USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 6
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The redoubt he describes as standing on a plain on the margin of the River, with a creek running alongside of it to a high woodland, "out of which comes a valley which
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makes this kill," where the town was built. The anec- dote runs in this wise :
Among the incidents which happened while I was here was that of an English ketch arriving here from the north with thirty pipes of Canary wine. There was a merchant with it, who was from the same city, in England, as the servant of the minister of this town, and was well acquainted with him. Now this merchant invited the minister's servant on board the vessel to drink with him ; and it seems that the man became fuddled with wine, or drank pretty freely, which was observed by the minister. So they brought the servant to the church, where the post stood, in order to whip him. The merchant then came to me and requested me to speak to the minister, as it was my fault that he had given wine to his countryman.
I accordingly went to the commander of our little fort, or redoubt, and invited the minister and the mayor [? governor ], and other leading men with their wives, who were very fond of eating cherries; as there were from forty to fifty cherry-trees standing about the redoubt, full of cherries, we feasted the minister and the governor, and their wives also came to us; and as we were seated at the meal in the redoubt, I together with the merchant, requested the minister to pardon his servant, saying that he probably had not partaken of any wine for a year, and that such sweet Canary wine would intoxicate any man. We were a long time before we could persuade him; but their wives spoke favorably, whereby the servant got free.
De Vries observed that the Hartford folk lived soberly as a rule. They " drink only three times at a meal, and whoever drinks himself drunk they tie to a post and whip him, as they do thieves in Holland."
Gysbert op Dyck resigned his charge in October, 1640, " disgusted with a post where he was so constantly in- sulted." The English had now openly denied the right of the Dutch to any land about the fort. "Show your right, and we are ready to exhibit ours." So Governor Hopkins,
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The Fall of the House of Hope
Haynes's successor, retorted to Op Dyck's reiterated plea of title through purchase prior to any English settlement here. The English right was now grounded also on pur- chase, with that of conquest added. In 1635 or 1636 they had secured a deed from Sunckquasson, son of Sow- heag, the " chief Sequeen," alluded to in the Dutch claim as the " lord or right owner of the entire River and land thereabouts," who had assented to the Pequots' sale to Van Curler in 1633. Their claim by conquest was through their crushing of the Pequots in 1638. To fortify their claim by purchase they had in July of 1640 obtained from Sunckquasson, or Sequasson, now chief of the tribe, a denial of the assent to the Pequot sale to Van Curler. Brought into the Hartford court, Sequasson had testified that " he never sold any ground to the Dutch, neither was at any time conquered by the Pequots, or paid tribute to them." In the following September the colony further procured from Uncas, since the Pequot overthrow the all- powerful Mohegan sagamore, "a clear and ample deed of all his lands in Connecticut, except the lands which were then planted," the latter being reserved for himself and his people. Meanwhile collisions between the English and Dutch farmers repeatedly occurred, and blows were ex- changed. Complaints appear in the later records of many petty encounters, some of which provoke a smile as we peruse them, though grave enough they must have been to the sufferers. There was the case of one Evert Duyc- kink, a garrison man, who while sowing grain was struck " a hole in his head with a sticke, soe that the bloode ran downe very strongly, downe upon his body." Others were beaten off, lamed, with plow-staves. Ground which the Dutch had broken and made ready for seed, was seized in the night-time, and sown with corn by the quick-acting
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English, and thenceforward held by them. were cut down and corn planted instead.
Standing peas
They cut the ropes of a plow and threw it in the river. They blocked up the House of Hope with palisades on the land side. " Those of Hartford sold a hogg that belonged to the honoured companie under pretense that it had eaten of their grounde grass, when they had not any foot of inheri- tance." Kieft, -Irving's " William the Testy," - now the director of New Netherland, entered stout-worded pro- tests against the aggressive acts, but rendered Op Dyck no other aid.
