Yale .' 7701-1726 Sdwin Oviail 1 I - -, ,v %^- OF NEVINS THE BEGINNINGS OF YALE PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF HERBERT A. SCHEFTEL OF THE CLASS OF 1898, YALE COLLEGE THE BEGINNINGS OF YALE (1701-1726) BY EDWIN OVIATT Illustrated by Theodore Diedricksen, Jr. NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXVI COPYRIGHT, 1916 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS First published October, 1916 THE HERBERT A. SCHEFTEL MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND The present volume is the second work published by the Yale University Press on the Herbert A. Scheftel Memorial Publica- tion Fund. This foundation was established January 12, 1915, by a gift to Yale Uni- versity by Mrs. Herbert A. Scheftel, of New York, in memory of her husband, a member of the Class of 1898, Yale College, who died September 12, 1914: "in recog- nition of the affection in which he always held Yale and in order to perpetuate in the University the memory of his particular interest in the work of the Yale University Press." PREFACE A surprisingly small number of books on Yale University are accessible to us. President Clap's quaint "Annals" of 1766 can now be consulted only in the few rare copies that have survived; Ebenezer Baldwin's dry compilation of 1831 has long been out of date; President Woolsey's fine Anniver- sary Address of 1850 is no longer in general circulation; the late William L. Kingsley's monumental "Yale College" was published as long ago as 1879. These old-time books, together with a few chapters in Bagg's "Four Years at Yale" (now out of print), and Professor Dexter's brief epitome of the University's history, together with such other narratives as may be found in periodicals and in American college history compilations, comprise practically all that has appeared in book form regarding Yale history. Much fresh material concerning these bygone days has come to light, of course, since 1879. Professor Dexter's researches, for instance, have brought out new facts and revised old statements. Delvers into Yale's past must needs become acquainted with his numerous papers in the publications of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, with his exhaust- ive collection of facts in his "Yale Biographies and Annals," and with his "Documentary History of Yale University," to be published this year. Anson Phelps Stokes' "Me- morials of Eminent Yale Men," published in 1914 by the Yale University Press, has brought together a great amount of hitherto scattered information regarding a number of graduates of the early days. Colonial town records have become much more accessible during these thirty-five years; letters and diaries have been discovered and pub- X Preface lished; new treatment has been given the whole Colonial period by numerous scholars, including our own Professors Fisher, Andrews, and Walker. As a result, much that had previously been accepted as true (as stated by such supposed authorities as Clap and President Quincy of Harvard and his school of followers) has had to be revised. The present writer has spent many an off-duty hour poring over these original sources, ransacking town-record offices and town and church histories, and visiting the scenes where Yale had its beginnings. Where considerable portions of this book give the modern understanding of certain epochs in Yale history, I presume that these latter-day corrections of the old views are responsible. Where I have given perhaps a new interpretation to certain other movements in this history, no one may be called to account but myself. Mr. Diedricksen's illustrations for this book should form not the least interesting and useful feature of it. Most of them have been drawn from ancient woodcuts and photographs; where an imaginary reconstruction has been attempted, only myself may be blamed for such anachro- nisms as may have crept in. It has been my plan to treat the several Colonial periods covered by these chronicles in such a way that one might first renew his acquaintance with the broad events of the times, and then follow the participants of the several acts of the drama in a perhaps more intimate way against that background. These three main periods are : the Davenport epoch, during which New Haven was founded as a Separa- tist church-state and attempts at a college were made; the Pierpont period, during which the Collegiate School was founded and carried on at the modern Clinton and the old Saybrook; and the Andrew-Cutler-Edwards era, during which Yale College was established and took root at New Haven. It is a coincidence, but a happy one, that this book Preface xi on these beginnings of Yale appears at the time of the two- hundredth anniversary of this latter event. That these easy-going pages may serve to give something at least of that new realization of how Yale's beginnings came about which the author came to have in writing them, is the cordial hope of the writer. EDWIN OVIATT. Ogden Street, New Haven, September 4, 1916. CONTENTS PART I JOHN DAVENPORT AND His NEW HAVEN COLLEGE PAGE Chapter I. John Davenport 3 Chapter II. The New Haven Colonists 18 Chapter III. The New Haven Church-State .... 30 Chapter IV. The Davenport Education 52 Chapter V. Davenport's New Haven College .... 70 Chapter VI. The Downfall of the New Haven Republic . 86 PART II THE FOUNDING OF THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL Chapter I. Connecticut after 1664 105 Chapter II. New Haven and James Pierpont . . . . 117 Chapter III. The Need of a Colony College . . . . 134 Chapter IV. The "Founding" by the Ministers . . . 148 Chapter V. The General Assembly Charter . . . . 172 Chapter VI. The Saybrook Organization 192 Chapter VII. Abraham Pierson 205 PART III THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL AND YALE COLLEGE Chapter I. The Killingworth Beginnings .... 223 Chapter II. Saybrook Days 245 Chapter III. The Connecticut Colony in 1701-1714 . . 259 Chapter IV. The Saybrook Platform 277 Chapter V. The Gifts of Books 289 xiv Contents PAGE Chapter VI. The Struggle for a Site .... . . 304 Chapter VII. The Beginnings at New Haven . . 324 Chapter VIII. "Yale College" at New- Haven . . . . 344 Chapter IX. Rector Cutler 369 Chapter X. The New Haven of Timothy Cutler . . 381 Chapter XI. The Result of the Books .... . . 396 Chapter XII. The End of an Era . . 413 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE THE GRANTING BY THE DEPUTIES OF THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL CHARTER, OCTOBER, 1701 . . Frontispiece An imaginary sketch, based on representations of the Second Meeting-house in standard New Haven histories, and on costumes of the period. The scene pictures the arrival of Deputies and members of the Upper House, and of James Pierpont and the other ministers with the Colle- giate School charter THE DAVENPORT ARMS ...... 2 Crest and Arms of John Davenport's Coventry family, from Kingsley's "Yale College" COVENTRY IN 1600 ....... 5 Ford's Hospital Gate, from Benjamin Poole's "The History of Coventry" COVENTRY FREE SCHOOL ...... 7 From an engraving in Poole's "The History of Coventry" MAGDALEN COLLEGE TOWER . . . . . 11 From Loggan's "View of Magdalen College, 1674," and from modern paintings, etc. LONDON SPIRES ........ 17 From an old English print, dated 1616 AUTOGRAPH OF THEOPHILUS EATON . . . . 18 From a letter by Davenport and Eaton to their friends in Boston, 1638 (the original is in the New York Public Library) A COLONIST'S HOUSE AT LENHAM, ENGLAND . . . 21 From a photograph owned by a descendant of Henri Thompson, Gent, who owned this house in the 17th Century. The Anthony Thompson of colonial New Haven is said to have been born here. The house, which is still standing, is not far from London xvi Illustrations PAGE THE "HECTOR" 22 From contemporaneous pictures of 17th Century English ships AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN HARVARD ..... 24 From Avery's "History of the United States" THE FIRST QUINNIPIAC WINTER ..... 26 This imaginary reconstruction is based on drawings of similar pioneer huts in Isham and Brown's "Early Con- necticut Houses." The view is from the west side of George Street near Church Street AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN DAVENPORT .... 28 Several letters by John Davenport are in the possession of Yale University PORTRAIT OF JOHN DAVENPORT ..... 29 From the original painting in the University Dining Hall STOCKS ......... 30 Based on sketches in standard American histories. The imaginary reconstruction of the Watch-house is based on Levermore's and Atwater's New Haven histories. The Stocks and Pillory, and the Watch-house faced College Street about opposite the present site of Phelps Hall GOVERNOR EATON'S HOUSE ...... 34 A crude woodcut representation of this chief dwelling house of colonial New Haven appears in Lambert's "His- tory of the Colony of New Haven" (1838). Isham and Brown, in their "Early Connecticut Houses," devote much space to a careful study of this building and to its probable floor plan and furniture arrangement. The house stood on the north side of the present Elm Street, about 200 feet east of Orange Street. Part of the original foundation is said to be still standing in the house now on that site NEW HAVEN IN 1640 ....... 39 Edward Atwater, in his "History of the Colony of New Haven" (1881), published a map of the village of this period, based on authoritative researches in the original Illustrations xvii PAGE allotment of land to the planters made by the late Henry White of New Haven. For the purposes of this book, the Atwater map has been elaborated from much new data gathered from the New Haven Colony Records, such as the probable designation of a number of the streets and main "corners," etc. The stockade and gates are problematical for this date (see footnote to p. 32), though the Colony Records look that way TRAINING-DAY ON THE MARKET-PLACE, NEW HAVEN . 42 The details for this drawing were studied from the Colony Records, and from descriptions by such authorities on New Haven history as Levermore, Atwater, Blake, etc. THE FIRST NEW HAVEN MEETING-HOUSE ... 46 Crude representations of this church building were pub- lished by Atwater and Mr. Henry T. Blake. The Colony Records supply such details as the location of the cause- way and "Mr. Davenport's Walk," the accoutrements of the soldier, the presence of a ladder at the Meeting-house, the drummer, etc. THE TOWN WATCH ....... 49 This imaginary reconstruction of the New Haven stockade and guard in 1640-1650 is based on the Colony Records, on Levermore's "Republic of New Haven," and on standard representations of the pioneer Plymouth Colony palisade A GUILFORD HOUSE IN 1660 ..... 51 The famous "Stone House" of the Rev. Mr. Whitfield, built partly for protective purposes against the Indians, and still standing (though greatly altered from its original structure) as a public museum. An exhaustive archi- tectural study of this well-known building may be found in Isham and Brown's "Early Connecticut Houses" EARLY NEW HAVEN WHARVES ..... 52 The principal "landing place" of colonial New Haven appears to have been on the present Water Street, north of Olive Street. The Colony Records contain numerous notes respecting the water front at this point. In the rear were the college "Oystershell-Fields" xviii Illustrations PAGE THE FIRST SCHOOLHOUSE ...... 57 In this imaginary reconstruction, the schoolhouse is given the pyramidal roof commonly adopted for most colonial public buildings of the period. An example may be found in Whitefield's "Homes of our Forefathers." The Colony Records mention a causeway (corduroy road) from this building to "Mr. Perry's Corner" (the present junction of Church and Elm Streets). According to Mr. Henry T. Blake, the schoolhouse probably stood just northeast of the present United Church AUTOGRAPH OF ISAAC ALLERTON ..... 58 From Avery's "History of the United States" AUTOGRAPH OF EZEKIEL CHEEVER .... 60 From Avery's "History of the United States" A NEW HAVEN STREET IN 1650 ..... 65 No representation has come down to us of any New Haven pioneer-period house except of Governor Eaton's. This imaginary sketch of a New Haven street of this period, therefore, has had to be based on studies of contemporary buildings elsewhere. For this purpose, Whitefield's "Homes of our Forefathers" and Isham and Brown's "Early Con- necticut Houses" have freely been drawn upon, a pro- cedure made possible by Mr. Isham's statement that pioneer New Haven and Hartford dwellings were much alike, and by the known number of rooms in such New Haven planters' houses as Thomas Gregson's. The width of the roadway, height of fences, presence of ladders (for fire protection), etc., are drawn from the Colony Records. Lambert is authority for the use of diamond-paned windows in at least some of the houses. Atwater's map has been used to locate the relative positions of the houses INTERIOR OF SCHOOLHOUSE ...... 69 Based on similar representations in standard American histories STATUE OF JOHN HARVARD ...... 70 From a photograph of the statue in the Harvard Yard Illustrations xix PAGE THE DUTCH ARREST NEW HAVEN TRADERS ... 73 The various details for this drawing are based on early prints of New York and of colonial shipping, and on books on early costumes THOMAS GREGSON'S CORNER OF THE MARKET-PLACE . 78 An imaginary reconstruction, based on Atwater's map, the Colony Records (as to the footbridge and fences), and on Isham and Brown's studies of contemporary houses in Hartford that fit the known requirements of the Gregson house. Isham says of this, that Gregson had "a parlor, hall, and chambers, an arrangement which requires nothing more elaborate than the two-room, central chimney plan." The view is up the modern Chapel Street from the Green corner of Church Street AUTOGRAPH OF EDWARD HOPKINS .... 85 The University owns an original letter by Edward Hop- kins, to John Winthrop, Sr., dated 1636 PORTRAIT OF GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP ... 86 The original painting, by some unknown artist, is in the possession of descendants of Governor Winthrop in New York City. A copy, by George F. Wright, is in the State Capitol at Hartford AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR JOHN WINTHROP ... 91 From "The Governors of Connecticut" THOMAS HOOKER'S HARTFORD HOUSE .... 93 From Avery's "History of the United States" GOVERNOR LEETE'S GUILFORD HOUSE .... 95 From a woodcut in Lambert's "History of the Colony of New Haven" AUTOGRAPH OF THOMAS HOOKER .... 