Ct., about one hundred and fifty miles, in 1639
or 1640.

Between 1630 and 1640 many of the best families in England sent
representatives to America. It is said that Oliver Cromwell was at one
time on the point of coming. Between February and August, 1630,
seventeen ships loaded with families, bringing their cattle, furniture
and other worldly goods, arrived. One ship of four hundred tons brought
one hundred and forty passengers, others perhaps a larger number. Among
them were Matthew and Priscilla Grant, from whom Gen. Grant was of the
eighth generation in descent. Bancroft says, "Many of them had been
accustomed to ease and affluence; an unusual proportion were graduates
of Cambridge and Oxford. The same rising tide of strong English sense
and piety, which soon overthrew tyranny forever in the British Isles,
under Cromwell, was forcing the best blood in England to these shores."
The shores of New England says George P. Marsh, were then sown with the
finest of wheat; Plymouth Rock had but just received the pilgrims; the
oldest cottages and log-cabins on the coast were yet new, when Samuel
Boreman first saw them. The Puritans were a people full of religion,
ministers came with their people; they improved the time on the voyage,
Roger Clap's diary, kept on shipboard 1630, says, "So we came by the
good hand of our God through the deep _comfortably_, having preaching
and expounding of the word of God _every day for ten weeks_ together by
our ministers." Mr. Blaine says that the same spirit which kept
Cromwell's soldiers at home to fight for liberty after 1640, impelled
men to America before that time, so that there was probably never an
emigration, in the history of the world, so influential as that to New
England from 1620 to 1643.

It is possible that Christopher Boreman fought and perhaps fell in the
army of the commonwealth. But why did so many of the early settlers,
quickly leave the Atlantic coast for the Connecticut valley? Their first
historians say there was even then "a hankering for new land." They
wished also to secure it from occupation by the Dutch who were entering
it. Reports of its marvelous fertility, says Bancroft, had the same
effect on their imagination, as those concerning the Genesee and Miami
have since exerted, inducing the "western fever," "Young man go West."
The richness of the soil of the Wethersfield meadows has been celebrated
as widely as the aroma of its onions. It is only three miles from
Hartford and was for two centuries one of the most prominent communities
in Connecticut. There was scarcely a more cultured society anywhere. "It
were a sin," said the early colonists "to leave so fertile a land
unimproved." The Pequod war had annihilated a powerful and hostile tribe
on the Thames in 1637. Six hundred Indians perished, only two whites
were killed. Connecticut was long after that comparatively safe from
Indians. In 1639, the people formed themselves into a body politic by a
voluntary association. The elective franchise belonged to all the
members of the towns who had taken the oath of allegiance to the
commonwealth. It was the most perfect democracy which had ever been
organized. It rested on free labor. "No jurisdiction of the English
monarch was recognized; the laws of honest justice were the basis of
their commonwealth. They were near to nature. These humble emigrants
invented an admirable system. After two centuries and a half, the people
of Connecticut desire no essential change from the government
established by their Puritan fathers." (Bancroft).

The first emigration of Puritans to the Connecticut river is supposed to
have been to "Pyquag," now Wethersfield, in 1634. The next year 1635,
witnessed the first to Windsor and Hartford; while in the following year
1636, Rev. Thomas Hooker and his famous colony made the forest resound
with psalms of praise, as in June, they made their pilgrimage from the
seaside "to the delightful banks" of the Connecticut. Hooker was
esteemed, "The light of the western churches," and a lay associate, John
Haynes, had been governor of Massachusetts. The church at Wethersfield
was organized while Mrs. Boreman's letter given above, was on its way,
Feb. 28, 1641; Samuel and Mary Boreman were undoubtedly among its
earliest members. His first pastor there was Rev. Richard Denton,
whom Cotton Mather describes, as "a little man with a great soul, an
accomplished mind in a lesser body, an Iliad in a nutshell; blind of an
eye, but a great seer; seeing much of what eye hath not seen." In the
deep forests, amid the cabins of settlers, and the wigwams of savages,
he composed a system of Divinity entitled "Soliloquia Sacra." Rev. John
Sherman, born in Dedham, England, Dec. 26, 1613, educated at Cambridge,
who came to America in 1634, also preached here for a short time. He
was afterwards settled at Watertown Mass., had twenty-two children and
died in 1685. The colony at New Haven, which was soon united with them,
was founded in 1638, under Rev. John Davenport