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EARLY NEW ENGLAND LIFE

The people who inhabited these little New England towns were from nearly every grade of English society, but the greater number were men and women of humble birth--laborers, artisans, and petty farmers--drawn from town and country, possessed of scanty education, little or no financial capital, and but slight experience with the larger world. Some were middle-class lawyers, merchants, and squires; a few, but very few, were of higher rank, while scores were of the soil, coarse in language and habits, and given to practices characteristic of the peasantry of England at that time. The fact that hardly a fifth of those in Massachusetts were professed Christians renders it doubtful how far religious convictions were the only driving motive that sent hundreds of these men to New England. The leaders were, in a majority of cases, university men familiar with good literature and possessed of good libraries, but more cognizant of theology and philosophy than of the law and order of nature. Some were professional soldiers, simple in thought as they were courageous in action, while others were men of affairs, who had acquired experience before the courts and in the counting houses of England and were often amazingly versatile, able to turn their hands to any business that confronted them. For the great majority there was little opportunity in these early years to practice a trade or a profession. Except for the clergy, who could preach in America with greater freedom than in England, and for the occasional practitioner in physic or the law who as time went on found occasion to apply his knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians, or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended his skill and his muscle in subduing a tough and unbroken soil.

New England was probably overstocked with men of strong minds and assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never have left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed opinions regarding some of the most important aspects of religious and social life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the details of their Puritanism they often differed as widely as did Roundheads and Cavaliers in England. Though representative of a common movement, they were far from united in their beliefs or consistent in their political practices. There was always something of the inquisitor at Boston and of the monk at Plymouth, and in all the Puritan colonies there prevailed a self-satisfied sense of importance as the chosen of God. The controversies that arose over jurisdictions and boundaries and the niceties of doctrine are not edifying, however honest may have been those who entered into them. Massachusetts and Connecticut always showed a disposition to stretch their demands for territory to the utmost and to take what they could, sometimes with little charity or forbearance. The dominance of the church over the organization and methods of government and the rigid scrutiny of individual lives and habits, of which the leaders, notably those of Massachusetts, approved, were hardly in accord with democracy or personal liberty. Of toleration, except in Rhode Island, there was none.

The unit of New England life was the town, a self-governing community, in large measure complete in itself, and if left alone capable of maintaining a separate existence. Within certain limits, it was independent of higher authority, and in this respect it was unlike anything to be found in England. At this period, it was at bottom a religious community which owned and distributed the lands set apart for its occupation, elected its own officials, and passed local ordinances for its own well-being. At first, church members, landholders, and inhabitants tended to be identical, but they gradually separated as time went on and as new comers appeared and old residents migrated elsewhere. Before the end of the century, the ecclesiastical society, the board of land proprietors, and the town proper, even when largely composed of the same members, acted as separate groups, though the line of separation was often vague and was sometimes not drawn at all. Town meetings continued to be held in the meeting-house, and land was distributed by the town in its collective capacity. Lands were parceled out as they were needed in proportion to contributions to a common purchase fund or to family need, and later according to the ratable value of a man's property. The fathers of Wallingford in Connecticut, "considering that even single persons industrious and laborious might through the blessing of God increase and grow into families," distributed to the meanest bachelor "such a quantity of land as might in an ordinary way serve for the comfortable maintenance of a family." Sometimes allotments were equal; often they varied greatly in size, from an acre to fifty acres and even more; but always they were determined by a desire to be fair and just. The land was granted in full right and could be sold or bequeathed, though at first only with the consent of the community. With the grant generally went rights in woodland and pasture; and even meadow land, after the hay was got in, was open to the use of the villagers. The early New England town took into consideration the welfare and contentment of the individual, but it rated as of even greater importance the interests of the whole body.

The coming of the Quakers to Boston in 1656, bringing with them as they did some of the very religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and roused the orthodox colonies to deny admission to ranters, heretics, Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their books as "corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous," flung these people into prison with every mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and emissaries of Satan. The first-comers were sent back to Barbados whence they came; the next were returned to England; those of 1657 were scourged; those of 1658, under the Massachusetts law of the previous year, were mutilated and, when all these measures had no effect, under the harsher law of October, 1658, four were hanged. One of these, Mary Dyer, though reprieved and banished, persisted in returning to her death. The Quakers were scourged in Plymouth, branded in New Haven, flogged at the cart's tail on Long Island, and chained to a wheelbarrow at New Amsterdam. Upon Connecticut they made almost no impression; only in Piscataqua, Rhode Island, Nantucket, and Eastern Long Island did they find a resting place.

