USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > The memorial history of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1884, Vol. I > Part 5
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88
" Doctrine I. That the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance.
"II. The privilege of election, which belongs to the people, therefore must not be exercised according to their humours, but according to the blessed will and law of God.
"III. They who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power also to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them.
" Reasons : 1. Because the foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of the people.
"2. Because, by a free choice, the hearts of the people will be more inclined to the love of the persons [chosen], and more ready to yield [obedience]."
No one could desire a broader charter for individual right and pub- lic liberty. He might have drawn another lesson from the text which
1 They were deciphered by Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, and are printed in the first volume of the Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, pp. 20, 21.
28
MEMORIAL HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY.
he chose, and very likely he did draw it, for we have only the briefest outline of the discourse, namely, that God said unto the people, " Choose and I will make them rulers," etc .; bringing democratic liberty into harmony with that great Bible truth, " there is no power but of God ; for the powers that be are ordained of God."
The same broad and catholic principles of government are an- nounced in a letter from Mr. Hooker to Governor John Winthrop, Sr. from which we shall have occasion to quote by and by for another pur- pose. The passage we are now to copy may be found in Vol. I. of the " Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society," (p. 12) :
" It's also a truth that counsel should be sought of counsellors ; but the question yet is, who those should be. Reserving smaller matters, which fall in occasionally, in common course, to a lower counsel, in matters of greater conse- quence, which concern the common good, a general counsel chosen by all, to transact businesses which concern all, I conceive, under favour, most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole."
Such unmistakable language as this clearly shows the bent of Mr. Hooker's thinking on matters pertaining to government. It is apparent that he would have been much more at home down in the Plymouth plantation, in company with such men as Governor William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and Elder William Brewster, than he was among the leading magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay, with their high prerogatives That Mr. Hooker had this democratic tendency in act as well as in word, is made evident by the shape given, in this respect, to the Connecticut Colony when it came to be politically organized. It seems to be generally conceded that no one man did more than he to give form to the early institutions of Connecticut. Governor John Haynes and other of the chief men of Connecticut seem to have been in sympathy and harmony with him; but he stands as the leading thinker in matters civil, as in matters ecclesiastical and theological. When society here had been organized, and the government set in motion, it was found that the body of freemen, as a rule, embraced all persons who should be recommended and presented by the major vote of their several towns.
Connecticut, then, was born, at the time it was, largely out of the public dissatisfactions prevailing in the Massachusetts Bay ; while at the same time it is not to be doubted that the rulers and managers of affairs in that jurisdiction were trying sincerely, according to the light they had, to establish a commonwealth for the honor of God and the welfare of men. And in spite of all the early hindrances encountered, it grew at length into the grandest proportions of freedom and public intelligence.
29
THE EXODUS AND THE FIRST COMERS.
II. THE EXODUS AND THE FIRST COMERS.
IN what precedes many things have been said, incidentally, touching the going out of the people from the settlements of the Massachusetts Bay, to plant the first towns in the Connecticut valley. But it will not be amiss if we consider, in more minute detail, the order and man- ner of their going. In looking back over those early years, we are apt to think of this movement as having taken place in solid bodies, and at about one and the same time. On the other hand, what may fairly be called the " Exodus" was fragmentary, and stretched itself, as a whole, over several years. It has been previously suggested that more was known at an early date among the people of the Bay about the Connecticut valley than might at first be supposed. It must be remembered that the people of Plymouth had been on these shores ten years before Governor Winthrop and his company arrived; and what- ever knowledge the Plymouth people had of New England, its previous history, its rivers, lakes, and mountains, the Indian tribes inhabiting it, etc., would be naturally communicated in one way and another to their Puritan brethren in the Bay.
