The Fathers of New England: A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths

But it soon became necessary for the four towns of what is now Rhode Island to have something more legal upon which to base their right to exist than a title derived from their plantation covenants and Indian bargains. Massachusetts was extending her claims southward; Edward Winslow was in England ready to show that the Rhode Island settlements were within the bounds of the Plymouth patent; and certain individuals, traders and land-seekers, were locating in the Narragansett country and taking possession of the soil. To combat these claims, Roger Williams, who had so vehemently denied the validity of a royal patent a few years before, but influenced now, it may be, by Gorton's insistence that a legal title could be obtained only from England, sailed overseas and secured from the parliamentary commissioners in March, 1644, a charter uniting Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport, under the name of Providence Plantations in the Narragansett Bay, and granting them powers of government. For the moment even this document had no certain value, for, in spite of the fact that the parliamentarians were at war with the King, Charles I was still sovereign of England and should he win in the Civil War the title would be worthless. However, the patent was not put in force until 1647, after the victory of Cromwell at Naseby had given control into the hands of Parliament; and then a general meeting was held at Portsmouth consisting of the freemen of Warwick, Portsmouth, and Newport, and ten representatives from Providence. The patent did not state how affairs were to be managed, and the colonials, meeting in subsequent assemblies, worked out the problem in their own way. They refused to have a governor, and, creating only a presiding officer with four assistants, constituted a court of trials for the hearing of important criminal and civil causes. No general court was created by law, but a legislative body soon came into existence consisting of six deputies from each town. Before this Portsmouth meeting of 1647 adjourned, it adopted a code of laws in which witchcraft trials and imprisonment for debt were forbidden, capital punishment was largely abolished, and divorce was granted for adultery only. In 1652, the assembly passed a noteworthy law against the holding of negroes in slavery.

But the new patent did not bring peace to the colony. In 1649, Roger Williams wrote to Governor Winthrop: "Our poor colony is in civil dissension. Their last meeting [of the assembly] at which I have not been, have fallen into factions. Mr. Coddington and Captain Partridge, etc., are the heads of one, and Captain Clarke, Mr. Easton, etc., the heads of the other." What had happened was this. Coddington, representing the conservative and theocratic wing of the assembly and opposing those who were more liberally minded, had evidently applied to Massachusetts and Plymouth for support in the effort to obtain an independent government for Aquidneck. This plan would have destroyed what unity the colony had obtained under the patent, but Coddington wished to be governor of a colony of his own. Both Massachusetts and Plymouth were favorable to this plan, as they hoped to further their own claims to the territory of islands and mainland. Twice Coddington made application to the newly formed Confederation of New England for admission, but was refused unless he would bring in Aquidneck as part of Massachusetts or Plymouth, the latter of which laid claim to it. Coddington himself was willing to do this but found the opposition to the plan so vehement that he gave up the attempt and went to England to secure a patent of his own. After long negotiations he was successful in his quest and returned with a document which appointed him governor for life with almost viceregal powers. But he had reckoned without the people whom he was to govern. Learning of the outcome of Coddington's mission and hearing that he had had secret dealings also with the Dutch at New Amsterdam, the inhabitants of the islands rose in revolt, hanged Captain Partridge and compelled Coddington to seek safety in flight. Williams again went to England in 1651 and procured the recall of Coddington's commission and a confirmation of his own patent, and Coddington in 1656 gave in his submission and was forgiven, The early history of Rhode Island thus furnishes a remarkable exhibition of intense individualism in things religious and a warring of disruptive forces in matters of civil organization.

