below the Dutch at Good Hope, at a place which they presently called
Wethersfield. The same year Dorchester people came and sat themselves
down beside the little group of protesting Plymouth men at Windsor. There
were men in England as well as at the Bay who had cast their eyes upon
the valley of the Connecticut as a place to be desired, and they also
chose this time to make ready for planting a colony. Lord Say and Sele,
Lord Brooke, and others, men of consequence, friends and correspondents
of the gentlemen at the Bay, had obtained a grant of lands upon the
lower Connecticut and upon the shores of the Sound, as far east as the
river of the Narragansetts and as far west as they chose, so long ago
as 1631, from the Earl of Warwick, President of the Council for New
England; and chose this very time of the migration from the Bay to make
their claim good. In 1635 they sent out John Winthrop the younger, the
Bay governor’s genial and capable son, as governor in their name “of the
River Connecticut with the places adjoining,” and close upon his heels
sent Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, a stout soldier bred to war, like so many
another, in the service of the Low Countries, to build fortifications
which should make them sure of whatever Mr. Winthrop might occupy. Mr.
Winthrop made no serious trouble for the new settlers already come from
the Bay. The action of their lordships his employers was friendly, not
hostile; his own temper was easy and accommodating; Lieutenant Gardiner
was detained at Boston a little while to assist with his expert advice
at the construction of fortifications on Fort Hill, ere he went on to
the Connecticut; and the fort which he built at the river’s mouth when
at last he went forward on his errand, though stout enough to guard the
place against all comers, was used only to keep the Dutch off. That very
year, 1636, Mr. Hooker came with a hundred settlers from Newtown and
joined some pioneers who had gone before him and planted themselves, as
most unwelcome neighbors, close alongside the Dutch at Good Hope, calling
their settlement Hartford.
[Illustration: DUTCH FORT—“GOOD HOPE”]
It had been no easy matter to struggle through the dense tangle of the
almost pathless forests all the long ninety miles which lay between these
new regions and the Bay. There were household goods and stores to be
carried; there were cattle to be fed and driven all the long way; there
were women and children to be thought of and spared; and those who made
the hard journey spent weeks of weary travelling and lonely camping in
those vast forests, which seemed to spread everywhere without border or
any limit at all. Even boats could not be expected to make the journey
round about by sea unless they chose their season; for when winter came
the river was apt to be choked with ice. But these Puritans were not men
to be daunted, as the Dutch found to their cost. The journey was made
again and again and again, by party after party, as if there were no
obstacles which even the women need dread.
Uneasy congregations were not the only people to quit the Bay in that day
of eager movement, when men came by the thousands out of England; and
the Connecticut was not the only goal of the new emigration. Many a man,
many a family who found the rule of the Massachusetts magistrates over
irksome, turned their eyes southward and went the shorter journey, of but
a little more than forty miles, which carried them through Plymouth’s
grant of lands into the country of the Narragansetts beyond, where deep
rivers and a spreading bay, dotted with inviting islands, made an open
way to the sheltered seas of the great Sound below. These shores and
islands soon became a place of refuge for all who were specially thrust
out from the Bay settlements for errors of life or opinion, and for all
who voluntarily quit the austere churches there in search of an absolute
individual freedom, such as was not to be had even with Mr. Hooker on
the Connecticut. Roger Williams had led the way thither in 1636, the
year Mr. Hooker went to Hartford. Mr. Williams was a man whom his very
enemies were constrained to love, when they had hearts under their
jackets,—even while they sincerely condemned his opinions. He had come
to the Bay almost as soon as Mr. Winthrop himself, in February, 1631,
in a ship which put in weather-beaten amidst a great drift of ice; and,
though a mere youth, had given the magistrates trouble from the first. He
was only the son of a merchant tailor of London; but nature had bestowed
upon him gifts of mind and tongue which put him in a way to succeed as
he pleased. He had become protégé and friend of the great Lord Coke,
had got his training at Cambridge, and then had turned his back on all
“gains and preferments in universities, city, country, and court,” for
the sake of absolute liberty of conscience and belief. He would no more
accept what he did not believe at the Bay than in England. He upbraided
