We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization, and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions concerning the relations between church and state. Of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of Exeter and Hampton. Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been settled by followers of Mason and Gorges. In 1641 these towns were added to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under a royal government. Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire. Mrs. Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at Portsmouth and Newport. After a quarter of a century of turbulence, these settlements coalesced with Williams's colony at Providence, and thus was formed the state of Rhode Island. After her husband's death in 1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New Netherlands. There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen victims in all. One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor of Massachusetts.
To the dangers arising from the ill-will of the crown, and from these theological quarrels, there was added the danger of a general attack by the savages. Down to this time, since the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the settlers of New England had been in no way molested by the natives. Massasoit's treaty with the Pilgrims was scrupulously observed on both sides, and kept the Wampanoags quiet for fifty-four years. The somewhat smaller tribe which took its name from the Massawachusett, or Great Hill, of Milton, kept on friendly terms with the settlers about Boston, because these red men coveted the powerful aid of the white strangers in case of war with their hereditary foes the Tarratines, who dwelt in the Piscataqua country. It was only when the English began to leave these coast regions and press into the interior that trouble arose. The western shores of Narragansett bay were possessed by the numerous and warlike tribe of that name, which held in partial subjection the Nyantics near Point Judith. To the west of these, and about the Thames river, dwelt the still more formidable Pequots, a tribe which for bravery and ferocity asserted a preeminence in New England not unlike that which the Iroquois league of the Mohawk valley was fast winning over all North America east of the Mississippi. North of the Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive under the yoke. The thickly wooded mountain ranges between the Connecticut and the Hudson had few human inhabitants. These hundred miles of crag and forest were a bulwark none too wide or strong against the incursions of the terrible Mohawks, whose name sent a shiver of fear throughout savage New England, and whose forbearance the Nipmucks and Mohegans were fain to ensure by a yearly payment of blackmail. Each summer there came two Mohawk elders, secure in the dread that Iroquois prowess had everywhere inspired; and up and down the Connecticut valley they seized the tribute of weapons and wampum, and proclaimed the last harsh edict issued from the savage council at Onondaga. The scowls that greeted their unwelcome visits were doubtless nowhere fiercer than among the Mohegans, thus ground down between Mohawk and Pequot as between the upper and the nether millstone. [Sidenote: From the Indians: the Pequot supremacy]
Among the various points in which civilized man surpasses the savage none is more conspicuous than the military brute force which in the highest civilization is always latent though comparatively seldom exerted. The sudden intrusion of English warfare into the Indian world of the seventeenth century may well have seemed to the red men a supernatural visitation, like the hurricane or the earthquake. The uncompromising vigour with which the founders of Massachusetts carried on their work was viewed in some quarters with a dissatisfaction which soon thrust the English migration into the very heart of the Indian country.
The first movement, however, was directed against the encroachments of the New Netherlands. In October, 1634, some men of Plymouth, led by William Holmes, sailed up the Connecticut river, and, after bandying threats with a party of Dutch who had built a rude fort on the site of Hartford, passed on and fortified themselves on the site of Windsor. Next year Governor Van Twiller sent a company of seventy men to drive away these intruders, but after reconnoitring the situation the Dutchmen thought it best not to make an attack. Their little stronghold at Hartford remained unmolested by the English, and, in order to secure the communication between this advanced outpost and New Amsterdam, Van Twiller decided to build another fort at the mouth of the river, but this time the English were beforehand. Rumours of Dutch designs may have reached the ears of Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke—"fanatic Brooke," as Scott calls him in "Marmion"—who had obtained from the Council for New England a grant of territory on the shores of the Sound. These noblemen chose as their agent the younger John Winthrop, son of the Massachusetts governor, and this new-comer arrived upon the scene just in time to drive away Van Twiller's vessel and build an English fort which in honour of his two patrons he called "Say-Brooke."
Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts, the English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been for a few years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and Saybrook. But there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with favour upon the aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity. The provision that none but church-members should vote or hold office was by no means unanimously approved. We see it in the course of another generation putting altogether too much temporal power into the hands of the clergy, and we can trace the growth of the opposition to it until in the reign of Charles II. it becomes a dangerous source of weakness to Massachusetts. At the outset the opposition seems to have been strongest in Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown. When the Board of Assistants undertook to secure for themselves permanency of tenure, together with the power of choosing the governor and making the laws, these three towns sent deputies to Boston to inspect the charter and see if it authorized any such stretch of power. They were foremost in insisting that representatives chosen by the towns must have a share in the general government. Men who held such opinions were naturally unwilling to increase the political weight of the clergy, who, during these early disputes and indeed until the downfall of the charter, were inclined to take aristocratic views and to sympathize with the Board of Assistants. Cotton declared that democracy was no fit government either for church or for commonwealth, and the majority of the ministers agreed with him. Chief among those who did not was the learned and eloquent Thomas Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When Winthrop, in a letter to Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the very threshold of American history, with such a lucid statement of the strongly contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were many in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as also in Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in framing town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown to evade the restrictions upon the suffrage.