101 An original letter by Thomas Hooker to John Winthrop, Jr., dated 1636, is in the University Archives xx Illustrations PAGE GOVERNOR ANDROS' COAT OF ARMS . . . . 104 A copy is in the Collections of the Bostonian Society, and is reproduced in Avery's "History of the United States" AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR WILLIAM LEETE . . . 105 An original letter by Governor Leete to John Winthrop, Jr., dated 1661, is in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR ANDROS . . . . 109 The University possesses an original letter by Andros to Governor Fitz-John Winthrop, dated 1687 A HARTFORD HOUSE IN 1660 . . . . . Ill From a drawing in Whitefield's "Homes of our Fore- fathers" AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR ROBERT TREAT . . . 114 An original letter by Governor Treat to Fitz-John Win- throp, dated 1702, is in the University Archives PORTRAIT OF JAMES PIERPONT . . . . . 117 The original painting, by an unknown artist, probably painted in Boston in 1711, is owned by descendants of Pier- pont in New Haven SECOND MEETING-HOUSED 1685 . . . . . 126 A representation of this church building may be found in Mr. Blake's "Chronicles of the New Haven Green" GOVERNOR ANDROS IN NEW HAVEN . . . . 131 The costumes, etc., are largely based on paintings by the late Howard Pyle JAMES PIERPONT'S CHAIR AND TABLE . . . . 133 The original chair is in the University Library lobby; the table is in the possession of descendants of Pierpont in New Haven, by whom permission was given to make this sketch from it PORTRAIT OF INCREASE MATHER . . . . . 134 John Vanderspriet's original painting is in the Massa- chusetts Historical Society Collections Illustrations xxi PAGE HARVARD COLLEGE IN 1700 138 The drawing, adapted to this date, is from a woodcut in Quincy's "History of Harvard" INCREASE MATHER'S HOUSE, BOSTON . . . . 145 From Edwin Whitefield's "Homes of our Forefathers." A later sketch, showing the changes due to modern business needs, is to be found in Porter's "Rambles in Old Boston" AUTOGRAPH OF INCREASE MATHER . . . . 147 The original letter by Increase Mather, dated 1701, in which his scheme for the Collegiate School is suggested, is in the University Archives THE BRANFORD HOUSE DOORS . . . . . 148 When the parsonage of Samuel Russel of Branford was torn down in 1836, these double front doors were saved and later brought to New Haven and set up in the wall of the private office of the University Librarian, where they now may be seen. Except for having been sawn down to accommodate the space allotted for them, these historic doors are in their original condition SAMUEL RUSSEL'S HOUSE, BRANFORD . . . . 160 A crude pen and ink drawing of this building was made about 1836, and from it have come all later representa- tions AUTOGRAPH OF COTTON MATHER . . . . . 164 The University possesses an original letter by Cotton Mather, dated 1714 PORTRAIT OF COTTON MATHER . . . . . 171 The original painting, by Pelham, is in the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society PORTRAIT OF JUDGE SAMUEL SEWALL . . . . 172 A copy of the original painting is in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society xxii Illustrations PAGE MILES' TAVERN IN 1700 175 Adapted from a water color in the possession of Gen. George H. Ford of New Haven, which in turn was painted from a pen and ink sketch of the building made around 1850 AUTOGRAPH OF SAMUEL SEWALL . . . . . 178 This signature may be found on an original letter by Samuel Sewall to James Pierpont, dated 1701, in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF ISAAC ADDINGTON . . . . 179 From Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America" THE UPPER HOUSE GRANTING THE CHARTER . . 185 This imaginary scene in Miles' Tavern depicts Governor Fitz-John Winthrop and his Council discussing the Colle- giate School charter, October, 1701. The costumes and furniture are from standard authorities on the period AUTOGRAPH OF GERSHOM BULKELEY . . . . 189 From the original letter by Bulkeley to the Collegiate School promoters, dated September 17, 1701, in which he opposes the granting of a charter. The letter is in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF JAMES FITCH . . . . . 190 From the original letter of gift to the Collegiate School, dated October 16, 1701, in the University Archives PORTRAIT OF SECRETARY ADDINGTON . . . . 191 The original painting is in the New England Historical and Genealogical Society rooms, Boston AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR FITZ-JOHN WINTHROP . . 192 The University owns an original letter from Governor Fitz-John Winthrop to Joseph Dudley, dated 1704 THE FIRST MEETING OF THE TRUSTEES . . . . 195 Various portraits of ministers of the period, and photo- graphs of contemporaneous houses still standing in Old Illustrations xxiii PAGE Saybrook, have been used for this scene at Thomas Buck- ingham's house BLACK HORSE TAVERN, SAYBROOK .... 200 From a photograph of the original building still standing in Old Saybrook, kindly loaned by Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart of Middletown, Conn. This house was built in 1665 PORTRAIT OF GOVERNOR FITZ-JOHN WINTHROP . . 204 The original painting, by an unknown artist, is in the State Library at Hartford ABRAHAM PIERSON'S GREAT WAINSCOT CHAIR . . 205 This chair stands in the President's room in Woodbridge Hall; for years it was annually used by Yale Presidents at Commencements THE FIRST NEWARK MEETING-HOUSE .... 212 From an old map of Newark, N. J., published in Jonathan F. Stearns' "First Church in Newark" ABRAHAM PIERSON'S STATUE ON THE COLLEGE CAMPUS . 219 A replica of this statue stands on the grounds of the Morgan School, Clinton, just east of the site of the Pierson parsonage of 1701-1707. The representation, of course, is imaginary, as no portrait of the Collegiate School's first Rector is known to exist. This statue was modeled by Mr. Launt Thompson AUTOGRAPHS OF THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL'S ORIGINAL TRUSTEES ....... 220 These signatures (in order) are of James Noyes, Israel Chauncy, Thomas Buckingham (of Saybrook), Abraham Pierson, Samuel Andrew, Timothy Woodbridge, James Pierpont, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, and Samuel Russel. They are taken from original autographs on a group of documents between 1701 and 1716, in the Uni- versity Archives, and are here published (most of them for the first time) with the permission of the University Library Committee. The only letter by Samuel Mather owned by the University is not in his own handwriting xxiv Illustrations PAGE THE YALE ARMS AND CREST ..... 222 This Yale family coat of arms is from "The Yales and Wales" by Rodney Horace Yale THE FRANKLIN MILE-STONE . . . 223 i From the original on the Clinton main street A MAP OF KlLLINGWORTH (CLINTON) JUST BEFORE RECTOR PIERSON'S DAY ..... 226 With additions to bring it to 1701, from a blue print in the Killingworth Town Clerk's office, kindly loaned by Mr. G. W. Jones of Clinton, Conn. This map was originally prepared from the land allotments of Killing- worth in 1665 THE KILLINGWORTH MEETING-HOUSE IN 1701 . . 229 From a drawing in Kingsley's "Yale College," and from Clinton documents describing the schoolhouse of 1703 TUTOR JOHN HART'S CHAIR ..... 236 From a photograph taken in the Whitfield House historical collection in Guilford, Conn. RECTOR PIERSON'S PARSONAGE IN KILLINGWORTH . . 238 An imaginary reconstruction, based on measurements made on the ground, and from descriptions in Stiles, etc. The building itself is drawn from a contemporaneous house, still standing, in Madison. The site of the well was recently uncovered by the present owner. The road at the right is the present Clinton main street. Rector Pierson's inventory shows that he had apple orchards and tobacco fields INDIAN RIVER, KILLINGWORTH, 1707 .... 241 From a drawing made on the spot; the view is east, looking up to the Meeting-house Hill, from just south of the present main street bridge MR. PIERSON'S CIDER-CUP ...... 244 From the original on exhibition in the University Library Illustrations xxv PAGE THE PIERSON GRAVE-STONE ..... 245 Drawn from the original THE LORD HOUSE, OLD SAYBROOK .... 248 From a photograph loaned by Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart of Middletown, an authority on Saybrook history. The house is still standing and was built in 1665 THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL AT SAYBROOK . . . 253 This imaginary sketch is based on photographs of con- temporary houses of the supposed Lynde house type, and on the map of Saybrook Point in 1709 on page 256 SAYBROOK POINT IN 1709 256 President Stiles published a rough sketch of the streets and houses on Saybrook Point in his "Itinerary" of 1793. The contours of the Point and street layout in this map, with such of the buildings as were standing in 1709, have been taken from the Stiles map. I am indebted to Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart, of Middletown, Conn., for numerous notes on the Stiles sketch, which have made it possible to repre- sent here, with a very close approach to historical accuracy, what other houses were then standing THE MORGAN HOUSE IN CLINTON .... 259 From the original building, on the Clinton main street, a few rods east of the Green. This house, however, may have been erected at a little later date than 1701, judging from a manuscript account of the town's history loaned by a Clinton antiquarian GOVERNOR TREAT'S HOUSE IN MILFORD, 1699 . . 265 From Lambert's "History of the Colony of New Haven" A MADISON HOUSE OF 1700 274 This building is still standing, opposite the Madison Green PORTRAIT OF GOVERNOR GURDON SALTONSTALL . . 277 The University owns a contemporary portrait of Salton- stall, from which was made the copy in the Connecticut State Library xxvi Illustrations PAGE GOVERNOR SALTONSTALI/S CHAIR .... 283 This chair stood in the Saltonstall house in East Haven and is now in the possession of a private owner there. This drawing of it is from a photograph reproduced in Sarah E. Hughes' "History of East Haven" SALTONSTALL'S CONNECTICUT TROOPS IN BOSTON IN 1710 287 Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America" is authority for the fact that Saltonstall's Boston headquarters on this military expedition was "The Green Dragon Inn." This picture of that inn is taken from Whitefield's "Homes of our Forefathers" AUTOGRAPH OF GURDON SALTONSTALL .... 288 From a letter to Governor Fitz-John Winthrop, dated 1698, in the University Archives PORTRAIT OF JEREMIAH DUMMER .... 289 From an engraving in Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America" QUEEN ANNE SQUARE, LONDON ..... 292 Based on a plate in "The History of the Squares of London," by E. Beresford Chancellor, which, being a little later in date, probably does not show the Yale mansion. The square, however, was practically the same in Elihu Yale's day PLASGRONO, ELIHU YALE'S WREXHAM HOUSE . . 295 From a photograph of an old drawing published in Rod- ney Horace Yale's "The Yales and Wales" THE ARRIVAL OF THE DUMMER BOOKS AT SAYBROOK . 299 The details for this imaginary reconstruction were studied on the ground, the scene being laid at the old Saybrook Point landing place at the south end of the main village street AUTOGRAPH OF BENJAMIN LORD . . . . . 311 From an original letter, dated 1776, in the University Archives Illustrations xxvii PAGE AUTOGRAPH OF THOMAS BUCKINGHAM (OF HARTFORD) . 314 From an original Trustees' document in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF THOMAS RUGGLES . . . . 318 From an original paper, dated 1720, in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF MOSES NOYES ..... 320 From an original endorsement of the minutes of the last Trustees' meeting held at Saybrook, September 12, 1716, in the University Archives REV. AZARIAH MATHER'S HOUSE IN SAYBROOK . . 321 From a photograph loaned by Rev. Dr. Samuel Hart of Middletown. This house, however, may have been built at a later date than 1716 AUTOGRAPH OF STEPHEN BUCKINGHAM . . . 323 From a copy of a Trustees' letter to Jeremiah Dummer, September 10, 1718, signed by the Trustees, and now in the University Archives AUTOGRAPH OF SAMUEL JOHNSON .... 324 From "The Life and Correspondence of Samuel John- son," by Rev. E. E. Beardsley THE SALTONSTALL HOUSE ...... 328 Reconstructed from a rough sketch in Whitefield's "Homes of our Forefathers" PORTRAIT OF TUTOR SAMUEL JOHNSON . . . . 331 From "The Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson," by Rev. E. E. Beardsley FACSIMILE OF LETTER BY RECTOR SAMUEL ANDREW . 334 From the original in the University Archives, dated July 23, 1717 xxviii Illustrations PAGE BUILDING THE COLLEGE HOUSE ..... 339 This imaginary sketch is based on the actual dimensions of the timbers, to be found in a memorandum on the back of a Trustees' paper in the University Archives, and pub- lished for the first time in Professor Dexter's "Docu- mentary History of Yale University" (1916). Several suggestions by Mr. Norman M. Isham, the Colonial archi- tecture authority, have been incorporated in the framing plans AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN DAVENPORT (OF STAMFORD) . . 343 From an original document in the University Archives, dated 1718 AUTOGRAPH OF ELIHU YALE ..... 344 From an original letter in the possession of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University AUTOGRAPH OF JEREMIAH DUMMER .... 349 From Avery's "History of the United States" PORTRAIT OF ELIHU YALE ...... 352 From the original painting by Enoch Zeeman, probably done in 1717 in London, and now in the University Dining Hall THE FIRST YALE COLLEGE HOUSE .... 