CONNECTICUT | How Theocratic Brits Created Two Colonies and a State

Rev. John Davenport, First Minister
of New Haven, 1638-1668. Portrait by
Amos Doolittle, c. 1797, Connecticut
Historical Society.

John Winthrop and the story of the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is better known than the stories of Hartford and New Haven, and the State that grew out of these towns is less well understood.

Thomas Hooker was a great preacher, an erudite writer on Christian subjects, the first minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the founders of both the city of Hartford and the state of Connecticut. He is also the inspiration for the "Fundamental Orders" of Connecticut, the world's first written democratic constitution.

Most likely he was born in Leicestershire, the county east of Warwickshire. The Hooker branch in Devon produced the great theologian, Rev. Richard Hooker who, with Sir Walter Raleigh, was one of the two most influential people to come from Exeter, Devon's the county town.

As a speaker, Hooker attracted crowds as well as spies from the Church of England. The Puritans wanted to "purify" the church, but the Anglican Church was a step ahead, purifying itself of heretics including Puritans, to protect the unpopular Charles I.

Hooker was ordered to appear before the High Commission, the Star Chamber. It was originally established to ensure fair enforcement of laws, but  became a vehicle for political oppression through its arbitrary use of power. Hooker decided to flee to Holland. From there, he and some parishioners made their way to Gov. Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony.

They settled in Newtown, later called Cambridge. But they came to oppose the undemocratic ways of Winthrop’s theocracy and moved in May 1636, the year Harvard was founded, en masse to the Connecticut River Valley. Two years after they moved, Hooker delivered a sermon on how Hartford should govern itself. He said:

The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. … [The] choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance. … [T]hey who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates [should] also … set the bounds and limitations of the power and the place unto which they call them. 

A historian (Ellsworth Grant) calls this statement “the first practical assertion ... of the right of the governed not only to choose their rulers but to limit their powers.” The Fundamental Orders of the colony of Connecticut, consisting of the towns of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, were based on Hooker’s sermon. They are the world's first written constitution. It is why Connecticut is known as the Constitution State. (https://www.hartfordhistory.net/founding_of_hartford.html)

John Davenport also left Winthrop not long after Hooker did. He was from the north end of Warwickshire, east of Birmingham, in the city of Coventry. Davenport is remembered as the man after whom Davenport College at Yale is named. He was born to a wealthy family, son and grandson of two generations of civic leaders in Coventry. He was educated at Oxford, matriculating at Merton College in 1613, switching to Magdalen College in 1615 and leaving Oxford before completing his degree. (He returned in 1625 when Charles I came to the throne to earn his B.D. and M.A. degrees.) 

In 1624 he was made vicar of the parish of St Stephen’s Church in London. At St. Stephen’s, his boyhood friend from Coventry, Theophilus Eaton, became a member of his parish. Eaton was the son of a minister with a B.D. degree from Oxford (Lincoln College). Davenport’s efforts to support rural clergy and relieve reformed clergy displaced by war were frustrated by Bishop William Laud, an alumnus of St John’s College, Oxford and a junkyard dog of a heretic-hunter. When Charles I appointed Laud to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Davenport resigned in disgust from the Church of England and moved to Holland. 

Davenport and Eaton left England on a ship to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony and fellow Puritans in Boston. Davenport brought with him much of the St Stephen’s parish on the Hector in 1637. William Woodin, ancestor of the first Treasury Secretary under FDR, might well have been on this ship even though he was only 12, since the Puritans tended to bring their families. There is no record of an older Woodin having come on the Boston voyage or on the later trip to New Haven, but young Woodin might have been put in the care of a friendly family. 

When they reached Boston, Davenport and Eaton were disappointed. Winthrop demanded his own version of Puritan orthodoxy. The last straw was the church trial in 1638  in the midst of the Antinomian disputes, i.e., the debate over whether people were saved by good works or by grace. Davenport was ordinarily on the side of battling heresy, but when he attended the trial of a fellow dissenter, he did not like conduct of the trial.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643) argued for a Covenant of Grace. The trial ended with her excommunication from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and she fled to Providence, where Roger Williams (1603-1683) had created the first Baptist Church and preached the ideas that Anne Hutchinson promoted. Williams was the first to argue for separation of church and state. Hutchinson moved to Portsmouth, R.I. and years later she and her children were killed by Indians.

Davenport and Eaton decided to leave Boston but not to join Hooker. Eaton, who had become a wealthy merchant in London, became New Haven’s first governor.

