USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 41
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At that time all older New England seemed to be on the move. Charlestown, New Hampshire, was thronged with companies interested in the upper Connecticut valley or the land to the west. The Crown Point road, built through the Green Mountains for military purposes, enticed many who might otherwise have settled along the
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river into the mountain valleys of the New Hampshire Grants. Such glowing reports of the soil and climate of northwestern New England came back to the rocky farms of Windham county that, in the words of its historian, "emigration raged .. . like an epidemic and seemed likely to sweep away a great part of the population." Through Windham county, also, traveled so many families from the regions farther south that when a flood in 1771 car- ried away many of the bridges, the authorities refused to reconstruct them without outside aid. This position they justified by reference to the abundant use of the bridges made by great numbers of families "traveling to the west part of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, and the north part of New York."
Once settled in the new regions, the pioneers acted as magnets to friends and relatives. William Bradley of New Haven, who had been stationed at Lanesboro dur- ing the fighting, brought his wife and four boys into the country in 1762. Eight years later his brother Jesse moved his wife and seven children to a farm in Lee. Shortly after, to Stockbridge, came his cousin Elisha with a wife and eight children. Jabez Bradley, another relative, accompanied by his father-in-law and his brother-in-law with their respective families, settled near Jesse. All the Bradleys occupied responsible positions in their respective towns.
In general the positions of political trust seem to have been dominated by the immigrants from Connecticut. Ezra May, for instance, a native of Woodstock, and one of the earliest settlers of the present town of Chesterfield, was moderator of the first town meeting, constable, and chairman of the selectmen, in addition to being the first deacon in the church. Of Middlefield, to which in one decade came one hundred and fourteen Connecticut
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settlers as compared with eighty-seven from older Massachusetts towns, a recent historian has written that "the Connecticut men proved to be better home makers." They acted together, controlled the elections, and gov- erned the town. Among the selectmen chosen between 1793 and 1800 thirteen out of seventeen were from Con- necticut while in the following thirty years all but one were of Connecticut birth.
Perhaps nowhere, however, was the Connecticut in- fluence more evident than in the ecclesiastical life of the region. Of the thirty-eight ministers settled in Berkshire county before 1800, Yale furnished twenty-six. In the territory covered by Old Hampshire the proportion of Yale men was not so overwhelming, but it was sufficient to give a definite Connecticut tinge to that county's development. When, in 1785, nine trustees were ap- pointed to carry out the will of Ephraim Williams and establish a free school in Williamstown, seven were Yale graduates, and when the school opened in 1791, Ebenezer Fitch, Yale 1777, was chosen president. With the charter- ing of the school as a college in 1793, three more trustees were added, two of whom were Yale trained. President Fitch and seven of the trustees were natives of Connecti- cut as well.
All these factors-the lateness of the settlement as com- pared to the towns of eastern Massachusetts, the frontier character of the society, and the influx of population from another colony-tended to develop those marked differences between the western and eastern parts of Massachusetts that were so evident at the time of the Revolution. As has been pointed out by the historian of New England's expansion, western Massachusetts "sup- plied the most radical element in the new state," at first toward England, and later toward the conservative sea-
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board. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that the first organizer of the movement which culminated in Shays's Rebellion was a deposed clergyman who had come to Hampshire county from Somers, Connecticut. The process by which this new Connecticut finally merged itself into the cultural life of Massachusetts was a long and painful one.
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FAR from solving Connecticut's population problem, the early emigration seemed only to intensify it. Connecti- cut people were ready, therefore, when the French and Indian menace had been removed, to take full advantage of the grants of Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire in what he considered the western confines of his colony. Two streams of migration, one following the Connecticut valley, the other working up the Housatonic valley or along the waterways of eastern New York, converged on the eastern and western slopes of the Green Mountains. While in both the Connecticut influence dominated, the settlers moving up the Connecticut river were joined by many from Rhode Island, eastern Massachusetts, and eastern New Hampshire. These served to render some- what more cosmopolitan the settlements to the east of the mountains. To the west, where the immigrants came largely from western Connecticut and western Massa- chusetts, with a small sprinkling of New Yorkers, the most distinctive of the new Connecticuts developed.
