LITMIR.BIZ

      The opening scenes tell us we are in another world. A human head is pitched on a pole in the marketplace. A man is hanged because he is deemed to be the father of a piglet. Other events could happen in any era. A gun explodes, injuring an eye. A woman’s reputation is slandered. All of these events, great and small, occurred at the dawn of American history, in a short-lived colony little remembered today.

      We know of these events because they happened as a result of trials held in the New Haven Colony in the middle of the seventeenth century. The trials were remarkable not only because of their subject matter but also because of the way they were conducted and recorded. Following centuries of obscurity, the trials contained in the colony’s records are brought to light in this book.

      The most engaging aspect of the New Haven trials is the vivid manner of their reporting. The long-ago secretaries responsible for recording the transactions of the colony were not content to use the dry, succinct language of official documents so common at that or any other time—“John Jones was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.” ¹ Instead, the New Haven secretaries had the skill and genius to put flesh on these bones and fill them with life. We don’t just hear the names of judges and litigants. We sit in the front row and hear the twists and turns of fortune as the participants battle with life and liberty at stake. We see witnesses squirm on the stand when confronted with evidence contradicting their testimony.² We hear the court denounce a defendant (unhappily, a twelve-year-old boy) as “a notorious lying boy, a great offense to the English amongst whom he lives, and a dishonor to the nation to which he belongs” (see chapter 28, “The Milford Arson Case”). We watch the court at its Solomonic best, reasoning with a widow who is about to receive her deceased husband’s entire estate at the expense of his minor children: the court asks her how she would feel if her husband had given everything to her children and nothing to her (see chapter 18, “The Disputed Will”). We observe the court at its bone-chilling worst, ordering a small girl to be publicly whipped and sold into servitude (see chapter 33, “The Burning Barn”). In all these instances, we are spectators watching real dramas involving recognizable human beings, in all their wisdom and in all their folly. The records of the New Haven Colony captured these moments in a way that few judicial documents have ever done.

      And then darkness. The records were not written for publication, and their authors could not have anticipated that anyone, at least anyone in future generations, would ever read them. They were written in a close and sometimes difficult seventeenth-century hand on folio sheets and then stored away in the anonymity of a local clerk’s repositories. There, they were almost forgotten, and several years of their contents were eventually lost.³

      In 1772, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a surprising archival enactment:

      Whereas the first antient [ancient] book of records of this Colony remaining in the Secretary’s office and the first records of the Jurisdiction of New Haven in the office of the town-clerk of the town of New Haven are much worn and decayed, and by constant use in danger of being totally ruined: Resolved by this Assembly, that the Secretary be directed, and he is hereby directed, to procure the said records to be fairly transcribed into some proper book or books to be by him procured for that purpose and laid before this Assembly to be compared and duly authenticated for common use: to the end that the said original ancient records may be safely preserved and used only upon special and important occasions. The Secretary is also directed to receive into his hands and deposit in his office the antient book of records of the Jurisdiction of New Haven now remaining in the office of the clerk of the county court of New Haven county, who is also hereby requested to deliver the same to him accordingly, that the same may remain for publick use in the publick archives of the Colony.⁴

      Although the records of the Colony of Connecticut were duly preserved and transcribed pursuant to this act, the New Haven records were not. They remained in the custody of local officials, eventually being placed in a copper box.⁵

      There matters stood until 1856. In that year, the Connecticut General Assembly passed the following act:

      Resolved, That the secretary be authorized to purchase for the use of the state, two hundred and fifty copies of the proposed publication of the records of the Colony of New Haven, prior to the union with Connecticut, transcribed and edited by Charles J. Hoadly, Esq. Provided, that such publication shall be authenticated by the official certificate of the secretary, as a true copy of the original record; and provided also, that the expense of the same shall not exceed two dollars and fifty cents per volume.

      Resolved, That the copies so purchased be distributed as follows: one copy to the town clerk of each town in this state, to be preserved in his office for the use of the town; one copy to the governor, and to each of the state officers of this state; one copy to the governor of each of the several states and territories of the United States, to be deposited in their several state libraries; one copy to the library of congress; one copy to the Smithsonian Institute; twenty five copies to Mr. Alexander Vattemare for international exchange; and the remainder of the said two hundred and fifty copies to be deposited in the office of the secretary, subject to the disposal of the general assembly.⁶

      Charles J. Hoadly, the Connecticut state librarian, took his job seriously. He painstakingly transcribed and printed the New Haven records, retaining the contractions and abbreviations found in the original manuscript, and published them in two volumes. The first volume, covering the years 1638 to 1649, was published in 1857. The second volume, covering 1653 to 1664, was published in 1858.⁷ (The manuscript for the years 1649 to 1653 was lost.)

      Prodigious though the effort behind these volumes was, three criticisms of the printed version are in order. First, the retention of the contractions and abbreviations of the original manuscript, however valuable to scholars, makes the end result extremely difficult to read. A modern reader

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