COMPLETING THE WORK OF SETTLEMENT
Through the portal of Boston at one time or another passed all or nearly
all those who were to found additional colonies in New England; and from
that portal, willingly or unwillingly, men and women journeyed north,
south, and west, searching for favorable locations, buying land of the
Indians, and laying the groundwork for permanent homes and organized
communities. In this way were begun the colonies of Rhode Island,
Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire, each of which sprang in part
from the desire for separate religious and political life and in part
from the migratory instinct which has always characterized the
Englishman in his effort to find a home and a means of livelihood.
Sometimes individuals wandered alone or in groups of two or three, but
more frequently covenanted companies of men and women of like minds
moved across the face of the land, followed Indian trails, or voyaged
by water along the coast and up the rivers, usually remaining where they
first found satisfaction, but often, in new combinations, taking up the
burden of their journeying and moving on, a second, a third, and even a
fourth time in search of homes. Abraham Pierson and his flock migrated
four times in thirty years, seeking a place where they might find rest
under a government according to God.
The frontier Puritan was neither docile nor easily satisfied. He was
restless, opinionated, and eager to assert himself and his convictions.
The controversies among the elect regarding doctrines and morals often
became so heated that complete separation was the only remedy; and
wherever there was a migrating leader followers were sure to be found.
Hence, despite the dangers from cold, famine, the Indian, and the
wilderness, the men of New England were constantly shifting in these
earlier years as one motive or another urged them on. Land was
plentiful, and, as a rule, easily obtained; opportunities for trade
presented themselves to any one who would seek them; and the freedom of
earth and sky and of nature unspoiled offered an ideal environment for
a closer communion with God. Owing to the many varieties of religious
opinion that prevailed among these radical pioneers, each new grouping
and consequent settlement had an individuality of its own, determined by
the personality of its leader and by the ideas that he represented. Thus
Williams, Clarke, Coddington, and Gorton influenced Rhode Island;
Hooker, Haynes, and Ludlow, Connecticut; Davenport, Eaton, and Pierson,
New Haven; and Wheelwright and Underhill, New Hampshire.
Roger Williams, the founder of Providence--the first plantation to be
settled in what was later the colony of Rhode Island--was driven out of
Boston because he called in question the authority of the government,
denied the legality of its land title as derived from the King, and
contested the right of the magistrates to deal with matters
ecclesiastical. Making his way through the wilderness in the winter of
1635-1636, he finally settled on the Mooshassuc River, calling the place
Providence; and in the ensuing two years he gathered about him a number
of those who found the church system of Massachusetts intolerable and
the Erastian doctrines of the magistrates, according to which the sins
of believers were to be punished by civil authority, distressing to
their consciences. They drew up a plantation covenant, promising to
subject themselves "in active or passive obedience to all such orders or
agreements" as might be made for the public good in an orderly way by
the majority vote of the masters of families, "incorporated together
into a town fellowship," but "only in civill things." Thus did the men
of Providence put into practice their doctrine of a church separable
from the state, and of a political order in which there were no
magistrates, no elders exercising civil as well as spiritual authority,
and no restraint on soul liberty.
A year or two later William Coddington, loyal ally of Anne Hutchinson,
with others--Clarke, Coggeshall, and Aspinwall, who resented the
aggressive attitude of Boston--purchased from the Indians the island of
Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay and at the northern end planted Pocasset,
afterwards Portsmouth, the second settlement in the colony of Rhode
Island. They, too, entered into a covenant to join themselves into a
body politic and elected Coddington as their judge and five others as
elders. But this modeling of the government after the practices of the
Old Testament was not pleasing to a majority of the community, which
desired a more democratic organization. After a few months, in the
spring of 1639, Coddington and his followers therefore journeyed
southward and established a third settlement at Newport. Here the
members adopted a covenant, "engaging" themselves "to bear equall
charges, answerable to our strength and estates in common," and to be
governed "by major voice of judge and elders; the judge to have a double
voice." Though differing from the system as developed in Massachusetts,
the Newport government at the beginning had a decidedly theocratic
character.