While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the adventurous John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over the mountains into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to the coast his glowing accounts set some people to thinking. Two years afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield. A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry, set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter supplies were sent around by water to meet them, but early in November the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts. Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston. Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number, led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle, made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took part in this pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife, being too ill to walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable year in which our great university was born, did Cambridge become, in the true Greek sense of a much-abused word, the metropolis or "mother town" of Hartford. The migration at once became strong in numbers. During the past twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made further movement easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with centuries of added political training. For one year a board of commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged. At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker preached a sermon of wonderful power, in which he maintained that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," "that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and that "they who have power to appoint officers and magistrates have the right also to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them." On the 14th of January, 1639, all the freemen of the three towns assembled at Hartford and adopted a written constitution in which the hand of the great preacher is clearly discernible. It is worthy of note that this document contains none of the conventional references to a "dread sovereign" or a "gracious king," nor the slightest allusion to the British or any other government outside of Connecticut itself, nor does it prescribe any condition of church-membership for the right of suffrage. It was the first written constitution known to history, that created a government, [10] and it marked the beginnings of American democracy, of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other man to be called the father. The government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen colonies. The most noteworthy feature of the Connecticut republic was that it was a federation of independent towns, and that all attributes of sovereignty not expressly granted to the General Court remained, as of original right, in the towns. Moreover, while the governor and council were chosen by a majority vote of the whole people, and by a suffrage that was almost universal, there was for each township an equality of representation in the assembly. [11] This little federal republic was allowed to develop peacefully and normally; its constitution was not violently wrenched out of shape like that of Massachusetts at the end of the seventeenth century. It silently grew till it became the strongest political structure on the continent, as was illustrated in the remarkable military energy and the unshaken financial credit of Connecticut during the Revolutionary War; and in the chief crisis of the Federal Convention of 1787 Connecticut, with her compromise which secured equal state representation in one branch of the national government and popular representation in the other, played the controlling part. [Sidenote: Connecticut Pioneers] [Sidenote: The first written constitution]
Before the little federation of towns had framed its government, it had its Indian question to dispose of. Three years before the migration led by Hooker, a crew of eight traders, while making their way up the river to the Dutch station on the site of Hartford, had been murdered by a party of Indians subject to Sassacus, chief sachem of the Pequots. Negotiations concerning this outrage had gone on between Sassacus and the government at Boston, and the Pequots had promised to deliver up the murderers, but had neglected to do so. In the summer of 1636 some Indians on Block Island subject to the Narragansetts murdered the pioneer John Oldham, who was sailing on the Sound, and captured his little vessel. At this, says Underhill, "God stirred up the hearts" of Governor Vane and the rest of the magistrates. They were determined to make an end of the Indian question and show the savages that such things would not be endured. First an embassy was sent to Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo, chief sachems of the Narragansetts, who hastened to disclaim all responsibility for the murder, and to throw the blame entirely upon the Indians of the island. Vane then sent out three vessels under command of Endicott, who ravaged Block Island, burning wigwams, sinking canoes, and slaying dogs, for the men had taken to the woods. Endicott then crossed to the mainland to reckon with the Pequots. He demanded the surrender of the murderers, with a thousand fathoms of wampum for damages; and not getting a satisfactory answer, he attacked the Indians, killed a score of them, seized their ripe corn, and burned and spoiled what he could. But such reprisals served only to enrage the red men. Lyon Gardiner, commander of the Saybrook fort, complained to Endicott: "You come hither to raise these wasps about my ears; then you will take wing and flee away." The immediate effect was to incite Sassacus to do his utmost to compass the ruin of the English. The superstitious awe with which the white men were at first regarded had been somewhat lessened by familiar contact with them, as in Aesop's fable of the fox and the lion. The resources of Indian diplomacy were exhausted in the attempt to unite the Narragansett warriors with the Pequots in a grand crusade against the white men. Such a combination could hardly have been as formidable as that which was effected forty years afterward in King Philip's war; for the savages had not as yet become accustomed to firearms, and the English settlements did not present so many points exposed to attack; but there is no doubt that it might have wrought fearful havoc. We can, at any rate, find no difficulty in comprehending the manifold perplexity of the Massachusetts men at this time, threatened as they were at once by an Indian crusade, by the machinations of a faithless king, and by a bitter theological quarrel at home, in this eventful year when they laid aside part of their incomes to establish Harvard College. [Sidenote: Origin of the Pequot War]