The town of Pawlet, Vermont, furnished an illustra- tion of a process which, with variations, was repeated over and over again. Captain Jonathan Willard, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1720, had resided for many years at Colchester, Connecticut. Seized with the wan-
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derlust, about 1750 he moved to Albany, New York, opened a public house, and furnished stores for the army at Lake George. After eight years in Albany, he moved on to Saratoga where he entered the lumber business. In 1760 he visited the New Hampshire Grants, obtained a grant for a town, and entered the names of his old neigh- bors in Connecticut in the charter. He then traveled to Colchester to tell his friends of his actions. Many, of course, had no desire to move. For a mug of flip or a new hat he purchased so many of their rights that he acquired title to two thirds of the town. With nine hired men and several horses he established himself and planted wheat. At the same time others from Colchester and Canterbury arrived. In this small area old Connecticut was repro- duced, its laws were reënacted, its local festivities were observed, and election cake was eaten with as keen a relish as in the down-country home of the settlers. During the first fifteen years of its existence the proportion of newcomers from Connecticut, as compared to those from elsewhere, was approximately four to one.
Often it happened that a group of neighbors from some Connecticut town would decide to remove to- gether. As a group they would obtain their grant, allocate their lands, and elect their town officers long before they actually left their old homes. Sometimes the men would spend a summer or two, preparing homes and planting crops, returning to Connecticut when winter set in. The earliest town meetings of many Vermont towns were thus held in Connecticut. The charter for the town of Castle- ton, for instance, was granted in 1761. The earliest proprietors' meeting of which there is an account was held in 1766 in Salisbury, Connecticut, probably at the home of Col. Amos Bird. After several more meetings at the same place, on February 27, 1770, the proprietors
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adjourned to reconvene at the house of Colonel Bird in Castleton on May 27 at 2 P.M.
Other inhabitants of Salisbury formed the majority of the grantees of the later Salisbury, Vermont. Although this town was surveyed in 1762, its settlement was slow until after the Revolution. With the coming of peace, however, its growth became so rapid that sufficient food for the inhabitants was produced only with the greatest difficulty.
In Pomfret, Connecticut, as in so many other Con- necticut towns, the better farming lands, which were largely held by the descendants of the earliest settlers, could not be easily purchased. Since in the households of three neighbors thirty-three children were growing up, to provide food for so many mouths, as well as occupation for so many hands, had become a serious problem. As early as 1735 a number of citizens had attempted unsuc- cessfully to purchase a township in the Equivalent Lands. In 1761 one of these same citizens, Isaac Dana, together with his son and others in the town, received a patent from Governor Wentworth to a township in the New Hampshire Grants. This township, which was originally named New Pomfret, had as its first settler Benjamin Durkee, from its Connecticut namesake. Others followed him from Pomfret and at least twenty-one names of neighboring Woodstock (Connecticut) families were to be found among the early settlers. Dana's son became the town clerk while John Throop of Woodstock represented the town in the first legislature of Vermont.
Early in the same year in which Pomfret was granted, petition was circulated through the region of the
a Thames river in eastern Connecticut asking Wentworth for a grant of four townships on the Connecticut river. After being extensively signed, the petition was carried
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to Portsmouth by Edmund Freeman and Joseph Storrs of the town of Mansfield. On July 4 they received patents to four adjacent towns, two on each side of the river. Three of the first town meetings of these four towns were held in Mansfield; the fourth took place in near-by Windham, Connecticut. In consequence, the large majority of the first settlers in Norwich and Hartford, Vermont, and in Hanover and Lebanon, New Hampshire, were from Connecticut, and Dartmouth College, like Williams, was started in a distinctly Connecticut atmos- phere. In fact, fifty-five of the sixty-eight shares of the town of Hanover were assigned to settlers from Wind- ham. A native of Windham, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a graduate of Yale and for many years min- ister at Lebanon Crank (now Columbia), founded the college.
To take up the history of other towns of Vermont indi- vidually would involve mere repetition. Suffice it to say that over forty of the earliest towns founded between the Connecticut river and the Champlain valley bear the names of Connecticut towns and in numbers of others the first town clerks, moderators, selectmen, representatives to the state legislature, and church deacons were natives of Connecticut.
