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In 1675, he went to the mouth of that stream with a small naval force to assert his authority. Captain Bull, the commander of a small fort at Saybrook, permitted him to land; but when he began to read his commission, he ordered him to be silent.
Its site in Saybrook is marked now by a granite boulder with a tablet and inscription. About half a mile west of this monument are two old millstones which are said to have been in use in the gristmill belonging to the first little fort at Saybrook, the "Fort on the River," which was built and defended by the "Brave Lieutenant Lion Gardiner."
Out of this proviso grew a misunderstanding in the Norwich church, which happens also to furnish a typical illustration of the difficulties sometimes encountered in trying to collect a minister's salary. When Mr. Woodward, pastor of the Norwich church, read the act establishing the Saybrook Platform, he omitted the proviso.
The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret, Connecticut. Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham "Herald," in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of italics and small capitals.
The Mohegans, however, proved faithful. On their way to the fort they fell in with forty Pequots, whom they attacked fiercely and put to rout, after having killed seven of their number, and taken one a captive. Their wretched prisoner they bound to a stake, and put to death with every barbarity which demoniac malice could suggest. The two parties met at Fort Saybrook.
Its position as the central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as familiar as the "Saybrook Platform."
Looked at from the point of view of the government, however, these Separatists varied so slightly from the legalized polity and worship, and yet withal so dangerously, that they did not deserve to be classed as "sober dissenters." To recognize them as such would be to set the seal of approval upon all who chose to question the authority, or the righteousness, of the Saybrook system.
The action of Massachusetts was heartily condemned by the Plymouth colony and the settlers on the Connecticut, and Gardiner, the commander of the Saybrook fort, bluntly told Endicott that the proceedings were outrageous and would serve only to bring the Indians "like wasps about his ears."
Already their very indifference to it, the long years of the gradual abandonment of the Saybrook system, together with the development in civil life of a broader conception of humanity, had tended to bring back the independence of the individual church, while custom had preserved the inroojted principle of church-fellowship.
Had it not been for seeds of discontent already sown in Massachusetts, the English hold upon the Connecticut valley might perhaps have been for a few years confined to these two military outposts at Windsor and Saybrook. But there were people in Massachusetts who did not look with favour upon the aristocratic and theocratic features in its polity.
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