Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II by Various

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Of Hoggs wee haue allready got from Achomack (a plantation in
Virginia) to the number of 100, & more: and some 30 Cowes; and more
wee expect daily, with Goates and Hennes; our Horses and Sheepe wee
must have out of England, or some other place by the way, for wee can
haue none in Virginia.

[1] This account was compiled from letters written to friends in
England by some of the original settlers about a year after their
arrival. George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, founder of Maryland,
had sent a group of colonists to Newfoundland in 1621, but the
venture being unsuccessful he secured a new grant north of the
Potomac, to which, at the request of Charles I, he gave the name of
Maryland, in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria. Calvert, after a visit
to Virginia, returned to England and there died before his charter
was actually issued. In consequence the grant was made out to
Calvert's son, Cecil. Cecil Calvert at once organized a company of
more than two hundred men, who effected a permanent settlement at
St. Mary's, which for sixty years was the capital of the colony of
Maryland, Annapolis being afterward chosen. Baltimore was not
founded until 1729.

The account here given was published in London in 1634, and is the
first extant description of the province. It has been conjectured
that Cecil Calvert prepared it from letters written by his
brothers, Leonard and George. The account is believed to preserve
the exact language of the original writers of the letters. Printed
in "Old South Leaflets."

[2] Now called the Susquehanna.

[3] The Susquehanna Indians.

ROGER WILLIAMS IN RHODE ISLAND

(1636)

BY NATHANIEL MORTON[1]

In the year 1634 Mr. Roger Williams removed from Plymouth to Salem: he
had lived about three years at Plymouth, where he was well accepted as
an assistant in the ministry to Mr. Ralph Smith, then pastor of the
church there, but by degrees venting of divers of his own singular
opinions, and seeking to impose them upon others, he not finding such
a concurrence as he expected, he desired his dismission to the Church
of Salem, which though some were unwilling to, yet through the prudent
counsel of Mr. Brewster (the ruling elder there) fearing that his
continuance amongst them might cause division, and [thinking that]
there being then many able men in the Bay, they would better deal with
him then [than] themselves could ... the Church of Plymouth consented
to his dismission, and such as did adhere to him were also dismissed,
and removed with him, or not long after him, to Salem....

But he having in one year's time filled that place with principles of
rigid separation, and tending to Anabaptistry, the prudent Magistrates
of the Massachusetts Jurisdiction, sent to the Church of Salem,
desiring them to forbear calling him to office, which they not
hearkening to, was a cause of much disturbance; for Mr. Williams had
begun, and then being in office, he proceeded more vigorously to vent
many dangerous opinions, as amongst many others these were some; That
it is not lawful for an unregenerate man to pray, nor to take an Oath,
and in special, not the Oath of Fidelity to the Civil Government; nor
was it lawful for a godly man to have communion either in Family
Prayer, or in an Oath with such as they judged unregenerate: and
therefore he himself refused the Oath of Fidelity, and taught others
so to do; also, That it was not lawful so much as to hear the godly
Ministers of England, when any occasionally went thither; & therefore
he admonished any Church-members that had done so, as for hainous sin:
also he spake dangerous words against the Patent, which was the
foundation of the Government of the Massachusets Colony: also he
affirmed, That the Magistrates had nothing to do in matters of the
first Table [of the commandments], but only the second; and that there
should be a general and unlimited Toleration of all Religions, and for
any man to be punished for any matters of his Conscience, was
persecution....

He persisted, and grew more violent in his way, insomuch as he staying
at home in his own house, sent a Letter, which was delivered and read
in the publick Church assembly, the scope of which was to give them
notice, That if the Church of Salem would not separate not only from
the Churches of Old-England, but the Churches of New-England too, he
would separate from them: the more prudent and sober part of the
Church being amazed at his way, could not yield unto him: whereupon he
never came to the Church Assembly more, professing separation from
them as Antichristian, and not only so, but he withdrew all private
religious Communion from any that would hold Communion with the Church
there, insomuch as he would not pray nor give thanks at meals with his
own wife nor any of his family, because they went to the Church
Assemblies ... which the prudent Magistrates understanding, and seeing
things grow more and more towards a general division and disturbance,
after all other means used in vain, they passed a sentence of
Banishment against him out of the Massachusets Colony, as against a
disturber of the peace, both of the Church and Commonwealth.

