CHAPTER XIII.

ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS. 1636-1791.

it was probably Inevitable, under the circum­stances of time and place, that the first effort to establish a democratic commonwealth should be complicated with an ecclesiastical, system entirely foreign to its real nature. Religious homogeneity almost compelled it. To the first settlers in Con­necticut, though not for the same reason as in New Haven, civil and ecclesiastical affairs were convertible terms. The township and the church were coterminous : the town, by which term, as distinguished from the territorial township, was meant the body of voters within the township, settled civil and ecclesiastical affairs Indifferently in the same town meeting; and as about all the voters were at first church - members and agreed closely in creed and methods, the dual system produced little friction for a time. It was inevi­table that lapse of time should disturb the origi­nal homogeneity and bring trouble. The effort in New Haven to put off the evil day by the practi­cal absorption of the state in the church led to the downfall of the commonwealth. The long contin-

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ued efforts in Connecticut to reconcile church and state under a free town system gave rise to diffi­culties whose history might fill volumes, and task the learning of an expert in church history. Ma-ther, no mean expert, said of one of the opening struggles that its origin was as obscure as that of the Connecticut River. The attempt of a mere layman to penetrate such a labyrinth must neces­sarily be hazardous ; and we are to venture in no further than relation is found to the peculiar development of the commonwealth.

It will easily be seen that a reconciliation be­tween churches which acknowledged no earthly master, and a commonwealth legislature whose final authority was to be supreme, was a work of no little difficulty. The long and comparatively successful maintenance of the concordat in Con­necticut seems to have been due to the character of Hooker and the impress which he left on the ecclesiastical traditions of the colony. He and Davenport were fair types of the methods of the two colonies. Both were masterful men, even for that time. Davenport applied his force directly, and failed. Hooker relied on influence, and suc­ceeded. Most of Hooker's successors, in spite of an occasional slip into direct aggression, followed his methods with like success. With no official voice in legislation, and no direct appeal even to their arbitration, there was hardly an important piece of legislation which was not tested by their

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approval or disapproval; and It is to their honor that they were content with the substance of power, based on the confidence of their people. Only this mutual confidence made the concordat possible. Many an act of the general assembly, which seems an interference with the liberty of the churches, was based in reality on the tacit approval of the ecclesiastical element of the col­ony. They were the voice of the ecclesiastical, speaking through the civil power.

At the beginning, the Connecticut and New Haven churches alike were Congregational and Calvinistic. Each church claimed complete con­trol of its own affairs. In cases of doubt or dis­pute, it would submit to the decision of a council of neighbor or allied churches; but the selection of the churches which were to form the council was always a matter for mutual agreement, or fresh disputes, between the two parties. The church knew no superior. It was begun bv a common agreement in articles of faith by those who proposed to become members. The ceremony of the selection of the " seven pillars," already described, was peculiar to the churches of New Haven, Milford, and Guilford, and seems to have been in their cases an expedient of the leaders for the establishment of their politico-ecclesiastical system. A well-organized Connecticut church was at first supposed to have two ministers. One was the pastor, whose duties were mainly the ex-

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hortation, encouragement, and pastoral care of the 'members; the other was the teacher, whose work was the doctrinal defense of the church and the Instruction of Its people. The ruling elder was the executive officer of the church; but Its success depended largely on the cooperation of the ruling elder with the pastor. The functions of the dea­cons were those which have always been familiar in those officers. Back of all of them was the vote of the church, a Calvinistic democracy, un­defined in its powers, and ready, on occasion, to claim the full powers of an ecumenical council. When the union had been completed, there were fifteen of these churches in the colony: the Long Island churches, organized In the same way, had passed under the dominion of New York.

The first churches were mostly small. Those of Hartford and New Haven were of course the largest. The church of Wethersfield, when it split and the defeated party removed to Stamford, numbered but seven communicants, the orthodox majority numbering four and the heterodox mi­nority three, Pierson's church at Southampton, on Long Island, numbered but sixteen. This paucity of numbers, however, was due to the promptness of the first settlers In organizing their churches. The church really began with the set­tlement. The first item in the Norwalk town records provides for the restraint of wandering swine ; the second, for the erection of a minister's house ; the third, for a pound.

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ued efforts in Connecticut to reconcile church and state under a free town system gave rise to diffi­culties whose history might fill volumes, and task the learning of an expert in church history. Ma­ther, no mean expert, said of one of the opening struggles that its origin was as obscure as that of the Connecticut River. The attempt of a mere layman to penetrate such a labyrinth must neces­sarily be hazardous ; and we are to venture in no farther than relation is found to the peculiar development of the commonwealth.

It will easily be seen that a reconciliation be­tween churches which acknowledged no earthly master, and a commonwealth legislature whose final authority was to be supreme, was a work of no little difficulty. The long and comparatively successful maintenance of the concordat in Con­necticut seems to have been clue to the character of Hooker and the impress which he left on the ecclesiastical traditions of the colony. He and Davenport were fair types of the methods of the two colonies, Both were masterful men, even for that time. Davenport applied his force directly, and failed. Hooker relied on influence, and suc­ceeded. Most of Hooker's successors, in spite of an occasional slip into direct aggression, followed his methods with like success. With no official voice in. legislation, and no direct appeal even to their arbitration, there was hardly an important piece of legislation which was not tested by their

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refused or neglected to support its minister, the general assembly settled the proper rate of main­tenance and enforced it on the church; and if a church remained without a minister for more than a year, the general assembly could name a proper amount for ministerial purposes, and compel the church to raise and expend it. The principle of such connection was the ecclesiastical system of the commonwealth from 1639 down to 1818 ; and the successive " enfranchisements " of other sects were simply permissions to them to use the secular arm according to what had been at first the special privilege of the establishment.

Considering the churches recognized in 1650 as established, the commonwealth forbade any persons to form a new church within the colony without consent of the general court and of the neighboring churches. The man, therefore, who, not being a member of one of the established churches, found himself within the territory of a church, was unable to vote in purely church matters ; but he was compelled to vote taxes and pay taxes for the support of a minister in whose call he had had no voice. From their estab­lishment, the churches had been strict in regard to baptism, and their inquisitions into the per­sonal experience of candidates for membership were searching. As the numbers increased of those who could not respond to such inquisitions and were thus barred from the church, dissatis-

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faction must have increased with them. It often took the shape of complaints that the children of such persons were refused baptism; but it may be suspected fairly that the natural wish to share in the control of the church whose expenses they helped to pay had a great deal to do with it. Either the right of suffrage must be restricted to church-members, or all the voters must be let into the church. In New Haven, church-member­ship had swallowed democracy; in Connecticut, was democracy to swallow church-membership ?

The Cambridge platform, adopted by a council of the New England churches held at Cambridge, Mass., in 1648, was intended to be the model for the church system of New England, and it governed the Connecticut churches for sixty years. Its im­portance was more in its recognition of church in­dependence than in any formulation of a creed. But, in spite of its recognition of church Indepen­dence, there was in it the seed of state interference, so far at least as Connecticut churches were con­cerned, for it insisted " that the magistrate is to see that the ministry be duly provided for." In Connecticut the magistrate was really the town; and the town's democracy would hardly be willing to support the church without at least trying to control it. The attempt was soon made by the general court, as the mouthpiece of all the towns, in the course of Its efforts to settle the Hartford difficulty.

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In February, 1657, the general court called for a council of the New England churches at Boston, to consider certain propositions of the general court. The object of these propositions was well understood to be the widening of church-member­ship. The New Haven churches rejected the sugges­tion of such a council, and the purely independent element in Connecticut sympathized with them, for the decision of such a council looked straight to state interference as a means of enforcing it. Nevertheless the council met, and sustained the new rather than the old view. It declared that baptized infants were bound, on arriving at years of discretion, to " own the covenant " and become formal church-members ; and that the church was bound to accept them, if they were not of scandal­ous life and understood the grounds of religion, and was bound to baptize their children, thus con­tinuing the chain of claims to church-membership to all generations. This made church-membership rather an affair of the head and of morals ; and it was deeply execrated by the New Haven churches, and by at least a strong minority of the Connecti­cut churches, for it really gave every baptized per­son a voice in church government. It was com­monly known as the Half-way Covenant.

In 1664 the general court formally approved the council's decision, and " commended " it to the churches under its jurisdiction, which now covered New Haven. So far as it ventured to do so, the

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general court thus made the Half-way Covenant, with Its loose system of admission to the church, the ecclesiastical law of the commonwealth. But It was from the first a political rather than an ecclesiastical idea; it never was welcome to the Connecticut churches, and some of them never accepted it.

To return now to the Hartford difficulty, which had been woven into every step of the progress toward the Half-way Covenant. Its nominal be­ginning was after the death of Hooker in 1647. Goodwin, the ruling elder, wanted Michael Wig-glesworth as Hooker's successor; and Stone, the surviving minister, refused to allow the proposition to be put to vote. The Goodwin party, twenty-one in number, including Deputy Governor Web­ster, withdrew from the church ; the Stone party undertook to discipline them ; a council of Con­necticut and New Haven churches failed to recon­cile the parties ; the general court kindly assumed the office of mediator, and succeeded In making both parties furious ; and finally a council at Boston In 1659 induced the Goodwin minority, now some sixty in number, to remove to Hadley, Mass.

A larger struggle followed Stone's death in 1668. There were now two young men, Whiting and Haynes, in the places of Hooker and Stone ; and the new incumbents, in addition to their opposi­tion to one another, seem to have been about equally tactless. Haynes headed the Half-way

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Covenant party. He was supported by the church, and the ratification of this form of church disci­pline by the general court in 1664 strengthened his position. Whiting, with those who still held to the primitive doctrine of the necessity of individual experience and. strict investigation of it before ad­mission to the church, was compelled to remain in a church which must have seemed to him and his party almost a heterodox body. Five years of this sort of life was necessary to convince both parties of the necessity of a compromise.

In May, 1669, the general court advised that all persons approved in law and sound in the funda­mentals of the Christian religion should "have allowance of their persuasion and profession in church ways ; " that is, that they should have lib­erty to constitute another church within the town limits. This innovation had evidently become in­evitable. In October, Mr. Whiting appeared be­fore the court, applied for permission to form a new church, and received it. The Second Church of Hartford was thus formed the next year by Mr. Whiting and thirty-one families ; and the first breach in the original identity of town and church was accomplished. Further, as the members of the new church necessarily received the privilege of diverting their share of the taxes to the support of their own church, the principle of this more democratic precedent guided the slow emancipa­tion of all the other sects down to 1818. But it

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is not a little odd to find that the new church, founded as a protest against the Half-way Cove­nant, adopted that practice from its very first meeting.

