by George Leon Walker

CHAPTER V.

IN MASSACHUSETTS AND REMOVAL TO CONNECTICUT.

For after Mr. Hooker’s coming over, it was observed that many of the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.
HUBBARD (ed. 1848), p. 165.

The communitary life into which Pastor Hooker and Teacher Stone found themselves introduced on their arrival in the Bay had already passed the severest of the experiences incident to the planting of a new colony. Salem, Dorchester, Boston, Watertown, Roxbury, Lynn, Charlestown, and probably Newtown mad not only regularly established town organizations, but church institutions and more or less well developed social privileges; and there were several other plantations in the near vicinity which were moving rapidly toward a like stage of development.

All these various settlements in the Bay had grown up since 1628, when, after several ineffectual attempts to plant permanent institutions, a company of settlers under the lead of John Endicott had fixed upon Salem, and made there the hoped-for dwelling-place of "peace." These towns were all gathered under the provisions of a charter to the "Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay," granted in 1629, which document had been brought over by Mr. John Winthrop and a notable company of associates in June, 1630. The granting of the charter was as a trumpet-call to sympathizers with the Puritan movement in England; and company after company of stalwart men and heroic women, despairing of the reformation of the State and Church in their own land, turned their faces in hope to the New World, and found home and sanctuary in more or less voluntary exile in America.

Probably at the time of Hooker’s arrival at Newtown at least three thousand Englishmen were scattered among the towns and plantations of the Bay. They were settling down to the various labours of planting, building, making roads and bridges, catching and curing fish, trading with the Indians for furs, taking care of their flocks of sheep and goats, breeding cattle, and building up the fabric of an orderly society. It was, on the whole, a remarkable assemblage of men and women.

The ministers, now numbering thirteen or fourteen in the colony, were nearly all University men, had been clergy of the English Church, and were, several of them, eminent at home for all clerical gifts and attainments. The magistrates were men of good social position in their own land, and some of them of wealth and honourable, family. The rank and file of the citizenship were of solid, middle-class English life, - men and women thrifty, sober, conscientious, intelligently religious, and Puritan by conviction and experience. It was a strong, hardy, somewhat stem and austere society, as became people who had had trials, were in the midst of hardships, and had the prospect of difficulties yet before them.

The particular town to which Hooker came had, in the autumn of 1633, about a hundred families. It had been intended that the place should be the seat of government; and in 1630 some houses had been built, and a "pallysadoe" made "aboute the newe towne," and a "fosse" - some of whose remains were visible at the beginning of the present century - dug about the designated precincts of the fortifications. The superior advantages of Boston, however, as the main town of the colony, caused the abandonment of the plan for fortifying Newtown; but William Wood, writing in the year Hooker arrived, describes the place as "one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New-England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them, are very rich, and well stored with cattle of all sorts, having many hundred acres of ground paled in with one general fence, which is about a mile and a half long, which secures all their weaker cattle from the wild beasts." (1) These fair structures and handsome-contrived streets must be understood in the light of certain orders on the records of the little settlement, - that "all the houses [within] the bounds of the town shall be covered [with] slate or board, and not with thatch," and that all houses shall "range even, and stand just six [feet on each man’s] own ground from the street." (2)

The coming of so marked a reinforcement of the ministry of the Bay as was implied in the arrival of Cotton, Hooker, and Stone was a source of profound rejoicing to the whole colony. Punning does not seem to have been a forbidden amusement; for the people were pleased to say that their "three great necessities were now supplied, for they had Cotton for their clothing, Hooker for their fishing, and Stone for their building."

