One of the salient features of Guilford’s founding in 1639 was that the group of Puritans led by the Reverend Henry Whitfield paid the local Menuncatuck squaw sachem Shaumpishuh for the land upon which the settlement would be built. That fact, in and of itself, might not seem all that surprising but the more one learns about the earliest English settlement of New England the more it becomes apparent that outright land purchase was not the initial approach adopted by the English settlers toward the existing Native American residents. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, for example, land was distributed by the leadership under the terms of a patent granted by the Crown to the company which organized their venture and it was simply assumed that the land distributed thereunder was in the King of England’s gift through a presumed right of “discovery” (which would have surprised the local inhabitants who had been there since time immemorial).
Significant settlement activity had already gone forward upon that basis when, in 1635, the Reverend Roger Williams called all land titles based upon that principle into question. The first Englishman truly conversant with the cultures of the various native peoples in Massachusetts and the later author of the first dictionary of the native Algonquian languages, Williams challenged the underlying assumption of most European invaders of the New World that the land was “empty” or “not in profitable use” and thereby open to be claimed by the new arrivals. Williams pointed to the obvious fact that the land was not at all empty or uninhabited at the time of first contact and that the native peoples simply used the land differently from Europeans through their mixed hunter-gatherer/subsistence farming approach. Most importantly, he challenged head-on the assumption that God would bless the Puritans’ deliberate experiment of creating a New Jerusalem in America if it were in fact based upon outright theft. These views rocked the Bay Colony and Williams was put on trial in 1635 and banished—though ostensibly only for certain doctrinal differences of opinion with other Bay Colony theologians.
When Guilford was founded four short years later, there would no question concerning the legitimacy of the land titles of the prospective new owners/settlers because all of them would follow a negotiated purchase of the land from the local squaw sachem. The Williams case had been closely followed by other leaders of the Puritan diaspora in New England and intelligence of it was readily available back in England to groups of prospective emigrants like the Whitfield group while making their plans for their plantation in Connecticut. While there is no direct evidence linking Williams’s trial and banishment to the Guilford plantation’s land purchase, it is safe to assume that both the prominence attaching to the trial and the sensitivities of the Puritan leadership to any possible weaknesses in their claim to be establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth in the wilds of New England had an influence on the Whitfield group’s decision to purchase the land which became Guilford rather than to simply expropriate it from the native Americans through the still common yet entirely specious claim of “discovery”.
John M. Barry’s comprehensive study of Roger Williams and the settlement of Rhode Island under his leadership is contained in his new book “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul”, which can be purchased at Breakwater Books on the Green in Guilford, as well as at the gift shop at the Henry Whitfield State Museum.