Davenport sought a "new haven", since he wanted a more orthodox theocracy than Hooker was offering. Eaton and his fellow merchants had a practical interest in being in a harbor like Boston. Men who returned from hunting the Pequots told them of a spot at Quinnipiack on the Long Island Sound shoreline. That was perfect. Here they chose to put into practice a theocracy even more rigid than in Massachusetts. They arranged their civil and church affairs in accordance with details in the Bible. 

In the spring of 1638, the town of New Haven was founded. More people came in subsequent years and some groups fanned out to form Milford, Guilford and Stamford towns. These four towns were united into the republic of New Haven and they added Southold, on Long Island, and Branford. As a confederation of six independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. 

From their origins during the colonial era, a sense of rivalry existed between the settlement at Hartford, formed in 1636 by followers of the Rev. Thomas Hooker and the settlement of New Haven, formed in 1638 by the followers of Puritan minister, Rev. John Davenport and his merchant-organizer friend, Theophilus Eaton.

So William Woodin put his head down and settled into being a New Haven resident. He would have felt the rivalry strongly. His name appears in the New Haven Congregational Church records in 1642. He married Sarah Clark in 1650 when he was 25 and she was 21. The church records show that he lived a quiet life with just a few embarrassing incidents caused by excessive alcohol consumption. 

But the Mother Country’s long arm was felt in New Haven. When Cromwell died, the opposition easily defeated his government. The monarchists swooped in and restored Charles II. Leaders in Boston and Hartford quickly recognized the new regime, but New Haven acted more slowly and in fact harbored two judges who had signed the death warrant for Charles I. While Charles II extended a general pardon to Cromwell’s leaders, he excepted the regicides.

Charles II punished New Haven for giving two of his father's killers, the regicides, a home. He granted a new charter to the Colony of Connecticut in 1662, ending the independence of New Haven and joining it to  Connecticut as of 1665. He was correct that the New Haven colony was more willing to oppose him, but was wrong about which of the two governing philosophies would be more dangerous for continued rule by the Mother Country. 

Hooker's colony was more radically democratic than Winthrop, while Davenport was more conservative about holding the power in the hands of fewer people. In the New Haven colony only church-members could vote, disfranchising half the settlers in New Haven town and Guilford, and one-fifth in Milford. Each of the six New Haven towns was also governed by seven church officers known as "11 pillars of the church" who served as judges. They ended the English system of trial by jury, because there was no authority for it in the laws of Moses. (Based on John Fisk, 1896 http://colonialwarsct.org/1638_eaton_davenport.htm.) 

Davenport was still venerated by his congregation in New Haven. Near the end of his life he was offered a position at the First Church in Boston, the most prestigious Puritan church in the colonies. Davenport accepted it, and thereby agitated his own New Haven parish. In the brouhaha that followed, Davenport died in 1670. He is remembered as a visionary who developed a plan for new college, 30 years before it was established and was given the name Yale. The University has recognized Davenport's role by naming a college after him.

In 1701 the Connecticut legislature made New Haven and Hartford co-capitals, with meetings every May in Hartford, and every October in New Haven. But maintaining capitol buildings in both places was expensive. Officials proposed eliminating one of the capitols and put it to a referendum. New Haven was larger, but Hartford was more central and offered land and $500,000 toward construction. In the fall of 1873, Hartford won the referendum, becoming Connecticut’s sole capital city, effective 1875. (Source: Patrick J. Mahoney, "A Tale of Two Capitals", https://connecticuthistory.org/a-tale-of-two-capitals/)

WOODIN | Will Woodin's Oxford, Conn. Ancestors

William H[artman] ("Will") Woodin, FDR's first Treasury Secretary, was born in Berwick, Pa., but before his family settled in Pennsylvania they lived in Oxford, Conn.

His ancestor David Woodin left England because he did not conform to the Church of England. Being a dissenter was, for a time, a treasonous way of life.

The English dissenters with which the first Woodins identified appear to have been Congregationalists. Having first  tried settling in the Netherlands, the dissenters migrated in large numbers to New Haven.

Why New Haven Was a Magnet for Puritans

New Haven was founded in 1638 by John Davenport and some 500 other Puritans who left Boston to create a theocratic colony. Unfortunately there were lapses of discipline in Boston and immigrants to New England chose to go to a new colony that permitted only fellow dissenters. Called the New Haven Colony, it was originally independent of the Connecticut colony to the south.

The Congregational churches or meetinghouses in the United States broke more definitively with the Church of England than the Presbyterians, who were at times allied with the Anglicans. The distinctive feature of the Congregational Church is that each church runs its own affairs; there is no hierarchy. The Presbyterians, however, elect not only their elders but higher regional levels of church leaders—the American Constitution is modeled on the Presbyterian church organization, using some of the language of Free Masonry.

