Once Upon A Time In Connecticut | Page 3

Caroline Clifford Newton
it the Dutch said the place should be a peaceful trading-post only and free to all Indians who came in peace.
Very soon after this little Dutch fort of the House of Hope was finished, Lieutenant William Holmes, from the Plymouth Colony, sailed up the river, and he and his men carried with them on their boat a frame house all ready to put together. The Dutch challenged the Plymouth boat as it passed their fort, but Holmes paid no attention. He had been told by the Governor of Plymouth to go up the river and he went, and at the mouth of the Farmington, where Windsor is to-day, he set up the first frame house in Connecticut and surrounded it with a palisade for protection.
Other Englishmen from Massachusetts Bay, hearing of these new fertile lands and of friendly Indians and a profitable fur trade, came overland, making their way through the wilderness. By and by their numbers were so great that the Dutch were crowded out and driven away and Connecticut was settled by the English.
One of the most interesting parties of settlers who came from Massachusetts to Hartford was "Mr. Hooker's company." Thomas Hooker, the minister in Cambridge, led one hundred members of his church overland to new homes in Connecticut in June, 1636. These people had come from England a few years before, hoping to find religious and political freedom in America, and, after a short stay in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they decided to remove to Connecticut. Their journey was made in warm weather, under sunny skies, with birds singing in the green woods. They traveled slowly, for there were women and little children with them, old people too, and some who were sick. Mrs. Hooker was carried all the way in a litter. They followed a path toward the west which by that time had probably become a well-marked trail. Part of it, no doubt, led through deep forests. Sometimes they passed Indian villages. Sometimes they forded streams. They drove with them a herd of one hundred and sixty cattle, letting them graze by the way. They had wagons and tents, and at night they camped, made fires, and milked the cows. There were berries to be picked along the edges of the meadows and clear springs to drink from, and the two weeks' journey must have been one long picnic to the children.
When "Hooker's company" arrived on the banks of the Connecticut River, three little English settlements had already been made there. They were soon named Hartford, Windsor, and We(a)thersfield. These three settlements were the beginning of the Connecticut Colony.
At first the people were under the government of Massachusetts because Massachusetts thought they were still within her borders. But before long it became necessary for them to organize a government of their own. They had brought no patent, or charter, with them from England, and so, finding themselves alone in the wilderness, separated by many long miles of forests from Massachusetts Bay, they determined to arrange their own affairs without reference to any outside authority. They set up a government on May 1, 1637, and the next year, under the leadership of such men as Thomas Hooker, John Haynes, who had once been Governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Roger Ludlow, who had had some legal training, this government, made up of deputies from each of the three little settlements, drafted eleven "Fundamental Orders." These "Fundamental Orders" were not a written constitution, but a series of laws very much like those of the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. There is a tradition that they were read to the people and adopted by them in the Hartford Meetihg-House on January 14, 1639.
Connecticut continued under this form of government, which she had decided upon for herself, for more than twenty years--until after the civil war in England was over. Then, when royalty was restored and Charles the Second became king, in 1660, the people feared that they might lose something of the independence they had learned to love and value, and they sent their governor, John Winthrop, to England to get from the king a charter to confirm their "privileges and liberties."
Winthrop was a man who had had a university education in England and the advantages of travel on the continent of Europe. He had a good presence and courteous manners. Best of all, he had powerful friends at court. There is a story that in an audience with the king he returned to him a ring which the king's father, Charles the First, had given to Winthrop's grandfather, and that the king was so pleased with this that he was willing to sign the charter Winthrop asked for. Whether this is true or not, the king did sign one of the most liberal charters granted to
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