Conceived in Liberty (41 page)

The New Haven settlers soon founded other towns: in 1639, nearby Milford and Guilford on the coast, followed by Stamford, some distance to the southwest, in 1641. Milford, founded by Rev. Peter Prudden, was more democratic than the other towns. The rules on church membership and voting were relaxed, so that only less than one-fifth of the populace was disfranchised, and at least a handful of local leaders remained outside the church. A more rigid deviation from the New Haven norm characterized the town of Guilford, founded by Rev. Henry Whitfield, a friend of Hooker and Fenwick. In Guilford, political privileges were restricted not simply to Puritan church members, but to members of Whitfield’s
own
church.

Stamford was settled in a manner completely different from the settling of other towns. New Haven had recently acquired a tract of land via one of the usual arbitrary purchases from the Indians. Anxious to settle the land, Davenport persuaded a group of dissidents in Wethersfield, Connecticut, headed by Rev. Richard Denton, to found a settlement (Stamford) there. In return, Stamford would submit to the jurisdiction of New Haven, send deputies to New Haven’s town court, and accept magistrates and officials chosen by the New Haven court.

Another town settled by New Haven was Southold, in 1640, on the northeastern tip of Long Island. The tract had been purchased from someone who had a dubious grant from the old Council for New England. On that tract Southold was founded by Rev. John Youngs. Again, New Haven retained jurisdiction.

In 1643 these five towns—New Haven and its cluster of two (Stamford and Southold), and the two independent towns of Milford and Guilford—united to form the Colony of New Haven. The Frame of Government of the colony restricted suffrage in the same way as in the original New Haven town; indeed, each town’s government was similar to New Haven’s. Over each government was the central government of the colony. The approved church members—the freemen—elected the deputies from each town, a governor, and a court of magistrates; all of these constituted the unicameral General Court, which exercised the colony’s legislative, executive, and judicial functions. The colony, however, was a loose confederation of towns, each town being autonomous in its own affairs.

So entrenched was the original oligarchy that Theophilus Eaton had no difficulty in remaining magistrate of New Haven town and governor of the colony from the beginning until his death in 1658.

Other towns added later to New Haven Colony were Branford, near New Haven, and Greenwich, as an addition to Stamford. No further foothold was gotten on Long Island; the towns there decided to join Connecticut. The failure of Southampton, Huntington, and Oyster Bay to join New Haven Colony was a particularly bitter blow, since New Haven had helped finance their settlement. The Long Island towns, however, objected particularly to New Haven’s highly restrictive franchise.

As we might expect, the theocratic rigors of New Haven Colony were severe indeed. Drunkenness and sexual misdeeds were not only outlawed, but regulated minutely by the authorities. Even card playing, dancing, and singing were partially prohibited, because they tended to corrupt the youth and were a “misspense of precious time.” Smoking in public was prohibited. The laws were enforced with particular severity against the lower classes—servants and seamen especially. Punishment was inflicted by stocks, pillories, whipping, and imprisonment, and some persons were executed for the crime of adultery. In a typical sentence in New Haven town, Goodman Hunt and his wife were banished from the town because he allowed someone else to kiss Mrs. Hunt on a Sunday.

New Haven did not turn out to be a flourishing colony, and much of the capital of the merchants was dissipated in unprofitable ventures. Not the least of these were the repeated and unsuccessful attempts to plant New Haven colonies far to the southwest, along the banks of the Delaware River.

One trouble was that the Delaware already had settlements, and non-English ones at that. Sweden’s New Sweden Company had planted a settlement at Fort Christina (Wilmington) in 1637, headed by the Dutchman Peter Minuit. The Dutch established their own settlements on the river shortly thereafter. New Haven merchants organized the Delaware Company, and in 1640 their expedition, headed by Capt. George Lamberton and Capt. Nathaniel Turner, settled at Salem Creek, on the east bank of the river. Swedish and especially Dutch pressure against the colonists, added to the severe conditions, forced the closing of the settlement. Many years later, in the mid-1650s, New Haven projected a much larger, better-organized settlement on the Delaware, but this too never materialized. New Haven was anxious for others to make war upon the Dutch, to oust them from the Delaware and pave the way for their own colonial expansion. Massachusetts, however, wisely refused to be persuaded to war upon the Dutch for New Haven’s advantage, and the New Haveners were bitterly disappointed when Cromwell made peace with Holland.

