Conceived in Liberty (40 page)

Williams also moved to stiffen the laws against immorality. The Assembly decreed the compulsory licensing of liquor dealers and an excise tax on liquor. Sales of spirits to Indians were restricted severely. Punishments were intensified. The four towns had, until then, failed to provide prisons or stocks, so little was the need and so pervasive the spirit of freedom. But the colonial Assembly now moved to fill this gap and also to outlaw “verbal incivilities,” which were to be punished by the stocks or payment of a fine. Adultery, which had not been subject to express penalty in the code of 1647, was now to be punished by whipping and a fine. Corporal punishment was to be levied for “loose living” and masters were to be held responsible for the “licentious careers” of servants or minor sons. On the other hand, divorce laws were liberalized, to allow for divorce for reasons of incompatibility.

It is clear that a large part of the motivation for the new statist trend was a desire to curry favor with Cromwell. It was shortly after receipt of Cromwell’s official reconfirmation of Rhode Island’s charter, in June 1655, that the Assembly passed the law against loose living, on information that Cromwell was restive at the state of morality in the colony. Furthermore, Cromwell in his message had ordered Rhode Island to provide against “intestine commotions.” The colony swiftly passed a law against “ringleaders of factions,” providing that such ringleaders, when found guilty by the General Court, were to be sent to England for trial. Here was the fulfillment of the ominous hints of Williams’ ship analogy.

But Baptist anarchism continued to multiply in Rhode Island. One of the new adherents was none other than Catherine Scott, the leading Baptist minister and a sister of Anne Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson’s lone pioneering in philosophical anarchism before her death had planted a seed
that came to fruition a decade and a half later. Also adopting anarchism were Rebecca Throckmorton, Robert West, and Ann Williams, wife of Roger’s brother Robert. Catherine Scott and Rebecca Throckmorton were soon to espouse the Quaker faith. Finally, in March 1657 the crackdown arrived, and the four individualists were summoned into court by Williams, as being “common opposers of all authority.” Williams relented after this public intimidation, however, and the charges were dismissed.

Meanwhile, Williams’ relations with Pawtuxet had undergone a subtle but significant change. A former aggressor that many times had called on Massachusetts to crush the colony, Pawtuxet now became a relative island of liberty resisting encroachment from Providence. Apart from its oligarchy in land, Pawtuxet had managed to avoid paying taxes either to Rhode Island or to Massachusetts Bay, and was content to live in liberty from immorality laws or from laws against trading with the Indians. It was now Williams who began to agitate aggressively for a joint Massachusetts-Providence suppression of Pawtuxian liberties and for the forcible end to Pawtuxet secession.

This entire Pawtuxian experience with governments served to confirm William Harris in his anarchism, and also to embitter Williams against Harris more than against his fellows. Harris was particularly vehement in opposition to taxation—all taxation—and circulated to all the towns a manuscript denouncing “all civil government,” and urged the people to “cry out no lords, no masters.” Harris predicted that the state, the “House of Saul,” would inevitably grow “weaker and weaker,” whereas the “House of David,” Harris and his followers, would grow “stronger and stronger.” Harris also condemned all punishments and prisons, all officials and legislative assemblies.

William Harris was now hauled into court, charged with “open defiance under his hand against our Charter, all our laws... parliament the Lord Protector and all government.” Harris, instead of quieting down under intimidation as had Mrs. Scott and the others, swore that he would continue to maintain his anarchism “with his blood.” Persistently refusing to recant, Harris repeated his interpretation of Scripture that “he that can say it is his conscience ought not to yield subjection to any human order amongst men.” The General Court found that Harris was guilty of being “contemptuous and seditious” and he and his son were heavily bonded for 500 pounds. The evidence was sent to England in preparation for a trial there for treason.

The treason trial never materialized, but only because the ship carrying the evidence to England was lost at sea. Harris was finally sufficiently cowed, however, to abandon his anarchism and he turned instead to a lifelong harassment of the hated Roger Williams through litigation of land claims.

Williams retired from the presidency in 1657, and a year later Pawtuxet was reunited with the rest of the colony.