The ministers themselves instituted a meeting "at one of their houses by course, where some question of moment was debated." This meeting - the probable progenitor of the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers - was, however, looked upon askance by Mr. Skelton, the pastor at Salem, and by Roger Williams, who was with him, "exercising by way of prophecy;" they "fearing it might grow in time to a presbytery or superintendency, to the prejudice of the churches’ liberties." (3) Special religious awakening at Boston followed the coming of Mr. Cotton to the church in that place; and it was probably at this time that the Thursday lectures were established in each of the four nearly adjacent towns, - Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Newtown. But by October of the following year (1634), "it being found, that the four lectures did spend too much time, and proved overburdensome to the ministers and people, the ministers, with the advice of the magistrates, . . . did agree to reduce them to two days, viz., Mr. Cotton at Boston one Thursday, or the 5th day of the week, and Mr. Hooker at Newtown the next 5th day, and Mr. Warham at Dorchester one 4^th day of the week, and Mr. Welde at Roxbury the next 4^th day." (4) Apparently, however, this arrangement did not long suit the people, who then, as generally, liked to get all they could out of their ministers; and in December following the old practice of the afternoon lectures in each town was resumed. (5) The range of these Thursday lectures, if we. may judge from the reports preserved of those of Mr. Cotton, swept the whole field of manners and morals as well as doctrine. One of these, in 1633 at Boston, was about the non-necessity of veils for women. Mr. Endicott, the fervid magistrate of Salem, who had been persuaded otherwise by Roger Williams, being present, argued against Mr. Cotton, adducing the commandment of "the apostle;" and the discussion grew so warm that the governor, Winthrop, felt called on to interpose, "and so it break off." (6)

At another lecture Mr. Cotton, being moved by complaints of the sharp dealing of Robert Keaine, a merchant of Boston, laid open the error of some "false principles" in matters of trade; one of which false principles was "that a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can;" another, "that he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, etc., and though the commodity be fallen." Against which he laid down the proposition, among others, that "a man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham, the land is worth thus much." (7) At still another lecture Mr. Cotton came down in reproval of a proposition pending in the General Court for leaving out of office "two of their ancientest magistrates, because they were grown poor," censuring "such miscarriage," and telling the "country, that such as were decayed in their estates by attending the service of the country ought to be maintained by the country." (8) But the staple of Mr. Cotton’s lectures was Scripture exposition and application. He had practised the same thing at his lectures in England, and "at both Bostons went through near the whole Bible." (9) Mr. Cotton’s Thursday lectures were probably in topic and method essentially the same with those of other ministers of the colony. We know more of them than we do of Mr. Hooker’s or the other ministers’ mainly because he had in his church an intelligent hearer who kept a journal. Mr. Hooker had no Governor Winthrop jotting down in his diary the current events in which his pastor took a share. Nevertheless he seems to have been concerned and influential in most matters that were going on. In 1633 and again in 1636 he was associated with Cotton and Wilson in reconciling certain oppositions of the somewhat touchy Mr. Dudley of Newtown and Governor Winthrop of Boston, - once on some personal difference, (10) and again about the degree of leniency allowable in the administration of public affairs, (11) Dudley being in favour of sterner measures than Winthrop practised or desired. On the second of these occasions, Mr. Haynes of Newtown, then governor, sided against the lenient conduct of Winthrop, - a fact to be made note of in connection with questions shortly to arise concerning the causes of the separation of the Newtown Company from the colony. In November, 1634, the Assistants called on Mr. Hooker, with Mr. Cotton and Mr. Welde of Roxbury, to take to task his old acquaintance, the usher of the Little Baddow School, John Eliot, - then the young Teacher of the Roxbury church and afterward the Indian Apostle, - for criticising the magistrates as to their manner of making peace with the Pequots. (12)

