Lyon Gardiner Tyler - England in America, 1580 to 1652

L >> Lyon Gardiner Tyler >> England in America, 1580 to 1652

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The desire of Massachusetts appeared to be to hold the heretics and
their new country under a kind of personal and territorial vassalage,
as was interestingly shown in the case of Mrs. Hutchinson and Samuel
Gorton. Despite her banishment and excommunication the church at
Boston seemed to consider it a duty to keep a paternal eye on Mrs.
Hutchinson; and not long after her settlement at Portsmouth sent an
embassy to interview her and obtain, if possible, a submission and
profession of repentance.

The bearers of this message met with an apt reception and returned
very much disconcerted. They found Mrs. Hutchinson, and declared that
they came as messengers from the church of Boston, but she replied
that she knew only the church of Christ and recognized no such church
as "the church of Boston." Nevertheless, she continued to be annoyed
with messages from Boston till, in order to be quiet and out of reach,
she removed to a place very near Hell Gate in the Dutch settlement,
and there, in 1643, she, with most of her family, perished in an
Indian attack.[8]

The authority of Massachusetts over the banished was not confined to
religious exhortations. Samuel Gorton, a great friend of Mrs.
Hutchinson, was in many respects one of the most interesting
characters in early New England history. This man had a most
pertinacious regard for his private rights, and at Plymouth,
Portsmouth, and Providence his career of trouble was very much the
same. But he was not an ordinary law-breaker, and in Providence, in
1641, Gorton and his friends refused to submit to a distress ordained
by the magistrates, for the reason that these magistrates, having no
charter, had no better authority to make laws than any private
person.[9]

The next year, 1642, thirteen citizens of Providence petitioned Boston
for assistance and protection against him; and not long after, four of
the petitioners submitted their persons and lands to the authority of
Massachusetts.[10] Although to accept this submission was to step
beyond their bounds under the Massachusetts charter, the authorities
at Boston, in October, 1642, gave a formal notice of their intention
to maintain the claim of the submissionists.[11] To this notice Gorton
replied, November 20, 1642, in a letter full of abstruse theology and
rancorous invective.

Nevertheless, he and his party left Patuxet and removed to Shawomet, a
tract beyond the limits of Providence, and purchased in January, 1643,
from Miantonomoh, the great sachem of the Narragansetts.[12] Gorton's
letter had secured for him the thorough hatred of the authorities in
Massachusetts, and his removal by no means ended their interference.
The right of Miantonomoh to make sale to Gorton was denied by two
local sachems; and Massachusetts coming to their support, Gorton was
formally summoned, in September, 1643, to appear before the court of
Boston to answer the complaint of the sachems for trespass.[13] Gorton
and his friends returned a contemptuous reply, and as he continued to
deny the right of Massachusetts to interfere, the Boston government
prepared to send an armed force against him.[14]

In the mean time, a terrible fate overtook the friend and ally of
Gorton, Miantonomoh, at the hands of his neighbors in the west, the
Mohegans, whose chief, Uncas, attacked one of Miantonomoh's
subordinate chiefs; Miantonomoh accepted the war, was defeated, and
captured by Uncas. Gorton interfered by letter to save his friend, and
Uncas referred the question of Miantonomoh's fate to the federal
commissioners at Boston. The elders were clamorous for the death
penalty, but the commissioners admitting that "there was no sufficient
ground for us to put him to death," agreed to deliver the unhappy
chieftain to Uncas, with permission to kill him as soon as he came
within Uncas's jurisdiction. Accordingly, Miantonomoh was slaughtered
by his enemy, who cut out a warm slice from his shoulder and declared
it the sweetest morsel he had ever tasted and that it gave strength to
his heart.[15] Thus fell Miantonomoh, the circumstances of whose death
were "not at all creditable to the federal commissioners and their
clerical advisers."[16]

Massachusetts sent out an armed force against the Gortonists, and
after some resistance the leaders were captured and brought to Boston.
Here Wilson and other ministers urged the death penalty upon the
"blasphemous heretics." But the civil authorities were not prepared to
go so far, and in October, 1643, adopted the alternative of
imprisonment. In March, 1644, Gorton and his friends were liberated,
but banished on pain of death from all places claimed to be within the
jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

