USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume I > Part 13
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12-VOL. 1
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ality. It now rests in its box, in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society at the Atheneum.
The Charter Oak had been prized by the Indians before the white men came and had been spared by the settlers at their re- quest. The natives said it long had indicated to them by the size of its new leaves the time to plant their corn, while under its branches they held their councils. The Wyllys estate passed to Stephen Bulkeley, descendant of Gershom Bulkeley, and then to his daughter, wife of Hon. Isaac W. Stuart. Mr. Stuart cared for the oak diligently till a strong wind blew it down August 21, 1856. Its rings, it is said, indicated a life of 1,000 years. Pieces of the tree were highly prized. One large section was given to the state, from which Albert Entress carved the lieutenant governor's chair which ever since has adorned the platform in the Senate chamber. A tablet, placed by the Society of Colonial Wars, now indicates where the majestic tree stood.
Governor Treat wrote the new King, rejoicing in his having come to the throne and saying that government was continuing under the charter though with some uneasiness because of the methods adopted by the late King, but reminding His Majesty that "we never resigned our charter, nor was it condemned;" therefore he entreated that the instrument be formally confirmed. While the request never was granted, the law officers of the realm declared Andros' usurpation illegal and the charter intact. Ply- mouth lost her colony independence to Massachusetts, which also included Maine, all under the governorship of the sailor adven- turer, Sir William Phipps.
However it was not to be long before there came the much-to- be-resented demand for control of Connecticut's militia. When King Louis of France had been aroused by the dethronement of his friend King James, and England saw design to spread the power of the Roman Catholic Church, Connecticut, retaining her control, responded graciously. Governor Leisler in New York feared French and Indian attacks to the extent that Capt. Thomas Bull of Hartford with a few men was sent to Schenectady to help the New York defenders. In the massacre that followed five of Bull's men were killed and others captured, through no fault of their own. The next spring Hartford County men joined the contingent for the expedition against Quebec, FitzJohn Winthrop
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in command. Leisler's failure to do his part made it necessary to abandon the undertaking.
In 1692, Benjamin Fletcher as governor of New York main- tained the royal prerogative to control all the soldiery of the colonies and therefore treated Connecticut's sentiments with con- tempt. He came himself to Hartford in October, 1693, to make . demand upon the General Assembly, and when the train bands were assembled and Fletcher ordered that his commission and purpose be read to them, tradition has it that Capt. Joseph Wads- worth again distinguished himself by causing the drums to make a deafening roar and by threatening Fletcher personally. The tradition has far outrun an official pamphlet published by author- ity of the General Assembly in 1694, under the title "Connecticut Vindicated," in which it was asserted that the royalists in New York, after the fashion of the day, were publishing pamphlets to bring the colony into disrepute in England and that it was they who were trying to create the impression that the colonists at Hartford were discourteous to the King's representative. In "vindicating" Connecticut, the General Assembly's pamphlet said that there were "no armed men" on that occasion. "A training was in hand" but not by the governor's order; no one rose against his excellency and matters were not at all "as suggested to strangers."
In 1693, 150 men were sent from Connecticut to assist Gov- ernor Fletcher, and on his appeal the following year, supplies of food and £500,-from the people who successfully resisted his attempts at military control over them. By the time of the peace in 1697, the colony had spent £12,000 or a sum equal to one-tenth of its grand list. Among the minor relief expeditions were those of Capt. William Whiting with sixty fusileers and forty Indians for the northeastern frontier at request of Governor Phipps, and the same Hartford County officer with a company of dragoons for the defense of Albany. Lieut. Stephen Hollister of Wethers- field led an expedition of forty men to quiet an up-river alarm.
The colony's devotion to Gov. John Winthrop's son was strong, especially after the Schenectady affair when Leisler, who had ruined the campaign, put Winthrop in confinement for court mar- tial, from which he was released by the wrathful Mohawks. Moreover he was a good soldier, having had experience in the
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Parliamentary army in Scotland, and also he was the man who had preserved the colony's rights. For it was in 1693 that he had gone to England to argue against Fletcher's usurpation of rights under the charter his own father had secured. He won the de- cision of the court that the charter never had been invalidated and his reply to Fletcher formulated the Connecticut sentiment which has remained constant. It said that whoever commanded the persons in a colony would also command the purse and be the governor; that there was such a connection between the civil authority and the command of the militia that "one could not exist without the other." While the colony was willing to grant use of the militia, there could be no conscription under royal order, and troops must be officered by men named by the colony's authorities.
