USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume I > Part 10
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In the Hartford church, after the death of Mr. Stone, the son of another distinguished citizen, Gov. John Haynes, had been chosen to succeed him. Thomas Haynes only recently had grad- uated from Harvard-in 1658. He was imbued with the new idea and in 1666 advocated its adoption by the church. Rev. John Whiting, senior colleague, emphatically objected; it was a blow at pure Congregationalism and let down the bars to Presbyte- rianism while lowering the standards of membership. "Saints" should be "visible," and they could not be "visible" unless war- ranted in the old way. Doctor Walker expresses it: "Half-way Covenant was filling the churches with people sufficiently re- ligious to claim baptism for their children but not enough so to have or profess any experience of piety or to come to the Lord's supper." In other words, they had started well but they were in a state of education, free as to their future course, and therefore
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hardly congenial at communion with the "visible saints." More- over this must lead to government by synod instead of govern- ment by self, an unthinkable thing for the church of Thomas Hooker. So reasoned Rev. Mr. Haynes. But the younger Whit- ing was persistent and led his flock of thirty-one away with him, after the General Assembly, though by close vote, had decided in February, 1670, that the church might be divided.
When the sharpness of this cleavage in the historic Hooker church is emphasized by many writers, one making a thorough study of the period can but recall the natural and then civic divi- sion between north and south sides of Little River, growing more noticeable every year, almost like two towns at the very begin- ning. "South" church instead of "Second" church has been the popular name of the new society ever since. It further can be remarked in this connection that an original church in any town frowned upon a division even for branches in remote places like East Hartford (from Hartford), since diminished membership meant decrease in indispensable revenue. Finally, it is to be noted that the Hooker church soon afterward accepted the half- way covenant principle.
By the code of 1650 colonists were taxed from 1 penny to 3 pence a pound for "encouragement of the ministry" but in 1677 the towns had to support their own churches. It was expensive to change ministers, for when one was chosen he was allowed two years' salary to begin with so that he might establish his home. In 1668 the General Assembly passed its first Toleration Act when it granted that "sundry persons of worth for prudence and piety amongst us * may have allowance of their perswasion and profession in church wayes." Nevertheless the support of the ministry continued compulsory and fines were de- manded for absence from service. Repeated exhibition of the harm resulting from having every church disagreement brought to the General Assembly caused that body in 1708 to direct each of the forty-one churches to send representatives to a synod in Saybrook where the famous Saybrook Platform was adopted. Only twelve ministers and four laymen obeyed the call but their action was at once ratified by the Legislature, thereby creating a "government within a government," for there was to be a con- sociation or permanent organization, consisting of the minister
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and one delegate from each church "planted in a convenient vicinity." Disputes should there be settled in common com- munion. Delegates from all the consociations should meet annu- ally. In this was a suggestion of Presbyterianism and the word became interchangeable with Congregationalism for many years. Only churches united by this platform were "owned and acknowl- edged established by law." There were two consociations in Hartford County. As will be seen in some of the town histories, there were instances of contempt for the plan. Unquestionably it did create a better working system and as Rev. George L. Clark, historian, says, it "may have been the best possible de- vice to tide the churches over trying times."
In establishing the platform the General Assembly specific- ally provided that all who "soberly" differed from the United Churches could worship in their own way, according to their con- sciences. This gave the Quakers, intolerable as they had made themselves in Massachusetts, the Episcopalians, the Baptists and even the troublous Rogerines of New London no cause for com- plaint to the English government which was threatening to send a governor for all New England. The "outlanders" were not welcome but, as in the case of the Quakers who sought persecu- tion, they were given fair hearing-twice in Hartford-and then urged to go elsewhere. Experience with bishops had left such a sting that toleration of Episcopalianism by the people was long in being brought about. The missionary priests out from New York were zealously encouraged from London and the taxation for Congregationalism aroused such ire over there that the Gen- eral Assembly provided that dissenters could form distinct or- ganization, as previously stated, provided they worked no injury to the established church. In 1727 this was followed by a law that in towns where there was an Episcopal church, those attend- ing it could pay their taxes to it; and altogether, rocky as was their path, they admit that it was less so in Connecticut than in any other colony. Their own energies resulted in 1784 in the consecration of the first bishop in America, Samuel Seabury, at Woodbury. Meanwhile concessions were being granted to vari- ous sects.
