Back Aa

Chronicles of America Volume 06 - The Fathers of New England

<h2>CHAPTER V</h2> <h2>AN ATTEMPT AT COLONIAL UNION</h2> The men who controlled the destinies of New England were deeply concerned not only with preserving its faith but also with guarding its rights and liberties as they defined them, and reverentially preserving the letter of its charters. For men who wished to sever their connection with England and to disregard English law and precedent as much as possible, they displayed a remarkable amount of respect for the documents that emanated from the British Chancery. In fact, however, they valued these grants and charters, not as expressions of royal favor, but as bulwarks against royal encroachment and outside interference, and in accepting such privileges as were conferred by their charters, they recognized no duty to be performed for the common mother, no obligations resting upon themselves to consider the welfare of England or to coöperate in her behalf. [Pg 89]The thoughts of these men were of themselves, their faith, and their problems of existence. The strongest ties were those that held together the people of a town, closely knit in the bond of a civil and religious covenant. Next above these were the ties of the colony, with its general court or assembly composed of representatives of the towns, its governor and other officials elected by the freemen, and its laws passed by the assembly for the benefit and well-being of all. Higher still was the loose bond of confederation that was fashioned in 1643 for the maintenance of order, peace, and security, in the form of a league of colonies. Highest, but weakest of all, was the bond that united them to England, recognized in sentiment but carrying with it no reciprocal obligations, either legal or otherwise. To the average inhabitant of New England, the mother country was merely the land from which he had come, the home to which he might or might not return. He had practically no knowledge of England's plans or policy, no comprehension of her purpose toward her colonies or the place of the colonies in her own scheme of expansion. He was absorbed in his own affairs, not in those of England; in the commands of God, not in those of [Pg 90]the King; and in the dangers which surrounded him from the foes of the frontier, not in those which confronted England in her relations with her continental rivals. He was dominated by his instinct for self-government and by his compelling fear of the Stuarts and all that they represented. Even during the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, England was three thousand miles away, appeal to her was difficult and costly, and the English brethren were not always as sympathetic as they might have been with the aims and methods of their co-religionists. This very isolation from the mother country, at a time when the New Englanders were pushing their fur-trading activities into the regions claimed by the Dutch and the French, rendered some sort of united action necessary and desirable. The settlers were of one stock and one purpose. Despite bickerings and disputes, they shared a common desire to enjoy the liberties of the Christian religion and to obtain from the new country into which they had come both subsistence and profit. The determination to open up trading posts on the Penobscot, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and to utilize all waters for their fisheries brought them into conflict with their rivals, at New [Pg 91]Amsterdam and in Nova Scotia, and made it imperative, should any one colony—Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Haven—attempt to pursue its plans alone, for all to band together in its support. The troubles already encountered with the Dutch on the Delaware and the Connecticut and with the French in Maine, in the competition for the fur trade of the interior, had rendered the situation acute and led, very early, to the proposal that a combination be effected. But it was not until 1643 that anything was accomplished. In May of that year, at the suggestion of Connecticut and New Haven, commissioners from these colonies, and from Massachusetts and Plymouth also, met at Boston and drafted a body of articles for a consociation or confederation to be known as the United Colonies of New England, a form of union which found a precedent in the federation of the Netherlands and corresponded in the political field to the consociation of churches in the ecclesiastical. Maine was not asked because, as a province belonging to Gorges, the people there (to quote from Winthrop's Journal) "ran a different course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil administration, ... had lately made [Pg 92]Acomenticus (a poor village) a corporation, and had made a taylor their mayor, and had entertained one Hull, an excommunicated person and very contentious, for their minister." Rhode Island, as a seat of separatism and heresy, was not invited and perhaps not even considered. For managing the affairs of the confederation, the main objects of which were friendship and amity, protection and defense, advice and succor, and the preservation of the truth and purity of the Gospel, eight commissioners were provided, to be chosen by the assemblies of the colonies and to represent the colonies as independent political units. Meetings were to be held once a year in one or other of the leading towns and a full record was to be kept of the business done. The board thus established never did more than make recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to be particularly significant. The commissioners dealt with a number of local disputes of no great moment and considered certain internal difficulties that threatened to [Pg 93]disturb the friendly intercourse among the colonies. For instance, Connecticut had levied tolls at Saybrook on vessels going up the Connecticut River to Springfield, and Massachusetts had retaliated by laying duties on goods from other colonies entering her ports. Under pressure from the commissioners both the colonies receded from their