CHAPTER XIV

NARRAGANSETT AND CONNECTICUT SETTLEMENTS

(1635-1637)

The island of Aquidneck, to which Mrs. Hutchinson retired, was secured from Canonicus and Miantonomoh, the sachems of the Narragansetts, through the good offices of Roger Williams, by John Clarke, William Coddington, and other leaders of her faction, a short time preceding her banishment, after a winter spent in Maine, where the climate proved too cold for them.[1 ] The place of settlement was at the northeastern corner of the island, and was known first by its Indian name of Pocasset and afterwards as Portsmouth. The first settlers, nineteen in number, constituted themselves a body politic and elected William Coddington as executive magistrate, with the title of chief judge, and William Aspinwall as secretary.[2 ] Other emigrants swelled the number, till in 1639 a new settlement at the southern part of the island, called Newport, resulted through the secession of a part of the settlers headed by Coddington. For more than a year the two settlements remained separate, but in March, 1640, they were formally united.[3 ] Settlers flocked to these parts, and in 1644 the Indian name of Aquidneck was changed to Rhode Island.[4 ]

Not less flourishing was Roger Williams's settlement of Providence on the main-land. In the summer of 1640 Patuxet was marked off as a separate township;[5 ] and in 1643 Samuel Gorton and others, fleeing from the wrath of Massachusetts, made a settlement called Shawomet, or Warwick, about twelve miles distant from Providence.

The tendency of these various towns was to combine in a commonwealth, but on account of their separate origin the process of union was slow. The source of most of their trouble in their infancy was the grasping policy of Massachusetts. Next to heretics in the bosom of the commonwealth heretic neighbors were especially abhorrent. When in 1640 the magistrates of Connecticut and New Haven addressed a joint letter to the general court of Massachusetts, and the citizens of Aquidneck ventured to join in it, Massachusetts arrogantly excluded the representation of Aquidneck from their reply as "men not fit to be capitulated withal by us either for themselves or for the people of the isle where they inhabit."[6 ] And neither in 1644 nor in 1648 would Massachusetts listen to the appeal of the Rhode-Islanders to be admitted into the confederacy of the New England colonies.[7 ]

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 £2000 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.