Liberalism, independence, and impatience with re- straint characterized this as they did all other American frontiers. Here, as in other cases, it was the individualists, the dissatisfied, the nonconformers who moved first and stamped their individuality on the settlements. At Canterbury, Connecticut, many people were offended by the bluntness and lack of discretion of the pastor of the Separate church. After considerable agitation, a council held in 1768 decided that "Brother Joseph Marshall be dismissed from the pastoral care of this church, on
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account of the contentions in the church respecting his gifts and ordination, which renders his improvement unprofitable." Brother Marshall promptly took the trail, first to western Connecticut, and later to the Grants where, amid more congenial surroundings, his labors, so we are told, were greatly blessed.
Under the liberal terms of Wentworth's grants there quickly developed in the Green Mountains a system of town government surpassing in its spirit of independence and unbridled democracy even its prototype in the colony to the south. The remoteness of the provincial government at Portsmouth, the sparseness of the popula- tion, and the dangers of the wilderness naturally led to this result among people already by previous training deeply imbued with the idea of local self-government. There was hardly a function of civil government that these little republics did not essay in the first twenty years of their existence.
Perhaps of even greater importance, however, was the part taken by natives of Connecticut in the organization of the state of Vermont. Of these, no one was more im- portant than Ira Allen of Salisbury. Hired by a group of Connecticut proprietors to survey a township in the Grants, he saw the possibilities of wealth in land specu- lation. After forming a land company with his brothers Ethan, Heman, and Zimri, and Remember Baker, he explored and secured title to large tracts of land in various parts of the area. Some of its holdings the company sold to neighbors in Salisbury, Thomas Chittenden being a large purchaser. All might have gone well had a dispute not arisen between New Hampshire and New York over the jurisdiction of the region. All the company's lands rested on grants from Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire, so, when the king of England, by an
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order in council in 1764, declared the Connecticut river north of where it entered Massachusetts to be the eastern boundary of New York, the Salisbury people saw their investment threatened. When, in addition, the governor of New York indicated that he would not disturb actual settlers on the lands granted by New Hampshire, but that he had no sympathy for speculators, there was bound to be trouble.
Along the banks of the Connecticut river, where a larger proportion of the land was held by actual settlers from all three of the southern New England colonies, New York's jurisdiction was at first accepted with little question. Led by Thomas Chandler who, with his two sons, had left Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1761 to locate in what is now Chester, Vermont, the settlers signed a petition to New York praying the establishment of an adequate government over the region.
West of the Green Mountains, where the largest part of the Allens' land was located, and where nearly all the actual settlers were from western Connecticut or western Massachusetts, the king's proclamation led to the dis- patch of an agent to London and preparations for active resistance to the extension of New York's control. A short time later one of the few settlers who had taken land under the authority of New York wrote to a friend:
One Ethan Allen hath brought from Connecticut twelve or fifteen of the most blackguard fellows he can get, double- armed in order to protect him, and if some method is not taken to subdue the towns of Bennington, Shaftsbury, Arlington and Manchester and those people in Socialborough [now Claren- don], and others scattering about the woods, there had as good be an end of government.
The story of the turbulent meetings in which the Green Mountain Boys, led by the Allens, Remember
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Baker, and the Connecticut-born Seth Warner, encoun- tered New York sheriffs and surveyors, needs no retelling. As a result of those meetings, in the fertile brain of Ira Allen there arose the idea, first of a fourteenth colony, and then of an independent state. That he and his brother, Ethan, considered this solution for some months before any action was taken, seems evident from the fact that in March, 1775, Ethan wrote to Oliver Wolcott, who had been sheriff in Ethan's home county in Connecticut, for advice as to the mode of government to be established over the settlements. Later in that year or early in 1776 at Salisbury, Connecticut, Ira won over his brother, Heman, Thomas Chittenden, and Dr. Jonas Fay to the plan.
Apparently believing that the people should be brought to the idea by degrees, a convention of the towns west of the Green Mountains was held at Dorset in January, 1776, to petition the Continental Congress to allow the Grants to take part in the resistance to England under their own authority, rather than under that of New York. Heman Allen presented the memorial to the congress, which ordered it to lie upon the table for further con- sideration. Heman then withdrew it and returned to report to a second convention of the western settlements held in July. This convention promptly resolved that "application be made to the Inhabitants of said Grants to form the same into a separate district." All inhabitants were invited to subscribe to this "Association" and per- sons were appointed to carry the idea to the people east of the mountains as well. Thus it happened that when the committees of the eastern counties assembled in August to nominate officers for their militia, Heman Allen, Jonas Fay, and William Marsh were present. They argued the subject of a separate jurisdiction, described the bounda- ries of what might be a new state, and asked the approval
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of the committees for the project. The committees in turn called town meetings to determine the views of their constituents.
