[41] This Mr. Dyer had been in England, had petitioned for, and, through Dr. Franklin’s interest, obtained a new office at the port of New-London, viz. that of Comptroller, but afterwards had thought proper to resign that office, in order to be made a Judge of the Superior Court and one of the Council; and, forsooth, that a stranger only might serve the King of Great Britain in the character of a publican in Connecticut. APPENDIX. The preceding sheets bring the “History of Connecticut” to its latest period of amity with Great Britain, agreeable to the plan upon which it was begun. I propose laying before my readers, in an Appendix, a summary account of the proceedings of the people of Connecticut immediately leading to their open hostilities against the Mother Country, not only because some events are not at all, or erroneously, known here, but also because they will form a supplement necessary in several instances to what has been already related. Another reason that induces me to make the proposed addition is, the contradictions that have so frequently appeared regarding the statements made by the author of the “History,” as to acts and laws that were in force in the colony of Connecticut during its early settlement, and which had been handed down to their posterity by the _Sober Dissenters_, as they called themselves, many of which laws remained in force up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Mr. James Hammond Trumbull, a descendant of Governor Trumbull, so frequently spoken of in this work and notes, in a book lately published by him, entitled “The True Blue Laws of Connecticut and Newhaven, and the False Blue Laws invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters,” has taken unnecessary pains to show that the Blue Laws represented in the “History” were never published in the colony, and consequently must be factitious. The author of the “History” himself mentions that they never were published; and had Mr. Trumbull referred to the action of the meeting of the planters in Quinnipiack, the 4th of June, 1639, he would have seen that the general resolutions then and there adopted were to be their laws, and that no laws were enacted. (See Note on pages 44-47.) Many writers have endeavoured to point out the motive which prompted the Americans to the wish of being independent of Great Britain, who had for a century and a half nursed and protected them with parental tenderness; but they have only touched upon the reasons ostensibly held up by the Americans, but which are merely a veil to the true causes. These, therefore, I shall endeavour to set before the reader.