However unwillingly the churches might accept the Half-way Covenant, it could not but affect their church - membership very seriously. The number of " strict Congregationalists " steadily de­creased, while the number of " large Congregation­alists," leaning to Presbyterianism, was as steadily increasing. " A church without a bishop, and a state without a king," was still the theory; but the state had now a regulator in the shape of a supreme legislature, and this was enough to bring about a desire for a similar regulator for the church. The general court evidently leaned to­ward a council of the churches, much after the fashion of a Presbyterian synod, as a fly-wheel to keep the churches in harmony on points of fun­damental importance, while allowing disagreement on minor points. The ministers had been in the habit of holding neighborhood meetings, and, after the union, county meetings ; but these were volun­tary, and their proceedings were limited to the special objects for which they had been called. This, however, was a germ for an establishment; and the absolute power of individual churches to decide upon the qualifications of candidates for the ministry, and certain scandals resulting therefrom, furnished the occasion.

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In 1708 the general court directed that the churches of each comity should send their minis­ters and " messengers," or lay representatives, to meet at their county town ; that the county assem­blies should settle upon what they considered the best system of church order ; and that delegates from the county assemblies should meet at Say-brook, at the corning Commencement, to draw up for the general court's adoption a common wealth church system.

The synod met in September, adopted the Savoy Confession as modified by the Boston synod of 1680, and formed the Saybrook platform as an ecclesiastical system for the commonwealth. It directed that " consociations" of neighboring churches should be formed in each county ; that a church, or an excommunicate person with the consent of the church, should have the right to bring disputes before the consociation; that a pastor or church refusing to be bound by the de­cision of the consociation should be put out of communion ; and that there should be an annual meeting of delegates from all the consociations. The scheme was at once ratified by the general court, and the churches united by it were " owned and acknowledged established by law ; " but per­mission was reserved to any church to " soberly differ or dissent from the united churches hereby established." This was about the measure of rights given to dissenters in England by the act

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of 1689, under William and Mary. The dissent­ing churches were to be taxed for the support of the established churches. The establishment was a modified Presbyterianism. There was no formal coercive power ; but the public provision for the minister's support, and the withdrawal of it from recalcitrant members, formed a coercive power of no mean efficacy. With its adoption, the Congre­gational churches of Connecticut passed into their semi-Presbyterian stage of existence; indeed, to­ward the end of the century, President Dwight uses the terms " Congregational" and " Presby­terian " as about convertible.

The Saybrook platform brought order at once into the Connecticut system; but worse than dis­order came with it. The tendency of such an or­derly system to a barren intellectualism, difficult enough to resist at the best, became far stronger when the church was dependent on the state for material support. Within thirty years, the worst symptoms of a purely state religion began to show themselves, and it required all the vitality of the churches, and a tremendous Internal convulsion, to banish them. The great revival of 1741, be­ginning in the church of Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, Mass., and intensified by the preach­ing of Whitefield, Gilbert Tennant, and others, struck the first blow at the hitherto secure position of the Saybrook platform. Wandering revivalists disturbed many of the ministers, and their com-

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plaints found a sympathetic audience in the gen­eral court. That body passed an act in 1742 which protected the churches rather more than the Say brook platform had given any reason for anticipating. It forbade under penalties the en-trance of an ordained minister into the parish of another minister to preach there without the invi­tation of the settled minister and his church ; it Increased the penalty in the case of an unlicensed person; and it ordered any foreigner or stranger, licensed or unlicensed, who should preach in vio­lation of the act, to be sent as a vagrant from " constable to constable " out of the colony.

The Connecticut churches had changed very much since the time of Hooker, but not enough to make it likely that such legislation as this would pass unchallenged. Churches all over the colony became divided within themselves; the " new lights," as the maintainers of freedom for the new methods were called, were hurried by zeal into the most fantastic doctrines and practices; and the colonial ecclesiastical system was again all at sea. One church chose a minister, ordained him, quarreled with him, silenced him, east him out of the church, and delivered him up to Satan, and all within the space of a year. The extrav­agance of the new lights afforded the " old lights " a fair opportunity of proceeding to extremes with a good grace. General court and assembly joined in arresting, excommunicating, and prosecuting

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ministers who violated the act and church-mem­bers who went to hear them. When Whitefiield made a second tour through the colony in 1745, the general court even denounced him by resolu­tion as a promoter of errors and disorders, and cautioned the ministers not to admit him to their pulpits, and church-members not to listen to him. Before 1748, the different consociations had ex­pelled about all the " new lights" among their ministers, one of the consociations remarking com­placently in one case that it had now blown out one new light, and that it meant to keep on until it had blown out all the rest.

Meanwhile separations among the churches had gone on apace. When a minister was disbarred by any of the consociations, that portion of his flock which agreed or sympathized with him left their church with him, and organized a church of their own. When a schism arose in a church from any cause, it was not long before it ran into some phase of the old and new light controversy, and a separation took place. There were thus a number of separate churches in the colony, and their posi­tion was peculiar. From its foundation, the law of the colony had been that any man who should refuse to contribute according to his ability to the support of the settled ministers should be com­pelled to do so by levy and distraint, as in the case of other taxes. At the same time, provision was made, and in 1669 and 1708, as has been said, was

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enacted into statute, that members of unestab-lished churches might " have allowance of their persuasion and profession in church ways or assem­blies without disturbance." This, however, was intended to secure quiet to licensed dissenting churches, and to enable members of new Con­gregational churches, when licensed by the gen­eral court, to transfer their share of the taxes to their own ministers. Unlicensed Congregational churches were worse off than either, for they were taxed for the support of the Established churches, and were open to prosecution besides.

This arrangement had worked very fairly for some sixty years. When a separation took place, as in Hartford, it was ratified by the general court, and the members of the new church paid their rates only for the support of their own min­ister. No one was legally a minister unless rec­ognized by the general court, and then he was en­titled to a measure of state support. About 1706 the ecclesiastical calm had been interrupted by the Church of England. One of its missionaries began to preach in Stratford, and in 1722 another was permanently settled there. It was but natu­ral that the members of this church should object to supporting their own minister and paying rates for the Congregational minister as well; and they had a strong disposition to appeal from the laws of Connecticut to those of Great Britain, which was the last thing the colony wanted. It Is a

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tradition that the establishment of the Episcopal Church In Few Haven was secured by an offer to pay the fines for dissidence, coupled with a de­mand for a copy of the proceedings for transmis­sion to the home government. In 1727 the gen­eral court passed an act which cut the tie that had so long bound town and church together. Hitherto there had been but one church in a town, unless the general court permitted a sepa­ration. Now any society of the Church of Eng­land might be formed in a town; its members were thereupon excused from paying rates to the settled or Congregational minister ; their obliga­tion to pay taxes was transferred to their own minister; and the old church was to be known as the " prime ancient society." The latter, however, still retained the taxing power over all persons not members of any church. In 1729 the act of 1727 was extended to cover the case of Quakers and Baptists.

The new churches formed by the new-light schism claimed to be Congregational: the tyran­nical legislation of 1742 had taken them out of the scope of the act of 1669, and their members were still held bound for taxes to support the very ministers from whom they had seceded. Some congregations became nominal Baptists in order to get the benefit of the act of 1729. Others simply refused to pay, and the settled ministers put every engine of the law in motion against

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them. Their property was levied upon and sold for a small fraction of Its real value; In default of satisfaction by property, they were arrested and taken to jail, with the scandalous accompani­ment of the scenes naturally arising from a vio­lent resistance ; and a faint flavor of the Inquisi­tion began to pervade the ecclesiastical system of the colony. When the cause of the new lights took this form, the end was not far distant. One church after another, on the occasion of almost any dispute with its minister, took the opportu­nity to repudiate the Saybrook platform, and to reassert the primitive freedom of the churches; the number of malcontents was steadily increas­ing ; and about 1780 the general court gave up the struggle and the Saybrook platform together. In 1791 it practically granted the right of free in­corporation to all religions bodies ; but persons unconnected with any church were still required to pay rates to the established Congregational or­ganization until the constitution of 1818 made all such contributions voluntary.

In spite of the act of 1727, other sects than the Congregational were really exotics. It was not until 1789 that the first Methodist society was founded at Stratford, where the Episcopalians had begun their organization. The Baptists and other sects had existed in small numbers ; but all the sects were weak, and membership in them was to some extent a removal from the sympathies of the

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mass of the people. To the Episcopalians, whose church had lorded It at home as the Congrega­tional church now lorded it in Connecticut, this state of affairs must have been particularly exas­perating. Their feeling of isolation was increased by the difficulty which they experienced in obtain­ing a bishop. It was not until 1784 that Bishop Seabury was consecrated by the Scottish bishops, having failed of ordination at the hands of the English bishops, on account of the necessity that the candidate should take the oath of allegiance to the crown.

For one reason or other, every dissenting sect In Connecticut had its own grievances, and felt itself to be more or less an alien to the common­wealth. This worst political feature of any ec­clesiastical restriction showed itself again and again in local politics before the Revolution, still more during the Revolution in the development of the Tory party in the State; and it was the ba­sis of almost all party opposition after the Revo­lution, until, coalescing with the rising tide of de­mocracy, it overthrew the charter itself in 1818.

The establishment of Yale College, as it was an essential part of the colony's ecclesiastical sys­tem, may best find a place here. The Connecti­cut general court, in establishing a free-school sys­tem in 1644, had done so on the express ground that it was " one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the

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Scriptures;" and the selectmen of the towns were cautioned, as a fundamental part of educa­tion, to see to it that parents and masters gave children weekly instruction in " some short ortho­dox catechism." A college was evidently needed as the capstone to the system ; and New Haven, under the impulse of Davenport, began thinking of such an Institution in 1641. It was allowed to slumber because of the protest of the leading men of the Bay: they urged that all the resources of all New England were barely enough to support Harvard, and that an attempt to establish a new institution would merely ruin both. In 1652 the project was formally given up for the time, but the New Haven authorities had been directed, five years before, to reserve one of the home lots for the college.

When the time seemed to have come, in 1698, for reviving the project, the general synod of the colony took the work in hand, intending to call the new college " The School of the Church." During the following year, the notion of church control was given up; but ten ministers were named as trustees. Their first meeting probably took place in the year 1700 ; and it was later in the same year that the famous meeting took place at Branford, when each minister laid upon the trustees' table his contribution of books, saying, " I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony." The whole number was about

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forty volumes : so small was the germ from which has sprung one of the great Institutions of learn­ing of the United States.

In October, 1701, the general court chartered the college, in order to enable It to hold lands and receive gifts and bequests; and an annual grant amounting to about £60 sterling was voted to aid in its support. The trustees fixed upon Saybrook as the place for the college, and Abraham Pierson as Its first rector. But Mr. Pierson was settled as minister at Killingworth, and his people would not consent to his removal. Until his death, the library and students remained at Killingworth; but the Commencements took place at Saybrook, The first of them was on the 13th of September, 1702, when Nathanael Chauncey, the first grad­uate, took his degree. Degrees, apparently hon­orary, were given at the same time to four others who had already been graduated at Harvard. It is a pleasing circumstance to record that a large part of the instruction of the early classes had been given by the trustees, In default of other in­structors.