But there had been passings to and fro directly between the Massa- chusetts Bay and the valley in those early years. Governor Winthrop, in his Journal, under date of April 4, 1631, says : -
" Wahginnacut, a sachem upon the River Quonehtacut, which lies west of Naragancet, came to the Governour at Boston, with John Sagamore and Jack Straw (an Indian who had lived in England and had served Sir Walter Raleigh, and was now turned Indian again), and divers of their sannops, and brought a letter to the governour from Mr. Endecott to this effect : that the said Wah- ginnacut was very desirous to have some Englishmen to come plant in his coun- try, and offered to find them corn, and give them yearly eighty skins of beaver, and that the country was very fruitful, etc., and wished that there might be two men sent with him to see the country. The Governour entertained them at dinner, but would send none with him. He discovered after, that the said saga- more is a very treacherous man, and at war with the Pekoath (a far greater saga- more). His country is not above five days' journey from us by land."
The Pekoath was the chief of the Pequods, and it was nothing very treacherous or wicked in Wahginnacut if he did want the English, with their weapons of war and greater power, to come into his coun- try to serve as a shelter against that cruel and warlike tribe. The reference to Sir Walter Raleigh is interesting. When Raleigh's ships were going back and forth in the ineffectual attempt to plant a colony in Virginia, 1685-1691, they carried quite a number of natives to Eng- land. It must have been more than forty years before, that this Jack Straw went to England, probably as a youth, but meanwhile had be- come a man well advanced. Although Governor Winthrop and his associates concluded not to give ear to this request, yet as this Indian deputation came with an interpreter, they must have communicated much information, then fresh and new, about New England's chief river and the lands bordering upon it. The Indians then made a like application to the men of the Plymouth Colony, and they were
30
MEMORIAL HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY.
much more inclined to listen to it. At that time and in that wilderness land all such business as this had to move slowly. But Governor Winthrop, under date of July 12, 1633, records as follows : -
"Mr. Edward Winslow, governour of Plimouth, and Mr. Bradford came into the Bay and went away the 18th. They came partly to confer about joining in a trade to Connecticut, for beaver and hemp. There was a motion to set up a trading-house there, to prevent the Dutch, who were about to build one ; but in regard the place was not fit for plantation, there being three or four thousand warlike Indians, and the river not to be gone into but by small pinnaces, having a bar affording but six feet at high water, and for that no vessels can get in for seven months in the year, partly by reason of the ice, and then the violent stream, etc., we thought not fit to meddle with it." 1
Mr. Winslow was Governor of Plymouth that year, because Mr. Bradford so desired (the latter serving as governor more than thirty years in all). These two men, of high character, seem to have been at Boston six days partly on this business, but their visit was unsuccess- ful. The reasons urged against their proposition (as Mr. Savage, the editor of Winthrop, admits) "look more like pretexts than real mo- tives." And, he adds, " some disingenuousness, I fear, may be imputed to [the Massachusetts] council." The whole matter was dismissed in a way that seems wanting in courtesy. "We thought not fit to meddle with it." The settlements were rich and strong in the Massachusetts Bay, and the Separatists down at Plymouthi were rather poor and hum- ble people, and the Massachusetts men preferred not to be mixed up with them. Governor Winslow and Governor Bradford went back to Plymouth, and the Plymouth people decided to undertake alone the en- terprise which they had asked the men of Massachusetts to share.
Though the Massachusetts leaders thought not " fit to meddle with it," they did begin to meddle with it, in their way, almost as soon as the Plymouth governors were gone home. It happened about the be- ginning of September, 1633, that "John Oldham, and three with him, went overland to Connecticut, to trade." "About ten days before this time, a bark was set forth to Connecticut and those parts, to trade." 2
If this had been a simple private enterprise of John Oldham and his three companions, we should not probably have found his name, in this connection, in Winthrop's Journal. John Oldham was a strange char- acter, a man of considerable ability, but a restless and roving adven- turer, who came to Plymouth as early as 1623, and had already passed through a variety of fortunes. He had been ignominiously expelled from Plymouth in 1624, and had lived some time at Nantasket. He had now joined himself to the Watertown settlement in the Bay, where land had been granted him, and where he was employed, to some extent, in an official capacity. No man in the Bay was more fit, by his knowledge of the Indians, to be sent on such an exploring expedition than he. Governor Winthrop tells us, " The sachem used them kindly and gave them some beaver. They brought of the hemp which grows there in great abundance, and is much better than the English." 3
1 Winthrop, vol. i. p. 105. 2 Ibid., p. 111 ; under date of Sept. 4.
3 John Oldham, after all his wanderings and exposures, was killed by the Indians of Block Island in 1636, and his death was made one of the pretexts for the war against the Pequots.
