Great Epochs in American History, Volume 2 / The Planting of the First Colonies: 1562—1733

by Unknown

The colony of Massachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its greatest poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight Massachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several occasions; and the assigned reasons are apparently so frivolous as to lead to the suspicion that some fundamental difference was at the bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were "newcomers," and this slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement, in 1633, of a number of strong men at these three towns, notably Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling: the two former led the way, in October, 1633, in establishing town governments under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less, the fundamental feature of Massachusetts policy,—the limitation of office-holding and the elective franchise to church-members. The three towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposition, a position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the circumstances.

The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were Warham and Maverick; of Newtown, Hooker and Stone; of Watertown, Phillips. Haynes of Newtown, Ludlow of Dorchester, and Pynchon of Roxbury, were the principal lay leaders of the half-formed opposition. Some have thought that Haynes was jealous of Governor Winthrop, Hooker of Cotton, and Ludlow of everybody. But the opposition, if it can be fairly called an opposition, was not so definite as to be traceable to any such personal source. The strength which marked the divergence was due neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and character which marked the leaders of the minority.

Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone were of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Hooker began to preach at Chelmsford in 1626, and was silenced for non-conformity in 1629. He then taught school, his assistant being John Eliot, afterward the apostle to the Indians; but the chase after him became warmer, and in 1630 he retired to Holland and resumed his preaching. In 1632 he and Stone came to New England as pastor and teacher of the church at Newtown; and the two took part in the migration to Hartford. Here Hooker became the undisputed ecclesiastical leader of Connecticut until his death in 1647. John Warham and John Maverick, both of Exeter in England, came to New England in 1630, as pastor and teacher of Dorchester. Maverick died while preparing to follow his church, but Warham settled with his parishioners at Windsor, and died there in 1670. George Phillips, also a Cambridge man, came to New England in 1630, as pastor of the church at Watertown. He took no part in the migration, but lived and died at Watertown. Fate seems to have determined that Wendell Phillips should belong to Massachusetts.

Roger Ludlow was Endicott's brother-in-law. He came to New England in 1630, and settled at Dorchester. He was deputy governor in 1634, and seems to have been "slated," to use the modern term, for the governorship in the following year. But this private agreement among the deputies was broken, for some unknown reason, by the voters, who chose Haynes, perhaps as a less objectionable representative of the opposition. Ludlow complained so openly and angrily of the failure to carry out the agreement that he was dropped from the magistracy at the next election. He went at once to Connecticut, and was deputy governor there in alternate years until 1654. Incensed at the interference of New Haven to prevent his county, Fairfield, from waging an independent warfare against the Dutch, he went to Virginia in 1654, taking the records of the county with him. It is not known when or where he died. Pynchon, the third lay leader of the opposition, took part in the migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, founding the town of Springfield.

At the May session of the Massachusetts General Court in 1634, an application for "liberty to remove" was received from Newtown. It was granted. At the September session the request was changed into one for removal to Connecticut. This was a very different matter, and, after long debate, was defeated by the vote of the Assistants, tho the Deputies passed it. Various reasons were assigned for the request to remove to Connecticut,—lack of room in their present locations, the desire to save Connecticut from the Dutch, and "the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither;" but the last looks like the strongest reason. In like manner, while the arguments to the contrary were those which would naturally suggest themselves, the weakening of Massachusetts, and the peril of the emigrants, the concluding argument, that "the removing of a candlestick" would be "a great judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession was the result of discord between two parties.

Haynes was made governor at the next General Court. Successful inducements were offered to some of the Newtown people to remove to Boston, and some few concessions were made. But the migration which had been denied to the corporate towns had probably been begun by individuals. There is a tradition that some of the Watertown people passed this winter of 1634-35 at the place where Wethersfield now stands. In May, 1635, the Massachusetts General Court voted that liberty be granted to the people of Watertown and Roxbury to remove themselves to any place within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. In March, 1636, the secession having already been accomplished, the General Court issued a "Commission to Several Persons to govern the people at Connecticut."

Its preamble reads: "Whereas, upon some reasons and grounds, there are to remove from this our Commonwealth and body of the Massachusetts in America divers of our loving friends and neighbors, freemen and members of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and other places, who are resolved to transport themselves and their estates unto the river of Connecticut, there to reside and inhabit; and to that end divers are there already, and divers others shortly to go." This tacit permission was the only authorization given by Massachusetts; but it should be noted that the unwilling permission was made more gracious by a kindly loan of cannon and ammunition for the protection of the new settlements.

If it be true that some of the Watertown people had wintered at Wethersfield in 1634-35, this was the first civil settlement in Connecticut; and it is certain that, all through the following spring, summer, and autumn, detached parties of Watertown people were settling at Wethersfield. During the summer of 1635, a Dorchester party appeared near the Plymouth factory, and laid the foundations of the town of Windsor. In October of the same year a party of sixty persons, including women and children, largely from Newtown, made the overland march and settled where Hartford now stands. Their journey was begun so late that the winter overtook them before they reached the river, and, as they had brought their cattle with them, they found great difficulty in getting everything across the river by means of rafts.

It may have been that the echoes of all these preparations had reached England, and stirred the tardy patentees to action. During the autumn of 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., agent of the Say and Sele associates, reached Boston, with authority to build a large fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. He was to be "Governor of the River Connecticut" for one year, and he at once issued a proclamation to the Massachusetts emigrants, asking "under what right and preference they had lately taken up their plantation."

It is said that they agreed to give up any lands demanded by him, or to return on having their expenses repaid. A more dangerous influence, however, soon claimed Winthrop's attention. Before the winter set in he had sent a party to seize the designated spot for a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. His promptness was needed. Just as his men had thrown up a work sufficient for defense and had mounted a few guns, a Dutch ship from New Amsterdam appeared, bringing a force intended to appropriate the same place. Again the Dutch found themselves a trifle late; and their post at Hartford was thus finally cut off from effective support.