To the awe inspired by the covenant with God was added the terror aroused by the dread power of Satan; and witchcraft inevitably took its place in the annals of New England Puritanism as it had done for a century in the annals of the older world. Not one of the colonies, except Rhode Island, was free from its manifestations. Plymouth had two cases which came to trial, but no executions; Connecticut and New Haven had many trials and a number of executions, beginning with that of Alse Young in Windsor in 1647, the first execution for witchcraft in New England. The witch panic, a fearful exhibition of human terror, appeared in Massachusetts as early as 1648, and ran its sinister course for more than forty years, involving high and low alike and disclosing an amazing amount of credulity and superstition. To the Puritan the power of Satan was ever imminent, working through friend or foe, and using the human form as an instrument of injury to the chosen of God. The great epidemic of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, the climax and close of the delusion, resulted in the imprisonment of over two hundred persons and the execution of nineteen. Some of those who sat in the court of trial later came to their senses and were heartily ashamed of their share in the proceedings.

The New Englander of the seventeenth century, courageous as he was and loyal to his religious convictions, was in a majority of cases gifted with but a meager mental outfit. The unknown world frightened and appalled him; Satan warring with the righteous was an ever-present menace to his soul; the will of God controlled the events of his daily life, whether for good or ill. The book of nature and the physiology and ailments of his own body he comprehended with the mind of a child. He believed that the planet upon which he lived was the center of the universe, that the stars were burning vapors, and the moon and comets agencies controlling human destinies. Strange portents presaged disaster or wrought evil works. Many a New Englander's life was governed according to the supposed influence of the heavenly bodies; Bradford believed that there was a connection between a cyclone and an eclipse; and Morton defined an earthquake as a movement of wind shut up in the pores and bowels of the earth.

Of medicine the Puritans knew little and practised less. They swallowed doses of weird and repelling concoctions, wore charms and amulets, found comfort and relief in internal and external remedies that could have had no possible influence upon the cause of the trouble, and when all else failed they fell back upon the mercy and will of God. Surgery was a matter of tooth-pulling and bone-setting, and though post-mortems were performed, we have no knowledge of the skill of the practitioner. The healing art, as well as nursing and midwifery, was frequently in the hands of women, one of whom deposed: "I was able to live by my chirurgery, but now I am blind and cannot see a wound, much less dress it or make salves"; and Jane Hawkins of Boston, the "bosom friend" of Mrs. Hutchinson, was forbidden by the general courts "to meddle in surgery or physic, drink, plaisters or oils," as well as religion. The men who practised physic were generally homebred, making the greater part of their living at farming or agriculture. Some were ministers as well as physicians, and one of them "took to drink and tumbled into the Connecticut River, and so ended." There were a number of regularly trained doctors, such as John Clark of Newbury, Fuller of Plymouth, Rossiter of Guilford, and others; and the younger Winthrop, though not a physician, had more than a smattering of medicine.

The daily routine of clearing the soil, tilling the arable land, raising corn, rye, wheat, oats, and flax, of gathering iron ore from bogs and turpentine from pine trees, and in other ways of providing the means of existence, rendered life essentially stationary and isolated, and the mind was but slightly quickened by association with the larger world. A little journeying was done on foot, on horseback, or by water, but the trip from colony to colony was rarely undertaken; and even within the colony itself but few went far beyond the borders of their own townships, except those who sat as deputies in the assembly or engaged in hunting, trading, fishing, or in wars with the Indians. A Connecticut man could speak of "going abroad" to Rhode Island. Though in the larger towns good houses were built, generally of wood and sometimes of brick, in the remoter districts the buildings were crude, with rooms on one floor and a ladder to the chamber above, where corn was frequently stored. Along the Pawcatuck River, families lived in cellars along with their pigs. Clapboards and shingles came in slowly as sawmills increased, but at first nails and glass were rare luxuries. Conditions in such seaports as Boston, where ships came and went and higher standards of living prevailed, must not be taken as typical of the whole country. The buildings of Boston in 1683 were spoken of as "handsome, joining one to another as in London, with many large streets, most of them paved with pebble stone." Money in the country towns was merchantable wheat, peas, pork, and beef at prices current. Time was reckoned by the farmers according to the seasons, not according to the calendar, and men dated events by "sweet corn time," "at the beginning of last hog time," "since Indian harvest," and "the latter part of seed time for winter wheat."

New England was a frontier land far removed from the older civilizations, and its people were always restive under restraint and convention. They were in the main men and women of good sense, sobriety, and thrift, who worked hard, squandered nothing, feared God, and honored the King, but the equipment they brought with them to America was insufficient at best and had to be replaced, as the years wore on, from resources developed on New England soil.