Discontent against the tight oligarchic rule was manifest in the colony by the 1650s especially outside the town of New Haven. When war loomed against the Dutch in the mid-1650s, citizens of Stamford, Milford, and Southold demanded an extension of the highly restricted suffrage and the substitution of regular English law for the rigors of the “Bible Commonwealth.” Robert Basset of Stamford was a particularly vocal dissident, attacking the government as tyrannical, and one under which justice could not possibly be obtained. The colony cracked down severely on all dissidents, hauling them into court and charging them with an attempt to change, undermine, and overthrow constituted authority, and with breaking their loyalty oaths by stirring up rebellion. All were convicted and heavily fined, and made haste to confess their sins. After this suppression, loyalty oaths were more widely imposed upon the inhabitants. Even so, grumbling continued against the high taxes and heavy debts stemming from increased governmental expenses for schools, meetinghouses, watchhouses, etc., and there was widespread tax evasion in the colony.

By the 1650s, then, five colonies were established in New England, as virtually self-governing entities: Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth in central New England, and Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven in the south. The estimated total population of these colonies in 1650 was: Plymouth, 1,500; Rhode Island, 800;
*
Connecticut and New Haven combined, 4,100; Massachusetts Bay, with twice as much as the others combined, 14,000.

What, however, of northern New England—the region north of Massachusetts Bay? The first settlements there had been made by “unauthorized” private groups of fishermen. In 1621 a group settled at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, near the site of what is now Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the Maine border. Two years later, another fishing group settled at Dover, up the bay from Portsmouth. More formal colonizing came later when, in August 1622, the Council for New England jointly granted to John Mason (a friend of the Duke of Buckingham, a favorite of King Charles I) and Sir Ferdinando Gorges all the land between the Merrimack and the Kennebec rivers (the former is now approximately at the New Hampshire—Massachusetts border, the latter is in western Maine). Small special subgrants of land were now made. In 1622 to David Thompson, who the following year founded the settlement of Rye (south of Portsmouth on the coast). In 1623 Christopher Levett received
a small grant and founded a settlement at the mouth of the Casco River (west of the Kennebec in Maine). And the following year John Oldham and Richard Vines settled Biddeford, on the south side of the Saco River, in what is now southern Maine. In 1629 Mason and Gorges agreed to divide their granted territory, Gorges obtaining all the land north of the Piscataqua, which he called Maine, and Mason all the land to the south, now called New Hampshire. In the early 1630s, Walter Neale founded two settlements on the Piscataqua, expanding Portsmouth further to the south, and adding the Rye settlement, and South Berwick on the north side. Gorges concentrated his colonizing in the area of York, a bit north of the border.

By the mid-1630s, then, northern New England was split in two, with small settlements along the coast: Casco, Biddeford, South Berwick, and especially York in Maine; Portsmouth and Dover in New Hampshire. John Mason had every intention of becoming lord proprietor of New Hampshire. Asserting that all the land was his own, he gave orders to arrest or shoot any persons daring to hunt animals on “his” territory. Mason also intended to establish the Anglican church in New Hampshire and to outlaw Dissenters. Stern resistance by the populace thwarted his designs, and when Mason died at the end of 1635, the colonists rebelled and announced the vacating of Mason’s claims. They declared Mason’s lands appropriated, and from then on they refused to recognize the sovereignty of his heirs. New Hampshire territory was now, like Rhode Island, a vacuum for free and unhampered settlement. Two years later, Rev. John Wheelwright, the first Hutchinsonian to be expelled from Massachusetts, walked northward through the snows to found the town of Exeter, New Hampshire. Wheelwright and his followers drew up the Exeter Compact in founding the town; it was modeled after the original Mayflower Compact. More orthodox Puritans, sent from Massachusetts Bay shortly afterward, founded Hampton, in New Hampshire.

Maine, however, was not that lucky with its proprietary feudal overlord. In 1639 Gorges obtained a royal charter that confirmed his position as proprietor and governor of Maine. Gorges sent his cousin Thomas Gorges to Maine to rule the colony, and he established a provincial court at York.

