chap. XVI.} 1765 Sept. |
To save his house from the peril of an attack, Ingersoll rode out from New Haven, in company with the governor, intending to place himself under the protection of the legislature, which was to convene on Thursday. Meeting two men on horseback, with newly barked cudgels in their hands, Fitch charged them to go and tell their companions to return back.
‘We look upon this,’ they answered, ‘as the cause of the people; we will not take directions about it from any one;’ and Ingersoll sent word by them that he would meet the concourse at Hartford.
On Thursday morning Ingersoll set forward alone. Two or three miles below Wethersfield, he met an advanced party of four or five; half a mile further, another of thirty; and soon the main body of about five hundred men, farmers and freeholders, all bearing long and large staves, white from being freshly rinded, all on horseback, two abreast, preceded by three trumpeters, and led by two militia officers in full uniform. They opened and received Ingersoll, and then, to the sound of trumpets, rode forward through the alluvial farms that grace the banks of the ‘lovely’ Connecticut, till they came into Wethersfield. There in the broad main street, twenty rods wide, in the midst of neat dwelling-houses, and of a people that owned the soil and themselves held the plough, in the very heart of New England culture, where the old Puritan spirit, as it had existed among ‘the Best’ in the days of Milton, had been preserved with the least admixture, the cavalcade halted, saying, ‘We cannot all hear and see so well in a house; we ’
