Rivers and mountains, in this spotty globe.”
As early as 1634, Hooker’s parishioners, at Cambridge, had petitioned the General Court to permit them “to look out either for enlargement or removal.”[906] The authorities withheld their assent at the outset; but when, in 1636, the motion was renewed, they said Yes.[907]
Hooker—whom Morton calls “a son of thunder”[908]—and Haynes were the chief promoters of this project to remove.[909] The winter of 1635-6 was spent in active preparation. Scouting parties were thrown forward. In the opening of the year, Hartford was settled, government was organized, civil order was established.[910] At the same time pioneers went out from Dorchester, and pushing the earlier Plymouth settlers from the ground, usurped Windsor in the name of Massachusetts Bay.[911] Others quitted Watertown, and sat down at Wethersfield;[912] while some left Roxbury, and were enchurched at Springfield, which was afterwards found to lie within the boundary of the old Bay State.[913]
But this emigration was merely preliminary; it was the first patter of the coming shower; it was the scouts of the Pilgrims, making an initial survey of the new Hesperia of Puritanism. In June, 1636, the principal caravan, led by Thomas Hooker and John Haynes, began its march. “There were of the company about one hundred souls, many of them persons accustomed to the affluence and ease of European life. They drove before them numerous herds of cattle; and thus they traversed the pathless forests of Massachusetts, advancing hardly ten miles a day through the tangled woods, across the swamps and numerous streams, and over the highlands that separated the intervening valleys; subsisting, as they slowly wandered along, on the milk of the kine, who 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 with the unwonted lowing of the herds! How were the forests enlivened by the fervent piety of Hooker! Never again was there such a pilgrimage from the seaside ‘to the delightful banks’ of the Connecticut.”[914]
The Pilgrims paused at Hartford, which the presence of Hooker and Haynes soon lifted into the foremost importance, and it became the Jerusalem of the west. The government was similar to that which Winthrop, and Endicott, and Cotton had shaped at Boston, except that now the church-membership test was omitted, church and state were half-divorced, and all freemen were citizens[915]—liberality which placed the new-born state close beside the Providence plantations in magnanimous catholicity. Indeed, Haynes, whose plastic hand moulded the primitive constitution of Connecticut, had gone through a bitter experience in the trial and banishment of Roger Williams; and his wiser statesmanship bade him beware lest, in steering clear of the Scylla of anarchy, he should ground his politics on the Charybdis of bigotry. His wise tact saved him from both perils, and enabled him, while never interrupting the entente cordiale with Massachusetts, to open a friendly intercourse with the Rhode Island “heretics.”[916]
A twelvemonth after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Hartford, the pioneers were flanked by an invasion of brother Puritans fresh from England. New Haven was planted; and in 1637, Guilford was colonized, and then Milford was settled.[917] These were independent of Connecticut, and for upwards of forty years formed a separate colony, called New Haven.[918] “The settlers,” says Cotton Mather, “were under the conduct of as holy, and as prudent, and as genteel persons, as ever visited these nooks of New England; and though they, in a manner, stole out of Britain, being forbidden to sail, yet they dropped here a plantation constellated with many stars of the first magnitude; for if Theophilus Eaton and John Davenport were not blazing lights, where shall we hunt for meteors?”[919]
The New-Haveners were traders; they believed more in commerce than in husbandry, and so they “went down to the sea in ships.” But in the wilderness traffic did not yield the dividends which it gave on ’change in London, or on the Rialtos of the world; so that in half a decade their stock was spent, and they so nearly touched bottom that they gladly turned for help to despised agriculture,[920] the surest base for new states to build on.
For some months New Haven lacked a charter, and so floated rudderless. But eventually the settlers formed themselves into a body politic by mutual consent, and signed a kind of constitution in a barn;[921] and this is the first political paper that was ever cradled in a manger. It was generally secundum usum Massachusettensem,[922] to follow Cotton Mather’s barbarous Latin; or, in plain English, after the model of the Bay State theocracy.
“Thus it was,” exclaims a jubilant old chronicler, “that Jesus Christ was worshipped in churches of an evangelical character in the outermost wilderness; and from thence, if the inquirer were inclined to make a sally across the channel to Long Island, he might have seen the congregations of our God taking root in those wild wastes.”[923]
The New Haven and Connecticut colonists were for many years on the verge of a quarrel with the Dutch at New Amsterdam, who felt that in this territorial race they had been outstripped and outwitted, and were consequently lifted out of their wonted phlegm by irritation. The “Yankee” and the Dutchman carried on a lusty war of words about their boundary lines, and for this good reason, there were none. Irving tells us that the Dutch disliked the smell of onions; and that the keen Yankee, knowing this, planted his rows each year a little farther west, and before this invasion of onions the sad Dutchman always retired with tearful eyes, leaving the polluted soil to the onion planters.