THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Golden Hill Indians
The Housatonic
The Wepawaug
Cupheags and Pequannock
Weantinock
Goodyear's Island
Indian Slaves
Indian Remnants
Indian Troubles
New Indian Papers

THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Wm. Howard Wilcoxson

Stratford Indians

Trouble with the Indians

Establishing Title to the Land

Indian Deeds and Relics

White Hills Purchase

FORREST MORGAN

Lifestyles, Government, Religion and War

Indian Titles and Mohegan Land Troubles

Sowheag, Uncas, and Miantonomo

Owenoco, the Son of Uncas

THE HOUSATONIC

CHARD POWERS SMITH

The Promised Land
Heathen in the Land
The Lord's Scouts

The Land and The Lord

The Next Seven Tribes

ALEXANDER JOHNSTON

Connecticut Indian History

The Pequot War

Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

Puritan River

The warrant for the accusation of intolerance which has fondly been pinned on the Puritans by America’s Europe-flattering apologists is largely derived from a work of irritated fancy touching the fictitious “Blue Laws of Connecticut,” composed by one Reverend Samuel Peters, an Episcopal minister, a Tory, and a faintly picturesque liar. He was used a little roughly by the Sons of Liberty in 1774--he claimed that his robe was torn—fled to England, and composed his authoritative work. He makes much of capital crimes and “bloodie” cruelty generally. A few facts in rebuttal will suffice.

In 1602 England had 31 capital crimes; and the number gradually increased to 223 in 1819. In 1656 Massachusetts and New Haven colonies had 16 each, and Connecticut Colony 14; and the number decreased thereafter In all three colonies. Of the other American plantations, New York and Virginia, while more modern in this respect than England, were less so that the Puritan establishments.

As for witchcraft, the delusion of it possessed the whole Occidental world in the sixteen, seventeenth, and part of the eighteenth century that there were a hundred thousand executions in Europe, perhaps one in five hundred of the average population during the period. Until 1697, when the mania ended in America—though not abroad, there were either nine or eleven executions in Connecticut, one of the doubtful ones being of Goody Bassett of Stratford, the only case in the valley. During the same period there were thirty-two executions in Massachusetts, making a maximum total of forty-three, or one in about seven thousand of the average population of the two colonies.

In the matter of “cruel and unusual punishments,” the Puritans were also much farther advanced out of medievalism than the mother country, and somewhat more liberal than New York and Virginia. The same was true of the use of torture to extract evidence. Nowhere in America in America were the Nazi horrors of the British Star Chamber even remotely rivaled, least of all in the New England colonies.

Of all the accomplishments of the Puritan-baiters, none is more groundless than the reputation they have given them for religious intolerance. Here, as in all things, they can be truly pictures only against the background of their times, not ours. Religious toleration as we know it today was upheld by no sate in the early seventeenth century. The Puritans did not flee from ghastly legalized persecution in England in order to establish that yet unknown principle—which one of their number, Roger Williams, was going to be the first to promulgate and practice. Nor did they claim that their settlements were havens for any sects but their own. They undertook certain privation and possible violent and early death in order to worship God in their own way, and once they had hewn out their settlements, they asked only to be let alone. There was plenty more wilderness available. Let the Quakers and Ranters and Baptists found their own settlements, instead of meddling with those who had already established theirs with great hardships.

The British law the Puritans fled from was far more cruel to heretics than the laws they adopted. It imprisoned all nonconformists, banished them after three months if they did not make public confession and submission, and killed them “without benefit of clergy” if they failed to obey the sentence of banishment or returned after their initial departure.

The laws if Virginia and New York against heresy were milder than those of Great Britain, but more stringent than those of New England. Massachusetts, like Virginia, killed Quakers who, having been twice banished, returned the third time. Connecticut—which incidentally included all of the settled part of the Housatonic Valley until after religious tolerance had become universal—never had any law against heresy at all. The extent of intolerance, as actually practiced by all the Puritans against people of different faiths, was stated in the law of New Haven Colony. It recognized freedom of private conscience, but forbade “broaching, publishing or maintaining any dangerous errour or heresie, or shall endeavour to draw, or seduce others thereto,” the punishment being normally fine or banishment. That is, every man’s private belief was his own affair, but when he began to preach any unorthodox “errour” and so threatened what the Puritans at great pains and danger had built, then they invited him either to desist or to leave.

In passing, it may be worth noting why the Puritans, like the rest of the Anglo-American world, were particularly severe against Quakers. The reason was that in the seventeenth century the Quakers were something quite different from the promoters of peace and brotherly love who are now universally admired. Their quietism did not appear till a century after, and in the period of Puritan settlement they were, for the most part, an ignorant and militant sect whose members made a practice of attending other meetings—especially Puritan meeting—for the avowed purpose of disrupting them. To this end they habitually violated ordinary decorum, keeping heir hats on, heckling the minister, and sometimes breaking into his sermon to harangue the congregation. It is understandable that this made them unpopular.

In our modern intolerance of the founders of our country, we would do well to inform ourselves concerning the times in which they lived. We would also do well to recall that they actually believed in and tried to live by a great religious faith. They were tolerant as they could be and maintain their integrity. We, having no faith, can be tolerant of anything except faith, with a tolerance that is empty.

But the importance of the record of the Puritans is not to rebut their detractors; it is to remind us of their positive contributions to America and the world. By the 1620’s, when they began coming to America, their principle of religious individualism was already expanded to include political individualism was already expanded to include political individualism. In the earliest expressions of the first American Puritans and in the governments they founded, the doctrine is established that no man is to be governed but by his consent, that governments comprises a contract or “covenant” between the rulers and the governed, and that when the former break the contract the latter have the right to take up arms in defense of their freedom. By the middle 1630’s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had embodied these principles in instruments which, after that of their neighbor Plymouth Colony, were the first of America’s series of written constitutions. Between these instruments and the correspondence of the men who drew them we find all the basic doctrines and much of the language of the great documents of a century and a half later.

At the same early period the theory of individualism was being applied as local democracy, first, in the religious congregationalism and, second, in the expansion of the principle to the town meeting where likewise majority vote prevailed. The now popular assumption that until some quite recent date all of New England except Rhode Island was theocratic—that is, limited the vote to church members—is contrary to fact.

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