the gathering and ordering of the church, the choice of magistrates and officers, the making and repeal of laws, the dividing of allotments of inher- itance, and all things of like nature. 3. That all " free planters " were to become such with the resolution and intention to be admitted into church fellowship as soon as God should fit them thereunto. 4. That civil order was to be such as should con- duce to securing the purity and peace of the ordi- nances to the free planters and their posterity. 5. That church-members only were to be " free burgesses," and were to choose from their own number magistrates and officers to make laws, di- vide inheritances, decide cases at law, and transact all public business. This alone seems to have met opposition. It called upon those free planters who were not church-members to surrender political as well as ecclesiastical power into the hands of the comparative minority who were church-members, and to make the surrender permanent and funda- mental. One man, probably Rev. Samuel Eaton, agreed to the general principle that voters and magistrates should be men fearing God, and that the church was the likeliest place to find such ; " only at this he stuck, that free planters ought 92 CONNECTICUT. not to give this power out of their hands." The vote left the objector in a minority of one. The number thus disfranchised in New Haven was probably a majority ; in Guilford, nearly half ; in Milford, but ten out of forty-four, and six of these were admitted within a year or two. 6. That the free burgesses, or church -members, were to choose twelve of their number, and that these twelve were to choose the " seven pillars " to begin the church. The twelve selected were Eaton, Davenport, Robert Newman, Matthew Gil- bert, Richard Malbon, Nathaniel Turner, Ezekiel Cheevers, Thomas Fugill, John Ponderson, Wil- liam Andrews and Jeremiah Dixon, all noted names in early New Haven history. The names given number but eleven. The reason for the de- ficiency is unknown. It may perhaps be found in a note on the record that one of the twelve was accused of extortion, confessed it with grief, and made restitution. His name may have been left out and never supplied. A provision was added to the " foundamentalls" that no one be admitted as a free planter until he had signed them. This was to make the peculiar- ities of the constitution permanent. Eaton, Davenport, Newman, Gilbert, Fugill, Ponderson and Dixon were chosen as the '' seven pillars." These then entered into covenant with one another (August 22), this step constituting the church, and proceeded to gather the other THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 93 brethren to them and it. They were thus a church before they were a civil government, and the or- ganized church organized the government. On the same day the church at Milford was gathered in the same way. The seven pillars met for the first time as a general court October 16, 1639. They elected Eaton " magistrate : " he was not called governor until the full development of the commonwealth in 1643. Newman, Gilbert, Turner and Fugill were chosen deputy magistrates, and Fugill secre- tary and notary public. It was agreed that future elections should be held in the last week of Octo- ber yearly, and that the word of God should be the only rule for the guidance of judges and public officers. Popular control, carefully limited as to the general court, was as nearly as possible ex- cluded from the periodical meetings of the magis- trates' court held by Eaton and his four deputies. Even after 1643, when it became the Particular Court of New Haven, it was rather a court of both civil and criminal equity than anything else. The republic of New Haven, thus constituted, had very little official communication with depend- ent or associated towns for some four years. Mil- ford with forty-four free planters, and Guilford with forty, were settled in 1639, in November and August respectively, under governments carefully modelled on that of New Haven. Most of the Milford settlers were dissatisfied Wethersfield 94 CONNECTICUT. people, who had left the Connecticut jurisdiction to reach just such a social and ecclesiastical system as that of New Haven ; while the Guilford people were absolutely in sympathy with Davenport even before their departure from England. Each had its church, gathered to its seven pillars, who also acted as a legislature and court, and held the town lands in trust for the town. The separate life of New Haven may therefore stand as a fair repre- sentative of the others. The lands belonging to the towns seem to have been distributed by common agreement or by lot, and with entire impartiality. The minister was given a first choice ; and it was very natural that a man so distinguished among his fellows as Eaton was honored with a choice next after the minister. The leading military man, Captain Turner, and the deacons, were given a similar privilege, so that they might choose places convenient for the ful- fillment of their duties. Thereafter the division bears a curious resemblance to the distribution of lands under the village community system. The limited area which was meant to be the real town was divided into home lots, and the outlying lands of the township, as distinguished from the town, were divided into corresponding plots of arable and meadow lands. Home lots and outlying plots were of different sizes, corresponding to the vari- ous known gradations of contribution to the com- mon stock. In each grade of contribution, the THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 95 contributors received share and share alike, though the higher grades of contributors had to be first satisfied. But " grades of contribution " did not depend simply on money values. In the distribu- tion of January, 1640, each settler received five acres of upland and meadow for each hundred pounds of his estate, and for each head in his family two and a half acres of upland and half an acre of meadow ; " and in the necke an acre to every hundred pound, and half an acre to every head." In the distribution of September, 1640, twenty acres of out-land were assigned to every " hundred pounds of estate given in," and two and a half acres for *' every head ; " and it was decided that each of the small lots in the town should have four acres of planting ground to each lot, and one acre to every head. As a restriction on the eager- ness for acquisition, taxes were imposed from the beginning, — fourpence an acre per annum for up- land and meadow, and twopence for second-division lands. Finally, no sales to outsiders were to be made without the approval of the general court ; and common lands, including clay-pits, were re- served to the commonwealth. These " common lands" were held under much the same conditions in the New Haven and Con- necticut towns as in those of Massachusetts, though the materials for study are not so abundant. There was no hasty scramble from ship to shore, no location wherever choice and opportunity might 96 CONNECTICUT. lead a family to settle without interfering with prior rights. On the contrary, every step was or- dered and directed by the voice of the town, ex- pressed in that assembly which has always been the mainspring of the New England system. The voice of the town either chose each man's location for him, or fixed the principles on which it was to be chosen. Here the parallel with any form of the village community must stop, for the New England settlers had come from England thor- oughly imbued with the idea of individual prop- erty in land; and the land, when once allotted, became purely individual property, subject to alienation or devise, without return to the com- mon stock. But there was necessarily a certain amount of land, larger or smaller, which was not needed for immediate allotment ; and the rules of the community were pretty rigidly applied to this. It was the property of all, and was at first regu- lated by the town authorities. In New Haven, January 16, 1642 (3), it was decided that the common land known as " The Neck " should be a " stinted common " for cattle, and should be fenced and fitted with gates. The owner of twelve acres could put in a horse, of six acres an ox, of three acres a two-year-old steer, and of two acres a calf. As allotments had not depended on wealth alone, but on " heads " as well, this gave every man a share in the common. So a Norwalk town meeting of May 30, 1655, voted that '' all THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 97 dry cattle, excepting two year old heifers, shall be herded together on the other side of the Nor- walk river, and there kept by the owners of the cattle; every man keeping according to his pro- portion of the cattle there herded." And all the town records of early years contain provisions al- lowing the inhabitants to fell timber in the town '' commonage " at particular seasons, or to carry away windfalls. As long as the town commonage was large and comparatively valueless, its affairs were managed by the town meeting. As its area became smaller and more valuable, and as new-comers crowded into the town, the management fell into the hands of an association of proprietors, composed of descend- ants of the original settlers, and interminable law- suits often varied the monotony of the management. All through the eighteenth century, the efforts of the " new-comers " to get a share of the common lands made up a large part of local politics ; and, during the Revolution period, the same question underlies much of the difference between " Sons of Liberty " and " Tories." Finally, the com- monage being reduced by sales to a minimum of land poor enough to bankrupt any corporation which should undertake to manage it in earnest, the association of proprietors dies out and disap- pears, or becomes an hereditary social organiza- tion. A pronounced distinction between New Haven 98 CONNECTICUT. and Connecticut was the inquisitorial character assumed by the former from the beginning of its existence. It is true that much of what appears to be inquisitorial proceeding was due to the pe- culiar theory which governed the constitution of the legislative bodies of New England : the legis- latures were also courts, and their proceedings were interspersed with a vast number of cases which would now be thought beneath the atten- tion of a commonwealth government, — cases of lewdness, drunkenness in servants, impertinence, promiscuous kissing, etc. But the difference, which is plainly perceptible from any reading of the respective records, is that such matters were rather matters of business with the Connecticut authorities, to be dealt with and got rid of as rap- idly as justice would permit; while to the New Haven magistracy they were matters of deep and serious import, to be probed to the bottom with scientific accuracy in every moral and psychologi- cal detail. Every New Haven sentence bristles at least with implications of the moral law. ''Never elsewhere, I believe," says Dr. Bacon, " has the world seen magistrates who felt more deeply that they were God's ministers executing God's justice." All this may be admitted with- out impairing the belief that this attempted per- sonification of Divine justice had its drawbacks. It would be unjust to say, as is generally assumed, that it resulted in Draconic severity of punish- THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 99 mcnt : New Haven punishments, as a rule, were not at all severe. It would be unfaithful not to say that it resulted in a meddlesomeness which must have done more moral harm than good, and in the end did much to overthrow the government itself. " Goodman Hunt and his wife, for keep- ing the councils of the said William Harding, bak- ing him a pasty and plum-cakes, and keeping com- pany with him on the Lord's day, and she suffer- ing Harding to kiss her," were ordered to be sent out of town " within one month after the date hereof [March 1, 1643], yea, in a shorter time if any miscarriage be found in them." While the New Haven magistracy was sitting in solemn la- bor to bring forth such a mouse as this, its Con- necticut rival was actively engaged in real com- monwealth business, every step of which made its ultimate supremacy more assured. The peculiar cast of mind of the New Haven magistracy has done injustice to the good name of the early town. Its records of trials contain a mass of filth from which the Connecticut records are comparatively free. Some think that the missing records, covering the years 1649-53, were even worse, and were destroyed by the authorities to protect the town's reputation. But the trials which remain really speak highly for the morals of the town. The amount of real uncleanness brought to light is singularly small; the "evi- dence " on which other convictions were based 100 CONN'jlCTICUT. would not be even admitted in a modern court of law ; and the whole makes up a record rather of the diseased suspicions of the magistrates than of the criminality of their people. Most of the " criminals " better deserved a medical than a ^' magistratical " examination ; and their cases are merely a demonstration of the necessity of the recognized rules of evidence, not of the immo- rality of the early Puritans, as dissenting author- ities are so fond of representing them. Sumptuary laws were attempted in New Haven, as in Connecticut, and with as little success in one as in the other. Codes were drawn up to regulate prices of labor and materials, but they were prob- ably meant mainly to regulate the rates at which taxes should be paid to the commonwealth in kind, in materials or labor. So far as they were meant to regulate individual contracts, they were evidently a failure, and they were soon repealed. Rules against excess in drinking and in apparel were also attempted, with the usual want of suc- cess ; and in their failure, as in the matter of "watching and warding," there are indications that kissing is not the only thing that goes by favor. John Jenner, accused, February 6, 1689 (40), of being drunk with strong waters, was ac- quitted, " itt appearing to be of infirmyty and occasioned by the extremyty of the colde." §i It needed but a few years for the little settle- ^ ment to show its consciousness of independent ex- THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 101 istence. As soon as the establishment of houses and streets had given it a corporate appearance and feeling, its name was changed, September 1, 1640, to New Haven (commonly then Newhaven). Another step, though abortive, shows the spirit of the people. It was ordered, December 25, 1641, " that a free school shall be set up in this town." Davenport was to ascertain the amount of money which would be needed for it, and to draw up rules for the institution. Contemporary expressions go to show that the intent was not to establish a mere school, in the modern sense of the word, but to lay a foundation which could develop easily into some such institution as the powerful university with which New Haven's name is now so closely linked. It should not be forgotten that, at least in spirit, the establishment of Harvard by the common- wealth of Massachusetts Bay had a contemporary rival in the straggling little settlement on the shores of Long Island Sound. But for the differ- ent circumstances of the two peoples, and a defer- ence to Harvard's appeals for support, their two universities would have been born almost together, and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversaries of Harvard and Yale would have been almost coinci- dent. When the separate existence of New Haven had lasted some five years, her government developed into a confederation. Many reasons might be assigned for such a result. The towns which 102 CONNECTICUT. had been founded on the New Haven purchases had been separated from the parent stem long enough to make Mr. Davenport's opinion some- thing less than all-sufficient, and to develop a higher regard for the opinion of their own minis- ters ; for there was a strong ecclesiastical tap-root to town independence, even under the New Haven system. Again, at may well be imagined that men like Goodyear and Leete had not been blind to the growth and possibilities of the Connecticut colony. New Haven claimed only what she had bought : Connecticut claimed every square foot on which a Pequot had ever collected tribute. If New Haven was to maintain her solidarity against her rival's indefinite and penetrating^ claims, it must be by turning a nominal hegemony into a real commonwealth. Closely connected with this point was the proposed New England Union. If New Haven were left out of it, she was practically subordinated to her rival in the new territory. If she was to present her claim to admission, it must be with all the prestige derivable from a cluster of allied, not dependent, towns. It is significant, perhaps, that the first suggestion of the change comes in the appointment, April 6, 1643, of com- missioners to the New England Union "for the jurisdiction of New Haven." It is quite probable that the leading men of the various towns had already agreed on the general form which the '' jurisdiction " was to take, but it was not settled THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 103 until October, owing to difficulties in the case of Milford. During Milford's four years of nominal depend- ence, but real independence, it had gone so far as to admit six men as " free burgesses," or voters, although they were not church-members. With the rise of the commonwealth proposition, the ad- mission of these six Milford burgesses became a great international question, which cost a whole summer of negotiation before it could be settled. It was finally agreed that the six should continue to vote in peace so long as they remained in Mil- ford, but that they should not hold office, and that Milford should never again scandalize the other towns by thus violating their common law. Harmony having thus been restored, a consti- tution for the commonwealth was agreed upon, October 27, 1643, by a general court, consisting of Governor Eaton, now first so called ; Deputy- governor Goodyear ; three magistrates ; and eight deputies, two each from New Haven, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford. The features of the new constitution were not essentially different from that of 1639. Free burgesses, or voters, were to be church-members only, except the six Milford anomalies. Only church-members were to hold office. The rights of '' free planters," not church- members, were limited to " their inheritance and to commerce." Each town was to have its par* ticular court, elected by the burgesses, dealing 104 CONNECTICUT. with causes of not more than <£20, or, in criminal cases, involving no greater punishment than "stocking and whipping'' or a fine of £5, with right of appeal to the general court. In the election of governor and other commonwealth of- ficers, voters need not go to New Haven, but might vote by proxy. The general court, con- sisting of governor, deputy governor, magistrates and two deputies from each town, was to meet at New Haven twice a year, on the first Wednesday in April and the last Wednesday in October, the latter being the court of election. The magis- trates were to meet separately, as a court of mag- istrates, on the Monday preceding the stated gen- eral court meetings, to try weighty and capital cases or appeals from town courts, and to perform most of the functions of a grand jury. Ordinary trial by jury was not a part of the New Haven system. The general court was to provide for the main- tenance of the purity of religion, and " suppress the contrary ; " to make and repeal laws, and require the execution of them ; to call magistrates to ac- count for misdemeanors ; to impose upon the in- habitants an oath of fidelity and subjection to the laws ; to settle and levy taxes ; and to try causes on appeal from any of the other courts. Its pro- ceedings were to be in accordance with the Scrip- tures, and no law was to pass but by a vote of a majority of the magistrates and a majority of the deputies. I THE NEW HAVEN COLONY, 105 At the next stated meeting in April, 1644, it was ordered that "the judicial laws of God, as they were delivered by Moses," should be consid- ered binding on all offenders, and should be a rule to all the courts of the jurisdiction, " till they be branched out into particulars hereafter." These are probably the provisions which have done most to develop the current notions of the criminal code of New Haven. They have very probably reflected upon the sister colony as well, and, since the provisions of the Connecticut criminal code were like those of New Haven, though without their expressed basis, both have helped to give currency to Mr. Peters's absurd code of " Blue Laws." A general reference to " the Mosaic code of New Haven " has usually been held sufficient rebutter to any attempt to argue against the Blue Law myth. Nor is the reason far to seek. It is not a violent assumption that the phrase, " the judicial laws of God, as they were delivered by Moses," has not, to the average reader or hearer of the present time, that clear-cut significance which it had to those who first used it, or which the death statutes of a modern state have to the criminal lawyer. It is true that the New Haven general statute, agreeing generally with those of Connecticut and Massachusetts, made some fifteen offenses capital crimes, — murder, treason, perjury aimed at life, kidnapping, bestiality, sodomy, adultery, incest, rape, blasphemy in its highest 106 CONNECTICUT. form, idolatry, witchcraft, ''presumptuous" Sab- bath-breaking, the third conviction for burglary committed on the Lord's day, and rebellion against parents. A formidable catalogue truly. But why is it the only one to be brought to the bar ? Mackintosh, speaking in the English House of Commons so late as March 2, 1819, said : " I hold in my hand a list of those offenses which at this moment are capital, in number two hundred and twenty-three^ The New Haven and Connecticut colonists, by a single stroke of legislation more than a century and a half before, had reduced their list of capital offenses to fifteen. If such a reduction, with hardly an execution for any of them, be not considered a long step in the history of law reform, law reformers are hard to satisfy. The government established in 1643 continued without essential change until its final absorption by Connecticut. Two towns, however, were added to the four already named. Southold, L. I., bought in 1640, was admitted as a town in 1649. It was at first called by its Indian name, Yennicott or Yennicock ; and its English name, Southold or Southhold, perhaps signified the place of strength to the south of New Haven. It ex- tended some forty miles west of Orient Point. Totoket, or Branford, was a part of the second purchase of 1638. Samuel Eaton having failed to settle it, it was granted in 1640 to another dis- satisfied Wethersfield company, headed by Wil- THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. 