The last of the Rhode Island settlements was at Shawomet, or Warwick, on
the western mainland at the upper end of the Bay. There Samuel Gorton,
the mystic and transcendentalist, one of the most individual of men in
an era of striking individualities, after many vicissitudes found an
abiding place. He was of London, "a clothier and professor of the
misteries of Christ," a believer in established authority as the surest
guardian of liberty, and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties.
Arriving at Boston in 1637 at the height of the Hutchinsonian
controversy, he had sought liberty of conscience, first in Boston, then
in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader
after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for
justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts
rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a
home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was
he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to
the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow
escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the
enlisting of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good
his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord
Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs,
ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people, and he
named the plantation Warwick after his patron.
Samuel Gorton played an influential and useful part in the later history
of the colony, and his career of peaceful service to Rhode Island belies
the opinion, based on Winslow's partisan pamphlet, _Hypocrasie
Unmasked_, and other contemporary writings, that he was a blasphemer, a
"crude and half-crazy thinker," a "proud and pestilent seducer," and a
"most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties." He preferred "the
universitie of humane reason and reading of the volume of visible
creation" to sectarianism and convention. No wonder the Massachusetts
leaders could not comprehend him! He questioned their infallibility,
their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own
self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his
heresies.
Thus Rhode Island at the beginning was formed of four separate and
independent communities, each in embryo a petty state, no one of which
possessed at first other than an Indian title for its lands and a
self-made plantation covenant as the warrant for its government. To
settle disputes over land titles and to dispose of town lands,
Providence established in 1640 a court of arbitration consisting of five
"disposers," who seem also to have served as a sort of executive board
for the town. In all outward relations she remained isolated from her
neighbors, pursuing a course of strictly local independence. Portsmouth
and Newport, for the sake of greater strength, united in March, 1640,
and a year later agreed on a form of government which they called "a
democratic or popular government," in which none was to be "accounted a
delinquent for doctrine." They set up a governor, deputy governor, and
four assistants, regularly elected, and provided that all laws should be
made by the freemen or the major part of them, "orderly assembled." In
the system thus established we can see the influence of the older
colonies and the beginning of a stronger government, but at best the
experiment was half-hearted, for each town reserved to itself complete
control over its own affairs. In 1647 Portsmouth withdrew "to be as free
in their transactions as any other town in the colony," and the spirit
of separatism was still dominant.
But it soon became necessary for the four towns of what is now Rhode
Island to have something more legal upon which to base their right to
exist than a title derived from their plantation covenants and Indian
bargains. Massachusetts was extending her claims southward; Edward
Winslow was in England ready to show that the Rhode Island settlements
were within the bounds of the Plymouth patent; and certain individuals,
traders and land-seekers, were locating in the Narragansett country and
taking possession of the soil. To combat these claims, Roger Williams,
who had so vehemently denied the validity of a royal patent a few years
before, but influenced now, it may be, by Gorton's insistence that a
legal title could be obtained only from England, sailed overseas and
secured from the parliamentary commissioners in March, 1644, a charter
uniting Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport, under the name of
Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay, and granting them powers
of government. For the moment even this document had no certain value,
for, in spite of the fact that the parliamentarians were at war with the
King, Charles I was still sovereign of England and should he win in the
Civil War the title would be worthless. However, the patent was not put
in force until 1647, after the victory of Cromwell at Naseby had given
control into the hands of Parliament; and then a general meeting was
held at Portsmouth consisting of the freemen of Warwick, Portsmouth, and
Newport, and ten representatives from Providence. The patent did not
state how affairs were to be managed, and the colonials, meeting in
subsequent assemblies, worked out the problem in their own way. They
refused to have a governor, and, creating only a presiding officer with
four assistants, constituted a court of trials for the hearing of
important criminal and civil causes. No general court was created by
law, but a legislative body soon came into existence consisting of six
deputies from each town. Before this Portsmouth meeting of 1647
adjourned, it adopted a code of laws in which witchcraft trials and
imprisonment for debt were forbidden, capital punishment was largely
abolished, and divorce was granted for adultery only. In 1652, the
assembly passed a noteworthy law against the holding of negroes in
slavery.
