USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume I > Part 4
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The Indian religion is very dubious, because it is uncertain how far our accounts represent genuine aborigin ideas, and how far the half-caught Christianity taught them by the mis- sionaries, or questions they answered as they knew the mis- sionaries wished to have them. They were said to have believed there was a Good Spirit who concerned himself but little with the affairs of men in this temporal life, but stood ready to forgive their mistakes when they reached the happy hunting grounds, and furnish them rest and happiness in life eternal. They held in more reverence their spirit of evil called Hobbamocke, and many dances and sacrifices were per-
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formed in his honor; they feared his power and malignant disposition, deeming him the author of all human plagues and calamities. The second half is much more probable than the first, and even that seems colored by Christianity. The medicine men or prophets made revelations from the spirit world, gaining their occult knowledge through the morti- fication of fasting and prayer.
The Indian lover commenced his courtship by presents to his intended, and her acceptance of them was a pledge of their betrothal. This by no means necessitated marriage, as she often went from lover to lover-husbands in all but permanency-to obtain more presents, till she settled down. The consent of the Sachem formed the marriage tie. While polygamy was allowed, it was seldom practiced, unless by a Sachem or one of abundant means. Marriages were dis- solved if the wife proved unfaithful, though divorces oc- curred for other causes besides adultery. In his family re- lations the Indian was an affectionate and indulgent parent, and was apparently no believer in that maxim, "Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child," as he never chastised his off- spring. They made a distinction between boys and girls, the former being encouraged to be bold and independent, while the latter were taught subjection.
The maladies of the Indians were few but severe, being caused by their exposure, hardships, evil, vice, and irregu- lar manner of living, and were largely of the pulmonary and rheumatic class of diseases. Their curatives were sweating, and purging the system with herbs; and they also used supernatural means, their medicine men acting as the spiritual mediums.
There were various reasons why the Indians did not multi- ply : the attendance of the women in their parties of war and
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hunting made child-bearing inconvenient; and being poorly fed, like wild animals, each succeeding generation became less active and less productive. The women's hard work also helped to sterilize them. When we first meet them, no In- dian tribe seems to be increasing; it is not quite clear how they ever attained their then present numbers.
On the death of a relative, visits of condolence were paid. The funeral ceremonies were conducted by a respectable member of the tribe; the corpse was adorned with such ornaments as his relatives could afford; his body was swathed in coverings of mats and skins; a shallow grave was dug, the bottom lined with sticks, and the dead body was placed either in a sitting or reclining position, and by his side were left food and implements of war. The relatives of the de- ceased blackened their faces as evidence of their mourning, and made an exhibition of their grief by tears, howls, and shrieks.
The general character of the Connecticut Indians com- pared favorably with that of any barbarians; and, relatively to their nature and situation, with that of white men. They told as few lies, and perhaps committed as few mur- ders; there could be no theft where there was nothing to steal; they were not lazy in gross, but like all savages, alter- nated spells of intense activity with others of quiescence, and anyway there was no reward for industry. They were glut- tonous, and became intemperate; but they had to eat when they had food, which was not always, food would not keep, and drunkenness was their one luxury. They were loose enough sexually, but then there were no barriers but those of permission; their licentiousness was hardly more in evidence than that of the civilized race that has succeeded them, and Thersites' summary of the permanent elements of society
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is by no means obsolete. In a word, their virtues and vices were dictated by their stage of culture and their environment, plus racial character-which is all that can be said of any people.