the congregations there which had not openly separated from the Church
of England; he denied the validity of the colony’s charter, saying that
the Indians alone, and not the King, owned and could grant the land; and
he declared that magistrates had no rightful power except over a man’s
body and goods, and were wrong when they tried to command what men should
believe and how they should worship.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM]
The magistrates at the Bay could not permit such views as these to
be preached and keep their authority. Mr. Williams had a most tender
and outspoken conscience upon all things, and was often enough a mere
“haberdasher of small questions,” as Mr. Cotton said in tart jest;
but he raised great questions, too, and his reasoning as often as not
struck at the very foundations of the curious structure of government
the Puritan magistrates had been at such pains to rear. They were in
effect separatists, if you but looked at them from the other side of
the water; and yet they did not suffer their several churches and
congregations to select or maintain what doctrines and practices they
pleased. Synods ruled opinion, magistrates enforced their conclusions and
their discipline, and Mr. Cotton, set high in the Boston pulpit where
the chief men of the government were his disciples and parishioners,
was a sort of bishop and primate of the churches. The masters of the
Bay had no mind to let Mr. Williams speak or teach as he pleased. And
yet it was five years before they made up their minds that he must be
expelled from the colony. He was so gentle, so sweet-tempered, so ready
to reason calmly with those who differed with him, so awkward to worst
in an argument, so passionately loved by all his friends, so mildly
hated by most of his foes, that they hesitated again and again what to
do. It was unquestionable, nevertheless, that he kept the minds of the
Salem people, to whom he preached, in something very like an attitude
of rebellion towards the governing authorities of the colony; and at
last he was driven out, obliged to fly secretly, even, lest they should
seize and send him back to England. Undoubtedly he bred discord and
contention wherever he went. He had lived for two years at Plymouth, to
escape persecution at the Bay, before the final breach came; and even
there, where they were inclined to be almost as liberal as he in matters
of opinion, he had made trouble. “A man godly and zealous,” the kindly
Bradford had pronounced him, “having many precious gifts, but very
unsettled in judgment.” And so he became a fugitive, and went with four
devoted companions, in the midst of bitter winter weather, deep into the
icy forests to the southward, to find covert for a sensitive conscience
beyond the grants of the crown.
[Illustration: UNCAS AND HIS SQUAW. THEIR MARKS]
And then, almost immediately, he was able to do the men who had banished
him an inestimable service. That very summer (1637) war came,—war with
the bold and dangerous Pequots, the Indian masters of the Connecticut and
the shores of the Sound; and nobody but Roger Williams could have held
the Narragansett tribes off from joining them to destroy the settlements.
A hostile union and concerted onset of all the tribes, effected then,
as the Pequots plotted, might have meant annihilation. There were but
five thousand Englishmen, even yet, scattered in the settlements, and
such a rising put everything at stake. The Narragansetts occupied the
lands which lay between Plymouth and the valley of the Connecticut. Mr.
Williams had been much among them while he lived at Plymouth; had learned
their language, and thoroughly won their liking. Their keen and watchful
eyes had seen how true and frank and steadfast he was, and how sincere a
friend. They had given him lands very gladly when he came among them a
fugitive; and now they hearkened to him rather than to the fierce Pequot
chiefs, whom he faced at the risk of his life at their very council
fires. The magistrates of the Bay had begged his intervention, and he had
undertaken it cheerfully. Such was the generous nature of the man.
[Illustration: MIANTONOMO. HIS MARK]
The Pequots had grown very hot against the English crowding in. No
Englishman’s life was safe anywhere, upon the river or the Sound, because
of them through the anxious winter of 1636-1637. Men at Lieutenant
Gardiner’s little fort at Saybrook hardly dared venture forth for fuel
or forage. When summer came, therefore, the settlers set themselves
ruthlessly to exterminate the tribe. A single bloody season of fire and
the sword, and the work was done: the braves of the tribe were slain or
driven forth in little despairing groups to the far Hudson in the west;
the few women who survived were taken and made slaves of. The terrible
business cleared all the river valley and all the nearer regions by the
Sound, and English settlers began to pour in again with a new heart.
