town, Dorchester, Watertown, and Roxbury migrated to the
west and south and settled the towns--Hartford, Wethersfield, and
Windsor--which became the nucleus of the colony of Connecticut.

While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive,
some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie
concealed in the naive phrase, "the strong bent of their spirits."
Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were
men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston,
they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton,
Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Massachusetts Bay, ideas
as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and
politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of
sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that "the
foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,"
whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people "is always
the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."
And so, when the petitioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of
their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward
without the limits of the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

While Hooker and his associates, with room for their cattle and their
ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the
negative voice and the covenant of works, were establishing a more
liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a
merchant of "fair estate and great esteem for religion," and John
Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establishing at New
Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Massachusetts.
They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-class
Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter.
Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the
colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed
by the concessions which had been made to the "mere democracy" as Hooker
had been by the restraints in favor of a "mixed aristocracy." They
therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of
Massachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the
Scriptures should be the "only rule attended to in ordering the affairs
of government." But these "Brahmins of New England Puritanism" did no