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 co?perate 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 "ran a different course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil administration, ... had lately made Acomenticus 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-Charnis?, 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 ," 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.

WINNING THE CHARTERS

The accession of Charles II to the throne of England provoked a crisis in the affairs of the Puritans and gave rise to many problems that the New Englanders had not anticipated and did not know how to solve. With a Stuart again in control, there were many questions that might be easily asked but less easily answered. Except for Massachusetts and Plymouth, not a settlement had a legal title to its soil; and except for Massachusetts, not one had ever received a sufficient warrant for the government which it had set up. Naturally, therefore, there was disquietude in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; and even Massachusetts, buttressed as she was, feared lest the King might object to many of the things she had done. Entrenched behind her charter and aware of her superiority in wealth, territory, and population, she had taken the leadership in New England and had used her opportunity to intimidate her neighbors. Except for New Haven, not a colony or group of settlements but had felt the weight of her claims. Plymouth and Connecticut had protested against her demands; the Narragansett towns with difficulty had evaded her attempt to absorb them; and the settlements at Piscataqua and on the Maine coast had finally yielded to her jurisdiction. As long as Cromwell lived and the Government of England was under Puritan direction, Massachusetts had little to fear from protests against her; but, with the Cromwellian r?gime at an end, she could not expect from the restored monarchy a favoring or friendly attitude.

The change in England was not merely one of government; it was one of policy as well. Even during the Cromwellian period, Englishmen awoke to a greater appreciation of the importance of colonies as assets of the mother country, and began to realize, in a fashion unknown to the earlier period, the necessity of extending and strengthening England's possessions in America. England was engaged in a desperate commercial war with Holland, whose vessels had obtained a monopoly of the carrying trade of the world; and to win in that conflict it was imperative that her statesmen should husband every resource that the kingdom possessed. The religious agitations of previous years were passing away and the New England colonies were not likely to be troubled on account of their Puritanism. The great question in England was not religious conformity but national strength based on commercial prosperity.

As the future of New England was certain to be debated at Whitehall after 1660, the colonies took pains to have representatives on the ground to meet criticisms and complaints, to ward off attacks, and to beg for favors. Rhode Island sent a commission to Dr. John Clarke, one of her founders and leading men, at that time in London, instructing him to ask for royal protection, self-government, liberty of conscience, and a charter. Massachusetts sent Simon Bradstreet and the Reverend John Norton, with a petition that reads like a sermon, praying the King not to listen to other men's words but to grant the colonists an opportunity to answer for themselves, they being "true men, fearers of God and the King, not given to change, orthodox and peaceable in Israel." Connecticut, with more worldly wisdom, sent John Winthrop, the Governor, a man courtly and tactful, with a petition shrewdly worded and to the point. Plymouth entrusted her mission also to Winthrop, hoping for a confirmation of her political and religious liberties. All protested their loyalty to the Crown, while Massachusetts, her petition signed by the stiff-necked Endecott, prostrated herself at the royal feet, craving pardon for her boldness, and subscribing herself "Your Majesties most humble subjects and suppliants." Did Endecott remember, we wonder, a certain incident connected with the royal ensign at Salem?

Against the lesser colonies no complaints were presented, except in the case of New Haven, which was charged by the inhabitants of Shelter Island with usurpation of their goods and territory; but for Massachusetts the restoration of the Stuarts opened a veritable Pandora's box of troubles. In "divers complaints, petitions, and other informations concerning New England," she was accused of overbearance and oppression, of seizing the territory of New Hampshire and Maine, of denying the rights of Englishmen to Anglicans and non-freemen of the colony, and of persecuting the Quakers and others of religious views different from her own. She was declared to be seeking independence of Crown and Parliament by forbidding appeals to England, refusing to enforce the oath of allegiance to the King, and in general exceeding the powers laid down in her charter. The new plantations council, commissioned by the King in December, 1660, sent a peremptory letter the following April ordering the colony to proclaim the King "in the most solemn manner," and to hold herself in readiness to answer complaints by appointing persons well instructed to represent her before itself in England. At the same time, it begged the King to go slowly, giving Massachusetts an opportunity to be heard, and to write a letter "with all possible tenderness," pointing out that submission to the royal authority was absolutely essential. This the King did, confirming the charter of Massachusetts, renewing the colony's rights and privileges, and in conciliatory fashion ascribing all derelictions of duty to the iniquity of the times rather than to any evil intention of the heart. Then declaring that the chief aim of the charter was liberty of conscience, the King struck at the very heart of the Massachusetts system, by commanding the magistrates to grant full liberty of worship to members of the Anglican Church and the right to vote to all who were "orthodox" in religion and possessed of "competent estates." Though this order was evaded by various definitions of "orthodox" and "competent estates" and was not to be fully executed for many years, yet its meaning was clear--no single religious body would ever again be allowed, by the royal authorities in England, to monopolize the government or control the political destinies of a British colony in America or elsewhere.