In discussing the question of their dispossession from the soil, there are two phases to be considered : one general to all Indians, one special to the Connecticut Indians. As to the former, they had no title to the soil themselves but occu- pancy, they recognized none in other tribes but the law of the strongest, and their occupancy itself had no boundary except the risk of being scalped by another and stronger tribe for intrusion. The whites had the same right to use the soil for purposes of a livelihood as the reds; it was the misfortune of the latter that the uses of the former excluded a joint roaming tenancy, and made it needful for them to adopt the same means of livelihood or have no place to gain it. The Indian was not morally to blame for being an Indian; but to use the fact, as is so often done, as the major premise of an argument that the white man must therefore be blama- ble for being civilized, is wholly irrational. Again, there was no such entity as "the Indians," or "the Red Men," or "the Aborigines," with common rights and common interests as against white men; if the same class of reasoning were used about the Europeans or the Asiatics as a whole, its ab- surdity would be perceived. There were red tribes, inde- pendent of and hostile to all other red tribes; but what su- perior moral claim does the possession of a certain color of skin give them to possession, either by occupation or con- quest, above that of whites? The question must be indi- vidual, not general; and we must carefully discriminate be- tween the Aborigines of America as an ethnological fact, and the Aborigines of any particular section, which is a question
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often impossible to determine, and when determined often leads to results the very opposite of those intended. There was no more solidarity of rights among Indians as a whole than between Indians and whites, and even less solidarity of interests; and the Indians themselves were the foremost to recognize the fact. A sterile wonder is often expressed that Indians did not stand together against the whites: why should they? It meant simply being scalped by other tribes. There was no result to stand together for; no common "In- dian" civilization or mode of society to be preserved by driv- ing off the whites, whom indeed they generally valued as their best protection against each other. The whites saved more Indians from being destroyed by other Indians than they ever destroyed themselves. What interest had one tribe of Indians in assisting another tribe to slaughter whites, when victory simply meant that it would be slaugh- tered in turn? Was the privilege of being roasted by other savages so precious a boon, above being slowly dispossessed of land, that they should shed their blood for it? In a word, "Indians," as such, had no future-could have none; it was because they had none that they were forced to give way to a social system that had one. It is absurd to suppose that the Creator has left his higher civilization no legitimate means of occupying the earth; and if it is equally wicked to dis- possess savages by violence, to buy their land from them (they being ignorant of its value, unfit to have the money, and unable to make any use of it), and to occupy tracts they do not cultivate, we land in the absurd impasse that after a few roaming savages have once spread over a continent, no method but crime is left for better societies to take their place.
As to the local question, it is much simpler. The Pequots
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were as much intruders pure and simple on the rights of the original occupants as the whites themselves; they were in- deed much more so, for they were mere invaders by violence, who had dispossessed part and cowed the rest of the Narra- gansett tribes here before them, while the whites were occu- pants by permission. Whether the Narragansetts were themselves invaders or no, we cannot tell, nor does it matter; for our purpose we grant them such. Then what title had this band of ferocious freebooters, the Pequots, who had been here very little longer than the whites, to set up the claim (they never did, it is true,-that was left for modern sentimentalists) to prescriptive right of occupancy? It is to be noted that the real occupants, the Narragansett tribes, were friends of the whites, helped them exterminate the Pe- quots, and considered them protectors against their fierce conquerors. Does the mere fact that the Pequots were red, and that some sort of red men were on the continent earlier than the whites, confer such a moral sanctity on even bar- barous conquest that it has a right to murder and torture peaceful cultivators ? The logic is not obvious. This is not slaying a man of straw. The sentimental view persistently confounds the question of red men vs. white men, which we have just shown does not exist, with the question of a given band of white settlers vs. a given tribe of savages, which is the question our forefathers had to settle, and their settlement of which gives us a peaceful community in which to decry them and their work. What rights the Connecticut settlers had against a non-existent abstraction called "the Indian" would seem too foolish an exercise even for schoolboys, were it not constantly declaimed by older people; what rights they had against a tribe of ferocious brigands who had preceded them into the territory a few years, and who were committing
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unprovoked atrocities on them to drive them out, and dispos- sess the original occupants besides, will appear in the course of this work.
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CHAPTER III THE WARWICK PATENT
T HE second patent to the territory included with- in the limits of what is now Connecticut is sur- rounded with mystery.
The Council of Plymouth was the mother of all land grants in New England, that cor- poration having been delegated this authority by Charles I. The Council was composed of members of the nobility and merchants of the west of England; and its records were very loosely kept and irregular. As early as 1623 a map di- viding New England into twenty parts, but making no men- tion of Connecticut, was presented to Prince Charles for his approval.
