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Montauk Point, Long Island, New York

Monday, April 9, 2007

Southern New England, 1638-45, image 11 of 19
Montauk Point, Long Island, New York
“The same year some New Haven people took possession at Southold on the Sound. The young colonies had not long to wait, when once a firm foothold was gained, for accessions both from Old and New England. Nor were the Dutch unreasonable, for they seemed quite willing to share the island with the English, leaving them to take possession of the eastern half unmolested. Ten years later indeed, in 1650, they made a treaty to this effect with the New England colonies, by which a dividing line should be drawn from the west side of Oyster Bay to the sea; but in the mean while, they had only insisted that the English plantations which in the course of that decade had grown up west of the line, should be held to be within the jurisdiction of the West India Company, and should acknowledge their allegiance to the States General. Hempstead, Flushing, Jamaica, and Newtown, were, therefore, Dutch towns, though settled by the English. But South Hampton, East Hampton, Southold, Brookhaven, Huntington, and Oyster Bay, were united at different periods, to Connecticut, till after the surrender of New Neatherlands to the English in 1664, when the whole island came under that government of the Duke of York.”Montauk Point, Long Island, New York

“This migration of the English from Massachusetts Bay to the country of the Connecticut, thence westward along both shores of the Sound, crowding in one direction almost as far as Hell Gate, pushing, in another, almost as far as Hell Gate, pushing, in another, almost to the banks of the Hudson, was not impelled by any imperative necessity of outward circumstance, but rather by an incontrollable restlessness, a fever of change that gave them no quiet. Full of energy, activity, curiosity, and a love of independence, political and religious, they demanded above all things space enough for the gratification of ambitions that sought to found thriving colonies and open new avenues to wealth.”

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Hookers Home in Hartford, Connecticut

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Southern New England, 1638-45, image 12 of 19
Hookers Home in Hartford, Connecticut
“They would not, indeed, have them paramount to all earthly considerations; but they were not therefore disposed to look upon all merely material interests with comparative indifference. It was not, perhaps, so much any essential radical difference of character between them and other New England emigrants of their time and class; but there was at least that fortunate difference of circumstance and opportunity which came with their escape from the fierce polemics of Boston, and reluctance to live under magistrates who, however excellent their rule in many respects, never willingly assented to the admission of others to any share of it, while insisting upon implicit obedience in all things which they decreed, whether relating to this world or the next. The people who escaped from this domination into Connecticut, if it were only that the ambitions of leaders might have fuller play, and the consent of followers a larger choice, gained, beside, more freedom than hey sought. They were led to take a wider view of the possibilities of the new country they had found than as merely an arena for theological discussion where the metes and bounds of religious liberty, however much enlarged into the wider field of Puritanism, were just as arbitrary and as fixed as ever. They saw that they might be prosperous without ceasing to be pious, and that worldly thrift was not necessarily incompatible with a due regard for the things of the everlasting life. They were too busy in clearing forests, in planting crops, in building towns at the mouths of all the rivers that seemed most promising for future commerce, to permit themselves to be absorbed in attempts to find out the whole counsel of God in dim and subtle distinctions of theological controversy.”Hookers Home in Hartford, Connecticut

“Not that they were unmindful of those things which made so large an element in the intellectual and spiritual life of the time; but that other interests were with them of equal if not sometimes of greater consideration. A steady compliance with the suggestions of worldly wisdom, and prudent attention to the conditions of worldly thrift, not less than an implicit obedience to the highest sense of religious duty, have ever characterized this branch of the family of New England Puritans. Wherever they have gone they have carried with them this profitable mixture of puritanic rectitude and wise worldliness. However stern and rigid their piety, hand in hand with it have gone industry and prosperity; the government of the people by the will of the majority; the free school; the free church according to their standard of religious freedom, and the common law of England. Of that hardy race of pioneers – whose indomitable courage, whose irrepressible energy, whose restless love of change, neither chains of mountains, nor gigantic rivers, nor lakes that are inland seas, nor arid deserts could hinder in their march to the shores of another ocean – there has been no more fruitful root than that which was first planted in the rich soil of the valley of the Connecticut.”