107 Ham Swayne, and Branford was admitted as a town in 1651. In 1644 it had been reinforced by- Rev. Abraham Pierson's church from Southamp- ton, L. I., which sought a more congenial home under the New Haven jurisdiction when its town joined Connecticut. But Pierson's church was not to escape thus. Within twenty years, the union was consummated, and the church again broke away from Connecticut and founded New- ark, N. J., a settlement which has given to New Jersey the mass of the Connecticut family names which have appeared in her history. Hunting- ton, L. I., also applied to be admitted in 1656 and 1659, but was refused because of her demand that her local court should try all her civil cases and all criminal cases not capital. Six towns, therefore, — New Haven, Milford, Guilford, Stamford, Southold and Branford, — made up the New Haven jurisdiction during its short history. With the exception of Stamford and Southold, the commonwealth lay immediately around New Haven. Its smaller members are now villages which ofEer little that is striking to the traveler or visitor. Time was when they were members of an almost independent republic whose hopes were high, and whose history serves at least to show that the New England town system cannot thrive in an unfriendly soil. CHAPTER VIII. THE SAYBROOK ATTEMPT AND ITS FAILURE. The Saybrook colony was the offspring, in one sense, of the English king's committal to the policy of " thorough." There was in the king- dom, in addition to the comparatively helpless lower-class victims of Laud, an unknown number of gentlemen of good family who were thoroughly indoctrinated with Puritanism, or with kindred forms of dissent. These had as yet escaped serious persecution, partly through family and social influ- ences, partly through the English reserve which, by checking any too violent expressions of dissent, had enabled family and social influences to have their full effect. About 1634-35 there were strong indications that the period of peace for this class was approaching its limit. Wentworth, in Ireland, was constructing the covered way by which the liberties of England were to be assailed. The heart of all Protestant Europe was yet faint and sick at the hideous atrocities of Tilly's musketeers at the sack of Magdeburg : was any more mercy to be expected by English cities at the hands of Wentworth's Irish musketeers ? And who was THE SAY BROOK ATTEMPT. 109 to suppose that the supple body known as a parlia- ment under Elizabeth and James would take the law into its own hands against Charles ? Or that Puritanism would develop a soldiery before which the king's men would faint and fly ? Patient and reserved men forgot that other Englishmen were as reserved, as patient and as dangerous as they, and concluded that hope was gone from England, and that there was no refuge but across the At- lantic. It may be that the supposititious, or at least unverifiable grant to Warwick by the Council of Plymouth in 1630 was a pious fraud, designed to provide some such refuge, if the fear of confisca- tion of charter rights should deter Massachusetts from receiving refugees. The difficulty is to un- derstand why the declaration of a baseless claim by the Say and Sele patentees, in the country and during the life of the original owner, should not have been met by a prompt contradiction. This is the strongest secondary evidence of the validity of the grant to Warwick in 1630, and its transfer to the Say and Sele Company in 1631, — that in 1634-35 the latter patentees made active and pub- lic preparations to enforce their claims to Con- necticut and to remove there themselves, without exciting any complaint or opposition on the part of the Plymouth Council or their later grantees. That broad excuse, "the confusion of the times," 110 CONNECTICUT, may serve as a partial but hardly as an entirely satisfactory explanation. John Winthrop, Sen., the governor of Massachu- setts, had led the great Puritan migration to that colony in 1630. His son, John Winthrop, Jr., did not reach Boston until October, 1636. He was then a young man of twenty-nine, of good natural parts, well improved at Cambridge and Dublin and by travel on the continent, and he had already shown that philosophical, equable and judicial temperament which made him a trusted leader of men throughout his life. One of the bitterest critics of the early Massachusetts system hesitates before the beauties of the younger Winthrop's character, and calls him "perhaps the brightest ornament of New England Puritanism." His father's connection with the Say and Sele associates must have been close, and they must have seen in the son the qualities they needed. It thus hap- pened that the son, on his way to Boston, was di- verted into an interest in Connecticut, which finally made him more vitally important to that colony than the father had ever been to Massachu- setts. Articles of agreement were entered into July 7, 1635, between John Winthrop, Jr., of the one part, and Viscount Say and Sele, Sir Arthur Has- selring, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Henry Lawrence, Henry Darley and George Fen wick of the other. Robert, Lord Brooke, did not sign, but was a party THE SAYBROOK ATTEMPT, 111 in interest. Winthrop was to be fully compen- sated for his time and trouble, was to act as " gov- ernor of the river Connecticut in New England, and of the harbor and places adjoining," for one year, and was to build a fort at the mouth of the river, with a garrison of fifty men, reserving 1,000 or 1,500 acres of good ground, near the fort, for its maintenance. His commission as governor was signed, sealed and delivered to him July 18. Winthrop arrived at Boston just a week before the first considerable migration to the Connecticut Valley. It is said that the intruding settlers made an agreement with him that, if the real owners, " their lordships," should require them to remove from their new settlements, they were to do so on receiving satisfaction for their improvements, or corresponding locations elsewhere. The agree- ment is referred to in the preamble to the Massa- chusetts commission to the provisional magistrates of Connecticut ; but it is curious that it does not seem to be referred to in the elaborate series of instructions to Winthrop, and letters to the king and various English noblemen in regard to the charter, although it would have materially strength- ened their case under the Fenwick purchase, as showing constructive permission from " their lord- ships " to settle, in default of notice to quit. Win- throp, to whom the instructions were addressed, was the very person who in 1635, as agent for the proprietors, had given them conditional per- 112 CONNECTICUT. mission to settle in the Connecticut Valley ; and yet, in 1661, they allow themselves to appear to his majesty as originally sheer interlopers. In spite of the authority of the father's journal, the statement seems to lack some particulars essential to a clear understanding of it. The mouth of the river had already been seized by an English force, in order to keep it from the Dutch ; but the v^orks constructed must have been of the most primitive character. A party of twenty men, sent by Winthrop, arrived at the fort and took possession November 24, 1635; and a little later came Winthrop himself and Lyon Gardiner, who soon became commander of the fort. For some years the garrison endured even more than the usual monotony of a frontier fort. Its men were ambushed and attacked during the Pe- quot struggle, but were restricted to a defensive warfare. Even settlement was really hindered by the fort. It drew danger, from Dutch or Indians, as the candle draws the moth ; and its direct protection was only efficient enough to keep its people within the fort, and in a few scattered buildings very near it. George Fenwick had visited the place the year of Winthrop's assumption of control. About mid- summer of the year 1639 he returned with much more parade. He had two vessels, which brought also his wife, Lady Alice Boteler, and his family. The name Saybrook was given to the settlement THE SAYBROOK ATTEMPT. 113 in honor of the two leading proprietors, Lord Say and Lord Brooke ; but the contemporary genius for misspelling, reacted upon by the neighborhood of the river and the Sound, made it read Seabrook for many years upon the Connecticut records. The first minister was Rev. Thomas Peters, followed in 1646 bv Rev. James Fitch, who re- moved in 1660 to settle at Norwich with most of his church, there to become very much entangled with the affairs of the Indians and the manage- ment of their lands. Besides these, Captain John Mason, a renowned man of war and major general of the Connecticut colony's militia, and Thomas Leffingwell, were the leading men ; but there were many other Say brook names which the Norwich migration transferred to that part of the common- wealth and subsequently far beyond its borders. The tract of land usually considered as under the jurisdiction of Saybrook was about ten miles in length, divided midway by the Connecticut River, and extending six or eight miles back from Long Island Sound. Small as this territory was, it was of great importance as controlling the only water exit from the Hartford region, and as the seat of the representative of the only paper title within the future commonwealth. The authori- ties of Connecticut showed their usual acuteness by forming close relations with Fenwick. He was admitted to the first conference which formed the New England union in 1643 ; and, as that con- 114 CONNECTICUT. federation recognized only the four colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New- Haven, Connecticut shrewdly appointed him as one of her commissioners in 1643 and 1644, with Edward Hopkins as the other. Fen wick was thus identified with Connecticut as closely as he could have been without an actual transfer of the rights which he represented. His second term of service as commissioner, in 1644, enabled him to render most important service to Connecticut in her boundary disputes with Massachusetts, which col- ony laid claim before the commissioners to the Pequot country. Fenwick interposed a protest against any decision which should in any way im- peach his principals' title to the territory in dis- pute, and the commissioners decided to postpone the decision until the patentees could be heard from. The delay served to enable Connecticut to secure a firmer hold on the conquered territory before a final decision became imperative. This diplomatic stroke had hardly been dealt when the Connecticut general court appointed a committee to treat with Fenwick for the sale of Saybrook. The logic of events had been too much for the Saybrook colony. The state of things at home was no longer what it had been in 1634. Whether Jenny Geddes ever threw her stool or not, a train of events had been started, bringing calamities to royalty and relief to the persecuted ; the once supple parliament had taught THE SAYBROOK ATTEMPT. 115 Went worth the real meaning of " thorough ; " and, above all, Cromwell and his Ironsides had charged at Marston Moor. Puritan gentlemen in England had other things to think of than emi- grating to Say brook ; and Fenwick was hopelessly- isolated. Connecticut had the purpose and power of growth, but there was no longer hope for Say- brook. The agreement of sale was made December 5, 1644. Fenwick made over the fort, its appurte- nances, and the land in the neighborhood to the colony of Connecticut. Lands not yet disposed of were to be distributed by a committee of five, of whom Fenwick was to be one. The rest of the Warwick patent, from Saybrook to Narragansett Bay, was to be brought by Fenwick " under the jurisdiction of Connecticut, if it came into his power." In return, Fenwick was to have the use of the buildings within the fort for ten years, with an impost on exports of corn, biscuit, beaver and cattle which should pass the fort during that time. As security to Fenwick, the general court ordered in the following February, in its ratification of the agreement, that every master of a vessel should land at the fort while passing it, and deliver to the commandant of the fort a note of the duti- able part of his cargo. In 1646 the amount was limited to £180 per annum, the total duty col- lected during the ten years being about £1,600. The imposition of the duty nearly disrupted 116 CONNECTICUT. the New England union. In 1647 Massachusetts filed a protest against it before the commission- ers of the union. She claimed that Connecticut had no right to levy on the Massachusetts towns of the upper Connecticut Valley a tax which was to inure to Connecticut's sole benefit in the acquisition of Saybrook. In 1649 the commis- sioners of the other three colonies decided against the protest of Massachusetts. Thereupon the Massachusetts commissioners exhibited an order of their general court, levying a tax on all goods of the other colonies imported into or exported from Boston, ostensibly for the repair of the cas- tle in the harbor. The suspiciously opportune circumstance of the castle's need of repairs just at this time excited considerable anger in the other colonies ; and this was intensified in 1653 by the refusal of Massachusetts to join the other colonies in a war against the Dutch and Indians. Perhaps the feeling in the latter case was the greater on account of the attitude assumed by Massachusetts, that of an advocate of peace and righteousness, averse to an offensive war ; whereas the fact, as it seemed to contemporary observers, was that the governing desire of the Bay colony was to con- vince the other colonies of their impotence, and of their folly in supporting the refusal of Connecti- cut to yield to Massachusetts even in the petty affair of the impost. With the expiration of Fen- wick's ten years' term the retaliatory measures THE SAYBROOK ATTEMPT, 117 were quietly allowed to disappear : probably the castle had been put into good repair by that time. With the conclusion of the agreement of 1644, Saybrook subsided into the position of a Connec- ticut township. Fenwick continued to reside at the fort, but took no prominent part in Connecti- cut affairs. The Connecticut general court re- quested him to return to England at his earliest convenience, and act as its agent in procuring that grant of the entire jurisdiction under the patent which he had promised to get " if it ever came within his power to do so." Lady Fenwick died at Saybrook about 1648, and her husband soon after returned to England, giving up the last vestige of the commercial city which was to have graced the mouth of the Connecticut. He died in 1657, before the colony applied for a charter. The Connecticut authorities were diligent in disseminating the idea, and were perhaps honest in their own belief, that Colonel Fen wick's sale had been a transfer of the patent and of the juris- diction thereunder, for this gave the colony a quasi-legal standing which it had not before. When Massachusetts, during the impost and boun- dary disputes, impugned the standing of Connec- ticut as a colony unauthorized and unwarranted by law, the latter colony always replied that it had a charter or patent in England, but that " the confusion of the times " prevented it from show« 118 CONNECTICUT, ing anything more than a copy. It was when the confusion began to disappear, and the validity of the excuse with it, that the colony took steps to secure a charter from the king. In the instruc- tions to Governor Winthrop, the colonial authori- ties lay great stress on the Fenwick sale as in- volving the equitable transfer of the patent itself, although the terms of the agreement contradict them. They go so far as to say, " Had we not been too credulous and confident of the goodness and faithfulness of that gentleman [Fenwick], we might possibly have been at a better pass ; " and they direct the governor to take steps to recover from Fenwick's heirs the amount paid to him. They even sequestered the colonial estate of Mrs. CuUick, Fenwick's sister and his New England heir, until <£500 were repaid and further claims were remitted. It would be far more than even- handed justice to the fathers of the Connecticut colony to admit that they were the simple victims of the wiles of George Fenwick : if he could so easily delude them, he was more successful than their other contemporaries. They seem to have understood perfectly in 1644 the wares for which they were then bargaining, and were quite aware that this part of the consideration was purely contingent. So impossible was it in 1661 for the contingency to be fulfilled that the letter of the colony to the king takes conspicuous care not to mention the Fenwick agreement at all. Perhaps THE 8AYBR00K ATTEMPT. 119 its attitude toward the Fenwick family may best be explained as that of men who had bought a contingency, found it less valuable than they ex- pected, and were unwilling to confess their error even to one another. On the other hand, the romantic life and death of Lady Fenwick ought not to give to her hus- band's character that generous glamour which Con- necticut historians have been too prone to allow him. It should not be forgotten that he deliber- ately sold and appropriated the proceeds of prop- erty of which he was not the sole owner, only the agent. The colonial authorities yielded to his de- mand for <£1,600 for property which was not his, rather than see it sold to the Dutch ; and they paid the sum agreed upon. But the substantial iniquity of the transaction undoubtedly stirred them to a greater eagerness to make use of the invalidity of one feature of the agreement in order to secure substantial justice in others. On the whole, the merits of the case seem to be with the colony. CHAPTER IX. CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. It is much to be regretted that the fathers of the Connecticut colony seem to have been too much immersed in the struggle for existence to give us any record of the appearance of men and things in these early years. In this respect, Con- necticut is unfortunate beyond any of her sister commonwealths. Hartford, the subsequent capir tal of the colony and state, may be taken as an example. There does not seem to be any surviv- ing map, plan, picture, sketch or verbal descrip- tion of the town, or of any public or private build- ing, until about the time of the Revolution. Even the zeal of the antiquary finds " no thorough- fare " inscribed almost immediately on every clue which would have been a promising one in Massa- chusetts. The contemporary letters, journals, etc., seem to take existing things for granted. The minds of the writers were occupied almost exclusively with the actions of men ; and the pregnant incidental hints as to social features, manners and customs, topography, etc., which are so frequently furnished in other colonies by CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 121 writers who had no notion that they were furnish- ing them, are not found in Connecticut. This was due to the peculiar nature of the early struggles in the colony. Difficulties of soil, commerce and general industry were no new matters with them : their wits were working mainly to know what other men might do or could do ; how Massachu- setts men would act about the boundary line ; how the Dutch would act about Long Island and the territory west of the Connecticut River ; how Eng- lishmen would settle their home government ; and what would be the influence on the fortunes of the little congeries of towns which, formed with- out a legal title, had never acquired one except from a man who never had it and did not profess to sell it. Determined as they were to maintain the integrity of their colonial existence, the im- pediments were enormous, and almost all of them lay in possible human action. It is no wonder, then, that the early official and unofficial records of Connecticut deal so largely with this one side of human history, and give us so little of any other. Antiquarian zeal has overcome some of these difficulties. The process of tracing back land ti- tles through the records of land transfers has given us an excellent map of Hartford in 1640, which, though partly conjectural, gives what is probably a very close representation of the town. It lies on the west bank of the Connecticut River, where 122. CONNECTICUT. the river runs nearly due south. Running east- ward, through the southern central part of the town, is the " little river," or " riveret," a swift- flowing brook, whose depth varied with the sea- sons. The bulk of the town was thus to the north of the little river, and to the west of the Connecti- cut. Like the city of Washington, it was at first a city of magnificent distances. Its first settlers laid it out on a scale so generous that it was not necessary to enlarge the city limits until 1853, or to add more than one highway to the original roads during the century and a half between the settlement of Hartford and its incorporation as a city in 1784. Only one tenth of the township was included in the city limits of 1784 ; the city now covers the whole township, and its streets have increased from thirty to three hundred in number within the present century. At the mouth of the little river is the Dutch post Good Hope, still in the possession of its orig- inal owners in 1640, as Berwick-upon-Tweed long marked the remnant of the English claims in Scot- land. Alongside the main river was a strip of meadow land, and along the rising ground which bounded it on the west ran the highway from Bos- ton, which passed through the three river towns, and afterwards became the highway to the whole territory to the south. On the north bank of the little river, fronting a road along its edge, there were placed in succession the houses of Governor CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 123 Haynes, of Rev. Mr. Hooker, of Rev. Mr. Stone, and of Elder Goodwin, " Meeting House Alley " separating Hooker and Stone. Meeting House Alley ran from the little river to a square (now State House Square), some distance in the rear of Stone and Goodwin, and nearly in the topo- graphical center of the town, which contained the market place, the jail, and the meeting house. The mass of the lots on this side of the town, ex- cept those fronting on the little river, lay east and west, perpendicular to the Boston highway and the parallel roads. The lots to the south of the little river lay mostly north and south, perpendic- ular to the highway along the little river and the parallel streets. Almost all the meadow land on this side of the little river, down to the Dutch settlement, was owned by Edward Hopkins, the colony's leading merchant ; and to the southwest of his tract was the estate of the Wyllys family, on which was that which was to be the Charter Oak. Further up the little river were the tan- yard, located on an island ; and the mill, on the northern shore. Outside of the town were the cow pasture, the ox pasture, the landing, etc., and the roads were named according to the places to which they led. Few particulars are known of the size or appear- ance of the meeting house, or of any other build- ing. All the buildings were very certainly small, though the erection of a sawmill in 1667 is an in- 124 CONNECTICUT. dication of an early improvement in house-build- ing. The windows were hardly more than open- ings for light and air ; and their size was reduced by the scarcity of glass, and the necessity of using oiled linen or other translucent material as a sub- stitute. The meeting house was too small to ad- mit of galleries, or of anything more than the mer- est suggestion of a pulpit. There was no plaster. Instead of pews there were plain and hard benches, and artificial heat was unknown, even in the bit- terest weather. Indeed, the Hartford church had no stoves until about 1815 ; and what Lodge calls '' the ferocious practice " of baptizing newly born infants in church must have had an additional horror in the depth of winter. Finally an armed guard, suggestive of Indian neighbors, was an in- separable accompaniment to religious services, and was provided with seats near the door. In the other Connecticut towns, religious and other meet- ings were called by beat of drum, one of the in- habitants making an annual contract for the ser- vice. Hartford alone had a bell, brought from Cambridge, which was probably at that time the only church or public bell on the continent, with the exception of the one at Jamestown, Va. Its contents now make part of the bell, recast in 1850, belonging to the First Congregational Church of Hartford. New Haven had no church bell until 1681. One of the most difficult and delicate functions CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION, 125 of a church committee in Connecticut and New Haven towns was the seating of the congregation. A transfer of a family from one seat to another betokened a social rise or fall. In the smaller towns, such transfers were usually made by a ma- jority vote at a town meeting; and the town records have numberless entries of permissions granted to fortunate and rising men to sit " in the justice's pew," or " in the cross pew by the sec- ond pillar," or " in the second pew on the right," the proper places for their wives, on their side of the house, being as carefully specified. Finally the meeting house was used for a long time for every variety of secular purposes, not only as a place for town and other meetings, but as a place of deposit for arms, military provisions, and lost or stolen property. The Hartford church building was not merely the scene of ecclesiastical councils : the meetings of the New England com- missioners, of deputies from other commonwealths, and even the exciting conferences with Andros in regard to the charter, took place here. It was not until toward the middle of the next century that the towns began to see the incongruity of secular business in a dedicated house of worship, and be- gan to erect townhouses and other distinctively public buildings. Bad as were the roads of the United States al- most everywhere until the era of turnpikes set in, and railroads in their turn forced the turnpikes up 126 CONNECTICUT. to a higher standard, the roads of Hartford and its neighborhood had a certain evil preeminence. The excellence of the soil was reflected in the bad char- acter of the roads. Its tenacious clay only needed moisture enough to become a weariness to the flesh of horses and of men. Within the last thirty years, says one authority, wagons have been seen sunk to the hub in the native clay of Pearl Street, close to the center of the city. In 1774 the town prisoners for debt represented to the general as- sembly that the roads were for a considerable part of the year so miry and impassable that no one came to the jail to bestow alms on the prisoners ; and they petitioned that the jail limits should be enlarged. What the roads must have been in still earlier days passes speculation. It may per- haps be that the early years of John Fitch, of Windsor, spent in annual experiences of the hor- rors of Hartford roads, were the influence which turned his attention to improving the waterways of the country by endeavoring to perfect the steamboat. Mr. J. C. Parsons " cannot discover that any land in the town is now in possession of the de- scendants of the original owners, having been con- tinuously in the possession of the family ; some, through female heirs, may possibly be so held." This state of things is common to most Connecti- cut towns, but it does not imply that the original stock is dying out. It is only a symptom of the CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 127 universal readiness to transfer property and assume new property relations. There is hardly a Con- necticut town in which the names of the first set- tlers are not as absolutely numerous as at the settlement ; if there is any relative decrease, it is due to the superimposition of a foreign popula- tion. The old names, even the Christian names, show a remarkable persistence, and an equally re- markable persistence in the characteristic of prop- erty-holding, even though their possessors have exchanged family for other property. The origi- nal fecundity is shown in the fact, that, in spite of this persistence, it is the old family names which have shown a disposition to drift out of the com- monwealth by emigration. For this there have been four main channels : in early years, td Ver- mont, and so over the border into New York ; later, to Pennsylvania (Wyoming) and to central New York ; later still, to the Western Reserve of Ohio, and so throughout that State and the West ; and of recent years, to New York city, and thence in every direction. In addition to these main channels, isolated routes of migration have been innumerable, so that Connecticut names are now to be found in every part of the Union. Such a steady stream of migration could not but have hastened this process of alienation of family prop- erty. Those who migrated soon disposed of their share of the patrimony, and it regularly passed away from the name, though not necessarily from 128 CONNECTICUT. Connecticut names and stock. The absence of an- cestral holdings in the State is merely a redistri- bution of the original holdings. The Massachusetts man and woman of 1637-38 are the exact social representatives of the early Connecticut settlers, except so far as the poverty and meagerness of the Massachusetts life of the time were still further intensified by the difficul- ties of an absolutely new settlement. There are said to have been but thirty plows at the time in all Massachusetts : what estimate shall we make for the new and struggling Connecticut colony? We have, unfortunately, no such Pepys as Judge Sewall for early life in Connecticut, but Sewall's hints as to the hardships of early Massachusetts life m^y well be reinforced and transferred to our commonwealth. The utter lack of a multitude of things which have come to seem absolute necessa- ries in the eyes of their descendants ; the difficul- ties of travel and communication ; the complete isolation from the outer world through the grim months of a New England winter, during which the sacramental bread in the churches was some- times frozen on the plates ; the bitterness of the winter cold even in private houses, where the ink sometimes froze in the inkstands within a few feet of the great fire ; the utter inadequacy of medical and surgical attendance ; the ignorance of and an- tagonism to the art of amusement in every form ; the incongruous mixture of the civilized and the CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 129 savage, in a society in which a minister, trained in an English university, might be called away from writing a treatise on the dealings of the Eng- lish commonwealth with its former king, or with the American churches, to drive a drunken Indian out of his kitchen, or chaffer with a hunter for food or clothing, — these were social conditions from which the early settler did not escape by re- moving from Massachusetts to Connecticut, and they are more fairly within the province of the Massachusetts historian. There are, however, certain visible distinctions between the drift of public events in Connecticut and in Massachusetts which make it difficult to believe that there was not some hidden differenti- ation between the people of the three migrating towns and of the five which were left, which has colored their whole subsequent history. The difficulties between king and parliament were at their height when the Connecticut colony was founded; and for more than half a century the relations of the house of Stuart to its various opponents formed the critical public question for the New England colonies. Throughout this pe- riod there was probably no great difference be- tween the underlying purposes of the two colonies under consideration. Both meant to preserve the public privileges which they had gained, to ex- tend their territory and jurisdiction, and to evade or resist the interference of the home government i^V* OF THE * r ^ 130 CONNECTICUT. with their autonomy. But the methods of Mas- sachusetts were peculiarly her own. There were strong reasons, in the history, traditions, and con- sistent public teachings of the colony, why she should pose as the pronounced champion of colo- nial liberties. On every occasion she seems to have felt it to be incumbent upon her to assume a more or less decided public attitude, and equally incumbent upon her strongest neighbor, Connecti- cut, to support her by a similar course. In very many cases Connecticut did so ; in fact, the most common criticism of her policy by her own people was that she was too apt to " trot after the Bay horse." But every case in which Connecticut chose to follow a policy of her own seemed to the Bay colony only an instance of unmanly defection rather than of independent action. The consistent policy of Connecticut, on the other hand, was to avoid notoriety and public at- titudes ; to secure her privileges without attract- ing needless notice ; to act as intensely and vig- orously as possible when action seemed necessary and promising; but to say as little as possible, yield as little as possible, and evade as much as possible when open resistance was evident folly. Much of the difference must have been due to the different circumstances of the two colonies. Mas- sachusetts, secure in the possession of a charter, must have felt always that, even if beaten down from any claim, she could fall back, in the last CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION, 131 resort, upon her legal privileges. Connecticut, while without a charter, must have felt the same hesitation in following some of the leads of her neighbor which an unarmored vessel would feel in following some of the motions of an ironclad ; but the steady continuance of her policy after she had obtained a charter seems to argue some structural difference in the people. Her line of public con- duct was precisely the same after as before 1662. And its success was remarkable : it is safe to say that the diplomatic skill, forethought, and self- control shown by the men who guided the course of Connecticut during this period have seldom been equaled on tbe larger fields of the world's history. As products of democracy, they were its best vindication. The period closed in 1691 with the loss of the original charter of Massachusetts, the imposition of a new and restricted charter upon her, and the palpable and even conscious inability of her pub- lic men to make good by action the positions as- sumed in the past. The mortification of this de- feat was aggravated by the pronounced success of the Connecticut policy. The best of New Eng- land's historians has not hesitated to avow and to reiterate his conviction, not only that Connecticut left Massachusetts in the lurch, but that she al- lowed her application for a charter to be used by the royal agents as an essential instrument in the disintegration of the New England union and the final humiliation of Massachusetts. 132 CONNECTICUT, Such a conclusion assumes far too much. It would have been just, in the first place, if Connec- ticut had ever imitated the Massachusetts posi- tions, and had given Massachusetts to understand that she had entered the union for the purpose of upholding the Massachusetts policy. On the con- trary, the Connecticut policy was a matter of no- toriety among New England public men from the beginning. The accusation of Massachusetts was wholly an afterthought to cover her own want of forethought in sacrificing democracy to class influence, and in thus drifting into a position where she was hopelessly stalemated. It must always have been baseless, except on the supposi- tion that Connecticut was in some manner bound to follow her neighbor's lead, and to surrender her own right of judgment in every great emergency, a course which Connecticut was not bound or likely to take. In the second place, an admission of the legality, with an impeachment of the jus- tice, of Connecticut's policy, assumes that a decided adherence by Connecticut to the Massachusetts policy would have resulted in obtaining a more complete autonomy for all the New England col- onies, and would have saved the union. But this is mere conjecture, and improbable as well. It is no more probable, at least, than that Massachu- setts would have scored a success equal to that of Connecticut by following a similar line of policy. It is no answer to this to say that Massachusetts CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 133 preferred failure, after an heroic resistance, to suc- cess attained by shifty and temporizing measures : the less said about the heroism shown by the dom- inant class of Massachusetts, in the events which culminated in 1691, the better. Its nullification of the articles of union in 1652-54 had taken the life out of them : they never again showed any vi- tality, and the Connecticut charter simply gave decent burial to the corpse. The facts are, that these commonwealths were then hardly fitted for complete autonomy ; that the Connecticut policy obtained about as much as was practicable or best at the time, while the Massa- chusetts policy obtained considerably less. The spirit which still moves the Connecticut workman to invent anything rather than expend a foot- pound of energy uselessly, seems to have actuated the people from the beginning. They would re- ceive Andros, for example, most deferentially, make no sign of resistance until resistance could take its most vigorous and efEective form : then the work was done thoroughly, and almost abso- lute silence followed until the next opportunity for decisive action. No one can study the history of the commonwealth without being struck with the individuality of the people, as shown in their public career ; or, without believing that that in- dividuality was not due simply to circumstances, to their thirty years' struggle for a charter, but that it belonged to them even in Massachusetts, perhaps even in old England. 134 CONNECTICUT. From their first settlement, Hartford and '' an- cient" Windsor seem to have gone quietly and steadily on in their natural course of development. Wethersfield had migrated without a minister, and, for this or some other reason, its course of devel- opment ran ill from the first. Within its first half dozen years of life, its neighbor towns and New Haven were compelled to offer '' loving coun- sel " as to Wethersfield difficulties ; and Daven- port, of New Haven, put his into the wise sugges- tion that the minority should migrate again. The minority who acted on this advice settled at Stam- ford and formed a New Haven town. In 1644 another portion of the Wethersfield minority, as has been said, removed to the New Haven juris- diction and formed part of the town of Branford. There seems to have been no defined method of turning a settlement into a political '^ town," be- yond the mere act of the general court in receiv- ing its deputies, until after the charter was ob- tained. It is difficult, therefore, to assign any exact date to the political birth of the early Con- necticut towns. The growth of the family may be traced in the steady increase in the number of deputies in the general court itself. There were seventeen deputies in 1649 ; twenty in 1650 ; twenty-two in 1651 ; twenty-five in 1654 ; and twenty-six in 1656-57, this number remaining the maximum until after the union was consummated under the charter. The increase came from the CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 135 successive recognition of the new towns of Say- brook, Stratford, Farmington, Fairfield, Norwalk, Middletown, New London, Norwich, and the Long Island towns — Huntington, Southampton and East Hampton ; but there can be no pretense at accuracy in saying when each of these towns was first represented in the general court. Town rec- ognition seems really to have taken a somewhat different line, hinging on those ancient and im- portant functionaries, the constables. Professor H. B. Adams has said : " We do not suppose that this has always been a conscious standard for leg- islative action in the recognition of towns, or for the actual determination of town or parish units ; but we claim that without a constable, or some power representing the corporate responsibility of the community for the preservation of the local peace, a town would be an impossibility." His evident hesitation in making an assertion which would seem almost a truism to the Connecticut historian is another illustration of the unwisdom of confining the study of the New England town system to its phases in Massachusetts, as if it had been a thing peculiar to that commonwealth. In fact, it can be studied better, for many purposes, in Connecticut than in Massachusetts ; for the town in Connecticut was almost as free as independency itself until near the period of the charter, while in Massachusetts it was circumscribed from the beginning by commonwealth power. Professor 136 CONNECTICUT. Adams will find his supposition, doubtful as it may be under the comparatively artificial Massa- chusetts system, emphatically confirmed under the more natural Connecticut system. We know, for example, that the Indian purchase on which the town of Norwalk rests was made in 1640, and that settlement began about 1650 ; and we infer from various circumstances that the purchase and settlement of Middletown took place about 1646- 47. But the record of their " incorporation "is no more than a vote of the general court, September 11, 1651, that " Mattabeseck [Middletown] and Norwalke " should be towns and should choose constables. As the collection of taxes and the an- nouncement of elections were among the functions of the constable, it seems probable that the ex- press or tacit recognition of the town's constable was in effect until the charter, a recognition of the town itself and of its right to choose deputies. The records really show no other. The difficulty of the general court in dealing with new towns was about parallel with the difficulty of the con- gress of the confederation in dealing with the quasi State of Vermont. A parallel indication of the growth of the col- ony is to be found in the tax-lists. The first dis- tinct increase of taxable property comes December 1, 1645, when the general court granted a '' rate " of £400, ''to be paid by the country." Of this amount <£340 was to be paid by the three origi- CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 137 nal towns ; £45 by Stratford and Fairfield ; <£15 by Say brook ; and <£10 each by Tunxis (Farm- ington) and Southampton, L. L In 1652 the " rates " were still confined to the towns just named, Southampton being omitted. It is an in- dication of the prosperity resulting from sixteen years' work that the assessed value of the property in these seven towns was now £70,000, as fol- lows : Hartford, £20,000; Windsor, £14,100; Wethersfield, £11,500 ; Farmington, £5,200 ; Saybrook, £3,600; Stratford, £7,000; and Fair- field, £8,900. In the following year, three new towns, Pequot (New London), Mattabesek (Mid- dletown), and Norwalk, are recognized in a draft of men for an armed force, as well as in the rates ; and the assessed value rises to £79,700. In 1661, just before the receipt of the charter, the assessed value rises to £84,137. The usual tax assessed upon this amount was a penny or a halfpenny, constituting a " rate " or a " half rate." Long Island had never been more than nom- inally under the jurisdiction of the Dutch. They had planted a few farms at its western end, but the rest of the island was a wilderness. Among the multitude of conflicting and unintelligible grants made by the council of Plymouth before its dissolution, was one to the Earl of Stirling, covering Long Island. The grantee seems to have claimed ownership only, not jurisdiction. In practice, therefore, when his agent sold a piece of 138 CONNECTICUT. territory, the new owners became an independent political community, with some claims against them, but no direct control. The island was thus in much the same position as the Connecticut ter- ritory before the first irruption of settlers, and offered