AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION
The men who controlled the destinies of New England were deeply
concerned not only with preserving its faith but also with guarding its
rights and liberties as they defined them, and reverentially preserving
the letter of its charters. For men who wished to sever their connection
with England and to disregard English law and precedent as much as
possible, they displayed a remarkable amount of respect for the
documents that emanated from the British Chancery. In fact, however,
they valued these grants and charters, not as expressions of royal
favor, but as bulwarks against royal encroachment and outside
interference, and in accepting such privileges as were conferred by
their charters, they recognized no duty to be performed for the common
mother, no obligations resting upon themselves to consider the welfare
of England or to cooeperate in her behalf.
The thoughts of these men were of themselves, their faith, and their
problems of existence. The strongest ties were those that held together
the people of a town, closely knit in the bond of a civil and religious
covenant. Next above these were the ties of the colony, with its general
court or assembly composed of representatives of the towns, its governor
and other officials elected by the freemen, and its laws passed by the
assembly for the benefit and well-being of all. Higher still was the
loose bond of confederation that was fashioned in 1643 for the
maintenance of order, peace, and security, in the form of a league of
colonies. Highest, but weakest of all, was the bond that united them to
England, recognized in sentiment but carrying with it no reciprocal
obligations, either legal or otherwise. To the average inhabitant of New
England, the mother country was merely the land from which he had come,
the home to which he might or might not return. He had practically no
knowledge of England's plans or policy, no comprehension of her purpose
toward her colonies or the place of the colonies in her own scheme of
expansion. He was absorbed in his own affairs, not in those of England;
in the commands of God, not in those of the King; and in the dangers
which surrounded him from the foes of the frontier, not in those which
confronted England in her relations with her continental rivals. He was
dominated by his instinct for self-government and by his compelling fear
of the Stuarts and all that they represented. Even during the period of
the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, England was three thousand miles
away, appeal to her was difficult and costly, and the English brethren
were not always as sympathetic as they might have been with the aims and
methods of their co-religionists.
This very isolation from the mother country, at a time when the New
Englanders were pushing their fur-trading activities into the regions
claimed by the Dutch and the French, rendered some sort of united action
necessary and desirable. The settlers were of one stock and one purpose.
Despite bickerings and disputes, they shared a common desire to enjoy
the liberties of the Christian religion and to obtain from the new
country into which they had come both subsistence and profit. The
determination to open up trading posts on the Penobscot, the Delaware,
and the Hudson, and to utilize all waters for their fisheries brought
them into conflict with their rivals, at New Amsterdam and in Nova
Scotia, and made it imperative, should any one colony--Plymouth,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Haven--attempt to pursue its plans
alone, for all to band together in its support. The troubles already
encountered with the Dutch on the Delaware and the Connecticut and with
the French in Maine, in the competition for the fur trade of the
interior, had rendered the situation acute and led, very early, to the
proposal that a combination be effected.
But it was not until 1643 that anything was accomplished. In May of that
year, at the suggestion of Connecticut and New Haven, commissioners from
these colonies, and from Massachusetts and Plymouth also, met at Boston
and drafted a body of articles for a consociation or confederation to be
known as the United Colonies of New England, a form of union which found
a precedent in the federation of the Netherlands and corresponded in the
political field to the consociation of churches in the ecclesiastical.
Maine was not asked because, as a province belonging to Gorges, the
people there (to quote from Winthrop's _Journal_) "ran a different
course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil
administration, ... had lately made Acomenticus (a poor village) a
corporation, and had made a taylor their mayor, and had entertained one
Hull, an excommunicated person and very contentious, for their
minister." Rhode Island, as a seat of separatism and heresy, was not
invited and perhaps not even considered. For managing the affairs of the
confederation, the main objects of which were friendship and amity,
protection and defense, advice and succor, and the preservation of the
truth and purity of the Gospel, eight commissioners were provided, to be
chosen by the assemblies of the colonies and to represent the colonies
as independent political units. Meetings were to be held once a year in
one or other of the leading towns and a full record was to be kept of
the business done. The board thus established never did more than make
recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any
of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its
meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of
important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to be
particularly significant.
The commissioners dealt with a number of local disputes of no great
moment and considered certain internal difficulties that threatened to
disturb the friendly intercourse among the colonies. For instance,
Connecticut had levied tolls at Saybrook on vessels going up the
Connecticut River to Springfield, and Massachusetts had retaliated by
laying duties on goods from other colonies entering her ports. Under
pressure from the commissioners both the colonies receded from their
positions. Again, the commissioners recommended the granting of aid to
Harvard College, and that institution consequently received from
Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance,
in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly
sixty graduates in the ensuing half-century well equipped to combat
latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their
obligation as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their
support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to
check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition
of church membership--efforts which eventually resulted in that
"illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the
driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature,"
and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They
upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the
labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John
Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their
language.
