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/)

LAND | Why Crematoria Are Like Pickleball

Plan of a Crematorium in England

I have posted something before about pickleball. It's a version of tennis that can be played on a court that is smaller. In fact four pickleball courts can just fit onto one tennis court (in practice, a few feet are allowed allowed between pickleball courts).

So a community that has space for four tennis courts that would accommodate 16 players when all courts are in use could put four pickleball courts in the space for a fourth tennis court and serve 28 players – 12 playing tennis and 16 playing pickleball.

The land economics of this make pickleball compelling. It has been called the fastest-growing sport in the United States.

Markers in a Flower Bed

Well, the trend toward crematoria  is another version of the same phenomenon. The photo at top is of a crematorium in England that has all the main facilities associated with modern graveyards – a place for religious services, trees, places to sit, memorials, and lots of parking for visitors.

What impressed me most was how economical the use of land was. Instead of grave sites that approximate the size of a coffin, the family arranges for a small metal marker that is a fraction of the size of a tombstone. See photo.

AMERICAN REVOLUTION | Oct. 19 – Washington Defeats Cornwallis

Redcoats Surrender to George Washington.

October 19, 2017 – At 2 a.m. on this day in 1781, 8,000 British troops and Hessian mercenaries under Charles (Lord) Cornwallis started filtering out of their Yorktown base to surrender to George Washington.

He had scored, with French allies, a decisive victory over the British, who two days before surrendered and sued for peace. Besides giving up troops and seamen, Cornwallis abandoned 144 cannons and nearly 50 naval vessels. 

It had not been going so well before that. Washington’s troops were wearing rags and food was short. Desertions were frequent. During the summer, only a few thousand troops were left at their camp at West Point, New York. 

The British had a large force in New York City under General Henry Clinton, well entrenched and prepared for an attack. But Washington learned that the British forces under the control of Lord Cornwallis were building a naval base at Yorktown in Virginia. He decided on a faking an attack on New York City, then marching his army past toward Virginia, to trap Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown. 

Washington’s 2,500 troops crossed the Hudson River on August 21, united with a French army of 4,000 men under Count de Rochambeau, and headed south to join up with the Marquis de Lafayette in Virginia, who was leading an American army of about 5,000 men. The combined force of 11,500 would attack Cornwallis. 

Washington's army and their French allies covered 200 miles in 15 days, marching every day from 2 a.m. until the troops were too exhausted by the heat to continue. They reached the head of Chesapeake Bay in early September. Few armies in history had ever moved with this speed so far.

Cornwallis got word of Washington's approach, but foolishly decided  that his troops could hold out till the British Navy arrived. To his dismay, he discovered that the large French fleet under Count de Grasse routed the British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves at the Battle of Virginia Capes on September 5, denying Cornwallis his rescue and exit.

Meanwhile, de Grasse sailed many of Washington and Rochambeau’s men down the Chesapeake to Virginia. They joined Lafayette on September 28 and cut off Cornwallis. De Grasse landed another 3,000 French troops on his ships. During the first two weeks of October, the 14,000 French and American troops overcame the fortified British positions with the aid of de Grasse’s warships... a British fleet carrying 7,000 men was on its way but was too slow in getting there to be of any help.

In the early weeks of October, Washington's troops began their siege, bombarding Corwallis with gun and cannon fire. He sent word of his surrender. Washington required the British to march out of the city, giving up their arms. But Cornwallis didn't show up for the surrender ceremony, pleading illness. He gave his sword to his second-in-command, to be offered to the French general, letting everyone know that Cornwallis considered himself beaten not by the American rebels but by the French. There was truth to that, surely, since half the troops and all the naval force was French. 

Whatever the mix of credit for Washington's victory, England took the defeat of Cornwallis with despair and lost the taste for teaching the colonials a lesson. The government decided not to invest in another army and appealed to Washington for peace. The eight-year Revolutionary War was officially over two years later, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783.

BIRTH | Oct. 18 – A. J. Liebling (Personal Comment)

A. J. Liebling. He died at 59, the
same year I met him briefly.

October 18, 2017 – This day was born in 1904 in New York City A(bbot) J(oseph) Liebling. As a boy, he loved reading the newspapers:

[M]any of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism... 

So he became a newspaper reporter and loved it. He would:

pound up tenement stairs and burst in on families disarranged by sudden misfortune. ... I learned almost immediately what every reporter knows, that most people are eager to talk about their troubles.

To get a job at the New York World, he hired a man to pace back and forth for three days outside the Pulitzer building with a sign: "Hire Joe Liebling." Although nobody at the World ever admitted to seeing the sign, he was hired. 

From The World in 1935 he moved up to a job with the The New Yorker that lasted till he died nearly 30 years later. He wrote about World War II, boxing and food. You might not figure out the first two topics, but you might guess the third by looking at his photo.

Comment

I met A. J. Liebling in the spring of 1963 when we were both at the Bircher-Benner Clinic on Keltenstrasse 9 in Zürich. Dr Bircher had an international clientèle, including my mother's Dutch relatives who claimed he cured several of them (including my grandmother) of cancer. His son Ralph Bircher carried on some of his work, and Dr Bircher's Estonian-born niece, Dr Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch, took over the Clinic in the 1940s after the death of Dr Bircher, who raised her as one of his own during and after World War I when the von Brasch family was at risk in Estonia. My mother made sure I was checked out several times at the Bircher-Benner-Privatklinik and I was given many earnest individual and group lectures on the value of exercise and minimally processed food. Modern medicine is catching up with Dr Bircher's régime. When I was there in 1963, I was told that a fellow American from New York I had met, Mr. Liebling, had left early because he didn't like the unprocessed food. Liebling was a gourmet and it showed (see photo above). It's too bad that he didn't learn to appreciate the gourmet qualities of Bircher Muesli. He died before the end of the year I met him, at a young 59 years of age.😕 

As Dr Bircher's son and daughter-in-law aged, the Bircher-Benner-Privatklinik lost some of its energy and it closed in 1994, becoming a government health facility. But as new research confirmed many of Dr Bircher's claims, and as the taste for Bircher Muesli spread throughout the world, the demand grew for the Clinic's return. It reopened in another location (Braunwald) in 2011.

