Colonial New Haven

New Haven Colony was a separate entity until its absorption into Connecticut under the Charter of 1662. It included detached settlements along Long Island Sound, such as Stamford and Greenwich, others on Long Island itself, and some as far away as the present site of Salem, New Jersey. There is a fascinating chart facing page 5 of Atwater, cited below, which shows all these New Haven connections and traces them back to their English communities.

The founding of New Haven is most easily and readily understood from Part I of Roland Osterweis's Three Centuries of New Haven: The Tercentenary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), but serious students must also Look at Isabel MacBeth Calder, The New Haven Colony (1934; reissued by Archon Books in 1970), and Edward E. Elias Atwater, The History of the Colony of New Haven to its Absorption into Connecticut (New Haven: 1881; rev, in 1902, Meriden: The Journal Publishing Co.). Atwater is discussed in Richard Hegel's Nineteenth-Century Historians of New Haven (Hamden: Archon Books, 1972). The most recent short summary is Thomas J. Farnham, "New Haven, 1638-1690," in Floyd Shumway and Richard Hegel, eds., New Haven: An Illustrated History, sponsored by the NHCHS and published in 1981. Dorothy Ann Lipson picks up the story in 1690 and carries it down to the mid-nineteenth century in the same work. Other aspects of the independent phase of New Haven Colony are treated in Leonard Bacon's Thirteen Historical Discourses, on the Completion of Two Hundred Years from the Beginning of the First Church in New Haven (New Haven: Durrie and Peck, 1 839). Bacon, minister of the First Church for forty-one years, was a prolific historian whose work is summarized in Richard Hegel's Nineteenth-Century Historians. See also

Andrews, Charles M. The Rise and Fall of New Haven Colony. Tercentenary pamphlet no. XLVIII (1936), comprised of chapters from his Colonial Period vol. II.

Bacon, Leonard. "Civil Government in New Haven Colony, Papers of the NHCHS 1(1865):11-28. Traces the origins of what was the closest thing to a theocracy among the seventeenth-century New England governments.

Baldwin, Ernest H. "Why New Haven is Not a State of the Union," Papers of the NHCHS 7(1908):161-87. An analysis of the causes of New Haven's failure to maintain an independent existence after 1664.

Bremer, Francis J. "The New Haven Colony and Oliver Cromwell." CHS Bulletin 38(July, 1973)3:65-72. Bremer traces the close relationship of New Haven Puritans with Cromwell, especially through the person of William Hooke, teacher in the New Haven church.

Calder, Isabel M. "John Cotton and the New Haven Colony.” New England Quarterly 3(1930)1:82-94. At one time in 1698 Cotton seriously considered joining Eaten and Davenport and moving with them to New Haven. He had developed a civil code, based on the Old Testament, which greatly influenced the New Haven system.

Lyman, Dean B., Jr. "Notes on the New Haven Colonial Courts." Connecticut Bar Journal 20(April, 1946)2:178-89. A short summary in which Lyman concludes: "It seems to me that the two main ends of these Colony courts were to preserve inviolate the precious theocratic principle of government under which they were organized to the glory of God, and to serve so far as in them lay, the cause of Justice. When these two ends conflicted, 1 fear that it was Justice that suffered." (p. 188)

Boetger, R.W. "Political dissent in the New Haven Colony," 1643-1660: a closer look. New Haven Colony Historical Society, 28 (Fall 1981), 19034.

Shumway, Floyd Mallory. "Early New Haven and its Leadership." Doctoral dissertation, Columbia, 1968. The first part of this work shows that "A small oligarchy consisting mostly of wealthy merchants planned and founded New Haven in 1638 and provided its leadership during the first generation. They soon converted the town into an unsanctioned colony, but their over optimism and poor judgement were largely responsible for its eventual downfall." (from the abstract) A new elite rose after 1665.

Sorenson, Charles William. "Response to Crisis: An Analysis of New Haven, 1638-1665." Doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University, 1973. "The thesis of this dissertation suggests that the initial impetus for settlement was a combination of intense religiousity and a strong interest in mercantile activities .... When by the mid-1640s, New Haven faced the possibility of total economic collapse, the leadership ... attempted to rectify the problems by purging society of those who deviated from the social political norms .... But repressive measures did not end the economic problems faced by the town. Between 1651 and 1665, the townspeople ...rejected those whose ideas had initially guided the community, and turned to men whose commitments were not centered on merchant activity." (from the abstract)

Steiner, Bernard C. "Governor William Leete and the Absorption of New Haven Colony by Connecticut." Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1891. Washington: AHA (1892):209-22. A very short but very sound scholarly study of Leete's objections and efforts to delay the absorption mandated in the Charter of 1662. Nevertheless, Andrews is better.

Steiner, Bruce E. "Dissention At Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of A Discourse About Civil Government in A New Plantation Whose Design is Religion." New England Quarterly. 54(March, 1981)1:14-32. This piece discusses the dissention between the Davenport group and the Prudden group leading the latter to separate from the New Haven venture and settle the independent colony that became Milford.

Whitaker, Epher. "The Early History of Southold, Long Island." Papers of the NHCHS 2(1877):1-29. Southold was first part of New Haven and later of Connecticut, from its establishment in c. 1640 to its incorporation into New York under Andros in 1674. This is an account of its early settlement.

-- "New Haven's Adventure on the Delaware Bay." Papers of the NHCHS 4(1888):209-30. New Haven claimed some land which was used for a commercial port and outpost though deep in Swedish and Dutch territory. The Duke of York's charter of 1 664 ended the claim.

White, Henry. "The New Haven Colony." Papers of the NHCHS 1(1865):1-10. An interesting short piece that emphasizes New Haven's unique characteristics. It had no connection with a commercial or chartered company in England or with any American colony; its constituent parts were disparate in organization and location.

The establishment of Connecticut's third "mother colony," Saybrook, is very competently discussed by Gilman C. Gates in Saybrook at the Mouth of the Connecticut: The First One Hundred Years (New Haven: Wilson H. Lee Co., 1935). Gates is not a sophisticated historian, but he writes clearly and usually has his facts straight. See also Christopher Collier, "Saybrook and Lyme: Secular Settlements in a Puritan Commonwealth," in George Willauer, ed., A Lyme Miscellany, 1776-1976 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977).