England in America, 1580-1652 Part 20

The fear of the appointment by the crown of a governor-general for New England was at its height, and so the application, though it met with favor from the majority of the deputies, was rejected by the court of a.s.sistants.[45]

The popularity of the measure, however, increased mightily, and there is a tradition that in the winter of 1634-1635 some persons from Watertown went to Connecticut and managed to survive the winter in a few huts erected at Pyquag, afterwards Wethersfield.[46] The next spring the Watertown and Dorchester people imitated the Newtown congregation in applying to the general court for permission to remove. They were more successful, and were given liberty to go to any place, even outside of Ma.s.sachusetts, provided they continued under the Ma.s.sachusetts authority.[47]

Then began a lively movement, and Jonathan Brewster, in a letter written from the Plymouth fort at Windsor in July, 1635, tells of the daily arrival by land and water of small parties of these adventurous settlers. Their presence around the fort caused Brewster much uneasiness, since some began to cast covetous eyes upon the very spot which the Plymouth government had bought from the Mohegans and held against the Dutch.

As their numbers grew their confidence increased; and finally the men of Dorchester, headed by Roger Ludlow, one of the richest men in Ma.s.sachusetts, pretending that the land was theirs as the "Lord's waste," upon which "the providence of G.o.d" had cast them, intruded themselves into the actual midst of the Plymouth people. The emigrants from Plymouth protested, but were finally glad to accept a compromise, though, as Bradford remarks, "the unkindness was not soon forgotten."

The Ma.s.sachusetts settlers held on to fifteen-sixteenths of the land, while they magnanimously conceded to the Plymouth people one-sixteenth, in addition to their block-houses.[48]

The emigration in the summer of 1635 was preliminary to a much larger exodus in the fall. In October a company of about sixty men, women, and children, driving before them their cows, horses, and swine, set out by land and reached the Connecticut "after a tedious and difficult journey";[49] but the winter set in very early, and the vessels which were to bring their provisions by water not appearing, they were forced to leave their settlement for fear of famine. They were fortunate to find a ship frozen up in the river, which they freed from the ice and used to return to Boston. The other settlers who remained upon the river suffered very much, and were finally reduced to the necessity of eating acorns and ground-nuts, which they dug out of the snow. A great number of the cattle perished, and the Dorchester Company "lost near 2000 worth."[50]

These calamities were soon forgotten; and as soon as the first flowers of spring suggested the end of the dreary winter season, the Newtown people prepared to move. Selling their lands on the Charles River to the congregation of Rev. Thomas Shepard, the whole body, in June, 1636, emigrated through the green woods, musical with birds and bright with flowers, under the leadership of their two eminent ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone.[51] Among the lay members of the community were Stephen Hart, Thomas Bull, and Richard Lord.[52] A little later the churches of Dorchester and Watertown completed their removal, while a settlement was made by emigrants from Roxbury under William Pynchon at Agawam, afterwards Springfield, just north of the boundary between Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut.[53]

At the beginning of the winter of 1636-1637 about eight hundred people were established in three townships below Springfield. These townships were first called after the towns from which their inhabitants removed--Newtown, Watertown, and Dorchester; but in February, 1637, their names were changed to Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor. The settlements well ill.u.s.trate the general type of New England colonization. The emigration from Ma.s.sachusetts was not of individuals, but of organized communities united in allegiance to a church and its pastor. Carrying provisions and supplies, erecting new villages, as communities they came from England to Ma.s.sachusetts, and in that character the people emigrated to Connecticut.

In the mean time, the silence of the Connecticut woods was broken by other visitors. The lands occupied by the Ma.s.sachusetts settlers upon the Connecticut lay within a grant executed March 19, 1631, by the earl of Warwick, as president of the Council for New England for "all that part of New England in America which lies and extends itself from a river there called Narragansett River, the s.p.a.ce of forty leagues upon a straight line near the seash.o.r.e towards the southwest, west, and by south, or west, as the coast lieth towards Virginia, accounting three English miles to the league; and also all and singular the lands and hereditaments whatsoever, lying and being within the lands aforesaid, north and south in lat.i.tude and breadth, and in length and longitude of and within, all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the main-lands there, from the western ocean to the south sea." The grantees included Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Richard Saltonstall.[54]

