TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS The Susquehannah Company: Connecticut^ s Experiment in Expansion (DOUBLE NUMBER) XXXIV PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 193 5 74 . 6 Connecticut State Library TER XXXIV Service Center c. 1 South Main Street Middletown, Connecticut 06457 The Printing-Office of the Yale University Press TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS The Susquehannah Company: Connecticutj Experiment in Expansion JULIAN PARKS BOYD I ARLY in February, 1774, Silas Deane of Wethersfield scribbled off "A Plan for making Discoveries, purchase, & Settlement on the ^Western Lands within the Limits of the Con- Enecticut Charter." It was a large subject, but Deane's imagination was feverish. He rapidly outlined a joint stock company of "Two hundred persons of Character and property" which he thought could be organized quickly enough to send out surveyors along the northern boundary of the colony, all the way to the Mississippi, by the middle of May. The government of such a tract of land as this company would purchase, thought Deane, "must for a Course of Time be ... a sort of voluntary & parental Government." When Deane finished this plan based on an Indian policy "different from any yet adopted in N America" he scarcely gave it a second reading so anxious was he to send it off to William Samuel Johnson of Stratford for counsel. He began a letter which he thought would be merely an accompanying note. But his flying quill turned off page after page as his imagination skimmed westward along Lake Erie and on to the Mis- sissippi. Then he looked into the future: "supposing from the Westermost boundaries of New York to the Mississippi it is Eight Hundred Mile & the width Seventy there Will not be Two Hundred Acres of Land to Each person in this Colony and allowing our increase to be justly Esti- mated, We shall from Connecticut alone soon people the whole of it in less than one Century.... Looking forward, we stand amaz'd at ourselves, or rather what We must inevitably be, & that very soon." At last he apologized for his verbosity—"the subject," he said, "has insensibly stole Me beyond all bounds of a Tolerable Letter." Had these thoughts about what Deane called "the Glory of this New World" raced through the brain of one of the leading citizens of Connecticut but a short quarter of a century before Deane committed them to paper, his sanity would probably have been challenged. The spark that set fire to Deane's imagination had been more than twenty years in the making. He wrote at the climax of a movement which had back of it two decades of propa- ganda, land speculation, political intrigue, and pam- phleteering; which had for its allies the increasing scarcity of land in Connecticut, the growing population, and the onrush of hard times; and which was, in January, 1774, given the legal sanction of an act of assembly recognizing the western claim and annexing most of northern Penn- sylvania to Litchfield county as the town of Westmore- land. Deane was by no means the only prominent citizen in the colony whose imagination had been inflamed: Roger Wolcott of East Windsor, George Wyllys of Hart- ford, Phineas Lyman of Suffield, Jonathan Trumbull and 2 William Williams of Lebanon, Eliphalet Dyer and Jedi- diah Elderkin of Windham, Jedidiah Strong of Litchfield, and Roger Sherman and Ezra Stiles of New Haven were some of those who, at one time or another, were caught up by "the Glory of this New World" which lay west of the Delaware river. Few subjects of Connecticut's history are more fascinating than the birth of this idea of a western claim and its growth in the public mind of Con- necticut in the quarter century preceding the Revolution. II IN I68 I when the overlapping grant to William Penn was made, Connecticut offered no protest. Sir William Jones, the attorney general of the crown, found no valid ob- struction in the "real but impractical" rights which the New England charters contained in their sea-to-sea grants. Nor had Connecticut in her boundary settlements with New York in 1664, 1683, and 1725 made any men- tion of a claim west of New York. Governors of the colony had invariably replied to the inquiries of the board of trade concerning boundaries by saying that Connecticut was limited on the west by New York. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a number of persons in Connecticut had begun to look into the seventeenth- century grant that Sir William Jones had found "real but impractical." In May, 1750, several inhabitants of Simsbury peti- tioned the legislature for a town grant. Except for the fact that these petitioners claimed that the charter granted by Charles II to Connecticut in 1662 covered "a Large Tract of Land . Lying west of Hudsons River which is not Included in any of the Charters to any of the neigh- bouring Governments," their petition was similar in form and purpose to the customary procedure for forming new 3 towns. That, however, was a startling difference. Here, apparently for the first time, was voiced the claim that the Connecticut legislature had a right to grant lands west of the colony of New York. What obscure attorney or shrewd yeoman first thought of making such a pretension we do not know, but it is possible that the idea came eastward from land disputes in New Jersey. An attorney of Norwalk, James Brown, acting on behalf of New York claimants in the New Jersey-New York disputed area, petitioned the legisla- ture in May, 1751, asking for a grant of any right or title the colony of Connecticut might have over the territory involved and offering in payment "a Reasonable sum of Money (which yr Memorialist hath Ready to offer)." Most prominent among Brown's New York clients was James Alexander, wealthy merchant and lawyer and a member of the councils of both New Jersey and New York. The joint committee to whom the petition was re- ferred, however, recommended that the colony surrender its claim to a tract of land bounded on the east by the Hudson river and on the west by a line drawn five de- grees of longitude west of the Delaware river. But the most significant statement in the joint committee's report was the candid admission that there was not the "Least Probability of this Colonys ever recovering the Posses- sion of any Lands Westward" of the line fixed as the western boundary in 1725. The upper house was willing to make a grant of the lands between the Hudson and Delaware rivers, but the lower house, aroused to the serious consideration of something hitherto considered worthless for which they had been offered seven hundred and sixty Spanish dollars, refused to make any grant. This was as near as Connecticut ever came to making a categorical renunciation, officially, of its western claim. 4 In a few months Brown and Alexander, no doubt, re- gretted their initiative in promoting the idea, for Irish settlers in Hunterdon county were petitioning the Con- necticut legislature to erect a county government over them and New York claimants as far up as Wallkill were "flocking to sign Petitions to the General Court of Con- necticut, to grant them Townships there." The New Jersey council took steps to suppress this seditious "Con- spiracy and Combination to throw off their Dependance on his Majesty's Government of this Province," and James Alexander's last years were complicated by similar activities of settlers on the New York side of the line. Meanwhile, the Simsbury town group, now six times the original number, set about to establish their priority in the matter of the western lands. In October, 1751, they renewed their petition for a grant of a town on the theory that they had been "as it were . the first discoverers of that new world." The idea of an almost unlimited supply of fresh lands in the West which might be had for the asking was one calculated to stir imaginations, and the Simsbury and Brown petitions were quickly followed by others. In May, 1752, Joseph Blackleach of Stratford and more than four hundred others, including those from Simsbury who had "discovered" the western claim, sent a request to the legislature for a grant of four towns on or near Delaware river. The large number of signatures af- fixed to this petition is evidence that the project was now a fairly common topic in the taprooms and other meeting places. Of still more significance in tracing the growth of the western claim is the fact that some important persons were among the signers, such as Eleazar Wheelock of Lebanon, Mathew Griswold of Lyme, Stephen Lee of New London, Eliphalet Dyer, and Silas Deane. At the May, 1753, session of the legislature no less than 5 six petitions for town grants were presented. Most impor- tant of these was that dated March 29, 1753, signed by 152 inhabitants of Windham, Farmington, Canterbury, Plainfield, and Voluntown. It asked for a grant and for the right to purchase the Indian title to a tract of land sixteen miles square covering the Wyoming Valley on the northeast branch of the Susquehanna river. This was the group which three months later, having expanded both in numbers and in purpose, formed the Susquehan- nah Company. At the same time John Whiting of Stoning- ton and other veterans of the Cape Breton expedition of 1745 asked for compensation in the form of a grant of land twenty miles square between the Hudson and Dela- ware rivers, where "Dayly Encroachments are made by Strangers without any Consideration to this Government." Sixty-eight inhabitants of Suffield asserted that their town was "Grown full of Inhabantants so that a Great many must unavoidably move to Sum other Place" and they thought it would be advantageous to Connecticut to plant settlements on the western lands in order to pre- vent encroachments, for which purpose they prayed a grant of a "suitable Quantity" of land.