John Davenport

John Davenport (1597-1670), English Puritan clergyman, born in Coventry, England, and educated at the University of Oxford. He held several pastorates as a minister of the Church of England but became a Nonconformist sometime before 1633. In that year he moved to Holland, where he became pastor of a Puritan church in Amsterdam. Three years later he returned to England and was among those responsible for obtaining for the Massachusetts Bay Company a charter to establish a colony in America. With Theophilus Eaton he immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637, and the next year he and Eaton established a new settlement, to which they gave its present name of New Haven, in what is now Connecticut. Davenport became pastor, a position of great influence that permitted him to control admission to church membership and thereby access to political privileges. Despite his power, he was unable to prevent the amalgamation of the New Haven and Connecticut colonies under the charter of 1662.

Davenport accepted a pastorate in Boston in 1667. The members of his congregation in the First Church there soon split into two factions. One group supported the controversial doctrine of the so-called Halfway Covenant, which denied the rights of participation in the sacrament of the Eucharist and of voting on church matters to members of the Congregational church who had been baptized as infants but had not experienced a personal conversion as adults. This view, accepted by church bodies in 1657 and 1662, was opposed by Davenport and a portion of the congregation of the First Church. The group supporting the covenant thereupon seceded and formed the Third Church, better known as the Old South Church. Davenport was the author of several works, including Discourse About Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion (1663) and The Power of Congregational Churches Asserted and Vindicated (pub. posthumously, 1672).