But the new patent did not bring peace to the colony. In 1649, Roger
Williams wrote to Governor Winthrop: "Our poor colony is in civil
dissension. Their last meeting [of the assembly] at which I have not
been, have fallen into factions. Mr. Coddington and Captain Partridge,
etc., are the heads of one, and Captain Clarke, Mr. Easton, etc., the
heads of the other." What had happened was this. Coddington,
representing the conservative and theocratic wing of the assembly and
opposing those who were more liberally minded, had evidently applied to
Massachusetts and Plymouth for support in the effort to obtain an
independent government for Aquidneck. This plan would have destroyed
what unity the colony had obtained under the patent, but Coddington
wished to be governor of a colony of his own. Both Massachusetts and
Plymouth were favorable to this plan, as they hoped to further their own
claims to the territory of islands and mainland. Twice Coddington made
application to the newly formed Confederation of New England for
admission, but was refused unless he would bring in Aquidneck as part of
Massachusetts or Plymouth, the latter of which laid claim to it.
Coddington himself was willing to do this but found the opposition to
the plan so vehement that he gave up the attempt and went to England to
secure a patent of his own. After long negotiations he was successful in
his quest and returned with a document which appointed him governor for
life with almost viceregal powers. But he had reckoned without the
people whom he was to govern. Learning of the outcome of Coddington's
mission and hearing that he had had secret dealings also with the Dutch
at New Amsterdam, the inhabitants of the islands rose in revolt, hanged
Captain Partridge and compelled Coddington to seek safety in flight.
Williams again went to England in 1651 and procured the recall of
Coddington's commission and a confirmation of his own patent, and
Coddington in 1656 gave in his submission and was forgiven. The early
history of Rhode Island thus furnishes a remarkable exhibition of
intense individualism in things religious and a warring of disruptive
forces in matters of civil organization.
Connecticut was settled during the years 1634 to 1636 by people from
Massachusetts. Knowledge of the fertile Connecticut valley had come
early to the Dutch, who had planted a blockhouse, the House of Good
Hope, at the southeast corner of the land upon which Hartford now
stands. Plymouth, too, in searching for advantageous trade openings had
sent out one William Holmes, who sailed past the Dutch fort and took
possession of the site of Windsor. In the autumn of 1634 a certain John
Oldham, trader and rover and frequent disturber of the Puritan peace,
came with a few companions and began to occupy and cultivate lands
within the bounds of modern Wethersfield. Settlers continued to arrive
from Massachusetts, either by land or by water, actuated by land-hunger
and stirred to movement westward by the same driving impulse that for
years to come was to populate the frontier wherever it stretched. The
territory thus possessed was claimed at first by Massachusetts, on the
theory that the southern line of the colony, if extended westward,
would include this portion of the Connecticut River. It was also claimed
by the group of English lords and gentlemen, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and
other Puritans, who, as they supposed, had obtained through the Earl of
Warwick from the New England Council a grant of land extending west and
southwest from Narragansett Bay forty leagues. These claims were of
course irreconcilable, but the English lords, in order to assert their
title, sent over in 1635 twenty servants, known as the Stiles party, who
reached Connecticut in the summer of that year. Thus by autumn there
were on the ground four sets of rival claimants: the Dutch, the Plymouth
traders, various emigrants from Massachusetts, chiefly from the town of
Dorchester, and the Stiles party, representing the English lords and
gentlemen. Their relations were not harmonious, for the Dutch tried to
drive out the Plymouth traders, and the latter resented in their turn
the attempt of the Dorchester men to occupy their lands.
