This section takes its name from the title of David Hackett Fischer's marvelous book Albion's Seed. The renowned historian has identified four waves of early English migration to America. The first one, The Great Migration from 1629 to 1641, is the one that concerns us here.
The primary impetus to this great movement was religious. Congregations followed to the New World their pastors who often declared their intention to build a "Bible Commonwealth". Ninety Puritan ministers came to New England in the Great Migration. They were a close-knit cultural elite, very devout and highly respected for their intellect and character.
Henry and Elizabeth Doude's family was just one of thousands of families comprising religious communities that settled New England and Connecticut. Like most of those humble planters they were more likely to be concerned about the spiritual condition of their families, especially their children, than to be concerned about reforming the Church of England. The New World offered "fewer temptations" and provided a fresh start for their spiritual strivings. It is very significant that early in their voyage, out on the Atlantic Ocean, their company entered into a covenant which sealed their contract with God and one another. (See the Guilford section of this site). It was this web of contracts with their Creator and fellow voyagers that most clearly defined their purpose in the New Zion.
The map below identifies settlements in Connecticut that were direct offshoots of ones in New England or, like Guilford, were formed by new arrivals from England. (Also indicated are some of the major existing settlements in New England and New Amsterdam at that time)
By 1639 these were the settlements in Connecticut, and the men who led them:
- 1635: John Winthrop, Jr. commissioned as first govenor of the river Quinnihticutt to counter Dutch presence in the region. He hires Lt. Lion Gardiner to build a fort and lay out a town. It is named Saybrook after the two principal titleholders: Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brook.
- 1635: Rev. Thomas Hooker and Rev. Samuel Stone settle Suckiaug (Hartford) with their congregation from Newtown/Cambridge (Massachusetts Colony)
- 1636: Rev. Wareham settled Mattaneaug or Cuschankamaug (Windsor) with his congregation from Dorchester (Massachusetts Colony)
- 1636: Mr. Smith settled Puquiaug (Wethersfield) with his congregation from Watertown (Massachusetts Colony)
- 1638: John Davenport ad Theophilus Eaton settle Quinnipiack (New Haven) with their congregation from England after a stop in Boston.
- 1639: Henry Whitfield settles Menankatunk (Guilford) with his congregation from England.
The tracts of land for these settlements were purchased from the Connecticut river Indians who, for the most part, were peaceable and acquiescent. Because these tribes were caught between the predatory Mohawks to the west, and the fierce Pequots to the East, English settlers could provide them with some degree of protection. In fact, a delegation of river indians traveled to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies in 1631 to invite English settlers to Suckiaug. The sachem, or chief, of the small Connecticut tribe told the English the Pequots and Mohawks feared very little but "the white-faced man with his hot-mouth weapon".
What followed was a great land grab. The good farmland of the Connecticut valley was very enticing to planters who liked to think of it as undeveloped. In his History of New England The Reverend William Hubbard probably reflected the prejudices of most of his fellow Puritans when he portrayed the native Americans as debased wretches not sufficiently endowed to comprehend the vast riches God had surrounded them with. The riches were intended for the Saved, of course, not "the foolish minions who had followed Satan..." In a chapter entitled "The Indians", Hubbard offers "scientific" evidence for his belief that native Americans were Satan's children. To his mind, then, it was perfectly conscionable, to displace those undeserving savages with the chosen people who had been commanded by their God to "go forth, be fruitful, and multiply". The New World was clearly intended for Puritans.
And what a New World it was! The rocky, misty coastlines and dense woods must have been intimidating to people just arriving from the settled countryside of pastoral East Anglia, but, the Puritans looked upon it through very special lenses. "Geography", wrote Cotton Mather, "must now find work for a Christianography". Englishmen were Englishmen and land was a precious commodity to any planter who had chaffed under the land system in Old England. Roger Williams went so far as to say that the aquisition of land was the new religion of many Puritans.
Climate
The most noticeable aspect of the New England climate was the cold. The Great Migration occurred at a time in earth's history that climatologists call "the little ice age". Ocean temperatures of the New England coast were three degrees centigrade colder in the eighteenth century than in the twentieth. In the mid seventeenth century water temperature off New England matched Labrador today. Salt Rivers froze solid and planters wrote of numbing cold and frostbite.
(more to follow....)
Footnote:
*Albion is the earliest name by which the island of Great Britain is known. It was used by Aristotle in the 300's B.C and appears in poetry. Greeks and Romans probably got the name from the Gauls. in whose language it would mean "mountain land" or "white land" from the Celtis "Alp", meaning "high" or "white" (whence also Alps) this probably referred to the chalky white Dover Cliffs.
-Encyclopedia Americana, 1999
Sources:
- Fischer, David Hackett - Albion's Seed (1989, Oxford University Press)
- Hubbard, William - A General History of New England (1971, Reprinted from The Collections of The Mass. Hist. Soc., Charles C. Little and James Brown, Arno Press, NY Times)
- Chitwood, Oliver Perry - A History of Colonial America (3rd ed. 1961, Harper & Row, Pub. New York)
- Steiner, Bernard Christian A History of the Plantation of Menunkatunk... (1897)
Main Directory / Dowd Genealogy / Related Links: Guilford / The Puritans / Henry Whitfield