The most important business of the confederation concerned the defense
of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The
Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed
the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay,
and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading
grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right
of the English, particularly those of Plymouth, to establish
trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to
all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot.
Though the French, in their effort to drive out all the English settlers
east of Pemaquid in Maine, had destroyed two Plymouth posts in that
region, the commissioners were called upon to decide not so much what
should be done about this act of aggression, as which of the claimants
among the French themselves it was wiser for the colonies to support. A
certain Charles de la Tour had been commissioned by the Governor-General
of Acadia or Nova Scotia as lieutenant of the region east of the St.
Croix, and another, Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay-Charnise, as
lieutenant of the region between the St. Croix and the Penobscot. When
the Governor-General died in 1635, a contest for the governorship took
place between these two men, and not unnaturally volunteers from
Massachusetts aided La Tour, whose original jurisdiction was farthest
removed from their colony. Trade on these northeastern coasts was deemed
essential to the prosperity of the New Englanders, and it was considered
of great importance to make no mistake in backing the wrong claimant.
D'Aulnay, or more correctly Aulnay, had been partly responsible for the
attack on the Plymouth trading-posts, but, on the other hand, he had the
stronger title; and Massachusetts was a good deal perplexed as to what
course to pursue. In 1644, Aulnay sent a commissioner to Boston, who
conversed with Governor Endecott in French and with the rest of the
magistrates in Latin and endeavored to arrange terms of peace. Two
years later the same commissioner came again, with two others, and was
cordially entertained with "wine and sweetmeats." The matter was
referred to the commissioners of the United Colonies, who decided, with
considerable shrewdness, that the volunteers in aiding La Tour had acted
efficiently but not wisely; and consequently a compromise was reached.
Aulnay's commissioners abated their claims for damages, and Governor
Winthrop consented to send "a small present" to Aulnay in lieu of
compensation. The present was "a fair new sedan (worth," says Winthrop,
"forty or fifty pounds, where it was made, but of no use to us)," having
been part of some Spanish booty taken in the West Indies and presented
to the Governor. So final peace was made at no expense to the colony;
and later, after Aulnay's death in 1650, La Tour married the widow and
came to his own in Nova Scotia.
The troubles with the Dutch were not so easily settled. England had
never acknowledged the Dutch claim to New Amsterdam, and the New England
Council in making its grants had paid no attention to the Dutch
occupation. Though trade had been carried on and early relations had
been on the whole amicable, yet, after Connecticut's overthrow of the
Pequots in 1637 and the opening of the territory to settlement, the
founding of towns as far west as Stamford and Greenwich had rendered
acute the conflict of titles. There was no western limit to the English
claims, and, as the colonists were perfectly willing to accept Sir
William Boswell's advice to "crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of those
places which they have occupied, without hostility or any act of
violence," a collision was bound to come. The Dutch, who in their turn
were not abating a jot of their claims, had already destroyed a New
Haven settlement on the Delaware, and had asserted rights of
jurisdiction even in New Haven harbor, by seizing there one of their own
ships charged with evading the laws of New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant,
the Dutch Governor, famous for his short temper and mythical silver leg,
visited Hartford in 1650, and negotiated with the commissioners of the
United Colonies a treaty drawing the boundary line from the west side of
Greenwich Bay northward twenty miles. But this treaty, though ratified
by the States General of Holland, was never ratified by England, and,
when two years later war between the two countries broke out overseas,
the question of an attack on New Amsterdam was taken up and debated with
such heat as nearly to disrupt the Confederation. The absolute refusal
of Massachusetts to enter on such an undertaking so prolonged the
discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but
Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, who
had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive
military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long
as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and
the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of
settlement, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few straggling
emigrants. There the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson with her family was
massacred by the Indians in 1643.
The New England Confederation performed the most important part of its
work during the first twenty years of its existence, for although it
lasted nominally till 1684, it ceased to be effective after 1664, and
was of little weight in New England history after the restoration of the
Stuarts. Owing to the fact that it had been formed without any authority
from England, the Confederation was never recognized by the Government
there, and with the return of the monarchy it survived chiefly as an
occasional committee meeting for debate and advice.