way through the snow to the wigwam of the Indian chief, Massasoit, on Narragansett Bay, and there in the summer of 1636 he founded Providence.  About the same time another teacher of what was then thought heresy, Anne Hutchinson, was driven from Massachusetts, and with some of her followers went southward and founded Portsmouth and Newport, on the island of Rhode Island.  For a while each of these settlements was independent, but in 1643 Williams went to London and secured a patent from Parliament which united them under the name of “The Incorporation of Providence Plantations on the Narragansett Bay in New England.”

%42.  Connecticut begun.%—­In the same year that Roger Williams began his settlement at Providence, several hundred people from the towns near Boston went off and settled in the Connecticut valley.  For a long time past there had been growing up in Massachusetts a strong feeling that the law that none but church members should vote or hold office was oppressive.  This feeling became so strong that in 1635 some hardy pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness and settled at Windsor.  A party from Watertown went further and settled Wethersfield.  These were small movements.  But in 1636 the Newtown congregation, led by its pastor, Thomas Hooker, walked to the Connecticut valley and founded Hartford.  The congregations of the Dorchester and Watertown churches soon followed, while a party from Roxbury settled at Springfield.  During three years these four towns were part of Massachusetts.  But in 1639, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield adopted a constitution and formed a little republic which in time was called Connecticut.  Their “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut” was the first written constitution made in America.  Their republic was the first in the history of the world to be founded by a written constitution, and marks the beginning of democratic government in our country.

%43.  The New Haven Colony.%—­Just at the time these things were happening in the Connecticut valley, the beginnings of another little republic were made on the shores of Long Island Sound.  One day in the summer of 1637 there came to Boston a company of rich London merchants under the lead of an eloquent preacher named John Davenport.  The people of Boston would gladly have kept the newcomers at that town.  But the strangers desired to found a state of their own, and so, after spending some months in seeking for a spot with a good harbor, they left Boston in 1638 and founded New Haven.  In 1639 Milford and Guilford were laid out, and Stamford was started in 1640.  Three years later these four towns joined in a sort of federal union and took the name of the New Haven colony.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Fiske’s Beginnings of New England, pp. 134-137.]

[Illustration:  NEW ENGLAND AND NEW NETHERLAND]