The president of the Council of Plymouth was Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, whose whole family were doubly in- terested in colonization. There appears in the extant rec- ords of the Council of Plymouth, in the year 1622, a resolu- tion granting a patent to the Earl of Warwick and his as- sociates; but all further proceedings of the corporation until 1631 are completely obliterated. Through the medium of correspondence, there has been established the fact that John Humphrey, writing in 1630 to a friend at Charlestown, Massachusetts, stated that my Lord of Warwick was to take a grant of the territory brought to his notice by the receiver of the latter; and in a subsequent communication, it evi- dently appears that these lands were located in the southern part of New England.
Documentary evidence, however, does in no way substanti- ate the execution of any patent to the Earl of Warwick, and so far as known, no such patent was conferred by Charles I. It was mainly through the representations of Sir Richard Saltonstall, who visited New England in 1631, that the seri-
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ous attention of the Earl of Warwick became directed to the fertility of the Connecticut valley.
During the seventh year of the reign of that unhappy King Charles I., the Earl of Warwick conveyed to Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brook, and nine others, by feoffment deed, the territory commencing at the Narragansett [Providence] River, and running forty leagues to the southwest on the sea- coast towards Virginia, and north and south of this line, all the lands in latitude and breadth, as in longitude and length, from the Western Ocean to the South Sea. As can be readily seen, the boundaries of this patent were very obscure and in- definite, which was mainly due to the ignorance by the English of the geography of the New World. In fact, it is space of one dimension to be interpreted in terms of two, and was interpreted in three different ways by different par- ties. It seems fairly evident, however,-recollecting the vague ideas of American geography,-that what was meant was forty leagues down the coast and then straight over to the Pacific, and on the north a straight line from the head of Providence River to the Pacific.
The following is the text of the Warwick patent, a copy of the original having been read by Mr. George Fenwick, the agent of the patentees, to the people of Connecticut on his ar- rival from England. This copy, or a copy of it, was after- wards found by Governor Winthrop among Governor Hop- kins' papers in London in 1661, and is now in the State archives of Connecticut. The document bears the follow- ing indorsement, "The copy of the patent for Connecticut being ye copy of that copy which was shewed to ye people there by Mr. George Fenwick found amongst Mr. Hopkins' papers," and reads :
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To all people vnto whom this present writeing shall come, Robert, Earle of Warwick sendeth greeting, in our Lord God everlasting: Know ye, that the sayd Robert, Earl of Warwick, for divers Good causes & considerations him there- vnto moueing, Hath giuen, grant, Bargain Seld enfeoffed, Aliened & confirmed, & by these presents doth giue, grant, Bargain, Sell, enfeoffe, Alien & confirm vnto the Right Honourable William, Viscount Say & Seale, the Right Honourable Rob't, Lord Brooke, The right Honour- able, Lord Rich, & the Honourable Charles Fines Esq'r, Sr. Nathaniel Rich, Knight, Sr. Richard Saltonstall, Knight, Richard Knightly, Esq'r, John Pim, Esq'r, John Hamden, Esq'r, John Humphrey, Esq'r & Herbert Pelham, Esq'r theire heires & assignes & their Associates forever, All that part of New England in Americah, which lyes & extends it selfe from a Riuer there called Narrogancett River, the space of Forty Leagues vpon a Straight Lyne neere the Sea Shore towards the Sowth west West, and by Sowth or West, as the Coast lyeth, towards Virginia, accounting Three English Miles to the League; & allso all & singuler the Lands & hereditaments what soeuer lyeing & being with in the Lands afoarsayd, North & South in Lattitude & Bredth & in Length & Longitude of & with in all the Bredth afoare- sayd, through out the Maine Lands there, from the Westerne Oscian to the South Sea; & all Lands & Grounds, place & places, Soyle, Wood & Woods, Grounds, Hauens, portes, creeks & Rivers, Waters, Fishings & hereditaments what soever, lying with in the sayd space & every part & parcell thereof; & allso all Islands lying in Americah afoarsayd, in the sayd Seas or either of them, on the Western or East- ern Coasts or parts of the sayd Tracts of Lands by these p'sents Mentioned to be giuen, granted, Bargained sold,
