As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665).
In 1636, New England Puritans founded a school in Cambridge for educating “English and Indian youth”: Harvard College. The next year, in Connecticut, war broke out between the colonists and the Pequot Indians. At the end of the war, the colonists decided to turn captured Indians into slaves and to sell them to the English in the Caribbean. In 1638, the first African slaves in New England. arrived in Salem, on board a ship called the Desire that had carried captured Pequots to the West Indies, where they’d been traded, as Winthrop noted in his diary, for “some cotton and tobacco, and negroes.” There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.
The English in the colonies understood their rights as “free men” as deriving from an “ancient constitution” that guaranteed that even kings were subject to the “laws of the land.” These same people sold Indians and bought Africans. By what right did they rule them, in their city on a hill?
[These Truths, page44]