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vehement sermon from Ezekiel Rogers in favor of rota- CHAPTER tion in office, Winthrop was re-elected governor. A late order of the House of Commons, that all exports and im- 1643. ports to and from New England should be free of all May. customs, was gratefully received, and entered on the records. The oath of allegiance to the king was dropped. As the "godly Parliament," in its struggle with the king, made no scruple to fight under the red cross, the doubts on that subject presently died away, and the English flag was resumed.

Massachusetts was now divided into four counties, Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, and Norfolk, the latter including the New Hampshire towns.

Some progress in exploring the interior had already been made. Darby Field, an Irishman, with two Indian guides, had penetrated to and ascended the White Hills, 1642. whose glistening tops, the first land seen on approaching the coast, had long been a noted landmark. The report he brought back of shining stones caused divers others to travel thither, "but they found nothing worthy of their pains." Thomas Gorges, governor of Maine, paddled up the Saco, in birch-bark canoes, as far as Pigwagget, an Indian town, whence he too climbed the mountains, and saw, from their tops, the sources of the Connecticut, the Androscoggin, the Merrimac, and the Saco.

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The jurisdiction of Massachusetts thus extended over New Hampshire, a confederacy, to be known as the UNITED COLONIES OF NEW ENGLAND, was entered into at 1643. Boston, between delegates from Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven on the one hand, and the General Court of Massachusetts on the other. Supposed dangers from the Indians, and their quarrels with the Dutch of Manhattan, had induced the people of Connecticut to withdraw their former objections to this measure. Two com

CHAPTER missioners from each colony were to meet annually, or

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1643. at Boston, Hartford, New Haven, and Plymouth; but Bos

ton was to have two sessions for one at each of the other places. The commissioners, all of whom must be church members, were to choose a president from among themselves, and every thing was to be decided by six voices out of the eight. No war was to be declared by either colony without the consent of the commissioners, to whose province Indian affairs and foreign relations were especially assigned. The sustentation of the "truth and liberties of the Gospel" was declared to be one great object of this alliance. All war expenses were to be a common charge, to be apportioned according to the number of male inhabitants in each colony. Runaway servants and fugitive criminals were to be delivered up, a provision afterward introduced into the Constitution of the United States; and the commissioners soon recommended, what remained ever after the practice of New England, and ultimately became, also, a provision of the United States Constitution, that judgments of courts of law and probates of wills in each colony should have full faith and credit in all the others. The commissioners from Massachusetts, as representing by far the most pow. erful colony of the alliance, claimed an honorary precedence, which the others readily conceded.

Plymouth, though far outgrown by Massachusetts, and even by Connecticut, had made, however, some progress. 1639. It now contained seven towns, and had lately adopted a representative system. But the old town of Plymouth was in decay, the people being drawn off to the new settlements. Bradford had remained governor, except for four years, during two of which he had been relieved by Edward Winslow, and the other two by Thomas Prince.

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New Haven was, perhaps, the weakest member of the CHAPTER alliance. Besides that town, the inhabitants of which were principally given to commerce, there were two 1643. others, Milford and Guilford, agricultural settlements; Southold, at the eastern extremity of Long Island, also acknowledged the jurisdiction of New Haven, and a new settlement had recently been established at Stamford, whither Underhill had removed, unable to find the means of support in Massachusetts. Patrick, Underhill's companion in arms, not able to accommodate himself to the strict manners of the Puritan school, had settled at Greenwich, still west of Stamford; but the settlers there had been persuaded to submit to the jurisdiction of the Dutch, who had also recently broken up a New Haven trading post, and attempted settlement on the Delaware.

The colony of Connecticut, not limited to the towns on the river, to which several new ones had already been added, included also Stratford and Fairfield, on the coast of the Sound, west of New Haven. Ludlow, the founder first of Dorchester and afterward of Windsor, had been the leader in the settlement of Fairfield, having become acquainted with that country while in pursuit of the flying Pequods. The town of Southampton, on Long Island, acknowledged also the jurisdiction of Connecticut. Fort Saybrook, at the mouth of the river, was still an independent settlement, and Fenwick, as the head of it, became a party to the articles of confederation. But the next year he sold out his interest to Connecticut, and into that colony Saybrook was absorbed. Returning to England, Fenwick became a colonel in the Parliamentary army.

The south line of Massachusetts, as far as Connecticut River, had been lately run, under authority of that 1642. colony, by two "mathematicians." It started from a

CHAPTER point, selected in the terms of the charter, three miles X. south of the southernmost part of Charles River; but, 1643. instead of running due west, as it should have done, it deviated so far to the south as to include the present towns of Enfield and Suffield, reckoned at that time a part of Springfield, and for a century afterward attached to Massachusetts.

Gorges's province of Maine was not received into the New England alliance, "because the people there ran a different course both in their ministry and civil administration." The same objection applied with still greater force to Aquiday and Providence. By omitting to excommunicate its exiled members, except in the case of Mrs. Hutchinson, the Boston Church still claimed a sort of spiritual authority over them, and had been not a little piqued at their repeated refusals to submit to it. A son and son-in-law of Mrs. Hutchinson, the latter a young minister from the West Indies, whom she was suspected of having fascinated by witchcraft, were ar1641. rested at Boston while on a visit there, and heavily fined and imprisoned on account of a letter which one of them had written, in which the Massachusetts churches were spoken of as "anti-Christian." Communications were on foot between Coddington and the Massachusetts magistrates, and, hardly thinking herself safe at Aquiday, Mrs. Hutchinson and her family, her husband being dead, presently removed to Greenwich, beyond New Haven, and under the jurisdiction of the Dutch. A war soon

after broke out between the Dutch and the Indians, during which these unfortunate exiles, to the number of eighteen, were massacred, except one young daughter, 1643. who was carried off a prisoner. "God's hand is apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman, to make her, and those belonging to her, an unheard-of heavy ex

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ample!" Such was the exultation of the pious Welde CHAPTER over Mrs. Hutchinson's tragical end. She left a son at Boston who did not share her exile, and whose posterity 1643. became distinguished in the history of the colony.

Roger Williams and the settlers at Providence were even more obnoxious than those of Rhode Island. Indeed, it was some movement at Aquiday toward a reconciliation with Massachusetts that had precipitated the flight of Mrs. Hutchinson. Williams, on the other hand, had embraced the doctrines of the Anabaptists, and being 1639. first dipped by one of the brethren, and then himself dipping the others, had become the founder and teacher of the first Baptist Church in America. But he soon left it, became a "seeker," and, after many doubts as to authority for any ecclesiastical organization, finally concluded that none was lawful, or, at least, necessary. Though he continued to employ the phraseology of the Puritans, he seems ultimately to have renounced all formalities of worship, having adopted the opinion that Christianity was but another name for humanity. "To be content with food and raiment; to mind, not our own, but every man the things of another; yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and the Son of God's sake-this is humanity, yea, this is Christianity; the rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and popish blasphemy against the Christian religion." So Williams expressed himself many years afterward, toward the end of his life, in a letter to Mason, hero of the Pequod war, and chief military officer of Connecticut.

But, though Williams abandoned his Baptist opinions, others took them up. The Lady Moody, "a wise and

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