King William's war was the first but far from being the last in which the colonists attested their loyalty to England. History must bring out the harsher events of the ages but it is not com- plete if it does not furnish the reader's mind with a conception of general mental attitude throughout each of its periods. These people who established and maintained their free government loved the ties of kinship with those across the water. Their senti- ment was deeply reciprocated by the masses and also by certain of those in high positions through the various changes in govern- mental control. Colonization was a comparatively new thing for what was to become the mighty empire. The judgment of one generation was not that of another. While there seemed to some to have opened up a wholly unsuspected field for graft and aggrandizement, others, of the noblest of the realm, brought to the subject of American colonies their most constructive ability, gave of their sympathies and in person braved the self-denial if not actual hardship in the new land.
As a whole the English people were heart and soul with the pioneers, eager for every item of news from them, while the frequent official reports to the Board of Trade were solemnly discussed and carefully preserved. The reports would make dry reading, but in them is the complete story, quaintly told, of the growth of business and commerce, of the increase in population and of their method of taxation. There was no more clashing of creeds than there was in the home country, and matters of this sort could not figure in material reports, being left, rather, to
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those who were active participants and could write their own statements to those similarly interested across the water. The old nation and that which was to be the new were feeling their way, impeded at times by foolish hands not always of their own blood but never with such persistent and far-reaching blunders as have proved the destruction of other states. At the close of its birth-century, the outlook for Hartford County, even in its Con- necticut independence, even in its respectful adherence to free thought and resolution, was favorable. It owed fealty to no flag but England's. This must be remembered by those who study the events of the following century which led to separation.
XIII
SELF-GOVERNMENT FEELING ITS WAY
POINTS ESTABLISHED IN MOMENTS OF PEACE-LAND AND EDUCA- TIONAL QUARRELS-LAWYERS AND COURT SYSTEM-FERRY AND "GREAT BRIDGE"-MINING AND SHIPPING-MASONIC LODGE-FIRST TIN PEDDLER-THE "GREAT AWAKENING."
In the intervals of peace in the eighteenth century, the county rather better than the rest of the colony gradually worked itself out of the condition of what was known colloquially in New Eng- land as "hard scrabble." The appeal of the General Court for raising the means to pay the expenses for procuring the charter is an illustration of the every-day struggle for subsistence when English currency was scarce. The colonists were besought, in a matter-of-fact way, to get together all they could of agricultural products, tar and other material for shipbuilding and whatever else the wilderness could yield, and send it to New London to be shipped to England.
Taxes yielded barely enough for routine needs; in cases of emergency there had to be recourse to what now are known as "drives," and at each one every man gave "till it hurt." Those who like Winthrop, Haynes and Hopkins had comparatively inde- pendent means were generous, but it was part of the principle of the government that all should share the burdens. The demands came to increase heavily with the expenses for King Philip's war, and in 1676 the General Assembly appointed a committee to fix valuations. The rate then was raised from 1 pence to 18 pence. In Hartford, home lots were valued at 40 shillings an acre; im- proved uplands at 25 shillings on the "north side" and 20 shillings on the "south side," and the meadows at 50 shillings for one-half and 40 shillings for the other. Paying taxes was somewhat like buying stock in a corporation; distribution of undivided land or land forfeited through failure to utilize it or inability to bear the tax was made in proportion to the amount each man paid in taxes, thereby relieving the poorer inhabitants and, while placing the
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chief burden on the wealthier, giving them the prospect of the later yield.