The policy thus adopted toward Massachusetts became even more conciliatory when applied to the other colonies. It is not improbable that the King's advisers saw in the strengthening of Connecticut and Rhode Island an opportunity to check the power of Massachusetts and to reduce her importance in New England. However that may be, they lent themselves to the efforts that Winthrop and Clarke were making to obtain charters for their respective colonies. These agents were able, discreet, and broadminded men. Clarke, a resident in England for a number of years, had acquired no little personal influence; and Winthrop, as an old-time friend of the English lords and gentlemen whose governor he had been at Saybrook, could count on the help of the one surviving member of that group, Lord Saye and Sele, who was a privy councillor, a member of the House of Lords and of the plantations council, and, as we are told, Lord Privy Seal, a position that would be of direct service in expediting the issue of a charter. Winthrop had personal qualities, also, that made for success. He was a university man, had made the grand tour of the Continent, and was familiar with official traditions and the ways of the court. Soon after his arrival in England, he became a member of the Royal Society and served on several of its committees, and thus had an opportunity of making friends and of showing his interest in other things than theology. If Cotton Mather was rightly informed, Winthrop was accorded a personal interview with Charles II and presented the King with a ring which Charles I, as Prince of Wales, had given his grandfather, Adam Winthrop.

Winthrop made good use of a good cause. Connecticut had behaved herself well and had incurred no ill-will. She had had no dealings with the Cromwellian Government, had dutifully proclaimed the King, had been discreet in her attitude toward Whalley and Goffe, the regicides who had fled to New England, and had aroused no resentment against herself among her neighbors. With proceedings once begun, the securing of the charter went rapidly forward. Winthrop at first petitioned for a confirmation of the old Warwick patent, which had been purchased of the English lords and gentlemen in 1644, but later, encouraged it may be by friends in England, he asked for a charter. The request was granted. The document gave to Connecticut the same boundaries as those of the old patent, and conferred powers of government identical with those of the Fundamental Orders of 1639. That the main features of the charter were drawn up in the colony before Winthrop sailed is probable, though it is not impossible that they were drafted in London by Winthrop himself. All that the English officials did was to give the text its proper legal form.

The New Haven federation was dissolved; Davenport withdrew to Boston, where he became a participant in the religious life of that colony; and the strict Puritans of Branford, Guilford, and Milford, led by Abraham Pierson, went to New Jersey and founded Newark. The towns, left loose and at large, joined Connecticut voluntarily and separately, and the New Haven colony ceased to exist. But the dual capital of Connecticut and the alternate meetings of its legislature in Hartford and New Haven, marked for more than two hundred years the twofold origin of the colony and the state.

In the meantime Rhode Island had become a legally incorporated colony. Even before Winthrop sailed for England, Dr. John Clarke had received a favorable reply to his petition for a charter. But a year passed and nothing was done about the matter, probably owing to the arrival of Winthrop and the feeling of uncertainty aroused by the conflicting boundary claims, which involved a stretch of some twenty-five miles of territory between Narragansett Bay and the Pawcatuck River. A third claimant also appeared, the Atherton Company, with its headquarters in Boston, which had purchased lands of the Indians at various points in the area and held them under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. When Clarke heard that Winthrop, in drawing the boundaries for the Connecticut charter of 1662, had included this Narragansett territory, he protested vehemently to the King, saying that Connecticut had "injuriously swallowed up the one-half of our colonie," and demanding a reconsideration. Finally, after the question had been debated in the presence of Clarendon and others, the decision was reached to give Rhode Island the boundaries and charter she desired, but to leave the question of conflicting claims for later settlement. Evidently Winthrop, though not agreeing with Clarke in matters of fact regarding the boundaries, supported Rhode Island's appeal for a charter, for Clarendon said afterwards that the draft which Clarke presented had in it expressions that were disliked, but that the charter was granted out of regard for Winthrop.