The matter was to be settled not by force but by weight of numbers and
soundness of title. In 1635, a new and larger migration was under
consideration in Massachusetts, prompted by various motives: partly
personal, as shown in the rivalries of strong men in a colony already
overstocked with leaders; partly material, as indicated by the desire
for wider fields for cultivation and especially good pasture; and partly
political, as evidenced by the dislike on the part of many for the power
of the elders and magistrates in Massachusetts and by the strong
inclination of masterful men toward a government of their own. Thomas
Hooker, the pastor of the Newtown church, John Haynes, the Governor of
Massachusetts in 1635, and Roger Ludlow, a former magistrate and deputy
governor who had failed of election to the magistracy in the same year,
were the leaders of the movement and, if we may judge from later events,
were believers in certain political ideas that were not finding
application in the Bay Colony. Disappointed because of the rigidity of
the Massachusetts system, they seem to have waited for an opportunity to
put into practice the principles which they believed essential to the
true government of a people.
When the decision was finally reached and certain of the inhabitants of
Newtown, Watertown, and Roxbury were ready to enter on their removal,
the question naturally arose as to the title to the territory. In June,
1635, Massachusetts had asserted her claim by exercising a sort of
supervision over those who had already gone to Connecticut; but in
October John Winthrop, Jr., the Reverend Hugh Peters, and Henry Vane
arrived from England with authority from the lords and gentlemen to push
their claim, and Winthrop actually bore a commission as governor of the
entire territory, which included Connecticut. It is hardly possible that
Hooker and Haynes would have ignored the demands of these agents, and
yet to acknowledge Winthrop as their governor would have been to accept
a head who was not of their own choosing. In all probability some
arrangement was made with Winthrop, according to which the Englishmen's
title to the lands was recognized but at the same time the Connecticut
settlers were to have full powers of self-government, and the question
of a governor was left for the moment undecided, Winthrop confining his
jurisdiction to Saybrook, the settlement which he was to promote at the
mouth of the river. This agreement was embodied in a commission which
was drawn up by the Massachusetts General Court and issued in March,
1636, "on behalf of our said members and John Winthrop, Jr.," and was
to last for one year. Who actually wrote this commission we do not know,
but the Connecticut men said afterwards that it arose from the desire of
the people who removed, because they did not want to go away without a
frame of government agreed on beforehand and did not want to recognize
"any claymes of the Massachusetts jurisdiction over them by vertew of
Patent." Apparently the people going to Connecticut wanted to get as far
away from Massachusetts as possible.
Armed with their commission, in the summer of 1636, members of the
Newtown church to the number of about one hundred persons, led by Thomas
Hooker, their pastor, and Samuel Stone, his assistant, made a famous
pilgrimage under summer skies through the woods that lay between
Massachusetts and the Connecticut River. Bearing Mrs. Hooker in a litter
and driving their cattle before them, these courageous pioneers, men,
women, and children, after a fortnight's journeying, reached Hartford,
the site of their future home, already occupied by those who had
foregathered there in number larger even than those who had newly
arrived. At about the same time, William Pynchon and others of Roxbury,
acting from similar motives, took the same course westward, but instead
of continuing down the Connecticut River, as the others had done,
stopped at its banks and made their settlement at Agawam (Springfield),
where they built a warehouse and a wharf for use in trade with the
Indians. The lower settlements, Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor,
became agricultural communities; but Springfield, standing at the
junction of Indian trails and river communication, was destined to
become the center of the beaver trade of the region, shipping furs and
receiving commodities through Boston, either in shallops around the Cape
or on pack-horses overland by the path the emigrants had trod. Pynchon's
settlement was one of the towns named in the commission and, for the
first year after it was founded, joined with the others in maintaining
order in the colony.
The commission government came to an end in March, 1637, and there is
reason to think that during the last month, an election of committees
took place in Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, which would show that
the Connecticut settlers were exercising the privilege of the franchise
more than a year before Hooker preached his famous sermon declaring that
the right of government lay in the people. There also is some reason to
think that the leaders were still undecided whether or not to come to an
agreement with the English lords and gentlemen and to put themselves
under the latter's jurisdiction. But as Winthrop's commission expired at
the end of a year and no new governor was appointed--the English
Puritans having become absorbed in affairs at home--the Connecticut
colony was thrown on its own resources and compelled to set up a
government of its own. Pynchon at Springfield now cast in his lot with
Massachusetts, and from this time forward Springfield was a part of the
Massachusetts colony, but the men of Connecticut, disliking Pynchon's
desertion, determined to act for themselves. On May 31, 1638, Hooker
preached a sermon laying down the principles according to which
government should be established; and during the six months that
followed, the court, consisting of six magistrates and nine deputies,
framed the Fundamental Orders, the laws that were to govern the colony.
