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Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818
Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818
By RICHARD J. PURCELL
New Edition, with a Foreword by S. HUGH BROCKUNIER
Wesleyan University Press MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Copyright @ 1963 by Wesleyan University
Originally published and copyright @ 1918 by the American Historical Association. Reissued by arrangement.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
The present edition of Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818, reset in a new format, follows the text of the original precisely, with no changes other than the correction of obvious mechanical errors.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-11058 Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword by S. Hugh Brockunier Biographical Note Preface to the First Edition
vii
xviii
xix
Introduction 3
CHAPTER
I.
I. The Rise of Infidelity to 1801
7
2. The Religious Life of Yale College
18
The Religious Revival After 1801
23
4. The Liberalizing of Calvinism
28
5. An Estimate of the Congregational Church Membership
31
II.
I. The Protestant Episcopal Church
33
2. The Strict Congregationalists
44
3. The Baptist Church
46
4. The Methodist-Episcopal Church
54
5. The Smaller Religious Bodies
59
6. Common Grievances of Dissenters
61
III. Banks and the Increase of Capital I.
65
2. Shipping and Carry Trade 74
3 . Manufactures 78
IV. I. Emigration and Western Lands
16
2. Agriculture and Sheep Raising
103
V. The Working Government II3
VI. Rise of the Democratic-Republican Party 146
VII. Federal Party Organization 190
VIII. Success of the Reform Party
2II
IX. Completion of the Revolution Appendix Bibliography Index 293
236
265 267
MAPS
Ecclesiastical Map-1818
facing 64
Vote for Governor-April 1817
facing 222
Vote on Constitution by Towns
facing 260
FOREWORD
Purcell's Connecticut in Transition by S. HUGH BROCKUNIER
F IRST published in 1918, Connecticut in Transition has been out of print but not out of date. Constantly mentioned by specialists, it re- mains a standard work. Despite its importance for every student who concerns himself with the Revolution and the post-Revolutionary dem- ocratic impulse, the book long has been unobtainable either for use in college history classes or for the general reader who is interested in our formative years. Many libraries have sought it in vain. At the greatest university in Connecticut, the book is virtually under lock and key. Wesleyan's Olin Library, despite a thirty years' search, still does not possess a copy.
An indispensable study of one of the oldest of the states, Purcell's book deserves its reputation as a historical classic. It is unique, in part because it throws light on peculiarities of Connecticut as a New England state and on the slowness of change there, as compared with democratic and religious changes in other states in the four decades after the Dec- laration of Independence. More especially, it is Purcell's method that is unique, as compared with the legalistic approaches or uncritical narra- tions that characterized many early studies of particular states. Purcell's book makes more understandable the small-state particularism that Roger Sherman exhibited in the Constitutional Convention. It provides an exciting story covering a span of forty years, ranging over crucial issues of democracy, the middle class, and aristocracy. These issues have universal import, and readers of today are as deeply concerned with them as those of earlier decades who were bred to the frontier school of Turner or the economic school of Beard. The basic and most defini- tive sections of Purcell's study provide a history of the long but peaceful revolution that changed Connecticut from a church-and-state oligarchy to a genuine democracy.
Connecticut in Transition is a revised and shortened version of the
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
thesis which Purcell wrote for his Ph.D. degree at Yale in 1916. Al- though Purcell wrote after the school of economic interpretation had come to the fore, his method was at variance with that given currency by Charles A. Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). The early writings of Beard presented laws and institutions primarily as reflections of the pressures and conflicts of powerful eco- nomic interests. Purcell, in contrast, exhibited the more restrained criti- cal realism associated with institutional analysis such as that of Henry Jones Ford in The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898). His historical method was, perhaps, particularly inspired by that of Max Farrand in The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Purcell, like his Yale mentor Farrand, was concerned not merely with the formal legal structure of institutions but with the conflict of ideals and the running debate over reform of pre-democratic institutions and political practices. Although his book studied all major aspects of social change, including the economic, he was a pioneer in his reliance on methods appropriate for an intellectual history of society and the state.
The circumstances of the original publication of Connecticut in Transition indicate both the immediate recognition of its value and the reasons for its limited audience. A distinguished committee of the American Historical Association-Carl Russell Fish, George L. Beer, Allen Johnson, Everett Kimball, and Orin P. Libby-honored Purcell by awarding his manuscript the Justin Winsor prize in 1916. The Asso- ciation's report of 1918 records the further honor of publication at the expense of the AHA. The edition, dedicated to the author's father, was limited to five hundred copies. The scarcity of the book is thus ex- plained.
Leading reviews illustrated the book's acceptance on publication. Princeton's veteran political scientist and friend of Woodrow Wilson, Henry Jones Ford, writing in the American Historical Review in 1919, was warm in praise.1 Ford thought Purcell had chosen wisely in com- mencing his study with the "fountain-head influence of all great insti- tutional change-the state of religious opinion." He liked the sequence which examined economic development and then traced political con- troversies in a synthesis that paid heed to religious and economic factors. Ford, one of the critical realists among political scientists, expressed his impatience with constitutional studies that only scratched the surface because they failed to go beyond an outward, formal, legalistic treat-
1 American Historical Review, Vol. 24, pp. 736-737.
ix
FOREWORD
ment. Pointing up the contrast, he praised Connecticut in Transition as a "model of what an institutional history ought to be." Similarly, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Charles R. Lingley, author of a study of the Revolutionary transition in Virginia, extolled Purcell's method of analysis of social classes, churches, and political power as a suggestive excursion into a new field of investigation.2 Pointing out that the business and professional leaders and the Congregational clergy were "the able and educated people," Lingley mildly criticized them for becoming narrowly partisan, and he complimented Purcell for having restrained his "natural and proper sympathy with the movement of revolt."