354 The traditional view of this building is the Greenwood plate published by Buck in Boston, around 1750. Pro- fessor Dexter, in his "Yale Biographies and Annals," con- siders the Greenwood representation as "a fancy sketch." It obviously does not follow the dimensions of the struc- ture, as given by the Trustees at the time or in their memorandum of the timber specifications, nor by President Clap in his "Annals of Yale," 1766. An attempt has here been made, with the valued assistance of Mr. Norman M. Isham of Providence, the recognized authority on early New England architecture, to represent this building for the first time in its known dimensions, which were about 165 feet long by 22 wide, and 27 feet high. Professor Dexter's decision that there was no clock on this building, Illustrations xxix PAGE as Greenwood's drawing has it, has been adopted for this representation. On the other hand, accepting Mr. Isham's decision, made after close study by him of all available sources, that "Greenwood probably sat down before this building and drew it 'just as it really was,' " all of the other details of the traditional sketch have been retained in this new representation. Says Mr. Isham: "From my examination of the Greenwood engraving it seems to me that, apart from the fact that it is inaccurate and wrong in many ways in proportion and perspective, it is correct in important items." As to the drawing in this book Mr. Isham says: "It is a good interpretation of the Greenwood engraving, and is as near as anyone can ever get to the building as it was in 1718, though the element of conjecture, of course, will largely come in in any modern reconstruction." Later contemporary sketches of this building are entirely at variance with each other, from the correctly-elongated plan in Brown's Map of 1724, and the high and short elevation in Wadsworth's Map of New Haven "with all the buildings in 1748" (which gives it six entries and a hip roof), to the views in Honey- wood's sketches printed in Stiles' "Literary Diary." The fact, however, that it had three entries, is fully established both by Greenwood's sketch and by the rough pen draw- ings in President Clap's manuscript College "Account Books" in the University Archives, wherein he assigned the rooms to the students AUTOGRAPH OF WILLIAM TAILOR .... 358 From Avery's "History of the United States" THE COMMENCEMENT AT NEW HAVEN IN 1718 . . 359 An imaginary sketch, based on Samuel Johnson's manu- script account of the occasion in the University Archives, from Brown's Map of 1724, and from the new view of the College House in this book THE HARTFORD STATE HOUSE OF 1719 . . . . 364 From a drawing in William DeLoss Love's "Colonial History of Hartford" BRINGING THE COLLEGE BOOKS TO NEW HAVEN . . 367 A sketch based on contemporary accounts of the proceeding xxx Illustrations PAGE PORTRAIT OF RECTOR TIMOTHY CUTLER . . . 373 From Kingsley's "Yale College" THE ENTRANCE TO ST. GILES CHURCH, WREXHAM . 376 From a photograph loaned by Mr. Warwick James Price, and published in The Yale Alumni Weekly in 1907 THE YALE FAMILY CHURCH-YARD NEAR PLAS-YN YALE . 380 From "The Yales and Wales," by Rodney Horace Yale THE MARKET-PLACE FROM THE COLLEGE YARD IN 1724 . 384 An imaginary reconstruction, based closely on contempo- rary records of the sites, and New Haven histories of the appearance, of the various buildings AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN ALLING ..... 389 This original autograph of Yale's treasurer from 1702 to 1717 is taken from his will, found for this book among the court documents of that period by John L. Gilson, judge of the Probate Court of New Haven County NEW HAVEN IN 1724 390 Reconstructed, with additions drawn from contemporary public records, from Brown's "Map of New Haven in 1724" AUTOGRAPH OF TIMOTHY CUTLER .... 394 From an original document in the University Archives dated 1720, and signed by the Trustees and witnessed by Cutler, who was not a Trustee A YALE UNDERGRADUATE OF 1720 .... 395 This drawing is based on costumes shown in Greenwood's sketch of the first College House, and from contempo- raneous Harvard student costumes in the well-known "Prospect of the Colleges in Cambridge, New England, 1726," published in George Gary Bush's "Harvard," and elsewhere Illustrations xxxi PAGE AUTOGRAPH OF JARED ELIOT ..... 397 From "Memorials of Eminent Yale Men," by Anson Phelps Stokes RECTOR CUTLER AND THE TRUSTEES .... 406 As described in the text, and showing the second-floor Library of the College House, with the Dummer books, globes, etc. AUTOGRAPH OF DANIEL BROWNE, JR. .... 410 From an original paper of 1720 in the University Archives PORTRAIT OF TUTOR JONATHAN EDWARDS . . . 413 From Anson Phelps Stokes' "Memorials of Eminent Yale Men" AUTOGRAPH OF JONATHAN EDWARDS . . . . 417 From "The Edwards Memorial," 1871 THE COLLEGE YARD FROM THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE . 419 An imaginary reconstruction, based on the new view of "Yale College" in this book, and on the known location of the President's house and gardens on Chapel Street AUTOGRAPH OF ELIPHALET ADAMS .... 425 From an original letter, dated New London, 1717, in the University Archives PORTRAIT OF RECTOR ELISHA WILLIAMS . . . 426 The original portrait of Rector Williams was painted by Smybert, the contemporary Boston artist, after 1724. The copy owned by the University was made by Moulthrop in 1795 THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE, 1722 428 From a drawing in Kingsley's "Yale College" AUTOGRAPH OF RECTOR ELISHA WILLIAMS . . . 430 From Kingsley's "Yale College" PART I JOHN DAVENPORT AND HIS NEW HAVEN COLLEGE TVie Davenport Arms CHAPTER I JOHN DAVENPORT I N the latter days of the reign of the good Queen Bess, the quaint little city of Coventry, famed for its ancient procession of the Lady Godiva and for its wooden-headed Peeping Tom, was still the considerable rural community that it had been for two centuries of English history. Around it still ran that great city wall, three miles long and nine good English feet in thickness, which, with its thirty-two towers and twelve fortified gates, had done good service for the rebel- lious Warwick against Edward VI and which, a half-century later, was to defy Charles I and, still later, be demolished by his son. It was, in 1600, a community of some twelve hun- dred houses, built for the most part of great timbers filled in with the plastered brick of the early I5th Century style, the upper stories of which projected over the narrow paved lanes below. Through it then, as in William Dugdale's day, still flowed the river Sherbourne, to join the Avon a few miles out in the country and then meander through pleasant woods and meadows to Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon, where William Shakespeare was shortly to end his days, and, come a few years, John Harvard to be born. Difficult it would have been to imagine, when John Davenport was born in 1597 in this ancient walled English city, that the seed was there to be planted that later, in the The Beginnings of Yale career of this famous son of Coventry, was to come to flower in the New World church-state of New Haven, and, two generations later still, to bring forth that institution whose beginnings are again to be traced in the following chapters. Yet the occasion was forming, for the England of Eliza- beth's day, as we will recall, was at the parting of the established ways of the English centuries. The forty years of Elizabeth had seen the highest development in Tudor history of the power of the Crown; on the other hand, of the most generally contented public under the traditional English monarchy. Yet the underlying movement for what we now know as the modern era was rising steadily. With the tactless opening acts of James I's reign, it was shortly to sweep up through the two decades of that grotesque period, and end, at the close of the civil wars of Charles I, in carrying Cromwell's Puritans over the decapitated body of the King into Whitehall, and, when that furious religious- political wave had subsided, in the beginnings of modern England. Coventry, as all Warwickshire, had been a storm-center of this hardly-understood popular movement throughout the half-century before John Davenport was born. During his grandfather's later years, Elizabeth being queen, the Protestant refugees who had scurried to Geneva during the brief days of Bloody Queen Mary had returned to their homes. They since, throughout rural England, had been growing in numbers and influence; had come to assume high offices in Church and State, and now, during the last years of the 1 6th Century, were the predominant party among the middle-class Englishmen, both in London and in the pro- vincial cities. In Warwickshire, the Protestant movement had been especially strong ever since the Lollard days. Warwick men had been famous martyrs to the popular John Davenport Church reform under the earlier Tudors, and Coventry friends and neighbors of Davenport's family had gone to the stake for the new religious principles. So that, I fancy, the majority of the people among whom John Davenport was to grow up as a serious-minded and ambitious boy, were prepared by the year 1600 to cast their lot with the new party and to add to the rapid- ly growing public feeling throughout England against the petty despot- isms of the divine- ly appointed James and his impositions of Church cere- mony. In 1565 the young Queen Bess had visited Coven- try and had been received with that genuine show of loyalty which was life itself to her. Ten years later she was again entertained, and the famous old Coventry play of "Hock Tuesday" performed for her benefit. But twenty-five years more, and the good Coventry townsfolk would have stood silently in their narrow paved lanes had Elizabeth visited them again, in strong aversion to the type of English life and court morality which the Queen and her royal favorites had come to typify for them. This change, which made the Coventry of John Daven- port's youth a different place from that of his father's, had, The Beginnings of Yale of course, permeated the whole of England. We may recall how it had been coming. The introduction of the Bible as a popular book had been reacting on the social as well as the religious conditions of the people for a century previous. The New Learning had come in with the Italian Renais- sance and had brought with it the philosophy and poetry of the Greeks and Latins. A broadened intellectual horizon had thus come to Englishmen. The new sense of individual- ism that grew out of the free study of the Bible had worked to produce that swelling tide of popular learning and that new sense of personal liberty which were shortly to lay the broad foundations for our modern intellectual and political democracy. The Coventry people had long been taking part in this new popular change. The great-grandfather of John Davenport could have bought suppressed translations of the Bible at the Coventry Corpus Christ! Fairs from itinerant missionaries, just as his father probably did buy, surreptitiously, the "Martin Marprelate" attacks on the Elizabethan episcopate from discreet neighboring trades- men in the Corpus Christi Fairs of his day. In fact, the "Marprelate" printers at one time had taken refuge from the Bishop of London and the Primate in friendly Coven- try, and had secretly issued their anonymous and revolution- ary pamphlet t s from the very houses where, doubtless, Davenport's father was a frequent visitor. The final sup- pression of these pamphlets, with the execution of one of their authors, was no doubt a determining factor in the religious zeal with which Coventry people, as Warwickshire folk generally, supported Cartwright, the master of the hospital at near-by Warwick, in his attempt to introduce his more or less Presbyterian scheme of church discipline and organization of classes and synods as a rival system to the established Church. Mid-England, and London as well, John Davenport were thus by 1600 preparing for the movement which, as we know it in Puritanism, was shortly to rock the nation to its very social and religious center, and bring about new times. So that John Davenport's religious and political sur- roundings, as he grew up to boyhood in the ancient walled city of Coventry, were decidedly revolutionary. The open- ing acts of the coming Puritan period were well under way by the time that he first appears as a scholar at the Free Grammar School of his old city. This school building, famous among the great English public schools that sprang up throughout the country during the Reformation, four centuries previously had been the home of the Coventry Hospitallers of St. John, and had been granted, during Henry VIII's sweeping suppression of the monasteries, to 8 The Beginnings of Yale one John Hales, who, a New Learning follower, had given it to the town as a Free School. One of the original aisles of this ancient hospital, and the schoolroom of young Davenport's boyhood, now a parish room, may still be seen by the inquiring visitor. It was in this tiny, high-peaked, stone-buttressed building, with its mullioned windows, that young John Davenport went to school, there to learn his grammar, to drone out his three music lessons a week, to recite his Latin verses, and, no doubt, boy fashion, to hack his initials in the old oak prior's stalls as did the famous antiquarian, Dugdale, before him. The father of John Milton's Cambridge tutor was later in charge of this school, and Dr. Holland, a renowned classical translator and drill- master of the day, was a youthful usher there when John Davenport began his schooling. John Davenport's lifelong fluency in classical study, and his various attempts to build his New Haven Colony education on it, very likely began in the many long boyhood hours that he 'spent in this quaint old Coventry Free School under the encouraging eye and rod of the scholarly Holland. It was during these school years of Davenport, and just before he went up to Oxford, that Coventry had that first serious clash with King James over religious matters which was to become in time an important factor in the establish- ment of his Puritan commonwealth. Throughout Eliza- beth's reign, and up to this time in King James', the popular feeling of the growing Puritan element in the Church had steadily been gaining ground for a repression of the many English-Church ceremonies which the liberated English mind connected with the Church of Rome. In addition to the giving of a ring in marriage, for instance, the Puritan element objected to the traditional custom of kneeling to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Coventry people, following the rebellious Cartwright, had come to John Davenport relinquish a number of these ceremonies. But noncon- formity in anything was to James I not only an evidence of disloyalty to the established Church, but to the Crown itself, and Coventry, in 1611, received a letter from the King's own hand soundly rating the Mayor and Corporation for permitting such revolutionary acts. John Davenport was fourteen years old when the uproar broke out upon the receipt of the King's summary commands, and it could hardly have escaped affecting him, as it no doubt had its part in unconsciously determining him in his own course some few years afterwards. The