142 CONNECTICUT’S INFLUENCE 
in Devonshire. There was also George Phillips, a 
graduate of Cambridge, who had since 1630 been pas- 
tor of the church at Watertown. Another adherent 
was Roger Ludlow of Dorchester, a brother-in-law of 
Endicott. Ludlow had been trained for the bar and 
was one of the most acute and learned of the Puritan 
settlers. The vicissitudes of his life might perhaps 
raise a suspicion that wherever there was a govern- 
ment, he was “agin it.” At all events, he was con- 
spicuous in opposition at the time of which we are 
speaking. 
By 1635 many reports had come to Boston of the 
beautiful smiling fields along the Connecticut River. 
Attention had been called to the site of Hartford, 
because here the Dutch had built a rude blockhouse 
and exchanged defiances with boats from Plymouth 
coming up the river. At the river’s mouth the Say- 
brook fort, lately founded, served to cut off the Dutch 
fortress of Good Hope from its supports on the Hud- 
son River, and all the rest of what is now Connecticut 
was rough and shaggy woodland. All at once it ap- 
peared that in the congregations of Dorchester, Water- 
town, and the New Town, a strong desire had sprung 
up of migrating to the banks of the Connecticut. 
There was no unseemly controversy, as in the cases 
of Roger Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson. This case 
was not parallel to theirs, for Hooker was no heresiarch 
and Massachusetts was most anxious to keep him and 
his friends. To lose three large congregations would 
but aggravate its complaint of poverty in men. More- 
over, antagonists like Hooker and Cotton knew how 
to be courteous. When the discontented congrega- 
tions petitioned the General Court for leave to with- 