The Congregational churches led the migration to America and later the revolt by Oliver Cromwell and others against Charles I. In 1630, Puritans founded the first American Congregational Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Sir Richard Saltonstall. They chose Rev. George Phillips from Norfolk County, England, as their first pastor.

Because of their emphasis on thinking for themselves, the Congregational churches put great emphasis on learning and founded some of the first colleges and universities in America, starting with Harvard in 1636 and then (as with Cambridge leaving Oxford) through dissent with Harvard thinking, Yale. Then they started Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst—and later, Beloit, Carleton, Grinnell, Oberlin, and Pomona. 

As Harvard was forming, in 1635, seven of the Watertown Puritans who came in 1630 left the Boston area and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut, becoming the second church organized and located in Connecticut (the first being in Windsor, earlier in the same year). In 1641, the New Haven Colony, at Rev. John Davenport's suggestion, offered land to 28 Wethersfield families within New Haven and they became the First Congregational Church of Stamford, six years before Stamford itself formally existed. Rev. John Sherman served as first pastor in Wethersfield (1635-1641) and Rev. Richard Denton, originally from Halifax, England, served as first pastor of the church in Stamford (1641-1644). Out of the migration to New Haven would come the momentum to found Yale.

William Woodin Migrates from England before 1642

Records of the First Congregational Church in New Haven indicate that three Woodin generations lived in New Haven at least part of their lives. The first William Woodin arrived three years after New Haven was founded, in 1842. He married Sarah Clark, who may have been the reason he chose New Haven, because she seems to have had family in the Colony. She died in 1691, seven years after her husband. Almost surely he or she had family or business connections in New Haven. They were members of the growing Congregational church, which would found Yale University in 1701, ten years after Sarah died. 

The first two American generations of Woodins appear to have sought security and lived long lives. The two Woodins born in New Haven to William and Sarah Woodin lived to an average age of 70. Will Woodin's g4[gggg] grandfather, Benjamin Woodin (1670-1738), was born when his father was 29. Benjamin married Mary Wilmot and he lived to be 67. His wife was five years younger and lived four years longer.

Benjamin and Mary Woodin had a son William in 1718. He married Katherine Harrington and moved to Oxford, Conn., He lived to 73 and his wife to 80.

The Oxford Woodins

Oxford, Conn. is located midway between Waterbury and Bridgeport, nestled between the Naugatuck River to the east and the Housatonic River to the west. The two rivers create an opportunity for good farmland and woodlands. Oxford, Conn. has a sawmill that would have been an Oxford export and generated the raw materials for builders of homes and boats in the region. Today there are many Woodins living in Oxford, with first names Alvin (connected with the Trowbridge family), Donald, Heidi, Lisa, and Pin Dylan.

The two Oxford-born Woodin ancestors were adventurous. Both had shockingly short lives. One Woodin died at sea as a young man and his son died of an illness in the same year his wife died.

Milo Woodin was born in 1774 in Oxford but decided to make his career on the open seas as a whaler — a dangerous but exciting profession. He was successful, rising to become captain of his own whaling ship, an Ahab (but presumably nicer) of his day. He married someone named Lucy (her last name is not recorded anywhere). Sadly, he was lost at sea as a young man of 28, in 1803.

Five years before he died, in 1798, Milo had a son, Will Woodin's great-grandfather, David Charles Woodin. David was an architect, and the last of the Woodins born in 1798 in Connecticut.

Pennsylvania, Ho!

David Woodin most likely left Oxford, Conn. in search of work. Pennsylvania was well-suited for the industrial revolution that was under way in the early 19th century, with ample coal and iron and rivers to carry them on. He was married in 1819 to Sarah Hartman (1792-1825), who was born in Catawissa, Columbia County, Pa., six years before her husband. David died, like his father, a very young man, on October 21, 1825, just 27, a month after his wife. Sarah’s brother Casper Hartman and his son and daughter-in-law were felled by an illness called the “flux”. The same illness seems to have killed David Woodin and his wife. It is considered today to have been a form of dysentery caused by bacteria or a parasite.

David and Sarah's children were William Hartman Woodin — Will Woodin's grandfather and co-founder of the Jackson & Woodin foundry — and two younger siblings, Joseph B. Woodin, and a daughter whose name is lost. All three of them were orphaned in 1825, the eldest being just five years old and the daughter aged two. These toddlers appear to have been brought up by Sarah’s brother Casper Hartman, and his wife Deborah Carr. Casper was born in Catawissa in 1777, the son of a pioneer German immigrant, Johann Wilhelm Hartman (1748-1831) from Baden Baden, Germany and a Quaker, Frances Reemy, so that there may have been some Quaker influences in the home of David Woodin.

