Emmigration of Hooker and his Party to Hartford Connecticut

One person caught in the crossfire of this religious controversy was the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the celebrated English minister who arrived in Boston in 1633 with the equally celebrated minister John Cotton. Almost immediately, both men were called upon to help resolve a number of religious conflicts that had arisen in the new colony. But Hooker and Cotton frequently had opposing views, which led to increased factionalism. One issue over which they strongly clashed was the standards for admission into the church: Hooker argued for more inclusive membership, Cotton for more restrictive. Hooker believed that achieving assurance that one was a Puritan saint came through a long and arduous process of living a Christian life and that people should be admitted as church members as soon as they had achieved “some hope” of their salvation. Cotton disagreed. He believed membership should be open only to those who could persuade the membership that they had fully received God’s grace.Over time, these disagreements, combined with other factors such as scarcity of good pasture land near Boston and fear of royal intervention (because of a widely trumpeted incident in which a Puritan zealot had cut the cross of Saint George out of the Bay Colony’s royal flag), helped convince Hooker to remove to Connecticut. The early New England historian William Hubbard wrote, “Two such eminent stars, such as were Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, both of the first magnitude, though of differing influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb.”Emigration of Hooker and his party to HartfordEmigration of Hooker and his party to Hartford, 1960.148.0 – Connecticut Historical SocietyOn May 1, 1636, Hooker and his assistant, the Reverend Samuel Stone, left Newtown (later Cambridge), Massachusetts, with about 100 members of their congregation and 160 head of cattle, on an overland journey to a place the Indians called Suckiaug. Stone, who had originally ministered in Hertford, England, had led an advance contingent to the area the year before. There, by the banks of the Little (later Hog) River, the company founded Hartford. Hooker’s and Stone’s new church was to follow the congregational model established in Massachusetts (in which the congregation selects its own ministers), but under Hooker’s leadership, the people of Hartford proved more tolerant in terms of church admissions than their coastal peers.This bent toward tolerance among Connecticut Puritans was later expressed in Connecticut’s more lenient treatment of Quakers (whom Bostonians occasionally executed), Connecticut’s acceptance of the oath of religious tolerance imposed on New England colonies by Charles II in the 1660s, and Connecticut’s cessation of witchcraft executions a full generation before the trials at Salem . These relatively progressive positions were further mirrored in Hooker’s sermon on May 1, 1638, wherein he expressed the view—remarkable for its time—that the foundation of governmental authority rested in “the free consent of the people.”This is not to imply, however, that the Puritans of Connecticut were advocates of religious freedom for all. Far from it. Quakers, though allowed to live, were still run out of the colony, and in the early 1660s Hartford hanged more than its fair share of witches. And as Connecticut grew, people still managed to squabble over the details of Puritan practice with almost as much fervor as their cousins to the north. Ultimately, even Hartford’s first church was torn by controversy. But the fact remains that Hartford in 1636 was founded by a minister who thought the Bay’s practice of Puritanism was harsher than it ought to be. And he thought so with enough intensity that he and his congregation pulled up stakes and headed west for the promise of a kinder, gentler, and better, life.

Print Type: Hand Colored Engraving
Date: c1840
Dimensions: 9 1/4 x 6"
Condition Report: Very good

Subject References: Immigration 187F