General History of Connecticut, from Its First Settlement Under George Fenwick to its Latest Period of Amity with Great Britain - Samuel Peters

TO WHICH ARE ADDED, ADDITIONS TO APPENDIX, NOTES, AND EXTRACTS
FROM LETTERS, VERIFYING MANY IMPORTANT STATEMENTS
MADE BY THE AUTHOR.

SAMUEL JARVIS McCORMICK.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
549 & 551 BROADWAY.
1877.

PREFACE.

Though Connecticut be the most flourishing, and, proportionally, the most populous, province in North America, it has hitherto found no writer to introduce it, in its own right, to the notice of the world. Slight and cursory mention in the accounts of other provinces, or of America in general, has yet only been made of it. The historians of New England have constantly endeavored to aggrandize Massachusetts Bay as the parent of the other colonies, and as comprehending all that is worthy of attention in that country. Thus Governor Hutchinson says, in the preface of his history of that province, that “there was no importation of planters from England to any part of the continent northward of Maryland, excepting to Massachusetts, for more than fifty years after the colony began;” not knowing, or willing to forget, or to conceal, that Saybrook, New Haven, and Long Island, were settled with emigrants from England within half that period. Another reason

for the obscurity in which the Connectitensians have hitherto been involved is to be found among their own sinister views and purposes: Prudence dictated that their deficiency in point of right to the soil they occupied, their wanton and barbarous persecutions, illegal practices, daring usurpations, etc., had better be concealed than exposed to public view.