Note Note 3, page 325 — BOOK III. CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING. (continued 2)

Emigration by churches. But the unit of New England migration was the church. No doubt the cohesiveness of the townships, and of the churches which were the nuclei of the towns, was re-enforced by provincial differences between the several communities. 1636. In 1636 Hooker, the real founder of Connecticut, and his congregation of Essex people, sold their houses and meadows and home lots and acre rights in the commonage in Cambridge to a new congregation led by Thomas Shepard. Note 3. From Newtown and from Dorchester the churches emigrated bodily—pastors, teachers, ruling elders, and deacons—carrying their organization with them through the wilderness like an ark of the covenant. New churches were soon afterward formed in the places they had left. Naturally, town government became the principal feature of civil organization in states thus planted by separate and coherent groups.