They departed to Shawomet, but Governor Winthrop forbade them to stay
there; and in April, 1644, Gorton and his friends once more sought
refuge at Aquidneck.[17] Gorton, having contrived to reach England,
returned in May, 1648, with an order from the Parliamentary
commissioners for plantations, directed to the authorities of
Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut, to permit him and his
friends to reside in peace at Warwick, which they were then permitted
to do.[18] In 1652 Gorton became president of Providence and
Warwick.[19]

In December, 1643, the agents of Massachusetts in England obtained
from the Parliamentary commissioners for plantations a grant of all
the main-land in Massachusetts Bay; and it appeared for the moment as
if it were all over with the independence of the Rhode Island towns.
Fortunately, Williams was in England at the time, and with indomitable
energy he set to work to counteract the danger.

In less than three months he persuaded the same commissioners to
issue, March 14, 1644, a second instrument[20] incorporating the towns
of "Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay in New England,"
and (in flat contradiction of the earlier grant to Massachusetts)
giving them "the Tract of Land in the Continent of America called by
the name of Narragansett Bay, bordering Northward and Northeast on the
patent of the Massachusetts, East and Southeast on Plymouth Patent,
South on the Ocean, and on the West and Northwest by the Indians
called Nahigganeucks, alias Narregansets--the whole Tract extending
about twenty-five English miles unto the Pequot River and Country."
The charter contained no mention of religion or citizenship, though it
gave the inhabitants full power "to rule themselves and such others as
shall hereafter inhabit within any Part of the said Tract, by such a
Form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the
greater Parte of them, they shall find most suitable to their Estate
and Condition."

Williams returned to America in September, 1644. On account of the
unfriendly disposition of Massachusetts he was compelled, when leaving
for England, to take his departure from the Dutch port of New
Amsterdam. Now, like one vindicated in name and character, he landed
in Boston, and, protected by a letter[21] from "divers Lords and
others of the Parliament," passed unmolested through Massachusetts,
and reached Providence by the same route which, as a homeless
wanderer, he had pursued eight years before. It is said that at
Seekonk he was met by fourteen canoes filled with people, who escorted
him across the water to Providence with shouts of triumph.[22]

Peace and union, however, did not at once flow from the labors of
Williams. The hostility of Massachusetts and Plymouth towards the
Rhode-Islanders seemed at first increased; and the principle of
self-government, to which the Rhode Island townships owed their
existence, delayed their confederation. At last, in May, 1647, an
assembly of freemen from the four towns of Portsmouth, Newport,
Providence, and Warwick met at Portsmouth, and proceeded to make laws
in the name of the whole body politic, incorporated under the charter.
The first president was John Coggeshall; and Roger Williams and
William Coddington were two of the first assistants.

Massachusetts, aided by the Plymouth colony, still continued her
machinations, and an ally was found in Rhode Island itself in the
person of William Coddington. In 1650 he went to England and obtained
an order, dated April 3, 1651, for the severance of the island from
the main-land settlements.[23] Fortunately, however, for the
preservation of Rhode Island unity, an act of intemperate bigotry on
the part of Massachusetts saved the state from Coddington's
interference.

The sect called Anabaptists, or Baptists, opposed to infant baptism,
made their appearance in New England soon after the banishment of Mrs.
Hutchinson. Rhode Island became a stronghold for them, and in 1638
Roger Williams adopted their tenets and was rebaptized.[24] In 1644 a
Baptist church was established at Newport.[25] The same year
Massachusetts passed a law decreeing banishment of all professors of
the new opinions.[26] In October, 1650, three prominent Baptists, John
Clarke, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, visited Massachusetts, when
they were seized, whipped, fined, imprisoned, and barely escaped with
their lives.[27]

The alarm created in Rhode Island by these proceedings brought the
towns once more into a common policy, and Clarke and Williams were
sent to England to undo the work of Coddington. Aided by the warm
friendship of Sir Harry Vane, the efforts of the agents were crowned
with success. Coddington's commission was revoked by an order of
council in September, 1652, and the townships were directed to unite
under the charter of 1644.[28] Coddington did not at once submit, and
there was a good deal of dissension in the Rhode Island towns till
June, 1654, when Williams returned from England. Then Coddington
yielded,[29] and, August 31, commissioners from the four towns voted
to restore the government constituted seven years before. The
consolidation of Rhode Island was perfected when, in 1658,
Massachusetts released her claims to jurisdiction there.[30]