The colonial law.for the support of ministers was framed at a time when only one church in a town was contemplated. Two
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years after the Second Church of Christ was established in Hart- ford an amendment went into effect by which people could con- tribute for the church they attended. After meeting in private dwellings, probably, the new society, being without power to hold real estate and not having a vote of the town for building, erected a structure on the unoccupied land of Lieut. Thomas Bull near the present southeast corner of Main and Sheldon streets near the schoolhouse which was in the highway. This had been com- pleted by 1673. During the next fifteen years ten members of the congregation made handsome bequests to the society, and it may be added that the generous disposition so early displayed is as much in evidence today as it was then. The building was fifty feet square, fashioned much like that of the parent society.
The "town bell" served for both churches till it cracked in 1725. It hung in the First Church belfry but it was felt that the repairs should be paid for by the town, that is by both societies. The question was complicated by the fact that both congrega- tions needed new houses, and the First Church suggested that they reunite. In the interim it was using a red flag as a signal in place of a bell. The Southsiders, now nearly equal in number and wealth, believed there could not be agreement on a convenient site. After eleven years of discussion, the First Church voted to build on the southeast corner of the burying ground, the present corner of Main and Gold streets. The vote was passed in 1734. It called for brick but wood was substituted. The building was sixty-six feet long, lengthwise with Main Street, and forty-six feet wide, the steeple on the north end, the doors at that end, at the south end and on the east side, the pulpit with its sounding- board on the west side. One "great alley" ran from the east door to the pulpit and another from the north to the south. Rev. Dan- iel Wadsworth preached his last sermon in the old church July 31, 1737. Timbers from the honored structure were incorpo- rated in the new building and are said to form part of the present one. Services were held in the State House till the new building was ready, December 30, 1739.
It was ten years later that the Second Church voted to build. The General Court, still holding prerogative to that extent, chose a site in the highway which is now Buckingham Street. As the proposed edifice, the saine size as that of the parent church, would practically fill the highway, and as the north side was under
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water in flood time, while a brook on the Main Street side would endanger the foundation, there was two years of hesitancy, then an appeal to the General Assembly, and finally an agreement reached for a site thirty feet east of the one indicated, two-thirds of the building to be in Main Street. Exterior and interior of the building, which was completed in 1754, closely resembled those of the First Church. The first sermon preached there was by Rev. George Whitefield, December 2, 1755. Rev. Elnathan Whitman was then pastor and continued as such for forty-five years. In 1762 the society received a deed to about four acres of land south of the church, given by Joseph Buckingham, son of Rev. Thomas Buckingham, former pastor to whom the society had conveyed the same in 1696. Both societies were to rebuild, as will be seen, on practically the same sites, and their continu- ing to occupy them is an important feature in Hartford's history.
§
In the history of the progress of civilization there is nothing more anomalous than the horrors committed under authority of the Scriptures as interpreted. Other contestants for the literal interpretation of the Mosaic code have had to yield to the de- mand of humanity, but in no particular with greater gratifica- tion to their descendants than in this. And when condemnations are flung at the American colonies, it is well to recall that for 300 years before the subject came up in the colonies there had been a fierce battle against those declared to be in collusion with Satan and that over 100,000 had been executed barbarously. For it is written in the Book of Exodus: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." A century after the frightful craze on the Conti- nent, the mighty legal mind of Blackstone gave forth this opin- ion: "To deny the possibility, nay, actual evidence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of the Old and New Testament."