Mr. Pierson died in 1707, and Mr. Andrew was chosen in his place. Part of the students went to his residence at Milford, and the rest to Saybrook; and the college was thus divided until 1716. When the trustees met at the Commencement of 1716, they found the college almost broken up Divided instruction and government, aided by the

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eager struggles of other towns to obtain the final location of the college, and crowned by an out­break of smallpox, bad scattered the students in every direction, and there were the germs of half a dozen possible colleges. In October the trus­tees voted to fix the college at New Haven, and persisted in spite of an opposition which divided the whole colony and was carried into colonial politics. In 1717 the general court endorsed the removal, and voted a grant to aid in the erection of buildings. All through these years, good friends in England had been sending over books, the foundation of the noble library which is now so great an ornament to the college. One of these benefactors was Elihu Yale, a man of New Haven ancestry, who bad gone into the East India trade and become a " nabob." He had shown a strong interest in the college; and it would probably be doing the excellent trustees no Injustice if one presumes them to have thought that his interest would be increased if the institution were removed to New Haven and named after him. At any rate, the first Commencement held at New Haven, in 1718, was marked by the adoption of the title yale college, with a dedicatory memorial to Mr. Yale. Yale started in the race long after, her rival at Cambridge ; and it is interesting to speculate on the results of the equality which she would have attained at the beginning. If Mr. Yale had been able to carry out the generous Intentions

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which he certainly felt for the college which bore his name. Unfortunately, he died intestate before he could do what he meant to do ; and the college received no more aid from him. Never was human distinction so cheaply purchased as that which has perpetuated the otherwise almost unknown names of John Harvard and Elihu Yale.

If a college were a living thing, one might fancy Yale drawing a long breath of satisfaction as it struck its roots deep into its new soil. It tad found its proper place: New Haven would not be New Haven without the college, nor would Yale be quite Yale without New Haven. But its troubles were by no means over. The dissatisfac­tion at the removal would not down: there was an irregular Commencement in progress at Weth-ersfield while the college was receiving its new name; and an attempt by the sheriff to remove the library from Saybrook led to a riot, in which many of the books were lost. These difficulties were healed by the prudence of the general court, and Timothy Cutler, of Stratford, was chosen rec­tor in Mr. Andrew's place. He proved to be a most efficient and popular head; but in 1722 the good people of the colony were astounded to learn, that the new rector, one of the tutors, and two neighboring ministers, had embraced Episcopacy, and were going to England to be ordained. They carried out their intention, and became the fathers of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. But they

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left the college in distress ; and it was not until 1725 that a successor to Mr. Cutler was found, in the person of Rev. Elisha Williams. Under his rectorship Yale at last began to prosper. Berke­ley, subsequently Bishop of Cloyne, made his visit to America, and recognized Yale's claims to a leading" educational place by gifts which were, for the time, very munificent; and Mr. Williams at his resignation in 1739 left the college firmly es­tablished.

His successor, Rev, Thomas Clap, of Windham, was the first in the long line of distinctively Yale presidents. His predecessors had been Connecti­cut ministers, set for a time over a special work. He sank everything else in his presidency. He introduced the modern systems of cataloguing the library ; he formulated the laws and customs of the college; and in 1745 he obtained a new char­ter for " The President and Fellows of Yale Col­lege." The clay of the " collegiate school " had gone by, and. the real Yale College had fairly be­gun its career, In 1750-52 the general court aided in erecting Connecticut Hall, and allowed President Clap to hold a lottery to complete the work. In 1755, when disputes connected in one way or other with the new-light controversy were distracting the Connecticut churches, President Clap showed his executive ability and promptness by establishing Yale as a separate church, thus removing it from the scene of active strife; and

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further, in order to avoid any conflict over the matter, he very shrewdly refused to ask the gen­eral court for permission, claiming the right, as an Incorporated college, to do so. The opposition to the college seized this opportunity to attack it before the general court, on the ground that it was " too independent; " but President Clap appeared as its attorney, and defended it successfully. He seems to have been one of those college presidents who, endowed by nature with abilities sufficient for eminence in any department, have devoted them all to the development of the college,

The college preacher who had been called in 1755, Rev. Naphtali Daggett, retained his posi­tion until his death in 1780, having acted as pres­ident for a time on the death of Mr, Clap in 1767. During his professorship in 1779, the British made their attack on New Haven. Among the hasty levies which went out to oppose them was the stout old college preacher, armed with his shot­gun. When the others took to their heels, he stood his ground, loading and firing in the most unministerial fashion. A British detachment charged him and captured him ; and the officer in command inquired, not very gently, " What are you doing here, you old fool, firing on his majes­ty's troops?" "Exercising the rights of war," said the doctor, grimly. He was to be exercised in the rights of war in a different way. In his own words, " They damned me, those who took

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mo, because they spared my life. Thus, 'midst a thousand insults, my Infernal driver hastened me along farther than my strength would admit in the extreme heat of the day, weakened as I was by my wounds and the loss of blood, which, at a moderate computation, could not be less than a quart. And when I failed in some degree through faintness, he would strike me on the back with a heavy walking-stall, and kick me behind with his foot. At length, by the supporting power of God, I arrived at the green in New Haven. ... I ob­tained leave of an officer to be carried into the Widow Lyman's and laid on a bed, where I lay the rest of the day and the succeeding night, in such acute and excruciating pain as I never felt before."

President Ezra Stiles, called in 1777, was a worthy successor to President Clap. He was suc­ceeded by Timothy Dwight in 1795, by Jeremiah Day in 1817, by Theodore D. Woolsey in 1846, by Noah Porter in 1871, and by Timothy Dwiglit in. 1886, Modern Yale began under President Dwight, in 1795. Able as preceding presidents had been, he was the first who readied a really national reputation. At the same time the rising opposition to Yale control in the State reacted by intensifying its support, so that it was for the time the ruling power, John. Wood, in 1802, thus describes the political structure of Connecticut, from a democratic standpoint; " This State has

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not formed any constitution since the Revolution ; but ancient superstition and the prejudice of cus­tom have established an hierarchy, which is di­rected by a sovereign pontiff, twelve cardinals, a ciyil council of nine, and about four hundred pa­rochial bishops. The present priest, who may be honored with the appellation of pope, is Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College. . . . The an­nual Commencement at Yale College takes place in September, a short time previous to the elec­tion of the legislature. At this time, the presi­dent is attended by his twelve cardinal members of the corporation, the governor, the lieutenant governor, and seven other senior members of the first legislative house (which compose the lay part), and the greatest part of the clergy. On this occasion, the governor and other civilians are subordinate to the president, and they feel deeply impressed with a sense of their subordination, knowing that he can kill or make alive at the next annual election, - that he emphatically holds the keys which command their political damna­tion or salvation. The pope, being thus sur­rounded by his cardinals, his civil councils, and his parochial bishops, determines the order and detail of the ensuing election. Each one returns home with a perfect understanding of the part he is to act." He then goes on to draw a highly col­ored picture of the manner in which the clergy, the " parochial bishops," control the elections un­der direction of Pope Dwight.

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All this was but a deeply prejudiced view of the feeling which Connecticut, and particularly the clergy, were coming to have toward the col­lege. The little State's little college was fast be­coming a national institution. Its former meagre system, under which instruction was given by the president and a few tutors, was giving place to the organized staff of professors which now num­ber's a hundred. From the beginning of this cen­tury, Yale's development has not only been strong, natural, and healthy : it has also tended steadily into university development. The original col­lege has been the nucleus around which have been clustered successive coordinated departments of study. The Medical School was added in 1813; the Theological School in 1822 ; the Law School in 1824; the Sheffield Scientific School in 1847; the Art School in 1864 ; and the Peabody Mu­seum of Natural History in 1866. In 1886 the title Yale College was changed to that of Yale University. In its sphere, the State's develop­ment has been limited by circumstances, while that of the college has been free from necessary limitations; naturally, therefore, the devotion of the State to the college has not been able to keep up the closely paternal relations which John Wood found so exasperating in 1802. But the State and city cannot but be proud of the institution which Davenport conceived, Clap preserved, and Dwight sent on its way to its present rank as a great uni­versity.

CHAPTER XIV.

FINANCIAL AFFAIRS. 1640-1763.

A democeacy usually finds Its vulnerable side in financial errors, and any decadence in the qual­ity of its individual units is most quickly reflected here. Connecticut's success in repairing her own blunders is an evidence that there was at least no decadence in her colonial history. The common­wealth shared with the other New England colo­nies the early difficulties arising from want of me­tallic currency, or from clumsy attempts to supply the want by various attractive but fallacious ex­pedients. At first, the little ready money which the settlers brought with them served for their trade with one another, while the Indian trade was carried on by means of Indian money. It soon became necessary to use the Indian money, wampum, wampum - peage, or simply peage, in traffic among the whites; and it passed current at the rate of six pieces, later four pieces, to the penny, or a fathom for five shillings. The use of this was not uncommon even during the early years of the next century. In addition, there were all sorts of substitutes for money: beaver-skins,

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codfish, farm products, live stock, bullets, and nails served either for small change or for large pay­ments. Much of the legislation, in Connecticut and in other New England colonies, which has been stigmatized as a sort of sumptuary legisla­tion, fixing prices for goods, was really intended to put a legal value on them so that they might serve as currency, either in liquidating private debts or in paying taxes. In case of doubt, the goods were " prysed," or appraised, by arbitrators selected by the two parties.

" Bay shillings," of the Massachusetts coinage of 1652, became current in Connecticut soon after their issue, in spite of the efforts of the Bay col­ony to keep them at home. But clipping soon put them into doubt, and. the colonists were driven back to primitive substitutes. The jour­nal of Mrs. Knight, who passed through Connecti­cut in 1704, tells us that there were then in use in that colony four distinct sorts of currency. " Pay " was barter, property at the prices which the general court had affixed to it in acceptance for taxes for that year. " Money " was metallic currency, or wampum for the token money. " Pay as money" was property, at rates fixed by the parties, not by the general court. " Trust " was a price, with time given. The court records often speak of the first as " country pay," not because the articles came from the country, as one might suppose, but because its rates of value were fixed

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by the " country," a term often used for the col­ony or state, and that in strict accordance with good English precedents. Payment " in specie " meant payment in articles specified by the agree­ment, or, in default of that, in articles at rates specified by the general court's acts. It was not limited to money until gold and silver were made the only legal tender. The " money " used in larger payments was mainly Spanish pieces-of-eight, that is, of eight reals, afterwards supplanted by the Spanish milled dollar, each about equiva­lent to six New England shillings; and the per­sistence of this equivalent value of six shillings to the federal dollar long afterward is a curious sur­vival of ancient values. As all these substitutes varied in value or in price, and as the real money was generally of somewhat doubtful quality, all the difficulties of arithmetic were added to the natural difficulties of trade; and, as always hap­pens under such circumstances, the sharpest and least scrupulous reaped all the profit, while the mass of the people, too busy with other things to study the intricacies of finance, paid the piper. Not content with this state of affairs, the colony was imprudent enough to seek relief in the thorny paths of paper money emissions. This part of the commonwealth's history is Intimately con­nected with her wars.