townspeople doubtless gave in, as the old records of Coventry show that King James made a formal visit there five years later, with a great train of nobility, to be received in humble loyalty. The houses and town gates were painted black and white in his honor on this occasion, there was a great procession of the Mayor and Corporation, and a massive cup of pure gold was presented as a peace offering to his Majesty and put among the royal plate. Two years later young Davenport went up to Oxford, to fit himself for the Church. Davenport's Oxford days are obscure and bear little on what was to follow. Whether he went to Merton College and thence to Magdalen (as Wood, the Oxford chronicler, says) or matriculated at Brasenose (as says Mather, who had Davenport's private papers before him when he wrote his biography in the "Magnalia" many years later) we do not now know. At any rate, he entered Oxford as a "battler," or beneficiary for his tuition and board, at the expense doubtless of his relatives in Coventry. It was prob- ably two years later that he was forced to leave Oxford, his degrees ungained for want of means to continue his study for them. Yet he had made a small mark there, even in that short time, if we may accept the word of a later enemy, one io The Beginnings of Yale Stephen Goffe, a most disreputable individual, by the way, and brother, as it happened, of that regicide whom Daven- port was to befriend many years later in New Haven. Goffe says that Davenport had made a name for himself as a speaker and writer at Oxford, natural gifts which were to make him one of the foremost preachers of his time. Oxford at that day was far from its earlier character as a "nest of Papists." It had passed through a tremendous religious excitement due to the incoming of the New Learn- ing. Yet, when Davenport was there, it was probably less intellectually rebellious than its sister university and in a few years was passively to accept King James' authority, as Coventry had done. This very passiveness may have had its usual effect in Davenport's mental training, and have driven in still deeper the sense of personal freedom in reli- gious matters with which he had come up to the University from Coventry. Yet I imagine that those two early years of Davenport's at Oxford were years of acquisition rather than of religious rebellion, as would be apt to be the case in a sixteen-year-old youth who had his chosen career before him. The opportunities in this way were unusual, even for Oxford. Sir Henry Saville, the renowned classical scholar, was Master of Merton then; John Hales, a descendant of the Coventry Hales, was Royal Professor of Greek; Dr. Thomas Holland, "an Apollos mighty at the Scriptures," had been Regius Professor of Divinity at Balliol, was now Rector of the Puritan school at Exeter, and later was to be one of the six Oxford scholars who were to translate the prophets for the King James Bible. Christopher Angelus, a Christian Greek who had been forced to leave his own country, had just arrived from Cambridge to teach elemen- tary Greek and vaingloriously to impress his scholars, so the story goes, with the marks that he carried of Turkish persecution. m/< ; ff \ f g 12 The Beginnings of Yale Yet Oxford in John Davenport's day was partially rebel- lious. Balliol College was a Puritan center then, Robert Abbott leading in the new movement, to the mounting anger of William Laud, then President of St. John's. This latter brilliant Churchman, later to be the sincere if cruel tool of the Stuarts in suppressing Puritanism and to have a deter- mining effect on John Davenport's career in the Church, was even then attracting incipient Puritan fire and brim- stone. The Oxford students of that day Davenport among them could hardly have escaped excitement over the situation in the University which resulted from such fierce public attacks upon him as when Abbott, thundering in Balliol pulpit, cried: "What art thou? Romish or English, Papist or Protestant? a mongrel compound of both." So that, if Oxford in 1616, when Davenport left it, was officially passive in the King's hands, there were pro- fessors and preachers in it who must have opened the eyes of the students to the coming struggle between the Church of James and the people of England. John Davenport's Oxford knew probably little of that other intellectual world, literary London. Shakespeare, having written "The Tempest" and "A 'Winter's Tale" during these formative years of young Davenport's life, had died comparatively unknown on the Avon in the year that the latter had left Oxford to begin his career in the English Church. Spenser had finished "The Faery Queen" when Davenport was two years old; Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson were coming on for the last stage of the declining Elizabethan drama. But all of this magnificent crest of the first great English literature had passed by such earnestly religious youths as John Davenport, and was doubtless little noticed by them. It is worth recalling something of this, as the cultural lack which we cannot fail to sense in the com- munity that John Davenport later led to the New World, John Davenport 13 and its absence in the intellectual life of the early days of the college his successors were to found, goes back, in very large measure, I doubt not, to this separation. I do not need to do more than pass rapidly over the well- known facts of Davenport's career in the next few years. We trace him through a minor chaplaincy near the historic church of Durham to a small position in St. Lawrence Jewry in London, and then suddenly to the vicarage of one of London's most influential churches, St. Stephen's in Coleman Street, a position which in itself is the best evidence that we can have of his inherent powers and capacity. Here John Davenport found himself suddenly in the midst of the fullest public life of his time, and in touch with the leaders on all sides of the great public questions. He went up to Oxford now, to pass his examinations for his degrees, and, returning to London, seems to have launched himself full upon the troublous waters of the day. These, we hardly need again to recall, were troublous enough. It had now been some sixty years since the first small voluntary congregation of Separatists from the Church of England had been broken up in London and most of the members unceremoniously marched off to jail. It had been some fifty years since Robert Browne's pioneer Congregational church had been formed and, in its extreme revolt from traditions, had angered the Puritan element in the established Church as much as the Church dignitaries themselves. It had been but a generation since, to the hilarious amusement of the Court and of the university men in London, that one of their members, John Barrowe, the Cambridge graduate, turned Puritan. The Separatist movement, fanned by the extremists who had fled to Holland and Geneva and returned, was now rapidly gaining. James, shivering and gibbering over the fear that the Scottish pres- bytery would follow him into England, had, immediately 14 The Beginnings of Yale upon his accession, demanded conformity of the English Puritan clergy and laymen, and begun that tense religious struggle which was at once to become a political one, with the results we now know. William Brewster, at Scrooby, had organized his Separatist congregation, and had at- tracted to it the William Bradford who later, as the first Governor of Plymouth, was to become a leader in the New World settlement. The Scrooby Separatists' church had been stopped by the public prosecutors, and the members had fled to Leyden in Holland. But the Puritan movement was under way. II All of which was the beginning of a new era in English history. And other factors were coming in as well. During the latter years of this period, English trade had established itself across the Atlantic in successful dispute of Spanish appropriations, and joint-stock companies of English capi- talists had been formed to colonize the New World's eastern coast and benefit from the great trading possibilities that were imagined to lie in that direction. The story is well known: how, in 1607, one of these companies settled Jamestown, Virginia; how in this way the attention of the London Puritan refugees was directed to the possibility of emigrating under one of them; how these so-called Pilgrims, under Brewster and Bradford, sailed across the ocean and, by a fortunate miscalculation, landed in what is now Massa- chusetts and settled Plymouth. And familiar is the story of how John White, the Puritan rector of Dorchester, saw in this pioneer emigration the chance to "raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Anti-christ," and thus to establish a Puritan refuge in a new England. This scheme, once broached, appears to have met with immediate favor among the leading Puritans. Salem was settled with Endicott as John Davenport Governor. The enterprise of "The Governor and Com- pany of Massachusetts Bay" was then begun, the charter for which Charles had unsuspiciously granted in the same week that had seen his dramatic ending, for eleven years, of popular Parliament in England and his clapping of the democratic Eliot into the Tower of London, there to end his noble days. In 1629 John Winthrop had ridden to Boston in Lincolnshire to consult with Thomas Dudley re- garding this Massachusetts scheme. A month later the famous Cambridge "Agreement" had been drawn up, and then Winthrop had sailed to become Governor of Massa- chusetts, where, in the next few years, over a thousand Puritans settled about the new Boston in New England. John Davenport was in his second year in his first London parish when the Brewster party had founded Plymouth, and he contributed 50 to this new Winthrop emigration. This gift, however, had been anonymous. He did not wish to come too prominently, at this time, to the notice of William Laud, now Bishop of London and rapidly becoming a power in the Church. The curious interest of that implacable enemy of nonconformity had for some time been turned in the direction of the young and brilliant preacher in Cole- man Street; envious tongues had been wagging; no doubt, like other Puritan leaders, he was discussed gaily at Ben Jonson's "Devil's Tavern" in Temple Bar; his popularity in London, which had come to fill St. Stephen's Church each Sunday, considering the unsettled state of the public reli- gious sentiment, was a suspicious matter. Meeting charges of nonconformity he seemed to have proved to Laud that he had conducted himself with at least full outward sem- blance of the strictest conformity to the Church ritual, even insisting on that kneeling upon which Laud set such im- portance. He did not escape so easily, however, in another matter. He had joined with a number of serious Puritan 16 The Beginnings of Yale churchmen in a sort of home-missionary society, formed for the purpose of supporting, with purchased parish impro- priations, a better grade of ministers for the country towns than Laud's party in the Church had been willing to have. This philanthropic effort had been stamped out by Laud as soon as he discovered it, and the culprits including Daven- port had all but been haled into the courts on criminal charges. The moment, therefore, was not propitious for a public avowal by him of his interest in the Massachusetts Bay Puritan emigration. To be seriously suspected of private inclinations toward "Doctrinal Puritanism" was to invite exclusion from the Church, suppression, and even imprisonment. And so, during this period, John Davenport found himself one of a very large number of earnest folk, both clerical and lay, who were tending toward Puritanism, yet attempting what finally became to them an impossible reconciliation between their outward acts and their private opinions. It was at this time, when he was under suspended indict- ment for his share in the "Feoffees" incident, that John Davenport seems to have proceeded methodically to investi- gate his own mind on the subject. In a voluminous personal notebook that has come down to us, is contained the ex- haustively argued account of his own intellectual change at this time from conformity to nonconformity. That this was brought about by outside influences, also, we now can have no doubt. In London were then in concealment two famous nonconforming ministers, whose cases were the subject of considerable public excitement. These two men, the later careers of whom were to be closely intertwined with John Davenport's, were John Cotton and Thomas Hooker. Both were university men and famous preachers, and both were friends of Davenport. Cotton had just been driven out of St. Botolph's in Boston by Bishop Laud, and Hooker John Davenport had been silenced for nonconformity in his preaching in the little country village of Chelmsford in Essex. Cotton had come to London in disguise, and was now in hiding under Davenport's protection. The latter seems to have set out to change Cotton's mind, and reclaim him for the Church, as he had his uncle in Coventry. But the long argument that ensued appears, instead, to have unsettled John Daven- port's own mind. Cotton escaped to New England, to join the Boston settlement. Davenport remained away from the communion services of St. Stephen's for the next few months and, when his old friend and protector against Laud suddenly died on August 4, 1633, and it became known that Laud was to be elevated to Canterbury, left London for the country, remained in seclusion there for three months, and then, "in a gray suit and an overgrown beard," took passage to Holland, a refugee from that Church in which he had planned to spend his life. CHAPTER II THE NEW HAVEN COLONISTS I OHN COTTON and Thomas Hooker had emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with large parties of their followers during this crisis in John Davenport's life, and the final few groups of the great Puritan emigration, which were to follow them, were now being formed. The last of these was now coming together in London, led by one Theophilus Eaton, an established London mer- chant of wealth and reputation. Eaton was a parishioner of Davenport's in the Coleman Street Church, and had been a boyhood friend in old Coventry. He was a good repre- sentative of the well-to-do middle class of the day who had become Puritan in their Church connections. Though not a university graduate, he was a man of parts, traveled, versed in Roman law and the classics, and of an attractive