More memorable was another transaction in which the General Court invoked Mr. Hooker’s aid. The restless and afterward celebrated Roger Williams had been installed in Mr. Skelton’s place at Salem against the remonstrance of the magistrates of the colony, (13) who a1ready - in 1631 - had had experience of his disquieting influence in that place. Since that time he had been in Plymouth ventilating such unsettled judgments as made the Plymouth church in commending him back to the Salem fellowship accompany their commendation "with some caution to them concerning him, and what care they ought to have of him." (14) Arrived at Salem again, he recommenced the controversies which ultimately resulted in his sentence of banishment. It was the circumstances of the time which gave to Mr. Williams’s performances their special dangerousness. No doctrinal question of religion was involved, least of all that view of baptism which he afterward - and temporarily (15) held, and which has so often erroneously been represented as a cause of exclusion from the colony. He denied the validity of the colonial charter; (16) he counselled the cutting out of the cross from the king’s flag; (17) he declared the administration of an oath of office to an unregenerate person to be a participation in taking "the name of God in vain;" (18) he pronounced worship in churches which had not renounced connection with the Established Church of England a sin. (19) When the General Court suspended action on a petition of Salem to receive a grant of public land, he moved his church to write to other churches to discipline their members who as town-representatives united in this delay; (20) when these churches hesitated to act on this advice of the Salem church, he counselled his church to withdraw fellowship from them; (21) when his church did not act on his counsel in this matter, he withdrew fellowship from it, and set up a private conventicle in his own house; (22) and when his wife continued to attend the Salem church, he renounced fellowship with her, and refused to say family prayers or grace at the table in her presence.(23) In an established time of quietude these performances of Mr. Williams might have been comparatively harmless, and been winked at as tokens only of the unsettled judgment which the clear mind of Governor Bradford had already noted. But it was not a time of quiet. The liberties of the colony were in imminent peril. Proceedings had already commenced for vacating the charter in the English courts. Reports tending to inflame the ecclesiastical authorities in England were continually sent back by disaffected persons in America. In this condition of affairs, to deny the charter’s validity, to charge the king with telling a "lie" in granting it, (24) to recommend the mutilation of the king’s colours, to proclaim the unchristian character of the churches in not denouncing the English Church as anti-christian, and to turmoil the churches and magistrates among themselves, were offences against civil peace which no administration could overlook. The question was not theological, it was a question of political order and of public safety; (25) and it was forced upon a reluctant government by a man who was not even a freeman of the colony, but one who personally declined, and employed his pulpit to induce others to decline, even a resident’s oath of loyalty to the government under which he lived.

Being summoned before the Court in October, 1635, Mr. Williams "maintained all his opinions." Asked if he would take the subject into further thought, for which purpose a month’s consideration was proposed to him, he refused, choosing to "dispute presently." Accepting his proposal, Mr. Hooker was requested to argue the points in debate, in hope of securing acquiescence to avoid extremer measures. Most of the discussion has perished. One point of it, however, in which Mr. Hooker apparently attempted to apply to Mr. Williams’s doctrine of the sinfulness of tendering an oath to an unregenerate person the method known as the reductio ad absurdum, remains in Mr. Cotton’s account of it. (26) Mr. Williams had complained -

The "dispute" had the general issue of similar controversies. Mr. Hooker’s endeavours were well meant, and judging from this sample were logically ingenious in putting Mr. Williams into an uncomfortable dilemma, but he "could not reduce him from any of his errors." The inevitable consequence followed. Mr. Williams’s teachings and behaviour were playing directly into the hands of Laud and prerogative abroad, and schism and disorder at home; and the order of Court was that he leave the colony, whose lawful right to be or to legislate he denounced, within the six weeks next ensuing.

Reference has been made to the mutilation of the national ensign. Though encouraged by Williams, the act was that of Endicott. The matter made a great stir. The towns were called on to choose a commission of one from each town on the subject, to which commission the magistrates added four. The commission declared Mr. Endicott’s "offence to be great;" his action in denouncing the cross as "a sin" impeaching the magistrates as "if they would suffer idolatry," and "giving occasion to the state of England to think ill of us." Mr. Endicott was therefore admonished, and "disabled for one year from bearing any public office;" the magistrates declining "any heavier sentence, because they were persuaded he did it out of tenderness of conscience, and not of any evil intent." (27) A sensible, quiet-tempered paper on this controversy was written by Mr. Hooker, which is preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s archives. It has never been published in full, but its general bearing may be inferred from the single paragraph:

"Not that I am a friend to the crosse as an idoll, or to any idollatry in it; or that any carnall fear takes me asyde and makes me unwilling to give way to the evidence of the truth, because of the sad consequences that may be suspected to flowe from it. I blesse the Lord, my conscience accuseth me of no such thing; but that as yet I am not able to see the sinfulness of this banner in a civil use."