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Coast of Massachusetts – Nantasket Beach

Saturday, April 7, 2007

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Coast of Massachusetts – Nantasket Beach
“So Davenport and his company sailed out of Boston harbor in the bright days of April, – sailed on even keel and with gentle breezes past the long beaches of the Bay; past the white strands and sandhills of Cape Cod; past the islands of the southern coast of New England where the warm current of the Gulf Stream with a westward sweep tempers the waters of the air; and so at length they came into Long Island Sound. The pastor meanwhile, no doubt gathering the elder men about him on sunny days in the shadow of the sails, held wise and sweet converse upon that stately temple of seven pillars which should presently rear its fair proportions in the primeval solitude where great oaks and elms cast their shadows over the rich meadows that stretched down to the sea.”Coast of Massachusetts - Nantasket Beach

“In popular defense of the intolerance of the early Boston Puritans – for strange to say, they have their defenders – is that the critical circumstances of their condition as an infant colony with its peculiar relations to the parent state made it imperative that a uniformity of belief should be enforced for the sake of preserving the Puritan ascendancy both in religious and civil affairs. And it is triumphantly asserted as the result of that character of the Massachusetts of later times, and its influence upon the history of the whole country, are due to the stern and wise policy of the early fathers in their suppression of a liberty what was running or had run into license. Whereas, the truth is that those bigoted elders and magistrates, though they sometimes silenced the men, never suppressed the opinions whether true or false. They only tried, and the more they tried the less they succeeded. The character of Massachusetts and the potent influence she has exercised upon the history of the United States are due to the fact that neither bigots nor fanatics have ever, from the time of Roger Williams to the present moment, been able to destroy the liberty of thought and of speech within her borders. Her people have always been wise enough – wiser always than the Synod of the General Court – to tolerate freedom of opinion, and in the long run, to reject that which was unwise and injurious and accept that which was true and good.”

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Signatures of Miantonomo and Canonicus

Friday, April 6, 2007

Southern New England – 1638-45, image 14 of 19
Signatures of Miantonomo and Canonicus
“All these went forth with the God-speeds and good wishers of the brethren of Massachusetts; but not so with the founders of Rhode Island. Roger Williams fled out into the night and the winter’s storm, with the order of the General Court behind him, the officers of the law in hot pursuit, and a ship waiting in the offing to bear him into perpetual banishment across the sea. The shelter which puritan intolerance denied him he sought and found among savage friends. As he, the next spring, with only five companions, paddled his canoe along the shore of Providence Bay, their thoughts were less of hierarchies and of commonwealths, than where the sunniest slope could be found for a field of maize, the most sheltered and convenient nook for huts.”Signatures of Miantonomo and Canonicus

“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.’ ”

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The Cove, Portsmouth, Rhode Island

Thursday, April 5, 2007

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The Cove, Portsmouth, Rhode Island
“Many of these were driven by such persecutions to seek for a new home outside the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Nearly all of them were of that number who were compelled to give up their arms. ‘I thought it not strange,’ wrote one of them – John Clark – ‘to see men differ about matters of Heaven, for I expect no less upon Earth: The Cove, Portsmouth, Rhode IslandBut to see that they were not able so to bear each with other in their different understandings and consciences, as in those utmost parts of the World to live peaceable together, whereupon I moved the latter [his own friends], for as much as the land was before us and wide enough, with the profer of Abraham to Lot, and for peace sake, to turn aside to the right hand, or to the left.’ Moved by a purpose so peaceful and sensible. Wheelright was first visited at Exeter; then Long Island and the Capes of the Delaware were proposed, and on the way southward Williams and the people of Plymouth, – tolerant of schismatics and who knew from long and bitter experience what exile for conscience’ sake meant – were visited. All concurred in advising them to go no further, but to take possession upon the island of Aquatnet, or Acquidneck – now Rhode Island. Their first choice was Sowames – a neck of land in the present town or Barrington, – but the Plymouth people claimed the latter as belonging to them, holding it, they said, ‘to be the garden of their Patent, and the flour in the garden,’ while the island was not within their boundaries. On this latter point, however, the Plymouth authorities changed their minds some years afterward. In 1650, when Coddington, the governor of Rhode Island, petitioned for a patent, Edward Winslow appeared on behalf of the Plymouth people before the committee of the admiralty in London, claiming that Acquidneck belonged to them under the grand of 1620.”