much the same attractions as a place of refuge for persons or communities who had found the connection between church and state grievous. A company from Lynn, Mass., bought the town- ship of Southampton from Stirling's agent, April 17, 1640. There were at first but sixteen persons in the company, Abraham Pierson being their minister. This was the church which, first re- moving to Branford in 1644, when Southampton became a Connecticut town, finally settled at Newark, N. J. Easthampton was settled about 1648, by another Lynn party, and was received as a Connecticut town, November 7, 1649. The town of Huntington, though part of it was bought from the Indians by Governor Eaton, of New Haven, in 1646, really dates from about 1653. May 17, 1660, it was received as a Connecticut town. There were thus three Connecticut towns on Long Island, in addition to Southold, the New Haven township. Between these and the really Dutch settlements at the western end of the is- land, there were English settlements in the neigh- borhood of Hempstead; but these acknowledged a much closer dependence on the Dutch authori^ ties. CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 139 Hardly any of the expansion of Connecticut, prior to the grant of the charter which gave a legal basis to its claims, was due to accident. In almost all of it we can see very clearly a provident de- termination on the part of the people to give their commonwealth respectable limits, and to turn to account every favoring circumstance in that direc- tion. Hardly was the Pequot war under way when the general court resolved to send thirty men to occupy " the Pequoitt Countrey & River in place convenient to maynteine* our right that God by Conquest hath given us." And from this moment Connecticut maintained her right by con- quest to the whole of the present eastern part of the State with a vigor which was in itself strong promise of success. One secret of the common- wealth's success, in this as in the Saybrook and other cases, was the policy which it followed with adverse claimants, a policy which the politico-reli- gious constitution of New Haven prevented it from imitating. Instead of engaging in a struggle with a rival, the Connecticut democracy always en- deavored to adopt him, to make its interests his, and so to secure even a better title out of conflict. In the case of the Pequot country, it was John Winthrop, Jr., the former agent of the Saybrook proprietors, who developed an inchoate rivalry with the colony for possession of the coveted terri- tory ; and Connecticut's policy, carefully applied, not only strengthened her title to the Pequot 140 CONNECTICUT. country, but gave her one of the best of her long line of excellent governors, and was in the end one of the chief means of obtaining her long desired charter. Winthrop's attention had been turned to the Pequot country. Fisher's Island, "against the mouth of the Pequot River," was granted to him by the Massachusetts general court, October 7, 1640, with a reservation of the possibly superior title of Connecticut or New Haven ; and Connecti- cut, instead of taking any exceptions to the grant, promptly confirmed it. In 1644 Massachusetts gave Winthrop authority to " make a plantation in the Pequot country." He went to the place in the following spring, and in the autumn of 1646 had gathered a few families there, and was begin- ning to put up houses. The claims of Massachu- setts were grounded on the fact that her troops had taken part in the conquest of the Pequots ; and the case was decided against her by the New Eng- land commissioners in July, 1647. Connecticut at once gave Winthrop a commission, September 9, 1647, to execute justice in his town "according to our laws and the rule of righteousness." May 17, 1649, the court established the boundaries of the new town and named its magistrates. One of these two dates, and most probably the former, is to be taken as the town's entrance to the list of Connecticut towns. On the latter date, the court suggested the name " Fair Haven," but the people preferred that of New London. CONNECTICUT UNTIL THE UNION. 141 The last of the Connecticut towns before the charter was Norwich, an offshoot of Saybrook. Its settlement was approved, under the name of " Mohegan," by the general court in 1659 ; and it was summoned, October 3, 1661, under the name, of " Norridge," to send representatives. The divergence between the Connecticut colony and its sister and rival of New Haven had become marked long before Monk began his march for London. The attempt has been made in this chapter to state some of the elements of strength of Connecticut. It had become a strong, well- balanced political unit, with a clear notion of a territorial goal to be striven for, and of the line of policy to be pursued in striving for it. Its democ- racy gave every man a personal interest in the main- tenance of the colony's^ claims ; and the results were another proof that " everybody knows more than anybody." Its towns were as free as towns could well be ; the right of suffrage was as nearly as possible universal ; it can hardly he said that there were any dissatisfied elements to be placated, or else to fester in the vitals of the commonwealth ; and the steady bias of the commonwealth toward civil and religious freedom had enabled it to find elements of increased strength in what might have been elements of intestine weakness. For twenty years or more, the " loving brethren " of Connec- ticut and New Haven lived on in entire satisfac- tion with one another's corporate existence. The 142 CONNECTICUT. time had then come when the growing common- wealth found that the separate existence of New Haven was a complete obstacle to the natural course of development of Connecticut. The com- parative weakness of New Haven will come out in the narrative of the events which led to the union ; but it is fair to say in advance that one of the most effective of these weakening elements in New Haven was the apparent agreement of a part of her people with Connecticut rather than with their own colony. Freedom was more attractive in the long run than restriction. CHAPTER X. THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. The organization in which the idea of the American Union first cropped out, to exist a while and then to die away ahnost unnoticed, was the New England union of 1643. As Massachusetts was the most distinguished and influential mem- ber of this confederation, the full account of its origin and history should in fairness be reserved to Massachusetts historians. It will not be im- proper to say here that such a union had been pro- posed by Connecticut in 1637, just after the settle- ment ; but Massachusetts received the proposal with a demand that her right to Agawam (Spring- field) and to free navigation of the Connecticut should be recognized. Connecticut's answer was so " harsh " that the further consideration of the matter lapsed for some years. It soon turned out that Massachusetts had right on her side, so far, at least, as the jurisdiction over Springfield was concerned ; and the extreme confusion of English affairs, through the struggle between king and parliament, was an inducement to the New Eng- land colonies to suspend all minor differences, 144 CONNECTICUT. and combine for common defense against the In- dians and the Dutch. In 1643 the union was formed, consisting of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. Connecticut had not yet advanced far enough on the road to a clear comprehension of her future to make any objec- tions to New Haven's separate existence ; but New Haven's hurry to organize a systematic govern- ment and take part in the confederation seems to show at least a dawning suspicion of a possible conflict between her own interests and those of her neighbor. There was not yet any consider- able superiority of one colony over the other : their respective populations are estimated at 3,000 for Connecticut and 2,500 for New Haven. The leading reason for the formation of the union was probably the inability of the home gov- ernment, during the confusion of the civil war, to afford protection to the New-England ers against the claims of the Dutch colony of New Nether- land. With the most amicable feelings on both sides, the Dutch colony, thrust in between English colonies to the south and to the north of it, must have been pressed more hardly as the English col- onies grew, until at last the question of the an- nexation or independent existence of New Nether- land must have called imperatively for settlement. But the feelings on neither side were really ami- cable. The New England settler was an English- man ; and the Englishman of that time had a THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 145 chronic disposition to regard the Dutchman as a commercial rival, and an habitual intruder into places where he had no good excuse for being. As the New England Englishmen found themselves forced into nearer relations with the New Nether- land Dutch, the two parties met with many of the old animosities still unhealed. The grant to the New Netherland company by the States General of Holland, October 11, 1614, had covered all the territory '' between New France and Virginia, the sea-coasts of which lie between the fortieth and forty-fifth degrees of latitude," that is, from about the present location of Philadelphia to the Bay of Fundy. This nominal jurisdiction was really con- firmed by the States General to the Dutch West India Company in 1621 for twenty-four years ; but in course of time the growth of English settlement compelled the Dutch to modify this nominal claim, and to rely on the discoveries of Hudson to support their claims to the district between the thirty- eighth and forty-second degrees of latitude, or from about the mouth of the Potomac to the mouth of the Connecticut. As the greatest concession to the English, based on the English charters then in existence, they claimed the coast from Cape May to the mouth of the Connecticut, from latitude 39° to latitude 41°. In answer to all these official and unofficial claims, the English finally relied on the voyages of the Cabots as entitling them to the whole coast, including the parts explored by Hud- 10 146 CONNECTICUT. son, which they declined to take as real discov- eries. But at first, with the possible expedition of one Captain Argal, of Virginia, about 1614, who is said to have compelled " the pretended Dutch governor " at the mouth of the Hudson to submit to the king of England and promise tribute, the English for many years quietly acquiesced in the Dutch settlement. Their objection was to the ex- tent, not to the fact, of the Dutch colony. The Delaware company, including nearly all the leading men of New Haven, had been formed for colonization purposes. Following the New Haven policy of purchase, the New Haven settlers had sent an agent in 1640, who bought from the natives a tract of land on both sides of the Dela- ware River. In the following year the New Haven civil authority asserted its jurisdiction over the purchased territory ; and a company was sent out which settled on the west shore of the Delaware, near what is now known as Salem Creek. This was under the governorship of Kieft ; and Wil- liam the Testy sent two ships in 1642 with a de- tachment of troops, who attacked the settlement, burned its houses and made the settlers prisoners. Remonstrance for this step was almost the first business of the commissioners of the New Eng- land union; but they got no satisfaction from Kieft. In 1649 Governor Eaton made another appeal to the commissioners for help ; but the commissioners were not disposed to enter upon a THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 147 quarrel at the time. They would refuse to assist any persons from any other colony who should attempt to settle the Delaware purchase without the consent of New Haven ; but they would not maintain the claims of New Haven against the Dutch by force. The failure of the scheme was a blow from which independent New Haven never recovered. Her richest men had ventured their all and lost it, and the colony was in sore straits for some years. The Dutch West India Company perceived clearly the growing strength of the English colo- nies. In reply to the appeal of the new Dutch governor, Stuyvesant, for authority to repel force by force, and for material aid, the home corpora- tion declined to think of war, which, they said, " cannot in any event be to our advantage : the New England people are too powerful for us." Thus left in the lurch by his superiors, Stuyve- sant could do no more than take the best terms obtainable ; and it is creditable to him that he kept his colony in existence more than ten years longer. His first step was to go to Hartford, to meet the New England commissioners in negotia- tion, arriving there September 11, 1650. He took high ground from the beginning. He insisted on having the negotiations conducted in writing; and, in his first letter, he not only protested against the presence of the English in Connecti- cut as an infringement on the undoubted rights of 148 CONNECTICUT. the Dutch, but dated the letter at " New Nether- land," thus calmly assuming every point in dis- pute. The commissioners were not to be caught. They refused to receive the letter and thus ac- knowledge that Hartford was within the Dutch territory. He finally yielded the point, and a long correspondence resulted in an agreement to submit all the questions between Dutch and Eng- lish to four arbitrators, two to be named by the governor, and two by the commissioners. Stuy- vesant named Englishmen as his agents, and the four agreed upon a settlement of the boundary matter, ignoring all other points in dispute as hav- ing occurred under the administration of Kieft. It was agreed that the Dutch were to retain their lands in Hartford ; that the boundary line be- tween the two peoples on the mainland was not to come within ten niiles of the Hudson River, but was to be left undecided for the present, except the first twenty miles from the Sound, which was to begin on the west side of Greenwich Bay, be- tween Stamford and Manhattan, running thence twenty miles north ; and that Long Island should be divided by a corresponding line across it, " from the westernmost part of Oyster Bay " to the sea. The English thus got the greater part of Long Island, a recognition of the rightfulness of their presence in the Connecticut territory, and at least the initial twenty miles of a boundary line which must, in the nature of things, be prolonged in THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION, 149 much the same direction, and which in fact has pretty closely governed subsequent boundary lines on that side of Connecticut. If these seem hard terms for the Dutch, and indicative of treachery on the part of their two English agents, it must be borne in mind that, by the terms of his instruc- tions from his principals, Stuyvesant had to take the best terms he could get. The treaty of Hart- ford was dated September 19, 1650. Peter Stuyvesant was probably not satisfied with the treaty, even though he was compelled to accept it. At all events, he soon furnished fresh occasion for negotiation. In the spring of 1651, the New Haven people fitted out another vessel for their Delaware Bay settlement. It touched at New Amsterdam, and its appearance put the last of the Dutch governors into a terrible rage. He arrested ofiicers and passengers, and only re- leased them with sounding threats of the fate of any future New Haven expedition to the Dela- ware, on their promise to return at once to New Haven. Again the New Haven adventurers ap- pealed to the New England commissioners, and those ofiicials this time espoused their cause. They wrote to Stuyvesant, charging him with a breach of the treaty, though it is not easy to see on what grounds ; and a resolution was passed, promising protection to any Delaware settlement against all comers, provided it should number a hundred and fifty men. Still there was no colli- sion. 150 CONNECTICUT. In the following year, vague rumors of an im- pending Dutch and Indian war nearly brought about the long expected struggle. As the New England colonies came nearer to the Dutch, the resulting complications with the Indians increased. The two Connecticut colonies, as has been said, had no difficulties with their own Indians after the downfall of the Pequots. Their main difficul- ties arose in the southwestern corner of the present State, in the district where now is the town of Greenwich. The district had been bought by its first owner, Robert Feake, as a part of the New Haven jurisdiction ; but the Dutch had seduced the first inhabitants, under Captain Patrick, who had a Dutch wife, to come under their jurisdiction and accept a place as a Dutch town. It had been agreed at Hartford that Greenwich should be restored to New Haven ; but the usual vices of a border settlement seem to have prevailed here. Later, in 1656, the deputies of Stamford at New Haven complained bitterly of the conduct of the people of Greenwich, of " their disorderly walke- ing among themselues, admitting of drunkenness both amonge the English and Indians, whereby they are apt to doe mischeife both to themselues and others : they receive disorderly children or seruants who fly from their parrents or masters lawful! correction ; they marry persons in a dis- orderly way, beside other miscariages." It was in this Alsatia that the troubles seem to have begun THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 151 which broke out first in the war of 1643 between the Dutch and Indians, when the Dutch called in Captain Underbill, of Stamford, as their comman- der-in-chief, and in the course of whicb Mrs. Hutchinson, who had found refuge here from her Massachusetts enemies, was done to death by the Indians. Other Indian outrages took place at in- tervals in the neighborhood. A Stamford Indian, found guilty of one of the most atrocious of these, was taken to New Haven and executed by decapi- tation. " He sat erect and motionless," says the New Haven record, " until his head was severed from his body." There was enough trouble with the Indians in this quarter to make it a source of universal alarm when, in the spring of 1652, ic was rumored that Stuyvesant had induced all the Indians to unite against the English, and had sup- plied them with ammunition. The evidence of the existence of the plot was in the affidavits of a number of the Indians themselves, a class of evi- dence which ought of itself to have been Stuyve- sant's complete vindication. A majority of the commissioners, however, believed it, and based upon it an ultimatum to Stuyvesant. The accu- sation naturally made Stuyvesant very indignant, and he demanded a committee of investigation. The commissioners sent three distinguished New- Englanders to New Amsterdam to act as such committee. The tone of their letters was not con- ciliatory, or calculated to inspire the governor with 152 CONNECTICUT. confidence in his judges ; and he refused to answer any questions except such as should be approved by persons whom he should select. His reason doubtless was his diffidence of his familiarity with the language in which the examination was to be conducted. But, as the persons whom he selected had " been complained of for misdemeanors at Hartford, and one of them had been laid under bonds for his crimes," the committee took the whole proceeding as a fresh affront, and judges and accused parted in still higher exasperation with one another. On the report of the commit- tee, whose members had obtained new evidence of Stuyvesant's duplicity and treachery on their way home, all the commissioners except those of Massa- chusetts declared for war. Massachusetts referred the question to her ministers, who declared that, while they believed the evidence against the Dutch governor, it was not sufficient to justify a war be- fore the judgment of the rest of the world ; and that the colonies should stand on the defensive, without declaring war. One of their number, who claimed to write on behalf of '' many pensive hearts," took more warlike ground, and threatened the commissioners with the curse of the angel of the Lord against Meroz unless they declared war upon Stuyvesant. But the resolution of the ma- jority was more satisfactory to the Massachusetts general court, and it steadfastly^ refused to take part in an offensive war. The whole controversy THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 153 is particularly interesting for the reason that it was the first in our history which shows the ten- dency which has finally controlled American con- stitutional law. All the parties acknowledged the binding character of the articles of union ; and the controversy went mainly to the construction of them, to the interpretation of the powers of the commissioners under thqm. The occasion was not, as it would have been in England, a dispute as to what the governing body had better do, but a dispute as to what the governing body had a right to do, thus showing that in the latter case there was behind the nominally governing body a recognized popular sovereignty superior to it. This debate of 1652 might very well be taken as the beginning of constitutional law, in the peculiar phase of the term which obtains in the United States and other countries having a written con- stitution. The unusual bitterness of the controversy had come largely, not from academic difiEerences as to the construction of the articles, but from the gen- eral suspicion that the Bay colony was moved by the question of the tolls at the mouth of the Con- necticut River, already referred to, and by a desire to convince the associate colonies that Massachu- setts was their real head. Some of the western towns of Connecticut even made ready for war on their own account ; atid it was when all prospect of war, either by colonial or home power, had van- 164 CONNECTICUT. ished, that Ludlow in disgust left the colony which he had helped to plant, and went to Virginia. In- deed, the New England confederation was in a state of extreme confusion, and almost in articulo mortis. The commissioners had declared war ; Massachusetts had really introduced the first in- stance of nullification ; and the other colonies found it equally difficult to make war, in obedi- ence to the commissioners, without Massachusetts, or to keep the peace and satisfy their