Part 19 (2/2)
They departed to Shawomet, but Governor Winthrop forbade them to stay there; and in April, 1644, Gorton and his friends once more sought refuge at Aquidneck.[17] Gorton, having contrived to reach England, returned in May, 1648, with an order from the Parliamentary commissioners for plantations, directed to the authorities of Ma.s.sachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut, to permit him and his friends to reside in peace at Warwick, which they were then permitted to do.[18] In 1652 Gorton became president of Providence and Warwick.[19]
In December, 1643, the agents of Ma.s.sachusetts in England obtained from the Parliamentary commissioners for plantations a grant of all the main-land in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay; and it appeared for the moment as if it were all over with the independence of the Rhode Island towns.
Fortunately, Williams was in England at the time, and with indomitable energy he set to work to counteract the danger.
In less than three months he persuaded the same commissioners to issue, March 14, 1644, a second instrument[20] incorporating the towns of ”Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay in New England,”
and (in flat contradiction of the earlier grant to Ma.s.sachusetts) giving them ”the Tract of Land in the Continent of America called by the name of Narragansett Bay, bordering Northward and Northeast on the patent of the Ma.s.sachusetts, East and Southeast on Plymouth Patent, South on the Ocean, and on the West and Northwest by the Indians called Nahigganeucks, alias Narregansets--the whole Tract extending about twenty-five English miles unto the Pequot River and Country.”
The charter contained no mention of religion or citizens.h.i.+p, though it gave the inhabitants full power ”to rule themselves and such others as shall hereafter inhabit within any Part of the said Tract, by such a Form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Parte of them, they shall find most suitable to their Estate and Condition.”
Williams returned to America in September, 1644. On account of the unfriendly disposition of Ma.s.sachusetts he was compelled, when leaving for England, to take his departure from the Dutch port of New Amsterdam. Now, like one vindicated in name and character, he landed in Boston, and, protected by a letter[21] from ”divers Lords and others of the Parliament,” pa.s.sed unmolested through Ma.s.sachusetts, and reached Providence by the same route which, as a homeless wanderer, he had pursued eight years before. It is said that at Seekonk he was met by fourteen canoes filled with people, who escorted him across the water to Providence with shouts of triumph.[22]
Peace and union, however, did not at once flow from the labors of Williams. The hostility of Ma.s.sachusetts and Plymouth towards the Rhode-Islanders seemed at first increased; and the principle of self-government, to which the Rhode Island towns.h.i.+ps owed their existence, delayed their confederation. At last, in May, 1647, an a.s.sembly of freemen from the four towns of Portsmouth, Newport, Providence, and Warwick met at Portsmouth, and proceeded to make laws in the name of the whole body politic, incorporated under the charter.
The first president was John Coggeshall; and Roger Williams and William Coddington were two of the first a.s.sistants.
Ma.s.sachusetts, aided by the Plymouth colony, still continued her machinations, and an ally was found in Rhode Island itself in the person of William Coddington. In 1650 he went to England and obtained an order, dated April 3, 1651, for the severance of the island from the main-land settlements.[23] Fortunately, however, for the preservation of Rhode Island unity, an act of intemperate bigotry on the part of Ma.s.sachusetts saved the state from Coddington's interference.
The sect called Anabaptists, or Baptists, opposed to infant baptism, made their appearance in New England soon after the banishment of Mrs.
Hutchinson. Rhode Island became a stronghold for them, and in 1638 Roger Williams adopted their tenets and was rebaptized.[24] In 1644 a Baptist church was established at Newport.[25] The same year Ma.s.sachusetts pa.s.sed a law decreeing banishment of all professors of the new opinions.[26] In October, 1650, three prominent Baptists, John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, visited Ma.s.sachusetts, when they were seized, whipped, fined, imprisoned, and barely escaped with their lives.[27]
The alarm created in Rhode Island by these proceedings brought the towns once more into a common policy, and Clarke and Williams were sent to England to undo the work of Coddington. Aided by the warm friends.h.i.+p of Sir Harry Vane, the efforts of the agents were crowned with success. Coddington's commission was revoked by an order of council in September, 1652, and the towns.h.i.+ps were directed to unite under the charter of 1644.[28] Coddington did not at once submit, and there was a good deal of dissension in the Rhode Island towns till June, 1654, when Williams returned from England. Then Coddington yielded,[29] and, August 31, commissioners from the four towns voted to restore the government const.i.tuted seven years before. The consolidation of Rhode Island was perfected when, in 1658, Ma.s.sachusetts released her claims to jurisdiction there.[30]
Liberty of conscience as a.s.serted by Roger Williams did not involve the abrogation of civil restraint, and when one William Harris disturbed the peace in 1656, by a.s.serting this doctrine in a pamphlet,[31] Williams, then governor, had a warrant issued for his apprehension. When, in 1658, Williams retired to private life the possibility of founding a state in which ”religious freedom and civil order could stand together” was fully proved to the world.[32]
Besides the Indian power, as many as six independent jurisdictions existed originally in the present state of Connecticut. (1) The Dutch fort of ”Good Hope,” established in 1633, on the Connecticut River, had jurisdiction over a small area of country. (2) The Plymouth colony owned some territory on the Connecticut River and built a fort there soon after the Dutch came. (3) Next was the jurisdiction of Fort Saybrook, the sole evidence of possession on the part of the holders of a patent from the earl of Warwick, president of the Council for New England, who claimed to own the whole of Connecticut. (4) A much larger jurisdiction was that of the Connecticut River towns, settled in 1635-1636, contemporaneously with the banishment of Roger Williams.
