CHAPTER III.

CONNECTICUT, RHODE ISLAND, AND CHARLES II.

THE Commission issued by the king on the first day of December, 1660, to Clarendon and seven others as a standing council, for regulating the numerous remote colonies and governments, "so many ways considerable to the crown," included the names of the earl of Manchester and the Viscount Say and Seal, who were sincere friends to New England.

Massachusetts, which had been republican, but never regicide, strong in its charter, made no haste to present itself in England as a suppliant. "The colony of Boston," wrote Stuyvesant, "remains constant to its old maxims of a free state, dependent on none but God." Had the king resolved on sending them a governor, the several towns and churches throughout the whole country were resolved to oppose him.

The colonies of Plymouth, of Connecticut, and of New Haven, not less than of Rhode Island, proclaimed the new king and acted in his name. Connecticut appeared in London by its representative, the younger Winthrop. Its people had purchased lands of the assigns of the earl of Warwick, and from Uncas the territory of the Mohegans; the news of the restoration awakened a desire for a patent. But they proceeded warily they draughted among themselves the instru ment which they desired the king to ratify; and they could plead for their possessions their rights by purchase, by conquest from the Pequods, and by their own labor which had redeemed the wilderness. A letter was addressed to the aged Lord Say and Seal, their early friend.

The venerable man secured for his clients the kind offices of the lord chamberlain, the earl of Manchester, a man "of

an obliging temper, universally beloved, being of a virtuous and generous mind." "Indeed he was a noble and a worthy lord, and one that loved the godly." "He and Lord Say did join together, that their godly friends in New England might enjoy their just rights and liberties."

But the chief happiness of Connecticut was in the selec tion of its agent. The younger Winthrop, as a child, had been the pride of his father's house; he had received the best instruction which Cambridge and Dublin could afford, and had perfected his education by visiting, in part at least, in the public service, not Holland and France only, in the days of Prince Maurice and Richelieu, but Venice and Constantinople. As he travelled through Europe, he sought the society of men eminent for learning. Returning to England in the bloom of life, with the fairest promise of advancement, he preferred to follow his father to the New World, regarding "diversities of countries but as so many inns," alike conducting to "the journey's end." When his father became impoverished, the son, unsolicited and without recompense, relinquished his inheritance, that "it might be spent in furthering the great work" in Massachusetts, himself, without wealth, engaging in the enterprise of planting Connecticut. Care for posterity seemed the motive to his actions. He respected learning and virtue and ability in whatever sect they might be found; and, when Quakers were the objects of persecution, he was unremitting in argument and entreaty to prevent the taking of their lives. He never regretted the brilliant prospects he had resigned, nor complained of the comparative solitude of New London; books furnished employment to his mind; the study of nature according to the principles of the philosophy of Bacon was his delight, for "he had a gift in understanding and art;" and his home was endeared by a happy marriage and "many sweet children." Understanding the springs of action and the principles that control affairs, he never attempted impracticable things, and noiselessly succeeded in all that he undertook. The New World was full of his praises; Puritans and Quakers and the freemen of Rhode Island were alike his eulogists; the Dutch at New York had confidence in his integrity; and it is the beautiful

eyes

testimony of his own father that "God gave him favor in the of all with whom he had to do." His personal merits, sympathy for his family, his exertions, the petition of the colony, and the ready good-will of Clarendon-for we must not reject all faith in generous feeling-easily prevailed to obtain for Connecticut an ample patent. The courtiers of King Charles, who themselves had an eye to possessions in America, suggested no limitations; and perhaps it was believed that Connecticut would serve to balance the power of Massachusetts.

The charter, sealed on the twentieth of April, 1662, connected New Haven and Hartford in one colony, with limits extending from the Narragansett river to the Pacific ocean. It confirmed to the colonists the right to govern themselves, which they had assumed from the beginning. They were allowed to elect all their own officers, to enact their own laws, to administer justice without appeals to England, to inflict punishments, to confer pardons, and, in a word, to exercise every power, deliberative and active. The king, far from reserving a negative on their laws, did not even require that they should be transmitted for his inspection; and no provision was made for the interference of the English government in any event whatever. Connecticut was independent except

in name.

After his successful negotiations, varied by active concert in founding the Royal Society, Winthrop, returned to America. The amalgamation of New Haven and Connecticut was effected without collision, though New Haven was at first reluctant to merge itself in the larger colony. The wellfounded gratitude of the united commonwealth followed him throughout his life; and for fourteen years he was annually elected its chief magistrate.

The charter of Connecticut secured to her an existence of unsurpassed tranquillity. Unmixed popular power was safe under the shelter of severe morality; and beggary and crime could not thrive. From the first, the minds of the yeomanry were kept active by the constant exercise of the elective franchise; and, except under James II., there was no such thing in the land as a home officer appointed by the English king. The government was in honest and upright hands; the

strifes of rivalry never became heated; in the choice of magistrates, gifts of learning and genius were valued, but the state was content with virtue and single-mindedness; and the public welfare never suffered at the hands of plain men. Roger Williams was ever a welcome guest at Hartford; and "that heavenly man, John Haynes," would say to him: "I think, Mr. Williams, I must now confesse to you that the most wise God hath provided and cut out this part of the world as a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences." There never existed a persecuting spirit in Connecticut; and "it had a scholar to their minister in every town or village." Religious speculation was carried to the highest degree of refinement, alike in its application to moral duties and to the mysterious questions on the nature of God, of liberty, and of the soul. A hardy race multiplied along the alluvion of the streams, and subdued less inviting fields; its population for a century doubled once in twenty years, in spite of considerable emigration. Religion united with the pursuits of agriculture to form a people of steady habits. The domestic wars were discussions of knotty points in theology; the concerns of the parish, the merits of the minister, were the weightiest affairs; and a church reproof the heaviest calamity. The strifes of the parent country, though they sometimes occasioned a levy among the sons of the husbandmen, never brought an enemy over their border. No fears of midnight ruffians disturbed the sweetness of slumber; the best house required no fastening but a latch, lifted by a string.

Industry enjoyed the abundance which it created. No great inequalities of condition excited envy or raised political feuds; wealth could display itself only in a larger house and a fuller barn. There was venison from the hills; salmon, in their season, not less than shad, from the rivers; and sugar from the maple of the forest. For a foreign market little was produced beside cattle; and, in return for them, but few foreign luxuries stole in. Even so late as 1713, the number of seamen did not exceed one hundred and twenty. The soil had originally been justly divided, or held as common property in trust for the public, and for new-comers. There was for a long time hardly a lawyer in the land. The husbandman

who held his own plough and fed his own cattle, was the great man of that day; no one was superior to the matron, who, with her busy daughters, kept the hum of the wheel incessantly alive, spinning and weaving every article of their dress. Life was uniform. The only revolution was from the time of sowing to the time of reaping; from the plain dress of the week to the more trim attire of Sunday. There was nothing morose in the Connecticut character. Frolic mingled with innocence; and the annual thanksgiving to God was, from primitive times, as joyous as it was sincere.

One question distressed and divided families. Without inward experience of the truth and power of Christianity, no one of a congregation of Calvinists was admitted to take the covenant which gave admission to the communion table; and the rite of baptism was administered to the children of those only who were communicants. There grew up an increasing number of parents of blameless lives, who did not become members of the church and yet wished baptism for their children. Influenced by their condition, the general court of Connecticut expressed a desire for a council of ministers of the four confederated Calvinistic colonies. The general court of Massachusetts proposed to refer the question to a general synod, and of itself went so far as to appoint fifteen ministers of its own colony as its delegates. Connecticut readily followed the example; but Plymouth kept aloof; and the austere colony of New Haven, guided by the inflexible Davenport, not only refused to send delegates, but by letter strongly rebuked the measure as fraught with dangers to religion. Yet, in February, 1657, the synod, representing the two colonies which, in extent of territory and in numbers, far outweighed the rest, sanctioned the baptizing of children of parents who themselves had been baptized, and though they were not ready to assume all the obligations of church members, would yet promise to give their offspring a Christian education. This mode of settlement was called in derision "the half-way covenant."

By the customs of the Congregational churches, the vote of a synod was but a recommendation, leaving the decision to each church for itself. In 1662, a Massachusetts synod repeated the advice which had before been given in conjunc