But if New Hampshire territory was a vacuum, it was, again, a vacuum that invited seizure by the ambitious, expansionist Massachusetts power. Massachusetts not only was impelled by the territorial drive endemic to all states, but also was attracted by the rich prospect of timber, fur, and fishing resources in the north. Unlike Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine had no influential Puritan friends in England; indeed, Mason and Gorges had been royal favorites and the settlers were largely Anglican. Hence, when the Puritans came to power in England, northern New England was looked upon as a ripe plum for Massachusetts’ designs.

The New Hampshire towns were the first to go. Hampton, founded as an outpost of Massachusetts Bay, had always been under its jurisdiction,
and had been sending a representative to the Massachusetts General Court. The other towns, beginning with Dover, were appropriated by Massachusetts during 1641–43, a circumstance forcing Reverend Mr. Wheelwright to flee once more, this time to Maine. Also appropriated were scattered New Hampshire towns far to the west of the Piscataqua towns: Merrimack and Salisbury on the Merrimack River, and Haverhill far to the northwest.

Fortunately, Massachusetts’ rule over the New Hampshire towns was relatively enlightened—due partly to the religious diversity of the towns and the numerous Anglicans living there. A large measure of home rule was allowed; the towns governed their local affairs in town meetings and elected deputies to the General Court at Boston. Significantly, the New Hampshiremen were exempt from the church-membership qualification for voting, a qualification strictly enforced in Massachusetts proper.

Massachusetts’ grab of Maine came a decade later and encountered stiffer resistance. Gorges’ death in 1647, coupled with the rise of Puritanism in England, left a vacuum in Maine. The three towns at the southern tip of Maine—York, Wells, and Kittery—attempted to form a free and independent union like that in Rhode Island, but Massachusetts did not permit it to come to fruition. Ignoring an appeal by Maine to Parliament, Massachusetts seized the towns in 1652 and then proceeded to annex the Saco and Casco settlements as well. Fortunately, the Maine towns received the same home-rule privileges as the towns of New Hampshire. Thus, both New Hampshire and Maine had by the 1650s been swallowed up by Massachusetts Bay.

*
Of the distribution of population in the Rhode Island settlements, the breakdown in 1655 was approximately: Newport, 38 percent; Portsmouth, 29 percent; Providence, 17 percent; Warwick, 16 percent. In short, two-thirds of the Rhode Islanders lived in Aquidneck and one-third on the mainland.

It was characteristic of the New England colonies that their first exercise in united action came in a joint slaughter of Indians; specifically, the Pequot War of 1636–37. The Pequots, who were the dominant tribe in the Connecticut area, had had difficulty with the Dutch in Connecticut and were therefore eager at first to welcome the English colonists. Unfortunately, Lt. William Holmes, commanding the first English settlement— the Plymouth expedition to Windsor—started off on the wrong foot; in late 1633 he purchased the land from dissident sachems whom he had brought back with him, and who had been expelled by the Pequots. Another unfortunate incident was the murder by the Pequots of a drunken Virginian sea captain named Stone, in the summer of 1633, in the mistaken belief that he was Dutch. Yet, the following year, the Pequot grand sachem Sassacus made with Massachusetts Bay a treaty that amounted to surrender to white wishes: the English were to be allowed to settle in Connecticut. The murderers of Stone were also to be surrendered to the English, but the latter thoughtfully made no demands for enforcement of this provision.

This peaceful state of affairs was disrupted by the murder of a prominent New England trader. In 1636, John Oldham was killed by the Block Island Indians on Block Island in the Atlantic Ocean east of Long Island. Now there were several things that characterized white treatment of the Indians in North America: (1) Indian guilt was always treated as collective rather than individual and punishment was never limited to the actual individual criminals; (2) the punishment was enormously greater than the original crime; (3) no careful distinctions were made between Indian tribes, the collective guilt being extended beyond the specific tribe involved;
and (4) surprise attacks were used extensively to slaughter men, women, and children of the tribe. All these characteristics marked the white reaction to the murder of Oldham. In the first place, immediately after the death of Oldham, a party of whites under John Gallop shot at and rammed the unarmed Indian crew that had committed the crime, until all but four of the Indians were drowned. Of the four, two surrendered and one of them was promptly thrown overboard by Gallop.