Massachusetts had lent her aid to the annihilation of the tribe, but
the Connecticut towns had begun the deadly work unaided. Until then
Massachusetts had maintained a formal oversight, an unbroken assumption
of authority among them; but now (1637), being clearly outside the
Massachusetts grant, they took leave to hold a General Court of their own
and assume independent powers. They had, indeed, no grant themselves,
either of land or of authority, from the crown; but there were no King’s
officers there in the quiet wilderness, and they would not, for the
present at any rate, be molested. For two years (1637-1639) they acted
without even formal agreement among themselves regarding the method or
organization of their government, choosing and obeying their magistrates,
electing and holding their assemblies, according to their habit before
they came. But in 1639 they adopted a formal constitution, which they
called their “Fundamental Orders.” Mr. Hooker’s liberal temper showed
itself very plainly in the principles by which they resolved to be
governed. “The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the
people,” he had said, preaching to them from Deuteronomy, i. 13 (“Take
you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will
make them rulers over you”); and it is best that it should be so, for
“by a free choice the hearts of the people will be more ready to yield”
obedience. This was the principle of the Fundamental Orders. Their
governor was always to be a member of some approved congregation; but
any man might be a freeman and voter and fill any other magistracy whose
town admitted him to be a resident, without test of doctrine or church
membership; and the freemen were to elect the deputies by whom the laws
of the colony were to be made in General Court.
[Illustration: ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND]
[Illustration: SIR HENRY VANE]
[Illustration: ANNE HUTCHINSON PREACHING IN HER HOUSE IN BOSTON]
The churches at the Bay had found very promptly that they could ill
spare Mr. Hooker from their counsels. They had sent for him, indeed,
at a very critical juncture in 1637: when the ministers needed all the
support they could get against a single masterful woman in Boston. Mrs.
Anne Hutchinson had come to the colony in 1634, to be near Mr. Cotton
once more, whom she had been used to hear and love in old Boston, in
Lincolnshire, where, until Laud drove him from the kingdom, he had
been minister of stately St. Botolph’s. At first she had seemed only
a very energetic and helpful woman, with an engaging earnestness and
eloquence which gave her a noticeable pre-eminence among her sex in the
little town; but before two years were out she had set the whole colony
agog. She undertook to preach in her own house, and before her day
of exile came both men and women were crowding in to hear her. Great
and small alike felt the woman’s singular charm and power. The whole
colony knew before long how many persons of parts and wit had become her
partisans,—how many magistrates, gentlemen, scholars, soldiers. Even
grave Mr. Winthrop, though he heartily disliked her doctrine, shielded
her from criticism. Young Mr. Harry Vane, the most distinguished and
engaging youth that had yet come to the colony, whom all had loved from
the moment of his landing, and whom the freemen had chosen governor
within six months of his coming, though he was but twenty-four, was
openly of her party. But only Boston, after all, was within reach of her
power. Elsewhere men knew only her opinions; and they were rank heresy.
She taught mystical errors touching the Holy Ghost which no church of the
colony could accept. She even claimed, it was said, direct revelation to
herself. The council to which Mr. Hooker was summoned roundly condemned
her opinions. It had hardly done so before it began to look as if the
woman’s partisans would bring not only ineradicable mischief into the
churches, but also disorder and contempt of authority into civil affairs.
Boston men who were of her party refused to enlist for the Pequot war.
That year, accordingly (1637), saw very peremptory action taken. Mrs.
Hutchinson was commanded to quit the colony by the next spring. She
turned, in her exile, like other refugees for opinion’s sake, to the
Narragansett country, whither Roger Williams had shown the way.
[Illustration: OLD FORT AT SAYBROOK, 1639]
And then, the Pequots being driven from the forests, and Massachusetts
purged of Mrs. Hutchinson’s heresies, every one began to think again of
the new settlements to the westward and southward, on the Connecticut and
the Sound. The tide of immigrants from over sea was still pouring in at
the Bay, with no show of slackening. More came in 1638 than ever before.
Finding the lands by the Bay already full, hundreds pressed on to the
farther shores below. Settlements were presently to be found scattered
at intervals, long and short, all the way from Saybrook at the mouth of
the Connecticut to Greenwich, built within twenty miles of the Dutch at
New Amsterdam: here a group of villages, there an isolated hamlet, set
far apart. The Sound itself was crossed, and new settlements nestled
here and there within the bays and harbors of the northern shore of Long
Island. It was plain enough by what long and steady strides the English
were approaching the gates of the Hudson. New Amsterdam grew and throve
well enough in a slow way; but new colonists did not come to the Dutch
by families, shiploads, congregations, as they came to the Bay. The Dutch
saw very clearly what they were to expect. They had already found the
English of “so proud a nature that they thought everything belonged to
them,” and knew very well how aggressive they would be.
