The Liberty Archive FREECAPITALISTS.ORG

Illustrated Episode · Volume I, chapter 46 · 13 July 1675

His bluff called at Saybrook

A gray-haired officer in a plain brown coat reads from a paper to a tall, wigged gentleman in a red coat on a shingle beach, with soldiers holding muskets behind him and a small fort and ship beyond.
Saybrook, July 1675. Sir Edmund Andros has come ashore with his commission to claim Connecticut for New York while the colony is at war, and Captain Thomas Bull, seventy, answers by reading the colony's protest to his face. Andros calls it a slander and sails away. Rothbard says his bluff was called, and Connecticut kept its self-government. Chapter 46 of Conceived in Liberty.

Download the painting, full size (JPEG)CC BY 4.0

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit freecapitalists.org. How to credit.

Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

King Philip's War had just broken out in the summer of 1675 when Sir Edmund Andros, the Duke of York's governor at New York, sailed for the Connecticut River with two small vessels to claim everything west of it for the duke. Connecticut sent Captain Thomas Bull, seventy years old, to hold the fort at Saybrook against any enemy. On the morning of 13 July, between seven and eight, Andros came ashore with his gentlemen. Bull ordered him in the King's name to forbear. Andros had the King's charter to the duke and the duke's commission read out anyway. Then Bull and Robert Chapman of Saybrook had the colony's own protest read to Andros and his gentlemen, with the town soldiers under arms behind them. Andros called it a slander. The town soldiers walked him back to the water, and he sailed away. Rothbard writes that Andros "had expected to find the militia away fighting Indians," and that with his "bluff called" he went home (CiL, p. 343). Connecticut kept its charter and its self-government, and it cost the colony nothing but a morning on the beach. Hartford praised Bull and still complained that he had been too mild: the reading, the government said, should have been drowned out by drums.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 46, pp. 334-344. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678; with the Journal of the Council of War, 1675 to 1678 (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), appendix no. XIX, 'Gov. Andross at Saybrook', pp. 578-584, with the letters of Chapman and Bull of 12 and 13 July 1675 (Col. Boundaries II, docs. 34 and 35). Primary source
  3. William H. Whitmore, ed., A Memoir of Sir Edmund Andros, Knt., Governor of New England, New York and Virginia (Boston: Prince Society, 1868), pp. xvi-xvii, quoting Trumbull, Col. Rec. Conn. II, p. 584. Secondary source
  4. Cypress Cemetery, Old Saybrook, 'Ruins of Saybrook Fort' (accessed 2026-09-29): the fort on Saybrook Point, water on three sides, the land neck palisaded. Secondary source
  5. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 'Massachusetts Dress Ways'. Secondary source
  6. New England Historical Society, 'The Puritan Dress Code and the Outrage of Slashed Sleeves' (accessed 2026-09-29): the dress code losing ground by the 1680s. Secondary source
  7. Pilgrim Hall Museum, 'Arms & Armor' (accessed 2026-09-29). Secondary source
  8. Attributed to Mary Beale, 'Sir Edmund Andros', oil on canvas, second half of the seventeenth century, Virginia Historical Society, as shown on Encyclopedia Virginia (viewed 2026-09-29). Secondary source