The schemes of Sassacus were unsuccessful. The hereditary enmity of the Narragansetts toward their Pequot rivals was too strong to be lightly overcome. Roger Williams, taking advantage of this feeling, so worked upon the minds of the Narragansett chiefs that in the autumn of 1636 they sent an embassy to Boston and made a treaty of alliance with the English. The Pequots were thus left to fight out their own quarrel; and had they still been separated from the English by the distance between Boston and the Thames river, the feud might very likely have smouldered until the drift of events had given a different shape to it. But as the English had in this very year thrown out their advanced posts into the lower Connecticut valley, there was clearly no issue from the situation save in deadly war. All through the winter of 1636-37 the Connecticut towns were kept in a state of alarm by the savages. Men going to their work were killed and horribly mangled. A Wethersfield man was kidnapped and roasted alive. Emboldened by the success of this feat, the Pequots attacked Wethersfield, massacred ten people, and carried away two girls. [Sidenote: Sassacus is foiled by Roger Williams] [Sidenote: The Pequots take the warpath alone]
Wrought up to desperation by these atrocities, the Connecticut men appealed to Massachusetts and Plymouth for aid, and put into service ninety of their own number, under command of John Mason, an excellent and sturdy officer who had won golden opinions from Sir Thomas Fairfax, under whom he had served in the Netherlands. It took time to get men from Boston, and all that Massachusetts contributed to the enterprise at its beginning was that eccentric daredevil John Underhill, with a force of twenty men. Seventy friendly Mohegans, under their chief Uncas, eager to see vengeance wrought upon their Pequot oppressors, accompanied the expedition. From the fort at Saybrook this little company set sail on the twentieth of May, 1637, and landed in brilliant moonlight near Point Judith, where they were reinforced by four hundred Narragansetts and Nyantics. From this point they turned westward toward the stronghold of the Pequots, near the place where the town of Stonington now stands. As they approached the dreaded spot the courage of the Indian allies gave out, and they slunk behind, declaring that Sassacus was a god whom it was useless to think of attacking. The force with which Mason and Underhill advanced to the fray consisted of just seventy-seven Englishmen. Their task was to assault and carry an entrenched fort or walled village containing seven hundred Pequots. The fort was a circle of two or three acres in area, girdled by a palisade of sturdy sapling-trunks, set firm and deep into the ground, the narrow interstices between them serving as loopholes wherefrom to reconnoitre any one passing by and to shoot at assailants. At opposite sides of this stronghold were two openings barely large enough to let any one go through. Within this enclosure were the crowded wigwams. The attack was skilfully managed, and was a complete surprise. A little before daybreak Mason, with sixteen men, occupied one of the doors, while Underhill made sure of the other. The Indians in panic sought first one outlet and then the other, and were ruthlessly shot down, whichever way they turned. A few succeeded in breaking loose, but these were caught and tomahawked by the Indian allies, who, though afraid to take the risks of the fight, were ready enough to help slay the fugitives. The English threw firebrands among the wigwams, and soon the whole village was in a light blaze, and most of the savages suffered the horrible death which they were so fond of inflicting upon their captives. Of the seven hundred Pequots in the stronghold, but five got away with their lives. All this bloody work had been done in less than an hour, and of the English there had been two killed and sixteen wounded. It was the end of the Pequot nation. Of the remnant which had not been included in this wholesale slaughter, most were soon afterwards destroyed piecemeal in a running fight which extended as far westward as the site of Fairfield. Sassacus fled across the Hudson river to the Mohawks, who slew him and sent his scalp to Boston, as a peace-offering to the English. The few survivors were divided between the Mohegans and Narragansetts and adopted into those tribes. Truly the work was done with Cromwellian thoroughness. The tribe which had lorded it so fiercely over the New England forests was all at once wiped out of existence. So terrible a vengeance the Indians had never heard of. If the name of Pequot had hitherto been a name of terror, so now did the Englishmen win the inheritance of that deadly prestige. Not for eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, not until a generation of red men had grown up that knew not Underhill and Mason, did the Indian of New England dare again to lift his hand against the white man. [Sidenote: And are exterminated]
Such scenes of wholesale slaughter are not pleasant reading in this milder age. But our forefathers felt that the wars of Canaan afforded a sound precedent for such cases; and, indeed, if we remember what the soldiers of Tilly and Wallenstein were doing at this very time in Germany, we shall realize that the work of Mason and Underhill would not have been felt by any one in that age to merit censure or stand in need of excuses. As a matter of practical policy the annihilation of the Pequots can be condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly as to suppose that savages, whose business is to torture and slay, can always be dealt with according to the methods in use between civilized peoples. A mighty nation, like the United States, is in honour bound to treat the red man with scrupulous justice and refrain from cruelty in punishing his delinquencies. But if the founders of Connecticut, in confronting a danger which threatened their very existence, struck with savage fierceness, we cannot blame them. The world is so made that it is only in that way that the higher races have been able to preserve themselves and carry on their progressive work.