This remarkable document, though deserving all the encomiums passed upon
it, was not a constitution in any modern sense of the word and
established nothing fundamentally new, because the form of government
it outlined differed only in certain particulars from that of
Massachusetts and Plymouth. It was made up of two parts, a preamble,
which is a plantation covenant like that signed in the cabin of the
_Mayflower_, and a series of laws or orders passed either separately or
together by the court which drafted them. This court was a lawmaking
body and it made public the laws when they were passed. That this body
of laws or, as we may not improperly call it, this frame of government
was ratified, as Trumbull says, by all the free planters assembled at
Hartford on January 14, 1639, is not impossible, though such action
would seem unnecessary as the court was a representative body, and
unlikely as the time of year was not favorable for holding a
mass-meeting at Hartford. Later courts never hesitated to change the
articles without referring the changes to the planters. The articles
simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in
existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy
governor--who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding
the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen.
In matters of detail the Connecticut system differed from that of
Massachusetts in three particulars: it imposed no religious test for
those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church
member, though it is probable that in practice only those would be
admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to
the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of
the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a
church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reelection until
after the expiration of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman
were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the
seventeenth century; the powers of the magistrates were increased; and
the governor was allowed to succeed himself. Connecticut was less
democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the
years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exercised the
freeman's privilege of voting for the higher officials. By no stretch of
the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New England
colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of
a very few men.
Two more settlements remain to be considered before a survey of the
foundations of New England can be called complete. When the Reverend
John Wheelwright, the friend of Anne Hutchinson, was driven from
Massachusetts and took his way northward to the region of Squamscott
Falls where he founded Exeter, he entered a territory of grants and
claims and rights of possession that render the early history of New
Hampshire a tangle of difficulties. Out of a grant to Gorges and Mason
of the stretch of coast between the Merrimac and the Kennebec in 1622,
and a confirmation of Mason's right to the region between the Merrimac
and the Piscataqua, arose the settlement of Strawberry Bank, or
Portsmouth, and accompanying it a controversy over the title to the soil
that lasted throughout the colonial period. Mason called his territory
New Hampshire; Gorges planned to call the region that he received New
Somersetshire; and both designations took root, one as the name of a
colony, the other as that of a county in Maine. At an earlier date,
merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury had become interested in this part
of New England and had sent over one Edward Hilton, who some time before
1627 began a settlement at Dover. The share of the Bristol merchants was
purchased in 1633 by the English lords and gentlemen already concerned
in the Connecticut settlement, for the purpose, it may be, of furnishing
another refuge in New England, should conditions at home demand their
withdrawal overseas. But nothing came of their purchase except an
unfortunate controversy with Plymouth colony over trading boundaries on
the Kennebec.
The men established on this northern frontier were often lawless and
difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their
own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and
settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four
settlements arose--Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican
and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil
compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in
number, and "the generality, of mean and low estates," and little
disposed to union among themselves. But in 1638-1639, when Massachusetts
discovered that one interpretation of her charter would carry her
northern boundary to a point above them, she took them under her
protecting wing. After considerable debate this jurisdiction was
recognized and the New Hampshire and Maine towns were brought within
her boundaries. Henceforth, for many years a number of these towns,
though in part Anglican communities and never burdened with the
requirement that their freemen be church members, were represented in
the general court at Boston. Nevertheless the Mason and Gorges
adherents--whose Anglican and pro-monarchical sympathies were hostile to
Puritan control and who were supported by the persistent efforts of the
Mason family in England--were able to obtain the separation of New
Hampshire from Massachusetts in 1678. Maine, however, remained a part of
the Bay Colony to the end of the colonial period.