31
THE EXODUS AND THE FIRST COMERS.
Not only was there this overland expedition to the valley, but under date of Oct. 2, 1633, Winthrop (i. 112) records the return of
" The bark Blessing [Winthrop's vessel, the " Blessing of the Bay "], which was sent to the southward. . .. She had been at an island over against Connecticut, called Long Island. . . They were also in the river of Connecticut, which is barred at the entrance, so as they could not find above one fathom of water."
There can be little doubt that both this voyage by sea and Old- ham's overland journey were brought about by the proposition from Plymouth which the Massachusetts men "did not think fit to meddle with." John Oldham went back to his home in Watertown. This was in the fall of 1633. Winter was coming on, and nothing more could be done until another season.1 Oldham and his three companions seem to have been the first white men that had gone across the country from the Bay to the river. Winthrop tells us that "he lodged at Indian towns all the way." He had been in the country now ten years, and he knew the ways and habits of the Indians, and probably had acquired their language sufficiently to hold some converse with them.
.
The winter of 1633-1634 passed by,2 and in the summer of 1634 Oldham led out a company of settlers, or adventurers, and planted them at Pyquaug, afterward called Watertown, and a little later Wethers- field. It is generally believed that this company reached their destina- tion late in the summer or in the early autumn ; and from the fact that they chose Pyquaug, it is supposed that this place had been reached by Oldham and his three companions the previous year.
One thing here is worthy of particular notice. The movement of this company of men under Oldham was before leave had been granted to the people of any of the Massachusetts towns to remove. It was Sept. 4, 1634, when the long debate began, which decided that the in- habitants of Newtowne might remove; and it was not until May 6, 1635, that the like privilege was given to the Watertown company. But these adventurers with Oldham were on the ground in Connecticut before even the Newtowne people -the first to obtain this privilege -had received any such permission. This was not, then, a part of that larger movement of disaffected people upon which we have so fully dwelt.
1 At least one other overland journey from the Bay to the Connecticut Valley was made in the autumn of 1633. Under date of Jan. 20, 1634, Winthrop mentions the return of "Hall and the two others, who went to Connecticut November 3, . . . having lost themselves and endured much misery. They informed us that the small-pox was gone as far as any In- dian plantation was known to the west, and much people dead of it, by reason whereof they could have no trade." (i. 123). Hubbard (Hist. of N. England, cxxviii. ) says that "Sam- uel Hall, who died lately about Malden, in Essex, scil. 1680," went with Oldham on his first journey to Connecticut, "in the beginning of September." Samuel Hall was of Ipswich, in 1636, afterwards returned home to England, and died 1680, "at Langford, near Malden, in Essex."- SAVAGE, Genealogical Dictionary.
2 The report made by Hall and his companions was not such as to encourage new adven- turers, even if the season had been more favorable for undertaking so long and perilous a journey. " This winter was very mild, . . . but oft snows, and great : one snow, the 15th [of Febru- ary] was near two feet deep all over," in Massachusetts. (Winthrop, i. 124). There was no hope of success in trade with the Indians, for hunting and trapping were suspended by the terrible ravages of the small-pox among the Connecticut tribes. The few who were not stricken by disease had enough to do in tending the sick and burying the dead. Of "about a thousand of them" who occupied a palisadoed fort, near the Plymouth trading-house (Windsor), "above 900, and a halfe of them dyed, and many of them did rott above ground for want of buriall." - BRADFORD, History of Plymouth, p. 325.
32
MEMORIAL HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY.
Can we well doubt that it was a scheme to counterbalance the enter- prise of the Plymouth men in planting their trading-house at Windsor the year before ?
Another little record in Winthrop's Journal for July, 1634, is worthy of attention : -
"Six of Newtown went in the Blessing (being bound to the Dutch planta- tion), to discover the Connecticut river, intending to remove their town thither."