After which Mr. Williams sat down in a place called Providence, out of
the Massachusets Jurisdiction, and was followed by many of the members
of the Church of Salem, who did zealously adhere to him, and who cried
out of the Persecution that was against him: some others also resorted
to him from other parts. They had not been long there together, but
from rigid separation they fell to Anabaptistry, renouncing the
Baptism which they had received in their Infancy, and taking up
another Baptism, and so began a Church in that way; but Mr. Williams
stopt not there long, for after some time he told the people that had
followed him, and joyned with him in a new Baptism, that he was out of
the way himself, and had mis-led them, for he did not finde that there
was any upon earth that could administer Baptism, and therefore their
last Baptism was a nullity, as well as their first; and therefore they
must lay down all, and wait for the coming of new Apostles: and so
they dissolved themselves, and turned Seekers, keeping that one
Principle, That every one should have liberty to Worship God according
to the Light of their own Consciences; but otherwise not owning any
Churches or Ordinances of God any where upon Earth.

[1] From Morton's "New England Memorial," published at the request
of the Commismoners of the Four United Colonies of New England.
Morton lived in the family of Governor Bradford and served as
secretary of the court at Plymouth. This fact should be kept in
mind when reading his account.

THE FOUNDING OF CONNECTICUT

(1633-1636)

BY ALEXANDER JOHNSTON[1]

During the ten years after 1620, the twin colonies of Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay had been fairly shaken down into their places, and
had even begun to look around them for opportunities of extension. It
was not possible that the fertile and inviting territory to the
southwest should long escape their notice. In 1629, De Rasieres, an
envoy from New Amsterdam, was at Plymouth. He found the Plymouth
people building a shallop for the purpose of obtaining a share in the
wampum trade of Narragansett Bay; and he very shrewdly sold them at a
bargain enough wampum to supply their needs, for fear they should
discover at Narragansett the more profitable peltry trade beyond. This
artifice only put off the evil day.

Within the next three years, several Plymouth men, including Winslow,
visited the Connecticut River, "not without profit." In April, 1631, a
Connecticut Indian visited Governor Winthrop at Boston, asking for
settlers, and offering to find them corn and furnish eighty beaver
skins a year. Winthrop declined even to send an exploring party. In
the midsummer of 1633, Winslow went to Boston to propose a joint
occupation of the new territory by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay; but
the latter still refused, doubting the profit and the safety of the
venture.

Three months later Plymouth undertook the work alone. A small vessel,
under command of William Holmes, was sent around by sea to the mouth
of the Connecticut River, with the frame of a trading house and
workmen to put it up. When Holmes had sailed up the river as far as
the place where Hartford was afterward built, he found the Dutch
already in possession. For ten years they had been talking of erecting
a fort on the Varsche River; but the ominous and repeated appearance
of New Englanders in the territory had roused them to action at last.

John Van Corlear, with a few men, had been commissioned by Governor
Van Twiller, and had put up a rude earthwork, with two guns, within
the present jurisdiction of Hartford. His summons to Holmes to stop
under penalty of being fired into met with no more respect than was
shown by the commandant of Rensselaerswyck to his challengers,
according to the veracious Knickerbocker. Holmes declared that he had
been sent up the river, and was going up the river, and furthermore he
went up the river. His little vessel passed on to the present site of
Windsor. Here the crew disembarked, put up and garrisoned their
trading house, and then returned home. Plymouth had at least planted
the flag far within the coveted and disputed territory.