The horrors of Salem in Massachusetts are marveled at to- day. But they were in 1692. By that time the "craze" in Con- necticut had yielded to common sense considerations and juries no longer were accepting ridiculous testimony of neighbors against odd characters who had fallen under suspicion. The vic-
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tims themselves were of a class who made trouble or enjoyed sen- sation at whatever risk, and the witnesses were of the class of professional talebearers, all mentally upset by the excitement of the hour. In Connecticut between 1647 and 1690 when the furore ended, there were but nine executions, of which three probably were in Hartford where the colony prison was located. The first victim-and probably the first in New England-was Alse Young of Windsor in 1647. The records furnish no details. Of Mary Johnson's case in Wethersfield the next year, Cotton Mather in his "Magnalia," referring to her having given birth to a child while in prison, wrote: "She died in a frame of mind extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it." In 1653 John Carrington, a Wethersfield carpenter, and his wife were hanged.
An illustration of how the evil spread is found in the instance of Ann Cole of Hartford and Wethersfield. She became relig- iously rabid and accused a neighbor who was sent to prison for a year and then removed to Rhode Island. Next to the Cole fam- ily lived Nathaniel Greensmith and his wife Rebecca. Rev. John Whiting wrote of the latter that she was of bad character. She caught the fever of confessing all the misdeeds accredited to witches and implicated her husband. In 1662 both were tried in Hartford. The two ministers, Haynes and Whiting, visited the woman in prison and sent her amazing confessions to John Mather who declared the evidence very convincing. Rev. Sam- uel Stone was deeply impressed with her accounts of how Satan appeared to her in various forms, as of a deer or fawn, and told her they would have "a merry meeting by Christmas;" her hus- band must be guilty because he brought in logs too large for a little man to handle. They were hanged in January, 1662, on Gallows Hill.
A supposed victim was Mary Barnes of Farmington whose case followed closely those of the Greensmiths. The most pecu- liar case was that of the well-to-do Katherine Harrison of Weth- ersfield in May, 1669. Governor John Winthrop, Jr., William Leete and Maj. John Mason were of the court. It was the usual charge of "familiarity with Satan, the grand enemy of man- kind." She demanded a jury trial. When the jury disagreed, she was held for another trial in October. The testimony of the witnesses was wildly imaginative and grotesque, as it reads to
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us. She had appeared with the body of an animal; she had tried to cut throats, to strangle, to break bones; she was a notorious liar and told fortunes. The jury having found her guilty, the magistrates advised with the ministers. Rev. Gershom Bulkeley of Wethersfield reported for them that whatever was beyond rea- son in the way of divination argued familiarity with Satan, "in- asmuch as such a person doth thereby declare his receiving the devill's instrument to communicate the same to others." This accused made no confession; she fought back and petitioned for relief. Becoming enraged, without losing her reason, she abused Michael Griswold who forthwith won a £40 damage suit against her. Eventually the court decided upon a year in prison. The General Assembly refused to concur and commuted the sentence to removal from the community, for her good and her neighbors'. The people in a New York town in which she took up her abode besought the governor to secure her banishment but he refused and bade her go wherever she chose.
A peculiar case is found in the manuscripts of President Ezra Stiles of Yale. In 1651, on the occasion of a military parade, Henry Stiles, eldest of the brothers who came to Windsor for Saltonstall's proposed settlement in 1635, was killed by the acci- dental discharge of a gun in the hands of Thomas Allyn of Wind- sor. Allyn was fined £20 according to the records of the General Court, was put on probation for a year and was forbidden to bear arms during that time. At a Particular Court in 1654, Lydia Gilbert of Windsor was indicted for witchcraft and, among other things, for having caused Stiles' death. Stiles had been a bachelor and had boarded with Thomas Gilbert, a neighbor who was in his employ. Whether Lydia was the wife or daughter of Gilbert does not appear, but from the wording of the indictment it would seem that she had been a trouble-maker in her neigh- borhood and easily could fall a victim to those suffering from witchcraft hallucination. She was tried and convicted but there is no record of her execution.