The ministers of the colony were not eligible to secular office, but their advice was sought on weighty occasions, and Mr. Hooker’s seems to have been prized as highly as that of anyone. His church prospered as well as any church in the colony; its leading lay member, Mr. John Haynes, was chosen governor in May, 1635, on which occasion he signalized his liberality and ability alike by declining the usual salary of the office. (28) The town was as flourishing as any in the Bay, its tax being as large as Boston’s. (29) But all along, from very near the arrival of the "Griffin’s" company, a certain uneasiness manifested itself in respect to the Newtown people’s situation, all the causes of which are difficult to trace, but which culminated at last in the removal of Mr. Hooker and nearly the entire population of the town to Hartford.

Only six months after the induction of Hooker and Stone into their offices the inhabitants of "Newtown complained [May, 1634] of straitness for want of land, especially meadow, and desired leave of the court to look out either for enlargement or removal, which was granted; whereupon they sent men to see Agawam and Merimack, and gave out that they would remove." (30) But apparently the Agawam and Merrimac reconnoissance was not satisfactory, for in July following they sent a pioneer party of six to Connecticut, "intending to remove their town thither." (31) In September the matter came up again in the General Court. Winthrop gives this account of it : (32)

"September 4, the general court began at Newtown, and continued a week, and then was adjourned fourteen days. Many things were there agitated and concluded. . . But the main business, which spent the most time, and caused the adjourning of the court, was about the removal of Newtown. They had leave, the last general court, to look out some place for enlargement or removal, with promise of having it confirmed to them, if it were not prejudicial to any other plantation; and now they moved that they might have leave to remove to Connecticut. The matter was debated divers days, and many reasons alleged pro and con. The principal reasons for their removal were, 1. Their want of accommodation for their cattle, so as they were not able to maintain their ministers, nor could receive any more of their friends to help them; and here it was alleged by Mr. Hooker, as a fundamental error, that towns were set so near to each other. 2. The fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the danger of having it possessed by others, Dutch or English. 3. The strong bent of their spirits to remove thither.

"Against these it was said, 1. That, in point of conscience, they ought not to depart from us, being knit to us in one body, and bound by oath to seek the welfare of this commonwealth. 2. That, in point of state and civil policy, we ought not to give them leave to depart. 1. Being we were now weak and in danger to be assailed. 2. The departure of Mr. Hooker would not only draw many from us, but also divert other friends that would come to us. 3. We should expose them to evident peril, both from the Dutch (who made claim to the same river, and had already built a fort there) and from the Indians, and also from our own state at home, who would not endure they should sit down without a patent in any place which our king lays claim unto. 3. They might be accomodated at home by some enlargement which other towns offered. 4. They might remove to Merrimack, or any other place within our patent. 5. The removing of a candlestick is a great judgement, which is to be avoided. Upon these and other arguments the court being divided, it was put to vote; and, of the deputies, fifteen were for their departure, and ten against it. The govemour [Dudley] and two assistants were for it, and the deputy and all the rest of the assistants were against it, (except the secretary, who gave no vote;) whereupon no record was entered, because there were not six assistants in the vote, as the patent requires. Upon this grew a great difference between the govemour and assistants, and the deputies. They would not yield the assistants a negative voice, and the others (considering how dangerous it might be to the commonwealth, if they should not keep that strength to balance the greater number of the deputies) thought it safe to stand upon it. So, when they could proceed no farther, the whole court agreed to keep a day of humiliation to seek the Lord, which accordingly was done, in all the congregations, the 18^th day of this month; and the 24^th the court met again. Before they began Mr. Cotton preached, (being desired by all the court, upon Mr. Hooker’s instant excuse of his unfitness for that occasion) (33*) He took his text out of Hag. II. 4, etc.,) out of which he laid down the nature or strength (as he termed it) of the magistracy, ministry, and people, viz., the strength of the magistracy to be their authority; of the people, their liberty; and of the ministry, their purity; and showed how all of these had a negative voice, etc., and that yet the ultimate resolution, etc., ought to be in the whole body of the people, etc., with answer to all objections, and a declaration of the people’s duty and right to maintain their true liberties against any unjust violence, etc., which gave great satisfaction to the company. And it pleased the Lord so to assist him, and to bless his own ordinance, that the affairs of the court went on cheerfully; and although all were not satisfied about the negative voice to be left to the magistrates, yet no man moved aught about it, and the congregation of Newtown came and accepted of such enlargement as had formerly been offered them by Boston and Watertown; and so the fear of their removal to Connecticut was removed."