Connecticut was settled during the years 1634 to 1636 by people from Massachusetts. Knowledge of the fertile Connecticut valley had come early to the Dutch, who had planted a blockhouse, the House of Good Hope, at the southeast corner of the land upon which Hartford now stands. Plymouth, too, in searching for advantageous trade openings had sent out one William Holmes, who sailed past the Dutch fort and took possession of the site of Windsor. In the autumn of 1634 a certain John Oldham, trader and rover and frequent disturber of the Puritan peace, came with a few companions and began to occupy and cultivate lands within the bounds of modern Wethersfield. Settlers continued to arrive from Massachusetts, either by land or by water, actuated by land-hunger and stirred to movement westward by the same driving impulse that for years to come was to populate the frontier wherever it stretched. The territory thus possessed was claimed at first by Massachusetts, on the theory that the southern line of the colony, if extended westward, would include this portion of the Connecticut River. It was also claimed by the group of English lords and gentlemen, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and other Puritans, who, as they supposed, had obtained through the Earl of Warwick from the New England Council a grant of land extending west and southwest from Narragansett Bay forty leagues. These claims were of course irreconcilable, but the English lords, in order to assert their title, sent over in 1635 twenty servants, known as the Stiles party, who reached Connecticut in the summer of that year. Thus by autumn there were on the ground four sets of rival claimants: the Dutch, the Plymouth traders, various emigrants from Massachusetts, chiefly from the town of Dorchester, and the Stiles party, representing the English lords and gentlemen. Their relations were not harmonious, for the Dutch tried to drive out the Plymouth traders, and the latter resented in their turn the attempt of the Dorchester men to occupy their lands.

The matter was to be settled not by force but by weight of numbers and soundness of title. In 1635, a new and larger migration was under consideration in Massachusetts, prompted by various motives: partly personal, as shown in the rivalries of strong men in a colony already overstocked with leaders; partly material, as indicated by the desire for wider fields for cultivation and especially good pasture; and partly political, as evidenced by the dislike on the part of many for the power of the elders and magistrates in Massachusetts and by the strong inclination of masterful men toward a government of their own. Thomas Hooker, the pastor of the Newtown church, John Haynes, the Governor of Massachusetts in 1635, and Roger Ludlow, a former magistrate and deputy governor who had failed of election to the magistracy in the same year, were the leaders of the movement and, if we may judge from later events, were believers in certain political ideas that were not finding application in the Bay Colony. Disappointed because of the rigidity of the Massachusetts system, they seem to have waited for an opportunity to put into practice the principles which they believed essential to the true government of a people.

When the decision was finally reached and certain of the inhabitants of Newtown, Watertown, and Roxbury were ready to enter on their removal, the question naturally arose as to the title to the territory. In June, 1635, Massachusetts had asserted her claim by exercising a sort of supervision over those who had already gone to Connecticut; but in October John Winthrop, Jr., the Reverend Hugh Peters, and Henry Vane arrived from England with authority from the lords and gentlemen to push their claim, and Winthrop actually bore a commission as governor of the entire territory, which included Connecticut. It is hardly possible that Hooker and Haynes would have ignored the demands of these agents, and yet to acknowledge Winthrop as their governor would have been to accept a head who was not of their own choosing. In all probability some arrangement was made with Winthrop, according to which the Englishmen's title to the lands was recognized but at the same time the Connecticut settlers were to have full powers of self-government, and the question of a governor was left for the moment undecided, Winthrop confining his jurisdiction to Saybrook, the settlement which he was to promote at the mouth of the river. This agreement was embodied in a commission which was drawn up by the Massachusetts General Court and issued in March, 1636, "on behalf of our said members and John Winthrop, Jr.," and was to last for one year. Who actually wrote this commission we do not know, but the Connecticut men said afterwards that it arose from the desire of the people who removed, because they did not want to go away without a frame of government agreed on beforehand and did not want to recognize "any claymes of the Massachusetts jurisdiction over them by vertew of Patent." Apparently the people going to Connecticut wanted to get as far away from Massachusetts as possible.