The first set conflict of Connecticut with the Canadian French came after the recovery of the

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charter. The accession of William and Mary to the English throne had been followed at once by war between England and France, in which the colonies were involved without any great desire for it. Connecticut's position was peculiar. She was shut off from any imminent danger by New York and Massachusetts ; and yet she was in a position from winch she could give quicker and. more ef­fective aid to the exposed settlements of those colonies than their centres of power could render. Help from Hartford could reach Albany or the towns of western. Massachusetts sooner than it could be sent from New York or Boston, Con­necticut was therefore usually at war in defense of her neighbors rather than of herself; but her aid was never given grudgingly or scantily.

At the first rumor of war, Connecticut had sent Captain Bull to Albany with a detachment for the defense of that place, and another detachment to New York city for a similar purpose. Leisler then held New York, city, while the Albany dis­trict was in a state of incipient rebellion against him. Suddenly the French and Indians burst into Schcnectady, where no sufficient watch was kept, massacred the people, and burned the place. Bull had warned the people to keep a better watch, but to no purpose. Leisler and his oppo­nents both charged the calamity upon the false security produced by the intrigues and promises of the opposite party ; and all the thanks received

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by Connecticut came in the form of accusations by both parties that she had encouraged the ras­cals of the opposition. There is a good commen­tary on her disinterestedness in the fact that De Calibres' plan of campaign contemplated only an attack on Albany and New York, with no design on Connecticut.

In conjunction with the other New England colonies and New York, Connecticut agreed to take part in the land expedition up the Hudson, which was to cooperate with Governor Phipps's sea expedition against Quebec. Fitz John Win-throp was placed in command of the joint forces, with Milborn, Leisler's son-in-law, as commissary. Milborn does not seem to have known enough to provide food or transportation for the army ; and, in default of these very necessary factors of suc­cess, Winthrop was compelled to retreat. Leisler took the side of his son-in-law, heaped volumes of abuse upon Winthrop, and finally ordered him under arrest. It is said that the Indians attached to the army released him, "to the universal joy of the army." The Connecticut general court ex­pressed itself emphatically in his favor, and the tone of Leisler's letters is enough to confirm their judgment. For the. remainder of the war, Con­necticut's part was confined to furnishing troops whenever any of her neighbors called for them.

The case was much the same in Queen Anne's war, which broke out in 1702, but was aggravated

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by the programme pursued by Governor Cornbury of New York, a cousin of the queen, and Governor Dudley of Massachusetts. Dudley's object was to unite all the New England colonies under his government; but he was shrewd enough to per­suade Cornbury that he meant merely to attach Connecticut to New York. So Connecticut was kept busy in satisfying the requisitions of her neighbor governors for troops and material aid of all kinds, while the two governors were all the time planning to vacate the charter of Connecticut. A bill for that purpose was brought before parlia­ment, and was only defeated by the most untiring efforts of Ashurst, the colony's agent. Dudley's attempt to enforce the Mohegan claims, already mentioned, was a part of the scheme.

Dudley's whole scheme proved abortive in 1705; and the colony no doubt took great satisfaction, when he next sent a request for troops in 1707, in returning a flat refusal. Two years after, In 1709, on a requisition from the queen for three hundred and fifty men to attack Quebec, and for four hun­dred more for a land expedition against Montreal, Connecticut promptly filled her quota ; and about one hundred of her men were among the dead who were the principal result of the campaign. The next year, three hundred men were raised and took part in the capture of Port Royal. In the following year, four hundred men were raised to give stupid Hovenden Walker the pleasure of wrecking them in Canadian waters.

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Until 1709 the colony had fought through all its work on a money basis, raising or lowering the tax-rates from time to time as necessity required or permitted. Its limit had now been reached. The taxes had risen to seven or eight pence in the pound, a ruinous rate for a poor and struggling agricultural commonwealth, whose own govern­mental expenses were kept down to the lowest point. In June, 1709, "the great scarcity of money, the payment of the public debts and charges of this government, especially in the in-tended expedition to Canada," led the general court to order the issue of £8,000 in paper cur­rency. It was to be received at a premium of five per cent, in payment of taxes; no legal-tender clause was inserted, as in other colonies; and a special tax of ten pence in the pound was ordered for payment in two annual parts. Further levies made it necessary to order the issue of £11,000 more in the same year, with the provision of a tax for payment in six annual parts. From this time the issues went on with bewildering rapidity. In all cases it speaks well for the underlying good sense of the authorities that provision was made for special taxation for the redemption of each issue; but the evil consequences of such issues could not he altogether avoided. The original avoidance of the legal-tender feature lasted until 1718, and then it was introduced under a bashful cover. Debtors who tendered bills of credit were

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relieved from execution and imprisonment. Fur­ther, counterfeiting liad become alarmingly com­mon ; and the general court had come to rely more and more, in every emergency, on fresh emissions of bills of credit. And in 1733 the once cautious colony had become so demoralized as to establish what was really a land-bank, issuing c£30,000 in bills, and dividing the amount in loans equally among the five counties. In spite of continuous efforts to provide in advance by taxation for the redemption of each issue, the balance against the colony was growing larger; the purchasing power of the paper was depreciating; and, though this effect was disguised from most people by the legal-tender feature, yet there was not a man in the col­ony who could not appreciate it, as it came in the rise of prices of commodities ; silver rose in price from 8s. per ounce in 1708 to 18s. in 1732, and to 32s, in 1744. As usual, the price of labor lagged behind in the rise, while the price of all that the laborer ate or wore was rising faster, so that the laborer paid the cost of most of the factitious in­crease of business. The authorities themselves be­came careless, so that, for the first time in its his­tory, the accounts of the colony became so puzzling during this period that it is practically impossible to make anything out of them. The best that can be made of them is that, down to 1740, £156,000 of paper had been issued, but that all but about £6,000 of this had been redeemed by taxation;

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and that there were still outstanding about £ 33,000 issued and loaned to the various counties, making about £39,000 in all for which the colony was now responsible.

From the time of Walker's luckless expedition there was peace in the colony for nearly thirty years, such peace as the colonists might have had nearly always but for the fact of the existence of a "home government." In 1739 this "home government" saw fit to declare a war against Spain, which swept France into its circle in 1744, and was only ended by the peace of Aix-la-Cha-pelle in 1748. It was only when the French took part in it that the more northern colonies became fully involved: until then, Oglethorpe and the new colony of Georgia bore the brunt of the con­flict. But the northern colonies did not altogether escape: the home government had prepared an entertainment for them, in Admiral Vernon's Car-thagena expedition, more elaborate than Walker's and almost as unlucky. Connecticut contributed her proportion of the men, one thousand in num­ber, whom New England sent to Carthagena, of whom hardly a hundred returned; and the ex­penses of the armament called for a further issue of £45,000 in paper, £8,000 to be applied to the redemption of former issues, or "old tenor," and £23,000 to be loaned out, and the interest applied to redemption purposes. This issue was called " new tenor." In obedience to a demand of the

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board of trade, the legal-tender provision was struck out. The extension of the war to France in 1744, and the brilliant and successful expedition against Louisburg, brought fresh expense, which Connecticut met by fresh issues of " new tenor," bringing her whole emissions for the war up to the enormous sum of £131,000, on a tax valuation of a little more than £ 900,000 in 1743. These bills soon began to depreciate in their turn, but never fell quite so low as those of the old tenor ; at the worst, one of the former was equal to three and a half of the latter. Steadily enforced taxation, and the receipt of some £29,000 in coin, which was the colony's share of the parliamentary grant In reimbursement of the expenses, were sufficient to wipe out the outstanding paper, which had amounted in 1751 to about £340,000, reckoning both old and new tenor in old tenor, as was cus­tomary. By 1756 the colony had pretty nearly got rid of her paper. This consummation had been helped by an act of parliament in 1751, for­bidding the issue of legal-tender paper and of paper currency of any kind, unless limited to the taxes of the current year, or secured by taxes payable within five years. It was also helped by the more uncomfortable fact that the colony took advantage of the depreciation of her own paper to redeem it at about eleven per cent of its face value.

Connecticut's experience with the treacherous expedient of paper currency had not been sufficient

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to guard her against all future resorts to it, but it was sufficient to save her from its worst phases for all time to come. In June, 1704, Queen Anne had issued her proclamation, stating a table of values for the various foreign coins then current in Great Britain and the colonies. Such money, at the English equivalents there named, now got the popu­lar name of " proclamation money," or " lawful money," the state of affairs being what would now be called a resumption of specie payments. Dur­ing the paper flood, the proclamation had been little regarded, but it now came into operation. When the French and Indian war broke out, Con­necticut at once met its initial expenses by the issue of paper payable within three years in " law­ful money," with interest at five per cent, and without any legal-tender clause; and this policy was followed steadily through the war. In all cases, a tax was laid to redeem each emission ; the paper, being of varying value according to the amount of accrued interest, circulated very little as currency ; and there was little depreciation or con­fusion. The whole amount issued was £359,000, and it all seems to have been paid at maturity or before.

Connecticut took her full part in the warlike operations for which all these issues were intended. She had sent eleven hundred of her sons, and a sloop of war of her own, on the expedition to Louisburg in 1745, when the colonies, abandoning

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all reliance on the shiftless home government, sur­prised it and themselves by taking a fortress which, by all military rules, should have been impregnable. Her part in the French and Indian war has been somewhat obscured by her strenuous opposition to the plan of union devised at Albany in 1754, at Franklin's suggestion, as if she had been an ob­stacle to the efficient prosecution of the war. The plan proposed a general government of the colonies by a president-general and a grand council; and one secret of Connecticut's opposition to it seems to have been its provision that all nominations of commissioned officers, by land and sea, should be by this central government. From the time of Andros down, every attack on the charter of Con­necticut, either by the crown or by neighbor col- onies, had come in the form of an attempt to get control of the colony's militia ; and the colony had come in her turn to have an almost fanatical determination to commission her own officers. It was this, rather than any unreason able democracy, which led her into opposition to the plan which always seemed to Franklin the fairest that could have been devised for both parties.

At the beginning of the war, Connecticut was called upon for one thousand men as her share of the army which was to win the battle of Lake George. The contingent of the much larger colony of Massachusetts was but a trifle larger ; but Con­necticut not only met the call at once, but author-

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ized the governor to raise five hundred more, If they should be needed. Her senior officer, Phineas Lyman, was second In command of the army, of which William Johnson, of New York, was com-mander in chief. The fortune of the two halves of the battle was similar in one respect. Major Williams, of Massachusetts, who commanded the routed advance party, was killed almost at the first fire; and it was Nathan Whiting, a New Haven officer, who rallied the men and managed the re­treat to the main body, Johnson, having been wounded enough to justify him in retiring, left the field at the beginning of the main action ; and it was Lyman, of Connecticut, who for five long hours carried on the fiercest conflict then on record in colonial history, in which almost the entire French regular force was put out of existence. The real victor did not have even the satisfaction of seeing his name misspelled in the " Gazette," Johnson, according to President Dwight, had the ineffable meanness to ignore him altogether in his report, and to accept the honor of knighthood for the victory which Lyman had won. The histories have treated Lyman very much as his superior officer did.