The General Court had come to permit individual towns to make their own distributions among inhabitants, as in the case of present East Hartford, but one result was that in 1723 it was necessary to pass a healing act, confirming old titles which had become uncertain because of the original method of assigning cer- tain amounts to "proprietors" or to others as free gift "in courtesy." When the word "inhabitants" began to assume its present meaning, they felt a right to obtain and hold ownership, by allotment after joint purchase. Such was the case in East Hartford when land was bought from Uncas' son-in-law in 1682 and later along the Bolton border, as will be seen in the history of that region; that not assigned pro rata was held as commons. A similar idea in Hartford's western division created litigation in 1754 that was long and searching. Measurement according to the amount of taxes paid let in inhabitants not heirs of early pro- prietors, and the litigation was between them as claimants and the heirs as owners since early days.
But a new feature had developed in this instance, namely, that when Andros was about to come to take over all New England, the General Assembly saw that he would have a right to assert specific and particular royal control over all undivided land; therefore the Assembly appointed committees in each town to arrange to receive that undivided land, which included much in the territory to the west of Hartford County's confines-to be mentioned further on,-and have it taken up in order by the inhabitants. One purpose of the law of 1723 was to confirm that cleverly devised plan. Along Hartford's western border was a strip a mile and a half long which in 1672 it had been voted to divide, leaving the rest a commons-"forever." The lots were laid out in 1674. By 1753, steps were taken to lay out the "com- mons." Heirs and plain "inhabitants" clashed. The litigation ended in the upper court by a jury decision for the heirs if the law provided that those who had purchased the land were invested with the fee thereto, and in 1755 it was found that the law did so provide. This was a precedent for other cases till finally, it is understood, the inhabitants whose allotments had been ques- tioned, including some of the original heirs themselves, bought the heirs' rights, and ownership thereafter could pass freely.
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Prior to this incident of Hartford litigation was the more sen- sational matter of the distribution of the large and more western territory snatched from Andros' grasp. For a time it shared in importance if not in peril with the French-Indian alarms. The ambition of the county to be putting its possessions in better shape was clearly indicated by the little that was done during this war period. After Wethersfield had been divided in 1690 by setting off Glastonbury on the east side of the gnawing Connecti- cut, it had been the intention to open up the western holdings for the orderly settlement which pioneering and Indian buying was making essential. The territory, running west from Farmington and Simsbury to the Housatonic, was bounded on the north by Massachusetts and on the south by Woodbury and Mattatuck (Waterbury). Steps were taken in 1707 to make the survey and arrive at agreements, but nothing substantial could be done till after Queen Anne's war and the Indian terror. New committees were appointed in 1713 for Hartford and Windsor, the towns to which the territory had been assigned, and four years later New Bantam (Litchfield) was laid out. After settlement with Farm- ington men who forehandedly had made purchases from the Indians, this layout was confirmed but with proviso that the sec- tion north of Woodbury and Litchfield should be left for further disposal by the Assembly.
Request by Hartford and Windsor to settle more of the west- ern sections met with no recorded response from the legislators. Nevertheless in 1720 Ensign Thomas Seymour and Sergeant James Ensign were sent to buy of the natives, and then a list of the purchasers in the towns was made with view to future appor- tionment. By 1723 the committees reported another tract ready to be laid out-in sixty-seven allotments to be sold at £6 each. The committees were among the prominent men of the colony but the Assembly, suspicious of graft, ordered their arrest, and that too not by the King's attorney of Hartford County but of New Haven County. Hartford County rose in protest; New Haven officials were ordered to make the arrests forthwith; Hartford parried by directing Joseph Talcott (son of Col. John Talcott and later governor), Capt. Hezekiah Wyllys, Lieut. Thomas Sey- mour and James Ensign to present the subject before the Assem- bly. Their compromise plan being rejected, it was voted in 1726 that Hartford and Windsor should have only the eastern part of
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the tract and the colony the western part, Litchfield to belong to the "proprietors." This gave the two towns the present Cole- brook, Hartland, Winchester, Barkhamsted, Torrington, New Hartford and Harwintown, and also Litchfield, for the proprie- tors, a total of 326,800 acres. The colony's portion was only 120,000 acres, but the thought was to get settlement under way without more dickering.
The lands having been annexed to the county, Capt. Thomas Seymour and Lieut. Roger Newberry as a committee prepared the layout by which Windsor received Colebrook, Barkhamsted, Farmington and the western half of Harwinton, and Hartford the rest. Each taxpayer of the two towns received, by his list of 1620, a share in the new townships, in proportion to his list at the rate of three acres to the pound. The colony's portion was sold and the proceeds devoted in perpetuity to the schools in the towns then settled. Litchfield County was established in 1751.