[Illustration: HOOKER’S HOUSE AT HARTFORD]
[Illustration: JOHN DAVENPORT]
Most of the settlements near the river or the Sound, no matter how deeply
buried in the forested wilderness, connected themselves with the free
and simple government set up by Mr. Hooker’s people at Hartford; but no
community or government owned the region more than another, and some
chose to keep an independent authority of their own. In June, 1637, a
very notable company had arrived at the Bay under the leadership of the
Reverend John Davenport,—people of substance, merchants for the more
part, the chief men of a congregation Mr. Davenport had served in London.
They wished, above all things else, to keep together, make and maintain
a separate church and parish for Mr. Davenport, and live their life in
a place of settlement of their own. They found what they wanted (1638)
within a safe and pleasing harbor on the Sound, which they presently
called New Haven. Busy Captain de Vries, putting in at New Haven in June,
1639, found “already three hundred houses and a handsome church” built
there. They had been at the pains to erect “fair and stately houses,
wherein they at first outdid the rest of the country”; and they soon
found their town become a sort of capital for that part of the shore.
Almost immediately other settlements sprang up close at hand,—Milford
upon the one hand, Guilford on the other, and others still as the years
went by. Deeming themselves a group apart, though in the midst of towns
joined with the river settlements above them, these associated themselves
with Mr. Davenport’s people to form an independent government, upon
another model. No one but a church member, admitted under the strictest
tests of belief, could among them, it was decreed, either vote or hold
office. They tried, in their singular stiffness and candor of faith in an
absolute and uncompromising Puritan order, for commonwealth no less than
for church, to make the laws of the Old Testament the laws of their own
political life and practice also, and steadfastly held themselves to the
self-denying liberty they had left the Old World to find.
[Illustration: HOUSE AT GUILFORD, 1639]
Settlements grew almost as numerously in the Narragansett country,
though not in just the same way. By 1638 some fifty settlers had drawn
about Mr. Williams at the place of refuge which he had reverently called
“Providence”; and as the other shores of the Sound filled, Narragansett
Bay was not overlooked. Colonists crossed the waters of the Bay from
Providence, which lay at its head, to the fair island at its seaward end,
which the Dutch had named Rhode (Red) Island, because when first they
saw it its cliffs showed ruddy in the sun. There Pocasset and Newport
were founded. But the settlers on those waters were not like settlers
elsewhere. They were people of many creeds and beliefs,—Baptists,
dissentient Puritans, partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson,—men and women whose
views and practices were not tolerated elsewhere. They came hither, as
Mr. Williams had come, to escape being governed at all in matters of
opinion. Mr. Williams had spoken, in his catholic tolerance, of “the
people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel’s banks either in Rome
or England.” It looked for a little as if the shores of Narragansett
were to be the banks of Babel. Men of all creeds made free to establish
themselves upon them. They set up very simple forms of government,—for
they generally agreed in wishing as little government of any kind as
possible,—and yet, how slack soever the authority of rulers among them,
they did not find it easy to live together. They were often turbulent;
always disposed, upon a disagreement, to break away and live elsewhere in
small, independent groups, rather than in strictly organized communities.
Mrs. Hutchinson herself, who came to Pocasset when forced to leave the
Bay in 1638, did not stay long. Her presence bred disquiet even there,
and she soon removed again (1642) to a place on Long Island, within the
territory of the Dutch, only twelve miles from New Amsterdam.
Many of the immigrants who crowded the ships that came yearly in at the
Bay came expressly to be with old friends and comrades at Plymouth; and
not a few others turned thither also when they had had time to make a
choice. Until 1632, which was twelve years after its founding, the single
village upon the hill at Plymouth had sufficed to hold all who came;
but between 1632 and 1639 the colony was transformed by mere growth.
