“The rule of the magistrate in the young Commonwealth was rigid. The common welfare demanded implicit submission to a compact for mutual protection. The virtuous and the orderly might be, as they usually are, a law unto themselves; but there was special need of watchfulness and restraint of the idle, the vicious, and the violent, who, relieved from the accustomed rule of a long organized society, would riot in the license of relaxed law. All the old bonds that hold society together, and kept anarchy at arms-length were loosened. The habit of obedience to constituted authority needed to be reestablished by fresh subjection and enforced discipline. In this respect the colonies were all alike. Each had to work out for itself with such wisdom and such vigor as it could command, the problem of self-government; and each addressed itself, first of all, to the question of self-preservation. Large consideration of the science of government concerned them less at this early stage of their existence than the daily conduct of each individual citizen. There was nothing in morals or in manners, as to what men should eat and drink and wherewithal they should be clothed; how they should dispose of their time and their industry; what their relations should be to each other, to the state, to their wives, to their children; – in all the affairs of life, whether small or great, there was nothing of which the law did not take cognizance. It was needful to the preservation and good order of society so newly organized that it should do so; and if sometimes – indeed very often – the true and sole function of perfected government, protection of person and property, was overstepped, and intellectual freedom encroached upon in the attempt to regulate religious belief and coerce the conscience, such exercise of power is to be pardoned to the exigencies of the times.”

“There were not probably more than a thousand people in the three Connecticut towns when the Pequot war was finished; the first English child born on the banks of that river (David, son of Captain Lion Gardiner, born at Saybrook Fort, April, 1636) was at that time only eighteen months old. It was not difficult for the watchful eyes of the magistrates to scan carefully the life and conversation of each man and woman. Nor could it be doubted that a community made up, in some degree, of mere adventurers, should have its vicious element, though each settlement was at first a church led in a body by its pastor from three Massachusetts towns – Newton, Watertown, and Dorchester. Even the godly people of the Dorchester church were led, Governor Bradford said, by a “hankering mind” to the pleasant Connecticut meadows on which Holmes’s colony from Plymouth had already settled; and by sheer weight of numbers and the influence of the stronger government behind them, they dispossessed the first comers. When such were the saints what might not be looked for from the sinners? The devil lurked even among the churches of the Puritans, and if he could not be got rid of altogether at least he could be watched with unceasing vigilance.”

“In the spring of 1638, the whole company sailed from Boston for Quinnipiack, now New Haven, purchased the preceding autumn from Momauguin, the Indian sachem, for twelve coats of English cloth, twelve alchemy spoons, twelve hatchets, twelve hoes, two dozen knives, twelve porringers and four cases of French knives and scissors.”

“Theophilus Eaton was chosen its first governor. In its general provisions – as to the holding of General Courts, the number and choice of magistrates, the exercise of legislative and judicial power, the rights of the citizen, and his responsibility to the law – it was essentially the same as that of Connecticut in all outward form, as in its purely democratic spirit. But after all it was democracy with a proviso; the right of self government in holding or in choosing to office was restricted to those who were members of that church. Others, who also assumed to call themselves Christians, were as completely shut out from any share in the government as a hundred and fifty years later the Constitution of the United States excluded “Indians not taxed” and “persons held to service or labor.”

“Mooshausick, as the place was called where Williams hope to find rest at last – and which he named Providence, because, he said, ‘of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress’ – he desired, also, ‘might be for a shelter for those distressed in conscience.’ It was not long ere such asylums were needed. Whether the exercise then and there of the right of fee thought and free speech was wise or foolish, whether it was harmless or baneful either to church or state, the attempt to suppress that right was altogether futile.”

“Roger Williams had not long to wait for companionship. Within two years from the time of his landing upon Slate Rock such accessions were made to his colony that ‘the lands on the two fresh rivers, Wowasquatuckett and Mooshausick,’ granted to him by Canonicus and Miantonomo, he conveyed to twelve associates for thirty pounds. These incorporated themselves and all that should be subsequently admitted, into a township, promising to render ‘an active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good, by the consent of the majority. But the submissions was to be ‘only in civil things.’ ”

“But from the first New England confederacy – with its immediate purpose of defence and offence against the Indians, and the possible purposes which time might bring forth – Gorges’s colony at Agamenticus (York) in Main, and the plantations on the Narragansett, were rigidly excluded. The Puritans dreaded the state and the church from which they had fled, and which Gorges represented; they hated the heretics who had escaped to Rhode Island from the persecutions of the church and the state which they sought to establish.”

“But there was an interval of forty years between those wars. That with the Pequots was so sharp and decisive a lesson that a generation passed away, and there were none left to bear the Pequot totem, ere the jealousy of the English overcame the memory of ther prowess, and led the Indians to venture upon another attempt at extermination. That interval of repose was of the last importance to the colonists. Without it, the history of the permanent settlement of New England might have dated some scores of years later. Whether Endicott’s expedition to Block Island, reckless and inconsiderate, as most of the acts of that precipitate and hot-headed Puritan usually were, was justifiable or not, when considered in the light of its possible, and even probably, immediate consequences, it had only a happy result. It provoked a war at a time when the Indians, foolishly divided among themselves, were easily subdued by the destruction of the most powerful and dangerous tribe among them, while the weaker, who had blindly helped in that destruction, could never again muster the courage or the strength to attempt, till it was too late, to drive the invaders back to the sea whence they came. That the result should be recognized as a signal evidence of the goodness of God was only in accordance with the Puritan faith that they were peculiarly under the devine protection. ‘The Lord was pleased,’ exclaims Captain Mason, with more force than elegance, at the close of his narrative – ‘the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.’ ”