A Community in Crisis

The Fall of the New Haven Colony

Walker Stollenwerck, '27

Issue: 2

“[F]or their respect to two Traitors they would do themselves injury and possibly ruin themselves and the whole Colony of New Haven.”1 These words, spoken by Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirke in 1649, portended the colonial failure that was soon to come. The New Haven Colony, which was founded in 1638 by Puritan settlers from England who had hoped to build a community with a strong relationship between church and state, was riddled with problems that led to its eventual demise. It would last less than one generation as an independently functioning colony. The New Haven Colony never successfully set up local or international trade, lost an enormous amount of money in a failed attempt to create a settlement in Delaware, and had its only oceangoing ship completely disappear in the water never to be seen again. In addition to being weak economically, the people of New Haven lacked physical security, as they were often in conflict with nearby Native Americans. Ultimately, however, it was the New Haven Colony’s support for the regicides, two judges who had fled persecution in England to come to America, that angered the British government and resulted in the New Haven Colony’s forcible merger with the Connecticut Colony via a 1662 charter. The fall of the self-governing New Haven Colony can be attributed to challenging circumstances, including economic hardship, tensions with neighboring Native Americans, and most critically, King Charles II’s decision to disband the colony due to the Puritans’ support for the regicides.

New Haven's lack of successful trade, including failed attempts to set up new settlements, its inability to establish local agricultural exchange, and the loss of its only oceangoing ship contributed to economic hardships that weakened the Colony’s stability. The New Haven Colony tried to trade with neighboring colonies like Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and Virginia with little success. Their hostile and impoverished Native American neighbors along the Quinnipiac River offered no additional opportunities for local commerce. In the winter of 1639, when George Lamberton, the town's most adventurous trader, arrived in Virginia, he “discovered that there was a brisk fur trade along the Delaware” with local Native Americans.2 Soon afterward, The Delaware Company was created, and fifty families were sent to the area to trade fur, establish churches, and create a settlement.3 Once there, they encountered resistance from the Dutch and the Swedes. Their trading house was burned and several settlers were arrested. Damages were estimated at a thousand pounds sterling.4 As a result, some settlers returned to New Haven, while those that remained became loyal to the Dutch.5 Thus, “the most ambitious and determined attempt at expansion” from the New Haven Colony crumbled. The New Haven settlers' effort was noted both for its “boldness and by its utter failure” as it required “the best energies and resources of the town and its complete collapse hastened the final ruin of the colony.” The New Haven Colony made at least two more attempts to get land in Delaware but were thwarted by the Dutch each time. The attempt to establish a settlement at Delaware Bay was a costly misfire for the Colony.6

Local farming could not repair trade losses at Delaware, so the New Haven Colony sought to trade with England, an effort that would result in the loss of their only long-range ship. During their first season in New Haven, the Colony’s farmers produced a good harvest, but they were unable to repeat it. As a result, they “never produced a surplus crop to sell to other colonies for profit.”7 In a last-ditch effort to trade effectively, the New Haven Colony decided to pool the majority of their remaining money and resources and build a ship (“The Phantom Ship”) that would depart in January for London.8 The goal of the settlers' voyage was “to set up a direct trade route between the New Haven Colony and London,” with the hope that this journey would establish the New Haven Bay as the Colony’s home base for international trade and commerce.9 The ship had seventy people on board, including three of the town's most prominent leaders. In the spring of 1646, ships from London started arriving but they brought no news of the vessel that had left in January, and the people of New Haven began to worry.10 John Davenport, a local minister, and the people of New Haven prayed “that the Lord would (if it was his pleasure) let them hear what he had done with their dear friends, and prepare them with a suitable submission to his Holy Will.”11 But the ship was never to return. With the loss of the ship's cargo valued at five thousand pounds, “New Haven's vision of becoming a major, commercial empire faded and the colonists were compelled to only rely primarily on agriculture,” making New Haven “little else than a colony of discouraged farmers”12 Despite various efforts, the New Haven Colony failed to create a viable economic community that might have allowed for their sustained existence.

Ongoing conflicts with Native Americans also weakened the security of the New Haven Colony and undermined its ability to thrive. The New Haven Colony generally treated their Native American neighbors with kindness: for example, when the Native Americans asked for a fence to protect their land from the Colony’s grazing animals, the colonists happily agreed.13 However, over time, instances of conflict with Native Americans emerged. In 1639, Wethersfield farmers quarreled with Sowheag, a Native American chief in the area. The conflict escalated and Sowheag incited several Pequots to attack, resulting in the death of six male and three female colonists. The Connecticut Colony commanded Sowheag to give up the murderers. Upon his refusal to do so, the General Court of Connecticut ordered a group of one hundred men to take them by force. However, Theophilus Eaton, the governor of the New Haven Colony, feared that this could start a war with the Native Americans and instructed the Connecticut Colony to not raid Sowheag’s hideout.14 Afterward, one of the Native American murderers, Nepaupuck, came to the New Haven Colony, presuming that the Colony would be lenient with him. However, he was incorrect as the Court of New Haven (which had recently been established) ordered that, “He that sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Consequently, his head was cut off the next day and pitched upon a pole in the marketplace.”15 This was just the start of the unrest that would distract the Colony as it attempted to establish itself.

