Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

3 Possession

Possession War did come, and with it slavery. A clash was unavoidable. By 1634, Winthrop and the Puritans were so well established that Sir Simonds D’Ewes, an influential Puritan who remained behind in England, would observe the governor and his company had “raised such forts, built so many towns . . . and so dispersed and enriched themselves . . . [it seemed] the very finger of God” had guided them. Now the colony was bursting at the seams. New houses sprang up along the Charles and Mystic rivers. Existing settlements grew. Meetinghouses were built, fields cleared and planted, forests cut. The Puritans’ headquarters moved to Boston, a great city being born. There, in the quiet of John Winthrop’s house on the first Tuesday of each month (“att 8 of the clocke,” old records say), the Court of Assistants gathered to shape the great experiment that was America. A metal plaque installed in 1930 on the stone façade of a Charlestown building describes that court’s beginnings. On it, a frieze depicts nine men attired in matching jackets, hats, and breeches clustered in the shade of several leafy trees. Beneath the frieze a text explains: “On this site the Assistants of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay met on August 23, 1630 and organized the Court of Assistants. This was succeeded in 1692 by the Superior Court of Judicature and in 1781 by the Supreme Judicial Court,” a body that still functions as the commonwealth’s final arbiter. In its infancy, the court’s nine judges established the 3 POSSESSION 37 colony’s legal system, approved laws, settled disputes, hosted criminal trials, and weighed the major issues of the day. Then they turned their attention to expansion. Territories to the south along the fertile Connecticut River valley seemed ripe for the taking. The court granted settlers permission to start building in that valley. Other populations were there first, however, and resented the intrusion . The ground was bloodied as Connecticut was born. In 1635, John Winthrop’s eldest son, twenty-nine-year-old John Jr., was dispatched to the region and put in charge of this new venture. It was no easy sinecure. For young John Winthrop to consolidate control he had to run a gauntlet of conflicting interests . Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam were anxious to stop the spread of English interests creeping south. Pequot Indians vowed they would hold the Connecticut River valley as their own. Settlers from Plymouth had their own agendas, too. Sensing the Puritans’ vulnerability, John Jr. dreamed of a massive fort to hold the coast and guard the river’s mouth. From there, he thought, he could extend the Puritans’ reach inland and effectively protect their interests. Upriver, meanwhile, three new settlements were established in quick succession, making a line of power down the broad, flat Connecticut River valley from Windsor, south to Hartford, then to Wethersfield. To the southeast , beside the sea, rough homesteads sprang up in rings around what was then only a raw clearing at the river’s mouth. The towns of Lyme, Westbrook, Chester, Essex, and Deep River were soon born. To protect the growing colony, the Puritan’s eldest son, now the dashing governor, petitioned his backers in England for an engineer to help devise a system of protection for those isolated villages. That sudden burst of energy shattered a thin calm. As settlers swept across old Pequot lands, felling the tribe’s forests and encroaching upon their villages, localized squabbles over trade, stolen livestock, damaged fields, hunting rights, property, and alcohol erupted up and down the valley. More and more, those arguments were settled with either a bullet or a blade. Pequot warriors gathered and prepared to fight. Puritan leaders spoke of war. Violence would turn the key to the Puritans’ continued growth. 38 CHAPTER 3 Back in England, the new colony’s backers asked a skilled designer named Lion Gardiner to join their fledgling enterprise as something of an urban planner, colonial-style. He was granted a four-year commission and a £100 annual salary and told to serve John Winthrop Jr. by “drawing, ordering and making of a city, towns or forts of defence.” Gardiner agreed and, after a stop in Holland to be married, arrived on the New England coast in November of that year. An early winter slowed him down, but by March 1636, Lion Gardiner and his pregnant wife had arrived at a...