It is certainly a curious circumstance that a place " not fit for plan- tation, there being three or four thousand warlike Indians, and the river not to be gone into but by small pinnaces," etc., should so soon after become a place of such commanding interest. There was then, in 1634, at Windsor a small company of white men from Plymouth, and a larger company (eighteen or twenty) at Wethersfield. Whether the six Newtowne men who sailed that summer " to discover the Connecticut river," which the Dutch had discovered in 1614, returned home or tar- ried in those parts we do not discover.
During the year 1635 other important steps were taken in the settle- ment of the Connecticut valley, though as yet the whole enterprise was in its incipient stages. The little company which John Oldham led to Wethersfield in 1634 managed to live through the winter of 1634-35, and early in the summer following received quite a large accession from their old friends and neighbors at Watertown, Mass. Francis S. Drake, in his "History of Middlesex County, Mass." (vol. ii. p. 440), says : -
" Wethersfield, the oldest town in Connecticut, received from Watertown its first considerable emigration in 1634. Pyquaug, its Indian name, was changed in 1635 to Watertown, and later to Wethersfield. . .. May 29, 1635, the follow- ing Watertown men went to Wethersfield : Rev. Richard Denton, Robert Rey- nolds, John Strickland, Jonas Weede, Rev. John Sherman, Robert Coe, and Andrew Ward."
Others, doubtless, were in this company, but these are mentioned as leading men. It has already been stated in a previous section that Watertown did not send an embodied church to Connecticut ; but in this company of 1635 were two ministers, both men of good ability, and one of them, John Sherman, eminent for his mathematical knowledge as well as his pulpit power.
About this time came another accession to the population of the valley, from a somewhat unexpected quarter. June 16, 1635, " A bark of forty tons arrived [at Boston], set forth with twenty servants, by Sir Richard Saltonstall, to go plant at Connecticut." 1
Sir Richard Saltonstall was in England, and this company sent by him, under Mr. Francis Stiles, came up the river and landed at Wind- sor, where they found the little company of Plymouth men already established. This new arrival complicated matters at Windsor. The men from Plymouth, braving the opposition of the Dutch, had already built their trading-house at this point. But the problem at Windsor was still more complicated by the arrival of a pioneer party from
1 Winthrop, vol. i. p. 161.
33
THE EXODUS AND THE FIRST COMERS.
Dorchester, Mass., to break ground and prepare for the coming soon after of the main body of emigrants from that plantation.
Palfrey quietly remarks,1 " It was not by Dutchmen that the Plymouth people were to be dispossessed of Connecticut;" and if he had gone on and completed the sentence as it lay in his mind, he would probably have added, " but by their English brethren in the Massachusetts Bay."
It was the 1st of July, 1635, when this company from England landed in the Connecticut valley. The Dorchester pioneers, who had been there a few days before, had gone up the river prospecting, to see if they could look out any better place.2 They did not discover any that suited them so well, and they returned to find those new-comers on the ground. Here were three companies of English-born people putting in their claims for the Windsor territory ; and the Plymouth people, who had bought the land of the Indians, being few in number, felt compelled at last to make such terms as they could, and retire, - not at once, for there was a long complication over this business before matters were finally adjusted.
John Winthrop, Jr., came over to the Massachusetts Bay in 1632, and in May of that year was chosen one of the assistants. In 1633, with a little company of twelve he " set up a trucking house up Merrimac river," at Agawam, thereby laying the foundations of the town of Ipswich. He went back to England in 1634, and in October, 1635, returned at the head of a new enterprise looking to the occupation of the Connecticut River and the settlement of Connecticut.
Palfrey says : -
" When John Winthrop the younger came to New England the second time, he bore a commission from Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and others their associates, patentees of Connecticut. It constituted him Governor of that terri- tory for a year, with instructions to build a fort at the river's mouth, for which he came provided with men and ammunition, and with two thousand pounds in money. . .. He was to take care that all settlers for the present should 'plant themselves either at the harbor or near the mouth of the river,' for the purpose of more effective mutual defence." 3
Sir Richard Saltonstall was one of these patentees, and it was in aid of this general enterprise that he had sent forward the vessel and passengers already noticed. This company held, or supposed they held, the territory of Connecticut, through powers conferred by Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, president of the council for New England. George Fenwick was one of these patentees. He came over as their represent- ative, in 1636, to take charge of the Saybrook plantation. He contin- ued to manage and govern the same until, in 1644, the whole was sold to the colony of Connecticut.
