Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/41

 THE

��GRANITE MONTHLY.

��A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, HISTORY AND STATE PROGRESS.

��VOL. T.

��JUNE, 1877.

��NO. 2.

��UNION OF NEW HAMPSHIRE WITH MASSACHUSETTS.

��BY PROF. E. D. SANBORN.

��The early history of New Hampshire was full of disorders, political and reli- gious. For the first seventeen years the colonists had no rest in church or state. They were too weak to punish great criminals, and too factious to exclude unworthy preachers. Their social feuds did not lead to open war. though they sometimes threatened it. Becoming weary of intestine troubles, the four towns, almost unanimously, in 1641, sought a union with Massachusetts. They were cordially welcomed by the larger State. At the time of the union, New Hampshire contained about two hundred legal voters. Hampton was founded under the auspices of Massachu- setts, and the territory where the other settlements were made was claimed by her citizens, because their charter bound- ed, their grant, on the north, by a line running three miles north of the head of the Merrimack River. This conflict of titles rose from the fact that the original grantors of the two charters knew noth- ing of the origin or course of rivers in New Hampshire. They supposed that the Merrimack rose in the west and ran

��eastward, as it does from Dracut to New- buryport. The union, for a time, post- poned this territorial controversy. John Mason, the proprietor of New Hampshire, died in 1635. His heirs were unable to find in the colony honest agents to take care of their property. The goods and cattle of Capt. Mason were removed from the plantations and sold in Nova Scotia and Boston. Norton, the chief proprie- tary agent, drove one hundred head of cattle to Boston and sold them for twen- ty-five pounds sterling a head; and, for aught that appears, appropriated the money. This valuable stock had been imported at great expense from Den- mark.

The colonists, being left without gov- ernors or overseers, formed separate polit- ical combinations for the better protec- tion of their own property and lives. This handful of men, brought from their homes three thousand miles away and planted in the wilderness, without effi- cient political or ecclesiastical organiza- tion, could not have been very formida- ble as foes or influential as friends. It is matter of astonishment that they had

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