personality which had permitted him to cut a good figure in the small London society of his day. He had at one time been employed, while abroad on his own affairs, as an agent of King James in Denmark. As subsequent events were to prove, Eaton was a man of unusual solidity and ability. Like Davenport, he had had a hand in the formation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and had subscribed to it, though his purpose in this was probably more commercial than religious. He had married, as his second wife, the widow The New Haven Colonists 19 of David Yale, a provincial gentleman of Denbighshire, North Wales, whose estate was but a few miles away from his father's church in Great Budworth, whither the Eaton family had removed in the early days from Coventry. This David Yale was the son of a distinguished Churchman, the vicar-general of Chester, and had settled in London, where he had recently died. His widow brought to Theophilus Eaton a "fair and large house" in the Coleman Street parish, and two grown sons, Thomas and David Yale, both of whom joined the Eaton party. David Yale, at this time well established in London business on an extensive patri- mony, was in time to become the father of Elihu Yale. Edward Hopkins, who had married Theophilus Eaton's step-daughter by the latter's marriage to the widow Yale, also a merchant in the city, likewise joined the London party. That the exile in Holland of John Davenport must have had a good deal to do with this decision of Theophilus Eaton to emigrate to New England, and that, during the two or three years that now elapsed while the many details involved in preparing for the change were being worked out, Eaton must have corresponded with Davenport from London about it, is highly probable. The religious impulse toward such a change was in itself a determining one to most of the London folk w r ho now gathered about Theophilus Eaton to embark upon it. The latter's brother, Samuel, a silenced nonconforming minister, was at this time in hiding and prepared to follow a colleague who had already left for New England. But Theophilus Eaton was a business man as well as a Churchman, and, from what later was to happen, I imagine that we may couple commercial ambition with religious fervor as the factors that made him the leader of the party, and that attracted to him that considerable group of other well-to-do London Puritan tradesmen who 2O The Beginnings of Yale joined him. Under his leadership several other groups, made up from the countryside about London, were now added to the new emigration. The Reverend Whitfield of Ashford had been leading a Separatist church movement in the diocese of Canterbury over which William Laud now presided as head of the English Church, and had been facing arrest and silencing; hearing of the new emigration he seems to have thrown in his fortunes and those of his Kentish parishioners, who followed him, with it. The Rev. Peter Prudden of distant Herefordshire, near Wales, added his little group, though they were not to sail with the original party. A third section, from Yorkshire, were under the leadership of their own nonconforming minister, the Rev. Ezekiel Rogers. II John Davenport had now spent three miserable years in Holland, where, in spite of the fact that he seems fully to have expected at first to return to good standing in the established Church, he had engaged in strenuous contro- versies with other English refugees, and had tried, with unhappy results, to conduct Separatist services on his own account. Letters from John Cotton in Boston, and doubt- less from Eaton in London, apprising him of the proposed emigration, would appear to have finally settled his mind. He slipped back again across the channel early in 1637 and, when the Eaton party sailed from London late in April of that year, had been accepted as the joint leader of it with Eaton, and as its spiritual pastor. A "covenant" was drawn up between the various groups of the Eaton party before the ship "Hector" weighed anchor off English shores, an agreement of some sort defining the purposes of the emi- gration and the rights of the shareholders in it, much the The New Haven Colonists 21 same in purpose as the Cambridge agreement of Mr. Win- throp's party. Considerable obscurity surrounds this epi- sode in the coming New Haven history. But I fancy that we may rather clearly see in it, viewing it from the advan- tage of later events, the informal preliminary foundation on English soil of that Separatist Church-State which eventu- ally was to be built on the Quinnipiac. Much more importance surrounds this new emigration than usually has been accorded it, for it was to be a unique enterprise. The original Plymouth congregation had had no intention of separating themselves politically from the old country; nor had the Massachusetts Bay settlers such a purpose. Both were English colonies of Puritan church folk in New England, remaining, in the New World, in touch with English affairs and contentedly, for a time at 22 The Beginnings of Yale least, amenable to the Court of High Commission. Whether Theophilus Eaton at first had intended to go further than that we do not know. But that John Daven- port, thinking out the situation for himself in Holland, had come to an extreme position in his own mind concerning the possibilities involved in the new emigration, there can be no doubt. We have many indications of this, in Davenport's own thoroughgoing contemporaneous study of what such a commonwealth should be, as well as in the original papers of the New Haven Colony itself. And we may well imagine that the personal relations of Davenport to the English Church, and especially to its primate Laud, had much to do with this decision for an independent church congregation in the New World. For such it was to be. William Laud had had, to be sure, his share in forcing the previous Puritan parties out of England. But, when Davenport's party was forming, he had come into autocratic power as the head of the Church. As such, this great tool of Charles I was now expending all of his force and power to demand conformity among the Puritan clergy, with the end in view of eventually reuniting the Church of Rome with the English Church, for The New Haven Colonists 23 his own and Charles' purposes. As a result, a new period of severe repression of nonconformity had come in. More- over, the English Church was forcibly being swung by Laud toward Catholicism in both doctrine and ceremonies. So that John Davenport, but a few years previously one of the most promising clergymen of London, now that he had taken the irrevocable step of fleeing from Laud's domina- tion, was his implacable enemy. "My hand will reach him there," Laud had angrily said when he heard of Daven- port's escape from England. Under such circumstances, Davenport not only had every reason to attempt to find a place for his settlement in the New World where Laud could not reach him, but to find a place where he could build his own church-state, independent even of the Puritan con- gregations in Massachusetts that had preceded him. It was with this unique Separatist purpose in mind that the leaders of the Eaton-Davenport party landed in Boston harbor on June 26, 1637. Ill The primitive Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which John Davenport was now welcomed by his old friend John Cotton and by John Wilson, received the newcomers including as they did so considerable a number of wealthy Puritan laymen with every desire to have them settle there. And a number did so. But, even if the Boston of 1637 had not been under the distant eye of Laud, other circumstances would have kept Davenport from remaining there. The famous Antinomian controversy was just then at its height, and the ravages which the valiant Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and her brother- in-law, John Wheelwright, were making in the Boston 24 The Beginnings of Yale church, as well as the trouble that had just been settled by the exile of Roger Williams, showed clearly that Massa- chusetts was no permanent home for a new group that had its own independent religious purposes to work out. Yet we may imagine that it was not entirely easy to carry out the plan of settling elsewhere. Several towns offered free land to the Davenport settlers if they would join the Bay Colony. Theophilus Eaton was made a Massachusetts magistrate in the expectation that he would remain there. A college had just been founded by an act of the Colony legislature with a public endowment of 400, and, just after John Davenport landed, the General Court had ap- pointed twelve of the leading men of the Colony to establish it. Davenport, as the most distinguished new addition to the university-bred leaders of the Colony, was appointed to be one of these, serving with John Cotton and John Wilson, Governor Winthrop, Stoughton, and Thomas Dudley. I imagine that that famous journey of the Bay Colony leaders across the marshes and river to Newtowne, to choose a site for the school that the next year was to be named "Harvard College" in the new "Cambridge," may well have had its important part in giving to John Davenport that idea of a similar academy in his own c l n y which he was later t o urge throughout his life and which finally was to be instituted by his successors. Not only in these ways did the Boston folk draw the newcomers into their most important affairs, but they named Theophilus Eaton's younger and scapegrace brother, Nathaniel, to be the first superintendent of the infant Harvard College, and its first instructor, with what amusing results Harvard's early history tells. But, in spite of these agreeable amenities, the Davenport party persisted in proceeding with that first determination The New Haven Colonists 25 to establish a new colony of their own. We do not need to do more than outline the familiar events which thereupon occurred. The redoubtable Captain Stoughton, returning in 1637 from his chase of the remaining Pequot Indians over the southern Connecticut marshes, had brought glow- ing tales of the excellent harbors to be found in that new country and of its climate and other possibilities. To in- vestigate these stories, and the particularly rosy account of the harbor of the Quinnipiac Indians, Theophilus Eaton sailed in August with a few of his hardiest followers around into Long Island Sound, past Roger Williams' forest home at Providence, the newly fortified English post of the younger John Winthrop at Saybrook, and into the broad, low mouth of the Quinnipiac. Adopting the wooded and fertile plain between the two cliffs that the Dutch had called the "Red Rocks" as a most desirable location for John Davenport's enterprise, Eaton left a few men for the winter and returned to Boston to recruit his colony. On the assumption that Quinnipiac was included in the land rights of the little Puritan colony of Connecticut that Thomas Hooker had but two years previously settled at Windsor and Hartford, Eaton sent his son-in-law, Edward Hopkins, to Hooker to secure a title for the new site. So far as we know, nothing came of this except the decision of Hopkins to cast in his lot with Hooker rather than with Davenport a decision which, as time was to show, was to prove of con- siderable importance in our narrative. Not hearing from Hopkins, the Eaton party, leaving behind at Boston such members as elected to stay there, and adding others who wished to leave Salem and Plymouth and Boston under the new leadership, set out for Quinnipiac in March, 1638. On April 10 they had rejoined the pioneers, whom they found living in mere earth cellars and half starved, and John Davenport preached his first sermon on his own soil, 26 The Beginnings of Yale finally safe from the persecutions of a Laud, and free to build his own church-state, unattached to the English Church and Crown and unentangled with any of the Puritan congregations then on New World soil. 1 IV It is a point worth noting that the Calvinistic society that John Davenport now founded on New Haven soil differed much more from the neighboring democratic commonwealth that Thomas Hooker had begun in the Connecticut Colony than it did from Massachusetts. The Massachusetts state and church were all but identical. The leaders there had clung to the old English idea of a government of a Christian church by Christians. And they had the old English social 1 The traditional site of this landing of John Davenport at New Haven is the northeast corner of College and George Streets. The creek to this spot, up which the New Haven settlers sailed from the harbor, was a navi- gable stream far into the 18th Century. Fairly recent excavations have unearthed ancient boats and crude docks used by Davenport's successors. The New Haven Colonists 27 feeling for an aristocracy. In that Colony the tendency was toward strong governmental centralization in the Governor and Council the counterpart, to them, of the King and Commission at home. None but church members had the franchise, though there was taxation for everybody, whether communicant or not. As a result, there had grown up, in the brief decade since its settlement, a somewhat undemo- cratic condition in Massachusetts. Influential non-church members who had joined the Colony and yet retained their allegiance to the established English Church, had a social dominance and standing quite out of proportion to their legal status in the community. Out of this, much trouble was later on to come. In the original settlement of Ply- mouth, however, non-church members were given the fran- chise. This was in full sympathy with the far-sighted views of that most distinguished of New England settlers, Thomas Hooker, who, therefore, in founding his Connecticut Colony at Windsor and Hartford and Wethersfield, broke away from the Massachusetts theory and, following the Plymouth idea, made no distinction, so far as the suffrage went, be- tween church and non-church members. This fundamental question was not decided by the New Haven colonists for a full year. When it was determined to adhere to the Massachusetts plan, it was the decision of the entire body of colonists, and therefore of those who had separated from the Church of England and those who had not. This was decided at the famous meeting in Mr. New- man's barn 1 in June, 1639, where the whole plan for the government of New Haven was adopted in public meeting. At this meeting (a full report of which has been preserved) John Davenport spared no pains to have it known how he felt about the matter, and how he emphatically stood with 1 This was on Grove Street, at about the foot of Hillhouse Avenue. 