PUBLISHERS' NOTE. in Issuing a new edition of Connecticut, it has seemed desirable to add a supplementary chapter dealing with the history of Connecticut since the Civil War, This chapter has been written by Clive Day, Assistant Professor of Economic His­tory in Yale University.

4 park st., September, 1903,

PREFACE 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 his­tory. These fields have been explored so thor­oughly by abler hands that it would be presump­tion 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 fortu­nate concurrence of circumstances, even more in­dependent of outside control than that of Massa­chusetts; the principle of local government had here a more complete recognition ; and, in the form in which it has done best service, its begin­ning was in Connecticut.

Vlll

II. The first conscious and deliberate effort on this continent to establish the democratic princi­ple in control of government was the settlement of Connecticut; and her constitution of 1639, the first written and democratic constitution on rec­ord, was the starting-point for the democratic de­velopment 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 colo­nial 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 cen­tripetal 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 conven­tion of 1787, by another happy concurrence of cir­cumstances, 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 ena­bled them to bend the form of our national con-

IX

stitution into a corresponding shape ; and the pe­culiar constitution of our congress, in the different bases of the senate and house of representatives, was thus the result of Connecticut's long main­tenance of a federative democracy.

VI. The first great effort at westward coloniza­tion, 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 or­ganization of the great Northwest.

VII. Individual capacity and energy, the natu­ral fruit of a democratic system, have enabled the people of Connecticut to survive and prosper un­der 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 Con­necticut has a claim to a high place among char­acteristic commonwealths; and that the antiqua­rian, biographical, and other features which usu­ally abound In State histories, should in this in­stance 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

Connecticut migration has been so great that it has been necessary to resist an almost constant temptation to diverge to the influence of Connecti­cut 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 thir­teen United States senators, twenty-two represen­tatives from New York, fifteen supreme court judges in other States, nine presidents of colleges and eighteen other professors, and eleven gover­nors and lieutenant-governors of States. The re­mark 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 Connecti­cut has been extraordinary. One must sympa­thize 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 loca­tion 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 Connec­ticut commonwealth, they must be still further

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 in­clude the feature of foot-notes for authorities, and the writer followed the plan of putting his author­ities into a bibliography. It has not seemed ne­cessary to alter the arrangement, and It has been retained as an essay toward a bibliography of the commonwealth for the further use of students,,1 It Is not meant to be implied that all, or nearly all, the books there named have been used exhaus­tively ; very many of them have merely been re­ferred to In order to keep the writer from going astray In matters on which their authors are au­thority 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 pros­ecute the study of this commonwealth's great and honest work.

The approaching year 1889 Is the 250th anni­versary (or, to adopt the modern phrase, the quar­ter-millennial) of the Constitution of 1639, which seems to the writer the most far-reaching political work of modern times, and from which he con­ceives there are direct lines of communication run­ning down to all the great events which followed, 1 See Appendix, p, 397.

Xii

— to commonwealth organization and colonial resistance, to national independence and federa­tion, 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 inaugura­tion of its Constitution, to whose essence and ex­pression 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.

note. — The seal on the title-page is a fac-simile of that which appears on the title-page of the first revision of the laws of Con­necticut, made in 1672 and published at Cambridge, Massachu­setts, by S. Green in 1673. A discussion of the seals of Connec­ticut will be found in the Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, I. 251.

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

The story of tlie commonwealth of Connecticut is one which Is not strongly marked by the ro­mantic element. Here are no witchcraft delu­sions 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 ten­dency 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 1

2

Eastern and Western boundaries forty-five 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 at 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 south­ern 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

3.

more sandy and less profitable. Tlie 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 advan­tages for grazing: their water power has since proved a greater source of wealth from manufac­tures. 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 'Salis­bury, is 2,854 feet above sea-level.