own people. Connecticut and New Haven kept a small cruiser in commission. New Haven decided guardedly that it would not do to begin war under present circumstances ; and it was not until April, 1654, that the Hartford general court formally " se- questered " the Dutch fort of Good Hope, and banished the Dutch ensign from Connecticut soil. But both had great difficulty in restraining their people, and a small insurrection had to be quelled in Stamford. The relations between England and Holland had not been improved by the establishment of the English commonwealth. At the execution of Charles I., the Dutch States General had waited in a body on his son, recognized him as Charles II., and refused even a reception to the English envoys. Cromwell's successful battle of Dunbar, in September, 1650, and his still more successful battle of Worcester jast a y^ar later, brought the Dutch to their senses, and they asked an alliance THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 155 with the Commonwealth. The English parlia- mentary leaders, however, wished to make a suc- cessful navy the counterbalance to their too suc- cessful army. They passed the Navigation Act of 1651, which cut their rivals out of the carrying trade. There was an '' accidental " collision be- tween the two fleets in May, 1652, when Blake called upon Van Tromp to lower his flag, and Van Tromp answered with a broadside. Again, in the autumn, Blake and De Ruyter met in the Channel in an indecisive conflict ; and in November Van Tromp drove Blake into the Thames, and sailed the Channel with a broom at his masthead. A few months later, Blake, issuing forth again into the Channel with a horsewhip at his masthead, drove Van Tromp in his turn into harbor. While the two great marine monsters were thus rolling heavily into collision, it was but natural that the little fish across the Atlantic should take a keen personal interest in the matter. Every accidental victory of Blake was to them an addi- tional hope of a parliamentary fleet, which should deal out justice to the wicked Dutch governor and his Manhattan associates. New Haven was espe- cially elate^ for the relations of her leading men with Cromwell had always been particularly close. It was the battle of Naseby which had brought about that almost solitary touch of romance in Connecticut history, the ''phantom ship " of New Haven. The New Haven people, feeling more 156 CONNECTICUT. reason for relying on the rising fortunes of the Cromwell interest, equipped a ship of one hundred and fifty tons, freighted her, and sent her to Eng- land with an agent to endeavor to procure a charter from the new power there. It was in January, 1647, that she sailed, and the ice in the harbor had to be cut in order to open the way for her. Nothing more was ever known of her : the seventy souls on board had gone to their account, and the material loss was so severe a strain on the colony- that its leaders began to cast about for a new location, in Ireland, Jamaica, or elsewhere, — the Jamaica proposition being Cromwell's own. In June, 1649, so the story goes, the long-lost ship was seen beating up the harbor towards New Haven. As the townspeople gathered to watch her, at first incredulous, then joyful, then hesitat- ing and awe-stricken, it was seen that there was but one man on her deck ; that he was leaning on liis sword, and looked sadly on the gathered mul- titude. As she drew nearer, he pointed once to the sea, and then New Haven's phantom ship vanished from sight. In June, 1653, the joyful news was received that Cromwell had taken sides witli the majority of the commissioners, and had enjoined Massachu- setts to desist from her opposition ; and that a fleet of commonwealth ships was at Boston, ready to help the New England union to remove the Dutch flag from Manhattan. The Massachusetts THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 157 general court was angry, but not angry enough to resist openly. It still refused to raise troops for the war, but consented to allow the parliamen- tary commissioners to raise men in Massachusetts, if they could. Arrangements for an expedition of eight hundred men, to attack New Netherland, were in progress, when they were stopped by the news of peace between England and Holland, which had been concluded April 5, 1654. Stuyve- sant thus obtained another lease of life. There was at first a strong disposition in Con- necticut and New Haven to allow the union to lapse because of what they regarded as the perfi- dious conduct of Massachusetts. New Haven had even formally voted not to choose commissioners. But Massachusetts urged a continuance of the union so feelingly that commissioners were chosen as usual, and their meeting proved to be an ex- ceedingly amicable one. From that time the union went on through the rest of its brief exist- ence with little apparent friction. But it is as evident as anything can be that the heart had been taken out of it by the course of Massachu- setts in 1652. Nullification is nullification, whether the moving cause be worthy or unworthy ; and after Massachusetts had once successfully nullified the plain provisions of the articles, her confeder- ates could never again feel that perfect confidence in her future action which is essential to the use- fulness and even the existence of a league govern- 158 CONNECTICUT. ment. A stronger tendency is evident every year to reduce the functions of the commissioners to matters of administrative routine, while the sev- eral colonies diverge more and more strongly in the protection of their own interests and in their peculiar development. For six years after the peace between England and Holland, the two Connecticut colonies went on in their course of development with few events of exceptional interest. Successive deaths were thin- ning out the ranks of the original settlers. Hooker died in 1647. John Haynes, the first governor of Connecticut, died in 1654, and his family seems to have become extinct soon after. Henry Wolcott, one of the most influential leaders of the same colony, died in 1655. He was more fortunate in his descendants : there was hardly a time for the next two centuries when a Wolcott was not in some post of trust and honor in the service of the Commonwealth. In 1657 and 1658 died Edward Hopkins of Connecticut, and Theophilus Eaton of New Haven. Hopkins had been governor of his colony in alternate years from 1640 until 1654, Haynes being chosen in the other years. He had married the sister of David Yale, a Boston mer- chant ; and his bequest to the towns of Hartford and New Haven founded the Hopkins grammar schools in those cities, as Elihu Yale's beneficence long afterward gave the impetus to the college which bears his name. Eaton had been chosen THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION. 159 governor of New Haven every year from the settlement in 1638 until bis death. His loss was almost irreparable to his colony, coming as it did just before the crisis in her history. It is impos- sible here to do justice to his public services and his private worth. But there are some indications that in these respects he had surmounted obstacles which the official records have not fully detailed. His biographers claim that his numerous family "was under the most perfect government." If the facts found by the church trial of 1644, in which Mrs. Eaton (the governor's second wife) was censured, are to be taken as proved, Eaton's home life must have been a constant thorn in the flesh. Mrs. Eaton seems to have been in the habit of venting a very ugly temper in the most outrageous language to the whole family, from her husband down to " Anthony the neager." She slapped the face of " old Mrs. Eaton," while the family were at dinner, until the governor was com- pelled to hold her hands ; she pinched Mary, the governor's daughter by his first marriage, until she was black and blue, and " knocked her head against the dresser, which made her nose bleed much ; " she slandered Mary, falsely impeaching her character ; and in all points she seems to have been the type of the vulgar notion of a step- mother. She, the wife of one of the " seven pil- lars," put the church to shame by becoming a pronounced Anabaptist, walking out from the com- 160 CONNECTICUT. munion service, arguing with Mr. Davenport from her seat in the audience, and expressing loud and exasperating approbation when he used the famil- iar formula, " On this point I will be brief." There seems to have been a good deal of human nature under the surface, even in New Haven. Davenport was still in New Haven : it was not until 1668, after the union of the two colonies had been accomplished, that he removed to Boston. In both Connecticut and New Haven, the healthy condition of the body politic was shown by the fact that new men were coming up prepared to take the places of those whom death was so rapidly removing. First among these was John Winthrop. Chosen governor in 1657, deputy governor in 1658, and governor again in 1659, he became at once so necessary to the people of Connecticut that they changed the provision in their constitu- tion forbidding the immediate reelection of a gov- ernor, and he was reelected annually until his death in 1676. His son, Fitz John, following in his father's course, was governor from 1698 until his death in 1707. The Wyllyses, Talcotts, Wol- cotts. Treats, Shermans, and other families were sending a stream of young men into public life, and all of them were well fitted for it. One of the ablest of the new men was John Allyn of Hart- ford. Nominated to the board of assistants in 1661, he was chosen secretary of state in 1664, and held that ofiBce for twenty-eight years between THE TWO COLONIES UNTIL THE UNION, 161 that date and his death in 1696. The personali- ties of the men of the time get little attention, unless their work is theological, as in the case of Hooker or Davenport, or their non-essential char- acteristics are such as to strike the public attention' and so win some advantage for the colony, as in the case of Winthrop. The mass of the leaders pass slowly across the stage, doing their work like men, but leaving us hardly any notion of their per- sonal appearance or traits. The influence of the feeling is shown in the refusal of the Wyllys family to erect any monuments in their family burying ground. Said one of them: " If Connecti- cut cannot remember the Wyllyses without a monument, let their memory rot." In few cases is this general tendency more disappointing than in that of John AUyn. Hardly any trace of him is left beyond the cramped but legible writing in which he kept the records, and the work which those records detail. And yet it is quite evident that, whenever work was to be done requiring stubborn tenacity of purpose and cautious shrewd- ness of method, John Allyn's name always appears in the center of it. Like so many of his contem- poraries, he seems to have been entirely satisfied with the reward offered by the consciousness of effective work ; and we can only wonder now how much the commonwealth of Connecticut owes to John Allyn. Eaton's place at New Haven had been taken by 11 162 CONNECTICUT. William Leete, who served as governor of that colony from 1661 until the union of the colonies. He was one of the original settlers, and one of the seven pillars of the church at Guilford. After the union, he became deputy governor, 1669-75, and then served as governor from Winthrop's death until 1680, dying in 1683. CHAPTER XL THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. Monk's march to London came in thfe opening days of the year 1660. On the 25th of April, Charles landed, at Dover ; and in July the momen- tous tidings reached Boston. On the vessel which brought them came Whalley and GofEe, two of the regicides : England was no longer a place for them. They stayed in Boston and Cambridge until the following February, treated at first with distinguished consideration by the authorities as well as by private persons. The first intelligence that they were under the ban of the new govern- ment made such a change in their treatment that they fled to New Haven, arriving there March 27. A royal warrant for their arrest followed them from Massachusetts through Hartford, but the messengers found their errand blocked at New Haven by the most exasperating obstacles. They had to yield to the magistrates' cautious regard for the Sabbath ; their documents were read aloud in public meeting, instead of being treated as secret-service business ; and, when the Sabbath came, they were regaled with a sermon from the 164 CONNECTICUT. significant text : " Hide the outcasts ; bewray not him that wandereth ; let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab ; be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler." Davenport and his people were evidently in full accord with the regicides. Leete and the magistrates seem to have seen the consequences of their action ; but they continued to make use of every legal obstacle to thwart the arrest, and the messengers finally returned to Bos- ton empty-handed, though the two judges had been concealed at New Haven, or within three miles of it, throughout their visit. The '' Judges' Cave," on the summit of West Rock, sheltered them for a month, and then they set out on their wanderings. Sometimes in New Haven, Guilford, or Milford, sometimes in their old refuge or like spots, they continued to escape their pursuers for some three years. In 1664, finding that special royal commissioners had arrived, charged with their arrest, they went to Hadley, in western Massachusetts. Their choice of a final, refuge shows again the secret tie which seems to have bound together the New Haven people, the minor- ity of the dissatisfied Connecticut churches, and the Cromwellian element in England ; for Had- ley's settlement had been due to the secession of a minority of the Hartford and Wethersfield churches. This was the scene of their asserted appearance to head the settlers in repelling an In- dian attack ; and here Whalley died about 1674, THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 165 and Goffe probably five years later. Their burial- place is really uncertain, though some have be- lieved it to be in New Haven. The authorities of Connecticut were as anxious as those of New Haven that no harm should come to the regicides, and the fugitives found as fre- quent and as secure refuge in Hartford as any- where else. But the difference of method showed itself in this as in other cases. When the regi- cides were really not within their jurisdiction, the Connecticut authorities always seized the oppor- tunity to make their zeal in the king's service evident. They overwhelmed the royal commis- sioners with warrants, letters of authority, and proclamations ; the colony was in a ferment be- cause of their haste to lay hands on the criminals ; they were his majesty's most faithful servants. Under the like circumstances, the New Haven au- thorities always showed a decorous satisfaction in saying No to the commissioners, which went far to discount the sincerity of their denials when the fugitives were suspected to be concealed within their jurisdiction with their privity. They could not but have been reported to the home authori- ties as a dangerous colony, the remaining quintes- sence of Cromwellianism ; and such reports could not but have had a strong influence on the fortunes of the two colonies in the charter struggle which followed immediately. The records of Connecticut show nothing done 166 CONNECTICUT. in regard to the Restoration until March 14, 1660 (61), though the vote then passed refers to a pre- vious decision at an informal meeting of the mag- istrates and deputies. On the date just given, the general court voted that Charles II. should be proclaimed king ; that an address should be pre- pared and sent to him, asking for " the continu- ance and confirmation of such privilidges and lib- erties as are necessary for the comfortable and peaceable settlement of this colony ; " and that the <£500 which the Cullick estate was to pay the colony should be reserved to pay the expense of the application. The court of election. May 16, approved a draft of an address offered by Gover- nor Winthrop, appointed a committee to revise and complete it, and named the governor as the colony's agent in England in regard to the patent. This last is the first open mention of what must have been the burning desire of every Connecticut leader, — the obtaining of a charter to give legal title to what had been done by popular author- ity. At the session of June 7, the court finally approved the address which had been completed, renewed the governor's appointment as agent " to procure us a patent," and authorized him to draw on the treasurer for £500. From that time there is not a word about the charter in the records un- til they are blazoned with the triumphant entry of its reception in October, 1662, more than a year afterward. In the interim, the colony, hav THE CHARTER AND THE UNION, 167 ing done all that it could do, waited in sober pa- tience. Just as Winthrop was embarking for England, New Haven at last proclaimed Charles II. king, more than a year after the news of his accession had been received ; and the step was not taken until remonstrances had been received from friends at home, warning the colony of the evil impression which its continued silence was mak- ing there. The form has been called grudging and half-hearted. In reality, it almost demands the space for insertion in full, for the sake of the refreshing contrast which its simple and manly terms offer to the servility of the style which the habit of the times at court seems to have extorted from Connecticut. It is as follows : " Although we have not received any form of proclamation, by order from His Majesty or Coun- cil of State, for proclaiming His Majesty in this Colony; yet the Court, taking encouragement from what has been done in the rest of the United Colonies, hath thought fit to declare publicly and proclaim that we do acknowledge His Royal Highness, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, to be our sovereign lord and king ; and that we do acknowledge our- selves, the inhabitants of this colony, to be his Majesty's loyal and faithful subjects." Winthrop set sail for England in August, 1661. 168 CONNECTICUT. He took with him the address and petition to his majesty, which had cost the whole intellect of the colony such prolonged labor ; a letter of instruc- tions from his principals ; and letters to Lord Say and Sele, and the Earl of Manchester, two old Puritans, now of the king's privy council. The instructions directed him to consult with Say and Sele, Brooke, and such of the original patentees as he could find ; to endeavor to obtain a copy of the Say and Sele patent, and have it confirmed to the colony, with such amendments as could be obtained ; and, in case the Say and Sele patent could not be come at, to apply for a new patent for the colony, with bounds extending " eastward to the Plymouth line, northward to the limits of the Massachusetts colony, and westward to the Bay of Delaware, if it may be." The southern limit is not mentioned, unless a recommendation to include the adjacent islands be considered as carrying the limits beyond New Haven and over Long Island. A contemporary protest from Con- necticut against the appointment of a boundary committee, cited by Atwater, would go to show that such was the case. " We conceive you can- not be ignorant of our real and true right to those parts of the country where you are seated, both by conquest, purchase, and possession, though hitherto we have been silent, and altogether forborne to make any absolute challenge to our own." The address to the king is of the most inflated style of THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 169 the Stuart period of English. It begins with a regret that its authors are separated by so vast an ocean from those who are under the immediate in- fluence and splendor of so great a monarch, in the princely palace of his renowned imperial city, the glory of the whole earth ; and that a too early winter had hindered them from long since pros- trating themselves by an humble address at their sovereign prince's feet. It described the settle- ment of the colony just at the beginning of the sad and unhappy times of the wars in England, which its people had since been bewailing with sighs and mournful tears. It told how the people of Connecticut, all through the civil war, had been hiding themselves behind the mountains in that desolate desert, as a people forsaken, choos- ing rather to sit solitary, and wait upon the Divine Providence for protection, than to apply to any of the illegitimate governments which had arisen in England, their hearts still remaining entire to his majesty's interests. It implored his majesty, now that the beams of his sovereignty had not only filled the world's hemisphere, but had ap- peared over the great deeps in the New England horizon, to accept '' this colony, your own colony, a little branch of your mighty empire." And it pleaded their poverty as an excuse for their pre- sentation of nothing more than their hearts and loyal affections to his majesty. It is hard to see how Winthrop could have read the document with a straight face. 170 CONNECTICUT. The gratitude of the colony was a lively sense of favors to come : the petition which accompanied the address was as straightforward as the address was circumgyratory. It asked that the king would grant to the colony a patent in the terms of that formerly granted to the Say and Sele as- sociates, or of that granted to Massachusetts ; and that it might include immunity from customs, in order that the colony might recoup by commerce its losses in the Pequot war. The letters to Man- chester and Say and Sele besought their coopera- tion, which was heartily given. Winthrop's winter in London was spent to good advantage. New England historians have wearied themselves in detailing his advantages for such a negotiation in such a court, — his natural powers of mind, developed by sound university education ; his gentle manners, polished by continental travel ; the manly beauty of his face and person ; and the kindly, mature, and solid judgment which governed the whole man. The story is also told of a ring given to Winthrop's grandfather by Charles I., and now returned by the ambassador to the new king ; and