Connecticut Colony Quotes

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn’t even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

The distinction between the Pilgrims, those who came to Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and the Puritans, who came after 1629, initially settling Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, eventually disappeared as the great wave of Puritan settlers transformed the colony.16

The chief care of the legislators [in the colonies of New England] was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: thus they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was no subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict either a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage, on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. We find a sentence, bearing date the 1st of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed. The Code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures. It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity. Innkeepers were forbidden to furnish more than certain quantities of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself demanded in Europe, makes attendance on divine service compulsory, and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, and even with death, Christians who choose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own. Sometimes, indeed, the zeal for regulation induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco. It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested in them, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and puritanical than the laws.... These errors are no doubt discreditable to human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. In strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow, sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still in advance of the liberties of our own age.

During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.24 Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”25 Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This was the Connecticut Alex had dreamed of—farmhouses without farms, sturdy red-brick colonials with black doors and tidy white trim, a neighborhood full of wood-burning fireplaces, gently tended lawns, windows glowing golden in the night like passageways to a better life, kitchens where something good bubbled on the stove, breakfast tables scattered with crayons. No one drew their curtains; light and heat and good fortune spilled out into the dark as if these foolish people didn’t know what such bounty might attract, as if they’d left these shining doorways open for any hungry girl to walk through.

British and perniciously bred into their economic life. The First Continental Congress, however, pledged itself to oppose the slave trade generally; Rhode Island, noting that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others,” ruled that slaves imported into the colony would thereafter be freed. Connecticut followed suit; Delaware prohibited the importation of slaves; and Pennsylvania taxed the trade so heavily as almost to extinguish it there. Abigail Adams spoke for many when she wrote on September 24, 1774, “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.

In the northern colonies, European Americans tended to own one or two slaves who worked on the family farm or were hired out. Rhode Island and Connecticut had a few large farms, where twenty or thirty slaves would live and work. Plantation-based slavery was more common in the South, where hundreds of slaves could be owned by the same person and forced to work in tobacco, indigo, or rice fields. In most cities, slaveholdings were small, usually one or two slaves who slept in the attic or cellar of the slave owner’s home. Abigail Smith Adams, a Congregational minister’s daughter, grew up outside Boston in a household that owned two slaves, Tom and Pheby. As an adult, she denounced slavery, as did her husband, John Adams, the second President of the United States. Historians recently discovered the remains of slaves found in the African Burial Ground near today’s City Hall in New York City. By studying the skeletons, scientists discovered that the slaves of New York suffered from poor nutrition, disease, and years of backbreaking labor. Most of them died young.

a closer walk with God than any man he had known. Davenport went from place to place without invitation, and depending upon impulses and impressions, denounced as unconverted such ministers as disagreed with him and exhorted their flocks to desert them and follow him. Confusion and bitterness resulted in almost every parish which he visited. Congregations were divided, alienation and strife were created, the evil effects of which continued for many years.  In order to suppress these evils the Connecticut legislature in 1742 passed an act forbidding any minister or licentiate to preach in any church not his own, without the consent of its pastor and the major portion of its membership, under penalty of forfeiting the right to collect his legal salary, if a resident of the colony, and liability to expulsion from the colony if not. Davenport was accordingly arrested and brought before the assembly, by whom he was adjudged insane and sent to his parish on Long Island. Not long afterwards he appeared in Boston, where in accordance with his custom he denounced the ministers as "unconverted" and "leading their people blindfold to hell." He was arrested for uttering slanderous statements

Robert Clive, one of the architects of British India, got married in St Mary’s Church. But that was much later. The very first marriage recorded in the register, on 4 November 1680, is that of Elihu Yale with Catherine Hynmer. Yale was the governor of the Fort from 1687 to 1692. It was during his tenure that the corporation for Madras and the post of the mayor were created, and the supreme court, which evolved over time into the present-day Madras high court, was set up. But despite an eventful stint, Yale was sacked because he used his position for private profit—he was engaged in an illegal diamond trade in Madras through an agent called Catherine Nicks. Yet he stayed on in Madras for seven more years, having packed off his wife to England. He lived in the same house with Mrs Nicks, fathering four children with her, and a Portuguese mistress called Hieronima de Paivia, who also bore him a son. He finally returned to London in 1699, an immensely wealthy man. As he busied himself spending the money he had made in India, a cash-starved school in the American colony of Connecticut requested him for a donation. The Yale family had lived in Connecticut for a long time before returning to England in 1652 when Elihu Yale was three years old. So when the college sought financial assistance, he shipped across nine bales of exquisite Indian textiles, 417 books and a portrait of King George I. The school kept the books and raised £562 from his other donations and, in gratitude, decided to rename itself after him. Thus was born Yale University, with the help of ill-gotten wealth amassed in Madras.

