But for various reasons, they chose to make a new beginning. A few weeks after their arrival (as we learn from the contemporary record of Winthrop), "Mr. Eaton and some others of Mr. Davenport's company went to view Quinepiack with intent to begin a plantation there,"*-i. e. if the prospect should seem favorable. We may assume that Eaton with his exploring party arrived at this point not far from September 14-24. He saw the "broad-armed port,"-the wooded plain just beginning to put on its autumn glory,-the basaltic bluffs that face the harbor,-the ranges of hills on the east and the west,—the streams that receive their waters from those hills, -the river, floating here and there an Indian canoe, and inviting to inland exploration,-and why might there not be here a commercial city? Some of the exploring party (as the local tradition tells us) were left here for the winter to make such preparation as would be necessary if this should be dedetermined on as the place for the intended plantation. For almost nine months after the arrival of the Hector in the port of Boston, "Mr. Davenport's company" seem to have held the question about the place of their settlement undecided, their judgment gradually shaping itself in favor of this location. When the end of winter was at hand, the decision could be no longer postponed, and on the 12th=22d of March, 1638, Davenport and Eaton, in behalf of their company, announced the decision in a formal letter to the Governor and assistants, and the General Court of Massachusetts. They had come “to a full and final conclusion," and had "sent letters to Connectacutt for a speedy transacting the purchase of the parts about Quillypieck, from the natives which might 'pretend title thereunto."" They considered themselves, therefore, "absolutely and irrevocably engaged that way;" and with devout expressions of Christian friendship, they bade farewell to Massachusetts.

The company had been re-inforced in Massachusetts by

The date of that expedition (Aug. 31), was five days after the return of Stoughton with the force under his command, which had finished the Pequot See what Stoughton had written about "Quillipeage river, and so beyond to the Dutch." Winth., i, 481, also p. 233.

war.

not a few who had been previously settled there, and having completed their arrangements, they sailed from Boston, March 30-April 9, 1638. In planning their enterprise, and preparing for it, they had not overlooked the necessity of a compact among themselves, including a provisional government. Having come together, they kept a day of fasting ;* and on that day, "the whole assembly of free-planters "—all the partners in the enterprise-bound themselves to each other by a religious covenant which they called "a plantation covenant," and which (though no copy of it has been preserved), included doubtless, a preliminary and pro tempore arrangement for maintaining peace and order in the town they were to establish, and for transacting their civil affairs, as well as for the ordinary business of their partnership. Thus, when they landed here, they were not a mere crowd of men, women, and children, masters and servants, but an organized company held together by a sacred compact. They had not yet become in form a church, nor had they organized definitively their civil commonwealth; but they had come hither for the purpose of constituting a church, and at the same time a state. Only a single provision of their "plantation covenant" is distinctly known to us,-namely, "that as in matters that concern the gathering and ordering of a church, so likewise. in all public offices [duties], which concern civil order,”—“ we will, all of us, be ordered by those rules which the Scripture holds forth to us." Under that "plantation covenant," they seem to have conducted their civil affairs, and their public worship and religious edification, for a period of more than sixteen months after their landing on the soil which they had bargained for with the native proprietors, and on which they were to build their homes. At the close of that period, their church was constituted [Aug. 22=Sept. 1, 1639]; but it was not till nine weeks later [Oct. 25], that the civil government was finally organized, and the announcement solemnly proclaimed: "All former power or trust for managing any public affairs in this plantation, into whose hands soever formerly

"The first day of extracrdinary humiliation we had after we came together." N. H. Col. Records, 12.

committed, is now abrogated and from henceforward utterly to cease."