In the unfortunate campaigns of 1756 and 1757, Connecticut regularly raised more than twice the number of men assigned to her as her quota. Her men underwent every vicissitude of the war; and her public men must have had a training in

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democracy such as their fathers had never quite enjoyed. In this war, the characteristics of de­mocracy and aristocracy were for the first time brought directly into contrast on American soil. The Connecticut democracy had produced a class of men of its own ; all were tested as to their ability, advanced as they were competent to serve the public, and then kept in office until they were ready to retire to a well-won old age. Rotation in office and favoritism were equally Incomprehensible to the Connecticut mind. Now it was brought to meet the varying product of the English aristo­cratic system: sometimes a gallant soldier, like Howe or Wolfe ; sometimes a statesman of genius, like Pitt ; more often an imbecile, like Webb or Loudoun or " Mrs. Nabbycrombie," who owed to family or court influence a position for which Con­necticut would never have paid them more than one year's salary.

Lyman, commissioned as major general, was senior officer of the Connecticut troops, and Whit­ing his second. Under them were most of the men who afterwards became distinguished as the com­monwealth's contribution to the defense of Ameri­can Independence, the most prominent of whom was Israel Putnam. A native of Salem, Mass., of which his forefather had been one of the first set­tlers, he had removed to Pomfret, Conn., in 1739, and It was near that place that his adventure with the wolf gave him a reputation throughout the col-

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ony for absolute fearlessness. Entering the war as a lieutenant, he came out with the grade of lieutenant colonel, having gained his advance, with the thanks of the colony's legislature, through a succession of wood-ranging adventures which would need a volume for the telling. Lyman, however, would have led Putnam in revolutionary rank and success, but for his unfortunate trust to court honor and gratitude. Going to England in 1763, to secure a grant of land for the disbanded soldiers, he lingered there for eleven years, in all that hope deferred which maketb the heart sick ; returned in 1774, broken in mind as well as in spirit; and died in West Florida the following year.

The Connecticut troops were in all the cam­paigns of 1758 ; they took their share in the awful butchery of Ticonderoga, and in the second cap­ture of Louisburg. The colony's efforts were so exhausting that, when it was called on for 5,000 men in the following year, it shrank, for the first time, from fulfilling it. The general court at first resolved that it was impossible to raise more than 3,600 men, because of the efforts of the past three years, and of the numbers of its citizens who had enlisted in the royal provincial regiments or among the boatmen. On the urgent request of the gov­ernor, the number was increased to 4,000; and another session, two months later, finally raised this to 5,000, the number first called for. The encouragement afforded by the capture of Quebec

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made it easier to renew this effort the next year ; and in 1761 it was called on for but two thirds the usual number. In 1762 the colony was called on for 1,000 men for the expedition to Havana. Ly-man had command of all the provincial forces, 2,500 in all ; and. Putnam was now in command of Lymnn's own regiment. In this, as in the expedi­tion against Carthagena, there was a great deal of what was then known as "glory : " wounds, disease, and death for the many; booty, pleasure, and rep­utation for the few. Only a handful of the men who left Connecticut lor the expedition ever re­turned; and this one event probably deprived the colony of the services of many an officer whose ex­perience would have been invaluable twelve years later.

With the close of the French and Indian war, Connecticut was brought at last into close practi­cal relations with her sister colonies ; the union which she had rejected, through a somewhat ex­treme provincialism, in 1754, had been forced on her by circumstances, although it had not been put on paper, or definitely expressed in its terms ; for that, a more severe exigency was necessary. But the pressure of well-understood common necessi­ties had taught her people: the duty of unselfish ex­ertion for the common defense. She was now pre­pared, as she had never been prepared before, to take her place as a coordinated commonwealth in an American union. Before turning to the process

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by which this was accomplished, it is proper to notice the steps by which the colony, which was to extend from Narragansett Bay to the Pacific Ocean, was restricted to the limits with which she entered the Union under the Constitution.

CHAPTER XV. COMMONWEALTH

DEVELOPMENT. - WYOMING AND THE WESTERN RESERVE.

the century following the grant and establish­ment of the charter was a period of quiet but al­most uninterrupted growth for Connecticut. Com­paratively undisturbed by wars or by the inter­ference of the home government, with no royal agent within her borders to frame Indictments against her policy and methods, and to press them upon the king's attention, she went steadily on .her way to that which her people wanted most, - the undisturbed power of gaining a livelihood and of worshiping God under democratic government. Her charter had secured to them most of these objects; the obstacle to the attainment of the rest was the unkindly nature of her soil.

In 1680 the colonial government sent, in answer to a request of the board of trade for detailed in­formation, a statement of the colony's condition. Its quaint and sometimes apparently guarded lan­guage carries in it many indications of the almost hopeless weakness of the colony, and of the stout hearts of the men who were maintaining it. The

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draft of the letter is from the hand of John Allyn, He estimates the fighting men, or "trained bands," of the colony, at 2,507, which might imply a pop­ulation of between ten and twelve thousand, or about three persons to the square mile, - about half the proportion of Nebraska in 1880. The peo­ple had "little traffique abroad," and the bulk of their trade was in " sending what provissions we rays to Boston, where we buy goods with it, to cloath vs." The country was mountainous, full of rocks, swamps, hills and vales ; most that was fit for planting had been taken up ; " what remaynes must be subdued, and gained out of the fire as it were, by hard blowes and for smal recompence." The principal towns were Hartford, New London, New Haven, and Fail-field, with twenty-six smaller towns, in one of which " we have two churches." The buildings, however, were not so bad, " for a wilderness ; " they were of wood, stone, and brick, many of them, says Allyn with pardonable pride, " 40 foot long and 20 foot broad, and some larger: three and four stories high," On second thoughts, Allyn struck out these latter specifications, perhaps fearing that such a picture of opulence might excite the greed of the home government. The exports were farm products, boards, staves, and horses, mainly sent to Boston, but some small quanti­ties to the West Indies, there to be bartered " for suger, cotton wool and rumme, and some money." Tobacco was grown for home consumption. There

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were but twenty merchants in the colony, and few of these had a foreign trade. There were very few servants, and only about thirty slaves, imported from Barbadoes at £22 each. The largest ship of the colony was one of ninety tons; twenty-eight others ranged from eight to eighty tons. Labor was scarce and dear ; wages were 2s, and 2s. 6d. a day ; and provisions were cheap, so that there was little necessity for poor relief. Beggars and vagabonds " were not suffered," but, when discovered, were bound out to service. There were no duties imposed by the colony on exports, and only a duty on imported wines, to be used as a school fund. The property of the col­ony was estimated for taxing purposes at about £110,000. But, in all such estimates, it should be remembered that about two fifths of it was more in the nature of a poll-tax, the tax being in­creased according to a somewhat arbitrary sched­ule of supposed wealth or position in the various trades and professions, so that it took the place, in part, of an income tax as well.

In spite of the poverty of the colony, its vitality was shown by the steady Increase in the number of its towns. Allyn gives their number as twenty-six in 1680. Six of these, Lyme, Haddam, Sims-bury, Wallingford, Derby, and Woodbury, had been incorporated since the union of the two col­onies; and three more, Waterbury, Glastenbury, and Plainfield, were to become towns before the

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end of the century. In the development of these new towns there were two distinct processes, ac­cording to the nature of the case. A speculator or a company might buy lands from the Indians, with the approval of the general court, in some lo­cality outside of the bounds of any town. As soon as the rates became sufficiently large to need the extension of the general court's taxing power over the little community, a committee was appointed by that body to bound out the town : it was then expected to choose constables, and send delegates to the general court. The other process contin­ually tended to become the only one, A town, when first established, usually had extensive boun­daries. Those persons who settled in the outflying districts of the township found it more and more troublesome, particularly in winter, to resort to the old church for preaching. When there were enough of such dissatisfied persons to support a minister of their own, they applied to the general court for permission to form a church. For the church was really a territorial term, quite as much so as the township; and the setting off of a new church meant the diminution of the area of the old church, and the inclusion of all persons within the new bounds in the new church. As this involved a diminution of the resources of the old church, it regularly met with strong opposition, and was only successful after several petitions. The erec­tion into a town followed at the discretion of the

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general court. Plainfield may be taken as a com­bination of the two processes. Originally settled as " Quinnabaug plantation," it was important enough in 1700 to become a town. The general court therefore incorporated it, named it Plain-field, and gave it, as was an essential step, a spe­cial "brand for its horses, in this case a triangle. In May, 1703, some discension having arisen, the court ordered the territory to be divided into two parts, the western settlers to pay their rates for the support of the eastern minister until they had " an approved minister " of their own. Their choice having been approved, the general court proceeded in October to constitute the people of the western half of Plainfield a distinct town, under the name of Canterbury, with a horse brand of its own.

The charter seems to have contemplated a gen­eral meeting of the governor, lieutenant governor, assistants, and deputies as the general assembly, still often called the general court; and this was the form, which its meetings at first took. In . 1678 the court ordered that the governor, lieuten­ant governor, and assistants should be a council to act for the commonwealth during the recesses of the court. This was the prelude to the inevitable introduction of a bi-cameral system. In 1698 the general court ordered that the council should sit as a separate house, and the deputies as the other, and that laws should be passed only by the assent of both houses ; and the arrangement went into

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force tbe next year. This change was followed by the adoption of a double capital. Among the first measures of conciliation proposed by Connec- ticut to induce New Haven to accept the charter was that New Haven should be made a coordinate capital of the commonwealth, as well as county town of a distinct county. New Haven's rejection of the terms caused the former proposition to lapse for the time ; but it was put into force in 1701. It was decided that the May session of the general court should be held hereafter at Hart­ford, and the October session at New Haven. This arrangement lasted until 1873, when Hart­ford was again made sole capital.

The long period of peace and comparative pros­perity during the first half of the last century was prolific in new towns. From 1700 until 1745 thirty of them were incorporated, very nearly as many as were in existence in 1700. There was an equally steady growth in population, though all the figures for it must be mere estimates. It is estimated by Bancroft at 17,000 for the year 1688, and by Trumbull at the same figures for 1713. In 1755 the board of trade estimated it at 100,000; and Bancroft at 133,000, with 3,500 slaves. It is not possible to get nearer to the truth; but the constantly increasing quotas of Connecticut to New England armies during the years between 1690 and 1763 are enough to show the growing population of the colony. At the

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date last named, a comparison of Bancroft's esti­mate for Connecticut with that for Massachusetts (207,000), and for whites in Virginia (168,000), will show that the seed planted on the "banks of the Connecticut had grown Info one of the stateli­est trees on the continent. It had grown so large as to feel the cramping influence of its surround­ings.