In September, at an adjourned session of the Dorset convention, with ten of the eastern towns represented, a plan was adopted for ruling the Grants through the resolves of similar meetings regularly held. It was further decided that in the future no law or direction received fre New York would be accepted or obeyed.
'ger time of the next meeting, which was scheduled for Ocm >er 30, found the British advancing on Ticonderoga, an 'the various delegates far too occupied with plans for dei ense to attend. In consequence, it was postponed until Jar ary 15, 1777, when twenty-two representatives from fi'St. mowns came together. Among them were Thomas
( en and Ira and Heman Allen. Discussions over
ti
son of a state had by this time become general
th sout the towns, and the time for action seemed to
ha rrived. After brief reports, indicating that east of the chfountains a majority of the settlers favored this procedure, and that west of the mountains there was practical unanimity for it, a declaration of independence was adopted and the name, New Connecticut, was chosen. Among the members of this convention at least nine were former residents of Connecticut, four came from Massa- chusetts, one had resided in New Hampshire, and one in New York. Of the seven whose origins are not known, five represented towns which had been settled very largely from Connecticut.
Although the Connecticut influence continued to domi- nate in the new state, its name lasted only until the next general convention, which met at Windsor in June, 1777. There it was decided that, since a district on the Susque- hanna river had for some time been known as New
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Connecticut, and since it would be inconvenient for two separate districts to bear the same name, the region of the Grants should be called Vermont.
Another indication of the close connection with Con- necticut was the overwhelming predominance of the men from Connecticut in the early state government. Thomas Chittenden served as governor, with the exception of but one year, from 1778 until 1797. Eight of the next fourteen governors also came from Connecticut. Ira Allen w/t. the state's first treasurer and Jonas Fay, in addition to lising entrusted with missions to the surrounding states, Ited at different times as secretary of state and judge. Anthng the many other Connecticut men who made important contributions to Vermont's early development migł & be mentioned Nathaniel Chipman of Salisbury . 25 f Vermont's ablest chief justices; Stephen Row B Ilus-
of
Cheshire (then part of Wallingford), commis.
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? Ist congress on behalf of Vermont and one of Vermor. M. senators; Thomas Chandler, Jr., of Woodstock er- mont's first secretary of state; Gamaliel Painter of alis- bury, a member of the council of censors and one of the men largely responsible for the establishment of Middle- bury College; and Governors Jonas Galusha of Norwich and Israel Smith of Suffield.
Connecticut also was the source from which Vermont derived many of its ideas of government and law. In the journal of the first session of the general assembly, there are two entries in these words:
Passed an act for the punishing high treason and other atrocious crimes, as said act stands in the Connecticut law- book.
Passed an act against treacherous conspiracies, as said act stands in the Connecticut law-book.
A comparison of other laws enacted by the assembly
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with the Connecticut statutes indicates that they served as the source from which many principles embodied in the penal statutes of Vermont were drawn.
In short, to western Massachusetts and to Vermont went, in that early day, the largest share of Connecticut's emigrants. In new homes carved out of the wilderness, they carried on Connecticut traditions and clung to old Connecticut canons. For Connecticut itself, these terri- tories served as a safety valve. To them flowed the stream of the discontented, the nonconformers, and those who sought wider economic opportunities. With the con- tinued draining away of such elements, the tendency to uniformity and conservatism within the state itself was accentuated. Connecticut came to be known as the Land ofte eady Habits.
Bibliographical Note
SOME additional information will be found in Lois K. M. Rosenberrys, Migrations from Connecticut prior to 1800 (No. XXVIII in this series) and in Lois K. Mathews, Expansion of New England (Boston, 1909), which con- tains helpful references to source material. The causes of migration from Connecticut are explained in Albert L. Olsons, Agricultural economy and the population in eighteenth-century Connecticut (No. XL in this series).
