New Haven, Connecticut

“ It was insisted that New Haven had been owned as a distinct government, not only by her sister colonies, by Parliament, and the Protector, during their administration, but by his Majesty, King Charles II.; that it was against the express articles of confederation, by which Connecticut was no less bound than the other colonies; that New Haven had never been notified of any design as to their incorporation with Connecticut, and that they had never been heard on the subject. ”

“ I wished to reside within a few hours of New York. I had never seen more delightful locations than there are upon the borders of Long Island Sound, between New Rochelle, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut; and my attention was therefore turned in that direction. Bridgeport seemed to be about the proper distance from the great metropolis. It is pleasantly situated at the terminus of two railroads, which traverse the fertile valleys of the Naugatuck and Housatonic rivers. The New York and New Haven Railroad runs through the city, and there is also daily steamboat communication with New York. ”

“ The island called Sandy Hook, at the entrance of the harbor of New York, was formerly a peninsula attached to the main land. The old citizens of New Haven, Connecticut, point out places where once boats, and even small vessels, used to anchor, but which are now at quite a distance from the water and covered with the dwellings of the inhabitants. Most of 439the large rivers of the United States are more or less changing their banks, and the places of their channels, from year to year. The sea, within the space of forty years, has retired more than a mile from Rosetta, in Egypt ”

“ New Ha′ven, the largest seaport and city of Connecticut and fourth largest in New England, stands at the head of New Haven Bay. It has broad, shaded streets, public squares, parks and gardens and handsome public buildings. ”

“ 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.' ... ”

“ New Haven.—The successful issue of the Pequot War opened the Connecticut Valley to another important migration. This was led by Rev. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, who had come to New England to plant a colony on purely theocratic lines. In 1638 they founded New Haven, and the following year drew up a form of government. Citizenship was restricted to church membership and an annual general court of freemen was to elect a governor and assistants, who were to conduct all governmental affairs, the only restriction on their authority being the law of Moses. ”

“ The great fame of New Haven comes from Yale College, having two hundred and fifty instructors and over twenty-five hundred students, the orthodox Congregational University of New England, which for two centuries has exerted a most advantageous and widely diffused influence upon the American intellectual character, and around it and its multitude of buildings of every kind clusters the town. In the year 1700 ten clergymen planned to have a college in the colony of Connecticut, and for the purpose contributed as many books as they could spare for its library. ”

“ Plymouth had started her trading posts on the rivers of Maine and Connecticut; settlements multiplied in Rhode Island; New Haven, from the meadows of Quinnipiack, was soon planting on Long Island, and nearing the Dutch boundaries on the Sound; while Connecticut, through her purchase of Saybrook from the disappointed patentees in 1644, [553] and her planting of towns westward even of New Haven's expansion, was rapidly stretching east and west. Massachusetts had long adopted the definite policy of extending her claims and control as fast and as far as possible. ”

“ On the first roster, you will find the names of the leading citizens of old New Haven town. The first men of the town were its sponsors. Back of them was a patriotic and humane purpose, and, having that purpose in view, I am able to declare that we are the oldest military organization of the sort in the State.
“The First Company in Hartford antedates us by a few months, but the First Company was what its name implies, the Governor’s Guard. The Second Company came at the call of the danger to liberty and its first act was to make response to the call of Lexington and Concord. ”

“ Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
SPEECH AT NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, MARCH 6, 1860 ”

“ The streets are very level, and many of the houses are handsome. I was once at New Haven, in Connecticut, and I think some of the streets in Cleveland look like some of those in New Haven. We have, however, no mountains, like East and West Rock. Indeed, the country is flat around Cleveland, and, far as the eye can reach, you can see nothing like a mountain. ”

“ Within a year after the signing of the treaty, New Haven attempted further encroachments upon the Delaware, and, when stopped by Stuyvesant, complained to the United Colonies, whose Commissioners wrote a bullying letter to the Dutch Governor. [18] The following year, in Europe, Cromwell forced war upon Holland, and New Haven and Connecticut felt that their chance had come to make an end of their neighbor, whose chief offense seems to have been the prior possession of lands the English coveted. ”

“ In the meantime the moss-troopers of Connecticut, the warriors of New Haven and Hartford, and Pyquag--otherwise called Weathersfield, famous for its onions and its witches--and of all the other border towns, were in a prodigious turmoil, furbishing up their rusty weapons, shouting aloud for war, and anticipating easy conquests and glorious rummaging of the fat little Dutch villages. ”

“ The Pilgrims had hardly weathered their first hard winter when they rebuilt one of their shallops and sent it northward on fishing and trading voyages; and later they sent one bark up the Connecticut and another to open up communication with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Pynchon was making Springfield the centre of the fur trade of the interior, though an overcrowding of merchants there was reducing profits and compelling the settlers to resort to agriculture for a living. Of all the colonies, New Haven was the most distinctly commercial. ”

“ The reactionary thought of the framers of these fundamental orders, however, was to be without appreciable influence upon the growth of colonial political theory as then developing; for New Haven was to have only a quarter of a century of independent but unimportant life before being absorbed by Connecticut, while a more and more democratic tendency was manifesting itself in all the colonies, even in Massachusetts.
The effects of the frontier life, and of the distance separating England from her colonies, were already beginning to 209show themselves strongly. ”