Conflict between New Haven settlers and local tribes escalated in the following years. Several years later in 1644, a colonist in Stamford was struck with a hammer by Busheage, a local Native American, leaving her with permanent brain damage. Busheage was tried for the crime in the New Haven Colony’s court and eventually convicted and sentenced to death.16 Also in that year, after the nearby Mohawk Tribe was seen preparing for war, the New Haven Court ordered the people of New Haven to take precautions:

It is ordered that each plantation shall keep their great guns loaded and ready for use… [and] [i]t is ordered for the setting of the watch, that the drum is to beat at the going down of the sun, and the watchmen to be there within an hour after the setting of the sun… In case of danger, the watch shall fire two guns for alarm, the sentinel shall fire one gun, and cause the drum to beat. If the danger be from fire, they shall cry, Fire! fire! if from the Indians, Arm! arm! upon which all the soldiers shall repair to the meeting house.17

Clearly, the colonists had now reached a state of intense fear and paranoia and were dedicating considerable energy to self-protection. In 1645 and 1646, tensions continued to worsen. The Native Americans would sometimes come up to the palisades (ten to twelve feet high fences put up by fearful New Haven colonists in order to keep Native Americans out) and “deride the English for being shut up in a pen, and challenge them to come out and fight like brave men; they boasted that they kept the English ‘shut up all one as pigs.’”18 The colonists were under immense physical and psychological pressure as the neighboring Native Americans would mock, ridicule, and attack them, thus threatening their long-term well-being.

As much as the New Haven Colony was faltering economically and fighting with its Native American neighbors, the final nail in its coffin was its decision to harbor two regicides, angering the British and resulting in it being subsumed by the Connecticut Colony. In order for a colony to be formally recognized by the British government, it needed a charter that would officially grant it land. In 1645, the New Haven Colony appointed its treasurer, Thomas Gregson, and the Connecticut Colony appointed George Fenwick, to secure charters from England for their governments. Gregson perished aboard the Phantom Ship and Fenwick never actually went to England.19 Therefore, the New Haven Colony remained charterless and in limbo until 1661 when plans resurfaced.

In 1649, Edward Whalley and William Goffe were judges at the trial of King Charles I and sentenced him to death. During the Restoration, when his son Charles II became king, the two judges, fearing for their lives, fled to the American colonies. Whalley and Goffe originally arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but once Charles II learned of their escape, he sought their arrest. Feeling unsafe, Whalley and Goffe fled to the home of their friend John Davenport in New Haven. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony received orders to find the judges, they sent Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirke to the New Haven Colony to capture them.20 William Leete, then New Haven’s governor, and other magistrates learned of the plan to search for the regicides but they refused to offer any information about Whalley and Goffe’s whereabouts. Eventually, “Kirke and Kellond left and searched the town to the extent they could without a warrant. Of course, they found nothing, Whalley and Goffe being in the wilderness and living in a cave.”21 Shortly before they left Kellond and Kirke pressed the governor to acknowledge King Charles II, to which he snarkily replied, “We will wait to see if the King will acknowledge us,” a reference to the fact that the New Haven Colony had not yet secured an official royal charter. Such insolence caused the New Haven Colony an “unenviable notoriety in the court of the second Charles.”22 While England insisted that the New Haven Colony respect the king and return the regicides, the New Haven Colony insisted it “would not surrender its friends to certain death.”23 The New Haven Colony had directly disobeyed and disrespected the king of England, and they would soon pay the price.

During the time that the New Haven Colony was protecting the judges, the Connecticut Colony had returned to the issue of securing a charter, an effort that had been abandoned in 1645. In March 1661, their Court approved this objective, and plans were finalized by June 1661. Realizing that his colony had lost favor with England, Leete visited John Winthrop, the governor of the Connecticut Colony, and asked Winthrop to advocate for a charter for the New Haven Colony during his journey to London.24 Instead, the Connecticut Colony “in a premeditated and cunning move”25 took advantage of New Haven’s poor relationship with the British government and secured a charter from Charles II that proclaimed that their territory encompassed, “all that part of our Dominions in New England in America, bounded on the East by Narragansett River, commonly called Narragansett Bay, where the said River falleth into the Sea, and on the North by the line of the Massachusetts Plantation, and on the south by the Sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts Colony, running from East to West, that is to say, from the said Narragansett Bay on the East to the South Sea on the West part, with the Islands there unto adjoining.”26 The Connecticut Colony now had the right to all of the New Haven Colony’s land. The King had effectively merged the New Haven Colony into the Connecticut Colony, resulting in the loss of the New Haven Colony’s independence.