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PUBLICATIONS OF THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
The Committee on Historical Publications of the Connecticut Tercentenary Commission has issued, during the past few years, a series of small pamphlets upon a great variety of topics, selected for the purpose of making better known among the people of Connecticut and others as many of the features as possible of the history and life of Connecticut as colony and state. No attempt has been made to deal with these subjects in either logical or chronological order, the intention having been to issue pamphlets at any time upon any subject that seemed to be of interest and worthy to be made a matter of record.
The series will be completed with the issuance of a total number of sixty pamphlets. A small supplementary pamphlet providing biographical data about the authors and other information about the series has been prepared, and may be obtained without charge from the Yale University Press.
I. Connecticut and the British Government, by C. M. ANDREWS. 36 pp. 25c.
II. The Connecticut Intestacy Law, by C. M. ANDREWS. 32 pp. .
25c.
III. The Charter of Connecticut, 1662, by C. M. ANDREWS and A. C. BATES. 24 Pp. 25c.
IV. Thomas Hooker, by W. S. ARCHIBALD. 20 pp. .
25c.
V. The Story of the War with the Pequots Re-Told, by H. BRADSTREET. 32 . pp. Illustrated. .
VI. The Settlement of the Connecticut Towns, by D. DEMING. 80 pp. Illus- trated. .
. 25c.
VIII. George Washington and Connecticut in War and Peace, by G. M. DUTCHER. 36 pp. Illustrated. 25 c .
IX. The Discoverer of Anesthesia: Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford, by H. W. ERVING. 16 pp. Illustrated. 25c.
X. Connecticut Taxation, 1750-1775, by L. H. GIPSON. 44 pp. 25c. · XI. Boundaries of Connecticut, by R. M. HOOKER. 38 pp. Illustrated. 25c.
XII. Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, by J. F. KELLY. 32 pp. 25c.
XIII. Milford, Connecticut: The Early Development of a Town as Shown in Its Land Records, by L. W. LABAREE. 32 pp. Illustrated.
25c.
XV. Hitchcock Chairs, by M. R. MOORE. 16 pp. Illustrated.
XVI. The Rise of Liberalism in Connecticut, 1828-1850, by J. M. MORSE. 48 pp.
XVII. Under the Constitution of 1818: The First Decade, by J. M. MORSE. 24 pp.
XVIII. The New England Meeting House, by N. PORTER. 36 pp. 25c. XIX. The Indians of Connecticut, by M. SPIESS. 36 pp. 25c.
XX. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, by G. M. DUTCHER and A. C. BATES. 20 pp. Illustrated. 50c.
XXI. The Litchfield Law School, 1775-1833, by S. H. FISHER. 32 pp. 25c.
XXII. The Hartford Chest, by H. W. ERVING. 16 pp. Illustrated. 25c.
XXIII. Early Clockmaking in Connecticut, by P. R. HOOPES. 32 pp. 25c.
XXIV. The Hartford Convention, by W. E. BUCKLEY. 32 pp. 25c.
XXV. The Spanish Ship Case: A Troublesome Episode for Connecticut, 1752- 1758, by R. M. HOOKER. 34 pp. 25 c .
XXVI. The Great Awakening and Other Revivals in the Religious Life of Con- necticut, by M. H. MITCHELL. 64 pp. 5ºc.
XXVII. Music Vale Seminary, 1835-1876, by F. H. JOHNSON. 24 pp. Illustrated. 25c. XXVIII. Migrations from Connecticut Prior to 1800, by L. K. M. ROSENBERRY. 36 pp. 25c.
75c. 25c.
VII. The Settlement of Litchfield County, by D. DEMING. 16 pp.
XIV. Roads and Road-Making in Colonial Connecticut, by I. S. MITCHELL. 32 pp. Illustrated. 25c. 25c. 5ºc. 25c.
XXIX. Connecticut's Tercentenary: A Retrospect of Three Centuries of Self- Government and Steady Habits, by G. M. DUTCHER. 32 pp. . 25c. .
XXXI. The Loyalists of Connecticut, by EPAPHRODITUS PECK. 32 pp.
XXXII. The Beginnings of Connecticut, 1632-1662, by C. M. ANDREWS. 84 pp. . XXXIII. Connecticut Inventors, by J. W. ROE. 32 pp. .
XXXIV. The Susquehannah Company: Connecticut's Experiment in Expansion, by J. P. BOYD. 48 pp.
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