Rhode Island was not the only New England colony settled by former residents of Massachusetts Bay. But whereas Rhode Island was peopled by exiles and refugees, the exodus to Connecticut—the other area of southern New England not covered by charter or other royal grant of ownership—was largely voluntary.

From the early 1630s the Connecticut vacuum proved to be a magnet for settlers from several of the colonies. The first settlers were Dutch from New Amsterdam, who in mid-1633 established a trading post—for trade with the Indians—at Fort Good Hope (now Hartford). The preceding fall, Edward Winslow, a leader of Plymouth, had explored the Connecticut River Valley; after unsuccessfully trying to promote a joint Plymouth-Massachusetts expedition in the summer, he organized a trading post on the river at Windsor, north of Hartford, in the fall of 1634. John Oldham, from Massachusetts, founded a small settlement, at about the same time, at Pyquag (Wethersfield), south of Hartford on the Connecticut River. In the following year, other groups from the Bay settled around Hartford and even at Windsor, in defiance of Plymouth’s claim to engrossment of the area.

In the summer of 1635, a Dutch vessel, erecting a fort and trading post at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was forcibly driven off by John Winthrop, Jr., a son of the Massachusetts governor and an agent of Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and other lords who had jointly received a grant of the territory from the Council for New England. Winthrop named the conquered settlement Saybrook in his patron’s honor.

One of the most important founders of Connecticut was Rev. Thomas
Hooker, minister at Newton in the Bay Colony. While Hooker was scarcely a libertarian, he was a moderate who was highly critical of the rigors of the Massachusetts theocracy. Hooker especially objected to the policy of admitting only a minority to membership in the approved Puritan churches, and of the virtually automatic reelection of state officials that had been instituted by the ruling oligarchy. Hooker also urged a clearer definition of the laws in order to limit the arbitrary rule of the magistrates. Finally, Hooker and his followers left Massachusetts in 1636 to settle at Hartford, his associates being led by the wealthy John Haynes and the lawyer Roger Ludlow, who moved southwestward in three years to found the Connecticut towns of Fairfield and Stratford. These and the previous river towns had all been settled with the permission of Massachusetts. But now a conflict arose between the claims of the English lords to the entire Connecticut Valley (as well as to Saybrook), and the right of the settlers themselves. In March 1636 the Massachusetts General Court, in a decision agreed upon by Hooker, the Connecticut settlers, and Winthrop—who had been regarded as governor of the territory—created a commission to govern the Connecticut River towns. In the joint agreement, Massachusetts—and Winthrop—ceded all governmental powers to the commission (all commissioners were to be residents of the territory), which was empowered to govern with the consent of all the inhabitants—thereby at least formally widening the base of government beyond the body of church membership. The commission was to be temporary, lasting only a year, but the effect was to relinquish all of Massachusetts’ and Winthrop’s claims to the river towns, and to leave Winthrop in charge of Saybrook.

Early the following year, three river towns—Hartford, Windsor (which had bought out Plymouth’s claim), and Wethersfield—elected three men from each town to meet as a General Court and act as the sovereign governmental authority. In the spring of 1638, the Reverend Mr. Hooker declared in an election-day sermon that the “foundation of authority is laid... in the free consent of the people”; in January 1639 the three towns established their own permanent government based on a written constitution, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The most northerly river town of Agawam (Springfield), led by William Pynchon, refused to join in this constitution, and instead submitted itself (permanently, as it eventually turned out) to Massachusetts’ rule.

The Fundamental Orders, largely inspired by Hooker, provided for a unicameral General Court of four deputies from each of the towns, as well as an annually elected governor and assistants. The governor was to be subordinate to the General Court, which had the legislative power not subject to any gubernatorial veto. Furthermore, the governor and the assistants could not serve for two consecutive years. These provisions, however, did not prevent the assistants from forming an oligarchy, by obtaining a veto power over the General Court. Yet the united colony of Connecticut still remained a federation of independent towns, since all
power not expressly granted to the General Court continued to be reserved to the separate towns.

