eligion,
ministers came with their people; they improved the time on the voyage,
Roger Clap's diary, kept on shipboard 1630, says, "So we came by the
good hand of our God through the deep _comfortably_, having preaching
and expounding of the word of God _every day for ten weeks_ together by
our ministers." Mr. Blaine says that the same spirit which kept
Cromwell's soldiers at home to fight for liberty after 1640, impelled
men to America before that time, so that there was probably never an
emigration, in the history of the world, so influential as that to New
England from 1620 to 1643.

It is possible that Christopher Boreman fought and perhaps fell in the
army of the commonwealth. But why did so many of the early settlers,
quickly leave the Atlantic coast for the Connecticut valley? Their first
historians say there was even then "a hankering for new land." They
wished also to secure it from occupation by the Dutch who were entering
it. Reports of its marvelous fertility, says Bancroft, had the same
effect on their imagination, as those concerning the Genesee and Miami
have since exerted, inducing the "western fever," "Young man go West."
The richness of the soil of the Wethersfield meadows has been celebrated
as widely as the aroma of its onions. It is only three miles from
Hartford and was for two centuries one of the most prominent communities
in Connecticut. There was scarcely a more cultured society anywhere. "It
were a sin," said the early colonists "to leave so fertile a land
unimproved." The Pequod war had annihilated a powerful and hostile tribe
on the Thames in 1637. Six hundred Indians perished, only two whites
were killed. Connecticut was long after that comparatively safe from
Indians. In 1639, the people formed themselves into a body politic by a
voluntary association. The elective franchise belonged to all the
members of the towns who had taken the oath of allegiance to the
commonwealth. It was the most perfect democracy which had ever been
organized. It rested on free labor. "No jurisdiction of the English
monarch was recognized; the laws of honest justice were the basis of
their commonwealth. They were near to nature. These humble emigrants
invented an admirable system. After two centuries and a half, the people
of Connecticut desire no essential change from the government
established by their Puritan fathers." (Bancroft).

The first emigration of Puritans to the Connecticut river is supposed to
have