The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut

by M. Louise Greene

Because of this college incident the difficulties in the Canterbury church attracted still more attention, but the end of the schism was at hand. In the month that witnessed the expulsion of the Clevelands, the minority of the original First Church voted that they were "The Church of Canterbury," and that those who had gone forth from among them in the January of the preceding year, 1743, as Congregationalists after the Cambridge Platform, had abrogated that of Saybrook. Consequently, to the minority lawfully belonged the election of the minister, the meeting house, and the taxes for ministerial support. Having thus fortified their position, they by a later vote declared:—

That those in the society who are differently minded from us, and can't conscientiously join in ye settlement of Mr. James Coggeshall as our minister may have free liberty to enjoy their own opinion, and we are willing they should be released and discharged from paying anything to ye support of Mr. Coggeshall, or living under his ministry any longer than until they have parish privileges granted them and are settled in church by themselves according to ye order of ye Gospel, or are lawfully released. [121]

At the repeal of the Toleration Act in 1743, a new method had been prescribed for sober dissenters who wished to separate from the state church, and who were not of the recognized sects. The method of relief, thereafter, was for the dissenters, no matter how widely scattered in the colony, to appeal in person to the General Assembly and ask for special exemption. Moreover, they were promised only that their requests would be listened to, and the Assembly was growing steadily more and more averse to granting such petitions. As a result of this policy, the Separatist church of Canterbury did not have a very good prospect of immediate ability to accept the good-will of the First Church, which went even farther than the resolution cited above. The First Church offered to assist the Separatists in obtaining recognition from the Assembly. This offer the Separatists refused, preferring to submit to double taxation, and thus to become a standing protest to the injustice of the laws.

After the expulsion of the Clevelands, Yale made one more pronounced effort to discipline its students and to repress the growth of the liberal spirit. She attempted to suppress a reprint of Locke's essay upon "Toleration" which the senior class had secretly printed at their expense. An attempt to overawe the students and to make them confess on pain of expulsion was met by the spirited resistance of one of the class, who threatened to appeal to the King in Council if his diploma were denied him. His diploma was granted; and some years after, when the sentiment in the colony had further changed, the college gave the Cleveland brothers their degree.

The church in Enfield[122] had an experience somewhat similar to that of Canterbury, to which it seems to have looked for spiritual advice and example. The Enfield Separate church was probably organized between 1745 and 1751, though its first known documents are a series of letters to the Separate church in Canterbury covering the period 1751-53. These letters sought advice in adjusting difficulties that were creating great discord in the church, which had already separated from the original church of Enfield. In 1762, the Enfield Separatists, once more in harmony, renewed their covenant, and called Mr. Nathaniel Collins to be their pastor. They struggled for existence until 1769, when they appealed to the General Assembly for exemption from the rates still levied upon them for the benefit of the First Society. They asked for recognition, separation, and incorporation as the Second Society and Church of Enfield. They were refused; but in May of the following year,—a year to be marked by special legislation in behalf of dissenters,—the Enfield Separatists again memorialized the Assembly, and in response were permitted to organize their own church. [123] This permission, however, was limited to the memorialists, eighty in number; to their children, if within six months after reaching their majority they filed certificates of membership in this Separate church; and to strangers, who should enter the new society within one year of their settling in the town. The history of the Enfield Separatists gives glimpses of the frequent double discord between the New Lights and the Old and among the New Lights themselves. The period of the Enfield persecution extended over years when, elsewhere in the colony, Separatists had obtained recognition of their claims to toleration, if only through special acts and not by general legislation.

If churches suffered from the severe ecclesiastical laws of 1742-43, individuals did also. Under the law which considered traveling ministers as vagrants, and which the Assembly had made still more stringent by the additional penalty "to pay down the cost of transportation," so learned a man as the Rev. Samuel Finley, afterwards president of Princeton, was imprisoned and driven from the colony because he insisted upon preaching in Connecticut. Indeed, it was his persistence in returning to the colony that caused the magistrates to increase the severity of the law.[124] When the ministers John Owen of Groton and Benjamin Pomeroy of Hebron, as well as the itinerant James Davenport of Southold, criticised the laws, all of them were at once arraigned for the offense before the Assembly. There was so much excitement over the arrest of Pomeroy and Davenport that it threatened a riot. All three men were discharged, but Davenport was ordered out of the colony for his itinerant preaching and for teaching resistance to the civil laws. Pomeroy, his friend, had declared that the laws forbade any faithful minister, or any one faithful in civil authority, to hold office. Events bore out his statement, for ministers were hounded, and the New Light justices of the peace, and other magistrates, were deprived of office. Pomeroy, himself, was discharged only to be complained of for irregular preaching at Colchester and in punishment to be,deprived of his salary for seven years.[125] The Rev. Nathan Stone of Stonington was disciplined for his New Light sympathies. Philemon Bobbins of Branford was deposed for preaching to the Baptists at Wallingford. This last procedure was the work of the Consociation of New Haven county, which thereby began a six years' contest, 1741-47, with the Branford church. In 1745 this church attempted to throw off the yoke of the Consociation by renouncing the Saybrook Platform.