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enfeoffed, aliened, & confirmed, & allso all Mines, Miner- alls,-as well Royall Mines of Gold & Siluer as other Mines & Mineralls what soeuer in the sayd Lands & premises, or any part thereof; & allso the several Riuers With in the sayd limits, by what Name or Names Soeuer called or Known; & all Jurisdictions, rights, Royalties, liberties, free- domes, Immunities, powers, priuiledges, Franchizes, prehem- inences & commodities what soeuer, which the said Rob't Earle of Warwick, now hath or had, or might vse, exercise or injoy, in or within the said Lands and premises or within any part or parcell thereof, excepting & reseruing to his Ma'tie, his heirs and Successors, the Fifth part of all Gold & Silver oare that shall be found with in the sayd premises or any part or parcell thereof : To have & To hold the sayd part of New England in Americah which lyes & Extends & is abutted as afoarsayd, And the sayd severall Riuers, & euery part & par- cell thereof, & all the sayd Islands, Riuers, portes, Hauens, Waters, Fishings, Mines, Mineralls, Jurisdictions, powers, Franchizes, Royalties, liberties, priviledges, Comodities, here- ditaments, & premises whatsoeuer, with the appurtenances, vnto the said William, Viscount Say & Seale, Robert, Lord Brooke, Robert, Lord Rich, Charles Fines, Sr. Nathaniel Rich, Sr. Richard Saltonstall, Richard Knightly, John Pim, John Hamden, John Humphrey & Herbert Pellam, their heirs & assignes & their Associates, to the onely proper & absolute vse & behoofe of them the sayd William, Viscount Say & Seale, Robert, Lord Brook, Robert, Lord Rich, Charles Fines, Sr. Nathaniel Rich, Sr. Richard Saltonstall, Richard Knightly, John Pim, John Hamden, John Humph- rey, and Herbert Pelham their heirs and assignes and their Associates for euermore, In Witness whereof, the sayd Rob- ert Earle of Warwick hath herevnto set his hand & Seale,
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the Nineteenth day of March, in the Seuenth yeare of the Reigne of ovr Soueraigne Lord Charles, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, De- fender of the fayth &c. Anno Dom 1631.
Robert Warwicke. [L. S.]
Signed, Sealed and delivered in the presence of
Walter Williams,
Thomas Howson,
Hartford, August 6 1679.
vera copia John Allyn, Secr'y.
That this patent had any standing in law cannot be main- tained. Only sovereigns, as Irving long ago remarked, can give away what does not belong to them; and if Warwick had ever received his grant from the sovereign, or from the council to whom the sovereign had granted it, his lawyer most unaccountably forgot to record that fact in the patent. Warwick in this document merely gives all that he himself possesses, but does not state what that is, nor from whom he had it. At the same time, it is a long step from this to saying that the patent was a pure fraud, or that Warwick thought he was giving or the patentees thought they were receiving a mere blank paper. Both suppositions are so improbable that any reasonable explanation must be preferred. Both parties must have believed that it secured them from prob- able order or suit of ejectment. But if it was an impudent figment, a quitclaim to property known to be at others' dis- posal, why should it afford any such security? On the other hand, the argument sometimes made, that he might have been empowered to execute it by vote of the council as its presi- dent, without formal grant, is open to the same objection as above, that he would have stated that fact and that official
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authority in the deed, as the solid basis of the grant. With- out pretending to cut this Gordian knot, the best probability seems to be, that this grant had been actually promised him, in the discussions of the council, and only awaited formal confirmation; that events were hurrying forward, and he wished to get his patentees in de facto possession as soon as possible, relying on the formal validation coming early enough to prevent any trouble, as a fresh guaranty could be attached; that meantime he knew that no one else expected it or claimed it besides himself, and that his position was powerful enough to make his promissory note pass for coin ; -but that the quarrel with the council, which shortly caused his removal, supervened and prevented the consummation of the grant. We are not unaware of the difficulties in the way of this theory,-chief of which is that the rough-draft of a grant to be made to Warwick by the council specifies a less territory with somewhat different boundaries; but it is not a mere guess, the confirmatory points being significant. And the difficulties are not nearly so formidable as on the one hand supposing that the grantor granted nothing when he had power to grant all, and that the patentees accepted that nothing when they could have obtained all, as the defenders of the patent assume; or on the other, that both parties dealt thus with a leaden counter, without strong warrant that it would answer as gold and shortly be replaced by gold.