(5) New Haven was settled in 1638, in the height of the Antinomian difficulties. (6) A claim was advanced by the marquis of Hamilton for a tract of land running from the mouth of the Connecticut River to Narragansett Bay, a.s.signed to him in the division of 1635, but it did not become a disturbing factor till 1665.
The early relations between the Dutch and English colonies were, as we have seen, characterized by kindness and good-fellows.h.i.+p. The Dutch advised the Plymouth settlers to remove from their ”present barren quarters,” and commended to them the valley of the ”Fresh River”
(Connecticut), referring to it as a fine place both for plantation and trade.[33] Afterwards, some Mohegan Indians visiting Plymouth in 1631 made similar representations. Their chief, Uncas, an able, unscrupulous, and ambitious savage, made it his great ambition to attain the heads.h.i.+p of his aggressive western neighbors, the Pequots.
The only result had been to turn the resentment of the Pequots against himself; and he sought the protection of the Plymouth government by encouraging them to plant a settlement on the Connecticut in his own neighborhood.[34]
These persuasions had at length some effect, and in 1632 Edward Winslow, being sent in a bark to examine the river, reported the country as conforming in every respect to the account given of it by the Dutch and the Indians.[35] Meanwhile, the Indians, not liking the delay, visited Boston and tried to induce the authorities there to send out a colony, but, though Governor Winthrop received them politely, he dismissed them without the hoped-for a.s.sistance.[36]
In July, 1633, Bradford and Winslow made a special visit to Boston to discuss the plan of a joint trading-post, but they did not receive much encouragement. Winthrop and his council suggested various objections: the impediments to commerce due to the sand-bar at the mouth; the long continuance of ice in spring, and the mult.i.tude of Indians in the neighborhood. But it seems likely that these allegations were pretexts, since we read in Winthrop's _Journal_ that in September, 1633, a bark was sent from Boston to Connecticut; and John Oldham, with three others, set out from Watertown overland to explore the river.[37]
Plymouth determined to wait no longer, and in October, 1633, sent a vessel, commanded by William Holmes, with workmen and the frame of a building for a trading-post. When they arrived in the river, they were surprised to find other Europeans in possession. The Dutch, aroused from their dream of security by the growth of the English settlement, made haste in the June previous to purchase from the Indians twenty acres where Hartford now stands, upon which they built a fort a short time after. When the vessel bearing the Plymouth traders reached this point in the river, the Dutch commander, John van Curler, commanded Holmes to stop and strike his flag. But Holmes, paying little attention to the threats of the Dutchman, continued his voyage and established a rival post ten miles above, at a place now known as Windsor.[38]
Meanwhile, the s.h.i.+p which Winthrop sent to Connecticut went onward to New Netherland, where the captain notified Governor Van Twiller, in Winthrop's name, that the English had a royal grant to the territory about the Connecticut River. It returned to Boston in October, 1633, and brought a reply from Van Twiller that the Dutch had also a claim under a grant from their States-General of Holland.[39] In December, 1633, Van Twiller heard of Holmes's trading-post and despatched an armed force of seventy men to expel the intruders. They appeared before the fort with colors flying, but finding that Holmes had received reinforcements, and that it would be impossible to dislodge him without bloodshed, they returned home without molesting him.[40]
The Plymouth settlers were destined to be dispossessed, not by the Dutch, but by their own countrymen. The people of Ma.s.sachusetts were now fully aroused, and the news that came to Boston in the summer of 1634 that the small-pox had practically destroyed the Indians on the river increased ”the hankering” after the coveted territory.[41] The people of Watertown, Dorchester, and Newtown (Cambridge) had long been restless under the Ma.s.sachusetts authority, and were anxious for a change. Dorchester was the residence of Captain Israel Stoughton, and Watertown the residence of Richard Brown and John Oldham, all three of whom had been under the ban of the orthodox Puritan church. At Watertown also had sprung up the first decided opposition to the aristocratic claim of the court of a.s.sistants to lay taxes on the people. As for Newtown (now Cambridge), its inhabitants could not forget that, though selected in the first instance as the capital of the colony, it had afterwards been discarded for the town of Boston.
In all three towns there was a pressure for arable lands and more or less jealousy among the ministers. Some dissatisfaction also with the requirement in Ma.s.sachusetts of church-members.h.i.+p for the suffrage may have been among the motives for seeking a new home. At the head of the movement was the Rev. Thomas Hooker, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who had lived in Holland, and while there had imbibed a greater share of liberality than was to be found among most of the clergy of Ma.s.sachusetts. Cotton declared that democracy was ”no fit government either for church or commonwealth,” and the majority of the ministers agreed with him. Winthrop defended his view in a letter to Hooker on the ground that ”the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser.” But Hooker replied that ”in matters which concern the common good a general council, chosen by all, to transact business which concerns all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for the relief of the whole.”
Hooker arrived in the colony in September, 1633,[42] and in May, 1634, at the first annual general court after his arrival, his congregation at Newtown pet.i.tioned to be permitted to move to some other quarters within the bounds of Ma.s.sachusetts.[43] The application was granted, and messengers were sent to Agawam and Merrimac to look for a suitable location.[44] After this, when the epidemic on the Connecticut became known, a pet.i.tion to be permitted to move out of the Ma.s.sachusetts jurisdiction was presented to the general court in September, 1634.
This raised a serious debate, and though there can be little doubt that Winthrop and the other leaders in Ma.s.sachusetts shrewdly cherished the idea of pre-empting in some way the trade of the Connecticut, against both the Plymouth people and the Dutch, an emigration such as was proposed appeared too much like a desertion.
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