28 The Beginnings of Yale John Cotton and John Winthrop on it. Indeed, he had set this forth in an essay, which he had written during that first year of general discussion of the policy to be pursued, and which, as a treatise on "Civil Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion," he afterwards pub- lished. The opposition to his P lan from among the consider- able number of New Haven planters who had not yet left the English Church, was led by Theophilus Eaton's brother, the Rev. Samuel Eaton, who, while a nonconformist in England, had not left the Church and in fact was to end his life years later still a clergyman in it. There was a prolonged debate. The "rules held forth in the Scripture" being first unanimously adopted as the only laws of the new colony, the franchise problem was finally decided (Samuel Eaton alone dissent- ing) by agreeing "that church members only shall be free burgesses, and that they only shall choose magistrates and officers among themselves." This was a momentous decision for the Colony of which Theophilus Eaton now became the Governor and John Davenport the pastor, and for the generations of their suc- cessors. It differentiated, at the start, the purposes of New Haven from those of the Connecticut Colony. It set John Davenport's New Haven Colony in fundamental harmony, so far as its religious framework went, with Massachusetts. It went even further than that. It produced a unique inde- pendence, religious and political, for its citizens. Creating a church-state as it did, wherein there was little or no dis- tinction between the two, and where the Mosaic Law was the only legal court, it led, as we shall see, to a society that was under obligations to perpetuate itself and that, to meet those obligations, had to adopt methods, particularly in The New Haven Colonists 29 education, which are to be of much significance in our chronicles. It was to lead to a situation where the conserva- tives of another Connecticut generation were to find them- selves on the side of a similar party in Massachusetts and to hark back to the fundamental principles of this religious organization of John Davenport's New Haven in their renewed efforts for orthodoxy. CHAPTER III THE NEW HAVEN CHURCH-STATE F the ambition of John Davenport had thus been satisfied to found a church-state of his own, the ambition of his fellow colonists to establish a New World trading metropolis was now to be met. It had been for this purpose that Eaton's London col- leagues had decided with him upon Quinnipiac, with its wide harbor spreading southward into the Sound. John Brockett, a young London surveyor who had followed Eaton in the hope of making the fair daughter of one of the settlers his wife, now staked out the town with Eaton's large plan in view. West of the modern Meadow Street and east of State, when the settlers arrived, were two broad, navigable creeks, the one running to beyond where College Street now inter- The New Haven Church-State 31 sects George, and the other paralleling the present State to Elm. The lovelorn Brockett based his boundaries on these creeks, laying out the town in a half-mile square subdivided into nine equal squares or "quarters," the innermost of which, now the Green, was to become the "Market-place" of the future metropolis. Cellars dug on the western creek's inner banks and covered by rough-hewn planks and leaky sod, with a few log cabins and barns, did for houses for the first few months. It was doubtless in one of these that the infant Michael Wigglesworth (that "Little Feeble Shadow of a Man," as Cotton Mather called him, and later lurid poet of "The Day of Doom") nearly caught an early death from exposure. Very likely that "easiest room in Hell," which later he was sympathetically to set aside for unbaptized infants in his verses on the Hereafter, may have had its origin in a remembrance of this early New Haven home of his father. But this was in 1638. Within a few years the settlement had come to be a village of perhaps a hundred comfortable houses, sprinkled over the eight out- side squares, about which were the burned and cleared meadows or uplands, protection alike against prowling Indian or Dutch and the packs of wolves that infested the neighborhood. The central square, or "Market-place," a sloping tract of woodland at first, was early cleared of most of its wood for the Meeting-house, the schoolhouse, and the public fences, and remained a sandy waste, dotted with stumps and a few remaining ancient trees, except at what is now the Church Street side, where there was a swamp out of which trickled a brook to the State Street creek. Across this bog, at the present corner of Chapel and Church Streets, then "Mr. Thomas Gregson's corner," was built a footbridge, and two log causeways led over it to the Meeting-house and schoolhouse from the "Mill Highway," now Church Street. This Meeting-house, a rude, square 32 The Beginnings of Yale structure, with a hipped roof on the apex of which was a square watchman's turret, stood in probably the precise center of the Market-place. On this turret the broad- brimmed town drummer lustily beat the community to church on Sabbath days, and on occasions of Dutch or Indian alarms sentries stood there all day and all night, ready to fire the signal for the town watch. North of the Meeting-house was the schoolhouse. On the modern Col- lege Street side, about opposite the present Phelps Gateway to the University, were the town stocks and pillory. Here also were the town gaol and the watch-house, the latter a great-chimnied, one-story building, wherein the watch not infrequently fell asleep and were haled ingloriously before the Colony Governor and magistrates therefor. About the primitive Meeting-house, by 1650, a few graves had been dug for the early victims of the rigorous change from the mild English winters. Little as we perhaps are apt to realize it, this ancient New Haven was a fortified town, as well protected against its enemies as was John Davenport's Coventry from Charles I's tyrannical soldiery. About the entire plantation was probably a stockade 1 of sharpened palings, or "palisadoes," set close together and perhaps seven feet high, through 1 1 am adopting Levermore's statement on this open question. It is not precisely known whether New Haven had such a stockade or not. Branford had a five-mile outer fence, and Milford was stockaded. As to New Haven, the Colony Records of 1639 have a vote: "Ordered that gates shalbe made att the end of every streete att the outside of the Towne, wth all ye outside fences." This outer fence, or "Town pale," appears to have been kept up at public or common expense, whereas the "Quarters' " fences were privately maintained. Barber, in his "Antiquities of New Haven," recalls an ancient gate across West Chapel Street six rods west of York, which may have been a last survivor of this pioneer palisade. The question is an open one, but the small evidence available points perhaps to the fact of such a stockade. A second stockade was erected in 1676, when the Indian wars became serious. The New Haven Church-State 33 which great chained gates led into the open farmlands and woods without. Each of the eight "quarters" was fenced off from the streets by a paling, doubtless of rough-split logs five or so feet high, while, in a year or two, the house-lots themselves were separated by high "rail" fences, built of three or five broad planks laid against heavy posts. The passer-by on the cleared sandy lanes of this primitive New Haven may well have thought himself in a fortified maze, able, as he must have been, hardly to look over the house- lot stockades into the gardens, within which, among their fruit trees and under their virgin-forest oaks and button- woods and elms, nestled the weather-beaten clapboarded houses of the planters. William Hubbard, New England's quaint contemporary chronicler, was a youth when Davenport's Puritan Separa- tists settled New Haven. Passing through the village a little later, he was astonished at the size and architectural excellence of some of the houses. "Fair and stately," he reported these to be, "wherein they at first outdid the rest of the country." Hubbard thought that the London immi- grants at Quinnipiac had spent too much on these houses. But the New Haven settlers had been London tradesmen or farmers in comfortable English villages, some of them well-to-do men, and they built their new homes as closely as possible after the English town and village style to which they had been accustomed. Among these were a few log cabins, no doubt, and numerous small, one-room houses, steep-roofed for sleeping lofts above. But there were a number of larger houses, two stories high, with second floors projecting a little over the first as was the fashion in English towns. And, as in the old country, so in Daven- port's New Haven, the windows of these houses were gen- erally diamond-paned, while the doors were in two parts, opening outward from the narrow front stair entry. Huge The New Haven Church-State 35 stone chimneys stood in the middle of these larger houses, on either side of which were the "hall" and kitchen, and the "parlor." In all of the gardens were well sweeps, and nearly every householder had his small thatched barn. There were, however, several very large houses in this early New Haven. Four of these, Governor Eaton's, Mr. Davenport's, Thomas Gregson's, and Isaac Aller- ton's, were probably unequaled in any of the other three New England Colonies. Mr. Davenport's, which faced north on the present Elm Street, below Orange, was built in the form of a cross, and had, so tradition later said, thir- teen fireplaces. Mr. Allerton's, which was built later and just below State Street, was similar in shape, with "four porches" or doorways in the four ells. 1 Governor Eaton's, which faced Mr. Davenport's nearly across Elm Street, had at least ten fireplaces, not counting more in the attic rooms. This was a famous house for those days. It was in the not uncommon English country style of a capital E, its two ells forming a small court facing the street. The front door opened directly into a great "hall," furnished with an immense "drawing" table and forms, at which the family probably met for meals, and about which the Colony General Court no doubt sat, in front of a yawning stone fireplace, for its frequent sessions. In the west ell was a "parlor" or state guest-chamber for distinguished travelers, and, in the rear, a library or "office." Here the Governor of the little republic held his daily prayers with his numerous family and relations (Elihu Yale's father, David Yale, lived with Eaton until he removed to Boston in 1649), an d here 1 There is a good account of these early New Haven houses in Lambert's history of the Colony, and an exhaustive study of the Eaton house in the "Early Connecticut Houses" by Isham and Brown. The drawings in this book of Davenport's period have been modeled on Isham's studies of con- temporary Connecticut Colony houses, which were not essentially different, he thinks, from New Haven's. 36 The Beginnings of Yale he received his callers on public business and for the numer- ous demands that were made on him to settle private quarrels and correct the wayward of the village. In the east ell were the kitchen and buttery or milkroom, back of which were his gardens and fruit orchards and hedged flower beds. The inventories of this early day show that many of the people lived in a very fair degree of comfort. Probably few were as impoverished as one planter who, in selling his house, could trump up only a bedstead and trundlebed, "a pair of vallance, a piece of blue charnix, a malt-mill, a well bucket and chayne, two loads of clay," and his fences to sell with it. Governor Eaton's belongings were of a high order. He had "round" and "short" tables, "green cushions," "sideboards," a "great chair with needlework," low and "high wyne" stools, books, a globe and map, tapestries on his walls, and "Turkey carpets," which had just come into fashion in England, and which were used either for floor coverings or on the tables. His "great hall" was filled with heavy pieces of old English-made furniture, and was orna- mented with much silver plate, a wall-clock, and with the silver basin and ewer which Mrs. Eaton had years before been given by her husband's colleagues in his Baltic Sea adventures. In this great house, in which, it was said, there were thirty people altogether, Governor Theophilus Eaton was accustomed to spend most of his day, reading and at his private devotions, or receiving the people of his Colony and dealing out, as English squires did in their own halls, the magisterial justice that devolved upon him, which in his case meant settling matters by the Mosaic law. II We may get a very good notion of how John Davenport's colonists lived, by poring over the wills and inventories of The New Haven Church-State 37 the time, and the musty pages of the Colony Court records, open to us in the cramped but still legible handwriting of Secretary Thomas Fugill. The life within the town stock- ade was a drowsy one, enlivened only by the military train- ing-days and elections, visits of trading vessels or travelers from the Bay, frequent searches for lost cattle, Sabbath-day meetings, and the numerous public punishments of male- factors at the town pillory and stocks. Inside the great paling the village was compact and fortified; outside, there were the commons and allotted farms and fenced-in pasture lands for oxen and cows, the town pound (which was at State and Chapel Streets), the fenced-in lot for "straingers' horses" (which was about where Hillhouse Avenue joins Grove Street), and the distant wigwams of the Indians in East Haven. The streets were not named, except that north Church Street was known as the "Mill Highway," leading as it did to the flour mill near East Rock, and north State Street the "Clay Pitts Way," leading to the Quinnipiac meadows where the settlers very early had discovered clay deposits for their brick. The block on Elm from Church to State was known as "Mr. Eaton's Street"; that on Chapel opposite the Market-place as "Mr. Goodyear's"; the mod- ern prosperous Chapel Street, near State, began as a neglected ditch road, known merely as "the lane that leadeth to Zuriel Kimberley's house"; the street intersections were known as "Mr. Perry's corner," or "Mr. Evance's," or "Mr. Tench's." There was a landing place far up George Street near High, just a step beyond where the settlers had first set foot on Quinnipiac soil, and another on State at the foot of Chapel, opposite the pound. The main landing for larger vessels, however, was outside of the village itself, on the present Water Street bank of the harbor, and at the old Indian "Oyster-shell Fields," where the water was rather higher than it is today. Here the 38 The Beginnings of Yale Bay ships unloaded their supplies of cattle and meat and the latest English fashions, and here the great people of the Colonies stepped upon John Davenport's New Haven soil from the shallops or lighters that at long intervals carried passengers back and forth from Hartford and Saybrook, Milford and Stamford, and across the Sound to Southold. Visitors on horseback came into the town from the east over the "Neck" bridge at State Street, and from Milford way over the West River bridge. There appear to have been few horses in the early days, but later these were numerous and occasioned many squabbles between rival claimants. The Colony eventually ordered each town to maintain two or more horses, with saddles and pistols, for travelers on public business. The New Haven people of these early times were not so solemn a folk in their everyday life as we sometimes imagine them, or as the renegade Peters described them to ready-eared English readers after the Revolutionary War. Despite the rigid laws and religious regulations and beliefs under which they lived, the citizens of Davenport's small republic were not entirely depressed by them. Now and then there were gay times after the good-night drum, and late tipplers would feel their way home in the dense black- ness by the "quarters' palings" to escape the watch; there were "watermillion" moonlight escapades by the young people in this or that Goodman's garden, and youthful "dalliances" and what not. But the routine life of the plan- tation was not very exciting. Out from the ancient records step the vigorous-bodied and dignified planters in their square-cut doublets and "mandillions" and their broad- brimmed sugar-loaf Puritan hats, in their shapely half-hose and laced shoes, their waist girdles, and their cloaks of white, red, or black stuffs. Quaint replicas of their fathers are the youngsters of the village, in their stiff little knee- tyfewfflaven in 164O k\ **?** j/~-*S'f*~* "~ <-*_i- x" ^ -^ ^5= **"_"*. -t*" . _. s 4O The Beginnings of Yale breeches, double jackets, broad hats and laced shoes. Not too garish in dress were the matrons and maids of Daven- port's colony, in their high hats and broad white collars and quiet-colored gowns, over which they wore their many- pocketed aprons, though now and then one of these good wives would wear green stockings or a scarlet cloak, or would trade her beeswax or "pease" for the latest fashions in embroidered colored petticoats that the traders brought from the Bay. But it is at their work and public duties that we may best recall these sturdy pioneers. Houses and fences were to be built, and so there was at first great felling of trees on the Market-place and streets and in the house-lots, and then in the forests outside the town, where farmlands had to be cleared for corn plantations and for cattle pastures. Boats and canoes were needed, and small sailing vessels; chimneys of stone, now and then brick-topped as the workmen began to use the Quinnipiac clay pits, were necessary; hay and straw, grain, pork and beef had to be stored against the long and famined winters. And so, as the years slip by, we see the men and grown boys in Thomas Fugill's ancient pages at work building and repairing the bridges and palings and houses, planting that corn which Winthrop wrote to his wife made a Paradise of New England, working in their fruit tree orchards (the New Haveners were great fruit growers) or gardens or in the fields outside, harvesting, tending the cattle and "haunting" the hogs, and cutting wood in the surrounding forests where today a broad, modern city crowds the whole plain between the two great Rocks. Planters, joiners, plasterers, bricklayers, ships- carpenters, tanners, coopers, mowers, cattle-herds, thatch- ers, were these first settlers. Twelve hours was a man's day's work in summer and eight in winter, while the women and girls managed the households, taught the little chaps The New Haven Church-State 41 their letters, spun wool and flax in the special rooms set apart for these gossipy occasions, tended the geese and chickens and bees, and made the woolen and leathern clothes for themselves and husbands. And now comes the watch, that had to keep a martial eye open for invaders of the calm of the little stockaded repub- lic, to look out for chimney fires at night, to see that each householder kept his ladder against his thatched or shingled roof day and night and a "fire hook" handy, to corral late wayfarers along the high-walled lanes, and to apprehend cheerful sailors or servants who might have had too many "strong watters" at Mr. Andrews' or Mr. Harriman's ordinary. The drummer beats at sundown for the watch to prepare; the master of the watch goes to the watch-house, and an hour after sundown the six watchmen have to follow, arms complete with pike and sword and musket. In pairs these watchmen then patrol the village all night, up and down the lanes and inside and outside of the town paling, so go the orders. They are to shout "Fire!" or "Arms, Arms, all the Town out!" as necessity dictates, and lug to the watch-house any suspicious persons for appearance be- fore Governor Eaton the next Colony Court day. The great public business of the colonists, however, is the train- ing-day on the Market-place. This comes on "Quarter- days." Two hundred men formed this military company, each settler over sixteen years of age having his obligatory share in the maneuvers. A martial sight it is, no doubt, as we visualize it from the old Court Records. First come the town drummers and the company secretary, to take their places near the Meeting-house, where the roll of the assembly drum brings the soldiers from all quarters. And now out troop the companies, "squadrons," as they are called, headed by the sturdy Captain Turner, veteran of the Pequot wars, sword in hand, his cloak, lined with scarlet, The Beginnings of Yale Training-Day on tf?eMarKet-Place,New Haven U thrown martially over one shoulder, his eye fired perhaps by remembrances of the recent Indian battles over Pequot way. Then comes Lieutenant Seely with his "partison," and the Ensign with the Colony colors. The "squadrons," with their sergeants and corporals, round the sandy public square to the beat of the two company drummers. Terrifying they may look to the wide-eyed Quinnipiac Indians who have slipped quietly through the great clanking gates of the stockade to witness these astonishing maneuvers of their white-faced invaders. Boldly the "squadrons" troop about the square, each private in his best yellow buckskin breeches, high hat, iron breastplate and flowing cloak, armed with musket or pike, with dangling sword, his "bandaleer" carry- ing his powder and bullets and round of "swan-shot," and on special occasions wearing the thick "cotton-wool" coats The New Haven Church-State 43 that the town has ordered the women to quilt for their husbands' and sons' protection against Indian arrows. Grouped about the open Market-place, under the few old trees that have been left standing, these proud dames and damsels are no doubt as frightened as are the scampering Indians when the "Quarter-day" parade ends with the explosive firing of the three "great guns," the volleys from which shake the wooden houses and echo over the sur- rounding woods to the distant hills. Then come feats of agility and strength among the younger soldiers (for the village bucks were mighty proud of their muscles and the turn of their calves), when they play at cudgels or "back- sword," and leap and "wrastle" as the Colony orders have it, and the great day ends. A few years later a horse troop (when the Dutch became bothersome) was formed, there was an artillery company, and, still later, a Colony dog pack to hunt wolves and track Indians. But it is in the Sabbath-day ceremonies at the Meeting- house that we seem best to visualize the people of these early Puritan times, long sleeping under the modern Green or in the Grove Street burying ground, in devout belief of their rise to join Christ's second coming. The roll of the second drum is reverberating through the quiet gardens and up and down the sandy lanes, vigorously pounded in the Meeting-house turret by that jovial Robert Bassett who later was to entertain some itinerant sailors at his home with so hospitable a decanter that he was fined five pounds and later left for Stamford, there to lead in mutinous out- breaks against the Jurisdiction. Walking sedately across the Market-place from their homes and those "Sabbath-day houses" that the country people built for their Sabbath noons in New Haven, come these pioneer Puritans of New Haven. Captain Turner, sword in hand, waits at one of the low, square doors of the first Meeting-house, to place 44 The Beginnings of Yale the guard for the day within and the sentry without. And now come the shadowy forms of the planters. Ezekiel Cheever, in broad flowing cloak and high hat and starched neckband, comes up Church Street with his wife and boy from his cabin at Church and Grove Streets. Governor Eaton, supporting his now aged mother, moves majestically, as becomes the first magistrate of this New World republic, up Elm Street and over the made causeway from "Mr. Perry's corner," his numerous family and servants, and the future father of Elihu Yale behind him. Then come the other settlers: from the Clay Pitts Way Magistrate Malbon, once a prosperous London merchant and now expecting great things from New Haven trading enterprises he is financing, from his large house on State Street fronting the not far-distant harbor; old Thomas Nash, once a Puritan refugee in Leyden, and now the official Colony gunsmith; Anthony Thompson, Lenham village merchant; John Ben- ham, brickmaker and town-crier; Goodman Kimberley, poundkeeper; Deacon Gilbert, from his spacious house at Church and Chapel Streets; Nicholas Augur, the town dis- penser of physic; the impecunious William Preston, whose large family of children are mostly kept alive by his wife's earnings in "dressing" the Meeting-house. Then come Deputy Governor Goodyear, former London trader, and Thomas Gregson, now one of the Colony's most energetic business men, from their adjoining houses on Chapel Street opposite the Market-place; young Joshua Atwater, late of Kent, and now treasurer of the Colony, from his great mansion where Osborn Hall now stands; tottering old Edward Wigglesworth, with his small son Michael the coming poet, from Chapel Street near the present High; Thomas Fugill and Corporal Bell, Ensign Newman and William Andrews the tavern keeper, and Goodman this and Goodwife that, until all of the small community are The New Haven Church-State 45 grouped about the Meeting-house door, on the broad nailed panels of which the latest bans of marriage and notices of estates that are before the Colony Court have been put up by the Secretary. And now the Rev. William Hooke, the Teacher of the church, in his flowing ministerial gown, comes alone down through the footpath under the trees from the College and Chapel Streets corner of the Market-place, his thoughts, perhaps, as much on his great cousin Crom- well's possible patronage if he should return to England, as on the two-hour prayer he is to make that morning. And then the people turn their faces across the open square to "Mr. Davenport's Walk," that has been fenced off for his use between two Church Street open lots where the present City Hall stands. The once famous preacher of the London church in Coleman Street comes slowly out from his "Walk," across the log causeway that has been laid over the bog for his comfort, and to his waiting flock, unspoken to by anyone on this great day of the Colony week. Slowly he walks, in gown and small black skullcap, Bible in hand. Through the silent ranks of his congregation he passes in through the rough-hewn door and up the broad center aisle of his crude new church, to the raised pulpit under the sounding-board of the day. Mrs. Eaton and the Governor follow, the congregation troops in, each man wearing his hat except when the opening prayer is pronounced, the im- portant families take their benches in order of Colony rank, men on one side and women on the other, and the children scatter to the pulpit stairs or sides of the bare room (where they make so much trouble that officers have to be appointed to keep them in order) and the Sabbath-day services begin. Mr. Hooke expounds a chapter from the Scriptures. The hourglass on the high pulpit may be turned once or even twice before the central event of the Colonists' week, the sermon by John Davenport, is over. Mr. Hooke then *-M*\v The New Haven Church-State 47 prays (and the prayers of those days were nearly as long as the sermons), "bills" are put up for the sick and the absent, and a long psalm follows, the pastor reading each line before it is droned out by the congregation. The short noon hour over, the Meeting-house is filled again for the afternoon service. Mr. Hooke now preaches, and Mr. Davenport prays, there is one more long psalm, and the wearied and not infrequently half-frozen people return to their candle-lit homes and firesides to meditate on the great words they have heard during the day, and the children to repeat the heads of the preacher's discourse from memory. Ill An earnestly pious people were these New Haven settlers, believers in the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures for human needs, individual and political, building their church-state on the Mosaic law as it was interpreted by the Colony magis- trates and deputies. The "Moses" of New Haven, Cotton Mather called Governor Eaton. But it needed another Solomon to manage the affairs of this new republic, and Theophilus Eaton was one. Before his Colony court came an extraordinary number of matters to settle, for the Colony officers did not hesitate to manage even the smallest details of the planters' lives. A settler could not leave the Juris- diction without written permission; if a shoemaker was not giving good leather he was haled before the court to answer for it; if the town