Hartford County was decreased in size when Windham County was established in 1726; in 1728, Waterbury's request to be annexed to New Haven County was granted. Norfolk and Salis- bury were sold at auction in Hartford in 1738.
The possibilities in reaches of territory were constantly in mind as when in the '50s Phineas Lyman, of Suffield, who had been a leader in the Massachusetts boundary affair, Roger Wol- cott, Jr., and others obtained from the Assembly rights to form the Susquehanna Company to go out into Pennsylvania's neigh- borhood, but within the region named in the charter, and estab- lish Wyoming, since tillable land in Connecticut had been well taken up.
Another of the real estate transactions which earlier tested war-ruffled tempers was the strife relative to Joshua's will in 1722. Joshua, third son of Uncas, whose remarkable will figures also in East Hartford history, in 1676 bequeathed much of his land in present Tolland and Windham counties to men of East Hartford, Hartford and Windsor, reserving his special hunting grounds for his sons. Capt. James Fitch of Norwich and Rev. Thomas Buckingham, then of Saybrook, were the administrators. In 1706 the Hartford legatees and in 1715 the Windsor legatees for Tolland received grants of township privileges. Previously Capt. Jeremiah Fitch of Norwich had bought of a Windsor settler in the Coventry section land that had been left by one of Joshua's
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sons to Maj. John Clarke and Rev. Mr. Buckingham. Clarke sued and won. Upon Fitch's refusal to surrender he was brought to Hartford jail, whereupon his squatter-sovereign neighbors marched to Hartford, broke in the jail doors, and, standing off Colonel Whiting, the sheriff, and his large posse at the foot of present Ferry Street, made their way home in triumph. All the jail prisoners were liberated. Later fifteen of the rioters were tried in Special Court and were convicted, but Captain Fitch, the storm center, was acquitted on the ground that he had had no hand in the affair. The outbreak is the more important because it is an illustration of the lawlessness which was developing in contrast with the previous behavior of the people.
The contest over the location of Yale College in the second decade of the century was another illustration, as affecting those in high station, men of the kind who previously had revered and upheld the Legislature. It grew out of the proposal to remove the "collegiate school" from Saybrook to New Haven for reasons that long had appealed to those who had the best interests of the institution at heart. Hartford's bid for it was based on incon- venience in transportation between the counties, ignoring the ambitions and preparations of Eaton's colony for many years. The town offered a sum of money and Rev. Timothy Woodbridge and Rev. Thomas Buckingham, his fellow pastor of the Second Church, worked for the plan. Inasmuch as Wethersfield's great man, Elisha Williams, was establishing a very commendable school in Wethersfield, that town became their first choice as the combat thickened, and inasmuch as they both were members of the board of trustees, it was felt that their wishes should have special weight. The board voted that those students who were "uneasy" might go to other places than Saybrook till the next commence- ment. Some of them went home and some to Wethersfield. Sam- uel Smith of Glastonbury, who had been appointed the third tutor at Yale, was induced to go to Mr. Williams' branch. It came about that there were fourteen pupils at Wethersfield, thirteen at New Haven and three or four at Saybrook. In 1716 four students were graduated at New Haven and one (Isaac Burr of Hartford) at Wethersfield. Some of the students were studying in Hartford and the senior class was living with Rector Samuel Andrews at Milford.
