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EXTERMINATION OF THE PEQUods.

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awake, rally, and resist, as well as bows and arrows can resist weapons of steel. The superiority of number was with the savages; as they fought, hand to hand, though the massacre spread from wigwam to wigwam, the issue was delayed. "We must burn them!" shouted Mason, and cast a firebrand to the windward among the light mats of the Indian cabins. Hardly could the English withdraw to encompass the place, before the whole encampment was in a blaze. Did the helpless natives climb the palisades, the flames assisted the marksmen to take good aim at the unprotected men; did they attempt a sally, they were cut down by the English broadswords. The carnage was complete: about six hundred Indians, men, women, and children, perished; most of them in the hideous conflagration. In about an hour the work of destruction was finished. Two only of the English had fallen. The sun, as it rose serenely in the east, was the witness of the victory.

With the light of morning, three hundred or more Pequod warriors were descried, as they proudly approached from their second fort. They had anticipated success; what was their horror as they beheld the smoking ruins, strown with the half-consumed flesh of so many hundreds of their race! 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 manner 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 the 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 vicinity 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 the heart of a Roman consul,

198 DEMOCRATIC LIBERTY IN CONNECTICUT.

[1639.

returning in triumph, swell more than the pride of Mason and his friends, when they found themselves received as victors, and “ nobly entertained with many great guns."

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 broken up, every cornfield laid waste. Sassacus, 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 Narragansets. There remained not a sannup nor squaw, not a warrior nor child, of the Pequod name. A nation had disappeared from the family of man.

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 succession of years of peace. The infant was safe in its cradle, the laborer in the fields, the solitary traveller during the night-watches in the forest; the houses needed no bolts, the settlements no palisades. Under the benignant auspices of peace, the citizens of the western colony resolved to perfect its political institutions, and to form a body politic by a voluntary association. The constitution which was thus framed in January, 1639, was of unexampled liberality. The elective franchise. belonged to all the members of the towns who had taken the oath of allegiance to the commonwealth; the magistrates and legislature were chosen annually by ballot; and the representatives were apportioned among the towns according to population. More than two centuries have elapsed; the world has been made wiser by the most various experience; political institutions have be come the theme on which the most powerful and cultivated minds have been employed; and so many consti

1638.]

DEMOCRATIC LIBERTY IN CONNECTICUT.

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tutions 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. No jurisdiction of the English monarch was recognized; the laws of honest justice were the basis of their commonwealth; and therefore its foundations were lasting. These humble 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 statesthe 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 of Haynes.

In equal independence, a Puritan colony sprang up at New Haven, under the guidance of John Davenport as its pastor, and of the excellent Theophilus Eaton, who was annually elected its governor for twenty years, till his death. Its forms were austere, unmixed Calvinism; but the spirit of humanity had sheltered itself under the rough exterior. On the eighteenth of April, 1638, the colonists held their first gathering under a branching oak. It was a season of gloom. Spring had not yet revived the verdure of nature; under the leafless tree the little flock were taught by Davenport, that, like the Son of man, they were led into the wilderness to be tempted. After a day of fasting and prayer, they rested their first frame of government on a simple plantation covenant, that "all of them would be ordered by the rules which the Scriptures held forth to them."

A title

200 THE HOUSE OF WISDOM AT NEW HAVEN. [1639.

to lands was obtained by a treaty with the natives, whom they protected against the Mohawks. When, after more than a year, the free planters of the colony desired a more perfect form of government, the followers of Him who was laid in a manger held their constituent assembly in a barn. There, on the fourth of June, 1639, by the influence of Davenport, it was solemnly resolved, that the Scriptures are the perfect rule of a commonwealth; that the purity and peace of the ordinance to themselves and their posterity, were the great end of civil order; and that church members only should be free burgesses. A committee of twelve was

selected to choose seven men, qualified for the foundation-work of organizing the government. Eaton, Davenport, and five others, were "the seven Pillars" for the new House of Wisdom, in the wilderness. In August, 1639, the seven pillars assembled, possessing for the time absolute power. Having abrogated every previous executive trust, they admitted to the court all church members; the character of civil magistrates was next expounded "from the sacred oracles;" and the election followed. Then Davenport, in the words of Moses to Israel in the wilderness, gave a charge to the governor, to judge righteously; "the cause that is too hard for you," such was part of the minister's text, bring it unto me, and I will hear it." Annual elections were ordered, and God's word established as the only rule in public affairs. Thus New Haven made the Bible its statute-book, and the elect its freemen. As neighboring towns were planted, each was likewise a house of wisdom, resting on its seven pillars, and aspiring to be illumined by the Eternal Light. The colonists prepared for the second coming of Christ, which they confidently expected. Meantime their pleasant villages spread along the Sound, and on the opposite shore of Long Island; and for years they nursed the hope of "speedily planting Delaware."

1634.] ENGLAND JEALOUS OF NEW ENGLAND.

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CHAPTER XVII.

THE UNITED COLONIES OF NEW ENGLAND.

THE English government was not indifferent to the progress of the colonies of New England. The stern discipline exercised by the government at Salem, produced an early harvest of enemies: resentment long rankled in the minds of some, whom Endicot had perhaps too passionately punished; and when they returned to England, Mason and Gorges, the rivals of the Massachusetts company, willingly echoed their vindictive complaints.

Proof was produced of marriages celebrated by civil magistrates, and of the system of colonial church discipline - proceedings which were at variance with the laws of England. "The departure of so many of THE BEST," such "numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen and good Christians," a more ill-boding sign to the nation than the portentous blaze of comets and the impressions in the air, at which astrologers are dismayed, began to be regarded by the archbishops as an affair of state; and ships bound with passengers for New England were detained in the Thames by an order of the council. "The colonists, it was said, aimed not at new discipline, but at sovereignty; and a requisition commanded the letters patent of the company to be produced in England.

In April, 1634, the archbishop of Canterbury, and those who were associated with him, received full power over the American plantations, to establish the government, to regulate the church, and to revoke any charter which conceded liberties prejudicial to the royal prerogative.

On receiving the news of this commission, poor as the new settlements were, six hundred pounds were raised towards fortifications; "the assistants and the deputies