It was on the occasion of this court - and it affords an indication of the excitement of the parties in interest - that the "very reverend and godly" Mr. William Goodwin, "elder of the congregation of Newtown," was reproved for his "unreverend speech to one of the assistants" in open court.

Things now seemed amicably adjusted. The enlargements granted to Newtown embraced the territory now known as the towns of Brookline, Brighton, Newton, and Arlington. Making every allowance for the necessities of a hundred families, even of an agricultural and cattle-raising class, this territory certainly seems sufficient. The population now dwelling on the same soil is upward of eighty thousand. But the settlers were not easy. "The strong bent of their spirits to remove" continued. Some cause deeper than any lack of land in five townships to pasture the cattle of a few settlers in the third year of their arrival must have impelled to this restlessness. What was it?

The historian Hubbard, writing within fifty years of these events, and while people still lived who were personally actors in them, says that other motives than deficiency of land did "more secretly and powerfully drive on the business." "Some men," he continues, "do not well like, at least, cannot well bear, to be opposed in their judgments and notions, and thence were they not unwilling to remove from under the power, as well as out of the bounds, of the Massachusetts." (34) "Two such eminent stars, such as were Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, both of the first magnitude, though of differing influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb." (35) Dr. Benjamin Trumbull, in speaking of the death of Mr. Haynes, intimates that considerations arising from the relative influence of Haynes and Winthrop were not without weight. Mr. Haynes, he says, "was not considered, in any respect, inferior to Governor Winthrop. His growing popularity, and the fame of Mr. Hooker, who, as to strength of genius, and his lively and powerful manner of preaching, rivalled Mr. Cotton, were supposed to have no small influence upon the general court, in their granting liberty to Mr. Hooker and his company to remove to Connecticut." (36) Some excellent writers have seemed quite unwilling to recognize in the actors in these events any such feelings, uttered or unexpressed, as are suggested in these statements of Hubbard and Trumbull. But nothing could be more natural, and few things are more probable.

Nevertheless the existence of such feelings, supposing them to exist, had doubtless their origin and occasion in matters lying deeper than merely personal ones. It seems clear that on certain important administrative questions the people who surrounded Mr. Hooker entertained different convictions from those prevalent in the Bay counsels generally. The Bay settlement was a distinctly theocratic society, in which civil franchise was contingent on church-membership. When Hooker arrived in Newtown, though the population of the colony was numbered by the thousands, the freemen of it were only about three hundred and fifty. (37) The principle of a state-church which Puritans had suffered from so much at home was, in fact, reestablished by them in the new land. (38) This contingency of civil privileges on church connection was never adopted in the Connecticut Colony; and whether openly objected to or not by the men who founded Connecticut while yet they remained in Massachusetts, there can be no doubt that it was inwardly disapproved. Strong evidence that this question had its influence, as well as of Mr. Hooker’s attitude upon it, remains in a letter written to Rev. John Wilson from England in the early spring after the removal to Connecticut had taken place, in which the writer speaks of having heard "That ther is great diuision of judgment in matters of religion amongst good ministers & people which moued Mr. Hoker to remoue;" and "That you are so strict in admission of members to your church, that more then halfe are out of your church in all your congregations, & that Mr. Hoker befor he went away preached against yt (as one reports who hard him)." (39)

