XI.

With regard to powers of government, the charter CHAP. was still more extraordinary. It conferred on the colonists unqualified power to govern themselves. 1662. They were allowed to elect all their own officers, to enact their own laws, to administer justice without appeals to England, to inflict punishments, to confer pardons, and, in a word, to exercise every power, deliberative and active. The king, far from reserving a negative on the acts of the colony, did not even require that the laws should be 'transmitted for his inspection; and no provision was made for the interference of the English government in any event whatever. Connecticut was independent except in name. Charles II. and Clarendon thought they had created a close corporation, and they had really sanctioned a democracy. To the younger Winthrop, probably because he had preserved a loyal spirit in Connecticut, Charles II. had written, "the world shall take notice of the sense I have of your kindness, and how great an instrument you have been in promoting the happiness

of

your country;" and the disinterested man asked favors only for the community of which he was a member.

After his successful negotiations, and efficient concert in founding the Royal Society, Winthrop returned to America, bringing with him a name which England honored, and which his country should never forget, and resumed his tranquil life in rural retirement. The amalgamation of the two colonies could not be effected without collision; and New Haven had been unwilling

1 MS. letter in my possession. Savage has printed and remarked on the letter, in a note on Winthrop, i. 126. Compare Maidston to Winthrop, in Thurloe, i. 763; and better

in Mass. Hist. Coll. xxi. 185. The
letter was communicated to me by
T. L. Winthrop of Boston, as ad-
dressed to the younger Winthrop,

CHAP. to merge itself in the larger colony; the wise moderaXI. tion of Winthrop was able to reconcile the jarrings,

and blend the interests of the united colonies. The

universal approbation of Connecticut followed him 1662 throughout all the remainder of his life; for twice 1676. seven years he continued to be annually elected to the office of her chief magistrate.'

to

And the gratitude of Connecticut was reasonable. The charter which Winthrop had obtained secured to her an existence of tranquillity which could not be surpassed. Civil freedom was safe under the shelter of masculine morality; and beggary and crime could not thrive in the midst of severest manners. From the first, the minds of the yeomanry were kept active by the constant exercise of the elective franchise; and, except under James II., there was no such thing in the land as an officer appointed by the English king. Connecticut, from the first, possessed unmixed popular liberty. The government was in honest and upright hands; the little strifes of rivalry never became heated; the magistrates were sometimes persons of no ordinary endowments; but though gifts of learning and genius were valued, the state was content with virtue and single-mindedness; and the public welfare never suffered at the hands of plain men. Roger Williams had ever been a welcome guest at Hartford; and "that heavenly man, John Haynes," would say to him, “I think, Mr. Williams, I must now confesse to you, that the most wise God hath provided and cut out this part of the world as a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences." 2 There never existed a persecuting

1 Compare further on the younger Winthrop, Savage, in Winthrop, i. 64, and 126; Eliot's Biog. Dict.;

Roger Wolcott, in Mass. Hist. Coll. iv. 262-298.

2 Mass. Hist. Coll. i. 280.

XI.

spirit' in Connecticut; while "it had a scholar to their CHAP minister in every town or village." Education was cherished; religious knowledge was carried to the highest degree of refinement, alike in its application to moral duties, and to the mysterious questions on the nature of God, of liberty, and of the soul. A hardy race multiplied along the alluvion of the streams, and subdued the more rocky and less inviting fields; its population for a century doubled once in twenty years, in spite of considerable emigration; and if, as has often been said, the ratio of the increase of population is the surest criterion of public happiness, Connecticut was long the happiest state in the world. Religion united with the pursuits of agriculture, to give to the land the aspect of salubrity. The domestic wars were discussions of knotty points in theology; the concerns of the parish, the merits of the minister, were the weightiest affairs; and a church reproof the heaviest calamity. The strifes of the parent country, though they sometimes occasioned a levy among the sons of the husbandmen, yet never brought an enemy within their borders; tranquillity was within their gates, and the peace of God within their hearts. No fears of midnight ruffians could disturb the sweetness of slumber; the best house required no. fastening but a latch, lifted by a string; bolts and locks were unknown.

acter.

There was nothing morose in the Connecticut charIt was temperate industry enjoying the abundance which it had created. No great inequalities of condition excited envy, or raised political feuds ;

1 So Douglas, ii. 135. "I never heard of any persecuting spirit in Connecticut; in this they are egregiously aspersed.

VOL. II.

8

2 Trumbull, i. 451, gives the number of inhabitants at 17,000, in 1713. There were, probably, as many as 17,000, and more, in 1688.

CHAP. Wealth could display itself only in a larger house and a XI. fuller barn; and covetousness was satisfied by the

tranquil succession of harvests.

There was venison

from the hills; salmon, in their season, not less than shad, from the rivers; and sugar from the trees of the forest. For a foreign market little was produced beside cattle; and in return for them but few foreign luxuries stole in. Even so late as 1713, the number of seamen did not exceed one hundred and twenty.1 The soil had originally been justly divided, or held as common property in trust for the public, and for new comers. Forestalling was successfully resisted; the brood of speculators in land inexorably turned aside. Happiness was enjoyed unconsciously; beneath the rugged exterior humanity wore its sweetest smile. There was for a long time hardly a lawyer in the land. The husbandman who held his own plough, and fed his own cattle, was the great man of the age; no one was superior to the matron, who, with her busy daughters, kept the hum of the wheel incessantly alive, spinning and weaving every article of their dress. Fashion was confined within narrow limits; and pride, which aimed at no grander equipage than a pillion, could exult only in the common splendor of the blue and white linen gown, with short sleeves, coming down to the waist, and in the snow-white flaxen apron, which, primly starched and ironed, was worn on public days by every woman in the land. For there was no revolution except from the time of sowing to the time of reaping; from the plain dress of the week day to the more trim attire of Sunday.

Every family was taught to look upward to God, as

1 Trumbull, i. 453.

XI.

to the Fountain of all good. Yet life was not sombre. CHAP. The spirit of frolic mingled with innocence: religion itself sometimes wore the garb of gayety; and the annual thanksgiving to God was, from primitive times, as joyous as it was sincere. Nature always asserts her rights, and abounds in means of gladness.

The frugality of private life had its influence on public expenditure. Half a century after the concession of the charter, the annual expenses of the government did not exceed eight hundred pounds, or four thousand dollars; and the wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service. In each county a magistrate acted as judge of probate, and the business was transacted with small expense to the fatherless.1

Education was always esteemed a concern of deepest interest, and there were common schools from the first. Nor was it long before a small college, such as the day of small things permitted, began to be established; and Yale owes its birth" to ten worthy fathers, who, in 1700, assembled at Branford, and each one, laying a few volumes on a table, said, 'I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony.'

But the political education of the people is due to the happy organization of towns, which here, as indeed throughout all New England, constituted each separate settlement a little democracy of itself. It was the natural reproduction of the system, which the instinct of humanity had imperfectly revealed to our AngloSaxon ancestors. In the ancient republics, citizenship had been an hereditary privilege. In Connecticut, citizenship was acquired by inhabitancy, was lost by

1 Trumbull, i. 452, 453.