The Rhode Island charter passed the seals July 8, 1663, and was received in the colony four months later with great joy and thanksgiving. It created a common government for all the towns, guaranteeing full liberty "in religious concernments" and freedom from all obligations to conform to the "litturgy, formes, and ceremonyes of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oathes and articles made and established in that behalfe." This may have been the phrase that Clarendon, who was a High Churchman, objected to when the draft was presented. The form of government was similar in all essential particulars to that of Connecticut.

Rhode Island's enthusiasm in obtaining a charter is not difficult to understand. That amphibious colony, consisting of mainland, islands, and a large body of water, was inhabited by "poor despised peasants," as Governor Brenton described them, "living remote in the woods" and subject to the "envious and subtle contrivances of our neighbour colonies round about us, who are in a combination united together to swallow us up." The colony had not been asked to join the New England Confederation, and its leaders were convinced that the members of the Confederation were in league to filch away their lands and, by driving them into the sea, to eliminate the colony altogether. Plymouth, seeking a better harbor than that of Plymouth Bay, claimed the eastern mainland as well as the chief islands, Hog, Conanicut, and Aquidneck; Massachusetts claimed Pawtuxet, Warwick, and the Narragansett country generally; while Connecticut wished to push her eastern boundary as far beyond the Pawcatuck River as she might be able to do. Had each of these colonies made good its claim, there would have been little left of Rhode Island, and we do not wonder that the settlers looked upon themselves as fighting, with their backs to the sea, for their very existence. Hence they welcomed the charter with the joy of one relieved of a great burden, for, though the boundary question remained unsettled, the charter assured the colony of its right to exist under royal protection.

FOOTNOTE:

The King's warrant was issued on February 28, the writ of Privy Seal on April 23, and the great seal was affixed on May 10, 1662.

MASSACHUSETTS DEFIANT

Massachusetts was yet to be taken in hand. The English authorities had become convinced that a satisfactory settlement of all the difficulties in New England could be undertaken not in England, where the facts were hard to get at, but in America. Lord Clarendon, the Chancellor, had been in correspondence with Samuel Maverick, an early settler in New England and for many years a resident of Boston and New Amsterdam. As an Anglican, Maverick had sympathized with the opposition in Massachusetts led by Dr. Robert Child, and had been debarred from all civil and religious rights in the colony; but he was a man of sobriety and good judgment, whose chief cause of offense was a difference of opinion as to how a colony should conduct its government. The fact that he had been able to get on with the Massachusetts men shows that his attitude had never been seriously aggressive, for though he certainly had no liking for the policy of the colony, he does not appear to have been influenced by any hostility towards Massachusetts.

Happening to be in England at this juncture, Maverick was called upon by the Chancellor to state the case against the colony, and this he did in several letters, giving many instances of the colony's disloyalty and injustice, and recommending that its privileges be taken away, just as it had taken away the privileges of others. To this suggestion Clarendon paid no heed, for it was no part of the royal purpose to drive the colonies to desperation at a time when the King was but newly come to his throne and needed all his resources in the struggle with the Dutch. But to Maverick's further suggestions that New Netherland be reduced, that Massachusetts be regulated, and that commissioners be sent over to accomplish these ends, he expressed himself as favorable, and all were finally accepted by the Government. Maverick's opinion that British control should be exercised over a British possession and that the government of such a possession should not be conducted after the fashion of an ecclesiastical society happened to coincide with that of the King's advisers and, as Maverick had lived in America for thirty years, his advice was listened to with respect and approval. All thought that, while Massachusetts might not be driven with safety, she could probably be persuaded to admit some alteration in her methods of government by tactful representatives.

Had the Duke of York, to whom was entrusted the task of selecting the new commissioners, chosen his men as wisely as Clarendon had shaped his policy, the results, as far as Massachusetts was concerned, might have been more successful. The trouble lay with the character of the work to be done. On the one hand the Dutch colony was to be seized by force of arms, a military undertaking involving boldness and executive ability; on the other, the Puritan colonies were to be regulated, a mission which called for the utmost tact. The men chosen for the work were far from the best that might have been selected to bring back to the path of true obedience and impartial justice a colony that was deemed wilful and perverse. They were Richard Nicolls, a favorite of the Duke of York and the only commissioner possessed of discrimination and wisdom, but who, as governor of the yet unconquered Dutch colony, was likely to be taken up with his duties to such an extent as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts and convinced of the necessity of radical changes in the constitution of the colony. Nicolls was liked and respected; Cartwright and Carr were distrusted as soldiers and strangers, and their presence was resented; whereas Maverick was objected to as a malcontent who had gone to England to complain and had returned with power to make trouble. When the colony heard of his appointment, it sent a vigorous address of protest to the King. If Clarendon expected from the last three of these men the wisdom and discretion that he said were essential to the task, he strangely misjudged their characters. He thought, to be sure, of adding other commissioners from New England, but he did not know whom to select and was fearful of arousing local jealousies. Yet considering the work to be done, it is doubtful if any commissioners, no matter how wisely selected, could have performed the task, for Massachusetts did not want to be regulated.