Armed with their commission, in the summer of 1636, members of the Newtown church to the number of about one hundred persons, led by Thomas Hooker, their pastor, and Samuel Stone, his assistant, made a famous pilgrimage under summer skies through the woods that lay between Massachusetts and the Connecticut River. Bearing Mrs. Hooker in a litter and driving their cattle before them, these courageous pioneers, men, women, and children, after a fortnight's journeying, reached Hartford, the site of their future home, already occupied by those who had foregathered there in number larger even than those who had newly arrived. At about the same time, William Pynchon and others of Roxbury, acting from similar motives, took the same course westward, but instead of continuing down the Connecticut River, as the others had done, stopped at its banks and made their settlement at Agawam (Springfield), where they built a warehouse and a wharf for use in trade with the Indians. The lower settlements, Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, became agricultural communities; but Springfield, standing at the junction of Indian trails and river communication, was destined to become the center of the beaver trade of the region, shipping furs and receiving commodities through Boston, either in shallops around the Cape or on pack-horses overland by the path the emigrants had trod. Pynchon's settlement was one of the towns named in the commission and, for the first year after it was founded, joined with the others in maintaining order in the colony.

The commission government came to an end in March, 1637, and there is reason to think that during the last month, an election of committees took place in Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, which would show that the Connecticut settlers were exercising the privilege of the franchise more than a year before Hooker preached his famous sermon declaring that the right of government lay in the people. There also is some reason to think that the leaders were still undecided whether or not to come to an agreement with the English lords and gentlemen and to put themselves under the latter's jurisdiction. But as Winthrop's commission expired at the end of a year and no new governor was appointed – the English Puritans having become absorbed in affairs at home – the Connecticut colony was thrown on its own resources and compelled to set up a government of its own. Pynchon at Springfield now cast in his lot with Massachusetts, and from this time forward Springfield was a part of the Massachusetts colony, but the men of Connecticut, disliking Pynchon's desertion, determined to act for themselves. On May 31, 1638, Hooker preached a sermon laying down the principles according to which government should be established; and during the six months that followed, the court, consisting of six magistrates and nine deputies, framed the Fundamental Orders, the laws that were to govern the colony.

This remarkable document, though deserving all the encomiums passed upon it, was not a constitution in any modern sense of the word and established nothing fundamentally new, because the form of government it outlined differed only in certain particulars from that of Massachusetts and Plymouth. It was made up of two parts, a preamble, which is a plantation covenant like that signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, and a series of laws or orders passed either separately or together by the court which drafted them. This court was a lawmaking body and it made public the laws when they were passed. That this body of laws or, as we may not improperly call it, this frame of government was ratified, as Trumbull says, by all the free planters assembled at Hartford on January 14, 1639, is not impossible, though such action would seem unnecessary as the court was a representative body, and unlikely as the time of year was not favorable for holding a mass-meeting at Hartford. Later courts never hesitated to change the articles without referring the changes to the planters. The articles simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy governor – who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen.

In matters of detail the Connecticut system differed from that of Massachusetts in three particulars: it imposed no religious test for those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church member, though it is probable that in practice only those would be admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reëlection until after the expiration of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the seventeenth century; the powers of the magistrates were increased; and the governor was allowed to succeed himself. Connecticut was less democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exercised the freeman's privilege of voting for the higher officials. By no stretch of the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New England colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men.

Two more settlements remain to be considered before a survey of the foundations of New England can be called complete. When the Reverend John Wheelwright, the friend of Anne Hutchinson, was driven from Massachusetts and took his way northward to the region of Squamscott Falls where he founded Exeter, he entered a territory of grants and claims and rights of possession that render the early history of New Hampshire a tangle of difficulties. Out of a grant to Gorges and Mason of the stretch of coast between the Merrimac and the Kennebec in 1622, and a confirmation of Mason's right to the region between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, arose the settlement of Strawberry Bank, or Portsmouth, and accompanying it a controversy over the title to the soil that lasted throughout the colonial period. Mason called his territory New Hampshire; Gorges planned to call the region that he received New Somersetshire; and both designations took root, one as the name of a colony, the other as that of a county in Maine. At an earlier date, merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury had become interested in this part of New England and had sent over one Edward Hilton, who some time before 1627 began a settlement at Dover. The share of the Bristol merchants was purchased in 1633 by the English lords and gentlemen already concerned in the Connecticut settlement, for the purpose, it may be, of furnishing another refuge in New England, should conditions at home demand their withdrawal overseas. But nothing came of their purchase except an unfortunate controversy with Plymouth colony over trading boundaries on the Kennebec.

