volume 1, chapter 6.

{500}

"Of all the New England colonies, New Haven was most purely a government by compact, by social contract. ... The free planters ... signed each their names to their voluntary compact, and ordered that 'all planters hereafter received in this plantation should submit to the said foundamentall agreement, and testifie the same by subscribing their names.' It is believed that this is the sole instance of the formation of an independent civil government by a general compact wherein all the parties to the agreement were legally required to be actual signers thereof. When this event occurred, John Locke was in his seventh year, and Rousseau was a century away."

_C. H. Levermore, The Republic of New Haven, page 23._

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1640-1655. The attempted New Haven colonization on the Delaware. Fresh quarrels with the Dutch.

See NEW JERSEY: A. D. 1640-1655.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1643. The confederation of the colonies. The progress and state of New Haven and the River Colony.

See NEW ENGLAND: A. D. 1643.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1650. Settlement of boundaries with the Dutch of New Netherland.

See NEW YORK: A. D. 1650.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1656-1661. The persecution of Quakers.

See MASSACHUSETTS: A. D. 1656-1661.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1660-1663. The beginning of boundary conflicts with Rhode Island.

See RHODE ISLAND: A. D. 1660-1663.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1660-1664. The protection of the regicides at New Haven.

"Against the colony of New Haven the king had a special grudge. Two of the regicide judges, who had sat in the tribunal which condemned his father, escaped to New England in 1660 and were well received there. They were gentlemen of high position. Edward Whalley was a cousin of Cromwell and Hampden. ... The other regicide, William Goffe, as a major-general in Cromwell's army, had won such distinction that there were some who pointed to him as the proper person to succeed the Lord Protector on the death of the latter. He had married Whalley's daughter. Soon after the arrival of these gentlemen, a royal order for their arrest was sent to Boston. ... The king's detectives hotly pursued them through the woodland paths of New England, and they would soon have been taken but for the aid they got from the people. Many are the stories of their hairbreadth escapes. Sometimes they took refuge in a cave on a mountain near New Haven, sometimes they hid in friendly cellars; and once, being hard put to it, they skulked under a wooden bridge, while their pursuers on horseback galloped by overhead. After lurking about New Haven and Milford for two or three years, on hearing of the expected arrival of Colonel Nichols and his commission [the royal commission appointed to take possession of the American grant lately made by the king to his brother, the Duke of York], they sought a more secluded hiding place near Hadley, a village lately settled far up the Connecticut river, within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Here the avengers lost the trail, the pursuit was abandoned, and the weary regicides were presently forgotten. The people of New Haven had been especially zealous in shielding the fugitives. ... The colony, moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II. to the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for more than a year. For these reasons, the wrath of the king was specially roused against New Haven."

_J. Fiske, The Beginnings of New England, pages 192-194._

ALSO IN: _G. H. Hollister, History of Connecticut, volume 1, chapter 11._

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1662-1664. The Royal Charter and annexation of New Haven to the River Colony.

"The Restoration in England left the New Haven colony under a cloud in the favor of the new government: it had been tardy and ungracious in its proclamation of Charles II.; it had been especially remiss in searching for the regicide colonels, Goffe and Whalley; and any application for a charter would have come from New Haven with a very ill grace. Connecticut was under no such disabilities; and it had in its Governor, John Winthrop [the younger, son of the first governor of Massachusetts], a man well calculated to win favor with the new King. ... In March, 1660, the General Court solemnly declared its loyalty to Charles II., sent the Governor to England to offer a loyal address to the King and ask him for a charter, and laid aside £500 for his expenses. Winthrop was successful, and the charter was granted April 20, 1662. The acquisition of the charter raised the Connecticut leaders to the seventh heaven of satisfaction. And well it might, for it was a grant of privileges with hardly a limitation. Practically the King had given Winthrop 'carte blanche,' and allowed him to frame the charter to suit himself. It incorporated the freemen of Connecticut as a 'body corporate and pollitique,' by the name of 'The Governor and Company of the English Collony of Conecticut in New England in America.' ... The people were to have all the liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects of the King, as if born within the realm. It granted to the Governor and Company all that part of New England south of the Massachusetts line and west of the 'Norroganatt River commonly called Norroganatt Bay' to the South Sea, with the 'Islands thereunto adioyneinge.' ... It is difficult to see more than two points in which it [the charter] altered the constitution adopted by the towns in 1639. There were now to be two deputies from each town; and the boundaries of the Commonwealth now embraced the rival colony of New Haven. ... New Haven did not submit without a struggle, for not only her pride of separate existence but the supremacy of her ecclesiastical system was at stake. For three years a succession of diplomatic notes passed between the General Court of Connecticut and 'our honored friends of New Haven, Milford, Branford, and Guilford.' ... {501} In October, 1664, the Connecticut General Court appointed the New Haven magistrates commissioners for their towns, 'with magistraticall powers,' established the New Haven local officers in their places for the time, and declared oblivion for any past resistance to the laws. In December, Milford having already submitted, the remnant of the New Haven General Court, representing New Haven, Guilford, and Branford, held its last meeting and voted to submit, 'with a salvo jure of our former rights and claims, as a people who have not yet been heard in point of plea.' The next year the laws of New Haven were laid aside forever, and her towns sent deputies to the General Court at Hartford. ... In 1701 the General Court ... voted that its annual October session should thereafter be held at New Haven. This provision of a double capital was incorporated into the constitution of 1818, and continued until in 1873 Hartford was made sole capital."