WOODIN | 1. Ancestors (Updated Oct. 24, 2015)

This post has been moved to a private blog. To obtain access, contact the author, John Tepper Marlin, at jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.

A Beautiful Day - Harvard Tops Yale 45-7

John Tepper Marlin

Robert Trentlyon is a member of the Class of 1950 at Yale. He called to invite me to join him at the Harvard-Yale game this year, which took place on Saturday. For many years, Bob has gone to The Game with two friends, his college roommate and Ambassador Walter Carrington, Harvard ’52, whom he met when both were involved in Students for Democratic Action. One year neither of Bob’s colleagues could make it, so I joined Bob in lieu of the other two. Harvard came from behind and won. Bob consoled himself at the time, by muttering: “Well, at least Walter isn’t here to gloat over me.”

Bob Trentlyon, Yale '50

I met Walter on Bob’s 80^th birthday. This year the three of us went to New Haven on Saturday, November 19. Bob is a former NYC newspaper publisher (Chelsea-Clinton News etc.) and a prominent civic leader, his POV distinct from that of his classmate, the late Bill Buckley Yale ’50. Bob told me that Yale calls the Class of 1950 its “greatest class”, swelled by GIs to twice the pre-war size of 800. We took the 7:55 am New Haven RR train from Grand Central (see photo). It was so crowded with young fans that many had to stand.

In New Haven, we met up with Walter, who came down from Boston. He served Presidents Carter and Clinton as Ambassador to Senegal and Nigeria and before that headed up the Peace Corps in Africa during the Kennedy-Johnson era. We took the Yale Club bus to the stadium for $15, round trip. We purchased general admission tickets for $5 each but then decided we wanted to sit closer to the 50-yard line so we purchased reserved seats at Portal 30 for another $30 each. Walter was delighted to find his seat number matched his birthday. It was our lucky day. We sat right by the 50-yard line.

Since the three of us purchased six tickets, the attendance figure put out by Yale is overstated by at least three, making it 55,134. This number amounts to 90 percent of the 61,446 capacity that the Bowl was left with after alterations in 2006. But the Yale Bowl was never 90 percent filled. Many people, especially on the Harvard side, must have bought tickets and didn’t come. And after the first half I regret to say a large number of Blue supporters threaded their way out well before the end of the game; for this game, the Sitzfleisch award goes to the Harvard fans.

L-R: Walter Carrington H'52, Robert Trentlyon Y'50, John Tepper Marlin H'62
Update January 2013 - Sadly, Bob Trentlyon tells me he was at a memorial
service for Ambassador Carrington - at Tony & Lucille's (see below) in the
second week of January.

We sat on the Harvard side, where the sun shines after the first quarter. Our caps shaded our eyes (see photo). The sun meant we shivered less than the Yalies on the other side of the Bowl. It was windy, especially in the first quarter, and several missed forward passes were probably  blown off course. The lateral passes had a higher completion rate but gained less yardage than a forward pass would have (duh!).

One reason some Harvard fans didn’t show is surely that Harvard was undefeated going into the game and was already the Ivy champion after beating Penn the week before. But the Harvard team reportedly had decided not to accept their Ivy championship rings if they failed to defeat Yale. Based on this fact, and the formidable team statistics at the front of the game program, I ventured to suggest to my senior companions that the score would be Harvard 48 to Yale 18.  Neither would wager.

The game began with a fine Yale touchdown. It was a sight to see the Yale side so excited. After the conversion and a 7-0 lead, the Yalies leaped up and waved blue hats and blue scarves until kingdom come. The idea surfaced… they could win this! In the excitement I confess I temporarily forgot my lopsided forecast. After all, no money was riding on the outcome. Ambassador Carrington thoughtfully also failed to remember what my forecast was. Bob, in contrast, reminded me I was the “baby” (his word) of the group, and for all he could tell, I was drinking Milk of Amnesia.

But Harvard’s Quarterback  Collier Winters quickly tied up the first quarter.  The stadium paused for a moment of silence out of respect for a woman who was killed before the game by a U-Haul carrying beer kegs, with two others injured. (The NY Times reported that the Yale undergraduate driver was sober and that the problem seems to have been a mechanical failure.)