the charter of Connecticut is attributed almost equally to the tactful courtesy of Winthrop and the filial affection of Charles. One can hardly help a suspicion, however, that the <£500, which the Connecticut leaders had placed at Winthrop's disposal, had a more considerable influence on the result than the histories have yet admitted. The THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 171 new court had required some time to get warm in its seat before showing plainly the depths of ve- nality to which it was prepared to descend. The time for the disposition of places, and of all kinds of court favors, by bargain and sale, had now fully come ; and it was about this time that Samuel Pepys seems to have had his eyes opened to the fact that this was the way in which many of those about the court did get their incomes. At any rate, there seems to have been no final accounting for the balance of the X500 between Winthrop and the colony. Winthrop had gone primarily on his own business : so says the resolve of May 16, 1661. The colony had ordered the munificent sum of £80 to be paid to the governor as his salary for the year ; and it would not have been likely to have passed over a further claim of <£500 for mere expenses, unless those expenses had been somewhat in the nature of a secret-service fund. There is a sentence in the petition to the king which may possibly have some significance. " May it please your majesty graciously to bestow upon your humble supplicants such royal munificence, according to the tenor of a draft or instrument, which is ready here to be tendered, at your gra- cious order." That Charles II. should have drawn up and offered to a Puritan commonwealth a char- ter under which, as Chalmers, sound royal author- ity, says, " over their acts of assembly there was no power of revisal reserved, either to the king or 172 * CONNECTICUT. to his courts of justice, nor was there any obliga- tion imposed to give an account of their transac- tions to any authority on earth," is hardly a con- ceivable theory. That a charter drawn up by Winthrop, and passing through some of the many secret channels existing at the court, should have ^ passed the scrutiny of the king, more through favor for the channel through which it had come than through filial affection or liking for a chance ac- quaintance, is at least more easy to believe. For no more democratic charter was ever given by a king than that which Charles signed for Connecti- cut, April 23, 1662, giving it a government which lasted for a century and a half, until the adoption of the new constitution in 1818. The charter constituted a body politic and cor- porate, under the name of '' Governor and Com- pany of the English Colony of Connecticut in New England in America," to , consist of Winthrop, John Mason, seventeen associates named, and such other persons as should be made free of the com- pany thereafter (^. e., admitted voters), with all the powers of an English corporation and with a common seal. The freemen were to choose from time to time a governor, a deputy governor, and twelve assistants ; each " town, place, or city " was to send two deputies ; and the governor, assistants, and deputies together were to constitute the gen- eral assembly, with power to change times of elec- tion, to admit freemen (that is, to establish the THE CHARTER AND THE UNION, 173 requisites for the right of suffrage), to constitute judicatories, to make laws not contrary to those of England, to define the duties of officers and the manner of their election, to impose fines and pen- alties or revoke them and pardon offenses, to repel warlike attacks by force, and to hold the territory within the limits granted in trust for the freemen of the colony. Until the second Thursday of the following October, Winthrop was named governor, Mason deputy governor, and twelve of the charter members assistants. All the freemen and their descendants were to have the rights of natural- born English subjects. Finally, the territory of the colony was to cover *'all that part of our do- minions in New England in America bounded on the east by Norrogancett River, commonly called Norrogancett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and on the north by the line of the Massachusetts Plantation, and on the south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Mas- sachusetts colony, running from east to west ; that is to say, from the said Narrogancett Bay on the east to the South Sea on the west part ; with the islands thereunto adjoining." Connecticut was thus to have a domain stretching from Narragan- sett Bay to the Pacific Ocean ; and the charter- less and defenseless colony of New Haven was included within these limits. The charter was first produced and shown in this country at a meeting of the New England 174 CONNECTICUT. commissioners at Boston, September 4, 1662. The New Haven commissioners must have sent the startling intelligence home at once, so that both the interested colonies must have known of it about the same time. The Connecticut general court records for October 9 note that the '' pa- tent or charter" was this day publicly read in the presence of the freemen, and that a committee of three had been appointed to take the charter into their custody in trust for the colony. Hart- ford was then declared the capital ; the civil and military officers of the colony were confirmed in their places ; and a formal letter was drawn up to the constables of the towns, directing them to col- lect the taxes, and to distrain the property of de- linquents. Such laws as were not in conflict with the terms of the charter were validated and con- firmed. The right of suffrage was regulated by an order that all candidates for the privilege should bring a certificate from a majority vote of their town that they were persons " of a civil, peaceable and honest conversation," twenty-one years old or upward, and taxed in the lists for at least «£20 estate. This was a widening of the elective fran- chise, for the qualification had been fixed at £30 since 1657. In addition to these enactments, a long series of resolutions was passed, all intended to strike at the weak spot of New Haven, and break up the political organization of that colony. Their details will be reserved until the statement THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 175 of the events which gave them success has been made. On its part, the New Haven general court, at its meeting of October 15, merely appointed a day of fasting and prayer for guidance '' in this weighty business about joining with Connecticut colony." Immediately after the fast, a New Haven town meeting disapproved any such union. At the freemen's meeting, November 4, and the general court meeting on the following day, a letter from Connecticut was read, enclosing a copy of the charter, and demanding the consummation of the union. Two answers were sent. The first inti- mated mildly that New Haven was not " expressly included" within the charter jurisdiction, and asked that the New Haven colony might remain " distinct, entire, and uninterrupted, as hereto- fore," until they could hear from Winthrop. The second, from the freemen, argued that the charter only empowered Connecticut to acquire and hold lands within the limits assigned, but did not author- ize it to interfere with the lands already acquired by New Haven ; and it besought the Connecticut authorities to wait until they could make appli- cation for a charter, and learn his majesty's real intentions, to which they meant to submit. Here the public records become silent until the follow- ing spring. But the inherent weakness of the New Haven confederacy, arising from its peculiar ecclesiastical 176 CONNECTICUT. system and its restrictions on the right of suffrage, had already become visible, and were having their influence on the proceedings of both parties to the controversy. For some ten years before, an un- derlying spirit of dissatisfaction seems to have cropped out from time to time ; but the final out- burst seems to have been due, at least indirectly, to the Quakers. The New England commissioners had recommended the several colonies, in Septem- ber, 1656, to take measures against the Quakers. Connecticut complied so far as to direct that any tov^n which harbored Quakers should be fined ; but the execution of the penalties against the sect was finally left " to the discretion " of the magis- trates. They seem to have exercised so much dis- cretion that the heretics, despairing of any chance of martyrdom in this quarter, gave Connecticut a comparatively wide berth. New Haven, on the contrary, went into the matter with more spirit. The court of magistrates itself undertook the trial of offenders, and every trial increased the number of criminals. The public and indignant criticisms of the Quakers and their harborers upon the meth- ods and manners of the New Haven jurisdiction must have been as fire to tow, when there were so many others dissatisfied by reason of more tem- poral circumstances. About 1660, the general court begins to have especial trouble in regard to letters attacking their civil organization and prac- tice. It looked upon all such offenses as not THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 177 merely civil offenses, but as offenses '' against the King of Peace, that had so long continued peace amongst them ; " and it punished them most rigor- ously. The number of its assailants rapidly be- came greater, as did the exasperation of the court, which was hardly ever out of hot water from 1660 until the union was accomplished. In 1661 the dissatisfaction had risen so high that several of those chosen as magistrates refused to take the oath ; and the general court decided to make public declaration of its position. It acknowledged that the non-freemen had complained that " just privileges and liberties " were denied them ; but it declared that this denial was a part of the funda- mental system of the colony, established by law, from which it would not be diverted by any agita- tion ; and it added the hint that it was only neces- sary for the dissentients to join the church in order to qualify themselves for the enjoyment of the rights to vote and hold office. This declaration must have added fuel to the flame ; and the court's meeting in May, 1662, gives evidence of this. The record admits that there was '' great discourage- ment upon the spirits of those that were now in place of magistracy ; " and it was no wonder. Cases were multiplying of men who, when arrested, denied the authority of the colony to make laws now that the king was proclaimed, and demanded of the marshal '' whether his authority came from Charles the Second ? " These were awkward ques- 178 CONNECTICUT. tions for New Haven to answer. As they multi- plied, the embarrassment of the court, and the hesitation of the doubtful mass of citizens, in- creased with them. The want of a legal basis to the colony's authority was already painfully evi- dent, even while its only antagonists were its own ill-disposed citizens : what was to be the difficulty of the case when Connecticut should set up her claims, and become an eager refuge and support to every one who should resist the authority of New Haven ? It was at this session that Bray Rossiter of Guilford, and his son John, the Mother Carey's chickens of the coming storm, first appeared on the scene. The father, as an allowed physician, had claimed exemption from taxation ; when that was refused, he excepted to the colony's right to tax ; and now he, with others of Guilford, was haled before the general court to answer to the charge of having sent some offensive papers to the court, and of having spread others abroad, " to the disturbance of the peace of this jurisdiction." Most of the accused apologized, the lamest apolo- gies being gladly accepted by the court ; but their statements all pointed to the Rossiters as the ring- leaders, and the court hardly knew what to do with them. There were present, says the record with half concealed bitterness, " Mr. Allen and Mr. Willis, of Connecticut, waiting to see an issue of the business, pretending to be friends to us and THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 179 friends to peace, laboring with Mr. Rossiter and his son to bring him to some acknowledgment of evil." Finally a written statement was accepted from him in which he '' owned that in several pas- sages and expressions he had been very rash and inconsiderate," and agreed to submit to the govern- ment " while he continued under it." The Con- necticut charter was soon to relieve him from con- scientious scruples as to the last-named clause. It is noteworthy that, in examining one of the parties, the court said that it " had met with this business both from Stamford and Southold ; " and Southold sent no deputies to this session. A sum- mons was sent to the Southold deputies to see that the taxes were paid, and to report for prosecution all persons refusing payment. It is evident that the New Haven jurisdiction was already among the breakers. This was the state of affairs when the two gen- eral courts met in October, and the Connecticut body heard their invaluable charter read to the freemen. Then followed the first series of orders by which Connecticut spread out her jurisdiction over her neighbor. The people of Southold wrote that they had had notice from "Mr. Willis, of Connecticut," that they were within Connecticut's limits ; and that they had appointed Mr. Young to be their deputy. Young was admitted as a freeman and deputy, and was appointed magistrate for Southold ; and the people of that place were 180 CONNECTICUT. directed to choose a constable, to whom Young was to administer the oath of fidelity to Connec- ticut. Similar applications were received from ''several inhabitants" of Stamford and Green- wich, of Huntington and Oyster Bay, on Long Island; and these towns, with Mystic and Pawca- tuck in the district claimed by Massachusetts, were directed to choose Connecticut constables, for the constable seems still to have been the pivot of town authority. The court went further, and ordered that word be sent to the inhabitants of Westchester that they too were within the colony's chartered limits, and that they should follow the same procedure. In the new pride of the charter, the colony was ready to throw down the gantlet not only to New Haven and Massachusetts, but to the Dutch also. So fully had the colony taken its position, that, at the meeting of the following March, it was necessary to do no more, except to vote X20 to Mr. Rossiter. The letter to New Haven, and the answers of the New Haven committee and freemen, already mentioned, occupied the winter; but the forces which were disintegrating New Haven met no check. The Connecticut committee, in March, 1663, proposed nearly the same terms of union, which were finally adopted ; but New Haven re- jected them, on the ground that she had appealed to the king and could not prejudice her appeal. In May, New Haven sent another remonstrance to THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 181 Connecticut ; but it is noteworthy that her offi- cers, then elected, took the oath " for the year en- suing, or until our foundation settlements be made null." In August, her committee showed further signs of weakness by proposing a series of a dozen questions as to the terms on which a treaty of union could be effected ; and the answer of the Connecticut committee certainly gave them full assurance of perfect equality and security for all their rights, except the exclusive privileges of church-members, under the New Haven system. In September, the New Haven delegates com- plained to the New England commissioners of the action of Connecticut, particularly of the appoint- ment of constables, " who are very troublesome to us." Connecticut answered, and Massachu- setts and Plymouth decided that, as New Haven had been recognized as an independent member of the confederation, any infringement on her juris- diction would be a violation of the articles of union ; and that any such act in the past ought to be recalled. All this time, however, the Connec- ticut authorities were quietly allowing their new agents in the New Haven towns to carry on their work ; and the results were that before the end of the next year the unfortunate colony of New Haven was deeply in debt, unable to collect taxes, and unable even to pay the salaries of her officers. At the meeting in December, 1663, the New 182 CONNECTICUT. Haven court had received some poor encourage- ment in two letters, one from Winthrop, the other from the English privy council. Winthrop's let- ter was to John Mason, deputy governor, and the Connecticut general court ; but he had sent a copy to New Haven. He remonstrated against the appointment of constables in New Haven towns, and wished that all such proceedings should be suspended until his return home, when he hoped to arrange an amicable union of the two colonies. His language as to his own previous pledges is curiously ambiguous : " And further I must let you know that testimony here doth affirm that I gave assurance before authority here, that it was not intended to meddle with any town or planta- tion that was settled under any other government ; had it been otherwise intended or declared, it had been injurious in taking out the patent not to have inserted a proportionable number of their names in it." Who can make out from this whether Winthrop means to endorse this asserted promise of his or not? The course of the two governors, indeed, is almost inexplicable. Win- throp obtains a charter, covering New Haven ; the New Haven authorities assert, without con- tradiction, that he had twice promised in writing, before setting out for England, that he would not have New Haven included under his colony's ju- risdiction ; and Winthrop finally makes this curi- ously roundabout admission, with which all par- THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 183 ties seem afraid to meddle further. On the other hand, while Leete, the New Haven governor, fal- fiUs all his duties through the crisis with punctu- ality, his action always carries a suspicion that it is perfunctory ; his heart does not seem to be in the work. No one who has followed the records carefully will be at all surprised by the assertion of Hubbard and Mather, that the action of Win- throp in so framing the charter as to include New Haven was by the special desire of Governor Leete himself ; nor by the assertion of the Con- necticut governor and council in 1675, when Leete was deputy governor and present, with sev- eral of the former New Haven leaders, that *' their [New Haven] conjunction with this colony was desired by the chief amongst them." Leete's action was repudiated by Davenport, in a letter to Winthrop, as " his private doing, without the consent or knowledge of any of us in this col- ony ; " " not done by him according to his public trust as governor, but contrary to it." And yet, so far from repudiating Leete, the people reelected him governor. The facts probably are that Leete and other New Haven leaders were quietly tired of the whole New Haven system, and despaired of their ability to maintain it longer ; that Winthrop ascertained this fact just before leaving for Eng- land ; and that much of the fury of words which was expended on the negotiations was meant to allow events to take their course, while the honest 184 CONNECTICUT. and conscientious upholders of the old system were being satisfied and convinced of the futility of further resistance. The times were out of joint for New Haven ; and while the leaders were not disposed to help overturn their fathers' work, they were no more disposed to stand in the way of events. No doubt Winthrop was relieved to find on his return that Connecticut had gone on obstinately in her course ; and no doubt also Leete was no less relieved to impart the news. The privy council's letter was no more than a circular to the governors of the New England colonies ; but as it was directed to New Haven among the rest, that colony took this as an evi- dence that the king had had no intention of ab- sorbing them in the rival colony. A sounding proclamation was issued at once. It rehearsed the special orders of the council in regard to New Haven, being careful to note the addition of his majesty's sign manual " in red wax ; " it stated the embarrassment which the colony was under in fulfilling the king's directions by reason of the refusal of some ill-disposed persons to pay their legal taxes ; and it cautioned all such persons to cease their opposition at once. It is almost pitiful to see the eagerness with which the colony, which had settled here in primitive independence, now seized on this straw of royal recognition ; and, however one may admit the necessity and benefit of the union, he can hardly help wishing that the manly little colony had not been forced into it. THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 185 Connecticut had succeeded in stirring up a hornet's nest in almost every quarter. Her gen- eral assembly had appointed agents for the colony, with the powers of magistrates, in the New Haven towns on the mainland and Long Island, in the Dutch towns of Hempstead, Jamaica, Flushing, and Westchester, and in the Narragansett or Rhode Island country as far east as Wickford. Stuyvesant had appeared before the commission- ers at Boston, in September, 1663, to protest on behalf of the Dutch ; and the commissioners, while recommending a reference of the matter to them at their next meeting, took ground against any violation of the boundaries agreed upon in the treaty of 1650. The people of the Narragan- sett country were memorializing the Massachu- setts general court. New Haven's protests found a sympathetic audience in the majority of the New England union. Connecticut hardly seemed to have a friend. The state of affairs, however, had one favorable aspect : each of the other par- ties had too many interests of its own to attend to for any unswerving support of New Haven. Connecticut agreed not to make any present claim of exclusive jurisdiction over the Dutch towns ; and a more temporizing policy as to the Massa- chusetts contest left New Haven finally isolated. Nevertheless, that sturdy colony again resolved in December to make no treaty with Connecticut until affairs had been restored again to their origi- 186 CONNECTICUT. nal condition. It