Agriculture, in its various forms, 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 Rev­olution 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 pro­prietors, and were finally made the state prison. They furnished the material for the " Granby

4

coppers," coined in 1737, and for other coins, in­ cluding the United States coinage. There is an ignis fatuus of gold and silver. The rocks of Connecticut have proved richer than a gold mine to who have developed them. Lime-stone, marble, brown-stone, and flagging-stone are found in excellent quality and unlimited amount, and a portion of the State leaves its borders annu­ ally in this form of export. The supply of feldspar and other minerals has been developed as sharper 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 harbors to build up any great foreign trade, a moderate export of mules, live stock,' and some food products to the West Indies; and in years, the railroad has been a channel 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 1680, con-this oblong as an unbroken wilderness, there would have been in it two points of great

5

material advantage. One was the upper valley of the Connecticut, with its rich soil, its broad mead­ows, and its capacity for luxuriant 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 ter­ritory, 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 com­panies, 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 superiority to commerce

6

in the new settlement. The first break from Mas­sachusetts into the Connecticut Valley was gov­erned 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 reli­gious dispute usually gave rise to a new town, un­til 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 intol­erable, 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 por­tions of it which would have waited longer for settlement but that the pressure from behind made distribution easier than return.

chapter ii. jurisdiction of the connecticut territory. the claim of England to the jurisdiction of t the territory included in Connecticut rested on the discoveries of the Cabots in 1407, and more espe­cially in 1498, This claim, however, wa,s allowed to He dormant until the organization of the Lon­don ami Plymouth companies in 1606, when the territory now in Connecticut was includded in the grant to the Plymouth Company, No effort was made to reduce this territory to possession. 'Ihie Dutch were allowed so plant a colony at New Am­sterdam, and the only white men who adventured on Long Island Sound were occasional Dutch skippers. The frist of these was Adrian Wok, who in 1614 found the mouth of the Connecticut River, and explored the river as fur 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 dis­coverer, and he sailed on to Narragansett Bay, leaving hut a geographical impress on the terri­tory, whose importance to the Dutch lay only in its trade in peltries.

8

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 Hamilton, between the 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 dis­posed 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 Con­necticut River, maintained their claims, and gave the settlers in the upper Connecticut Valley either a private or a tacit permission to enter their do­main. In 1662, with the consent of the surviving

9

patentees, the jurisdiction was transferred to the Connecticut colony, which could thus claim un­broken 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 Con­necticut 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 ever­lasting to all people unto whom this present writ­ing shall come." He "gives, grants, bargains,

10

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 Jurisdic­tion " 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 ac­quired 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 War­wick transaction took this peculiar shape, why Warwick transferred, without showing title, a ter­ritory 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 Connecti­cut ; 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 pre­scription 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

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 con­tract by public force. The Civil War and its con­sequences upon royal authority lasted long enough to cover the time which human 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 impor­tance. The first settlements, at Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield, were an irruption of subjects of the king of England into an unorganized and un­occupied territory, very much like the first settle­ments in the territory of Iowa, more than two centuries later. But there was one very great difference between the two cases : the Iowa settle­ment was an irruption of individuals ; the Con­necticut settlement was an irruption of organized

12 .

towns. In Massachusetts, the original towns, or " plantations," were hardly to be taken as organ­ized governments ; and the advent of the charter government reduced them, and subsequent towns as well, to a condition of subordination. In Con­necticut, three fully • organized Massachusetts towns passed out of the jurisdiction of any com­monwealth, and proceeded to build up a common­wealth 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 Con­necticut is peculiar in that it was the product, in­stead 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 re­tained a marked individuality, and the common­wealth 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 tutned was the town system, rather than the com­monwealth. 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

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 havo done itself without a fratricidal struggle with a sister colony.

CHAPTER III. THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS OF CONNECTIOUT. DURING the ten years after 1620, the twin col­onies 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 en­voy 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, in­cluding Winslow, visited the Connecticut River, " not without profit." In April, 1631, a Connecti­cut Indian visited Governor Winthrop at Boston, asking for settlers, and offering to find them corn and furnish eighty beaver skins a year. Win­throp declined even to send an exploring party. In

15

the midsummer of 1633, Wmslow 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, tinder command of William Holmes, was sent around by sea to the month 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 theVarsche 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 Gover­nor Van Twilier, and had put up a rude earth­work, with two guns, within the present jurisdic­tion 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

returned home. Plymouth, had at least planted the flag far within the coveted and disputed terri­tory.