The next year (1641), however, when Jan Hendricksen Roesen had succeeded Op Dyck, Kieft roused himself to action. In June he arranged to send a force of fifty sol- diers and two sloops to fortify the fort, and "to prevent the repetition of such hostility as the English have wick- edly committed against our people, and maintain our rights and territory." Johannes La Montagne, the Hugue- not physician, second to Kieft in the council of New Netherland, was put in charge of this expedition. But it never reached the River. "It pleased the Lord to dis- appoint their purpose," they being compelled to " keep their soldiers at home to defend themselves." So the elder Winthrop wrote down in his Journal. The occasion, far from providential to the Dutch, was a cruel rising of the Indians against De Vries's colony on Staten Island. Meanwhile counter complaints were made by the Hartford government of the "insolent behavior " of the men at the fort. They were charged with vending arms and ammu- nition to the Indians suspected of hostile intentions ; with giving "entertainment " to fugitives from justice; with helping prisoners to "file off their irons"; with assisting criminals in breaking goal; with persuading servants to
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The Fall of the House of Hope
run from their masters and then sheltering them; with purchasing goods stolen from the English, and refusing to return them. By this time the domain about the fort had been contracted by the English to about thirty acres.
In 1642 David Provoost came to the charge of the fort and held it through five stormy years. During this period the commissioners of the United Colonies took a hand in the controversy between the two contestants, and the mat- ter was carried across the sea for adjustment. But all failed of success, and the relations steadily grew more strained. In 1642 Kieft instituted new retaliatory meas- ures, in issuing a prohibition of all trade and commercial intercourse with the Hartford folk in the neighborhood of the fort. Later on the colony proposed to buy out the Dutch company's interest in the contested land about the- fort. The General Court sent delegates to New Nether- land to negotiate. Kieft, "after explaining in detail the antiquity of the Dutch title," declined to entertain their proposal. He offered, instead, a lease of the coveted Hartford field for an annual rent of a tenth part of the produce from it, so long as the English occupation should continue. The committee reported accordingly to the court, and there the matter ended.
At length, in 1646, Provoost committed an act of defiance to the colonial authorities which led the commis- sioners of the United Colonies to address Kieft in formal complaint of the " strange and insufferable boldness " of the Dutch on the River. Provoost's performance was in- discreet, but dramatic, with a chivalrous air and the hauteur of a soldier baited by a petty police, which compels admi- ration. A captive Indian woman fleeing from her English master had found refuge in the fort, and the magistrates demanded her surrender. The demand being denied or
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ignored, the "watch of Hartford " were sent to enforce it. Provoost met them without the fort, and drawing his rapier broke it upon their weapons. Then turning his back upon them contemptuously, he strode off without a word, to his quarters. " Had he been slain in this proud affront," the commissioners exclaimed, "his blood had been upon his own head !" Kieft's reply was an asser- tion that the Hartford people had deceived the commis- sioners with false accusations. The wrongs, he insisted, had been committed on their side. For them to complain of the Dutch at Fort Hope was "like Esop's Wolf com- plaining of the Lamb." As to the " barbarian handmaid " detained by them, "she was probably not a slave but a free woman, 'because she was neither taken in war nor bought with a price'; yet she should not be 'wrongfully detained.'" The commissioners answered expressing them- selves as "much unsatisfied " with Kieft's attitude. He could not prove his charge of deceit against the Hartford people, they wrote. Nor was his assumption as to the status of the Indian maid true. She was a captive, taken in war; and she had "fled from public justice, and was detained by the Dutch ' both from her master and the magis- trate.' " As " for your other expressions, proverbs, or allu- sions," the letter closes with fine dignity, " we leave them to your better consideration." Thus the correspondence, conducted on both sides in sonorous Latin, ended, the honors with the English. For, as Brodhead, holding the brief for the Dutch, says, " while justice and equity ap- peared to be on the side of the Hollanders, the English negotiators showed themselves the better diplomatists, and the reckless Kieft only injured a good cause by intemper- ate zeal and undignified language."