Let it not be thought, however, that the more democratic Connecticut framework was significantly less intolerant than Massachusetts Bay. The Connecticut leaders agreed with Massachusetts that a major task of the state was to compel uniformity of religious creed. Connecticut’s law of 1642 provided that if “any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.” In 1644 the General Court established the Puritan church by taxing all residents for its support. And failure to attend a Puritan church, or speaking critically of its official doctrine, was outlawed and punished by stiff fines. While there was no official religious test for voting in Connecticut, as there was in the Bay, suffrage was restricted to freemen. Admission to the ranks of freemen was, in effect, restricted to orthodox churchmen, the admission being decided by the General Court itself. And one of the requirements for admission was that the person be of “peaceable and honest conversation”; interpretation of this vague test rested with the authorities. The chief difference between Massachusetts and Connecticut rule was that Hooker and Connecticut based the government of the colony on the body of orthodox church members, while Massachusetts government was far more centered in the hands of an oligarchy of magistrates and ministers.

Whereas local town government was guarded against any invasion by central government power, the same cannot be said for the liberty of the individual in Connecticut. Land allocation was, as in Massachusetts, under the control of the local oligarchy; land reverted to the ownership of the town if the individual owner moved away; forced labor was imposed for road building; and strangers had to be admitted by the town government. Blasphemy, drunkenness, and the like were outlawed and indentured servants jealously guarded. Speech critical of the government was severely punished. One woman was duly executed for expressing anti-Christian sentiments. A score of women were punished for alleged witchcraft and several hanged—the persecution of “witches” reached a peak in the early 1660s. Repeatedly, in the late 1640s and 1650s, the Connecticut government took steps to overrule the towns so as not to admit supposed “undesirables” to residence. Minimum requirements of property for “freemen” and for “admitted inhabitants” were imposed. By the 1660s oligarchy in Connecticut had grown considerably and at the expense of the originally more democratic framework envisioned by Thomas Hooker.

Meanwhile, what of Saybrook? By the early 1640s, the English lords had lost interest in their claims and had, at least
de facto,
abandoned them. The only proprietor living at Saybrook was George Fenwick, who illegally and without consulting his partners sold the ownership of Saybrook to Connecticut in exchange for the privilege of exacting tolls on goods passing through the mouth of the Connecticut River. From the time of this agreement,
in 1643–44, Connecticut assumed complete jurisdiction over Saybrook.

By 1662 fifteen towns had associated themselves in the Connecticut colony. Most of them were situated on the Connecticut River; the others were in the Fairfield-Stratford area to the southwest, on Long Island Sound, or eastward in the New London area. In addition, several townships on Long Island had joined Connecticut, including Southampton, Huntington, and Oyster Bay.

Completely separate from the Connecticut towns, for over a generation, was the Colony of New Haven. The founder of New Haven was the Reverend John Davenport, who arrived in Boston from England with his followers just in time to play a leading role in the persecution of Anne Hutchinson. To Davenport,
mirabile dictu,
Massachusetts Bay was lax and soft and not nearly theocratic enough. And so the Reverend Mr. Davenport, along with the wealthy merchant Theophilus Eaton, founded New Haven as an independent town in the spring of 1638. The land was purchased from the Indians. Davenport and Eaton made sure that
their
ruling theocracy would be
really
oligarchic, without any of the Bay Colony’s democratic taint. In mid-1639, they selected twelve men, who in turn chose seven men, to begin the church, and government, of the town. This committee of seven had absolute power over admission of any member to the church, and only church members, of course, could vote in governmental elections. The result was that at the outset over one-half of the inhabitants of New Haven town were disfranchised, an achievement which Massachusetts took a score of years of growth and immigration to emulate.

The laws of New Haven were expressly to be confined to the “laws of God,” as interpreted by the ruling clique. The seven committeemen, known as the “pillars of the church,” chose nine or more additional men to constitute the General Court of the town. This court elected a magistrate and four deputies who served as judges. There was no need for jury trial, as the answers were to be found by the judges in the Bible. The town’s General Court
was
the sole “town meeting.” In short, there was little for even the restricted voting list to vote about.