John Wheelwright, with other of Anne Hutchinson’s disciples, went to the north, where he purchased, in the valley of the Piscataqua, a tract of land from a celebrated Indian sorcerer, the chief of the Pennicook Indians, and founded the town of Exeter.
Of the remarkable woman, the head of this intellectual movement, which still survives in America, we have but little to relate, and that is sad as the last act of a tragedy. Leaving the state from which she was thrust out, she travelled by land through the wilderness to Providence, and thence joined her family and friends on their island settlement. Banishment had not, however, destroyed her influence in Massachusetts; she continued to draw after her such numbers that the wise men of Massachusetts suspected her of witchcraft. Her son and her son-in-law, both preachers, who had been in Barbadoes, returning thence to Boston, were heavily fined and imprisoned for preaching. Anne Hutchinson was now a widow, and as not even Rhode Island seemed a refuge from persecution, she and her family, the following year, removed still further south, to the borders of the Dutch settlements. Unfortunately, the Indians were at that time in a state of exasperation against the Dutch, and not discriminating between nations, set fire to the house of Anne Hutchinson, and, sorrowful to relate, she and all her family, with the exception of one child, sixteen persons in number, perished at midnight either by the flames or the cruel weapons of the Indians.
CHAPTER X.
SETTLEMENT OF CONNECTICUT.
The Connecticut river was discovered about the same time both by the Dutch and the English, who both claim the honour, which is supposed by some writers to be due to the Dutch; the English, however, were the first settlers on its banks. In 1651, Wahquimacut, the sachem of one of the Indian tribes which inhabited the Connecticut valley, being pressed by his enemies the Pequods on the east, and the Mohawks on the west, made his appearance in Boston, and afterwards in Plymouth, to invite a settlement in his country, the beauty and fertility of which he described in glowing colours. The Plymouth colony, which had declined the invitation of Lord Baltimore into the milder region of Maryland, listened more willingly to that of the Indian sachem, and Governor Winslow himself visited the valley, and found it no less attractive than had been represented.
The report of this new and delightful region, lying on a river which offered every facility for an advantageous trade with the Indians, soon reached England, and the council for New England granted a patent of the Connecticut valley to the Earl of Warwick, a puritan nobleman and a friend and disciple of Hooker, who had already emigrated. This grant, however, was soon after transferred to Lord Say and Seal, Lord Brooke and others; and John Winthrop, son of Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts, a man whose excellent endowments, high religious character and great learning, made him universally loved and respected, being at that time in England on the business of Massachusetts, returned to the New World, as agent of the noble patentees and their friends, with a commission to build a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, together with houses suitable not only for emigrants in general, but for persons of wealth and condition. This grant included the whole extent of the country “from the Narragansett river, 120 miles in a straight line near the shore, towards the south-west, as the coast lies towards Virginia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea;” it being still supposed that the continent of America was narrow, and that the South, or Pacific Sea, was easily attainable from the Atlantic shore.
But before Winthrop reached America with his commission, settlements had already been made on the Connecticut. The people of Plymouth, following the advice of the friendly sachem, built a trading house at a place called Windsor, and commenced a traffic with the Indians in furs; and the Dutch, jealous of the English, had sent a colony from Manhattan, and established what they called the House of Good Hope somewhat lower down the river. A more important movement, however, than either of these had set in towards the valley of the Connecticut, of which we must speak more in detail.
Vast numbers of the persecuted still continuing to pour in from England, the older settlements were presently found to be too narrow for their occupants, and, as in the full hive at midsummer, a spirit of diffusion urged them abroad. The people of Dorchester, New Town and Watertown felt the first impulse, and lured by the intelligence of fine pasture land on the banks of the Connecticut, many of them determined to remove thither. In the month of October, 1635, a company of sixty persons, men, women and children, set out on a second pilgrimage through the forests, which were yet pathless save to the Indians, driving their cattle before them, and taking with them merely provisions for the journey, further supplies, together with their household possessions, having been sent forward by sea. The American autumn is generally fine and steady, and, late as it was in the season, no danger was apprehended. But dangers and difficulties met them; the winter set in unusually early and with unexampled severity; and to add to their misfortunes, the vessels which were to supply them with necessaries were, some delayed by storms, and others wrecked. The history of their suffering is appalling; a few weathered out the terrible season, sustained by mast and acorns, and others reached the sea-shore, where, finding a vessel, they returned to Massachusetts. Their cattle fared as hardly as themselves, numbers of them perished, and the remainder picked up a scanty subsistence in the woods. It was a fearful beginning; but the Pilgrims, inured to hardships, were not daunted by that which would have quailed the courage of ordinary men. The next spring, they who had escaped with their lives to Massachusetts were ready to return to Connecticut, only to be followed by a much larger and more important emigration.