The men established on this northern frontier were often lawless and difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four settlements arose – Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in number, and "the generality, of mean and low estates," and little disposed to union among themselves. But in 1638-1639, when Massachusetts discovered that one interpretation of her charter would carry her northern boundary to a point above them, she took them under her protecting wing. After considerable debate this jurisdiction was recognized and the New Hampshire and Maine towns were brought within her boundaries. Henceforth, for many years a number of these towns, though in part Anglican communities and never burdened with the requirement that their freemen be church members, were represented in the general court at Boston. Nevertheless the Mason and Gorges adherents – whose Anglican and pro-monarchical sympathies were hostile to Puritan control and who were supported by the persistent efforts of the Mason family in England – were able to obtain the separation of New Hampshire from Massachusetts in 1678. Maine, however, remained a part of the Bay Colony to the end of the colonial period.

The circumstances attending the settlement of New Haven were wholly unlike those of New Hampshire. John Davenport, a London clergyman of an extreme Puritan type, Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant in the Baltic trade and a member of the Eastland Company, Samuel Eaton and John Lathrop, two nonconforming ministers, were the leaders of the movement. Lathrop never went to New Haven, and Samuel Eaton early returned to England. The leaders and many of their followers were men of considerable property for that day, and their interest in trade gave to the colony a marked commercial character. The company was composed of men and women from London and its vicinity, and of others who joined them from Kent, Hereford, and Yorkshire. As both Davenport and Theophilus Eaton were members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, they were familiar with its work; and on coming to America in June, 1637, they stopped at Boston and remained there during the winter. Pressure was brought upon them to make Massachusetts their home, but without success, for though Davenport had much in common with the Massachusetts people, he was not content to remain where he would be merely one among many. Desiring a free place for worship and trade, he sent Eaton voyaging to find one; and the latter, who had heard of Quinnipiac on the Connecticut shore, viewed this spot and reported favorably. In March, 1638, the company set sail from Boston and laid the foundations of the town of New Haven.

This company had neither charter nor land grant, and, as far as we know, it had made no attempt to obtain either. "The first planters," says Kingsley, "recognized in their acts no human authority foreign to themselves." Unlike the Pilgrims in their Mayflower compact, they made no reference in their plantation covenant to the dread sovereign, King James, and in none of their acts and statements did they express a longing for their native country or regard for its authority. Their settlement bears some resemblance to that of the Rhode Island towns, but it was better organized and more orderly from the beginning. The settlers may have drawn up their covenant before leaving Boston and may have reached Quinnipiac as a community already united in a common civil and religious bond. Their lands, which they purchased from the Indians, they laid out in their own way. The next year on June 4, 1639, they held a meeting in Robert Newman's barn and there, declaring that the Word of God should be their guide in families and commonwealth and that only church members should be sharers in government, they chose twelve men as the foundations of their church state. Two months later these twelve selected "seven pillars" who proceeded to organize a church by associating others with themselves. Under the leadership of the seven the government continued until October, when they resigned and a gathering of the church members elected Theophilus Eaton as their magistrate and four others to act as assistants, with a secretary and a treasurer. Thus was begun a form of government which when perfected was very similar to that of the other New England colonies.

While New Haven as a town-colony was taking on form, other plantations were arising near by. Milford was settled partly from New Haven and partly from Wethersfield, where an overplus of clergy was leading to disputes and many withdrawals to other parts. Guilford was settled directly from England. Southold on Long Island was settled also from England, by way of New Haven. Stamford had its origin in a Wethersfield quarrel, when the Reverend Richard Denton, "blind of one eye but not the least among the seers of Israel," departed with his flock. Branford also was born of a Wethersfield controversy and later received accessions from Long Island. In 1643, Milford, Guilford, and Stamford combined under the common jurisdiction of New Haven, to which Southold and Branford acceded later with a form of government copied after that of Massachusetts, though the colony was distinctly federal in character, consisting of "the government of New Haven with the plantations in combination therewith." Though there was no special reservation of town rights in the fundamental articles which defined the government, yet the towns, five in number, considered themselves free to withdraw at any time if they so desired.

