1637.

English boats sailed by the places where their rude works frowned defiance, it was rumored among them that their enemies had vanished through fear. Hundreds of the Pequods spent much of the last night of their lives in rejoicings, at a time when the sentinels of the English were within hearing of their songs. On the twenty- May 26. sixth, two hours before day, the soldiers of Connecticut put themselves in motion; and, as the light of morning began to dawn, they made their attack on the principal fort, which stood in a strong position at the summit of a hill. The colonists were fighting for the security of their homes; if defeated, the war-whoop would resound near their cottages, and their wives and children be abandoned to the scalping-knife and the tomahawk. They ascend to the attack; a watch-dog bays an alarm at their approach; the Indians awake, rally, and resist, as well as bows and arrows can resist weapons of steel. The superiority of number was with them; and fighting closely, hand to hand, victory was tardy. "We must burn them!" shouted Mason, and cast a firebrand to the windward among the light mats of their cabins. Hardly could the English withdraw to encompass the place, before the encampment was in a blaze. Did the helpless natives climb the palisades, the flames assisted the marksmen to take good aim at them; did they attempt a sally, they were cut down by English broadswords. About six hundred Indians, men, women, and children, perished; most of them in the hideous conflagration. In little more than an hour, the work of destruction was finished, and two only of the English had fallen.

With the light of morning, three hundred or more Pequod warriors were descried, approaching from their second fort. They had anticipated success; what was their horror as they beheld the smoking ruins! They stamped on the ground, and tore their hair; but it was in vain to attempt revenge; then and always, to the close of the war, the feeble resistance of the natives hardly deserved, says Mason, the name of fighting; their defeat was certain, and unattended with much loss to the English. The aborigines were never

formidable in battle, till they became supplied with weapons of European invention.

A portion of the troops hastened homewards to protect the settlements from any sudden attack; while Mason, with about twenty men, marched across the country from the neighborhood of New London to the English fort at Saybrook. He reached the river at sunset; but Gardner, who commanded the fort, observed his approach; and never did a Roman consul, returning in triumph, ascend the Capitol with more joy than that of Mason and his friends, when they found themselves received as victors, and "nobly entertained with many great guns.'

وو

In a few days, the troops from Massachusetts arrived, attended by Wilson; for the ministers always shared every hardship and every danger. The remnants of the Pequods were pursued into their hiding-places; every wigwam was

burned, every settlement was laid waste. Sassacus, 1637. their sachem, was murdered by the Mohawks, to

whom he had fled for protection. The few that survived, about two hundred, surrendering in despair, were enslaved by the English, or incorporated among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts. "Fifteen of the boys and two women" were exported by Massachusetts to Providence Isle; and the returning ship brought back "some cotton, tobacco, and negroes."

1638.

The vigor and courage displayed by the settlers on the Connecticut, in this first Indian war in New England, struck terror into the savages, and secured a long period of peace. The infant was safe in its cradle, the laborer in the fields, the solitary traveller during the nightwatches in the forest; the houses needed no bolts, the settlements no palisades. The constitution, which on the *fourteenth of January, 1639, was adopted by them, was of unexampled liberality.

In two successive years, a general court had been held in May; at the time of the election, the committees from the towns came in and chose their magistrates, installed them, and engaged themselves to submit to their government and dispensation of justice. "The foundation of authority," said

1638.

May 31.

"They

Hooker, in an election sermon preached before the general court in May, 1638, "is laid in the free consent of the people, to whom the choice of public magistrates belongs by God's own allowance." who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place into which they call them."

Aug.

Winthrop of Massachusetts held it to be an error in the sister colony "that they chose divers men who, though otherwise holy and religious, had no learning or judgment which might fit them for affairs of government; by occasion whereof the main burden for managing state government fell upon some one of their ministers, who, though they were men of singular wisdom and godliness, yet, stepping out of their course, their actions wanted that blessing which otherwise might have been expected." In a letter therefore, written to Hooker, in the midsummer of 1638, "to quench these sparks of contention," Winthrop made remarks on the boundary between the states, and on the rejected articles of confederation which would have given to the commissioners of the states "absolute power;" that is, power of final decision, without need of further approval by the several states. He further "expostulated about the unwarrantableness and unsafeness of referring matter of counsel or judicature to the body of the people, quia the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser. The old law was, Thou shalt bring the matter to the judge, etc."

