Rapid growth of Massachu In the spring of 1630 a fleet of eleven ships, bearing Winthrop and a large company of emigrants, sailed for Massachusetts, and arrived at Salem, June 12. Many of these settlers, unlike those of the presetts, 1630- ceding year, were persons of education and high position. They found the Salem colony in a sad plight; over eighty had died during the previous winter, and the survivors were weak and suffering for lack of food. 1642 JOHN WINTHROP. Winthrop as governor of the Company superseded Endicott, and soon moved with most of the new settlers to Charlestown, in the neighborhood of which there were already several settlements. The winter of 1630-1631 was unusually severe and the settlers suffered many hardships. During the next year few new settlers arrived,. but from 1633 to 1640 the numbers increased rap idly. Between 1628 and 1640 more than 20,000 Englishmen came to New England, the great majority to Massachusetts. As this was largely the result of the high church policies of Laud, it has been suggested that he is entitled to be called the founder of New England. With the outbreak of the Civil War in England the great Puritan migration came to an end. In fact some of those who had come to America returned to England to take up arms against the king. The growth of Massachusetts Bay was more rapid than that of any other colony. In 1645 its population was over 16,000, more than that of all the other English colonies combined. Between 1636 and 1638 several scattered settlements were made in Rhode Island and Connecticut by religious refugees from Massachusetts, illustrating what Edward Roger Eggleston calls "the centrifugal force of Puritan- Williams ism." Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the founders of Rhode Island, were expelled from Massachusetts by the formal action of the authorities, while the founders of Connecticut left of their own accord because they were dissatisfied with religious and political conditions in the older colony. Roger Williams, a master of arts of Pembroke College, Cambridge, came to Massachusetts in 1631 and was invited to the church at Salem. Here he made a favorable impression by his ability and eloquence, but within two months he began questioning the validity of land titles not derived from the Indians and the right of the magistrates to impose penalties for Sabbath breaking. Governor Winthrop complained to the Salem church and Williams soon removed to Plymouth, but two years later returned to Salem, and soon called down upon himself the wrath of the Massachusetts authorities. Finally in October, 1635, he was banished from the colony by the General Court. Island After a winter of great privation spent among the Pokanoket Indians he was joined in the spring by a few friends from Salem and in June, 1636, founded Provi- The founddence, the first settlement in Rhode Island. ing of Rhode Two years later Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from Massachusetts on account of her peculiar religious views, took refuge at Providence, and then crossing over with her followers to the island of Aquidneck formed the settlement at Portsmouth. In 1639 William Coddington headed a secession from Portsmouth and founded Newport, and in 1643 Samuel Gorton, the most persistent heretic of them all, after being expelled in turn from Boston, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Providence, founded Shawomet, the later Warwick. In 1644 Roger Williams went to England and secured a charter uniting all these settlements and granting them the privilege of adopting a suitable form of self-government. Rhode A few years before this Roger Williams had become a Baptist and Rhode Island soon became a Baptist stronghold. There was a strong tendency on the part Religious toleration in of some to follow the example of the Anabaptists of Germany and the Low Countries in holding that freedom of conscience involved freedom from civil restraint, but Roger Williams took a firm stand against this doctrine from the first, and his greatest service to mankind was in demonstrating the possibility of founding a commonwealth in which liberty of conscience could be permitted without loosening the bonds of civil society. The first European settlement within the present state of Connecticut was made by the Dutch, who established a trading post and built a fort on the Connecticut The beginnings of River where Hartford now stands, in the early Connecticut, summer of 1633. In October of the same year 1633-1636 some traders from Plymouth established a rival post ten miles higher up the river at Windsor. Both the Dutch and Plymouth settlers were destined to be dispossessed by emigrants from Massachusetts, who began forming settlements in the summer of 1635, but the real movement began the next year. Rev. Thomas Hooker, pastor of the Newtown (Cambridge) church, was the leader of this exodus. Hooker was a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a man of liberal views which had been cultivated through a residence in Holland. He came to Massachusetts in 1633 and the following year his congregation at Newtown petitioned the General Court to allow them to move to some new point within the bounds of Massachusetts. The petition was rejected at this time, but granted reluctantly the following year. A variety of motives appear to have influenced the Hooker founders of Connecticut in deserting Massachusetts. objected to the close union of church and state; others were doubtless attracted by the fertile valley of the Connecticut. The 1639 The emigration was not of individuals, but of organized. congregations. By the fall of 1636 about 800 people were settled in the three towns of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor. They were squatters merely, "Fundawithout land patent or charter from the king of mental England. Although beyond the bounds of Mas- Orders," sachusetts, they were governed for a time by magistrates who acted under a commission from the General Court of that colony, but in January, 1639, the freemen of the three towns met at Hartford and adopted the "Fundamental Orders," a document since famous as "the first written constitution framed by a community, through its own representatives, as a basis for government." It did not make church membership a condition of citizenship, as did Massachusetts, and it contained no recognition of any superior authority in England. From this time forth these river towns were a self-governing community under the name of Connecticut. In October, 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., arrived from England with a commission as governor of the "river Connecticut in New England" and formed a settlement at Saybrook, the mouth of the river which he called Saybrook 1635 in honor of his patrons, Lord Brooke and Lord Say, who several years before had received an indefinite grant of land south of Massachusetts extending from the Narragansett River to the South Sea. Hardly had he completed the fortifications of the place in the spring of 1636 when a Dutch vessel arrived from New Amsterdam with the intention of occupying the mouth of the river and blocking the trade outlet of the English settlements higher up. The Dutch arrived too late, and thus Winthrop saved the control of the river for the English. His authority over the upper settlements was never more than nominal, though his relations with them were friendly, as was shown during the Pequot War, in the course of which the Indian tribe of that name, which had been harrying the Connecticut settlements, was exterminated and its territory appropriated. In 1644 Saybrook was sold to Connecticut by one of the surviving associates of Lords Brooke and Say and the colony soon expanded in other directions also. The same year Southampton on Long Island was annexed and five years later Easthampton. By The expansion of Connecticut 1653 Connecticut had twelve towns. The New Haven colony, 1638-1662 The settlement of New Haven, made in 1638, was for many years a separate and distinct colony. The founders were John Davenport, a noted London preacher, and Theophilus Eaton, a wealthy merchant, who was one of his parishioners. They arrived at Boston in 1637, in the midst of the Hutchinsonian controversy, and in spite of every inducement that was offered them to remain in Massachusetts proceeded to Long Island Sound and founded New Haven. They had no charter of any kind, and their only right to the soil was based on purchases from the Indians. In 1639 the free planters met in a barn, and after Davenport had preached from the text, "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars," they proceeded to adopt a set of resolutions binding them to be governed by the Scriptures as a sufficient guide in all the affairs of life and providing for the selection of seven men as "pillars" of the new church and state. Only church members were to be admitted as free burgesses. On this basis the "seven pillars" proceeded to organize a Bible commonwealth of the extremest type. A general court was organized to meet once a year for the election of a governor and assistants, in whose hands was |