The general object of the commission was "to unite and reconcile persons of very different judgments and practice in all things," particularly concerning "the peace and prosperity of the people and their joint submission and obedience to us and our government." More specifically, the commissioners were to effect the overthrow of the Dutch, investigate conditions among the Indians, capture the regicides, secure obedience to the navigation acts, look into the question of boundaries, and determine the title to the Narragansett country, henceforth to be called the King's Province. The commissioners were to make it clear that they were not come to interfere with the prevailing religious systems, but to demand liberty of conscience for all, though Clarendon could not repress the hope that ultimately the New Englanders might return to the Anglican fold. The secret instructions were even more remarkable as evidence of a complete misunderstanding of conditions in New England. Clarendon wished to secure for the Crown the power to nominate or at least to approve the governor of Massachusetts, to control the militia, and to examine and correct the laws--powers, it may be noted, which were exercised in every royal colony as a matter of course. He suggested that the commissioners interest themselves in the elections so far as "to gett men of the best reputation and most peaceably inclined" chosen to the assembly, but he cautioned them to "proceed very warily" in some of these things. He had a hope that Massachusetts might be so wrought upon as to choose Nicolls for her governor and Carr for her major-general, but in this, as in the pious hope of a return of the Puritans to the Church of England, he reckoned without a knowledge of the grimness of the Massachusetts temper.

The Massachusetts mission was hopeless from the beginning. The magistrates and general court would not admit the right of the commissioners to interfere in any way with governmental procedure or with the course of justice; and standing with absolute firmness on the powers granted by the charter and pointing to the recent renewal by the King as a full confirmation of all their privileges, they denied the validity of the royal mission and refused to discuss the question of jurisdiction. The commissioners said very plainly that Massachusetts had not administered the oath of allegiance or permitted the use of the Book of Common Prayer, as she had promised to do, and, as for the new franchise law, they did not understand it themselves and did not believe it would meet the royal requirements. To none of these points did the magistrates make any sufficient reply, but, feeling convinced that safety lay in avoiding decisions, they preferred rather to leave the matter ambiguous than to attempt any clearing up of the points at issue.

But when the commissioners took up the question of appeals and announced their determination to sit as a court of justice, the issue was more fairly joined. The magistrates quoted the text of the charter to show that the colony had full power over all judicial affairs, while the commissioners cited their instructions as a sufficient warrant for their right to hear complaints against the colony. A deadlock ensued, but in the end the colony triumphed. After spending a month in fruitless negotiations, the commissioners gave up the struggle, preferring to leave the conduct of Massachusetts to be passed upon by the Crown rather than to prolong the controversy. For the time being, the Massachusetts men had their own way; but they had raised a serious and dangerous question, that of their allegiance and its obligations, for, as the commissioners said, "The King did not grant away his soveraigntie over you when he made you a corporation. When His Majestie gave you power to make wholesome lawes and to administer justice, he parted not with his right of judging whether those laws are wholsom, or whether justice was administered accordingly or no. When His Majestie gave you authoritie over such of his subjects as lived within the limits of your jurisdiction, he made them not your subjects nor you their supream authority." Had the magistrates been wiser men, less homebred and provincial, and possessed of wider vision, they would have foreseen the dangers that confronted them. But Bellingham and Leverett, the leading representatives of the policy of no surrender, were not men gifted with foresight, and they remained unmoved by the last threat of the commissioners that it would be hazardous to deny the King's supremacy, for "'tis possible that the charter which you so much idolize may be forfeited."

The magistrates were undoubtedly influenced by the character of the commissioners and their rough and ready methods of procedure. Had all been as honorable and upright as Nicolls, who unfortunately took but little part in the negotiations, the outcome might have been different. But there is reason to think otherwise. The Massachusetts leaders took the ground that if they yielded any part they must eventually yield all, and they wanted no interference from outside in their government. Having ruled themselves for thirty years as they thought best, they were not disposed to admit that the King had any rights in the colony; and they believed that by steady resistance or by dilatory practices they could stave off intervention and that, with the danger once removed, the colony would be allowed to continue in its own course. In a measure they were justified in their belief. The King recalled the commissioners, and, though he wrote a letter declaring that Massachusetts had shown a great want of duty and respect for the royal authority, he went no further than to command the colony to send agents to England to answer there the questions that had not been settled during the stay of the commissioners at Boston. But the colony did not take this command seriously and sent no agents. Nicolls, always temperate in speech, wrote in 1666: "The grandees of Boston are too proud to be dealt with, saying that His Majesty is well satisfied with their loyalty."