In the meantime Winthrop, who had arrived from England with his commission, commenced to build the projected fort at the mouth of the Connecticut, when a Dutch vessel appeared to take possession, but, as in the case of the first settlement of the English at Windsor, the place had been held in defiance of the Dutch, so now, having two pieces of cannon, Winthrop prevented their landing, and completed the fort without further molestation, which he named Saybrooke, after the two noble patentees.
And now, but not without great dissatisfaction to the colony of Massachusetts, the great emigration commenced to the attractive valley of Connecticut. The whole narrative reads like a chapter of patriarchal life or a beautiful Arcadian poem. “In the month of June,” says Bancroft, “the principal caravan began its march, led by Thomas Hooker, ‘the light of the western churches.’ There were of the company about one hundred souls; many of them were persons accustomed to affluence and the ease of European life. They drove before them numerous herds of cattle; and thus they traversed on foot the pathless forests of Massachusetts, Mrs. Hooker, who was at the time in delicate health, being borne in a litter; advancing merely ten miles a day through the tangled woods, across swamps and numerous streams and over the highlands that separated the several intervening valleys; subsisting, as they slowly wandered along, on the milk of the kine which browsed on the fresh leaves and early shoots; having no guide through the nearly untrodden wilderness but the compass, and no pillow for their nightly rest but heaps of stones. How did the hills echo to the unwonted lowing of the herds; how were the forests enlivened by the loud and fervent piety of Hooker. Never again was there such a pilgrimage from the sea-side to the delightful banks of the Connecticut.” Well might Massachusetts oppose this “severing of the commonwealth;” well might she remind them that “the removing of a candlestick was a great judgment in the church;” for this hand of Pilgrims which was leaving her infant towns “was gathered from among the most valued citizens, the earliest settlers and the oldest churches of the bay.” There was John Haynes, who had been governor of Massachusetts, and “Hooker, who had no rival in the public estimation as a preacher, excepting Cotton, whom he far surpassed in character, together with many others. They were in fact the civil and religious fathers of Massachusetts who were now leaving her.” Hooker, it is said, immediately on his arrival in the New World, where he was welcomed by his flock, who had preceded him from England, determined on removing them to a new ground. There were yet numbers of his persecuted friends ready to come over for his sake, and he wished for these, as well as for himself, more room than the older colony could afford him. The affluent and beautiful valley of the Connecticut promised him all that he required.
The Pilgrims reached the place of their destination in safety, and fixed upon the locality for their town, which they called Hartford. At once they began to build and to cultivate. The miseries of the former year had to be guarded against, houses to be built, and the forest felled before the land could be planted; and through that summer and the whole of the year their labours were arduous and unremitting. The fatigues and hardships of labour were not, however, all that they had to contend against. They had enemies in the Dutch, who saw with jealousy and hatred the steady advance of the English on their borders; the country, unlike Massachusetts, was thickly populated by native tribes of a fierce and warlike character. The Pequods, occupying the country to the eastward, mustered 700 warriors, whilst the settlers themselves scarcely amounted to 200. It was by this bold and relentless tribe that that league of extermination with the Mohegans and Narragansetts was formed, which, as we have related, was revealed and prevented by Roger Williams. But although the Narragansetts and Mohegans gave in their adherence to the English, the Pequods remained not the less inveterate. Injuries and murders were of daily occurrence, and at length the settlers of the three colonies agreed to unite together to suppress the common enemy. Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, was their ally, and after solemn prayer and religious exercises, the command was given to John Mason, an old soldier of the Netherlands, who conducted himself so much to the satisfaction of all, that “an inheritance was given to him in that part of the country as a reward of his faithful service.” “After nearly a whole night,” says Bancroft, “spent at the request of the soldiers in importunate prayer, by the very learned and godly Stone, who accompanied them as chaplain, about sixty men, one-third of the whole colony, aided by John Underhill and twenty gallant recruits, whom the forethought of Vane had sent from Massachusetts, sailed up the Pequod river, now called the Thames, on the banks of which dwelt the enemy; and designing to reach the Pequod fort unobserved, entered a harbour in Narragansett Bay. The next day was the Sabbath, sacred to religion and rest.” Religion was mixed up in every circumstance of life among the New England settlers, even when, to our view, the very circumstances lacked somewhat of the Christian spirit; as, for instance, it is recorded, probably on a Sabbath, that while Stone was earnestly praying for some token of love which might confirm to them the fidelity of their Indian allies, of whom they had doubts, these allies came in with five Pequod scalps and a prisoner, which was considered as Heaven’s answer to their prayer.