In December of the following year a Dutch force of seventy men from
New Amsterdam appeared before the trading house to drive out the
intruders. He must be strong who drives a Yankee away from a
profitable trade; and the attitude of the little garrison was so
determined that the Dutchmen, after a few hostile demonstrations,
decided that the nut was too hard to crack, and withdrew. For about
twenty years thereafter the Dutch held post at Hartford, isolated from
Dutch support by a continually deepening mass of New Englanders, who
refrained from hostilities, and waited until the apple was ripe enough
to drop.

With respect to the claims of the Indians, the attitudes of the two
parties to the struggle were directly opposite. The Dutch came on the
strength of purchase from the Pequots, the conquerors and lords
paramount of the local Indians. Holmes brought to the Connecticut
River in his vessel the local sachems, who had been driven away by the
Pequots, and made his purchases from them. The English policy will
account for the unfriendly disposition of the Pequots, and, when
followed up by the tremendous overthrow of the Pequots, for
Connecticut's permanent exemption from Indian difficulties. The
Connecticut settlers followed a straight road, buying lands fairly
from the Indians found in possession, ignoring those who claimed a
supremacy based on violence, and, in ease of resistance by the latter,
asserting and maintaining for Connecticut an exactly similar
title,--the right of the stronger. Those who claimed right received
it; those who preferred force were accommodated.

One route to the new territory by Long Island Sound and the
Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland
route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633,
by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years
afterward. He found his way westward to the Connecticut River, and
brought back most appetizing accounts of the upper Connecticut Valley;
and his reports seem to have suggested a way out of a serious
difficulty which had come to a head in Massachusetts Bay.

The colony of Massachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district
covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its
greatest poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the
colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight
Massachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now
Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several
occasions; and the assigned reasons are apparently so frivolous as to
lead to the suspicion that some fundamental difference was at the
bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great
Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were "newcomers," and this
slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement,
in 1633, of a number of strong men at these three towns, notably
Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dorchester, Watertown, and
Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling: the two
former led the way, in October, 1633, in establishing town governments
under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less,
the fundamental feature of Massachusetts policy,--the limitation of
office-holding and the elective franchise to church-members. The three
towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposition, a
position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the
circumstances.

The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were Warham and Maverick; of
Newtown, Hooker and Stone; of Watertown, Phillips. Haynes of Newtown,
Ludlow of Dorchester, and Pynchon of Roxbury, were the principal lay
leaders of the half-formed opposition. Some have thought that Haynes
was jealous of Governor Winthrop, Hooker of Cotton, and Ludlow of
everybody. But the opposition, if it can be fairly called an
opposition, was not so definite as to be traceable to any such
personal source. The strength which marked the divergence was due
neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and
character which marked the leaders of the minority.

Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone were of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Hooker began to preach at Chelmsford in 1626, and was silenced for
non-conformity in 1629. He then taught school, his assistant being
John Eliot, afterward the apostle to the Indians; but the chase after
him became warmer, and in 1630 he retired to Holland and resumed his
preaching. In 1632 he and Stone came to New England as pastor and
teacher of the church at Newtown; and the two took part in the
migration to Hartford. Here Hooker became the undisputed
ecclesiastical leader of Connecticut until his death in 1647. John
Warham and John Maverick, both of Exeter in England, came to New
England in 1630, as pastor and teacher of Dorchester. Maverick died
while preparing to follow his church, but Warham settled with his
parishioners at Windsor, and died there in 1670. George Phillips, also
a Cambridge man, came to New England in 1630, as pastor of the church
at Watertown. He took no part in the migration, but lived and died at
Watertown. Fate seems to have determined that Wendell Phillips should
belong to Massachusetts.

Roger Ludlow was Endicott's brother-in-law. He came to New England in
1630, and settled at Dorchester. He was deputy governor in 1634, and
seems to have been "slated," to use the modern term, for the
governorship in the following year. But this private agreement among
the deputies was broken, for some unknown reason, by the voters, who
chose Haynes, perhaps as a less objectionable representative of the
opposition. Ludlow complained so openly and angrily of the failure to
carry out the agreement that he was dropped from the magistracy at the
next election. He went at once to Connecticut, and was deputy governor
there in alternate years until 1654. Incensed at the interference of
New Haven to prevent his county, Fairfield, from waging an independent
warfare against the Dutch, he went to Virginia in 1654, taking the
records of the county with him. It is not known when or where he died.
Pynchon, the third lay leader of the opposition, took part in the
migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts,
founding the town of Springfield.