WARS WITH THE INDIANS

The period from 1660 to 1675, a time of readjustment in the affairs of the New England colonies, was characterized by widespread excitement and deep concern on the part of the colonies everywhere. Scarcely a section of the territory from Maine to the frontier of New York and the towns of Long Island but felt the strain of impending change in its political status. The winning of the charters and the capture of New Amsterdam were momentous events in the lives of the colonists of Rhode Island and Connecticut; while the agitation for the annexation of New Haven and the acrimonious debate that accompanied it must have stirred profoundly the towns of that colony and have led to local controversies, rivalries, and contentions that kept the inhabitants in a continual state of perturbation. On Long Island before 1664, the uncertainty as to jurisdiction, due to grave doubts as to the meaning of Connecticut's charter, aroused the towns from Easthampton and Southold on the east to Flushing and Gravesend on the west, and divided the people into discordant and clashing groups. Captain John Scott, already mentioned, an adventurer and soldier of fortune who at one time or another seems to have made trouble in nearly every part of the British world, appeared at this time in Long Island and, denying Connecticut's title to the territory, proclaimed the King. In January, 1664, he established a government at Setauket, with himself as president. This event set the towns in an uproar; Captain Young from Southold, upholding Connecticut's claim, came "with a trumpet" to Hempstead; New Haven men crossed Long Island Sound to support Scott's cause; and at last Connecticut herself sent over officers to seize the insurgents. Though Scott said he would "sacrifice his heart's blood upon the ground" before he would yield, he was taken and carried in chains to Hartford.

Both Plymouth and Massachusetts sent letters protesting against the treatment of Scott, and the heat engendered among the members of the New England Confederation was intensified by the controversy over New Haven and the "uncomfortable debates" regarding the title to the Narragansett territory. Massachusetts wrote to Connecticut in 1662, "We cannot a little wonder at your proceeding so suddenly to extend your authority to the trouble of your friends and confederates"; to which Connecticut replied, hoping that Massachusetts would stop laying further temptations before "our subjects at Mistack of disobedience to this government." The matter was debated for many years, and it was not until 1672 that Massachusetts recognized Connecticut's title under the charter and yielded, not because it thought the claim just but because "it was judged by us more dangerous to the common cause of New England to oppose than by our forbearance and yielding to endeavour to prevent a mischief to us both."

In Rhode Island conditions were equally unsettled, for the inhabitants of the border towns did not know certainly in what colony they were situated or what authority to recognize; and though these doubts affected but little the daily life of the farmer, they did affect the title to his lands and the payment of his taxes, and threw suspicion upon all legal processes and transactions. The situation was even more disturbed in the regions north of Massachusetts, where the status of Maine and New Hampshire was undecided and where the coming of the royal commissioners only served to throw the inhabitants into a new ferment. The claims of Mason and Gorges were revived by their descendants, and the King peremptorily ordered Massachusetts to surrender the provinces. Agents of Gorges appeared in the territory and demanded an acknowledgment of their authority; the commissioners themselves attempted to organize a government and to exercise jurisdiction there in the King's name; but in 1668 Massachusetts, denying all other pretensions, adopted a resolution asserting her full right of control, and, sending commissioners with a military escort to York, resumed jurisdiction of the province. The inhabitants did not know what to do. Some upheld the Gorges agents and the commissioners; others adhered to Massachusetts. Even in Massachusetts itself there were grave differences of opinion, for the younger generation did not always follow the old magistrates, and the people of Boston were developing views both of government and of the proper relations toward England that were at variance with those of the more conservative country towns and districts.

The larger disputes between the colonies were frequently accompanied with lesser disputes between the towns over their boundaries; and both at this time and for years afterwards there was scarcely an important settlement in New England that did not have some trouble with its neighbor. In 1666 Stamford and Greenwich came to blows over their dividing line, and in 1672 men from New London and Lyme attempted to mow the same piece of meadow and had a pitched battle with clubs and scythes. Not many years later the inhabitants of Windsor and Enfield "were so fiercely engag'd" over a disputed strip of land, reported an eye-witness, that a hundred men met to decide this controversy by force, "a resolute combat" ensuing between them "in which many blows were given to the exasperating each party, so that the lives and limbs of his Majesties subjects were endangered thereby."