“ A general chorus of neighbors and friends rose in the columns of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette":—"It is with a noble and patriotic pride that America boasts of her Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Humphreys, the poetical luminaries of Connecticut"; and all true New-Englanders preferred their home-made verses to the best imported article. The fame of the Seven extended into the neighboring States; Boston, not yet the Athens of America, confessed "that Pegasus was not backed by better horsemen from any part of the Union." ”

“ In its recent close new traffic alliance with the New Haven—an alliance whose outward expression consists very largely of some new through trains and sleeping-car services from New England by way of the Hell Gate Bridge and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the Pennsylvania undoubtedly has all of the New Haven that it can easily digest. Broad Street cannot be anxious to undertake the management of the Litchfield branch in Connecticut, or the Chatham one down Cape Cod way. ”

“ Ocean Connecticut territory, Connecticut received every whit of that
right to govern itself which Charles was so sternly challenging in the
case of Massachusetts.
John Winthrop the Younger.
From this time on, as indeed earlier, Connecticut was for many years
perhaps the most delightful example of popular government in all
history. Connecticut and New Haven together had about ten thousand
inhabitants. Their rulers were just, wise, and of a mind truly to serve
the people. Here none were persecuted for their faith. Education was
universal. Few were poor, none very rich. ”

“ Mrs. Hooker was borne through the wilderness upon a litter. The people generally carried their packs, arms, and utensils. They were nearly a fortnight on their journey.
[8] While the planters of Connecticut were thus exerting themselves in prosecuting and regulating the affairs of that colony, another was projected and settled at Quinnipiack, and afterward called New Haven. On the 26th of July, 1637, Mr. John Davenport, Mr. Samuel Eaton, Theophilus Eaton, and Edward Hopkins, Esquires, Mr. Thomas Gregson, and many others of good character and fortune, arrived in Boston. ”

“ Davenport was entirely opposed to a union with Connecticut. He proceeded, therefore, to offer a number of reasons why the inhabitants of New Haven could not be included in the patent of that colony, and for which they ought, by no means voluntary, to form a union. He left his reasons in writing, for the consideration of the freemen. He observed that he should leave others to act, according to the light which they should receive. ”

“ In the ill-defined bounds of the Connecticut charter lay the seeds of many a future contest; but the effect upon Rhode Island was as immediate as upon New Haven. As we have already seen, the Narragansett country had for some time been a matter of controversy between the three adjoining colonies. As Connecticut now extended to the Bay, by royal grant, Massachusetts was seemingly excluded, and the contest lay between Rhode Island’s patent rights and those conferred in her neighbor’s new charter. ”

“ For several decades the large emigration of the male population to the West resulted in an excess of females within the State; but the 1900 census shows that the sexes are almost equal in number.
Being of a manufacturing State, the population shows a strong tendency to congregate in the cities. In 1900, 53 per cent. of the population was in cities of over 8000 population. According to the census of 1900, New Haven had 108,027 inhabitants; Hartford, 79,850 ”

“ As a social organization, the Company continued to enlist the élite of New Haven and the surrounding towns for nearly a hundred years, appearing in parades as escort for distinguished visitors and vieing with similar organizations in Connecticut and neighboring states in making the social seasons a round of gayety for its members and friends. ”

“ John Davenport, after witnessing the Antinomian controversy, declined the pressing hospitality of Massachusetts, and led his New Haven company far enough afield to avoid theological entanglements or disputed points of church polity. Unimpeded, they would make their intended experiment in statecraft and build their strictly scriptural republic. Still earlier Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and John Warham led the Connecticut colonists into the wilderness because they foresaw contention, strife, and evil days before them if they were to be forced to conform to the strict policy of Massachusetts. ”

“ Plant is of pure Puritan stock; his earliest American ancestors left England about 1640, and if they were not among the little company who came with John Davenport to Quinnipiac, afterward called New Haven, they followed very soon after. They settled in Branford, Connecticut, a town lying between New Haven and Guilford, at which{119} place some of Davenport’s most eminent men soon established themselves. ”

“ There are many sincere and religious people amongst them.... They have store of children and are well accommodated with servants; many hands make light work, many hands make a full fraught, but many mouths eat up all, as some old planters have experienced."
Approximately a century later the keen-eyed Sarah Knight visited New Haven, and commented in her Journal upon the growing laxity of rules and customs among the people of the quaint old town:
"They are governed by the same laws as we in Boston (or little differing) , throughout this whole colony of Connecticut ... ”

“ There were twenty extensive quarries and mines in the State in 1870. There are over 100 miles of deeply indented coast on the Sound (which measures 140 miles by 24 miles) , affording excellent harbours. The chief of these are Stonington, New London, Saybrook, New Haven, Bridgeport, and Fairfield. The harbour at New London is one of the best in the country, capacious, and never frozen over. The climate of the State, while very changeable, is very healthful,—the mortality being below the average of the other States. ”