WED | Eckholm & Fensterer

Bob and Victoria in a magical sea of lights.
Photos by JT Marlin.

October 8, 2017 – Alice and I yesterday went to the wedding party of Bob Eckholm and Victoria Fensterer.

It was at their home on the bay near Maidstone Park in East Hampton Town, off one of those roads with names from towns in the south of England. 

Victoria and Bob cut the
ceremonial cake.

They live in a lovely house overlooking a bay and Long Island Sound, near Folkstone [sic], named after Folkestone on the English Channel.

Bob Eckholm many years ago met Victoria through David Tyson. 

L to R: David Tyson and a cousin.
Photos by JT Marlin.

David's mother had a regular square dance at her home on Tyson Lane off Further Lane (we went to a few of these dances in the 1980s). The one-time family business was Kentile, a product still in use that is a tile bonded with a cork base. One of the guests from the family told me about the feast-and-famine cycles of the company.

I got to know David well during the decade when Alice and I sailed regularly on small boats. David was the Fleet Captain for an impressive array of 26 Sunfish that would race on weekends. He also sailed a 32-foot racing boat that won races regularly in light winds. Since then, heavier boats have become more popular.

The bride's brother, who officiated, looks on
with benevolence. At right is the bride and
Alice Tepper Marlin.

Bob visited and went with David to a party for David's grandmSpother and grandfather.

There he met Victoria and it was love at first sight.

This was a full event. Lots a good food, attentively served by the Springs General Store; a bottomless bar with a super-responsive bartender who was a friend of the couple; lots of toasts, and many, many stories.

Victoria gets a hug from a
fan.

It was good to see so many long-time and new friends, and to meet new ones.

I first met Janet Fensterer, the bride's sister, when she was an organist at the Springs Community Presbyterian Church and I was in the choir. 

Alice knew Bob Eckholm through an event where she was on the program with Bill Moyers. Bob was working with on a United Nations project and was interested in her work.

Bob's sister and spouse.

Besides members of the Eckholm, Fensterer and Tyson families, we talked with Joe McDonald, Scott Chwasky and Nina Gilman.

IRELAND 1955 | Todd Andrews

Todd Andrews (L) and Louis Rhatigan,
in Russia.

I just discovered a couple of books by Christopher Stephen "Todd" Andrews – Dublin Made Me (Lilliput Press, 2001) and A Man of No Property.

Todd got his name because he had a likeness to a comic strip character in The Magnet, Alonzo Todd.

Todd was born in Summerhill, Dublin in 1901. He attended St. Enda's School and Synge Street CBS.

He studied Commerce at University College Dublin with a break in which he participated in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Afterwards he returned to the university and earned a degree in Commerce.

My discovery of his books has prompted me to post here a letter he wrote to my mother, Hilda van Stockum Marlin, in 1955. I have been sorting through these letters since she died in 2006.

Todd was head of Bord na Móna, which was established in 1946 as a quasi-governmental corporation in order to exploit the fuel potential of turf. In subsequent years it has expanded to include other alternative-energy-related initiatives.

My father was then working for the International Civil Aviation Organization as the Director of Technical Assistance. Of the 1,700 employees of ICAO, 1,500 were technical assistance workers under his direction. He was at that time developing air traffic control guidelines, assisting with airport design, and staffing pilot training centers all over the world – in places like Afghanistan, Beirut and... Shannon.

The training center he set up in Beirut under U.N./ICAO auspices was regional.

It was a substantial structure, called "Spike Marlin's building," later used as barracks for the U.S. marines, who were tragically the victims of a terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, my mother was a bit impatient in the late 1940s at the amount of travel that my Dad did while she froze in the Canadian winters (ICAO was based in Montreal), although she made the best of its by writing two books about the family in Canada.

She figured out that a U.N. family with a peripatetic father could live better than we were living in Montreal, and we could live anywhere in the world.

After our Granny (Olga Boissevain van Stockum) died in 1949, Hilda  prevailed in a family move to Dublin, a return to the city where Hilda and Spike met.

We six children were installed first in Blackrock and then for two more years in Dalkey at the top of Harbour Road in a house called "Beulah" (referencing the Biblical Beulah Land, the subject of a lovely hymn with the chorus  "I'm counting all the hours...").

The house is now chopped up into several smaller pieces, but even so "Beulah" is currently priced at about $8 million.

Randal and I went to Blackrock College. Olga was at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Brigid went to art school and the other two sisters went nearby in Blackrock  to Sion Hill.

The two-page letter from Todd Andrews is embedded in this post. It expresses great admiration for Olga's ability to speak French, and disappointment in the progress of Ireland relative to Sweden. Like many Irish people after WW2, Todd was eager for Ireland to prosper from the economic benefits of peace. The Emerald Tiger didn't emerge until the tech boom, and that didn't end well...

(The "John" mentioned in the letter is presumably John Dowling, the dentist. He and his wife Joan were close friends of Hilda and it was John who introduced Todd to Spike and Hilda.)

WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.