At the May session of the Massachusetts General Court in 1634, an
application for "liberty to remove" was received from Newtown. It was
granted. At the September session the request was changed into one for
removal to Connecticut. This was a very different matter, and, after
long debate, was defeated by the vote of the Assistants, tho the
Deputies passed it. Various reasons were assigned for the request to
remove to Connecticut,--lack of room in their present locations, the
desire to save Connecticut from the Dutch, and "the strong bent of
their spirits to remove thither;" but the last looks like the
strongest reason. In like manner, while the arguments to the contrary
were those which would naturally suggest themselves, the weakening of
Massachusetts, and the peril of the emigrants, the concluding
argument, that "the removing of a candlestick" would be "a great
judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession
was the result of discord between two parties.

Haynes was made governor at the next General Court. Successful
inducements were offered to some of the Newtown people to remove to
Boston, and some few concessions were made. But the migration which
had been denied to the corporate towns had probably been begun by
individuals. There is a tradition that some of the Watertown people
passed this winter of 1634-35 at the place where Wethersfield now
stands. In May, 1635, the Massachusetts General Court voted that
liberty be granted to the people of Watertown and Roxbury to remove
themselves to any place within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. In
March, 1636, the secession having already been accomplished, the
General Court issued a "Commission to Several Persons to govern the
people at Connecticut."

Its preamble reads: "Whereas, upon some reasons and grounds, there are
to remove from this our Commonwealth and body of the Massachusetts in
America divers of our loving friends and neighbors, freemen and
members of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and other places, who are
resolved to transport themselves and their estates unto the river of
Connecticut, there to reside and inhabit; and to that end divers are
there already, and divers others shortly to go." This tacit permission
was the only authorization given by Massachusetts; but it should be
noted that the unwilling permission was made more gracious by a kindly
loan of cannon and ammunition for the protection of the new
settlements.

If it be true that some of the Watertown people had wintered at
Wethersfield in 1634-35, this was the first civil settlement in
Connecticut; and it is certain that, all through the following spring,
summer, and autumn, detached parties of Watertown people were settling
at Wethersfield. During the summer of 1635, a Dorchester party
appeared near the Plymouth factory, and laid the foundations of the
town of Windsor. In October of the same year a party of sixty persons,
including women and children, largely from Newtown, made the overland
march and settled where Hartford now stands. Their journey was begun
so late that the winter overtook them before they reached the river,
and, as they had brought their cattle with them, they found great
difficulty in getting everything across the river by means of rafts.

It may have been that the echoes of all these preparations had reached
England, and stirred the tardy patentees to action. During the autumn
of 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., agent of the Say and Sele associates,
reached Boston, with authority to build a large fort at the mouth of
the Connecticut River. He was to be "Governor of the River
Connecticut" for one year, and he at once issued a proclamation to the
Massachusetts emigrants, asking "under what right and preference they
had lately taken up their plantation."

It is said that they agreed to give up any lands demanded by him, or
to return on having their expenses repaid. A more dangerous influence,
however, soon claimed Winthrop's attention. Before the winter set in
he had sent a party to seize the designated spot for a fort at the
mouth of the Connecticut River. His promptness was needed. Just as his
men had thrown up a work sufficient for defense and had mounted a few
guns, a Dutch ship from New Amsterdam appeared, bringing a force
intended to appropriate the same place. Again the Dutch found
themselves a trifle late; and their post at Hartford was thus finally
cut off from effective support.

