On Some Early Aspects of Connecticut History

Abstract

IN origin, Connecticut was a Puritan state, of the same flesh and blood as Massachusetts, and in her beginnings represented even better than her neighbor the Puritan ideal of a Heavenly City of God, a city protected from the outside world by a hedge that Cotton Mather wished to erect against the wild beasts of the ungodly to safeguard God's people from contamination and defilement. She stood among the other colonies in a class by herself-a small, inconspicuous agricultural community admirably contrived for the purpose of keeping alive the habits and traditions of her founders and with few of the political and commercial contacts that opened for Massachusetts the doors for the admittance of carnal ideas