storekeeper (a Mrs. Stolions) over- charged, she had to explain and cut her prices; if a man's fence was down, he had to stand trial for damages his cattle and hogs did to his neighbors' gardens in consequence; if a settler "took tobacco" in the streets or outside of his house, he was brought before the court to pay a fine; if a soldier came to training without his full equipment, if a The Beginnings of Yale watchman slept on his rounds, if a laborer broke the Sab- bath, if a good wife slandered another woman, if a ladder was not in its place against a house, Governor Eaton's court decided the penalty. And these penalties were severe ones. Hubbard wrote that the New Haveners were very "vigorous in the execution of justice, and especially in the punishment of offenders." The town stocks and pillory were a busy place for a few days after each court meeting, and many a careless planter and servant and visiting sailor cooled his legs and neck on the board platform next to the watch-house on College Street to the gaping entertainment of the villagers. For more serious offenses there were public whippings of both men and women, and these were so severe that one unlucky malefactor vowed he would rather "fall into the hands of the Turks" than be whipped again. And they had other agreeable little methods of making an incorrigible reform. Halters were hung about these fellows' necks, and locks put on their legs; the tongues of slanderers or profane persons were bored with hot irons or put into cloven sticks; not a few offenders against the comparatively few capital laws of the Colony were publicly hung. The laws were the laws of the Hebrew God, and alack for him who transgressed them. Even the Deputy Governor was fined on one occasion for having permitted the sale of liquors by an elected tavern keeper who had not yet taken office. To us of today, the church discipline of these pioneer times undoubtedly seems the most exacting. Yet there was good reason for this, considering the peculiar religious re- public that John Davenport had founded. The New Haven Jurisdiction churches, separate as they were from all other New England churches, were the New Haven state. The towns and Colony political organizations were but the machine by which this church-state was supported. None The New Haven Church-State 49 but the regenerate could vote in town meetings, or for the Governor and magistrates and deputies to the Colony Court. Church members ruled the New Haven state, and noncon- formity to the churches was treason to the state itself. And so we find John Davenport extremely alert for any infringements of his religious authority and for any back- sliding from the obligations of church membership. He and his New Haven flock were believers in witchcraft, and in the second coming of Christ. It is said that they expected Christ to make New Haven the seat of his second em- pire, so the Colony's theological lamp must be kept trimmed. So serious was this motive in the New Haven life that as important a member of the community as Governor Eaton's good lady fell into difficulties with Davenport and was publicly punished therefor. So earnest was John Dav- 50 The Beginnings of Yale enport in this conception of his duty toward a pure church membership that he became, in time, renowned through New England for his severity in church discipline, and was said by Cotton Mather to "use the golden snuffers of the sanctuary overmuch." The more lively of his parishioners in this orthodox New Haven, thus ecclesiastically snuffed out as occasions arose, doubtless endorsed this sentence. For they were brought up sharply for very small misdoings. The Colony Court would settle a case of profanity with dis- patch and unction. Some unlucky visiting sailor, for instance, had admitted saying a round "by God." The New Haven church and state were shocked. Governor Eaton, facing the astonished culprit across his great table, vowed that it was a manifest "piercing of the name of God in passion," whereas the rule of God was "let your words be yea yea and nay nay." The unlucky sailor's tongue was bored for his crime, and he was sent out of the Colony to warn others not to be profane in it. From time to time, in the old Colony papers, we find the citizens of this too ideal republic breaking forth into exas- perate opposition to this kind of discipline. It is an enlight- ening scene that the old Court Records describe, when a Mrs. Moore is apprehended for a theological eccentricity. She had, it appears, "pished" at the statement that there were "2 sorts of angells, some sperits, some in flesh." Mrs. Moore thought "angells" were the only "sperits" and had privately given it forth as her opinion that the officers of the New Haven church were going beyond their rights in claiming to be "angells" of God "in the flesh." Governor Eaton rebuked her severely. "Christ," he said, "was indeed with his apostles in their worke through all their travells, & they travelled farr, yet could not goe into every part or country of the world. Probably [he said] they were never in this lardge tract & part of the World, called America." The New Haven Church-State Therefore Christ had to be represented in New Haven by "angells in the flesh," which office Mr. Davenport and the church elders had humbly succeeded to. Mrs. Moore was not, however, satisfied, and went out of the Governor's house "in a great rage," announcing, with a fling of her independent head, as she passed through his great gate to the street, that "she would goe to none of the church officers for any truth of her salvation." The case made a mighty noise in the Colony. Others had from time to time burst their church bonds, and some had "pished" at Mr. Cheever's teaching, and even at Mr. Davenport's business ability, and not a few had been "sermon sick." But no one until Mrs. Moore had openly flaunted the right of the church elders to call themselves "angells." A growing num- ber came to do so as time passed, however, and that final day was to come when the whole question of the divine authority of the inner church membership in the Colony was to become a serious one, and with it the question of the fun- damental soundness of John Davenport's great church-state scheme itself. &L 9w[forot~ fflouse in 1660 CHAPTER IV THE DAVENPORT EDUCATION I N leaving Boston for the Quinnipiac in 1638, John Davenport had brought with him a young professional school- master in the quaint and energetic person of that Ezekiel Cheever whom we have mentioned, and who, in later years, was to become one of the most famous of colonial pedagogues. This able gentleman was at this time twenty-three years of age. He was a Londoner by birth, and for several years had been a private tutor among the Rev. John Wilson's flock in Boston. Tradition pictures him vividly as a tall, thin young fellow, whose pointed beard became a sort of animated barometer to his wary scholars; when he stroked this beard to its point, the story goes, his pupils cocked an eye for trouble. And this frequently came (as Cheever The Davenport Education 53 was of an irascible temperament) from unexpected causes; for not only did the first New Haven schoolmaster use the alder and birch rods that he ominously cut as he crossed the swamp to the schoolhouse of mornings, but he also had the salutary habit of licking the good boys for not exerting their influence over the obstreperous ones. Cheever was an excellent Latin scholar, a bit of a pedant, perhaps, if the truth were known, and during his eleven years in the rude New Haven settlement wrote his famous "Short Introduc- tion to the Latin Tongue." This, as the famous Cheever "Accidence," ran through twenty editions before 1785 and emerged, for the last time, to the astonished chagrin of still another generation of American youngsters, as late as 1838, when it was succeeded by others, Bullions, etc., no less formidable. Through this Latin grammar ploughed very nearly all of the college-bound youths of Massachusetts and Connecticut during the first century of Harvard and the first half-century of Yale. Ezekiel Cheever had arrived in Quinnipiac with 20 and two dependents, and one of the earliest businesses of his fellow townsmen, after the raising of the square Meeting- house on the Market-place and of the great mansions of Davenport and Eaton, appears to have been to build a small cabin for him. This was set up at what is now the south- east corner of Grove and Church Streets, and here Cheever seems to have begun to teach New Haven's first school. In that quaint account of his own life that Michael Wiggles- worth left to a laxer and more critical posterity, he says that, having escaped death in his father's dug-out cellar on the banks of the creek in New Haven, he was sent to school in 1639 to Ezekiel Cheever, "and under him," says he, "profited so much through the blessing of God, that I began to make Latin & to get forward apace." This was probably in Cheever's own cabin on Grove Street. 54 The Beginnings of Yale It was on Christmas Day, 1641, that John Davenport secured a town vote to establish the Colony's first public school. I fancy that we may set this date among the large events in New Haven history. Such a public school had been set up in Boston, hardly had the Winthrop party arrived there. The year following, 1636, one had been established in the primitive settlement at Charlestown. The Rev. John Fiske had become the first teacher of a similar Salem school in 1637, and in 1639, when Cheever had begun to teach in his own house in New Haven, a public school had been begun at Dorchester. The Cambridge public school was to be established a year later. In several of these cases, the school had even preceded the church organization itself, so anxious were the Puritan colonists that there should be no interruption in the upbringing of the next generation in their church. And we may now see the necessity for this immediate beginning of youthful education in the colonies. The public school and the grammar school were no novelty to the New England settlers. The Londoners in the New Haven Col- ony had long been accustomed to it; their forefathers had known it ever since Dean Colet had opened his grammar school beneath St. Paul's in 1510. Even the immigrants from such English rural villages as Ashford or Lenham, a number of whom, as we have seen, were in the New Haven party, had had their free schools at home. Among the settlers of Massachusetts were some sixty Cambridge Uni- versity graduates and about a third as many Oxford men, and these men, now the leaders in their new communi- ties, naturally looked upon the immediate beginnings of a New England school system as an imperative matter, nearly if not as important as the institution of the churches themselves. The Davenport Education 55 But the movement in this direction had an even deeper significance. The great guide to conduct of the Puritan element in the English Church for a hundred years had been the Bible; and, as the Puritan interpretation of religion was individualistic, so the reading of the Bible was a matter of individual duty. It was to bring about this general ability to read the Bible that those numerous Puritan foundations had been established throughout old England from which the public-school system, leading in many cases to the ad- vanced grammar school with its study of the Latin commen- taries and of the Greek originals of the New Testament, had grown. Yet the English school system was sporadic and privately endowed, as in the famous Hales Free School of Coventry, which we have seen John Davenport attending when a boy. The Dutch church-school system, on the other hand, which the Plymouth colonists and John Davenport had become acquainted with when in exile in Holland, was of a different nature. There a state educational system had for some time been established. This was a compulsory public- school system, supported by municipal or parish taxes in- stead of by private donations as in England. This novel and democratic notion of public education could not but have made a strong impression upon John Davenport when he was in Rotterdam. And, during his short stay in Boston, he had seen the new plan being attempted, though perhaps in no very definite way at that time, in the first of the Massa- chusetts public schools. The general principles of the Dutch idea were now incorporated in Davenport's scheme for his New Haven commonwealth, superimposed upon which was his own notion of a graded system from the common school up through the grammar or Latin school to a sort of Puritan "college" similar to the Harvard which he had had a hand in planting. 56 The Beginnings of Yale II Fully to realize the departure which John Davenport thus made in beginning, in 1641, the New Haven Colony public school, and agitating almost as immediately his plan for a "college," we may recall what had been done in schooling matters in this country before his arrival. The Virginia Cavaliers, for example, living a patriarchal existence on their great tobacco plantations, had no such community life as had the New England townsfolk. They had brought over with them the customary English idea of secondary and higher learning for the youth of the upper classes only. They had founded no common schools, as, indeed, their manner of life called for none. They had contented them- selves with importing private tutors from Cambridge or Oxford for the favored sons of the ruling classes; for the poorer children they had begun industrial schooling on the plantations. The Virginia public sentiment, in fact, was against a free public education. The colonists there were good Church of England communicants, and, even at the comparatively late date of 1692, when William and Mary College was chartered, their purpose in it was to afford a colony higher education for the sons of the upper classes alone. In Dutch New Amsterdam, on the contrary, the parochial school system of the old country had early been established, though probably of the elementary type in Holland. In Puritan New England, both the stern necessity of the churches for raising the new generation strictly after the religious principles of the settlers, and the community life which was at once begun, centering about the church, led to a third type of school, the purpose of which was, at least at some public expense, to bring the Bible into the lives of the second generation and thus to continue the Puritan commonwealth in all of its original purity of character. The Davenport Education 57 ffirsf