Upon the recall of "William the Testy " and the in-
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coming of " Peter the Headstrong," Gysbert op Dyck was returned to the command of the fort. During the five years interim between his first service and his reappoint- ment he had been a member of Kieft's council at New Amsterdam, and, though the director's friend, had opposed his harsher methods and policy. A man of education and good parts, having withal some skill in diplomacy, he now established more agreeable relations with his neighbors. During this second term, beginning in 1647, there was less of the friction that drove him to resign in disgust before. But the English pressure continued unabated. At length the Dutch limits on the River were definitely defined in the provisional " Hartford Treaty " of 1650, which resulted from the friendly meeting of Stuyvesant with the council of the United Colonies at Hartford, to settle the various long-standing disputes between New Netherland and New England, in the hope of establishing a "perpetual and happy peace." For this convention Stuyvesant made the autumn journey from New Amsterdam in state. The immortal Knickerbocker tells of his suite of the "'wisest and weightiest men' of the community, that is to say, men with the oldest heads and heaviest pockets." And how when these " ponderous burghers " departed on this em- bassy, " all the old men and the old women " of the Man- hattoes "predicted that men of such weight, with such evidence, would leave the Yankees no alternative but to pack up their tin-kettles and wooden wares, put wife and children in a cart, and abandon all the lands of their High Mightinesses on which they had squatted." By the arbi- trators' decision, however, the Dutch got the little end of the bargain. They were allowed only the land about the fort then actually occupied by them, and marked by cer- tain defined bounds; all the remaining territory that had
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been taken into Hartford bounds, on both sides of the River, being confirmed as in the jurisdiction of the English.
The "happy peace " was of short duration. By 1653, when the war between England and Holland was on, and Connecticut, spoiling for a fight with New Netherland, was held back only by the refusal of Massachusetts to join, happy peace was completely shattered. With the reports of a Dutch and Indian plot to destroy the English plantations, and the sharp passages between the commis- sioners of the United Colonies and Stuyvesant as to his complicity in the alleged plot, an accusation hotly charged and denied, the House of Hope appears to have been quietly abandoned. Then came upon the scene that rest- less soldier and worldly Puritan, Captain John Underhill, -he whose sword, trained in the British service in the Low Countries, in Ireland and in Cadiz, had been with the Dutch as well as the English in American-Indian wars ; a hero of the Pequot war; leader of the "flying army " in the Dutch war against the Indians of Long Island and the mainland; sometime of Boston, disciplined there by the church and confessing with much " blubbering " and little sincerity to " foul sins " against the social code ; sometime of Stamford on the Sound; later of Flushing on Long Island under the Dutch; there, when the moment seemed propitious, hoisting the Parliament colors and calling upon the commonality of New Amsterdam to " accept and sub- mit ye to the Parliament of England." Ordered to quit the Dutch province, he fled to Rhode Island; thence, with a roving commission under the seal of the colony of Provi- dence Plantations giving him and William Dyer "full power and authority to defend themselves from the Dutch and all enemies of the commonwealth of England," this robustious hero started out on a little war of his own.
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The Fall of the House of Hope
Armed with his commission, Underhill made his appear- ance on the River one June day, and proceeding to the House of Hope posted this flaming notice on its outer door :
Whereas, By virtue off Commission graunted me by Providence Collonye, authorized by the Councell of State, and I hauinge in the said Commission full power for land service against ye Dutch in these terms following -" It is farther resolved yt Capt. Jo. Under- hill shall be Commander in Cheife in ye service against ye Dutch by land & Mr Wm Dyer in Cheife by Water,"-and by virtue of ye sd Commission, and according to Act of Parlyment and wth permission from ye Generall Court of Hartford, -
I Jo Underhill doe seize upon this hous and lands thereunto belonging as Dutch goods claymed by ye West India Company in Amsterdam enemies of the Commonweal of England, and thus to remayne seized till further determined by ye said Court.
Hartford, this 27th of June, 1653.
There is no record of the permission from the Hartford government which Underhill claimed to have had. He apparently acted on his own responsibility, and treated the property as his private spoils. For he subsequently twice sold it, giving his personal deed. In less than ten months after his seizure, the Hartford court, ignoring his action, sequestered the property by virtue of its own authority, in this order :
[April session, 1654] . .. Ordered and declared, that the Dutch howse the Hope with the lands, buildings, and fences thereunto be- longing, bee hereby sequestered and resarued, all perticular claimes or prtended right thereunto notwithstanding, in the behalfe of the Common wealth of England, till a true tryall may be had of the prmises, & in the meane time this Court prohibitts all persons what- soeuer from improving of the premises by vertue of any former title had, made, or giuen, to them or any of them, by any of the Dutch natyon, or any other, without the aprobatyon of this Courte, or except it bee by vertue of power & order rec'd from them for their
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soe doing ; & whatever rent for any part of the premises in any of their hands, it shall not be disposed off but according to what order they shall receive from this Court or the Magistrates thereof.