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Governor Coddington

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Southern New England, 1638-45, image 16 of 19
Governor Coddington of Rhode Island
“The purchase was made on the 24th of March 1637-8. The new comers pitched their tents at the northern extremity of the island, at Pocasset, now called Portsmouth, possibly some days before. With a reverential reliance upon the divine support, quite out of keeping with the supposition that they were men too dangerous to society to be trusted with deadly weapons, they had entered, on the 7th of the month, into a compact rather of a character of a church than as of a civil body. To incorporate themselves into a body politic they submitted their lives, persons and estates unto the ‘Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and to all those most perfect and absolute laws of his, given unto us in his holy word of truth, to be guided and judged thereby.’ Under this theocracy they proposed to live; and Mr. Coddington was at once chosen chief judge, with, probably, the functions of an equity court, but without the power of enforcing its decisions.”Governor Coddington of Rhode Island

“The experiment was a short one. ‘The perfect and absolute law’ of the Scriptures might have been quite sufficient for the original associates alone, but their numbers were soon added to with such a result as might have been looked for. Some of those who came to the new settlement were probably not saints; some of those who were may possibly have been saints of a very pragmatical and uncompliant disposition. Not a year had passed when we find that three persons were elected as elders to assist Mr. Coddington, and two of these three were not among the original associates. Not long after a constable was chosen to preserve the peace and prevent unlawful meetings, and a sergeant elected to keep a prison for the custody of those committed to his charge. About the same time William Aspinwall, one of the most respectable and most conspicuous of those who had been banished from Massachusetts, was proceeded against ‘as a suspected person for sedition against the State.’ There are no surer evidences of civil government than jails and constables.”

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Entrance to Newport Harbor

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

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Entrance to Newport Harbor, Newport, Rhode Island
“It is easy to imagine the progress of events. The class to which, under the category of ‘Persons distressed in conscience,’ Roger William suggested that a shelter might be found about Narragansett Bay, is always sure to include some very disagreeable and very unreasonable, though unquestionably most upright and worthy people. Some of this kind, probably, whose consciences were very tender, as well as some who had no consciences at all, followed to Rhode Island John Clark and his friends, whose earnest desire in going was that they might be permitted ‘to live peaceably together.’ There were penalties many and severe yet to be paid before liberty and peach could dwell together undisturbed, as these people soon make manifest.”Entrance to Newport Harbor, Newport, RI
“It was thought in Boston, or, at least, Governor Winthrop believed, that Mrs. Hutchinson was at the bottom of the troubles which broke out in the new colony. In May, 1639, the governor writes: ‘At Aquiday the people grew very tumultuous, and put out Mr. Coddington and the other magistrates, and chose Mr. Hutchison only, a man of very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife, who had been the beginner of all the former troubles in the country, and still continued to breed disturbance.’ ”

“This was, no doubt, so far true that Mrs. Hutchison was not likely to have been a silent listener to any discussions, especially upon theological questions, and these could hardly have failed arise among minds cut loose from all settled beliefs by the Antinomian controversy, and hot and eager with novel theories, political and polemical. And out of such discussions may well have been evolved the necessity of civil rule and a change of rulers. But the spirit, nevertheless, in which John Clark spoke influenced many among them, remembering the proffer of Abraham to Lot, and turning one to the right hand and the other to the left. Coddington and his friends removed within two years to the other end of the island, -at Newport, – but the colonies were soon after united under one government, with Coddington at its head, and Hutchinson as one of his assistants.”

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Coddington’s House, Newport, RI

Monday, April 2, 2007

Southern New England, 1638-45, image 17 of 19
Coddington’s House, Newport, Rhode Island
“Newport was settled by nine of the leading men of Pocasset – or, as it was this year named, Portsmouth – including all its magistrates. Of these, the first who built a house was Nicholas Easton, who, with his two sons, Peter and John, arrived in a boat on the first of May, perhaps a little in advance of his eight associates. He and his sons, at any rate, were the first to provide themselves with a permanent shelter. At the First recorded meeting of the emigrants on the 16th of May, the site of ‘the plantation now begun at this southwest end of the island’ is fixed as on both sides of the spring, ‘by the seaside southward’; this spring was on the west side of the present Spring Street near the State House, its stream running to the harbor. The town grew rapidly, and in five months numbered one hundred and one persons. Winthrop says in his journal of that month: ‘They [at Acuidneck] also gathered a church in a very disordered way; for they took some excommunicated persons, and others who were members of the church of Boston and not dismissed.’ He probably refers to a gathering at Pocasset, but these nine founders of Newport must have been its chief members, and were not likely to have lost their Christian fellowship by their removal. The ‘disordered way’ was ere long the Baptist Church of Newport, with the Rev. John Clark as pastor, – the Puritan mind ‘a confusion worse confounded.’ ”Coddington’s House, Newport, RI

“Hutchinson died in 1642. Only the summer before a son and a son-in-law of the family had been imprisoned and fined on a visit to Boston, and it is far more probably that Mrs. Hutchinson, longing for peace and tranquility, sought, after her husband’s death, to escape persecution and calumny by removing to New Netherland, out of reach of her own countrymen, than that it became intolerable to her, as her detractors would have us believe, to live in any peaceful and well-ordered community. ‘She and her party,’ says Winthrop, ‘would have no magistracy.’ But there was no evil he was not willing to believe of that unhappy Lady. He even suspected her of witchcraft, and that she had bewitched this young man Collins, who married her daughter; for ‘it was certainly known,’ he says, with the utmost solemnity, that her ‘bosom friend,’ one Hawkin’s wife, ‘had much familiarity with the devil in England.’ ”

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The Signature of John Davenport

Sunday, April 1, 2007

“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.”

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Recapture of Oldham’s Vessel

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Pequot War, 1636-37, image 1 of 13
Off Block Island, Block Island Sound
“John Oldham had been in New England from the first settlement of Plymouth. After his ignominious expulsion from that colony, we hear of his apparent restoration to favor among that people; of his attempts to found colonies of his own in Maine and Boston harbor, so far, at least as to procure patents to that end; of his trading along the coast; of his disputing with the Council of the Massachusetts Bay Company their title to the lands which they held under the hand and seal of the king. Restless, energetic, always engaged in some enterprise, he certainly was; and there is no evidence that there was anything more amiss in him than belongs almost inevitable to a man of violent temper, removed in a great degree from the restrains of civilization, leading a life of adventure, associating and trading with the Indians till he had acquired, perhaps, as such men are apt to do, something of the habits and almost the nature of an Indian.”

Recapture

“In 1636 he was trading in a vessel of his own, along the Connecticut River. What encounter there may have been between him and the Indians, that led to the final catastrophe, is not known – whether his vessel was boarded by them merely for plunder, or whether some aggression on his part provoked retaliation. But off Block Island, a Massachusetts fisherman, John Gallop, descried the vessel drifting helplessly out to sea, crowded with Indians who could handle neither helm nor sail. Gallop, who had only one man and two boys with him, without hesitation attacked the vessel and then boarded her, assaulting the Indians with such weapons as he had at hand. It must have been a gallant naval battle, for the brave fisherman and his brave companions drove the Indians before them, some diving into the hold for safety, some throwing themselves into the sea, till none were left upon the vessel but the dying and the dead. Upon the deck lay the body of Oldham, still bleeding from recent wounds where he had fallen with his crew in defense of his vessel.”

“This death of Oldham was the signal for war. The government of Massachusetts Bay, the people who had already come, and the people who were coming into the Connecticut valley, saw that peace with the Pequots was no longer to be purchased by attempts at conciliation. Immediate measures were taken to punish this outrage; the Indians put themselves both on the defensive and the offensive, and the colonies of New England were for the first time engaged in serious war.”

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