Through a diversity of Bible-based beliefs, Colonial America firmly founded its culture, laws, and government on the Judeo-Christian worldview. That common faith was clearly expressed in the founding documents of all thirteen American colonies: The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter recorded an intent to spread the “knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith,” much as the Mayflower Compact cited a commitment to “the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian faith.” Connecticut’s Fundamental Orders officially called for “an orderly and decent Government established according to God” that would “maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In New Hampshire, the Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter vowed to establish a government “in the name of Christ” that “shall be to our best discerning agreeable to the Will of God.” Rhode Island’s colonial charter invoked the “blessing of God” for “a sure foundation of happiness to all America.” The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England stated, “Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel …” New York’s Duke’s Laws prohibited denial of “the true God and his Attributes.” New Jersey’s founding charter vowed, “Forasmuch as it has pleased God, to bring us into this Province…we may be a people to the praise and honor of his name.” Delaware’s original charter officially acknowledged “One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World.” Pennsylvania’s charter officially cited a “Love of Civil Society and Christian Religion” as motivation for the colony’s founding. Maryland’s charter declared an official goal of “extending the Christian Religion.” Virginia’s first charter commissioned colonization as “so noble a work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the…propagating of Christian Religion.” The charter for the Colony of Carolina proclaimed “a laudable and pious zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith.” Georgia’s charter officially cited a commitment to the “propagating of Christian religion.”27

Every other Massachusetts town founded before 1660 was named after an English community. Of thirty-five such names, at least eighteen (57%) were drawn from East Anglia and twenty-two (63%) from seven eastern counties. Most were named after English towns within sixty miles of the village of Haverhill.2 As the Puritans moved beyond the borders of New England to other colonies, their place names continued to come from the east of England. When they settled Long Island, they named their county Suffolk. In the Connecticut Valley, their first county was called Hartford. When they founded a colony in New Jersey, the most important town was called the New Ark of the Covenant (now the modern city of Newark) and the county was named Essex. In general, the proportion of eastern and East Anglian place names in Massachusetts and its affiliated colonies was 60 percent—exactly the same as in genealogies and ship lists.

In the course of researching, I learned that colonial Connecticut had been a major provisioner of the British West Indies plantations where slaves were growing and processing sugar in a monoculture that yielded huge profits to England. Connecticut-grown onions, potatoes, pigs, and cows were considered the best of the best on the Caribbean’s English plantations, and the sturdy white oak we grew also was highly sought after. The horses raised on farms in eastern Connecticut were shipped to the Caribbean in the tens

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees Eben realized that he need not worry about being burned or tortured. He was going to starve to death. Eben had thought that up here, where nobody lived or ever had, the deer would be standing in rows in the woods awaiting a bullet. He had expected rabbits and grouse, moose and beaver. But there was no game. They built shelters from woven branches, piling spruce and hemlock on top to keep out the snow. Each day some of the Indians left to hunt and each day they came back with nothing. It had never occurred to Eben that an Indian could go hunting and find nothing. He was not sure how far they still had to go to reach Canada. He had seen a map once that showed the Connecticut River, how it split the colony of Connecticut in half, then cut up through Massachusetts, headed north through unknown lands and bumped into Canada. The northern part of the map was guesswork. Eben needed a French map, which would show the city of Montreal, where the French kept their government, and the St. Lawrence River, down which fortunes in fur were shipped. He could not ask his master. An Indian kept his map in his head.

Between 1730 and 1760, Connecticut’s population more than tripled, from 38,000 in 1730 to 70,000 in 1749, increasing to over 130,000 by 1760. On the eve of the American Revolution in 1774, it was close to 200,000. Town populations began to outstrip the local agricultural capacity. The abundant 150 acres of land granted to the average first comer, was soon whittled down by inheritance divisions to just enough land to get by, and then not even that. In the 1730s, the voracious demand for more land was satisfied by the sale of three hundred thousand acres in the northwest Connecticut hills, but by 1750 the last of the colony’s public lands were gone. Meanwhile, in the Land of Steady Habits, no habit was steadier than regularly producing children, so the need for additional farm land for rising generations became a Connecticut constant.