Liberty of conscience as asserted by Roger Williams did not involve
the abrogation of civil restraint, and when one William Harris
disturbed the peace in 1656, by asserting this doctrine in a
pamphlet,[31] Williams, then governor, had a warrant issued for his
apprehension. When, in 1658, Williams retired to private life the
possibility of founding a state in which "religious freedom and civil
order could stand together" was fully proved to the world.[32]

Besides the Indian power, as many as six independent jurisdictions
existed originally in the present state of Connecticut. (1) The Dutch
fort of "Good Hope," established in 1633, on the Connecticut River,
had jurisdiction over a small area of country. (2) The Plymouth colony
owned some territory on the Connecticut River and built a fort there
soon after the Dutch came. (3) Next was the jurisdiction of Fort
Saybrook, the sole evidence of possession on the part of the holders
of a patent from the earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New
England, who claimed to own the whole of Connecticut. (4) A much
larger jurisdiction was that of the Connecticut River towns, settled
in 1635-1636, contemporaneously with the banishment of Roger Williams.
(5) New Haven was settled in 1638, in the height of the Antinomian
difficulties. (6) A claim was advanced by the marquis of Hamilton for
a tract of land running from the mouth of the Connecticut River to
Narragansett Bay, assigned to him in the division of 1635, but it did
not become a disturbing factor till 1665.

The early relations between the Dutch and English colonies were, as we
have seen, characterized by kindness and good-fellowship. The Dutch
advised the Plymouth settlers to remove from their "present barren
quarters," and commended to them the valley of the "Fresh River"
(Connecticut), referring to it as a fine place both for plantation and
trade.[33] Afterwards, some Mohegan Indians visiting Plymouth in 1631
made similar representations. Their chief, Uncas, an able,
unscrupulous, and ambitious savage, made it his great ambition to
attain the headship of his aggressive western neighbors, the Pequots.
The only result had been to turn the resentment of the Pequots against
himself; and he sought the protection of the Plymouth government by
encouraging them to plant a settlement on the Connecticut in his own
neighborhood.[34]

These persuasions had at length some effect, and in 1632 Edward
Winslow, being sent in a bark to examine the river, reported the
country as conforming in every respect to the account given of it by
the Dutch and the Indians.[35] Meanwhile, the Indians, not liking the
delay, visited Boston and tried to induce the authorities there to
send out a colony, but, though Governor Winthrop received them
politely, he dismissed them without the hoped-for assistance.[36]

In July, 1633, Bradford and Winslow made a special visit to Boston to
discuss the plan of a joint trading-post, but they did not receive
much encouragement. Winthrop and his council suggested various
objections: the impediments to commerce due to the sand-bar at the
mouth; the long continuance of ice in spring, and the multitude of
Indians in the neighborhood. But it seems likely that these
allegations were pretexts, since we read in Winthrop's _Journal_ that
in September, 1633, a bark was sent from Boston to Connecticut; and
John Oldham, with three others, set out from Watertown overland to
explore the river.[37]

Plymouth determined to wait no longer, and in October, 1633, sent a
vessel, commanded by William Holmes, with workmen and the frame of a
building for a trading-post. When they arrived in the river, they were
surprised to find other Europeans in possession. The Dutch, aroused
from their dream of security by the growth of the English settlement,
made haste in the June previous to purchase from the Indians twenty
acres where Hartford now stands, upon which they built a fort a short
time after. When the vessel bearing the Plymouth traders reached this
point in the river, the Dutch commander, John van Curler, commanded
Holmes to stop and strike his flag. But Holmes, paying little
attention to the threats of the Dutchman, continued his voyage and
established a rival post ten miles above, at a place now known as
Windsor.[38]

Meanwhile, the ship which Winthrop sent to Connecticut went onward to
New Netherland, where the captain notified Governor Van Twiller, in
Winthrop's name, that the English had a royal grant to the territory
about the Connecticut River. It returned to Boston in October, 1633,
and brought a reply from Van Twiller that the Dutch had also a claim
under a grant from their States-General of Holland.[39] In December,
1633, Van Twiller heard of Holmes's trading-post and despatched an
armed force of seventy men to expel the intruders. They appeared
before the fort with colors flying, but finding that Holmes had
received reinforcements, and that it would be impossible to dislodge
him without bloodshed, they returned home without molesting him.[40]