We have thus reviewed the conditions under which some forty towns, grouped under five jurisdictions, were founded in New England. They were destined to treble their number in the next generation and to suffer such regrouping as to reduce the jurisdictions to four before the end of the century – New Hampshire separating from Massachusetts, New Haven being absorbed by Connecticut, and Plymouth submitting to the authority of Massachusetts under the charter of 1691. In this readjustment we have the origin of four of the six New England States of the present day.

CHAPTER IV

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 settlements of New England inevitably presented great variations of local life and color, stretching as they did from the Plymouth trucking posts in Maine, through the fishing villages of Saco and York, and those on the Piscataqua, to the towns of Long Island and the frontier communities of western Connecticut – Stamford and Greenwich. The inhabitants to the number of more than thirty thousand in 1640 were not only in possession of the coast but were also pushing their way into the interior. To fishing and agriculture they added trading, lumbering, and commerce, and were constantly reaching out for new lands and wider opportunities. The Pilgrims had hardly weathered their first hard winter when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Pynchon was making Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of all the colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. Stephen Goodyear built a trucking house on an island below the great falls of the Housatonic in 1642; other New Haven colonists engaged in ventures on Delaware Bay; and in 1645, the colony endeavored to open a direct trade with England. But nearly every New Haven enterprise failed, and by 1660 the wealth of the colony had materially diminished and the settlement had become "little else than a colony of discouraged farmers." Among all the colonies in New England and elsewhere there was considerable coasting traffic, and vessels went to Newfoundland and Bermuda, and even to the distant West Indies, to Madeira, and to Bilboa across the ocean. Ever since Winthrop built the Blessing of the Bay in 1631, the first sea-going craft launched in New England, Massachusetts had been the leading commercial colony, and her vessels occasionally made the long triangular voyage to Jamaica, and England, and back to the Bay. The vessels carried planks, pipe staves, furs, fish, and provisions, and exchanged them for sugar, molasses, household goods, and other wares and commodities needed for the comfort and convenience of the colonists.

The older generation was passing away. By 1660, Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, Haynes, Bradford, and Whiting were dead; Davenport and Roger Williams were growing old; some of the ablest men, Peters, Ludlow, Whitfield, Desborough, Hooke, had returned to England, and others less conspicuous had gone to the West Indies or to the adjacent colonies. The younger men were coming on, new arrivals were creeping in, and a loosening of the old rigidity was affecting the social order. The Cambridge platform of 1648, which embodied the orthodox features of the Congregational system as determined up to that time, gave place to the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662, which owed its rise to the coming to maturity of the second generation, the children of the first settlers, now admitted to membership but not to full communion – a wide departure from the original purpose of the founders. Rhode Island continued to be the colony of separatism and soul liberty, where Seeker, Generalist, Anabaptist, and religious anarchist of the William Harris type found place, though not always peace. Cotton Mather later said there had never been "such a variety of religions together on so small a spot as there have been in that colony."