positions. Again, the commissioners recommended the granting of aid to Harvard College, and that institution consequently received from Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance, in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly sixty graduates in the ensuing half-century well equipped to combat latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their obligation as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition of church membership—efforts which eventually resulted in that "illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature," and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They [Pg 94]upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their language. The most important business of the confederation concerned the defense of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay, and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right of the English, particularly those of Plymouth, to establish trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot. Though the French, in their effort to drive out all the English settlers east of Pemaquid in Maine, had destroyed two Plymouth posts in that region, the commissioners were called upon to decide not so much what should be done about this act [Pg 95]of aggression, as which of the claimants among the French themselves it was wiser for the colonies to support. A certain Charles de la Tour had been commissioned by the Governor-General of Acadia or Nova Scotia as lieutenant of the region east of the St. Croix, and another, Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay-Charnisé, as lieutenant of the region between the St. Croix and the Penobscot. When the Governor-General died in 1635, a contest for the governorship took place between these two men, and not unnaturally volunteers from Massachusetts aided La Tour, whose original jurisdiction was farthest removed from their colony. Trade on these northeastern coasts was deemed essential to the prosperity of the New Englanders, and it was considered of great importance to make no mistake in backing the wrong claimant. D'Aulnay, or more correctly Aulnay, had been partly responsible for the attack on the Plymouth trading-posts, but, on the other hand, he had the stronger title; and Massachusetts was a good deal perplexed as to what course to pursue. In 1644, Aulnay sent a commissioner to Boston, who conversed with Governor Endecott in French and with the rest of the magistrates in Latin and endeavored to arrange terms of peace. [Pg 96]Two years later the same commissioner came again, with two others, and was cordially entertained with "wine and sweetmeats." The matter was referred to the commissioners of the United Colonies, who decided, with considerable shrewdness, that the volunteers in aiding La Tour had acted efficiently but not wisely; and consequently a compromise was reached. Aulnay's commissioners abated their claims for damages, and Governor Winthrop consented to send "a small present" to Aulnay in lieu of compensation. The present was "a fair new sedan (worth," says Winthrop, "forty or fifty pounds, where it was made, but of no use to us)," having been part of some Spanish booty taken in the West Indies and presented to the Governor. So final peace was made at no expense to the colony; and later, after Aulnay's death in 1650, La Tour married the widow and came to his own in Nova Scotia. The troubles with the Dutch were not so easily settled. England had never acknowledged the Dutch claim to New Amsterdam, and the New England Council in making its grants had paid no attention to the Dutch occupation. Though trade had been carried on and early relations had [Pg 97]been on the whole amicable, yet, after Connecticut's overthrow of the Pequots in 1637 and the opening of the territory to settlement, the founding of towns as far west as Stamford and Greenwich had rendered acute the conflict of titles. There was no western limit to the English claims, and, as the colonists were perfectly willing to accept Sir William Boswell's advice to "crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of those places which they have occupied, without hostility or any act of violence," a collision was bound to come. The Dutch, who in their turn were not abating a jot of their claims, had already destroyed a New Haven settlement on the Delaware, and had asserted rights of jurisdiction even in New Haven harbor, by seizing there one of their own ships charged with evading the laws of New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, famous for his short temper and mythical silver leg, visited Hartford in 1650, and negotiated with the commissioners of the United Colonies a treaty drawing the boundary line from the west side of Greenwich Bay northward twenty miles. But this treaty, though ratified by the States General of Holland, was never ratified by England, and, when two years later war between the two [Pg 98]countries broke out overseas, the question of an attack on New Amsterdam was taken up and debated with such heat as nearly to disrupt the Confederation. The absolute refusal of Massachusetts to enter on such an undertaking so prolonged the discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, who had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of settlement, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few straggling emigrants. There the unfortunate Anne Hutchinson with her family was massacred by the Indians in 1643. The New England Confederation performed the most important part of its work during the first twenty years of its existence, for although it lasted nominally till 1684, it ceased to be effective after 1664, and was of little weight in New England history after the restoration of the Stuarts. Owing to the fact that it had been formed without any authority from England, the Confederation [Pg 99]was never recognized by the Government there, and with the return of the monarchy it survived chiefly as an occasional committee meeting for debate and advice. [Pg 100] <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.