At the same time, a group of Pilgrims, led by William Bradford, agreed to personally assume the full responsibility for the community’s debt, with the £1,800 due in nine annual installments of £200 starting in 1628. For relieving the citizens of Plymouth of this debt, Bradford and his group received the exclusive fur-trading rights of the colony. Indeed, the rights would have been immensely valuable, but for one thing: competition. By 1628 New England had received shiploads of settlers. Some, such as the Puritans, had religious inclinations. Others were itinerant traders making landfall. The Dutch, with their own settlement on the Hudson River, were building trading posts as far north as the Connecticut River. The French too made incursions. For all, fur was vital. Native Americans, continuing their role as hunters and preparers, were a key part of this transatlantic trade. None of this was good news for the local beaver.

While he thus gained general hatred, he also won universal contempt by his debaucheries and excesses, by his debts, and by his habit of dressing as a woman. He was plunged in one long quarrel with his Assemblies, both in New York and New Jersey, plotted with Dudley, of Massachusetts, to destroy the free - charter governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and at last excited such loud and strenuous opposition that he was recalled, but could not return to England until his accession to the Earldom of Clarendon released him from prison, into which he had been thrown for debt.

At the same time they turned over the whole province to the city of Amsterdam; but the effort was vain; the colony of the south continued feeble and languishing, and the temporary success against Lord Baltimore was soon clouded by events at the north. In the charter which Winthrop obtained from Charles II., Connecticut and New Haven were consolidated, and all Long Island and the northern New Netherlands were declared within the Connecticut boundaries.

Dès 1628, une charte de cette nature fut accordée par Charles Ier à des émigrants qui vinrent fonder la colonie du Massachusetts. Mais, en général, on n'octroya les chartes aux colonies de la Nouvelle-Angleterre que long-temps après que leur existence fut devenue un fait accompli. Plymouth, Providence, New-Haven, l'État de Connecticut et celui de Rhode-Island furent fondés sans le concours et en quelque sorte à l'insu de la mère-patrie. Les nouveaux habitants, sans nier la suprématie de la métropole, n'allèrent pas puiser dans son sein la source des pouvoirs; ils se constituèrent eux-mêmes, et ce ne fut que trente ou quarante ans après, sous Charles II, qu'une charte royale vint légaliser leur existence.

sojourn in Greenwich, Connecticut, known for its art colony.

To assure Sabbath observance in the Connecticut colony, the General Court required in 1668 that constables in every town “make search after all offenders.” The ruling specified that anyone who “shall keep out of the meeting house during the public worship unnecessarily, there being convenient room in the house,” would pay five shillings for each offense or sit in the stocks one hour. Not everyone in Lyme complied. Two years later the county court in New London heard “the complaint of the constable of Lyme concerning Mr. and Mrs. Ely, their profanation of the Sabbath and also contempt of authority.” The clerk summoned Richard Ely (1610–1684) together with his wife and “ye Negro servant Moses” to appear at the next court session in June 1670 to answer the charges.

The self-denying gentleman, who had imployed his commission of governour so little to the disadvantage of the infant-colony at Connecticut, was himself, ere long, by election made governour of that colony.

In 1643, the four separate colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Plantation, Connecticut, and New Haven agreed to form an association known as the New England Confederation. This was the first attempt to unite several colonies in mutual cooperation. The governing document for that Confederation clearly stated the Christian nature of these early settlements: Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity and peace….The said United Colonies…[do] enter into a firm and perpetual league of friendship…for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel and for their own mutual safety and welfare.181 The New England Confederation was the first joint government in America, even having its own version of a Congress with elected representatives from each of the four colonies. It lasted until 1684, when Great Britain tried to force the separate colonies to become just one. The people eventually defeated that British plan and restored the independent sovereignty of each colony.

The Boston Latin School, Harvard College and mighty Yale College (founded at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1701, by strict Congregationalists, when Harvard showed alarming signs of liberalism) were merely the most conspicuous of many excellent educational institutions which gave New England the highest literacy rate in the colonies and quite probably in the world. Inoculation

in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven during the seventeenth century, unmarried people were required to live with families that were “well governed” by a church-going, land-owning man.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take the English long to make changes; 2 days after Stuyvesant's surrender, New Amsterdam was once again blessed with a new name. This massive territory was now to be called “New York.” The now crown-owned region traced its borders around present-day New Jersey, Delaware, Vermont, and included portions of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The name paid homage to James II, the Duke of York and soon-to-be King of England.