George Bancroft, History of the Colonization of the United States, Vol. 1, 17th edition.

[402] broken up, every cornfield laid waste. Sassacus, their

Chap. IX.} 1637.

sachem, was murdered by the Mohawks, to whom he had fled for protection. The few that survived, about two hundred, surrendering in despair, were enslaved by the English, or incorporated among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts. There remained not a sannup nor squaw, not a warrior nor child, of the Pequod name. A nation had disappeared from the family of man.

The vigor and courage displayed by the settlers on

1638.

the Connecticut, in this first Indian war in New England, struck terror into the savages, and secured a long succession of years of peace. The infant was safe in its cradle, the laborer in the fields, the solitary traveller during the night-watches in the forest; the houses needed no bolts, the settlements no palisades. Under the benignant auspices of peace, the citizens of the western colony resolved to perfect its political institutions, and to form a body politic by a voluntary

1639 Jan. 14.

association. The constitution which was thus framed was of unexampled liberality. The elective franchise belonged to all the members of the towns who had taken te oath of allegiance to the commonwealth; the magistrates and legislature were chosen annually by ballot; and the representatives were apportioned among the towns according to population. More than two centuries have elapsed; the world has been made wiser by the most various experience; political institutions have become the theme on which the most powerful and cultivated minds have been employed; and so many constitutions have been framed or reformed, stifled or subverted, that memory may despair of a complete catalogue;—but the people of Connecticut have found no reason to deviate essentially from the frame of government established by their fathers. No jurisdiction of the English monarch was recognized.