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 (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is sorry to say) "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 mass of the New Englanders of the seventeenth century had but little education and but few opportunities for travel. As early as 1642, Massachusetts required that every child should be taught to read, and in 1647 enacted a law ordaining that every township should appoint a schoolmaster, and that the larger towns should each set up a grammar school. This well-known and much praised enactment, which made education the handmaid of religion and was designed to stem the tide of religious indifference rising over the colony, was better in intention than in execution. It had little effect at first, and even when under its provisions the common school gradually took root in New England, the education given was of a very primitive variety. Harvard College itself, chartered in 1636, was a seat of but a moderate amount of learning and at its best had only the training of the clergy in view. In Hartford and New Haven, grammar schools were founded under the bequest of Governor Hopkins, but came to little in the seventeenth century. In 1674, one Robert Bartlett left money for the setting up of a free school in New London, for the teaching of Latin to poor children, but the hope was richer than the fulfilment. In truth, of education for the laity at this time in New England there was scarcely more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The frugal townspeople of New England generally deemed education an unnecessary expense; the school laws were evaded, and when complied with were more honored in the breach than in the observance. Even when honestly carried out, they produced but slender results. Probably most people could sign their names after a fashion, though many extant wills and depositions bear only the marks of their signers. Schoolmasters and town clerks had difficulties with spelling and grammar, and the rural population were too much engrossed by their farm labors to find much time for the improvement of the mind. Except in the homes of the clergy and the leading men of the larger towns there were few books, and those chiefly of a religious character. The English Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, printed in Boston in 1681, were most frequently read, and in the houses of the farmers the British Almanac was occasionally found. There were no newspapers, and printing had as yet made little progress.

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.

CHAPTER V

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 coöperate 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 (to quote from Winthrop's Journal) "ran a different course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil administration, … had lately made Acomenticus (a poor village) 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-Charnisé, 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 (worth," says Winthrop, "forty or fifty pounds, where it was made, but of no use to us)," 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.

CHAPTER VI

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 régime 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.

Thus England was fashioning a new system and defining a new policy. By means of navigation acts, she barred the Dutch from the carrying trade and confined colonial commerce in large part to the mother country. She established councils and committees of trade and plantations, and, by the seizure of New Netherland in 1664 and the grant of the Carolinas and the Bahamas in 1663 and 1670, she completed the chain of her possessions in America from New England to Barbados. A far-flung colonial world was gradually taking shape, demanding of the King and his advisers an interest in America of a kind hitherto unknown. It is not surprising that so vast a problem, involving the trade and defense of nearly twenty colonies, should have made the internal affairs of New England seem of less consequence to the royal authorities than had been the case in the days of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, when the obtaining of the Massachusetts Bay charter had roused such intensity of feeling in England. What was interesting Englishmen was no longer the matter of religious obedience in the colonies, but rather that of their political and commercial dependence on the mother country.

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.[2 - 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.] 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.

After the receipt of the charter and its proclamation in the colony and after a slight readjustment of the government to meet the few changes required, the general court of Connecticut proceeded to enforce the full territorial rights of the colony. The men of Connecticut had made up their minds, now that the charter had come, to execute its terms to the uttermost and to extend the authority of the colony to the farthest bounds, so that, next to the government of the Bay, Connecticut might be the greatest in New England. The court took under its protection the towns of Stamford and Greenwich, and on the ground that the whole territory westward was within its jurisdiction warned the Dutch governor not to meddle. It accepted the petition of Southold on Long Island and of certain residents of Guilford, both of the New Haven federation, for annexation, and, sending a force to Long Island to demand the surrender of the western towns there, it seized Captain John Scott, who was planning to establish a separate government over them, and brought him to Hartford for trial. It informed the towns of Mystic and Pawcatuck, lying in the disputed land between Connecticut and Rhode Island, that they were in the Connecticut colony and must henceforth conduct their affairs according to its laws. The relations with Rhode Island were to be a matter of later adjustment, and no immediate trouble followed; but Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, protested angrily against Connecticut's claim to Dutch territory and brought the matter to the attention of the commissioners of the United Colonies. On one pretext or another, the latter delayed action; and the matter was not settled until England's seizure of New Amsterdam in 1664 brought the Dutch rule to an end and made operative the royal grant of the territory to the Duke of York, thus stopping Connecticut in her somewhat headlong career westward and taking from her the whole of Long Island and all the land west of the Connecticut River. If maintained, this grant would have reduced the colony by half and would have materially retarded its progress; but Connecticut eventually saved the western portion of her territory as far as the line of 1650. However, her people could do no more crowding on into the region beyond, for the province of New York now lay directly across the path of her westward expansion.