The circumstances attending the settlement of New Haven were wholly
unlike those of New Hampshire. John Davenport, a London clergyman of an
extreme Puritan type, Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant in the Baltic
trade and a member of the Eastland Company, Samuel Eaton and John
Lathrop, two nonconforming ministers, were the leaders of the movement.
Lathrop never went to New Haven, and Samuel Eaton early returned to
England. The leaders and many of their followers were men of
considerable property for that day, and their interest in trade gave to
the colony a marked commercial character. The company was composed of
men and women from London and its vicinity, and of others who joined
them from Kent, Hereford, and Yorkshire. As both Davenport and
Theophilus Eaton were members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, they
were familiar with its work; and on coming to America in June, 1637,
they stopped at Boston and remained there during the winter. Pressure
was brought upon them to make Massachusetts their home, but without
success, for though Davenport had much in common with the Massachusetts
people, he was not content to remain where he would be merely one among
many. Desiring a free place for worship and trade, he sent Eaton
voyaging to find one; and the latter, who had heard of Quinnipiac on the
Connecticut shore, viewed this spot and reported favorably. In March,
1638, the company set sail from Boston and laid the foundations of the
town of New Haven.
This company had neither charter nor land grant, and, as far as we know,
it had made no attempt to obtain either. "The first planters," says
Kingsley, "recognized in their acts no human authority foreign to
themselves." Unlike the Pilgrims in their _Mayflower_ compact, they made
no reference in their plantation covenant to the dread sovereign, King
James, and in none of their acts and statements did they express a
longing for their native country or regard for its authority. Their
settlement bears some resemblance to that of the Rhode Island towns, but
it was better organized and more orderly from the beginning. The
settlers may have drawn up their covenant before leaving Boston and may
have reached Quinnipiac as a community already united in a common civil
and religious bond. Their lands, which they purchased from the Indians,
they laid out in their own way. The next year on June 4, 1639, they held
a meeting in Robert Newman's barn and there, declaring that the Word of
God should be their guide in families and commonwealth and that only
church members should be sharers in government, they chose twelve men as
the foundations of their church state. Two months later these twelve
selected "seven pillars" who proceeded to organize a church by
associating others with themselves. Under the leadership of the seven
the government continued until October, when they resigned and a
gathering of the church members elected Theophilus Eaton as their
magistrate and four others to act as assistants, with a secretary and a
treasurer. Thus was begun a form of government which when perfected was
very similar to that of the other New England colonies.
While New Haven as a town-colony was taking on form, other plantations
were arising near by. Milford was settled partly from New Haven and
partly from Wethersfield, where an overplus of clergy was leading to
disputes and many withdrawals to other parts. Guilford was settled
directly from England. Southold on Long Island was settled also from
England, by way of New Haven. Stamford had its origin in a Wethersfield
quarrel, when the Reverend Richard Denton, "blind of one eye but not the
least among the seers of Israel," departed with his flock. Branford also
was born of a Wethersfield controversy and later received accessions
from Long Island. In 1643, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford combined
under the common jurisdiction of New Haven, to which Southold and
Branford acceded later with a form of government copied after that of
Massachusetts, though the colony was distinctly federal in character,
consisting of "the government of New Haven with the plantations in
combination therewith." Though there was no special reservation of town
rights in the fundamental articles which defined the government, yet
the towns, five in number, considered themselves free to withdraw at any
time if they so desired.
We have thus reviewed the conditions under which some forty towns,
grouped under five jurisdictions, were founded in New England. They were
destined to treble their number in the next generation and to suffer
such regrouping as to reduce the jurisdictions to four before the end of
the century--New Hampshire separating from Massachusetts, New Haven
being absorbed by Connecticut, and Plymouth submitting to the authority
of Massachusetts under the charter of 1691. In this readjustment we have
the origin of four of the six New England States of the present day.