Seven towns were after that to be counted within the Plymouth grant; the
government of the colony had been readjusted, and a new code of laws
drawn up. A new and more various life had come to the quiet bay. Captain
Standish had been the first to set the example of expansion. In 1632 he
had crossed the little harbor which lay before the town and had begun to
build at Duxbury. Others followed his lead. Villages sprang up in quick
succession, both on the shore to the northward facing the open sea, and
on the shore to the southward which lay within the sheltering curve of
the great arm of Cape Cod. Settlers turned inland also, and began to
build at Taunton, full twenty miles and more away in the forest, upon one
of the larger streams which ran southward into the bay of Narragansett.
[Illustration: MAP OF NEW AMSTERDAM AND VICINITY, 1666]
The Dutch were not slow to see what they must do against the swarming of
the English at their doors. The best and only chance for New Netherland,
it was plain, lay in pushing her own enterprises very vigorously and
multiplying her own population as fast as possible, and so growing too
strong to be despised and encroached upon. The great grants of land and
privilege offered to patroons had attracted a few rich purchasers, but
not many actual settlers. Not many could be found who wished to go to
the New World to live under feudal lords more absolute than any in the
Old. The company changed its policy, therefore. It offered patroons less
and actual farmers more. It arranged to let every settler have land
“according to his condition and means,” and to give him free passage
to the colony; and it opened the trade of the colony to all upon equal
terms. French Huguenots, as well as Dutch farmers, even Englishmen from
New England and Virginia, came to take advantage of the new terms of
settlement. It was no small part of the attraction of the place for the
English in New England that there was as complete liberty of conscience
in New Netherland as at Providence with Mr. Williams or on Rhode Island.
The colony grew steadily, therefore, and in a way to countenance very
sanguine hopes.
But every prospect was marred by bad administration. The place was
spoiled by a veritable pest of governors. The company sent out either
mere clerks, or else men of questionable reputation and ruined fortunes,
to take charge of its affairs. The weak and sluggish Van Twiller, who
blustered and threatened but did not act when the English began to crowd
in at the Connecticut, was succeeded in 1638 by the no less foolish
Kieft,—a good enough agent for business to be done on a small scale and
by rote, but incapable of understanding strong and efficient men or any
large question of policy; and Kieft brought everything to the verge of
utter ruin by his faithless and exasperating dealings with the Indians.
He prompted attacks upon them for what they had not done; demanded
tribute from friendly tribes who were the colony’s best defence against
those which were hostile; suffered them to be treacherously massacred
when they fled to Fort Amsterdam for succor against the Iroquois; finally
brought friend and foe alike to such a pitch of exasperation that they
united for a war of extermination. Every outlying farm was rendered
uninhabitable; scores of white men were put to death; the nearer English
settlements suffered with the Dutch, and all the slow work of peaceful
growth was undone. In that fearful year of plunder and death (1643) Anne
Hutchinson lost her life, her last refuge swept away with the rest.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF SAMUEL BLOMAERT]
In the South River the very friends of the Dutch played them false. Kieft
did not scruple, in 1642, to drive away a body of English settlers there
whom the New Haven people had sent down to take the trade of the region;
but quite three years before that other rivals had fixed themselves on
the western banks of the river of whom it was not so easy to get rid. In
1638 Samuel Blomaert, who had but a little while before taken out the
rights of a patroon under the Dutch West India Company, and Peter Minuit,
who had once been the company’s governor at New Amsterdam, set up a
colony at the South River under a charter from the King of Sweden, Minuit
himself leading the settlers thither, and bringing with him more Dutch
than Swedes. And there the colony he established remained, safe at its
“Fort Christina,” because stronger than the Dutch at their lonely “Fort
Nassau.” The new-comers cheerfully lent a hand in driving the New Haven
men out; but they kept their own foothold; multiplied faster than the men
of New Netherland; grew steadily Swedish rather than Dutch in blood; and
seemed likely, though neighborly enough for the present, to oust their
lagging rivals in good season.
The principal _general authorities_ on the history of New
England during the seventeenth century are John Gorham
Palfrey’s _History of New England_ (1492-1774) and
_Compendious History of New England_ (1497-1765); the second
and third volumes of J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in
America_; John Fiske’s _Beginnings of New England_; Justin
Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_, volumes
III. and V.; Bancroft and Hildreth’s general histories of the
country.