Such was the beginning of civil government in the new settlement at Quinipiack. That civil government, let us remember, was not formed for a nation like the people of England, nor for a great colony with a royal charter of privileges like the then existing colony of Massachusetts, nor for a cluster of settlements like the three towns of Connecticut, nor for some Utopian commonwealth in the realm of imagination. Milford and Guilford were coming into existence at the same time with New Haven, and were shaping their institutions in accordance with the same ideas; but the three plantations were severally independent, and it was not till four years later that they were "combined" and began to be known as the New Haven colony or jurisdiction. The government which "the free planters" set up here, October 25= Nov. 4, 1639, was simply an arrangement for administering justice and keeping the peace in one plantation, such as Plymouth was in its beginning. It did not occur to those free planters that they were not to manage the affairs of their partnership in their own way. They had purchased a certain tract of land for their own use, and they intended not to lose the control of it. They had purchased the soil, and were intending to live upon it and to be buried in it, for the purpose of founding and perpetuating here a church which should not be under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, nor subject in any way to the ecclesiastical laws and courts with which their experience in their native country had made them well acquainted. Therefore they determined, unanimously, that the government which they were setting up should not, by any negligence of theirs, pass into the hands of their enemies, the enemies of their great religious enterprise. Let us remember that what they most feared, and had most reason to fear, was that, in some way, the ecclesiastical government of England, with its bishops' courts and bishops' prisons, its High Commission for causes ecclesiastical, and its whole body of canon law, would follow them into their retreat and be obtruded upon their plantation in this

wilderness; and we can understand why it was that those planters, in full assembly, without a dissenting vote, resolved that none but members of the church which they were form'ing, or of other approved churches, should participate in the government of their plantation.

Such then was the relation of the Congregational churches to the beginning of civil government in this part of Connecticut. A company of religious men came hither for the express purpose of being at liberty to "gather and order" churches-not according to act of Parliament, nor according to the will of the High Commission Court, nor under the royal supremacy of Charles, Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England, but—under the supremacy of Christ alone, and according to "those rules which the Scripture holds forth," or, more exactly, which the Scripture, in their devout study of its rules and precedents, did hold forth to them. Therefore they declared in full assembly, unanimously, that "they held themselves bound to establish such civil order as might best conduce to the securing of the purity and peace of the ordinances [i. e. of Christian worship and communion], to themselves and their posterity," God's word in Scripture being the rule and warrant.

Well, what sort of a civil government did they establish? Just the simplest that would serve their purpose,—a government in which (notwithstanding the known preferences of the lords and knights who held the Earl of Warwick's patent) there were to be no hereditary distinctions of rank or power, a government in which every man might partake, with no other qualification than personal character and professed loyalty to the chief end of the plantation, attested by the suffrages of his friends and neighbors admitting him, at his own request, to their communion. First, there was a "general court," beginning with the seven who had been chosen by all the free-planters for “the foundation work” in church and state, and increased from time to time by the admission of all who being qualified according to "the fundamental agreement," were willing to share in the responsibility. Then there was a subordinate court, consisting of a "magis

trate"-not governor-and four "deputies," all chosen annually by "the general court," the duty of the deputies being "to assist the magistrate in all courts called by him for the occasions of the plantation."

It was under these forms that civil government began in the plantations which were, not long afterwards, combined as the New Haven colony, adopting as the organic law of their combination, a written constitution resembling in its provisions that of the sister colony on the river, yet differing from it by rigorously maintaining the rule that political power, in the several towns and in the general jurisdiction over them, should be entrusted only to members "of the approved churches in New England."

In that first age, then, the relation of the Congregational churches to civil government was so close that both the merit and the demerit of the latter, in either of the two colonies, must be ascribed to the former. Civil government, whether on the river or on the sound, was instituted for the Congregational churches, and by their members. Constitutions were framed, laws were enacted, all the administration of civil. affairs was determined, not indeed by the churches in churchmeetings, but by members of the churches acting as members of the State. If the constitution of the river colony was liberal, far in advance of the age, let that merit be ascribed to the churches there, and to their ministers, and preeminently to the renowned pastor of Hartford, Thomas Hooker,—than whom no more illustrious mind came from the mother country to the colonization of New England. If the "fundamental agreement" at New Haven guarded too carefully, and therefore mistakenly, the freedom of the churches, let the blame of that over-carefulness rest on those churches, and primarily on that pastor, John Davenport, who swayed by his imperial force of mind not only the New Haven church, but the others also.

Yet let the fact be observed that, so long as the New Haven jurisdiction continued, there was no meddling of the civil government in matters properly ecclesiastical. Nor do we find any trace of inability in the churches of that juris