In 1762 all the soil of the colony had been al­lotted to townships, and new towns formed after that year were carved out of townships already in existence. Long before that time, population had begun to show a disposition to swarm.. The first effort in this direction was due to the boun­dary settlement of 1713-14 between Connecticut and Massachusetts. In consideration of certain concessions in straightening the line, Massachu­setts gave Connecticut a parcel of her western lands. Some of these (60,000 acres, according to the New York attorney general's report in 1752), though then believed to be in Massachusetts, were really in the district to be known as Vermont. These lands were sold by Connecticut to private parties, and their purchases drew off the atten­tion of a considerable number of her people to this territory. The erection of Fort Dummer in 1729 offered some promise of protection to set­tlers, and those who had long owned these wild lands began to think of settling upon them. At first, a few young men were sent thither in the

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summer to work the land, returning home for the winter, New York claimed jurisdiction over the whole territory, under the iniquitous grant to the duke, which had been extended up to the Con­necticut River in defiance of the Massachusetts and Connecticut charters. So far as these two colonies were concerned, the claim had been given up; but New York still maintained it against New Hampshire. Governor Went worth, of New Hampshire, insisted that the limits of his colony extended as far west as the two colonies to the south, though it is not easy to see on what ground. He proceeded to make grants of land in the dis­puted territory, very many of them to Connecti­cut settlers. He cared for little except the pro­ceeds of the sales, and left civil organization to the settlers. The result was that the Connecti­cut town system was again transferred to a wil­derness, there to begin a struggle with the central­ized system of New York. The Vermont towns were even more independent than their proto­types ; and their " independence and unbridled democracy" formed one of the arguments by which New York obtained a judgment in her fa­vor from the home government, Connecticut blood and town and personal names were strongly represented in the " Hampshire Grants; " indeed, some of the towns in the grants held their first town meeting in Connecticut before the removal of their settlers. Ethan and Ira Alien, Warner,

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the Chipmans, Chittenden, and a host of other Connecticut men, took a leading place among those who resisted the authorities of New York, with, perhaps, a touch of hereditary bitterness; and when the territory erected itself into a State in 1777, it assumed the significant title of " New Connecticut," the more appropriate name of Ver­mont being substituted in the course of the year. The details of the struggle are not within our province. It need only be said that the New York authorities seem to have found most embar­rassment in dealing with the new and vigorous form of local government which had become es­tablished in the territory, and that the final establishment of the State of Vermont may fairly be claimed as another success of the Connecticut town system.

Here dropping this extra-legal effort at com­monwealth expansion, we come to the strictly le­gal attempt to enforce the charter boundaries, and its failure. The effort evidently arose from an instinctive perception that the practical bounds of the commonwealth would seriously cramp its growth, and reduce its rank among the States, as they have since done. The charter bounds ex­tended west to the Pacific Ocean: this would have carried Connecticut over a strip covering the northern two fifths of the present State of Penn­sylvania. Stuart faithlessness interfered with this doubly. Almost immediately after the grant of

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the charter, Charles granted to his brother James the Dutch colony of New Netherland, thus inter­rupting the continuity of Connecticut. Rather than resist the king's brother, Connecticut agreed and ratified the interruption. In 1681 a more serious interference took place, Charles granted to Penn the province of Pennsylvania, extending westward five degrees between the 40th and 43d parallels of north latitude. The width of the province would have been from the northern out­skirts of Philadelphia to about the present city of Utica in New York, thus taking in five degrees of Connecticut's grant, and all western New York except the lake-shore. Geographical knowledge was not very profound; and Perm seems to have founded his capital city before discovering that he had unluckily placed it too far to the south, out­side of his own province and in the Baltimore grant. What was to be clone ? The solution of the difficulty deserves more credit for its ingenuity than for its ingenuousness, and Bancroft absolves Penn from responsibility for it. The language of his grant was from " the beginning of the 40th parallel " to "the beginning of the 48d." What was " the beginning of the 40th parallel " ? Evi­dently, said the Pennsylvania argument, the 39th, And " the beginning of the 43d " ? As clearly, the 42d. Ergo, Pennsylvania extended south from its present northern boundary to Annapolis, taking in the city of Baltimore on the way. The

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war haying thus been carried into Africa, the of­fer was made to compromise with the Baltimore family on the present boundaries, from about latitude 39° 45' to latitude 42°, and, after half a century's struggle, the compromise was adopted, New York was more than satisfied with the ar­rangement, as it carried her southern boundary a full degree to the south; and all the parties seem to have ignored Connecticut.

The territory taken from Connecticut by the Penn grant would be bounded southerly on the present map by a straight line entering Pennsyl­vania about Stroudsburg, just north of the Dela­ware Water Gap, and running west through Hazel-ton, Catawissa, Clearfield, and New Castle, taking in all the northern coal, iron, and oil fields. It was a royal heritage, but the Perms made no at­tempt to settle it, and Connecticut until the middle of the eighteenth century had no energy to spare from the task of winning her home territory " out of the fire, as it were, by hard blows and for small recompense," This task had been fairly well done by 1750, and in 1753 a movement to colonize in the Wyoming country was set on foot in Wind-ham county. It spread by degrees until the Sus-quehanna Company was formed the next year, with nearly 700 members, of whom 638 were of Connecticut. Their agents made a treaty with the Five Nations July 11, 1754, by which they bought for £2,000 a tract of land beginning at the forty-

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first degree of latitude, the southerly boundary of Connecticut; thence running north, following the line of the Susquehanna at a distance of ten miles from it, to the present northern boundary of Pennsylvania; thence one hundred and twenty miles west; thence south to the forty-first degree and back to the point of beginning. In May, 1755, the Connecticut general assembly expressed its acquiescence in the scheme, if the king should approve it ; and it approved also a plan of Samuel Hazard, of Philadelphia, for another colony, to be placed west of Pennsylvania, and within the char­tered limits of Connecticut. The court might have taken stronger ground than this; for, at the meet­ing of commissioners from the various colonies at Albany, in 1754, the representatives of Pennsyl­vania being present, no opposition was made to a resolution that Connecticut and Massachusetts, by charter right, extended west to the South Sea. The formation of the Susquehanna Company brought out objections from Pennsylvania, but the company sent out surveyors and plotted its tract.

Settlement was begun on the Delaware Elver in 1757. and In the Susquehanna purchase in 1762. This was a temporary settlement, the set­tlers going home for the winter. A permanent venture was made the next year on the flats be­low Wilkes Barre, but it was destroyed by the Indians the same year. In 1768 the company

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marked out five townships, and sent out forty sot-tiers for the first, Kingston. Most of them, In­cluding the famous Captain Zebulon Butler, had served in the French and Indian war ; and their first step was to build the " Forty Fort."' The Penns, after their usual policy, had refused to sell lands, but had leased plots to a number of men on condition of their " defending the lands from the Coimectieut claimants." The forty Connecti­cut men found these in possession when they ar­rived In February, 1769, and a war of writs and arrests followed for the remainder of the year. The Pennsylvania men had one too powerful ar­gument in the shape of a four-pounder gun, and they retained possession at the end of the year. Early in 1770 the forty reappeared, captured the four-pounder, and secured possession. For a time in 1771 the Pennsylvania men returned, put up a fort of their own, and. engaged in a partisan warfare ; but the numbers of the Connecticut men were rapidly Increasing, and they remained mas­ters until the opening of the Revolution, when they numbered some three thousand. The Con­necticut general court passed a resolution in 1771, maintaining the claim of its colony to its charter limits west of the Delaware. In 1774 it erected the Susquehanna district into a town, under the name of Westmoreland, making it a part of Litch-field county, the farthest northwest of the origi-' nal counties; and its deputies took their seats in

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the Connecticut legislature. In 1776, Westmore-land town was made a distinct county, and its civil organization was complete. Connecticut laws and taxes were enforced regularly ; Connecticut courts alone were in session ; and the levies from the dis­trict formed the twenty-fourth Connecticut regi­ment in the Continental armies. The sordid, grasping, long - leasing policy of the Penns had never been able to stand a moment before the on­coming wave of Connecticut democracy, with its individual land-ownership, its liberal local govern­ment, and the personal incentive offered to indi­viduals by its town system. So far as the Penns were concerned, the Connecticut town system sim­ply swept over them, and hardly thought of them as it went. But for the Revolution, the check oc­casioned by the massacre, and the appearance of a popular government in place of the Penns, nothing could have prevented the establishment of Con­necticut's authority over all the regions embraced in her western claims.

In July, 1778, after the Continental Congress had refused to allow the temporary return of the able-bodied men whom the Westmoreland people had sent freely into the army, the Tories and In­dians, under John Butler and Brandt, fell upon the almost defenseless settlement. They met no unresisting victims. The old men and boys, the town dignitaries who had been administering civil affairs, mustered into rank, and only yielded and

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fled after a loss of half their number. The women and children were spared for the greater horrors of the overland retreat to Connecticut; and the Connecticut possession vanished again into thin air. Detached parties returned from time to time, gathered scanty crops under constant dan­ger from Indians, and kept alive the claims of In­dividuals and of the commonwealth. But West-moreland county, as it had been, was no more.

The articles of confederation went into force early in 1781. One of their provisions empowered congress to appoint courts of arbitration to decide disputes between States as to boundaries. Penn­sylvania at once availed herself of this, and ap­plied for a court to decide the Wyoming dispute. Connecticut asked for time, in order to get papers from England; but congress overruled the mo­tion, and ordered the court to meet at Trenton In November, 1782. After forty-one days of argu-ment, the court came to the unanimous conclusion that Wyoming, or the Susquehanna district, be­longed to Pennsylvania and not to Connecticut. It came to light, more than ten years afterward, that the court had secretly agreed on two points for its guidance : (1) whatever Its decision might be, it was to assign no reasons for it; and (2) the minority was to yield to the majority in order to make the decision unanimous. The knowledge of these antecedent conditions takes away much of the force of the decision; but they were not

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known in 1782, and Connecticut yielded at once. For this yielding, however, there were probably reasons apart from the justice of the decision.

It was just at this time that the Western terri­tory was the controlling question in politics. Virginia, under a strained and very dubious inter­pretation of her northern boundary, claimed the whole Northwest, in addition to Kentucky. The States whose western boundaries were fixed had two points of objection : Virginia would get none of this territory if the authority of the crown were reestablished; and they did not intend to spend their blood and money in order to obtain the Northwest for Virginia. Connecticut's western claims, though based on a clear, not on a doubt­ful, charter statement, were too much on a par with those of Virginia to be easily separated from them. There was an instinctive sense, outside of Virginia, that the national existence of the United States was bound up with the jurisdiction over this Northwest territory; and Connecticut's share in the feeling was enough to balance even her selfish interests. She even imperiled the latter by yielding to the decision; for it is hardly pos­sible to reconcile the decision of 1782, which ig­nored the charter, with the acceptance by congress of the Connecticut cession of 1786, which im-pliedly recognized the charter and the very claims which had been rejected in 1782. There was no bargain, for Pennsylvania in 1786 voted not to

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accept the cession, on the ground that it recog­nized the charter. Connecticut simply made way intelligently, If somewhat regretfully, for the coming nationality.