During these years of persecution, the opposition to the Old Light policy was gradually gaining effective power, although the college had expelled Brainerd, and Mr. Cook, one of the Yale corporation, had found it expedient to resign because of his too prominent part in the formation of the North Church of New Haven. The Old Lights in the legislature of 1743 passed the repeal of the Toleration Act because the New Lights had no commanding vote; but they were increasing throughout the colony. Fairfield East Consociation had licensed Brainerd the year that Yale expelled him. Twelve ministers of New London and Windham county had met to approve the revival, notwithstanding the repeal of the Toleration Act and the known antagonism of the Windham Association to the Separatists. Windham Consociation and that of Fairfield East favored the revival. Large numbers of converts were made in these districts, and many also in Hartford county. In the New Haven district the spirit of antagonism and of persecution was strongest.

It was in accordance with the laws of 1742-43 that Mack, Shaw, and Pyrlæus, Moravian missionaries, on a visit in 1744 to their mission stations among the Indians in Connecticut, were seized as Papists and hustled from sheriff to sheriff for three days until "the Governor of Connecticut honorably dismissed them," though their accusers insisted upon their being bound over under a penalty of £100 to keep the law. "Being not fully acquainted with all the special laws of the country, they perceived a trap laid for them and thought it prudent to retire to Shekomeko" (Pine Plains, Dutchess County, N. Y.). Missionaries sent out from Nazareth and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had established this sub-centre for work in New York and Connecticut, and in the latter colony, in 1740-43, had made Indian converts at Sharon, Salisbury Indian Pond, near Newtown, and at Pachgatgoch, two miles southwest of Kent. Here was their principal station in Connecticut. They had made, in all, some twenty converts among the Indians, and had reclaimed several of their chief men from drunkenness and idleness. Moravian principles forbade these missionaries to take an oath. Consequently, the greed of traders, the rivalry of creeds, together with the belief that there was something wrong about men who would not swear allegiance to King George,—notwithstanding their willingness to affirm it, and notwithstanding their denial of the Pretender,—gave rise to the conviction that they must be Papists[d] in league with the French and their Indian allies. Accordingly both magistrates and ministers arrested the missionaries, and hurried them before the court at Poughkeepsie or at New Milford. Though the governors of both states recognized the value of the mission work, popular feeling ran so high that New York, in September, 1744, passed a law requiring them to take the oaths prescribed or to leave the country, and also commanding that "vagrant Teachers, Moravians, and disguised Papists should not preach or teach in public or private" without first obtaining a license. In Connecticut, as has been said, the laws of 1742-1743 were enforced against them; later, when during the Old French War groundless rumors of their intrigues with hostile Indians were circulated against them, a vain hunt was made for three thousand stands of arms that were said to be secreted in their missions. The severe persecution in New York had driven these missionaries into Pennsylvania and into Connecticut, but these rumors of intrigue broke up their work and caused the abandonment of their stations in the latter colony. Some of these, such as Kent, Sharon, and Salisbury, were revived in 1749-1762, at the request of the English settlers as well as of the Indian converts.[126]

Returning to the main story of the progress of dissent, we find that in 1746 the General Court of Connecticut felt obliged to safeguard the Establishment by the passage of a law entitled, "Concerning who shall vote in Society Meetings."[127] Its preamble states that persons exempted from taxes for the support of the established ministry, because of their dissenting from the way of worship and ministry of the Presbyterian, Congregational, or Consociated churches, "ought not to vote in society meetings with respect to the support or to the building and maintaining of meeting houses," yet some persons, exempted as aforesaid, "have adventured to vote and act therein," as there was no express law to the contrary. The new law forbade such voting, and limited the ecclesiastical ballot to members of the Establishment who "were persons of full age and in full communion with the church," and to other unexempted persons who held a freehold rated at fifty shillings per year, or personal property to the value of forty pounds. This law was just, in that it excluded all dissenters who had received exemption from Presbyterian rates. It included all others having the property qualification, whether they wanted to vote or not. That it was felt to be a necessity is a witness to the increasing recognition of the strength of the dissenting element.

In 1747, the Consociation of Windham sent forth a violent pamphlet describing the Separatists as a people in revolt against God and in rebellion against the Church and government. But the tide of public opinion was turning, and popular sentiment did not support the writers of this pamphlet. Moreover, the secular affairs of the colony were calling minds away from religious contentions as the stress of the Old French War was more and more felt. In 1748, venturing upon the improvement in public sentiment, Solomon Paine sent to the legislature a memorial signed by three hundred and thirty persons and asking for a repeal of such laws as debarred people from enjoying the liberty "granted by God and tolerated by the King."[128] It was known to these memorialists that a revision of the laws, first undertaken in 1742, was nearing completion, and their desire was that all obnoxious or unfair acts should be repealed. The petition met with a sharp rebuff, and, as a punishment, three members were expelled from the Assembly for being Separatists. But by such measures the Old Lights were overreaching themselves. A mark of the turning of public opinion was given this same year, when, upon the request of his old church in Hebron, the church vouching for his work and character, the Assembly restored to his ministerial rights and privileges the Rev. James Pomeroy. The unjust laws of 1742-43 and of the following years were never formally repealed, but were quietly dropped out of the revision of the laws issued in 1750.