The Plymouth settlers were destined to be dispossessed, not by the
Dutch, but by their own countrymen. The people of Massachusetts were
now fully aroused, and the news that came to Boston in the summer of
1634 that the small-pox had practically destroyed the Indians on the
river increased "the hankering" after the coveted territory.[41] The
people of Watertown, Dorchester, and Newtown (Cambridge) had long been
restless under the Massachusetts authority, and were anxious for a
change. Dorchester was the residence of Captain Israel Stoughton, and
Watertown the residence of Richard Brown and John Oldham, all three of
whom had been under the ban of the orthodox Puritan church. At
Watertown also had sprung up the first decided opposition to the
aristocratic claim of the court of assistants to lay taxes on the
people. As for Newtown (now Cambridge), its inhabitants could not
forget that, though selected in the first instance as the capital of
the colony, it had afterwards been discarded for the town of Boston.

In all three towns there was a pressure for arable lands and more or
less jealousy among the ministers. Some dissatisfaction also with the
requirement in Massachusetts of church-membership for the suffrage may
have been among the motives for seeking a new home. At the head of the
movement was the Rev. Thomas Hooker, a graduate of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, who had lived in Holland, and while there had imbibed a
greater share of liberality than was to be found among most of the
clergy of Massachusetts. Cotton declared that democracy was "no fit
government either for church or commonwealth," and the majority of the
ministers agreed with him. Winthrop defended his view in a letter to
Hooker on the ground that "the best part is always the least, and of
that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." But Hooker
replied that "in matters which concern the common good a general
council, chosen by all, to transact business which concerns all, I
conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for the relief of the
whole."

Hooker arrived in the colony in September, 1633,[42] and in May, 1634,
at the first annual general court after his arrival, his congregation
at Newtown petitioned to be permitted to move to some other quarters
within the bounds of Massachusetts.[43] The application was granted,
and messengers were sent to Agawam and Merrimac to look for a suitable
location.[44] After this, when the epidemic on the Connecticut became
known, a petition to be permitted to move out of the Massachusetts
jurisdiction was presented to the general court in September, 1634.
This raised a serious debate, and though there can be little doubt
that Winthrop and the other leaders in Massachusetts shrewdly
cherished the idea of pre-empting in some way the trade of the
Connecticut, against both the Plymouth people and the Dutch, an
emigration such as was proposed appeared too much like a desertion.
The fear of the appointment by the crown of a governor-general for New
England was at its height, and so the application, though it met with
favor from the majority of the deputies, was rejected by the court of
assistants.[45]

The popularity of the measure, however, increased mightily, and there
is a tradition that in the winter of 1634-1635 some persons from
Watertown went to Connecticut and managed to survive the winter in a
few huts erected at Pyquag, afterwards Wethersfield.[46] The next
spring the Watertown and Dorchester people imitated the Newtown
congregation in applying to the general court for permission to
remove. They were more successful, and were given liberty to go to any
place, even outside of Massachusetts, provided they continued under
the Massachusetts authority.[47]

Then began a lively movement, and Jonathan Brewster, in a letter
written from the Plymouth fort at Windsor in July, 1635, tells of the
daily arrival by land and water of small parties of these adventurous
settlers. Their presence around the fort caused Brewster much
uneasiness, since some began to cast covetous eyes upon the very spot
which the Plymouth government had bought from the Mohegans and held
against the Dutch.

