PREFACE. THOUGH Connecticut be the most flourishing, and proportionally, the most populous province in North America, it has hitherto found no writer to introduce it, in its own right, to the notice of the world. Slight and cursory mention in the accounts of other provinces, or of America in general, has yet only been made of it. The historians of New-England have constantly endeavored to aggrandize Massachusetts Bay as the parent of the other colonies, and as comprehending all that is worthy of attention, in that country. Thus governor Hutchinson says, in the preface to his history of that province," that there was no importation of planters from England to any part of the continent, northward of Maryland, except to the Massachusetts, for more than fifty years after the colony began ;" not knowing or willing to forget or to conceal, that Saybrook, New-Haven, and Long Island, were settled by emigrants from England within half that period. Another reason for the obscurity in which the Connectitensians have hitherto been involved, is to be found among their own sinister views and purposes. Prudence dictated, that their deficiency in point of right to the soil they occupied, their wanton and barbarous persecutions, illegal practices, daring usurpations, etc. had better be concealed than exposed to public view. To dissipate this cloud of prejudice and knavery, and to bring to light truths long concealed, is the motive of my offering the following sheets to the world. I am bold to assert, that Connecticut merits a fuller account than envy or ignorance has yet suffered to be given of it; and that I have followed the line of truth freely, and unbiassed by partiality or prejudice. The reader therefore, will not be surprised, should I have placed the New Englanders in a different light from that in which they have yet appeared: their characterizers have not been sufficiently unprejudiced, unawed by power, or unaffected by the desire of obtaining it, always to set them in the true one. Dr. Mather |