The cession of 1786 of course put an end to all Connecticut's ambitions of common wealth expan­sion: she was to be forever restricted to the terri­tory lying between Massachusetts and Long Is­land Sound, and between Rhode Island and New York. And yet the legal title of Connecticut to the territory winch she gave tip by this cession was beyond dispute. It has been suggested that the crown made the grant under ignorance, sup­posing that North America was far narrower than it proved to be. But the Plymouth council, when it gave up its charter in 1635, notified the king that their grant was " through all the main land, from sea to sea, being near about three thousand miles in length." There was not a geographer in England but knew that the Connecticut grant, in its turn, was three thousand miles long. It was adduced as a prior grant by the English com­missioners against the French in 1752, in order to assert title across the Mississippi. Its validity was recognized by the Albany congress of 1754, Penn­sylvania being represented. The establishment of the Mississippi as a boundary line between the colonies and Spain was founded on these western charters of indefinite extent. The peace of 1783, which laid claim to the Mississippi as a western

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boundary for the United States, was a renewed affirmation of the charters which had carried the claims of the United States up to that river. Fi­nally, the acceptance of the Connecticut cession by the United States in 1786 was a renewed con­firmation of the charter's validity, on which the further claim of the United States was based, The fact that Connecticut had yielded to the erection of the new colony of New York was of interest only to the two colonies involved, - Con­necticut and New Fork; no third party, as Penn­sylvania, could gain or lose any rights thereby.

It would have been absurd to ask Connecticut to surrender a claim so sound in law, and so for­tified by repeated recognitions, without any rec­ompense. Her proposition, that she should re­serve a tract of about the same length and width as the Wyoming grant, west of Pennsylvania, in northeastern Ohio, was accepted ; and this was the tract known as the Western Reserve of Con­necticut. It contained about three and a half millions of acres. In 1792 some five hundred thousand acres in the western part of the Reserve were devoted to the relief of those persons who had been burned out and plundered by the Brit­ish: this was known as the "Fire Lands." The rest was sold under the direction of a legislative committee, and the proceeds were devoted to the school fund of the commonwealth. It was not very productive until Senator James Hillhouse

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was appointed sole commissioner in 1810. He held the position for some fifteen years, and in­creased the principal to nearly $2,000,000, with an annual income of over $50,000. This principal still remains intact.

The unfortunate Wyoming settlers, deserted by their own State, and left to the mercy of rival claimants, had a hard time of it for years. The militia of the neighboring counties of Pennsylva­nia was mustered to enforce the writs of Pennsyl­vania courts: the property of the Connecticut men was destroyed, their fences were cast down, and their rights ignored; and the " Pennamite and Yankee War " began. The Yankees were evi­dently getting the worse, and their friends at home were not deaf to their grievances. The old Susquehanna Company was reorganized in 1785- 86, and made ready to support its settlers by force. New Yankee faces came crowding into the dis­puted territory. Among them was Ethan Allen, and with him came some Green Mountain Boys, the promise and potency of more, and pungent memories of the manner in which Vermont had solved a similar difficulty with New York. It was an open secret that the intention was to organize a new State, and weary Pennsylvania and con­gress into a recognition of it. Its constitution had been drafted, and its state officers tacitly agreed upon.

Pennsylvania in 1786 passed an accommodation

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act, by winch the lands of actual settlers were confirmed to them, and the district was erected into the county of Luzerne. Unfortunately, there were dissensions between the old settlers and the new-comers of the Wyoming district, and Penn- sylvania suspended the accommodation act in 1788, and repealed it in 1790. There were re­newed struggles, and in 1799 the act was sub­stantially re enacted, and the controversy came to an end. The settlement had the result of car­rying into Pennsylvania a large infusion of Con­necticut blood, the source of the prevalence of Connecticut names in this part of Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE STAMP ACT AND THE REVOLUTION.

the close of the French and Indian war marks the period when Connecticut's democratic consti­tution began to influence other commonwealths. Her charter was an object-lesson to all of them. It was the standard to which their demands grad­ually came up ; and their growing demands upon the crown caused an equally steady approximation toward the establishment of a local democracy like that which Connecticut had kept up for a hundred and fifty years.

The passage of the Stamp Act by the English Parliament was met at once by a protest from the Connecticut general assembly, followed by in­structions to its agent in London to insist firmly on " the exclusive right of the colonies to tax themselves and on the privilege of trial by jury," as rights which " they never could recede from." It had good reason to speak plainly, for the prin­ciple of the act struck more heavily at Connecti­cut than at any other colony except Rhode Is­land. No other colonies had been so completely free from any appearance of royal interference as

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these; and Connecticut's lack of commerce had prevented it from feeling even those forms of royal interference which the commercial interests of Rhode Island had brought upon it. To Con­necticut the act was simply intolerable, and she not only spoke but made ready for action.

Jared Ingersoll, of New Haven, was sent to London as special agent to remonstrate against the passage of the act. When his mission had failed, he accepted the office of stamp agent for Connecticut, by advice of Franklin, and set out for home. He found things there in a ferment. The governor and some of the leading men were willing to submit, rather than risk the loss of the charter, but the instinct of the democracy taught it that this was the time to put its charter priv­ileges into security forever. The ministers were preaching against the act; the towns were order-ing their officers to disregard it, promising to hold them harmless; Trumbull had become the head of a popular movement; and volunteer organiza­tions, calling themselves " Sons of Liberty," were patrolling the country, overawing those who were inclined to support the home government, and making ready to resist the execution of the law. Ingersoll seems to have been sufficiently impressed with the strength of the home government to he willing to avoid a conflict; and he meant now to execute faithfully the office which he had accepted only to make its provisions more tolerable to his

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countrymen. The meeting between him and them was that of the flint and steel. The Sons of Lib­erty were out and in waiting for him as he rode from New Haven to Hartford ; and he entered the capital under the escort of a thousand horse­men, farmers and freeholders, who had compelled him to resign his office. He had not lost his head or shown any craven frailty: he had simply made up his mind that he had gone far enough in an unpleasant duty, and that " the cause was not worth dying for." He had, however, carried his resistance up to the verge of temerity; and, as he rode on his white horse at the head of the trium­phant mob, he said afterward that he realized at last what the book of Revelation meant by "Death on the pale horse, and hell following him."

Governor Fitch died in 1766, and, after a three years' service of William Pitkin, Jonathan Trum-bull, the first " war governor " of Connecticut, succeeded him. He held the office until 1783 ; he was the trusted associate of Washington, and the latter's familiar way of addressing him when ask­ing his advice or assistance is said to have been the origin of the popular phrase "Brother Jona­than." The family has been one of the most noted in the history of the commonwealth. It has included Governor Jonathan Trumbull, his sons John (the painter), Jonathan, governor from 1798 until 1809, and Joseph, commissary general

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of the Revolutionary army ; John Trumbull, the author of "McFingal;" Benjamin Trumbull, the author of one of the standard histories of the State; James Hammond Trumbull, the recognized authority on the Indian languages and the history of the State; his brother, H. C. Trumbull, a leader in missionary and Sunday-school work; and ex-Senator Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois. The reign of the Trumbulls was ushered in brilliantly by the governor. In him the people had found the man they needed, and doubt and hesitation fled before him.

The rapid succession of events which followed the Boston Tea Party- the Boston Port Bill, the Massachusetts Act, and the preparations of Massa­chusetts for active resistance - met prompt sym­pathy and support in Connecticut, The non-im­portation agreement had been universally signed in 1768-69, and, if contemporary accounts are to be trusted, was kept far more faithfully in Con­necticut than in some of her neighbor colonies. Unofficial preparations, with the quiet approval of the official authorities, were now made, so that, when hostilities began, Connecticut was the first colony to take her place abreast of Massachusetts. In all this there was not one iota of change in the traditional policy of the colony. In the pro­ceedings which led to the loss or serious modifica­tion of the Massachusetts charter in 1691, Con­necticut had taken no part with the attacked col-

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ony, partly because the latter had no intentions of real resistance, and partly because such resistance, under the circumstances into which Massachusetts had got herself, was evidently hopeless. In 1728 likewise, when Massachusetts was engaging in a war of annoyances with her royal governors, Con- necticut had instructed her London agent to take no part with Massachusetts, but to secure the colony's maintenance of her charter quite inde­pendently of her. The Connecticut general as­sembly had a great trust confided to it, and it was not disposed to risk it in Quixotic enterprises of this sort. In 1769-70 Massachusetts had at last been wrought up to concert pitch : her people ev­idently meant to fight; there was a fair chance of success, since the other colonies showed their in­tention of supporting her; the enterprise was neces­sary, was no longer Quixotic, and Connecticut went into it heart and soul. Nothing in the history of this commonwealth is so noteworthy as the pre­vailing characteristic of its people, - their judicial power of estimating the chances of success, their self-restraint under every provocation until the chances seem to be reasonably good, and their un­reserved abandonment to action when the time for action seems to have fully come. It is Con­necticut tradition that the first step of the gen­eral assembly In 1763 was to appoint three of its ablest men to argue in favor of the right of parlia­ment to tax the colonies, and three fairly matched

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opponents to argue against it; that the argument, consuming several days, took place before the as­sembly under a pledge of secrecy from all con­cerned ; and that its result was the unanimous agreement of the members against the right of parliament, and in favor of the lawfulness of resist­ance. The story is fairly typical of the Connecti­cut way of looking at questions of the kind, its determination to anchor tenacity of purpose fast in legality of object, and to insist first on being right. One may well speculate as to the results on American history if such a people, instead of being cribbed into four thousand square miles of territory, had been able to impress their character­istics on the population of the magnificent domain which was theirs by charter.

At first, the preparations for resistance were made by the towns, which acted, in the traditional Connecticut fashion, as if they were little com­monwealths in themselves. They met, voted sol­emn condemnation of the ministry, appointed committees of safety, and appropriated money to buy arms and powder. Every town sent its con­tribution to the poor of Boston, and every com­mittee felt bound also to send a long letter of con­dolence. The general assembly then began prepa­rations to direct the storm. In May and October, 1774, it appointed military officers where they were needed ; directed every military company in the colony to be drilled, with fines for non-attend-

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ance ; and sent delegates to the Continental Con­gress. The recommendations of that body against importing or exporting goods from or to Great Britain were endorsed by the general assembly, and were faithfully carried out. But it Is, again, a curious survival of primitive conditions that the towns thought it necessary for them also to meet and endorse the action of congress and the assem­bly, The town republics, which had given birth to the commonwealth, were still conscious of an abundant vitality.

The battle of Lexington led to the first offen­sive movement by the Americans ; and it is a sin­gularly fitting testimony to Connecticut's readi­ness to help Massachusetts, that, while the latter was defending herself, this offensive movement for her relief, the capture of Ticonderoga and its stores, came from Connecticut, The general as­sembly refrained from officially sanctioning it ; but it was undertaken with its approval, and it paid the bills for the expedition two years after­ward. The opportunity for the venture was of­fered by the close connection which had so long existed between Connecticut and Vermont. Silas Deane and ten associates, having assurances of the assembly's approval, took the money, some £800, out of the treasury, giving their receipts therefor; took a party of Connecticut volunteers to Vermont; raised a force among the kindred spirits of that region ; and made the capture

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which brought encouragement and relief to the blockading army before Boston.