As their numbers grew their confidence increased; and finally the men
of Dorchester, headed by Roger Ludlow, one of the richest men in
Massachusetts, pretending that the land was theirs as the "Lord's
waste," upon which "the providence of God" had cast them, intruded
themselves into the actual midst of the Plymouth people. The emigrants
from Plymouth protested, but were finally glad to accept a compromise,
though, as Bradford remarks, "the unkindness was not soon forgotten."
The Massachusetts settlers held on to fifteen-sixteenths of the land,
while they magnanimously conceded to the Plymouth people
one-sixteenth, in addition to their block-houses.[48]

The emigration in the summer of 1635 was preliminary to a much larger
exodus in the fall. In October a company of about sixty men, women,
and children, driving before them their cows, horses, and swine, set
out by land and reached the Connecticut "after a tedious and difficult
journey";[49] but the winter set in very early, and the vessels which
were to bring their provisions by water not appearing, they were
forced to leave their settlement for fear of famine. They were
fortunate to find a ship frozen up in the river, which they freed from
the ice and used to return to Boston. The other settlers who remained
upon the river suffered very much, and were finally reduced to the
necessity of eating acorns and ground-nuts, which they dug out of the
snow. A great number of the cattle perished, and the Dorchester
Company "lost near L2000 worth."[50]

These calamities were soon forgotten; and as soon as the first flowers
of spring suggested the end of the dreary winter season, the Newtown
people prepared to move. Selling their lands on the Charles River to
the congregation of Rev. Thomas Shepard, the whole body, in June,
1636, emigrated through the green woods, musical with birds and bright
with flowers, under the leadership of their two eminent ministers,
Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone.[51] Among the lay members of the
community were Stephen Hart, Thomas Bull, and Richard Lord.[52] A
little later the churches of Dorchester and Watertown completed their
removal, while a settlement was made by emigrants from Roxbury under
William Pynchon at Agawam, afterwards Springfield, just north of the
boundary between Massachusetts and Connecticut.[53]

At the beginning of the winter of 1636-1637 about eight hundred people
were established in three townships below Springfield. These townships
were first called after the towns from which their inhabitants
removed--Newtown, Watertown, and Dorchester; but in February, 1637,
their names were changed to Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor. The
settlements well illustrate the general type of New England
colonization. The emigration from Massachusetts was not of
individuals, but of organized communities united in allegiance to a
church and its pastor. Carrying provisions and supplies, erecting new
villages, as communities they came from England to Massachusetts, and
in that character the people emigrated to Connecticut.

In the mean time, the silence of the Connecticut woods was broken by
other visitors. The lands occupied by the Massachusetts settlers upon
the Connecticut lay within a grant executed March 19, 1631, by the
earl of Warwick, as president of the Council for New England for "all
that part of New England in America which lies and extends itself from
a river there called Narragansett River, the space of forty leagues
upon a straight line near the seashore towards the southwest, west,
and by south, or west, as the coast lieth towards Virginia, accounting
three English miles to the league; and also all and singular the lands
and hereditaments whatsoever, lying and being within the lands
aforesaid, north and south in latitude and breadth, and in length and
longitude of and within, all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the
main-lands there, from the western ocean to the south sea." The
grantees included Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Richard
Saltonstall.[54]

Probably some report of the unauthorized colonies reached them and
hastened Saltonstall to send out a party of twenty men in July, 1635,
to plant a settlement on the Connecticut. But the Dorchester settlers
treated them with even less consideration than they had the Plymouth
men. They set upon them and drove them out of the river.[55] Then, in
October, 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., the eldest son of John Winthrop of
Massachusetts, came from England with a commission to be governor of
the "river Connecticut in New England" for the space of one year.[56]

He was, however, a governor in theory, and made but one substantial
contribution to the permanent possession of Connecticut by the
English. In November, 1635, he erected at the mouth of the river a
fort called after Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--Saybrook--which
in the spring of 1636 he placed under the command of Lyon Gardiner, an
expert military engineer, who had seen much service in the
Netherlands.[57] Hardly had the English mounted two cannon on their
slight fortification when a Dutch vessel sent from New Amsterdam on a
sudden errand arrived in the river. Finding themselves anticipated,
the Dutch returned home, and the scheme of cutting off the English
settlements on the upper Connecticut from the rest of New England was
frustrated.[58]

For a year the towns on the Connecticut, including Springfield, were
governed by a commission issued by the general court of Massachusetts,
in concert with John Winthrop, Jr., as a representative of the
patentees.[59] When the year expired the commission was not renewed,
but a general court representing the three towns of Massachusetts and
consisting of six assistants and nine delegates, three for each town,
was held at Hartford in May, 1637. They became from this time a
self-governing community under the name of Connecticut, and the union
happened just in time to be of much service in repelling a great
danger.

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