X CONSTITUTION AND CHARTER
PERFECTED AND SECURED BY WINTHROP-NEW HAVEN'S COMPLAINT -DUKE OF YORK'S CLAIM TO TERRITORY-METHOD OF ELECTIONS.
The method of the founders of 1635 in achieving their high purpose culminating in the Constitution was no less masterly, tested by the standards of whatever generation, than that of their successors in securing their charter from a restored monarchy in 1662. The Congregational Church itself was no longer the all- embracing entity; it had been the nucleus for widely different and not always amenable elements, but it was standing the test of control during unprecedented experiences and was to continue to be the foundation of the government through many succeed- ing generations. In its efforts to adapt circumstances to itself, it was competent to detect its own errors, and, with population and territory increasing, was cautiously adapting itself to cir- cumstances without yielding its principles. The vote was still the freeman's, pledged to fealty ; church-membership was not his test; the government was in his hands, with the promoters of the system carefully guiding and instructing him (in those first days of experiment) ; and if his tax, willy nilly, went to help maintain churches, it was because the name of the Almighty and his Word were still keenly recognized in public and private af- fairs, and it was believed they always should be. There was this much hold-over from the experience of generations in the land of their birth. Therein is a feature ignored by modern critics who see in the change from the union of church and state in the 1800s a fierce rebellion and not a step in sequence -- a step impelled by changing conditions, creeds and population, and approved or ac- quiesced in by men themselves descendants of the founders.
The fundamental principle of the people's control, under guidance, had stood forth and had drawn much unto itself, on
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American soil, through England's stormy periods of no Parli- ment, of the Long Parliament, of the overthrow of monarchy and of the great Protectorate. Could it cope with the new monarchy that had been set up-with Charles II, the successor of the be- headed Charles I whose judges had found their refuge in this New England? Diverting thought for the moment from the much-described achievements, no imagination is too feeble to picture the actual qualms. None of the qualms were written into official records, either then or when a new political peril threat- ened with the next change in royal government. Outwardly and barring their correspondence, the founders were stoics; "pub- licity" was not to become the rule and requirement in affairs public or private for many years to come. As for the people, in their small communities, they knew and trusted their leaders from the outset, and on the advent of John Winthrop, Jr., to the governor's office, they had repealed their law prohibiting two terms in succession. After testing by means of alternative terms, they had concluded that, a man's fidelity attested, his experience was worth much to them. Similarly with the magis- trates, though would-be dispassionate writers in later years set forth that it was the system of balloting which compelled this.
Hooker had been blunt in his determination but tactful and wise in his planning, a bold pioneer and a noble intellectual leader. Ludlow had been a jurist and a builder, though perhaps justifiably impatient at the last; Haynes, a gracious executive, with prestige; Mason, a stern captain of the guard. Their gen- eration was passing when the news came in 1659 that the Pro- tectorate had ended, and it especially behooved a colony with a questioned patent and a record for independence to look to its standing. A crisis impended in which argument might not pre- vail; keenest felicity was demanded.