With a difference of judgment in a matter so fundamental, other differences easily allied themselves. A distinct diversity of conception of the" authority of the magistrates" was clearly developed at the Court of September, 1634, between the Newtown party and the party opposed to removal. (40) Open and free disagreement between Mr. Haynes and Governor Winthrop as to administrative policy found expression in January, 1636, and had been taken cognizance of by all the ministers and magistrates, who had put themselves on one side or other of the point in debate. Add to this the danger impending that the charter of the colony might be withdrawn, and there seem to be ample grounds for believing that Mr. Haynes and Mr. Goodwin and the leading laymen of Newtown felt that they would be more comfortable under an administration of their own, in some other quarter of the boundless new land.

Nor is it improbable that Mr. Hooker shared the feeling on personal as well as political grounds. Before he left England overtures had been made by his friends, acting at Mr. Hooker’s motion, (41) to secure Mr. Cotton as colleague with him in the proposed enterprise to America. The overture was declined. But on the arrival together in the new country of the two old acquaintances - and doubtless always friends - the colony seems to have been thrown into a kind of ferment as to the proper disposal of Mr. Cotton. Thirteen days after he landed the Governor and Council and all the ministers were called together "to consider about Mr. Cotton his sitting down." (42) Boston was fixed on as the "fittest place;" and it was first agreed that the payment for his weekly lectures should be out of the public treasury. This resolve was presently revoked as being invidious in its discrimination, but it indicates the feeling of the hour.

Established thus with the acclaim of the magistracy and of the people in the central point of ecclesiastical influence in the colony, the great abilities and tireless industry of Mr. Cotton pervaded everything. "Whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." (43) And Mr. Cotton’s political deliverances were generally on the side of authority and permanency in the magistracy; a side to which the general tendencies of the Newtown pastor’s mind did not equally lead him. On the critical occasion of the hearing before the Court in September, 1634, of the great question of the removal - when Mr. Hooker somewhat unaccountably excused himself from preaching on the issues raised by the Newtown proposal - Mr. Cotton’s effort apparently settled the business on the side of the Assistants, and adversely to the Newtown party.

So that on the whole it is neither strange nor at all discreditable, that the Newtown company should have thought themselves likely to be happier and more useful in some other settlement than that to which the Court had ordered them in 1632. Conscious of the possession of laymen as able as any in the colony, and of a minister of as great qualities as any other, their "strong bent" to remove continued, and finally prevailed.

Some of them apparently went to Connecticut before September, 1635; for on the 3d of that month William Westwood was "sworn Constable of the plantations at Connecticut till some other be chosen," (44) a procedure hardly reconcilable with the theory maintained in the arguments before the Court in September previous that the settlers there would be without the Massachusetts patent. (45) Others soon followed. These settlers of 1635 suffered immense hardships along the banks of the great river, which froze over that season by the 15^th of November. Famine and cold seemed to conspire against the enterprise. Cattle died; the people had to resort to acorns for food. Except for the succour afforded by Indians, many must have perished. (46)

But these hardships were not to deter the main body of the Newtown pilgrims; when spring came again, the rest of the company were ready for flight.

Fortunately the arrival, the autumn previous, of a large number of immigrants into the Bay, and the gathering of a considerable part of them into church-relationship under the pastoral care of Rev. Thomas Shepard on the 1^st of February, 1636, enabled the Newtown people to sell their houses to the newcomers. On the 3d of March, 1636, John Steele and William Westwood were appointed among the eight commissioners empowered by Massachusetts to "govern the people at Connecticutt." These commissioners were either then in Connecticut or speedily after, as five of them, including Steele and Westwood, held a "Corte. . . att Newton [Hartford] 26 Apr. 1636." (47)

The 31^St of May saw the emigrants upon their journey. It is the season of the year in our New England climate when the billowy expanses of our forests are bursting into leaf, and each day marks a visible deepening of colour and density in the landscape verdure. The streams run full with the newly melted snows of winter. The ground is spotted with the anemone and wild violet. In the marshy places glow the adder-tongue and the cowslip. The season is alive with promise; but the nights, though short, are damp and chill.