Governor Winthrop notices in his Journal the arrival of his son at the head of this new interest. Under date of October, 1635, he says :
1 History of New England, vol. i. p. 340.
2 July 6, 1635, Jonathan Brewster, who was the manager of the Plymouth trading-house at " Matianuck " ( Windsor), wrote to Governor Bradford, "Ye Massachusetts men are coming almost dayly, some by water & some by land, who are not yet determined where to setle, though some have a great mind to ye place we are upon, and which was last bought. . .. I shall doe what I can to withstand them. I hope they will hear reason," etc. - BRADFORD, History of Plymouth, p. 339.
3 History of New England, vol. i. p. 450. VOL. I. - 3.
34
MEMORIAL HISTORY OF HARTFORD COUNTY.
" There came also John Winthrop, the younger, with commission from the Lord Say, Lord Brook, and divers other great persons in England, to begin a plantation at Connecticut and to be governour there."
One other item may complete the record of 1635 so far as concerns the laying of foundations for the settlement of the Connecticut valley. Late in the autumn an overland company set out from the Massachu- setts Bay and fell on troublous times. Winthrop wrote, under date of Oct. 15, 1635 :-
" About sixty men, women, and little children went by land towards Con- necticut with their cows, horses, and swine, and after a tedious and difficult journey arrived safe there."
A month later (November 26) he has the following entry, which refers to the same journey : -
" There came twelve men from Connecticut. They had been ten days upon their journey, and had lost one of their company, drowned in the ice by the way ; and had been all starved, but that, by God's providence, they lighted upon an Indian wigwam. Connecticut river was frozen up the 15th of this month."
The cold weather set in early that season, but it was not wise to defer such a journey, with women and children and cattle, to so late a period. As it proved, the goods which they sent round by water were frozen in at the mouth of the river, and, being without supplies, the twelve men seem to have struggled back through the forests so that the burden of support might be less upon those who were already there. If the men from Plymouth and Stiles's party had not taken care of these unfortunate travellers during the long cold winter of 1635-36, their condition would have been most pitiable. The Plymouth men showed themselves better Christians at that time than did the men of Massa- chusetts.
In many histories and records this company of sixty, that came across the country in the fall of 1635, is regarded as an advance party of Mr. Hooker's colony. Sometimes they are spoken of as if they came from different places in the Bay, and were destined to differ- ent places in the valley. But the fact was, probably, that they were simply Dorchester people, the advance party from that town, and that others would follow in the spring. That the great body of the Dorchester people had not removed to Connecticut in that autumnal emigration is evidenced by the fact that Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, went to Dorchester, after that migration, to effect a settlement in the wrong done about the lands at Windsor. Governor Winthrop mentions this under date of Feb. 24, 1635-6 :- -
" Mr. Winslow of Plimouth came to treat with those of Dorchester about their land in Connecticut, which they had taken from them." 1
1 For an account of the " differences betweene those of Dorchester plantation and them [of Plymouth]," and how, at last, " was ye controversie ended, but the unkindnes not so soone forgotten," see Bradford's "History of Plymouth," pp. 338-342. "They of New-towne dealt more fairly, desireing only what they [of Plymouth] could conveniently spare from a compe- tancie reserved for a plantation, for themselves ; which made [us] the more carefull to procure a moyety for them, in this agreement & distribution." - History of Plymouth, p. 342.
35
THE EXODUS AND THE FIRST COMERS.
They came to Dorchester because the leaders and responsible agents of the Windsor plantation were still there. On the 3d of that month of February, John Maverick, one of the ministers of the congregation, died at Dorchester; and the prevailing impression is that Mr. John Warham, the other minister, was also there through the winter, though some think he went on to Windsor in that autumnal journey. No movement to organize another church in Dorchester was made until 1636, and it is altogether probable that Mr. Warham did not leave Dorchester before the spring of 1636, but stayed there and ministered as before. So ends the year 1635 ; and we have endeavored to trace the various enterprises and events of that year which had a bearing on the question of the settlement of the valley.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.