One man was recognized above all others to meet this require- ment, a man whose name should be placed alongside Hooker's a man whose attributes were sufficiently different from those of Hooker, Ludlow and the others to exercise the diplomacy now necessary at the royal seat of all government. This was the younger Winthrop who had worked out the Warwick Patent un- derstanding. He, if anyone, could stand for the dependability of that patent even when all patents were in danger; he was famil- iar by birth and experience with court ways and he, as governor,
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JOHN WINTHROP Governor 1657, 1659-1676
FITZ JOHN WINTHROP Governor 1698-1707
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had given new evidence of his devotion to the colony. Preemi- nently he was the man for the hour. Historian Bancroft says of him :
"As a child he had been the pride of his father's house; he had received the best instruction which Cambridge and Dublin could afford, and had perfected his education by vis- iting, in part at least, in the public service, not Holland and France only, in the days of Prince Maurice and Richelieu, but Venice and Constantinople. As he traveled through Europe he sought the society of men eminent for learning. Returning to England in the bloom of life, with the fairest promise of advancement, he preferred to follow his father to the New World, regarding 'diversities of countries but as many inns,' alike conducting to 'the journey's end.' When his father became impoverished, the son, unsolicited and without recompense, relinquished his inheritance, that it 'might be spent in furthering the great work' in Massachu- setts ; himself, without wealth, engaging in the enterprise of planting Connecticut. Care for posterity seemed the motive to his actions. Understanding the springs of action, and the principles that control affairs, he never attempted imprac- ticable things, and noiselessly succeeded in all that he under- took. The New World was full of his praises. Puritans and Quakers and the freemen of Rhode Island were alike his eulogists. The Dutch at New York had confidence in his in- tegrity, and it is the beautiful testimony of his own father that 'God gave him favor in the eyes of all with whom he had to do.' ""
Narrative of facts brings out the romance of history, espe- cially at a point like this. Winthrop was chosen to make the journey to London, and the way-it was supposed by the magis- trates-was paved by two letters. Massachusetts, Plymouth and finally New Haven reluctantly had hailed the new sovereign, as in duty bound and with courtly words, but Connecticut pon- dered and remained silent till July 7, 1661, when it addressed the King. But a month prior to this petition the General Court had written Lord Saye and Sele, for years the spokesman of the Puritans, a letter which shows the conception at this time of certain important proceedings previously mentioned herein, chronologically. The letter referred to his "former encour- agement" and his present interest "by value of patent power" and begged his assistance. It reviewed the purchase from Fen- wick who "for reasons best known to himself" wished to return
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to England. The purchase was "exceedingly opposed" by sev- eral who said this would be distasteful to his lordship and the patentees, but it was pressed by Fenwick ("God removing some from us by death that were interested in the hearts and affection of several of those nobles and gentlemen, the patentees in Eng- land"). Fenwick insisted he had the power to sell, "the rest of the patentees deserting," and the matter "falling into his hands by agreement," and also declaring that he might sell to "noisome neighbors" (the Dutch), whereupon, for peace and security, agreement was made for about £1600-a "great abuse at Mr. Fenwick's hands," considering the poverty of the people and the small advantage gained. Indeed, the condition was worse than if they had contented themselves with the patronage of the "grand patentees," for there was no copy of the patent to secure standing as a commonwealth and assure continuance of privi- leges so dearly paid for; nor was there anything given by Fen- wick which would bind him and his heirs as to rights above the professed Massachusetts border; and, being destitute of patent or copy, the purchasers could not maintain their claims even on the Narragansett side. The petition concluded by saying that Winthrop would call on him for advice and counsel and they would pray that "an inundation of mercies may flow in upon your lordship."
In the petition to the King the General Court said that it had not had the opportunity to obtain from the King such patent as would assure them of privileges and power to enable them to face the great hardships and hazards in this remote place where subsistence was to be had only as a result of infinite labor and expense. Already the settlers had spent much on buildings and defenses to add to the honor and enlargement of the King's do- minions. They had paid a large sum to Fenwick for a jurisdiction right which they had understood was from "true royal author- ity" and would submit a copy of a copy which, after the first had been lost by fire or in some other way, had sufficed till they could take up the matter of royal prerogatives. They besought the King to confirm those privileges or else the privileges under the old Massachusetts grant, encouraged by which such endeavor had been put forth and under which at first it was supposed Con- necticut territory was covered. Also and moreover, there was
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the defensive war against the heathen which had cost much in life and means ("divers of our dear countrymen were treacher- ously destroyed") and still was the colony under great expense for maintenance, all of which, hopefully, should bring immunity from customs and promotion of commerce in the products this land could furnish. They subscribed themselves, without ful- someness, loyal subjects and servants.
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