The Newtown pilgrims struck out into the almost pathless woods. Only a few miles from their place of brief habitation, and they were in a wilderness marked only by signs of Indian trails. Evening by evening they made camp and slept, guarded and sentinelled, by forest fires. One of their number, Mrs. Hooker, the pastor’s wife, was carried on a litter because of her infirmity. It was a picturesque but an arduous Pilgrimage. Men and women of refinement and delicate breeding turned explorers of primeval forests in search of a wilderness home. The lowing of a hundred and sixty cattle sounding through the forest aisles, not to mention the bleating of goats and the squealing of swine, summoned them to each morning’s advance. The day began and ended with the voice of prayer and perhaps of song. At some point on their fortnight’s journey a Sabbath must have intervened, when of course the camp remained still for worship in the wilderness. Their toilsome and devious way led them probably by the route which came to be known as the "old Connecticut path," through what were afterward the towns of Framingham and Dudley and Woodstock; the same route by which the roving Oldham went in 1633, when he lodged in "Indian towns all the way." Reaching at some uncertain point the wide, full Connecticut, flowing then with larger tide than now, and swollen with its northern snows, the travellers crossed on rafts and rudely constructed boats; and on the spot where Hartford now lifts its stately edifices of worship and of trade, and cheered by the sight of some pioneer attempts at habitation and settlement made the season previous, "Mr. Hooker’s company" rested, and the ark of the church stood still.

1 "New England’s Prospect," in Young’s Massachusetts, p, 402.

2 Paige’s Cambridge, pp. 18, 19.

3 Winthrop. i. 139.

4 Winthrop, 1. 172.

5 Ibid. 180.

6 Ibid. 149.

7 Winthrop, i. 378-382.

8 Ibid. ii. 67.

9 Cotton’s Narrative, 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., iv. 284.

10 Winthrop, i. 139, 140.

11 Ibid. 212.

12 Winthrop, i. 179.

13 Hubbard, p. 204.

14 Bradford, p. 310.

15 Winthrop, i. 352, 353, 369.

16 Ibid. 145; 180.

17 Hubbard p. 205

18 Winthrop, i. 188.

19 Ibid 63, 180

20 Ibid. 195.

21 Ibid. 198-204.

22 Hubbard, p. 207.

23 Ibid.

24 Winthrop, i. 145.

25 Palfrey, i. 414; Ellis’s Puritan Age, pp. 267-291; Dexter’s As to Roger Williams, p. 79.

26 Cotton’s Reply to Mr. Williams his Examination, p. 30.

27 Winthrop, I. 188, 189.

28 Ibid.l90.

29 Colonial Records, I. 149.

30 Winthrop, 1.157-159.

31 Ibid. 162.

32 Ibid. 166-169.

33 As being, perhaps, a too nearly interested party in the issue. One is reminded, however, of a certain nervousness which seems at times to have overborne Mr. Hooker, of which an instance is recorded later, May, 1639.

34 General History, pp. 305, 306.

35 Ibid. 173.

36 Trumbull, i. 216.

37 Palfrey, i. 383.

38 Palfrey, i. 447. See also Doyle’s English in America, i. 146, 147, 191.

39 Rev. R. Stansby to John Wilson, April 17. 1637: 4 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii. 10, 11.

40 Winthrop, i. 169; Hubbard, pp. 165, 166.

41 Magnalia, i. 393.

42 Winthrop, i. 133.

43 Hubbard, p. 182.

44 Mass. Col. Rec., i. 159.

45 Winthrop, i. 167.

46 Trumbull’s Connecticut, i. 62,63.

47 Conn. Col. Rec., i., preface iii, and note, text.p. 1.