In reply to this, Hooker expressed an unwillingness in the matter of confederation "to exceed the limits of that equity which is to be looked at in all combinations of free states." As to the manner of conducting their separate governments, he wrote unreservedly: "That in the matter which is referred to the judge, the sentence should be left to his discretion, I ever looked at as a way which leads directly to tyranny, and so to confusion; and must plainly profess, if it was in my liberty, I should choose neither to live, nor leave my posterity, under such a government. Let the judge do according to the sentence of the law. Seek

the law at his mouth. The heathen man said, by the candle light of common sense: the law is not subject to passion, and therefore ought to have chief rule over rulers themselves.' It's also a truth that counsel should be sought from councillors; but the question yet is, who those should be. In matters of greater consequence, which concern the common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses which concern all, I conceive, under favor, most suitable to rule, and most safe for relief of the whole. This was the practice of the Jewish church, and the approved experience of the best ordered states."

1639.

From this seed sprung the constitution of ConJan. 14. necticut, first in the series of written American constitutions framed by the people for the people. Reluctantly leaving Springfield to the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, on the fourteenth of January, 1639, "the inhabitants and residents of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, associated and conjoined to be as one public state or commonwealth." The supreme power was intrusted to a general court composed of a governor, magistrates, and deputies from the several towns, all freemen of the commonwealth, and all chosen by ballot. The governor was further required to be "a member of some approved congregation and" to have been "formerly of the magistracy;" nor might the same person be chosen to that office oftener than once in two years. The governor and the magistrates were chosen by a majority of the whole body of freemen; the deputies of the towns, by all who had been admitted inhabitants of them, and had taken the oath of fidelity. Each of the three towns might send four deputies to every general court, and new towns might send so many deputies as the court should judge to be in a reasonable proportion to the number of freemen in the said towns; so that the representatives might form a general council, chosen by all. The general court alone had power to admit a freeman, whose qualifications were required to be residence within the jurisdiction and preceding admission as an inhabitant of one of the towns; that is, according to a later interpretation, a householder. By the oath of allegiance, as in Massachusetts, every

freeman must swear to be true and faithful to the government of the jurisdiction of Connecticut; and of no other sovereign was there a mention. The governor was in like manner sworn “to maintain all lawful privileges of this commonwealth," and to give effect "to all wholesome laws that are, or shall be, made by lawful authority here established." The oath imposed on the magistrates bound them "to administer justice according to the laws here established, and for want thereof according to the word of God." The amendment of the fundamental orders rested with the freemen in general court assembled. All power was to proceed from the people. From the beginning, Connecticut was constituted a republic, and was in fact independent.

More than two centuries have elapsed; the world has been made wiser by the most various experience; political institutions have become the theme on which the most powerful and cultivated minds have been employed, and so many constitutions have been framed or reformed, stifled or subverted, that memory may despair of a complete catalogue: but the people of Connecticut have found no reason to deviate essentially from the frame of government established by their fathers. Equal laws were the basis of their commonwealth; and therefore its foundations were lasting. These unpretending emigrants invented an admirable system; for they were near to nature, listened willingly to her voice, and easily copied her forms. No ancient usages, no hereditary differences of rank, no established interests, impeded the application of the principles of justice. Freedom springs spontaneously into life; the artificial distinctions of society require centuries to ripen. History has ever celebrated the heroes who have won laurels in scenes of carnage. Has it no place for the founders of states; the wise legislators, who struck the rock in the wilderness, so that the waters of liberty gushed forth in copious and perennial fountains? They who judge of men by their services to the human race will never cease to honor the memory of Hooker, and will join with it that of Ludlow and still more that of Haynes.

In equal independence, a Puritan colony sprang up at