“For six years, as we have already said, this question of confederation was a topic of anxious discussion. Though so strictly defined and limited, it was only with the utmost caution that the several colonies consented to surrender the rights of self-government even for so obvious a good as a sure protection against their enemies. Perhaps the league would have been even longer delayed had not other than Indian wars been thought possible. The people along the southern coast of New England had turned their resolute faces and longing eyes towards New Netherland. The people of Massachusetts, or, at least, the leaders among them, never lost sight of the hope of absolute independence which first moved them to transfer their company, with its charter, quietly and secretly from London to Massachusetts Bay. They watched with absorbing interest the progress of the Revolution in England, cautious of any rash precipitancy, but ready for any emergency by which they might be involved in that great struggle, and any event that might be turned to their own advantage. That General Court of Massachusetts which ratified the act of confederacy, also decreed that in the oath of allegiance taken by the Governor and magistrates they should omit ‘for the present’ the words ‘you shall bear true faith and allegiance to our Sovereign Lord King Charles;’ for the king, they said, ‘had violated the privileges of Parliament, and made war upon them.’ ”
“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.”