also ordered that distraint be made for unpaid taxes. This last step brought about a significant hint of a readiness to resist by force. On the last day of the year, the Rossiters, who had gone to Hartford and secured a Connecti- cut constable and magistrates, created a terrible hubbub in Guilford before daylight. Guns were fired ; the inhabitants were roused and thrown into great confusion; and assistance had to be summoned from New Haven and Branford to keep order. Though this was accomplished, the object of the Rossiters was accomplished with it, for it was agreed that tax collection and distraint should be suspended for the present. New Haven's position was now desperate. There was no money in the treasury ; the towns were divided within themselves; there was no physical force to constrain the disloyal; and the authorities were either discouraged or faint- hearted. Leete called a special session of the general court in January, 1663 (4), and laid the state of the case before it. It still stubbornly voted not to treat ; and it named Messrs. Daven- port and Street a committee to draw up its griev- ances in writing. The committee's work is com- monly known as " New Haven's Case Stated." It is the most dignified and pathetic document in the whole controversy. It stated the origin of the colony ; its title by purchase ; its recognition by the Dutch, by parliament, by the king, by the THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 187 united colonies of New England, and by Connec- ticut herself ; the promises of Winthrop ; and the turbulent and seditious practices of Connecticut toward her sister colony, contrary to righteousness and peace ; and it demanded that reparation be offered for the past, and security for the future. The document was in the form of a letter to the Connecticut general assembly ; and it is to be re- gretted that Connecticut's answer was by no means so dignified. Its tone is that of triumph and ex- ultation ; and its writers were evidently out of patience with long waiting. There are indica- tions, however, in a most amicable contempora- neous correspondence between the two commit- tees, that both parties had about accepted the fact of union as inevitable, and had pretty well agreed on its terms. At any rate, the New Haven gen- eral court ceased from this time to do any impor- tant business. The inevitable conclusion was hastened by an unexpected event. It was now March, 1664, the month in which King Charles made his grant of the territory then in New Netherland to his brother, the Duke of York. The grant covered the whole of Long Island, and the mainland from Delaware Bay to the Connecticut River, thus in- cluding both Hartford and New Haven within its limits. Little as they liked Connecticut, the New Haven people liked the duke less ; and the only apparent security against his government, for both 188 CONNECTICUT, colonies, was in the charter of Connecticut. The news of the grant was brought to Boston by the fleet and army of Nichols in July ; and the down- fall of the Dutch government at Manhadoes fol- lowed in August. In the same month, Leete called a meeting of his general court, and in- formed them that their committee recommended submission. With great confusion and dissatis- faction, a vote to that effect was passed, then re- considered, and then passed again in about the same words ; but the people were still so stubborn that the vote amounted to little. In September, the New Haven delegates were admitted for the last time, and against the pro- test of Connecticut, to seats in the meeting of the New England commissioners. In October, the Connecticut general assembly appointed a com- mittee to demand the submission of New Haven, and to admit New Haven freemen as Connecticut freemen ; and it also appointed Leete and other New Haven leaders agents of Connecticut, with the powers of magistrates, to administer justice, and ordered all other officers to retain their places and perform their duties until the next election. In November, the representatives of Connecticut attended a meeting of royal commissioners at New York, to settle the limits between New York and Connecticut. This erudite body assigned Long Is- land to "• the Ducke off Yorke," and all plantations lying eastward of a certain creek or river called THE CHARTER AND THE UNION. 189 " Momoronack, which is reputed to be about twelve miles to the east of Westchester," to Con- necticut. This was accepted as the king's decision by the much-enduring New Haven colony. The general court, with " as many of the inhabitants as was pleased to come," voted to submit, but "with a salvo jure of our former right and claim, as a people who have not yet been heard in point of plea." Connecticut had renewed her first offers of ample security for equality under the charter, and in her answ^er to the notice of submission asked that all unpleasant reflections might be " buried in perpetual silence." When the general as- sembly met at Hartford in March, 1665, deputies from the former New Haven towns were present ; the proceedings were harmonious ; and Leete and three other New Haven leaders were chosen magis- trates or assistants. The colony of New Haven had ceased to exist, and ecclesiastical supremacy had given way to democracy. In October, 1665, in probable pursuance of terms before agreed upon, the general assembly ordered that two county courts be held at New Haven in June and November. These introduced trial by jury into the former New Haven territory, while they preserved to the people all that could be granted of their former autonomy. In May, 1666, the general assembly proceeded to divide the commonwealth into four counties, the bound-* 190 CONNECTICUT. aries of New Haven county extending " from the east bounds of Guilford unto the west bounds of Milford." This made a change in the common- wealth's judicial system. Until 1665, the highest judicial body was the particular court, composed of the governor or deputy and the magistrates. From 1665 until 1711, the particular court was succeeded by the court of assistants, seven of the twelve assistants chosen by the general assembly. The superior court was introduced in 1711, and the supreme court of errors and appeals, composed of the governor and assistants, in 1784. From 1807 until 1855, the latter was composed of supe- rior court judges sitting in bank, and, since 1855, of district judges. The commonwealth's court of assistants, however, did not sit at New Haven until 1701. Connecticut has played no small part in the development of the American Union, and in the peaceful conquest of the great western continent ; and her part would have been sadly marred if the integrity of her natural boundaries had been broken by the continued existence of the separate colony on the south. Her leaders of 1662-65 were bound by every regard to the future of the common- wealth to insist on the absorption of New Haven ; their insistence showed their foresight. And yet, even though the commonwealth emerges from the struggle with its natural outline unbroken, one THE CHARTER AND THE UNION, 191 may be pardoned a feeling of regret as New Haven sinks beneath the surface after her persistent fight for life. The county of New Haven does not quite fill the void left by the republic of New Haven. CHAPTEE XII. THE COMMONWEALTH. 1662-1763. Before the grant of the charter, the general court of Connecticut had begun to show the char- acteristics of a real commonwealth government. No exact point of time can be stated at which the transformation took place ; but there is a plain difference between the generally recommendatory tone in which the court was in the habit of ad- dressing the towns in 1 640, and the decidedly man- datory tone into which it had grown in 1660. As soon as the charter had given it the consciousness of a legal title to existence and authority apart from its town units, its drift in the assumption of powers heretofore left to the towns became some- what stronger, until the essential commonwealth interests had been brought under its jurisdiction. And yet it never lost the influence of the forces which had founded the colony. The Connecticut towns, while they were generally content to con- fine their work to the matters of purely local in- terest which had been left to them by the general assembly, had never any hesitation in resisting, by all peaceable means, any action of the supreme THE COMMONWEALTH. 193 legislative body which seemed to them unjust; and the general assembly, in its turn, was always disposed to treat such town resistance mildly, and to seek for an accommodation rather than resort to force. During the century which followed the grant of the charter, Connecticut had but nine governors, excluding Andros. All of these, with the excep- tion of Wolcott, who was dropped by reason of accusations of extortion, served until death or ad- vancing age compelled the choice of another ; and as the elections were annual, the long terms of ser- vice speak well for the satisfaction of the people with the rulers of their choice, and for the conser- vatism and " steady habits " of the Connecticut people. For some years after 1665 the colony went on in comparative quiet, developing new towns in every direction, and disturbed only by boundary disputes with its neighbors, by King Philip's war, and by the temporary recapture of New York by a Dutch fleet and army in 1673-74. The latter alarm was short-lived. The forces of New England were set in array ; the English towns on Long Island returned gladly to the jurisdiction of Con- necticut for protection ; but peace between Eng- land and Holland restored the province of New York to the duke in 1674. The king issued a new patent for the province, in which he not only included Long Island, but the territory up to the 194 CONNECTICUT. Connecticut River, which had been assigned to Connecticut by the royal commissioners. The assignment of Long Island was regretted, but not resisted ; and the island which is the natural sea- wall of Connecticut passed, by royal decree, to a province whose only natural claim to it was that it barely touched it at one corner. The revival of the duke's claim to a part of the mainland was a different matter, and every preparation was made for resistance. In July, 1675, just as King Philip's war had broken out in Plymouth, hasty word was sent from the authorities at Hartford to Captain Thomas Bull at Saybrook that Governor Andros of New York was on his way through the Sound for the purpose, as he avowed, of aiding the people • against the Indians. Of the two evils, Connecti- cut rather preferred the Indians. Bull was in- structed to inform Andros, if he should call at Say- brook, that the colony had taken all precautions against the Indians, and to direct him to the actual scene of conflict, but not to permit the landing of any armed soldiers. '' And you are to keep the king's colors standing there, under his majesty's lieutenant, the governor of Connecticut ; and if any other colors be set up there, you are not to suffer them to stand. . . . But you are in his majesty's name required to avoid striking the first blow; but if they begin, then you are to defend yourselves, and do your best to secure his majesty's interest and the peace of the whole colony of Con- THE COMMONWEALTH. 195 necticut in our possession." Andros came and landed at Saybrook, but confined his proceedings to reading the duke's patent, against the protest of Bull and the Connecticut representatives. It may have been thought that this success would meet the approval of the Hartford authorities, but they were made of sterner stuff. While com- mending the officers and men engaged, they added significantly : *' We wish he had been interrupted in doing the least thing under pretense of his hav- ing anything to do to use his majesty's name in commanding there so usurpingly, ivhich might have been done by shouts^ or sound of drum^ etc., without violence^ This lesson of unhesitating resistance was not lost on succeeding officers of the colony. In October, 1693, Benjamin Fletcher, the hot- tempered governor of New York, appeared at Hart- ford with his majesty's commission to act as com- mander-in-chief of the New England militia. In spite of the assembly's protest, he ordered out the militia, and went to the parade ground to review them. The commanding officer was Captain Wadsworth, who had saved the charter from An- dros. Fletcher began to read his commission. Wadsworth ordered the drums to beat ; and, says Trumbull, " there was such a roaring of them that nothing else could be heard." Fletcher angrily demanded silence, and the drummers hesitatingly complied. The instant the reading of the com- mission was renewed, Wadsworth shouted, " Drum, 196 CONNECTICUT, drum, I say ! " Again the rattle began, and again the governor struggled for silence. When he had obtained it, Wadsworth turned to him and said, " If I am interrupted again, I will make the sun shine through you." He then gave final orders to his drummers, and the governor retired without having his commission read. Connecticut suffered comparatively little from the horrors of King Philip's war ; the lesson to her Indians had been too sternly taught for that. It is a little curious to notice how close the storm of war came to her northern and eastern bound- aries without overpassing them. There were burn- ings and massacres through the western borders of Massachusetts, and battles in Rhode Island ; but the Connecticut men regularly fought outside of their own colony. The colony, however, must have been kept in a constant state of alarm by the near approach of hostilities, and her troops were freely furnished, and took an active part. She kept in the field about one third of the New England forces. It was Major Treat, with a Con- necticut force, who relieved the Essex men at Deerfield, and drove off the Indian besiegers of Springfield and Hadley ; and in the great swauip fight, Connecticut's contingent of three hundred men lost eighty killed and wounded, or about half the total loss. In sober, manly, and striking lan- guage, the general assembly gave them a fitting epitaph : " There died many brave officers and THE COMMONWEALTH. 197 jentinels, whose memory is blessed, and whose ieath redeemed our lives. The bitter cold, the :arled swamp, the tedious march, the strong fort, :he numerous and stubborn enemy they contended ^vith, for their God, king and country, be their trophies over death. Our mourners, over all the iolony, witness for our men that they were not mfaithful in that day." Andros had come out as governor of New York )n its recovery from the Dutch in 1674. All the etters of the Connecticut council, as the upper lOuse of the assembly was called under the char- ;er, show a standing distrust of Andros, which vas a fitting prelude to their intercourse ten years ater. Such distrust, in the case of an able man IS Andros seems to have been, was certainly in- evitable. The state of affairs was worthy of no- iice. The Empire State of New York has little •eason to envy the prosperity of the State of Con- lecticut in 1886 ; the case was far otherwise in L674. At that time, an able, enterprising cava- ier officer, sent out as governor of the duke's Drovince of New York, found his energies crippled vith the management of a territory consisting of ;vvo fairly important towns, a few straggling set- ilements on the Hudson, and some disaffected ^ew England townships on Long Island. Tliis vestern half of Connecticut was just the strip of erritory needed to make New York a province in •eality, and to enable him to do essential service ^^ OF THF ' f^ 198 CONNECTICUT, against his majesty's enemies in Canada ; the duke had at least a claim to it; and the royal governor could not be expected to appreciate at their full value the objections of a set of Hart- ford Puritans to this most necessary absorp- tion. A boozing, incompetent governor of New York was an immense relief to the Connecticut authorities : a man of Andros's abilities had to be, and always was, dealt with at arm's length. His offers of help against the Indians were accepted cordially, but were always restricted to the exact service required. The letters which passed be- tween the two parties show a constant sense of the real situation, in their mixture of distinguished courtesy with occasional railing, and in the con- stant readiness of Connecticut to bristle up in de- fense of some point which the governor was al- ways ready to assure them was not of the least importance. The intercourse, however, gave Con- necticut a very fair knowledge of Andros's char- acter and methods, which must have been of ser- vice in the coming struggle. In the later years of Charles II., royal commis- sioners, headed by Edward Randolph, gave New England much distress, urging upon the home government the general neglect of the navigation acts, and the offensive independence of this quar- ter of America. Massachusetts suffered most; and her charter, like the franchises of London, was vacated on a writ of quo warranto. Charles THE COMMONWEALTH. 199 lied in 1685, and his brother, James II., succeeded lira. In July, 1686, Governor Treat received wo writs of quo warranto against the colony of Connecticut, issued the previous year, calling upon t to show title for its exercise of political powers ►r abandon them. In December came another, n both cases, according to the colony's subse- [uent letter to King William, the time set for ap- )earance had elapsed before the serving of the vrit, so that the colony could make no defense, LS perhaps was intended ; but an attorney was ap- )ointed, and every preparation made for what re- istance was possible. Andros had been succeeded )y Dongan as governor of New York in 1682 ; Lnd the king was represented in New England by Joseph Dudley, a recreant Massachusetts man, as )resident of the royal commissioners. Dudley un- loubtedly did part of his work by endeavoring to )ersuade Connecticut to surrender her charter )eaceably to the crown, promising to exert all his nfluence to procure her one equally favorable, riie colony was not to be cajoled : aware of her mpotence for open resistance, she followed her iraditional policy, arguing and expostulating, lever yielding a jot, but not resorting to action mtil the time for action was fully come. In December, 1686, the Hartford authorities vere called upon to measure their strength again vith their old antagonist. Andros had landed at Boston, commissioned as governor of all New 200 CONNECTICUT, England, and bent on abrogating the charters. Following Dudle^^'s lead, he wrote to Treat, sug- gesting that by this time the trial of the writs had certainly gone against the colony ; and that the authorities would do much to commend the colony to his majesty's good pleasure by entering a for- mal surrender of the charter. The colony author- ities were possibly as well versed in the law of the case as Andros, and they took good care to do nothing of the sort ; and, as the event showed, they thus saved the charter. The assembly met as usual in October, 1687 ; but their records show that they were in profound doubt and distress. Andros was with them, accom- panied by some sixty regular soldiers, to enforce his demand for the charter. It is certain that he did not get it, though the records, as usual, are cau- tious enough to give no reason why. Tradition is responsible for the story of the charter oak. The assembly had met the royal governor in the meet- ing-house ; the demand for the charter had been made ; and the assembly had exhausted the re- sources of language to show to Andros how dear it was to them, and how impossible it was to give it up. Andros was immovable ; he had watched that charter with longing eyes from the banks of the Hudson, and he had no intention of giving up his object now that the king had put him in power on the banks of the Connecticut. Toward even- ing the case had become desperate. The little THE COMMONWEALTH, 201 democracy was at last driven into a corner, where its old policy seemed no longer available ; it must resist openly, or make a formal surrender of its charter. Just as the lights were lighted, the legal authorities yielded so far as to order the precious document to be brought in and laid on the table before the eyes of Andros. Then came a little more debate. Suddenly the lights were blown out ; Captain Wads worth, of Hartford, carried off the charter, and hid it in a hollow oak-tree on the estate of the Wyllyses, just across the " riveret ; " and when the lights were relighted, the colony was no longer able to comply with Andros's demand for a surrender. Although tlie account of the affair is traditional, it is difficult to see any good grounds for impeaching it on that account. It supplies, in the simplest and most natural manner, a blank in the Hartford proceedings of Andros which would otherwise be quite unaccountable. His plain purpose was to force Connecticut into a po- sition where she must either surrender the charter or resist openly. He failed : the charter never was in his possession ; and the official records as- sign no reason for his failure. The colony was too prudent, and Andros too proud, to put the true reason on record. Tradition supplies the gap' with an exactness which proves itself. Having done all that men could do. Treat and his associates bowed for the time to superior force. Andros was allowed to read his commission, and 202 CONNECTICUT. Treat, Fitz-John and Wait Wintlirop, and John Allyn received appointments as members of his council for New England. John Allyn made what the governor doubtless considered to be the closing record for all time. But it is noteworthy that the record was so written as to flatter An- dros's vanity, while it really put in terms a decla- ration of overpowering force, on which the com- monwealth finally succeeded in saving her charter from invalidation. It is as follows : "At a General Court at Hartford, October 81st, 1687, his excellency. Sir Edmund Andross, knight and Captain General and Governor of His Majesty's territories and dominions in New Eng- land, by order of His Majesty James the Second, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, the 31st of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of the colony of Connecticut, it being by His Majesty annexed to Massachusetts and other colonies under his excellency's govern- ment. ,, „ " FINIS." The government was destined to last far longer than either the governor or his government. But, while it lasted, Andros's government was bitterly i hated, and with good reason. The reasons are more peculiarly appropriate to the history of Massachusetts, where they were felt more keenly than in Connecticut ; but even in Connecticut, THE COMMONWEALTH, 203 poor as was the field for plunder, and distant as it was from the "ring" which surrounded Andros, the exactions of the new system were wellnigh intolerable to a people whose annual expense of government had been carefully kept down to the lowest limits, so that, says Bancroft, they " did not exceed four thousand dollars ; and the wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service." The feeling in Connecticut is well represented in the story of the answer made to Andros himself, when he asked somewhat suspi- ciously for the reason of the proclamation of a fast- day : " Sir, this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." There were not lacking incitements to premature insurrection ; there were letters from hot-headed friends in England, telling them that they were '' but a company of hens " if they did not revive their charter by force; and the Andros party had private intelligence implicating various leaders in some vague plot for a revolt. But the people were, as ever, self-restrained. The letters of Treat and AUyn to Andros are models of courtesy, as of faithful stewards who thought only of his interests. The colony waited patiently for the precise moment when it could strike most ef- fectively, and then it struck once and for all, with all the strength that was in it. April, 1689, came at last. The people of Bos- ton, at the first news of the English Revolution, clapped Andros into custody. May 9, the old 204 CONNECTICUT. Connecticut authorities quietly resumed their func- tions, and called the assembly together for the following month. William and Mary were pro- claimed with great fervor. Not a word was said about the disappearance or reappearance of the charter ; but the charter government was put into full effect again, as if Andros had never inter- rupted it. An address was sent to the king, asking that the charter be no further interfered with; but operations under it went on as before. No de- cided action was taken by the home government for some years, except that its appointment of the New York governor, Fletcher, to the command of the Connecticut militia, implied a decision that the Connecticut charter had been superseded. Late in 1693, Fitz John Winthrop was sent to England as agent to obtain a confirmation of the charter. He secured an emphatic legal opinion from Attor- ney General Somers, backed by those of Treby and Ward, that the charter was entirely valid, Treby 's concurrent opinion taking this shape : "I am of the same opinion, and, as this matter is stated, there is no ground of doubt." The basis of the opinion was that the charter had been granted under the great seal ; that it had not been surren- dered under the common seal of the colony, nor had any judgment of record been entered against it ; that its operation had merely been interfered with by overpowering force ; that the charter therefore remained valid ; and that the peaceable submission THE COMMONWEALTH. 