In July came the news of peace between England and Holland with the treaty stipulating that each side should hold what it had taken. So the last foothold of the Dutch on the Connecticut was finally broken, and the English colonists were supreme in the River's possession.
The House of Hope and its grounds remained seques- tered for a year, or till July, 1655, when Underhill made his second sale. The transaction was in spite of a decree of the Hartford court two months before, refusing a peti- tion from him for permission to sell, his rights in the property being definitely denied. The grantees were Wil- liam Gibbons and Richard Low, both responsible citizens of Hartford, " distinguished for their probity, enterprise, and good service to the country." Accordingly, it is assumed, the court made no interference with the transfer, contenting itself with the formal record of its own rights in the case.
In the process of time, however, the unceasing River removed what the court left undisturbed. Every vestige of the site on which the House of Hope stood was long ago worn away; and of the house itself the only memorial is a single yellow Holland brick now among the relics of the Connecticut Historical Society at Hartford.
Dutch Point, Hartford. Near the site of the Dutch " House of Hope"
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VI Saybrook Fort
The Saybrook Plantation for Important Colonists who never came -The Questioned Story of the Embarkation of Cromwell and Hampden - Beginnings by George Fenwick - Lion Gardiner's grim Humor - John Winthrop the Younger : a Remarkable Personage-Fenwick's Home on Saybrook Point-Lady Fenwick - John Higginson, the Chaplain - Lady Fenwick's lonely Tomb -The second Saybrook Fort, Scene of an Adventure of Andros in 1675 - Beginnings of Yale College at Saybrook - The "Saybrook Platform " - First Book Printed in Connecticut.
SAYBROOK remained the sole foothold of the Lords and Gentlemen on the River lands for five years after the establishment of the Connecticut colony, and then was absorbed in it. Their great project had early faded out. Of the noble company of "persons of quality" with " three hundred able men," for whose coming in 1636 Lion Gardiner had industriously prepared, only two ap- peared, - George Fenwick and his man-servant. Numerous others of "figure and distinction " had undoubtedly made ready for removal, but circumstances changed their plans. There appears to be fair ground for belief that among them were Sir Arthur Hazlerig, Sir Matthew Boynton, and the commoners Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell. Although au- thorities widely differ as to this tradition, the lay reader is disposed to accept it, fascinated by its picturesqueness, and for the zest it gives to speculation upon what might have been. Thus the story runs, as evolved by the various writers from the original statement of Dr. George Bates, physician to Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II respec-
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tively. Cromwell, Hampden and the rest were passengers on one of a fleet of eight ships ready to sail, in the spring of 1638, when by orders passed in council the vessels were stayed and all the passengers and provisions put ashore. Subsequently the vessels were permitted to depart, but this company remained behind. Most picturesque is Macaulay's portrayal of this embarkation :
Hampden determined to leave England. Beyond the Atlantic Ocean a few of the persecuted Puritans had formed in the wilder- ness of the Connecticut a settlement which has since become a pros- perous commonwealth. Lord Saye and Lord Brook were the original projectors of this scheme of emigration. Hampden had been early consulted respecting it. He was now, it appears, desir- ous to withdraw himself beyond the reach of oppressors who, as he probably suspected, and as we know, were bent on punishing his manful resistance to their tyranny. He was accompanied by his kinsman, Oliver Cromwell, over whom he possessed great influence, and in whom he alone had discovered under an exterior appearance of coarseness and extravagance, those great and commanding talents which were afterward the admiration and the dread of Europe. The cousins took their passage on a vessel which lay in the Thames, and which was bound for North America. They were actually on board when an order of council appeared, by which the ship was prohibited from sailing. . . . Hampden and Cromwell remained ; and with them remained the Evil Genius of the house of Stuart.
How wondrously different might history have read had Cromwell got here, and established himself at the mouth of our River !
Fenwick was at this time again in England, having gone back in the summer or autumn of 1636, probably to report to his associates and arrange the proposed emigration. When the new Connecticut government was inaugurated he was still abroad. By midsummer following, however, he had returned, accompanied by his family and a few
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others. Then, as agent for the patentees, he set up his independent establishment, and gave the plantation its name of Saybrook, in compliment to Lords Say and Brooke.
