rs. The articles
simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in
existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy
governor--who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding
the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen.

In matters of detail the Connecticut system differed from that of
Massachusetts in three particulars: it imposed no religious test for
those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church
member, though it is probable that in practice only those would be
admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to
the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of
the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a
church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reelection until
after the expiration of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman
were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the
seventeenth century; the powers of the magistrates were increased; and
the governor was allowed to succeed himself. Connecticut was less
democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the
years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exercised the
freeman's privilege of voting for the higher officials. By no stretch of
the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New England
colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of
a very few men.

Two more settlements remain to be considered before a survey of the
foundations of New England can be called complete. When the Reverend
John Wheelwright, the friend of Anne Hutchinson, was driven from
Massachusetts and took his way northward to the region of Squamscott
Falls where he founded Exeter, he entered a territory of grants and
claims and rights of possession that render the early history of New
Hampshire a tangle of difficulties. Out of a grant to Gorges and Mason
of the stretch of coast between the Merrimac and the Kennebec in 1622,
and a confirmation of Mason's right to the region between the Merrimac
and the Piscataqua, arose the settlement of Strawberry Bank, or
Portsmouth, and accompanying it a controversy over the title to the soil
that lasted throughout the colonial period. Mason called his territory
New Hampshire; Gorges planned to call the region that he received New
Somersetshire; and both designations took root, one as the name of a
colony,