Long before this, however, the men of Connec­ticut had been in motion for Boston. The first message from the governor to Putnam, announ­cing the fight at Concord and Lexington, found the veteran at work in his field. He left the plow in the furrow, galloped to the governor's resi­dence, and received orders to go to Boston forth­with. He rode thither in eighteen hours, without dismounting, and was followed by the volunteers of his colony, many of whom had undergone train­ing in the French and Indian war. With Put­nam, as leading officers, were David Wooster and Joseph Spencer, also veterans; they were com­missioned by congress as brigadier-generals, and Putnam as major-general. It is a little curious that Arnold, though a Connecticut man by birth, did not receive any special recognition from the colony, his commissions and employments being mainly from Massachusetts.

The general assembly ordered the emission of £100,000 in bills of credit, to provide for the equipment of eight regiments, which were ordered to be enlisted from the militia. One result of the far-sighted preparations of the commonwealth was, that, when the battle of Bunker Hill was fought, and the ammunition of the fort's defenders con­sisted of but sixty-three half-barrels of powder, thirty-six of them were a present from the colony

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of Connecticut, Like all the other New England colonies, she sent men who were unaccustomed to discipline, and were not easily brought under prompt military obedience; but Bunker Hill was enough to show that they could at least fight when placed before an enemy. If there was a flag in the line, it was theirs; they held the rail fence until the retreat was secured; and their leader, Putnam, put his own life at stake again and again in the effort to check the retreat at Bunker Hill, and at every step on the road off the peninsula. Indeed, it is a mooted question whether, in the general confusion of the day, Put-nam should not be considered the commander of the American forces engaged.

The colony itself was comparatively safe from invasion except on the coast, where there was an attack on Stonington by a British vessel. Never­theless, those who had not gone to the seat of war were not disposed to remain idle, Connecticut was practically unanimous on the great question ; New York was badly divided, and the Tories there were men of influence and determination. The man of most influence among them was Riving-ton, the publisher of the " New York Gazette," the Tory newspaper organ. Early in September, 1775, Captain Isaac Sears, having raised a, troop of Connecticut horsemen, rode into New York city, raided the " Gazette " office, and carried off the types and apparatus. Early in 1776 Gen-

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eral Lee seized New York city with some 1,200 Connecticut troops, and held it until Washington's army was transferred thither after the evacuation of Boston. Then Putnam was put in command of the city and its environs, and drove off the Eng­lish fleet. One of the ornaments of the city had been an equestrian statue of King George, cast in lead and gilt. Just a week after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, this was carried off by night to the house of Oliver Wolcott, in Litehfield county, and there cast into bullets, making 42,088 cartridges.

While the zeal of the people thus outran official discretion, the Connecticut authorities also had all that they could attend to, though In a soberer way. Governor Trurnbull's correspondence with Washington had already assumed that close and confidential cast which it maintained throughout the contest. The assembly was busily engaged in raising men, and providing for their support by the issue of bills and by taxation. It is not too much to say that for a time almost the entire bur­den of the struggle lay upon Connecticut; and the unflinching manner in which it was met and sustained is made more conspicuous by the fact that the colony was not individually menaced as were colonies which refused to bear any fair pro­portion of the burden. The Department of the North, in 1775, had 2,800 men in the field; 2,500 of these were Connecticut troops. When Wash-

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ington's army settled down around New York, more than half of Ms force of 17,000 men had been contributed by Connecticut. It was not wonderful that Washington should write to the governor that he had " full confidence in your most ready assistance on every occasion, and that such measures as appear to you most likely to ad­vance the public good, in this and every instance, will be most cheerfully adopted ; " nor that he should speak of the assembly in such terms as these : " I have nothing to suggest for the consid­eration of your assembly; I am confident they will not be wanting in their exertions for support­ing the just and constitutional rights of the colo­nies." Even Washington's emphasis had some­thing of reserve and self-restraint about it; and his unreserve in this case derives additional force from his well-grounded complaints of the action of colonial authorities in general.

One of the captains of Knowlton's Connecticut regiment was Captain Nathan Hale, a graduate of Yale in 1773, a young man of fine personal pres­ence and of high intelligence. His family was settled in Coventry, Conn.; and his ancestor had been the first minister of Beverly, Mass. While Washington was lying near Fort Washington, af­ter the retreat from. Long Island, it became im­peratively necessary for him to obtain accurate intelligence from the British camp. He called for a volunteer from the younger officers of the

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army, and Hale was the only one who offered him­self. His offer was accepted, and his mission had been accomplished with skill and success, when he was recognized by a Tory relative in the Brit­ish lines, who sent word to headquarters that an American spy was at work in the camp. Adver­tised and described throughout the lines, he yet had sufficient address to make his way as far as the outposts before he was arrested. The testi­mony of his relative convicted him, and he was hanged on the following morning. Not so much his fate, as the manner of it, exasperated the peo­ple of the commonwealth. He was denied the company of a minister ; the poor consolation of a written message home was refused; and it was the common report that the reason for this bar­barity of punishment was that " the rebels might not know that they had a man in their army who could die with such firmness." In the traditional Connecticut spirit, having undertaken the work, he did not flinch from its consummation. His last words were: "If 1 had ten thousand lives, I would lay them down in defense of my country," The words meant something in his mouth.

On the coast, the preponderant navy of the king was very annoying, but principally in its at­tacks on chicken-roosts and sheepfolds. Yankee ingenuity exerted itself to get rid of the annoy­ance. David Bushnell, another young graduate of Yale, of the class of 1775, living at Saybrook,

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stimulated by the necessity of the case, brought out Ms " American Turtle," which was to antici­pate the modern system of torpedoes, and blow the British fleet out of water. The Turtle contained a magazine of explosives, and a connected system of clock-work, and could bo kept under the control of the operator on shore, so as to rise and fall at his will. The first attempt, made by a person unfamiliar with the mechanism, resulted in a tre­mendous explosion, not under the vessel aimed at, but near enough to put the naval officers into a terrible fright. Another attempt had better suc­cess, and this increased the terror. Still another, in 1777, gave rise to the panic among the British forces at Philadelphia which Hopkinson celebrated in his " Battle of the Kegs." Long afterward, in 1813, on a similar occasion, the too Impertinent intrusion of the British fleet on the shores of Con­necticut was rebuked and checked in the same fashion. A. British vessel was allowed to capture a vessel in which explosives had been connected with a clock-work. The Ramil lies barely escaped destruction, and her angry commander inflicted a bombardment on the offending town, Stonington, demanding as the price of exemption that the in­habitants should promise to set no more torpedoes afloat, a demand which was promptly refused.

The interior of the commonwealth, secure alike by Its distance from the seat of war, by the uni­versal loyalty of its population, and by the primi-

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tive simplicity of a people who knew all their neighbors for miles, and could detect any one at­tempting an escape, was a most excellent place for the detention of prisoners. The jails, the public buildings, and even" the private houses of the northern townships, were made places of deposit for prisoners of war or for political prisoners. Hither came the Tory officials of New York, the prisoners from Long Island, and others ; and the lenity of their treatment stood in strong contrast with the condition of the Americans who returned from the horrible prison-hulks of the British forces, starved, diseased, and treated with every shade of heathenish cruelty short of absolute cannibalism. Their return home is particularly creditable to the colonists in that it seems to have made no differ-ence in their treatment of their own prisoners, or rather guests.

It must be acknowledged that the substantial unanimity of the people had been secured by strong, if unofficial, measures, The authorities winked assiduously at the operations of the town committees who made it their special business to see that Tories recanted, left the town, or were placed where they would do the least harm. We have no means of ascertaining exactly how far it was necessary for these committees to go. Terrible accounts of their doings, of their riotous proceed­ings, tarrings and featherings, etc., are given us by the Rev. Samuel Peters, a Tory clergyman of

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the Church of England, who was driven from the colony during the opening troubles, and afterwards took a terrible revenue by publishing a " History " of Connecticut in London. But Peters stands also as the only authority for the phenomena, at Bel­lows' Falls, where the water of the Connecticut River runs so swiftly that an iron crowbar cannot be forced into it, but floats on the surface ; for the inhumanity, to give it no worse name, of Hooker, in giving to the Connecticut Indians Bibles infected with the smallpox, so as to put them out of the way of the rising young colony ; for the amusing manner in which the inhabitants of Windham, alarmed by the noise of an invading army, kept guard against it all night, finding in the morning that it was no more than a living column of frogs on the way to water ; for those singular members of the Connecticut fauna, the " whapperknocker " and the " cuba," whose untamable ferocity, so well known to all naturalists, the veracious " Doctor " takes pleasure in describing from personal obser­vation ; and for such a mass of other lies as Mun-chausen himself might have been proud to father. Unless this mass of fiction is also to be taken on Peters's authority, it is difficult to see how his authority is to count for much as to the asserted mistreatment of Connecticut Tories.

Outside of Peters's statements, and the vague newspaper stories current at that day, the strongest case made agrainst the Connecticut fathers of the

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republic is in their use of the Simsbury copper-mines as a place of confinement for Tories " and other notorious offenders." The existence of cop­per at Simsbury was suspected as early as 1705 ; and the town leased the mines to various compa­nies, who brought over miners from Germany and spent their money freely, but got little of it back. The ore contained from fifteen to twenty per cent.

of copper, but was too refractory to do more than lure speculators into bankruptcy through assayers' reports. Governor Belcher wrote in 1735 that he had spent $75,000 there since 1721. Coins, called u Granby coppers," from the residence of the coiner in the neighboring town of Granby, were made from the metal in 1737-39 ; but the copper was so nearly pure, and so much in demand for jewelers' alloy, that they have almost disappeared. In 1773 mining ceased, and the colony spent about $375 in fitting up the mine as a prison. The main shaft was near the top of a small hill; and the buildings at the mouth, the wall surrounding them, and the naked hill sloping down in front of it, must have added a shade of horror to the unknown future in the mind of the Tory who was approaching it. Certain it is that hardly anything was so dreadful to the Tory mind as the prospect of incarceration at Simsbury. In 1781 congress applied for per­mission to use it as a prison for state offenders ; but the almost immediate cessation of hostilities relieved the national authority from any such ne­cessity.

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The number confined here, both of ordinary of­fenders and of Tories, probably never exceeded thirty at any one time ; but the number of Insur­rections and escapes was disproportionately great, showing that even copper-mines will not a prison make. The shaft was nearly a hundred feet deep ; but the cells were in the galleries, none of them more than sixty feet below the surface. In spite of the frequent escapes, public confidence in the security of the place was unimpaired, and it was the ordinary state prison from 1790 until 1827, when the new prison at Wethersfield took Its place. In defense of the establishment of the prison in such a location, it may be urged that such a step was not considered improper anywhere at the time ; that the terrors of the place were more in imagination than in reality; that the health of the prisoners was good and was not af­fected unfavorably by their location; and that special practices of that time must not be judged by the more civilized theory of a later era. So late as 1807, a traveler who visited it could go no further in reprehension than to say : " For myself, I cannot get rid of the impression that, without any extraordinary cruelty in. its actual operation, there is something very like cruelty in the device and design." How much more lenient must have been the judgment of a sound Whig of 1775 when lie saw a Tory consigned to the Simsbury New- gate!