Probably some report of the unauthorized colonies reached them and hastened Saltonstall to send out a party of twenty men in July, 1635, to plant a settlement on the Connecticut. But the Dorchester settlers treated them with even less consideration than they had the Plymouth men. They set upon them and drove them out of the river.[55] Then, in October, 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., the eldest son of John Winthrop of Ma.s.sachusetts, came from England with a commission to be governor of the "river Connecticut in New England" for the s.p.a.ce of one year.[56]

He was, however, a governor in theory, and made but one substantial contribution to the permanent possession of Connecticut by the English. In November, 1635, he erected at the mouth of the river a fort called after Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--Saybrook--which in the spring of 1636 he placed under the command of Lyon Gardiner, an expert military engineer, who had seen much service in the Netherlands.[57] Hardly had the English mounted two cannon on their slight fortification when a Dutch vessel sent from New Amsterdam on a sudden errand arrived in the river. Finding themselves antic.i.p.ated, the Dutch returned home, and the scheme of cutting off the English settlements on the upper Connecticut from the rest of New England was frustrated.[58]

For a year the towns on the Connecticut, including Springfield, were governed by a commission issued by the general court of Ma.s.sachusetts, in concert with John Winthrop, Jr., as a representative of the patentees.[59] When the year expired the commission was not renewed, but a general court representing the three towns of Ma.s.sachusetts and consisting of six a.s.sistants and nine delegates, three for each town, was held at Hartford in May, 1637. They became from this time a self-governing community under the name of Connecticut, and the union happened just in time to be of much service in repelling a great danger.

[Footnote 1: Clarke, _Ill Newes from New England_ (Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc., _Collections_, 4th series, II., 1-113).]

[Footnote 2: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 52.]

[Footnote 3: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 87, 100, 108.]

[Footnote 4: Ibid., 127. In 1614 the Dutch navigator Adrian Block gave to the country of Narragansett Bay the name of Rhode Island--the Red Island--because of the red clay in some portions of its sh.o.r.es.]

[Footnote 5: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 27.]

[Footnote 6: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 24; _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, I., 305.]

[Footnote 7: _Plymouth Col. Records_, IX., 23, 110.]

[Footnote 8: Sparks, _American Biographies_, VI., 333, 352; Arnold, _Rhode Island_, I., 66, n.]

[Footnote 9: Sparks, _American Biographies_, V., 326-340.]

[Footnote 10: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 71.]

[Footnote 11: Ibid., 102; _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, II., 22.]

[Footnote 12: _Simplicities Defence Against Seven-Headed Policy_ (Force, Tracts, IV., No. vi.), 24.]

[Footnote 13: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, II., 40, 41.]

[Footnote 14: _Simplicities Defence_.]

[Footnote 15: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 157-162; _Acts of the Federal Commissioners_, I., 10-12.]

[Footnote 16: Fiske, _Beginnings of New England_, 171.]

[Footnote 17: _Simplicities Defence_ (Force, _Tracts_, IV., No. vi.), 86; Winthrop, _New England_, II., 165, 188.]

[Footnote 18: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 387-390.]

[Footnote 19: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 241.]

[Footnote 20: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 325.]

[Footnote 21: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 236.]

[Footnote 22: Richard Scott's letter, in Fox, _New England Fire Brand Quenched_, App.]

[Footnote 23: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 354.]

[Footnote 24: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 352.]

[Footnote 25: Palfrey, _New England_, II., 346.]

[Footnote 26: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, II., 85.]

[Footnote 27: Clarke, _Ill Newes from New England_ (Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc., _Collections_, 4th series, II., 1-113).]

[Footnote 28: Backus, _New England_, I., 277.]

[Footnote 29: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 328.]

[Footnote 30: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, IV., pt. i., 333.]

[Footnote 31: _R.I. Col. Records_, I., 364.]

[Footnote 32: Doyle, _English Colonies_, II., 319.]

[Footnote 33: Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 370, 371.]

[Footnote 34: Trumbull, _Connecticut_, I., 41.]

[Footnote 35: Ibid., 31; Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 371.]

[Footnote 36: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 62.]

[Footnote 37: Ibid., 132, 162.]

[Footnote 38: Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 373; Brodhead, _New York_, I., 241.]

[Footnote 39: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 133.]