In December of the following year, a Dutch force of seventy men from New Amsterdam ap­peared before the trading house to drive out the intruders. He must be strong who drives a Yan­kee away from a profitable trade ; and the attitude of the little garrison was so determined that the Dutchmen, after a few hostile demonstrations, de­cided 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 di­rectly 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 Eiver 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 dis­position of the Pequots, and, when followed up by the tremendous overthrow of the Pequots, for Con­necticut's permanent exemption from Indian dif­ficulties. The Connecticut settlers followed a

17

found in possession, ignoring those who claimed a supremacy based on violence, and, in case of re­sistance 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 ac­commodated.

One route to the new territory, by Long Is­land Sound and the Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1688, 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 dif­ficulty which had come to a head In Massachu­setts 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 great­est 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 Massa­chusetts 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

18

lead to the suspicion that some fundamental differ­ence 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 num­ber of strong men at these three towns, notably Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dor­chester, Watertown, and Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling : the two former led the way, in October, 1633, in establish­ing town governments under " selectmen ;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less, the fun­damental feature of Massachusetts policy, — the limitation of office-holding and the elective fran­chise to church-members. The three towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposi­tion, a position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the circumstances.

The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were Warham 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

19

divergence was due neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and charac­ter 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 1680 he retired to Holland and resumed his preaching. In 1632, he and Stone came to Sew 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 1847. 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 set­tled with Ms 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, Phil­lips 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 1684,

20

and seems to have been " slated," to use the modern term, for the governorship in the follow­ing 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 in­dependent 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 oppo­sition, took part in the migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, founding the town of Springfield.

At the May session of the Massachusetts Gen­eral 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 Con­necticut, — lack of room in their present locations,

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 Massachu­setts, and the peril of the emigrants, the conclud­ing argument, that "the removing of a candle­stick " would be " a great judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession was the result of discord between two parties.

Hay ties 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 1684-5 at the place where Wethersfield now stands. In May, 1685, the Massachusetts General Court voted that lib­erty be granted to the people of Watertown and Roxbury to remove themselves to any place within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. In March, 1636, the secession having already been accom­plished, the General Court issued a " Commission to Several Persons to govern the people at Con­necticut," Its preamble reads : " Whereas, upon-some reasons and grounds, there are to remove from this our Commonwealth and body of the

22

Massachusetts In America divers of our loving iriends 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 clivers 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 ammuni­tion for the protection of the new settlements.

If it be true that some of the Watertown peo­ple had wintered at Wethersfield in 1684-5, 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. Dur­ing the summer of 1685, a Dorchester party ap­peared near the Plymouth factory, and laid the foundations of the town of Windsor. In October of the same year, a party of sixty persons, includ­ing women and children, largely from Newtown, made the overland march and settled where Hart­ford 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.

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It may have been that the echoes of all these preparations had reached England, and stirred the tardy patentees to action. During the autumn of 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., agent of the Say and Sele associates, readied Boston, with authority to build a large fort at the month, of the Connecticut River. He was to be " Governor of the River Connecticut " for one year, and lie at once Issued a proclamation to the Massachusetts emigrants, asking " under what right and preference they had lately taken up their plantation." It Is said that they agreed to give up any lands demanded by him, or to return on having their expenses re­paid, A more dangerous Influence, however, soon claimed Winthrop's attention. Before the winter set in, lie had sent a party to seize the designated spot for a fort at the month of the Connecticut River, His promptness was needed. Just as Ms men had thrown up a work sufficient for defense and had mounted a few guns, a Dutch ship from New Arnsterdarn appeared, bringing a force in­tended 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 Connecti­cut. The navigation of the river was completely blocked by ice before the middle of November ; and the vessels which were to have brought their

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winter supplies by way of Long Island Sound the river were forced to return to Boston, leaving tie wretched 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-tori ves­sel, and made their way back to Boston. Others turned back on the way they had come, and strug­gled 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 neces­sary supplies from home. The Dorchester people alone lost cattle to the value of two thousand pounds.