_A. Johnston, The Genesis of a New England State, pages 25-28._

ALSO IN: _B. Trumbull, History of Connecticut, volume 1, chapter 12._

_Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 1665-78._

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1664. Royal grant to the Duke of York, in conflict with the charter.

See NEW YORK: A. D. 1664.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1666. The New Haven migration to Newark, N. J.

See NEW JERSEY: A. D. 1664-1667.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1674-1675. Long Island and the western half of the colony granted to the Duke of York.

In 1674, after the momentary recovery of New York by the Dutch, and its re-surrender to the English, "the king issued a new patent for the province, in which he not only included Long Island, but the territory up to the Connecticut River, which had been assigned to Connecticut by the royal commissioners. The assignment of Long Island was regretted, but not resisted; and the island which is the natural sea-wall of Connecticut passed, by royal decree, to a province whose only natural claim to it was that it barely touched it at one corner. The revival of the duke's claim to a part of the mainland was a different matter, and every preparation was made for resistance. In July, 1675, just as King Philip's war had broken out in Plymouth, hasty word was sent from the authorities at Hartford to Captain Thomas Bull at Saybrook that Governor Andros of New York was on his way through the Sound for the purpose, as he avowed, of aiding the people against the Indians. Of the two evils, Connecticut rather preferred the Indians. Bull was instructed to inform Andros, if he should call at Saybrook, that the colony had taken all precautions against the Indians, and to direct him to the actual scene of conflict, but not to permit the landing of any armed soldiers. 'And you are to keep the king's colors standing there, under his majesty's lieutenant, the governor of Connecticut; and if any other colors be set up there, you are not to suffer them to stand. ... But you are in his majesty's name required to avoid striking the first blow; but if they begin, then you are to defend yourselves, and do your best to secure his majesty's interest and the peace of the whole colony of Connecticut in our possession.' Andros came and landed at Saybrook, but confined his proceedings to reading the duke's patent against the protest of Bull and the Connecticut representatives."

_A. Johnston, Connecticut, chapter 12._

_Report of Regents of the University on the Boundaries of the State of New York, page 21._

ALSO IN: _C. W. Bowen, The Boundary Disputes of Connecticut, pages 70-72._

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1674-1678. King Philip's War.

See NEW ENGLAND: A. D. 1674-1675; 1675; 1676-1678.

CONNECTICUT: A. D. 1685-1687. The hostile king and the hidden charter. Sir Edmund Andros in possession of the government.

"During the latter years of the reign of Charles II. the king had become so reckless of his pledges and his faith that he did not scruple to set the dangerous example of violating the charters that had been granted by the crown. Owing to the friendship that the king entertained for Winthrop, we have seen that Connecticut was favored by him to a degree even after the death of that great man. But no sooner had Charles demised and the sceptre passed into the hands of his bigoted brother, King James II., than Connecticut was called upon to contend against her sovereign for liberties that had been affirmed to her by the most solemn muniments known to the law of England. The accession of James II. took place on the 6th day of February 1685, and such was his haste to violate the honor of the crown that, early in the summer of 1685, a quo warranto was issued against the governor and company of Connecticut, citing them to appear before the king, within eight days of St. Martin's, to show by what right and tenor they exercised certain powers and privileges." This was quickly followed by two other writs, conveyed to Hartford by Edward Randolph, the implacable enemy of the colonies. "The day of appearance named in them was passed long before the writs were served." Mr. Whiting was sent to England as the agent of the colony, to exert such influences as might be brought to bear against the plainly hostile and unscrupulous intentions of the king; but his errand was fruitless. "On the 28th of December another writ of quo warranto was served upon the governor and company of the colony. This writ bore date the 23d of October, and required the defendants to appear before the king' within eight days of the purification of the Blessed Virgin.' ... Of course, the day named was not known to the English law, and was therefore no day at all in legal contemplation." Already, the other New England colonies had been brought under a provisional general government, by commissioners, of whom Joseph Dudley was named president. President Dudley "addressed a letter to the governor and council, advising them to resign the charter into the king's hands. Should they do so, he undertook to use his influence in behalf of the colony. They did not deem it advisable to comply with the request. Indeed they had hardly time to do so before the old commission was broken up, and a new one granted, superseding Dudley and naming Sir Edmund Andros governor of New England. Sir Edmund arrived in Boston on the 19th of December, 1686, and the next day he published his commission and took the government into his hands. Scarcely had he established himself, when he sent a letter to the governor and company of Connecticut, acquainting them with his appointment, and informing them that he was commissioned by the king to receive their charter if they would give it up to him."

_G. H. Hollister, History of Connecticut,