Harvard’s second touchdown was at the beginning of the second quarter, as Winters threw a successful 20-yard pass to Wide Receiver Alex Sarkisian in the end zone. The next two scores featured kicker David Mothander, who faked a field goal and ran over the goal line without a single Blue hand being laid on him and then, before the end of the first half, kicked a real field goal.

From the game program I counted 138 names on the Harvard squad, 128 on the Yale squad. So, on average, 8.3 percent of the two squads are on the field at any one time. I couldn't find a roster of the two bands; my impression is that they have shrunk from the numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. If my impression is correct, I wonder what the reason is. 

By the middle of the second quarter when Harvard was well ahead, I re-remembered my forecast. The Harvard defense held up during the rest of the game, blocking a Yale field goal kick, forcing a fumble and intercepting three times. At the third down 18 times, Yale was able to grind out the yardage for a first down only four times, which is a success rate of just 22.2 percent.

As the shadows lengthened, and Winters hammered away, the
 sons and daughters of Eli streamed out of the stadium. 

The Yale announcer kept up his spirits by noting the achievements of many of the other 35 varsity sports the university competes in, and noting the scores of games in the world beyond New Haven. He also made the point that Yale was ahead over the full 128-game series, with 65 games won to Harvard’s 53 (soon to be 54) and the rest tied.  But Yale has been lagging in recent years. Since 1956, when the Ivy League was formalized, Harvard has won 31 to 24, with only one game tied - the one in 1968 that is formally listed as a 29-29 tie but is correctly described (I was there) in Cambridge as a Harvard win. The 21^st century has seen ten wins for Harvard, one for Yale. At what point does Harvard start to look like a bully?

After a scoreless third quarter, what sped the sons and daughters of Eli on an early exit from the Bowl was the Bang-Bang Winters Silver Hammer coming down on their heads for three touchdowns in a row.  The most exciting moments were a 60-yard pass to Kyle Jusczcyk and a long runback after an interception by Harvard captain Alex Gedeon.

Ivy Champs '99. This was the last time Yale won against
 Harvard at home. Bob hypothesized this was 1899.

Somewhere in the fourth quarter I observed to Bob that Yale hasn’t beaten Harvard at the Yale Bowl since ’99. I pointed to the “Ivy Champs ‘99” banner on the field (see photo). Bob had by this point in the game become… and I hate to say this about a friend… a bitter man. He looked out over the field and said, with his gallows-humor nostrils flaring: “You realize, of course, that the banner refers to eighteen-99.”

According to Harvard Magazine's report of the game, the final score equaled (was identical to!) the best previous Harvard win, in 1982.

Archway entrance to Little Italy,
New Haven.

To be fair, Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt did his best. During the season he has broken many Yale passing records. He completed 24 of 39 attempted passes during the game, an average of slightly less than 10 yards per pass, with one of them ending with a Yale touchdown. The wind may have contributed to three of his passes ending in Harvard hands. There was a kerfuffle over Witt’s choosing to play with his team instead of showing up for a Rhodes Scholarship finalist interview. He did the right thing for his team and can always apply for a Rhodes in 2012.

Tony & Lucille's, where we ate dinner.

After the game, there being no more Mory’s, we went to Little Italy (see photo of archway at entrance to the neighborhood) and had a really fine meal at Tony & Lucille’s (photo at left). We had trouble afterwards getting a taxi to the train station but fortunately got a lift from a Yalie patron of Frank Pepe’s Pizza  across the road. Pepe’s is reputed to be the most ancient pizza vendor in the United States, says Bob, who by this time was greatly cheered up by a large helping of fettucini, more than he could finish, and some Californian pinot grigio.

Tony & Lucille's restaurant has installed
 an ATM machine. The local bank puts
a distance between  itself and Wall Street.

The ATM machine at Tony & Lucille's was installed by Domestic Bank, which self-describes its mission as "We're Main Street - Not Wall Street".  A sign of the times. This led to some stories by Bob of his days as a newspaper publisher, including the time when his biggest advertisers, NYC’s savings banks (institutions that would now be called “community banks”) were clobbered by the Savings and Loan crisis. It was a hard time for neighborhood-based periodicals, which relied heavily on these bank ads. He once offered a savings bank some toasters in return for advertising - in those days, you got a toaster for opening an account. PS: It didn’t work. “I have a basement full of toasters,” said the banker.

That story was as close as we came to talking about the reality of the world of 2011, laid low by excessive risk-taking by American financial institutions and facing the possibility of another whammy from the asset-shrinking impact of U.S.-originated derivatives on European banks. It was a welcome respite. It was, for Walter and me, and maybe even for Bob, a beautiful day.