The Newtown congregation, in October, 1685, 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-

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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 there. 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 aban­doning Connecticut disappeared forever.

During the summer of 1686, 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 1687 had fairly opened, there were about eight hundred persons within the present limits of Connecticut, two hundred and fifty of whom wefe adult males and fighting men. Perhaps the " strong bent of spirit" to remove to a commonwealth where Indi­viduality was not to be sacrificed to " steady hab­its " was not entirely confined to New town, 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 nu­merous ; the lowest and most probable estimate of their numbers is six or seven thousand, and the highest twenty thousand. The northeastern sec­tion 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 powowing, devil-worship, and darker immoralities, if we may trust the possibly hasty and prejudiced accounts of the early Puritan ob-

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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, how­ever, developed military science so far as to have become acquainted with the rudiments of fortifi­cation. It is not easy to say how far their con­structions deserved the name of forts, but they were numerous, and were an advance on the ordi­nary Indian methods of fighting. The Connec­ticut 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 mem­bers, 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 mem­ber that their name was regularly put by synec­doche for the whole. The Connecticut Indians, at any rate, never stopped to discriminate mi­nutely between the various branches of the Six Nations, but, on the appearance of any of them, promptly fled with the panic-stricken cry, " The

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Mohawks 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, col­lecting tribute, and announcing the edicts of the great council at Onondaga. To this exercise of supremacy they seem to have made but one excep­tion, 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, ac­cording to tradition, a sept of the Mohegan blood from New York, crossing the Hudson and moving eastward to the Connecticut River, passed south­ward and conquered a permanent home for them­selves on the shore of Long Island Sound, in the southeastern part of the present State. This ir­ruption split the Indian population Into two parts. To the east of the Pequots were the Narragansetts, 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 was 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

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Indians into that mass of petty tribes which, has been referred to, none of which dared to offer re­sistance after the power of the Pequots had been once established, all being interested merely to es­cape the notice of their oppressors as far as pos­sible, 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 esti­mated 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 ex­clusive extortion. Both were satisfied by the pay­ment of their respective tribute, and. the Pequot irruption merely doubled the burden of the abori­ginal inhabitants.

At the time of the English, entrance to Connec­ticut, 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 impor­tant Pequot district. His courage, strength, and cunning were remarkable even among the Pe­quots ; and the relations between him and Sas-

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sacus soon became strained and finally broke. Un­able 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 corning 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 Pe­quots, 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 sa­chems, who had been expelled by the Pequots, and made his purchases of land from them. Further­more, a certain lewd and drunken ship-captain named Stone, from Virginia, having brought his vessel into the Connecticut River during the sum­mer 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

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terms of which many of the difficulties between his tribe and. the English were put out of sight. The Pequots were to allow the English to colonize 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 Pe­quots, 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 posses­sion 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-

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board. As the sea was rising be took Oldham's body Into his vessel, and allowed the derelict to drift ashore with two of the Indians still In her hold.

It Is difficult to see how the Pequots were con­cerned in all this. But Governor Vane and. his council, of Massachusetts Bay, In sending Endi-cott with an expedition to punish the Block Island­ers, assumed that the Pequots had harbored some of the murderers, and must be included In the punishment. No proof was offered to the in­dictment against the Pequots, who seem to have held the same place in the English mind that Habakknk held in the Frenchman's, and to be "capable of anything," But Endicott gathered no laurels in his Pequot expedition. His fero­cious 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 alli­ance 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 Pe­quots were thus left to maintain alone their ancient

33

title, by courage, to their territory. They did not hesitate, The fort at Saybrook, whose commander, Lieutenant Gardiner, had strongly disapproved Endicott's expedition, was first attacked. A forag­ing party was cut off, and several men were cap­tured 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 lie 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 cap­tive girls. The Pequot war had fairly begun, and, in the nature of tilings, 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 es­timate of the governor.