The United Colonies of New England, 1643-90

Résumé du livre

"This scholarly book presents, from the constitutional viewpoint, a definitive study of America's first experiment in union on the intercolonial level-an experiment based upon principles later embodied in the Constitution of the United States. Professor Ward's scrutiny of all available data-including unpublished 17th-century manuscripts-has resulted in a work which throws new-even startling-light upon an unjustifiably neglected aspect of our history. The New England Confederation, 1643-1690, was a treaty between four individual governments-those of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven. It came into being when the colonists, homogeneous in origin and intent, facing the mounting fury of the red man and beginning to "knock on the doors" of outlying Dutch and French settlements, decided that their interests could best be served by united action...without sanction from the mother country. Its Puritan members termed the union "a firme and perpetuall league of friendship and amytie for offence and defence, mutuall advice and succour upon all just occations both for preserving and propagateing the truth and liberties of the Gospell and for their owne mutuall saftey and wellfare." Local government remained strictly in the hands of each individual colony. We follow the Confederation's stormy history from the first triumph and days through the times of falling out...and we perceive the factors which were, eventually, to sweep away the walls of uniformity...and unity. We glimpse such colorful figures as James Cudworth, who attacked harsh treatment of the Quakers: Thomas Hooker, "irrepressible democrat"; Roger Williams, defender of liberty of conscience, We sense the purposefulness of the colonists...and the tensions they knew. Citing basic principles of the Confederation, their origin and implementation, Professor Ward shows how these concepts, implanted in the colonial mind, took root, to flourish 150 years later in our Federal Constitution. "The United Colonies of New England was the acron from which the mighty oak sprang," says the author. "It cannot be dismissed on the grounds that it endured sporadically...the first full-scale attempt at federation, it provided a half-century of unity for the New England colonies...and considering that it was the product of colonists in their own in search of principles of government independent of the mother country, it ranks as one of most noble political experiments of all time.""-Publisher.