Watertown. When the Board of Assistants
undertook to secure for themselves permanency of tenure, together with
the power of choosing the governor and making the laws, these three
towns sent deputies to Boston to inspect the charter and see if it
authorized any such stretch of power. They were foremost in insisting
that representatives chosen by the towns must have a share in the
general government. Men who held such opinions were naturally unwilling
to increase the political weight of the clergy, who, during these early
disputes and indeed until the downfall of the charter, were inclined to
take aristocratic views and to sympathize with the Board of Assistants.
Cotton declared that democracy was no fit government either for church
or for commonwealth, and the majority of the ministers agreed with
him. Chief among those who did not was the learned and eloquent Thomas
Hooker, pastor of the church at Newtown. When Winthrop, in a letter to
Hooker, defended the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the
best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is
always the lesser;" Hooker replied that "in matters which concern the
common good, a general council, chosen by all, to transact businesses
which concern all, I conceive most suitable to rule and most safe for
relief of the whole." It is interesting to meet, on the very threshold
of American history, with such a lucid statement of the strongly
contrasted views which a hundred and fifty years later were to be
represented on a national scale by Hamilton and Jefferson. There were
many in Newtown who took Hooker's view of the matter; and there, as
also in Watertown and Dorchester, which in 1633 took the initiative in
framing town governments with selectmen, a strong disposition was shown
to evade the restrictions upon the suffrage.

While such things were talked about in the summer of 1633 the
adventurous John Oldham was making his way through the forest and over
the mountains into the Connecticut valley, and when he returned to
the coast his glowing accounts set some people to thinking. Two years
afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness
as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from
Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield.
A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry,
set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter
supplies were