I
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New Haven bid as high as £700 and late in 1716 won the vote of the trustees who also voted to begin at once a school building and a rector's house. It was while these were being built in 1718 that Elihu Yale of London, governor of the East India Company, made his gift of books, goods and money, and others contributed. The new building was named "Yale College." At commencement that year eight received diplomas in New Haven and five (includ- ing Jonathan Edwards of South Windsor, the great theologian of the century) at Wethersfield. Soon after, the latter group received full recognition as members of the New Haven class. Meantime, the Assembly, "to quiet the minds of the people and introduce a general harmony into public affairs,"-words that picture the colony's anxiety over the disruptions-voted "that a state house should be built at Hartford to compensate for the college at New Haven; that £25 sterling should be given to Say- brook for the use of the school, to compensate for the removal of the college," and that the governor and council should see to the removal of the library from Saybrook to New Haven. The orders of the governor and council were so vigorously opposed in Say- brook and vicinity that the sheriff and his men got the books only after a hot encounter; bridges were torn down, the wagons were attacked and robbed and many valuable books and papers were destroyed in the week's journey to New Haven. The up-river opposition subsided, but when the two local trustees were elected to the Assembly the next year in recognition of their services, they were not allowed to take their seats. The Wethersfield school continued for only a short time and in 1722 Rev. Mr. Williams was made rector pro tempore in New Haven, on the removal of Rector Cutler.
It was in 1717 that the General Assembly took up the subject of purchases from the Indians without legislative sanction. A committee was appointed to consider previous purchases. Indi- viduals had bought with clothing, tools and so forth, but for the future the colony would do the buying, and all in the name of the Crown. As previously remarked, the Indians were wont to think they were selling simply hunting rights.
Court decisions were no great deterrent to litigation. Free- dom of opinion was strongly implanted in many minds. A statute relative to rioters, drunkards and other undesirable citizens de-
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creed that "common barrators, which frequently move, stir up and maintain suits of law in court, or quarrels and parts in the country, shall give security for their good behavior, or be sent to the common gaol." It was during Talcott's administration that the Assembly declared that "many persons had taken upon them to be attorneys at the bar, so that quarrels and lawsuits were multiplied and the King's good subjects disturbed." For a time the number of lawyers was limited.
There was little general knowledge of the English law, such as Ludlow had had, and the process of adapting it to local circum- stances was slow. Judge Tapping Reeve, who practiced a year in Hartford before opening America's first law school in Litchfield in 1772, was yet to come. There were, nevertheless, brainy men who availed themselves of meagre opportunities. Barring two permitted to practice regularly under the Andros regime, the first to be appointed in the county were Roger Wolcott of Windsor, who became chief judge of the Superior Court, Capt. John Wads- worth, of Farmington, Capt. Thomas Welles of Wethersfield (grandson of Governor Thomas Welles), and Richard Edwards of Windsor, ancestor of the two Presidents Jonathan Edwards, of Governor Henry W. Edwards, of Judge Ogden Edwards of New York, of Pierpont Edwards of Connecticut, of Aaron Burr and of other leaders at the bar and in the church. Those appoint- ments were in 1708. The next year the appointments were of Capt. Joseph Wadsworth of charter fame, Thomas Olcott and Capt. Aaron Cook, Sr., all of Hartford, and Samuel Moore, of Windsor. In the immediately succeeding years there were appointed Edward Bulkeley of Wethersfield, son of Gershom Bulkeley, Daniel Hooker of Hartford, who became the first tutor at Yale; Thomas Kimberly, of Glastonbury, for a few years colonial secretary and for a long period a teacher in Wethersfield; Capt. Thomas Stoughton of East Windsor; John Bissell of Hart- ford; and Peletiah Mills, the chief boniface of Windsor. Lieut. Samuel Pettibone, Jr., in 1729, was the first lawyer for Simsbury, and in that year John Curtis was appointed in Wethersfield. When the law was passed in 1730 that there should be but three lawyers in the county and two in each of the other counties, the Hartford appointees were Curtis, Joseph Gilbert of Hartford and Roger Wolcott, Jr., of Windsor. The limitation of number was removed after one year's trial.
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It can but be observed that the self-government was feeling its way. Foundations for the present day were being laid on experi- ence. Judicial as well as legislative and regulatory powers were vested in the General Court. New requirements were met thoughtfully and precedents established with care more wonder- fully in evidence when one keeps in mind the frequent expeditions for war. The Fundamental Orders were sufficiently elastic to admit of the functions which the inexperienced self-government had to assume and to alter. The early division of the Court into magistrates and deputies became more distinctly the upper house (the Governor and Council) and the lower house, after the ab- sorption of New Haven in 1664 when the title "General Assembly" was assumed. Power ran from the Legislature downward to the towns and it was not till generations later, as will be seen else- where, that the Legislature could not supersede courts.
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