At any rate, the patent conveyed no rights of government, or even the power to create a corporation. The grantees were simply joint tenants; though the prospect of the Earl of Warwick's receiving any monetary remuneration in lieu of rent was not very encouraging, as it was distinctly stated that
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one-fifth of all gold and silver mined within the territory was to reimburse him for his interests.
The original patentees had a consociation of business in- terests, in other land grants in the New World. Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brook were associated with the Earl of Warwick, Lord Rich, and John Pym, in affairs pertaining to the Bahamas; Sir Richard Saltonstall and John Humph- rey were among the original patentees of Massachusetts; and Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brook were interested in the original patent of New Hampshire.
The grantees were all men of prominence and affairs in England. John Pym was a famous leader in the House of Commons during the reigns of James I. and Charles I .; a lawyer by profession, fearless, eloquent, and an unequalled parliamentarian. Identified with the popular interest against the Crown, he was prominently identified with the impeach- ments of Buckingham and Strafford; he and Hampden were the leaders of the Long Parliament; and on the outbreak of hostilities he remained in London, rendering executive ser- vices of more value and assistance than a general in the field. He was one of the five members whose attempted seizure by the King on the floor of Parliament, for dealings with the Scotch rebels, made the Civil War inevitable. He died sud- denly early in the war, at fifty-nine.
John Hampden was a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, and of the foremost influence as a leader in the patriot party; con- sidered by them as "pater patria," and denounced by Claren- don as the fountain of all mischief. His endurance of im- prisonment rather than pay his small assessment of "ship- money," a levy intended to make the Crown independent of popular control, had made him a recognized champion, which his great judgment, pithy speech, and acute states-
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manship, confirmed. He was another of the Five Members. He was a member of the Committee of Safety at the out- break of the war, became a colonel, and was mortally wounded at Chalgrove, fighting against Rupert, in its sec- ond year.
Sir Richard Saltonstall was a nephew of Sir Richard, Lord Mayor of London in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and was one of the fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; being its assistant governor in 1630, in which year he was identified with the first settlement of Watertown, Mass. He returned to England in 1631, and was ever af- terwards a warm friend of the American colonies.
William Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, was a member of Par- liament, a firm exponent of the abolishment of Episcopacy, and was one of the leading advocates of Presbyterianism; but upon the creation of the Protectorate, he withdrew from public life. With many another good patriot, he welcomed and assisted in the restoration of Charles II., who made him Lord Privy Seal.
Robert, Lord Brook, was also a member of Parliament, a colleague of Lord Say and Sele, and associated with him in his advocacy of religious freedom; his peasantry during the civil war were attached to the Parliamentary Army, but he died before the Restoration.
Robert, Lord Rich, was the eldest son of the Earl of War- wick; the Honorable Charles "Fines" [Fiennes] was of the family of Lord Say and Sele. John Humphreys was one of the original patentees of Massachusetts; Sir Nathaniel Rich (of the Warwick connection) and Richard Knightly died a few years after the granting of the Connecticut pat- ent; Herbert Pelham was of the family afterward Dukes of Newcastle.
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The original grantees of Connecticut were Puritans, there- fore differing from the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth. This had a tendency to people Connecticut with Nonconformists, who, while they believed in the Church of England, were op- posed to what they regarded as its corrupt and unauthorized practices. The unsettled state of civil affairs in England caused a delay of several years on the part of the Connecticut patentees, in making a permanent settlement on their grant.
In the summer of 1635 there arrived at Boston twenty ser- vants of Sir Richard Saltonstall, under the superintendency of Francis Stiles, with instructions to locate two thousand acres in Windsor. This territory had been preoccupied by settlers from Massachusetts, who were in position to main- tain their rights, on the principle that possession was nine points of the law. This discouraging outlook disgusted Stiles, and after a couple of months' stay in Boston he re- turned to England.
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