The New Haven Colony could not survive trade gaps, violence with Native Americans, and most critically a dispute with the king of England. Perhaps the New Haven Colony was just too small to be a player in the New World, facing an uphill battle to create more economic size and permanence, protect itself from the maneuvers of larger settlements and colonies, and fend off brutal attacks. In its weakened state, it was certainly not well-positioned to challenge the king by harboring regicides. Ultimately, this little colony faced too many overlapping conflicts. Indeed, it would be more than one hundred years before colonists, now united as a major force, could take on a British king.

*Authors Note: Unless citing a primary source, I have replaced the word “Indian” with “Native American” and I have modernized Old English language.

Bibliography

Atwater, Edward. History of the Colony of New Haven to Its Absorption into Connecticut. Boston, Mass.: Rand, Avery & Co., 1880.

Calder, Isabel M. The New Haven Colony. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970.

"Charter of the Colony of Connecticut," 1662, https://www.cga.ct.gov/hco/books/Charter_of_the_Colony_of_CT_1662.pdf.

Daniels, Bruce C. "Connecticut." In Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History, edited by Andrew W. Robertson, 89-92. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010. Gale eBooks.

Lambert, Edward R. History of the Colony of New Haven before and after the Union with Connecticut Containing a Particular Description of the Towns Which Composed That Government. N.p.: Hitchcock & Stafford, 1838.

Levermore, Charles. Republic of New Haven. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1886.

Menta, John. The Quinnipiac: Cultural Conflict in Southern New England. New Haven, Conn.: Dept. of Anthropology, Yale University: Division of Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2003.

Ofgang, Erik. "The Legend of the Ghost Ship of New Haven." Connecticut Insider, May 27, 2021. https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/article/The-legend-of-the-Ghost-Ship-of-New-Haven-17046076.php.

Osterweis, Rollin G. Three Centuries of New Haven 1638-1938. Forge Village, Mass: Yale University Press, 1953.

Pagliuco, Christopher. The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe: Smuggled through Connecticut. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012.

Prince, Carl E. "New Haven Colony." In Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., edited by Stanley I. Kutler, 59-60. Vol. 6. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. Gale eBooks.

Sletcher, Michael. New Haven: From Puritanism to the Age of Terrorism. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004.

Weir, David, A., and Stephen Schechter. "New Haven Fundamentals, 1643." In American Governance. New York City, New York, USA: Macmillan US, 2016. Credo Reference.

Footnotes

[1] Isabel M. Calder, The New Haven Colony (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970), 224.

[2] Charles Levermore, Republic of New Haven (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1886), 90-91.

[3] Michael Sletcher, New Haven: From Puritanism to the Age of Terrorism (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004), 14.

[4] Edward Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven to Its Absorption into Connecticut (Boston, Mass.: Rand, Avery & Co., 1880), 194.

[5] Edward Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven to Its Absorption into Connecticut (Boston, Mass.: Rand, Avery & Co., 1880), 194.

[6] Rollin G. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven 1638-1938 (Forge Village, Mass: Yale University Press, 1953), 27.

[7] John Menta, The Quinnipiac : Cultural Conflict in Southern New England (New Haven, Conn.: Dept. of Anthropology, Yale University : Division of Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2003), 103.

[8] Lambert, History of the Colony, 57.

[9] Sletcher, New Haven, 15.

[10] Sletcher, New Haven, 15.

[11] Erik Ofgang, "The Legend of the Ghost Ship of New Haven," Connecticut Insider, May 27, 2021.

[12] Erik Ofgang, "The Legend of the Ghost Ship of New Haven," Connecticut Insider, May 27, 2021.

[13] Atwater, History of the Colony, 324.

[14] Ibid, 326

[15] Atwater, History of the Colony, 329.

[16] Ibid,326

[17] Lambert, History of the Colony, 27.

[18] Ibid, 128.

[19] Ibid, 29

[20] Calder, The New Haven, 221-223.

[21] Christopher Pagliuco, The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe: Smuggled through Connecticut (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012), 73.

[22] Levermore, Republic of New Haven, 112.

[23] Calder, The New Haven, 224-225.

[24] Ibid, 220

[25] Sletcher, New Haven, 21.

[26] "Charter of the Colony of Connecticut," 1662, https://www.cga.ct.gov/hco/books/Charter_of_the_Colony_of_CT_1662.pdf.