205 of the colony to Andros was raerely an illegal sus- pension of lawful authority. In other words, the passive attitude of the colonial government had disarmed Andros so far as to stop the legal pro- ceedings necessary to forfeit the charter ; and then prompt action, at the critical moment, secured all that could be secured under the circumstances. William was willing enough to retain all possible fruits of James's tyranny, as he showed by enforc- ing the forfeiture of the Massachusetts charter ; but the law in this case was too plain, and he ratified the lawyers' opinion in April, 1694. The charter had escaped its enemies at last, and its escape is a monument of one of the advantages of a real democ- racy. For fifty years, every man in the common- wealth had felt the maintenance of the common- wealth to be his own personal concern, and had been willing not only to die for it, but to live for it, work for it, and exercise the highest sort of self-control for it. Out of this mass there had been evolved a class of representative men, who were in the highest degree capable of seeing and doing just what was needed. Democracy had done more for Connecticut than class influence had done for Massachusetts. The settlement of the boundaries of the colony was a longer and more fruitful source of dissension than the legal government. On the west, the agreement of 1664 was superseded in 1683 by a new one between Connecticut and Governor Don- gan of New York, Andros's successor, in which 206 CONNECTICUT. the quadrilateral, at the southwest corner of Con- necticut, first makes its appearance. It was agreed that the starting point of the line should be Lyon's Point, at the mouth of " Byram Brook," between the towns of Rye and Greenwich ; thence up that brook to the " wading place," where the common road crossed it ; thence eight English miles north- northwest into the country ; thence easterly to a line parallel to the first, beginning twelve miles east of Lyon's Point as the Sound runs, and to a place in that line eight miles from the Sound; thence along this north-northwest line to a point twenty miles from the Hudson ; thence northerly to the Massachusetts border, by a line " parallel to Hudson's River in every point." If the quadrilat- eral first described came at any point nearer than twenty miles to the Hudson, the other northerly lines were to be run so much further to the east- ward as to give New York an equivalent tract of land. This threw Rye into New York, and recog- nized New York's old claim that Connecticut was to come no nearer to the Hudson than twenty miles' distance. It also gave up the line agreed upon in 1664, running north-northwest from Ma- maroneck, crossing the Hudson near West Point, and leaving the district east of it, including New- burgh, Poughkeepsie, and Kingston, under Con- necticut. It has since been rectified in various points, and the proposed line parallel to the Hud- son has been straightened, but otherwise it is the THE COMMONWEALTH, 207 basis of the present line. Rye revolted to Con- necticut in 1697 ; but the king's confirmation of the line of 1683 in 1700 forced the town to return to New York. The whole line was established by- survey in 1725 and 1731, re-surveyed by New York in 1860, agreed upon by both States in 1878 and 1879, and ratified by congress in 1880-81. It should be added that the unnatural junction of Long Island with New York in 1664 carried with it the island called Fisher's Island, off the south- east corner of Connecticut, which had been granted to Winthrop by Connecticut in 1641 ; and it thus gave the southern boundary of Connecticut its odd appearance, running from the mouth of Pawcatuck River, at the eastern end of the Sound, to the cen- ter of the East River, at the western end. The northern boundary of the colony was not fully settled for more than a century. When Con- necticut was settled, the Massachusetts southern line was in the air ; and in 1642 that colony sent two men. Woodward and Saffery, to run the line according to the charter. The surveyors are said to have been ignorant men; and Connecticut author- ities call them lucus a non lucendo^ " the mathe- maticians." They began operations by finding what seemed to them a point '' three English miles on the south part of the Charles River, or of any or every part thereof : " thence the southern Mas- sachusetts line was to run west to the Pacific Ocean. The two mathematicians, however, either 208 CONNECTICUT. hesitating to undertake a foot journey to the Pa- cific, or doubting the sympathy of casual Indians with the advancement of science, and being suffi- ciently learned to know that two points are enough to determine the direction of a line, did not run the line directly west. Instead, they took ship, sailed around Cape Cod and up the Connecticut River, and found what they asserted to be a point in the same latitude as the first. In fact, they had got some eight miles too far to the south, thus giv- ing their employers far too much territory ; but they had fulfilled their principal duty, which was to show that Springfield was in Massachusetts. An ex parte survey, and of such a nature, could not of course be recognized by Connecticut. The oblong indentation in Connecticut's northern boun- dary is a remnant of the ignorance of Woodward and Saffery ; for Massachusetts claimed a line run- ning just north of Windsor, and Connecticut finally reclaimed all but this oblong. She made ex parte surveys of her own in 1695 and 1702, and then both colonies appealed to the crown. This was evidently a dangerous tribunal for both ; and in 1714 they agreed on a compromise line much as it is at present. Connecticut received, in return for her concessions, 107,000 acres of wild land in Mas- sachusetts, which was sold for about $2,500 and the proceeds given to Yale College. As surveys became still more accurate, it was found that the present towns of Enfield, Suffield, and Woodstock, THE COMMONWEALTH. 209 which had fallen to Massachusetts by the agree- ment of 1714, were really south of the line, so that Massachusetts was governing territory outside of her charter limits. In 1749 Connecticut ac- cepted the petition of these towns to be restored to her jurisdiction, and the}^ have since been Con- necticut towns. Massachusetts continued to claim the towns, but did not attempt to enforce the claim until 1804, when she finally abandoned it. In 1822 and 1826, the line was run as it now is, leaving the indentation to Massachusetts, perhaps as a memorial to Woodward and Sa£Eery. " How the boundary on the east was ever fixed," says Bowen, '' seems a puzzle ; " and he cites, very appropriately, Rufus Choate's description of it in one of its stages: " The commissioners might as well have decided that the line between the States was bounded on the north by a bramble bush, on the south by a blue jay, on the west by a hive of bees in swarming time, and on the east by five hundred foxes with firebrands tied to their tails." Connecticut claimed all the Narragansett country, up to Narragansett Bay, by conquest from the Pequots; and Massachusetts, on the ground of her essential assistance to Connecticut, claimed a divi- sion of the spoils. Rhode Island was considered an unchartered nonentity by both. In 1658 the New England commissioners really gave judgment against Connecticut, assigning the Mystic River as the boundary between Massachusetts and Connec- 14 210 CONNECTICUT. ticut, thus handing over the whole of Rhode Island and the eastern part of the present State of Con- necticut to the Bay colony. The present town- ship of Stonington thus became a Massachusetts town, and was called Southerton ; and the Ather- ton Company, a Massachusetts association, whose leader. Captain Atherton, had bought large tracts of land in Rhode Island from the Indians, and which had acknowledged the jurisdiction of Con- necticut, now passed under that of Massachusetts. The Connecticut charter in 1662, by carrying that colony up to Narragansett Bay, instead of clearing matters up, complicated them still further. Rhode Island then had an agent in London, soliciting a charter, which was granted in 1663 ; and it assigned as the western boundary of that colony the Pawca- tuck River from its mouth to its source, and thence a due north line to the Massachusetts boundary. To prevent a conflict, Winthrop had made an agreement with the Rhode Island «gent, which was made a part of the Rhode Island charter, that the Pawcatuck River should receive the additional title of '^ alias Norrogansett or Narrogansett River ; " and that, wherever the Connecticut char- ter spoke of the Narragansett River, the Pawca- tuck River should be taken and deemed to be the one intended ! Connecticut at once repudiated this action of Winthrop as ultra vires, erected a town government at Wickford, and set the all- penetrating power of the Connecticut constable to THE COMMONWEALTH. 211 work there. Then followed a period of great con- fusion, Rhode Island arresting Connecticut town officers, and vice versa^ in the disputed territory, and Connecticut preparing to make her claims good by force, for the New England commission- ers in 1664 had decided the dispute in her favor. In the mean time, Randolph's royal commis- sioners, whose history in New England was that of a common and public nuisance, took the Narragan- sett dispute under consideration in 1665, without giving the parties any hearing or notice of it, and decided it in their usual impartial fashion. They decided that neither Connecticut nor Rhode Island had the slightest claim to the territory in dispute ; and they took it away from both, and erected it into a separate territory, to be known as the King's Province, belonging solely to his majesty. The title of the Atherton Company to their land pur- chases was decided in the same summary way : it was adjudged null and void, and the settlers were ordered to leave the King's Province. It adds to the oddity of the decisions that no one seems to have asked the commissioners to interfere. The country in dispute was in reality almost a wilderness, with very few settlers. Connecticut therefore allowed the Randolph decision to go with a protest, until it became obsolete as the royal commissioners faded like an unhappy dream out of New England's memory. From time to time she appointed commissioners to meet those of 212 CONNECTICUT. Rhode Island, thougli the meetings came to noth- ing. Proclamations and arrests enlivened the lot of the lonely dwellers in the Narragansett coun- try; but settlement was retarded by the knowl- edge that the settler had to buy into a lawsuit of the most vexatious character. Rhode Island south- west of Providence was thus practically unset- tled except by Indians, when the events of King Philip's war embittered the controversy by rein- forcing the feeling of Connecticut men that the Narragansett country rightfully belonged to them by conquest as well as by charter. Their soldiers had fought in the swamp fight at Kingston, where the power of Philip was broken ; their patrolling parties had afterwards scoured the country, and swept it of Narragansetts ; and all the time Rhode Island had looked idly on, and had never struck a blow for the coveted territory, for her neighbors or for herself. After renewed confusion, a new set of royal commissioners, in 1633, decided every point in the Narragansett controversy in favor of Connecticut. The prospect for Rhode Island was therefore dark. All of its present territory west of Narragansett Bay and southwest of Providence had been adjudged to Connecticut. All east of the bay, if the grounds of this decision were to hold good as a precedent, belonged to Plymouth. And Massachusetts, to the north, was in waiting with a variety of claims, and a general willingness to act as residuary legatee of the late colony of THE COMMONWEALTH. 213 Rhode Island. It must have seemed certain that the existence of the stout little colony was to be limited to its first fifty years, and that its time had come. But its salvation came from the inability of its enemies to agree. The decision of the com- missioners was not confirmed or considered by the home government, owing to the troublous times of James II. ; and Rhode Island was enabled to deny its weight altogether. Then came Andros, who took Rhode Island's view of the case, and put her into possession of the disputed territory. She held to it, in spite of intermittent attempts of Con- necticut to exercise jurisdiction over it, and in spite of a decision of the English attorney general in 1696 in favor of Connecticut. Indeed, her per- sistency, and the ugly possibility of an appeal to England for a general decision, began to incline Connecticut to a modification of her claims. Un- der the charter of Rhode Island, her western boun- dary was to be the Pawcatuck River to its head, r^nd thence due north to the Massachusetts line. If the Pawcatuck River be followed up to its source, as still given on Rhode Island maps, that point will be found in a pond just east of where the swamp fight took place, near Kingston, within a jlialf dozen miles of Narragansett Bay. A line due north from this point would pass just west of Providence, and would leave Rhode Island only a narrow strip of territory on the west shore of the bay. Connecticut, giving up her first claim to 214 CONNECTICUT. abut on the bay, now held to a literal interpreta- tion of the Rhode Island charter ; and it is not easy to see how her legal claim to the bulk of the disputed soil could be gainsaid. Rhode Island, however, was really fighting for her life ; and her struggle was so persistent that Connecticut at last abandoned her old claim. In 1703 commissioners from both colonies agreed to follow the Pawcatuck River up to a branch called the Ashaway, thence a straight line to a point twenty miles due west of the extremity of Warwick Neck in Narragansett Bay, the northwest corner of the Atherton tract, and thence due north to the Massachusetts line. A subsequent attempt of Rhode Island to revive her ancient claim to the Mystic River as her west- ern boundary led Connecticut to renew her resist- ance to the settlement of 1703 ; but the English board of trade in 1723 repotted in favor of the moral claim of Rhode Island, and showed a disposi- tion to make the dispute an excuse for uniting the two colonies in a royal government. Connecticut therefore joined in 1727-28 in running the line of 1703, which, slightly straightened in 1840, has since remained the boundary. The legal grounds of Connecticut's claim seem to have been good ; but common justice to the different relations to , the territory in dispute, which was vital to Rhode Island and only important to Connecticut, and common justice also to the obstinate fight made by the smaller colony, may fairly give reason for THE COMMONWEALTH. 215 satisfaction in the final settlement. But it should not be forgotten that this was a case in which the smaller colony, if sufficiently determined, as Rhode Island evidently was, had a great advantage. She was ready to risk everything on an appeal to Eng- land; for, if she lost this territory in default of an appeal, she had little else to live for. In every crisis of the controversy, therefore, Rhode Island had a weapon in reserve to which Connecticut had no shield, for the last thing she wished was to come again under the general jurisdiction of an English tribunal : she had too many larger inter- ests, outside of the Narragansett country, which such a tribunal would undoubtedly bring into question, while Rhode Island had hardly anything else to risk. This weapon, brought promptly and resolutely into play by Rhode Island whenever it was necessary, gave her a victory, to which she was fairly entitled by circumstan, 67 ; in New Haven, 84, 102, 177 ; in Vermont, 272 ; in Pennsylvania, 278. " Town-born," 339. Township, the, 220, 268. Tracy, Uriah, 331. Tread well, John, 351. Treat, Gov. Robert, 196, 199-201. INDEX. 409 Treby, 204. Trinity College, 355. Trumbull, Benjamin, 288. Trumbull, Fort, 312. Trumbull, Gov. Jonathan, 286, 294. Trumbull, Gov. Jonathan, 81, 287. TrumbiUl, J. H., 71, 288. Trumbull, John, 28T. Trumbull, John, 288, 340. Trumbull, H. G., 288. Trumbull, Lyman, 288. Tryon, Gov. William, 303, 307, 309. Turner, Nathaniel, 92, 94. Tyler, Gen. Daniel, 381. Tyler, Gen. R. O., 381. Uncas, 29, 35, 46, 53, 217. Underliill, Captain John, 38. Union, the American, 62, 263. Union, the New England, 102, 114, 116, 143; difficulties with the Dutch, 147, 152; nulhfication by Massachusetts, 157 ; failure, 132, 157. United colonies, the, 49. Utica, N.Y.,274. Van Corlear, John, 15. Vane, Gov. Harry, 32, 33. Van Tromp, Admiral, 155. Van Twiller, Gov. Walter, 15. Vermont, 127, 136, 271, 273, 291. Vernon, Admiral, 256. Virginia, 280, 315, 320, 323. Wadsworth, Captain Joseph, 195, 201. Walker, Admiral Hovenden, 253. Wallingford, 267. Wampum, 248. Ward, 204. Warham, Rev. John, 18, 19. Wars, 250 foil. Warwick grant, 8, 9, 109, 115, 118. Warwick Neck, 214. Washington College, 355. Washington, George, 294, 295, 311, 317, 343. Waterbury, 267, 337, 358, 359. Water power, 360. Watertown, 17. Webb, Gen., 261. Webster, Gov. John, 228. Wells, Thomas, 80. Welles, Gideon, 381. Wentworth, Gov. Benning, 272. Wentworth, Strafford, Earl of, 108, 115. Wesleyan University, 355. Westchester, 180. Western Reserve, the, 127, 282, 315. West Haven, 308. Westmoreland, 277, 279. West Point, N. y.,306. Wethersfield, 11, 21, 22, 33, 56, 312 ; dissensions in, 93, 134, 164, 223; commencement at, 242 ; State pri- son, 301. Whalley, Edward, 163 foil. " Whapperknocker," the, 299. Wharf, the Long, 339. Wheaton, Dr., 355. Wheelock, Ebenezer, 55. Whitfield, Rev. Henry, 88. Whitefield, Rev. Henry, 232, 234. Whiting, John, 81. Whiting, Joseph, 81. Whiting, Nathan, 260. Whiting, Rev. Joseph, 228. Whitney, EH, 303. Whitneyville, 363. Wickford, R. I., 185, 210. Wigglesworth, Rev. Michael, 228. William and Mary, 208, 251. Williams, Dr. John, 355. Williams, Rev. Elisha, 242. Williams, Roger, 32. Wilson, James, 326. Winchester Arms Co., 364. Windham, 299. Windsor, 11, 15, 22, 25, 56. Winslow, Gov. Edward, 14. Winthrop, Fitz John, 160, 202, 204, 252. Winthrop, Jr., John, 8, 23, 77, 80, 110, M3 ; at Pequot, 140 ; governor, 160 ; sent to England, 166 ; obtains a charter, 177 foil., 210. Winthrop, Sr., John, 14, 58, 110; let- ter to Hooker, 66. Winthrop, Theodore, 380. Winthrop, Wait, 202. Wolcott, Henry, 158. . Wolcott, Jr., Henry, 71. Wolcott, Oliver, 294. Wolcott, Oliver, 352. Wolfe, Gen. James, 261. Wood, John, 245. Woodbury, 267. Woodward, 207. Wool, 342, 343. Woolsey, Pres. T. D., 245. Wooster, Gen. David, 292, 303, 304. Wyllys, George, 81. Wyllys, Hezekiah, 81. Wyllys, Samuel, 81. Wyllys Family, the, 123, 161, 201. Wyoming, migration to, 127 ; settle- ment, 275 foil. ; massacre, 278 ; failure, 279. Tale College, 101, 238 foil. ; Univeik sity, 247. Yale, David, 158. Yale, Elihu, 241. " Yankee N otions," 357? f ^ OF THK ^^^ UNIVERSITV li THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL pBte~0P 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE To fl THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE THr»^''"'"' i Zj0V2Ff9lt-| / YA, ozbyb UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY