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Page 46
One route to the new territory by Long Island Sound and the
Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland
route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633,
by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years
afterward. He found his way westward to the Connecticut River, and
brought back most appetizing accounts of the upper Connecticut Valley;
and his reports seem to have suggested a way out of a serious
difficulty which had come to a head in Massachusetts Bay.
The colony of Massachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district
covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its
greatest poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the
colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight
Massachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now
Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several
occasions; and the assigned reasons are apparently so frivolous as to
lead to the suspicion that some fundamental difference was at the
bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great
Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were "newcomers," and this
slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement,
in 1633, of a number of strong men at these three towns, notably
Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dorchester, Watertown, and
Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling: the two
former led the way, in October, 1633, in establishing town governments
under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less,
the fundamental feature of Massachusetts policy,--the limitation of
office-holding and the elective franchise to church-members. The three
towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposition, a
position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the
circumstances.
The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were Warham and Maverick; of
Newtown, Hooker and Stone; of Watertown, Phillips. Haynes of Newtown,
Ludlow of Dorchester, and Pynchon of Roxbury, were the principal lay
leaders of the half-formed opposition. Some have thought that Haynes
was jealous of Governor Winthrop, Hooker of Cotton, and Ludlow of
everybody. But the opposition, if it can be fairly called an
opposition, was not so definite as to be traceable to any such
personal source. The strength which marked the divergence was due
neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and
character which marked the leaders of the minority.
Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone were of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Hooker began to preach at Chelmsford in 1626, and was silenced for
non-conformity in 1629. He then taught school, his assistant being
John Eliot, afterward the apostle to the Indians; but the chase after
him became warmer, and in 1630 he retired to Holland and resumed his
preaching. In 1632 he and Stone came to New England as pastor and
teacher of the church at Newtown; and the two took part in the
migration to Hartford. Here Hooker became the undisputed
ecclesiastical leader of Connecticut until his death in 1647. John
Warham and John Maverick, both of Exeter in England, came to New
England in 1630, as pastor and teacher of Dorchester. Maverick died
while preparing to follow his church, but Warham settled with his
parishioners at Windsor, and died there in 1670. George Phillips, also
a Cambridge man, came to New England in 1630, as pastor of the church
at Watertown. He took no part in the migration, but lived and died at
Watertown. Fate seems to have determined that Wendell Phillips should
belong to Massachusetts.
Roger Ludlow was Endicott's brother-in-law. He came to New England in
1630, and settled at Dorchester. He was deputy governor in 1634, and
seems to have been "slated," to use the modern term, for the
governorship in the following year. But this private agreement among
the deputies was broken, for some unknown reason, by the voters, who
chose Haynes, perhaps as a less objectionable representative of the
opposition. Ludlow complained so openly and angrily of the failure to
carry out the agreement that he was dropped from the magistracy at the
next election. He went at once to Connecticut, and was deputy governor
there in alternate years until 1654. Incensed at the interference of
New Haven to prevent his county, Fairfield, from waging an independent
warfare against the Dutch, he went to Virginia in 1654, taking the
records of the county with him. It is not known when or where he died.
Pynchon, the third lay leader of the opposition, took part in the
migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts,
founding the town of Springfield.
At the May session of the Massachusetts General Court in 1634, an
application for "liberty to remove" was received from Newtown. It was
granted. At the September session the request was changed into one for
removal to Connecticut. This was a very different matter, and, after
long debate, was defeated by the vote of the Assistants, tho the
Deputies passed it. Various reasons were assigned for the request to
remove to Connecticut,--lack of room in their present locations, the
desire to save Connecticut from the Dutch, and "the strong bent of
their spirits to remove thither;" but the last looks like the
strongest reason. In like manner, while the arguments to the contrary
were those which would naturally suggest themselves, the weakening of
Massachusetts, and the peril of the emigrants, the concluding
argument, that "the removing of a candlestick" would be "a great
judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession
was the result of discord between two parties.
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