ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 145 
At first the seceders said nothing about escaping 
from the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and indeed, the 
permission granted to the Watertown congregation ex- 
pressly provided that in their new home they should 
remain a part of that commonwealth. What Hooker 
and his friends may have at first intended we do not 
really know. One thing is clear: they waited until 
their new homes were built before they took the great 
question of government in hand. At about the same 
time a party from Roxbury migrated westward and 
founded Springfield higher up the river. Their leader, 
William Pynchon, was more than once in very bad 
repute with the people of Boston; and some years later 
he published in London a treatise on the Atonement, 
which our Boston friends solemnly burned in the mar- 
ket-place by order of the General Court. 
For a couple of years the affairs of Windsor, Hart- 
ford, and Wethersfield were managed by a commission 
from Massachusetts in which William Pynchon and 
Roger Ludlow were the leading spirits. There was a 
difference in the position of Springfield and the three 
lower towns with reference to the government in 
Boston. The charter of the Massachusetts Company 
granted it a broad strip of land running indefinitely 
westward. With the imperfect geographical know- 
ledge of that time and in the entire absence of surveys, 
it was possible for Massachusetts to claim Springfield 
as situated within her original grant. No such claim, 
however, was possible in the case of the three lower 
towns.' Latitude settled the business for them to the 
1“ The new towns, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, were indispu- 
tably outside of the jurisdiction cf Massachusetts in so far as grants from 
the crown could go.” 
2L 