Though clubs and scythes and fists are dangerous weapons enough, the only real fighting in which the colonists engaged was with the Indians and with weapons consisting of pikes and muskets. Indian attacks were an ever-present danger, for the stretches of unoccupied land between the colonies were the hunting-grounds of the Narragansetts of eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island, the Pequots of Connecticut, the Wampanoags of Plymouth and its neighborhood, the Pennacooks of New Hampshire, and the Abenaki tribes of Maine. Plague and starvation had so far weakened the coast Indians before the arrival of the first colonists that the new settlements had been but little disturbed; but, unfortunately, as the first comers pushed into the interior, founding new plantations, felling trees, and clearing the soil, and the trappers and traders invaded the Indian hunting-grounds, carrying with them firearms and liquor, the Indian menace became serious.

To meet the Indian peril, all the colonies made provision for a supply of arms and for the drilling of the citizen body in militia companies or train-bands. But in equipment, discipline, and morale the fighting force of New England was very imperfect. The troops had no uniforms; there was a very inadequate commissariat; and alarums, whether by beacon, drum-beat, or discharge of guns, were slow and unreliable. Weapons were crude, and the method of handling them was exceedingly awkward and cumbersome. The pike was early abandoned and the matchlock soon gave way to the flintlock--both heavy and unwieldy instruments of war--and carbines and pistols were also used. Cavalry or mounted infantry, though expensive because of horse and outfit, were introduced whenever possible. In 1675, Plymouth had fourteen companies of infantry and cavalry; Massachusetts had six regiments, including the Ancient and Honorable Artillery; and Maine and New Hampshire had one each. Connecticut had four train-bands in 1662 and nine in 1668, a troop of dragoneers, and a troop of horse, but no regiments until the next century. For coast defense there were forts, very inadequately supplied with ordnance, of which that on Castle Island in Boston harbor was the most conspicuous, and, for the frontier, there were garrison-houses and stockades.

Though Massachusetts had twice put herself in readiness to repel attempts at coercion from England, and though both Connecticut and New Haven seemed on several occasions in danger from the Dutch, particularly after the recapture of New Amsterdam in 1673, New England's chief danger was always from the Indians. Both French and Dutch were believed to be instrumental in inciting Indian warfare, one along the southwestern border, the other at various points in the north, notably in New Hampshire and Maine. But, except for occasional Indian forays and for house-burnings and scalpings in the more remote districts, there were only two serious wars in the seventeenth century--that against the Pequots in 1637 and the great War of King Philip in 1675-1676.

The Pequot War, which was carried on by Connecticut with a few men from Massachusetts and a number of Mohegan allies, ended in the complete overthrow of the Pequot nation and the extermination of nearly all its fighting force. It began in June, 1637, with the successful attack by Captain John Mason on the Pequot fort near Groton, and was brought to an end by the battle of Fairfield Swamp, July 13, where the surviving Pequots made their last stand. Sassacus, the Pequot chieftain, was murdered by the Mohawks, among whom he had sought refuge; and during the year that followed wandering members of the tribe, whenever found, were slain by their enemies, the Mohegans and Narragansetts. An entire Indian people was wiped out of existence, an achievement difficult to justify on any ground save that of the extreme necessity of either slaying or being slain. The relentless pursuit of the scattered and dispirited remnants of these tribes admits of little defense.

The overthrow of the Pequots opened to settlement the region from Saybrook to Mystic and led to a treaty in 1638 with the Mohegans and Narragansetts, according to which harmony was to prevail and peace was to reign. But the outcome of this impracticable treaty was a five years' struggle between the Mohegan chieftain, Uncas, actively allied with the colony of Connecticut, and Miantonomo, sachem of the Narragansetts, which involved Connecticut in a tortuous and often dishonorable policy of attempting to divide the Indians in order to rule them--a policy which led to many embarrassing negotiations and bloody conflicts and ended in the murder of Miantonomo in 1643, by the Mohegans, at the instigation of the commissioners of the United Colonies. This alliance between Uncas and the colony lasted for more than forty years. It placed upon Connecticut the burden of supporting a treacherous and grasping Indian chief; it created a great deal of confusion in land titles in the eastern part of the colony because of indiscriminate Indian grants; it started the famous Mohegan controversy which agitated the colony and England also, and was not finally settled until 1773, one hundred and thirty years later; and it was, in part at least, a cause of King Philip's War, because of the colony's support of the Mohegans against their traditional enemies, the Narragansetts and Niantics.

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