Lion Gardiner, who had held the fort with his little garrison and their families from the beginning, now moved with a few of the soldier-farmers to the fair island across the Sound which perpetuates his name. Here, on friendly terms with the Indians, he began the first English settle- ment within the limits of the present State of New York, calling his island the Isle of Wight. His sturdy wife, whom he had married in Holland, had borne him two children while at Saybrook Fort, the eldest, a boy, being the first white child born in Connecticut. Gardiner was a valiant captain, stout of heart, and sound of head. He was a humorist, too, of a grim sort. When some of the Bay men had spoken slightingly of Indian arrows, he sent them a dead man's rib with an arrow's head, which had shot through the body, sticking so fast in the bone that none could withdraw it. He was firm and just in his dealings with the Indians, faithful to agreements, relent- less in warfare. He was a strategist, often circumventing the wily enemy with "pretty pranks," some of which he related in his old age, whereby "young men may learn," that they "may with such pretty pranks preserve them- selves from danger; for policy is needful in wars as well as strength."
John Winthrop the younger was now living at his Massachusetts home in Ipswich, concerned in other than Connecticut interests. His dwelling at Saybrook Fort had been confined to a few months or weeks in 1636. He had taken no steps for the renewal of his commission as governor for the Lords and Gentlemen after its techni-
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cal expiration in 1637; but the term still held with him. He did not come permanently to reside in Connecticut till 1645 or 1646. Then he fixed his home in the conquered Pequot country, founding New London. At the same time he had a summer lodge on Fisher's Island, off the mouth of Mystic River, in the Sound, which was granted him in 1640, and remained a preserve of the Winthrop family through six generations. He became officially con- nected with the Connecticut colony in 1651, being that year chosen one of the higher magistrates. He established him- self at Hartford when he first became governor of the colony in 1657, after having lived a year or two previ- ously at New Haven. After his first term in this gover- norship he was deputy governor. Chosen again governor in 1659, he was continued in the executive office by annual election from that time till his death in 1676, a period of sixteen years. He was through his prime Connecticut's foremost man. In culture he surpassed his remarkable father, the first statesman of Massachusetts. "Books furnished employment to his mind; the study of nature according to the principles of the philosophy of Bacon was his delight, for ' he had a gift in understanding and art.'" He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Philo- sophical Transactions at its foundation in London, when modern science was young. He was "one of the greatest chymists and physicians of his age," the historian Trum- bull notes. He was amiable, large minded, and tactful in affairs. He "noiselessly succeeded in all that he under- took," says Bancroft. "God gave him favour in the eyes of all with whom he had to do," was the elder Winthrop's pious testimony. He "inherited much of his father's combination of audacity with velvet tact," was John Fiske's more modern phrasing. When in 1661, upon the
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Restoration, he was chosen as the colony's agent to pre- sent their petition to Charles II for a charter under the royal seal, "the New World was full of his praises." " Puritan and Quaker, and the freemen of Rhode Island were alike his eulogists; the Dutch at New York had confidence in his integrity." In London, enlisting the powerful influence of those constant friends of the colonies, Lord Say and Sele, now the venerable sole survivor of the noblemen interested in the Lords and Gentlemen's patent, and the Earl of Manchester, now Chamberlain of the King's Household, he accomplished his mission with sur- prising ease. The king received him and the petition " with uncommon grace and favour." Fixed in history is the statement that the king's good will was won by a clever courtier-like stroke. "Mr. Winthrop had an extra- ordinary ring which had been given his grandfather by King Charles the first, which he presented to the king. This, it is said, exceedingly pleased His Majesty, as it had been the property of a father most dear to him." So runs the legend. But this is apocryphal. It was the play of the skill of the diplomat rather than the arts of the cour- tier that achieved his ends. "He knew at once how to maintain the rights and claims of Connecticut and how to make Charles II think him the best fellow in the world," says Fiske. So he secured the charter, which, passing the seals April 20, 1662, confirmed to the Connecticut colony the territory covered by the Lords and Gentlemen's patent, and the right to govern themselves, precisely as they had been doing; and summarily annexed to them the neigh- boring New Haven colony, much to the disturbance of the latter's theocratic party, but "hailed with delight" by " the disfranchised minority." This was the charter that a quarter century after was hidden from Andros in the
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