It is no part of our purpose to unravel the tangle of ecclesiastical and civil politics in which the proposed emigration had now become involved. The Dorchester church and a part of that of Watertown were ready to follow the lead of Hooker and Newtown. Days of fasting and prayer were appointed to prevent the removal of these "candlesticks," as the churches were called, out of their places; but in spite of humiliations and of Cotton's persuasive eloquence, which at one time almost charmed away the discontent, the emigration set in, stragglingly at first. [Sidenote: Explorers and pioneers.] [Sidenote: 1633.] John Oldham, an adventurous man of a rather lawless temper--one of those half-ruffians that are most serviceable on an Indian frontier--had been expelled from Plymouth. He was now a resident of Watertown, one of the centers of discontent and next neighbor to Newtown. He had gone with three others on a trading expedition to the westward overland. Walking along trails from one Indian village to another they discovered a large river, which they found to be the Fresh River of the Dutch and the Connecticut of the Plymouth traders. They probably brought back to Watertown accounts that produced a fever for removal. Oldham was not a man to stand on the manner of his emigration. Waiting for nobody's consent, he led out a small company from Watertown the next year. These settled at what is now Wethersfield. From Dorchester, which had no alewife fishery with which to enrich its fields, settlers removed in 1634 to the Connecticut, where the soil did not need to be "fished." In 1635 the number of emigrants was larger, and there was much suffering during the following winter and many of the cattle perished. X. [Sidenote: Emigration by churches.] [Sidenote: 1636.] [Sidenote: Note 3.] 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. 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. 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. XI. [Sidenote: The new government.] [Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 20, 21.] [Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 3, and ff.]