This was a horrible winter to the advanced guard of English settlers
on the upper Connecticut. The navigation of the river was completely
blocked by ice before the middle of November; and the vessels which
were to have brought their winter supplies by way of Long Island Sound
and the river were forced to return to Boston, leaving the wretched
settlers unprovided for. For a little while some scanty supplies of
corn were obtained from the neighboring Indians, but this resource
soon failed. About seventy persons straggled down the river to the
fort at its mouth. There they found and dug out of the ice a sixty-ton
vessel, and made their way back to Boston. Others turned back on the
way they had come, and struggled through the snow and ice to "the
Bay." But a few held their grip on the new territory. Subsisting first
on a little corn bought from more distant Indians, then by hunting,
and finally on ground-nuts and acorns dug from under the snow, they
fought through the winter and held their ground. But it was a narrow
escape. Spring found them almost exhausted, their unsheltered cattle
dead, and just time enough to bring necessary supplies from home. The
Dorchester people alone lost cattle to the value of two thousand
pounds.

The Newtown congregation, in October, 1635, found customers for their
old homes in a new party from England; and in the following June
Hooker and Stone led their people overland to Connecticut. They
numbered one hundred, with one hundred and sixty head of cattle. Women
and children were of the party. Mrs. Hooker, who was ill, was carried
on a litter; and the journey, of "about one hundred miles," occupied
two weeks. Its termination was well calculated to dissipate the evil
auguries of the previous winter. The Connecticut Valley in early June!
Its green meadows, flanked by wooded hills, lay before them. Its oaks,
whose patriarch was to shelter their charter, its great elms and
tulip-trees, were broken by the silver ribbon of the river; here and
there were the wigwams of the Indians, or the cabins of the survivors
of the winter; and, over and through all, the light of a day in June
welcomed the newcomers. The thought of abandoning Connecticut
disappeared forever.

[1] From Johnston's "History of Connecticut." By permission of, and
by arrangement with, the authorized publishers, Houghton, Mifflin
Co. Copyright, 1887, by Alexander Johnston.

WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND

(1647-1696)

BY JOHN G. PALFREY[1]

The people of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other
Christian people at that time and later,--at least, with extremely
rare individual exceptions,--believed in the reality of a hideous
crime called witchcraft. They thought they had Scripture for that
belief, and they knew they had law for it, explicit and abundant; and
with them law and Scripture were absolute authorities for the
regulation of opinion and of conduct.

In a few instances, witches were believed to have appeared in the
earlier years of New England. But the cases had been sporadic. The
first instance of an execution for witchcraft is said to have occurred
in Connecticut, soon after the settlement [1647, May 30th]; but the
circumstances are not known, and the fact has been doubted. A year
later, one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown in Massachusetts, and it has
been said, two other women in Dorchester and Cambridge, were convicted
and executed for the goblin crime. These cases appear to have excited
no more attention than would have been given to the commission of any
other felony, and no judicial record of them survives....

With three or four exceptions,--for the evidence respecting the
asserted sufferers at Dorchester and Cambridge is imperfect,--no
person appears to have been punished for witchcraft in Massachusetts,
nor convicted of it, for more than sixty years after the settlement,
though there had been three or four trials of other persons suspected
of the crime. At the time when the question respecting the colonial
charter was rapidly approaching an issue, and the public mind was in
feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for
collecting facts concerning witchcraft [1681]. This brought out a work
from President Mather entitled "Illustrious Providences," in which
that influential person related numerous stories of the performances
of persons leagued with the Devil [1684].

The imagination of his restless young son[2] was stimulated, and
circumstances fed the flame. In the last year of the government of
Andros [1688], a daughter, thirteen years old, of John Goodwin,--a
mason living at the South End of Boston,--had a quarrel with an Irish
washerwoman about some missing clothes. The woman's mother took it up,
and scolded provokingly. Thereupon the wicked child, profiting, as it
seems, by what she had been hearing and reading on the mysterious
subject, "cried out upon her," as the phrase was, as a witch, and
proceeded to act the part understood to be fit for a bewitched person;
in which behavior she was presently joined by three others of the
circle, one of them only four or five years old. Now they would lose
their hearing, now their sight, now their speech; and sometimes all
three faculties at once. They mewed like kittens; they barked like
dogs.

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