In his inquiry into issues of liberty and authority, Purcell exhibited the interests and humane values of the Progressive generation, but the issues he studied were timeless. His purpose was to relate political con- flicts and changing institutions to evolving democratic thought. He was asking the question: Were the nation's forefathers necessarily liberty- loving democrats ?- a question significant for his time and ours. In a revolution of rising expectations in a newborn nation, just emancipated from colonial status, would the new rulers strive to continue a system of authority and privilege against the protests of out-groups and lower social orders? Historians in the United States today, influenced by the Cold War, are sometimes concerned to show the historical development of national unity and world power, and sometimes they miss the signifi- cance of Purcell's method of study of an internal regime following a revolution. Currently it is asserted that the American Revolution was not very revolutionary; to the contrary, it is contended that "middle- class democracy" was already established before 1776. Numerous his- torians have sought to revise economic interpretations by the Beard school, particularly the characteristic assumption that the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary document designed to check the democratic impulses of the Revolutionary Era. There remain many others who perceive that Purcell's question as to revolution and the regime that fol- lows it is not only relevant but of supreme importance.
It is a question to which different scholars have found different an- swers. Robert E. Brown, boldest of those who criticize the historians of the Beard generation, parallels Purcell in studying the transition from colonial to state government in his book Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts (1955). This work, covering the years
2 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 6, pp. 118-120.
X
CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
up to 1780, ends in a period of wartime unity against invading armies, and it stresses internal American democratic solidarity against aristo- cratic British Toryism. Its most valuable contribution is the data in- dicating a widespread distribution of property, which had the conse- quence that much of the male population was eligible for the privilege of voting. Yet Purcell, focusing on the subtle conflicts in political thought and in the process of government during the Revolution and afterward, saw no such condition in Connecticut. Indeed, in his own words, he sought to explain the "gradual growth from an aristocratic, paternalistic into a modern democratic state." Here we have an anomaly. One historian reports democracy on the northern side of a state bound- ary in 1780; the other reports its absence south of that same boundary, not only in 1780 but for years thereafter. Can it be that Yankee Con- gregationalists were so different on the two sides of the state line?
It is true that, to outward appearances, Connecticut looked like a state committed to democratic equality. In another book 3 Brown cites Roger Sherman as saying that the poor were equal to the rich in voting; and again, that checks and balances were needed to protect the state, because states, like individuals, had their peculiar habits and usages. Brown's interpretation is that Connecticut was essentially democratic. Yet the reader is puzzled, for at one point, Sherman says that legisla- tion should follow the predominant opinion of the constituents, and elsewhere he holds that the people should have as little as possible to say about government. Purcell's interpretation shows that the latter view prevailed in Connecticut practice, and his data make clear why Sherman could have such confidence in the state's unique system of annual elec- tions. His findings strongly reinforce the contemporary observation of John Adams: "The state of Connecticut has always been governed by an aristocracy, more decisively than the empire of Great Britain is. Half a dozen, or, at most a dozen families, have controlled that country when a colony, as well as since it has been a state." 4
Although local pride and sectional particularism were not absent in other states, such influences were usually not as strong as in Connecticut. As Purcell shows, such important worthies as Noah Webster and Tim- othy Dwight believed that the religious and moral foundations in New England, and especially the close control under Connecticut's Stand- ing Order, were superior to those in any other parts of the United States.
3 Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution (1956).
4 C. F. Adams, Works of John Adams, Vol. 6 (1851), P. 530.
xi
FOREWORD
Because orthodox Congregational leadership ruled with little opposition in most of rural Connecticut, and because the growth of dissenting re- ligious minorities and of urban opposition was slow after the Revolution, the Federalist leaders could and did boldly embrace, to an exceptional degree, the sectional impulse that in 1815 culminated in the Hartford Convention. Purcell's monograph does not attempt to investigate the national role of Connecticut or the politics of New England sectional- ism, but his data might suggest that the "Connecticut compromise" in the Constitutional Convention reflected the deliberate demand of Con- necticut's delegates for federal checks and balances that would protect New England's sectional interests and the home-state political and re- ligious institutions by which Roger Sherman and his cohorts maintained a virtual political monopoly.
Purcell's view that the quasi-established church in Connecticut ex- ercised inequitable power in politics is borne out by later studies.5 De- spite the Revolution and the democratic impulse that produced Ameri- can bills of rights and proclamations of religious freedom, Connecticut's Congregational Church retained its privileged status for forty-two years after the Declaration of Independence. Intolerance, notes Guido de Ruggiero, is the natural consequence in every church that is supremely confident that its faith possesses the only effective means for salvation.6 "If there were a majority of one sect, a bill of rights would be a poor protection for liberty," wrote James Madison; "where there is . . . a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest." 7 Purcell provides an excellent case study that verifies the force of Madison's thesis. "One church, one party" might as adequately express the belief of Federalist Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, as it did the belief of the first Puritans who colonized New England.
Not even a Timothy Dwight could totally defeat the call for change. The toleration law of 1784 was a signal gain in that it gave dissenting religious groups greater legal freedom to organize churches. Purcell shows, however, that this as well as the later laws of 1791 and 1793 dis- criminated very effectively in favor of the old-established church. Bap- tists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, as well as any stray Unitarians or
5 Cf. Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (1953).
6 Guido de Ruggiero, "Religious Freedom," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 13 (1934), p. 239. Cf. Leslie Lipson, The Great Issues of Politics (1960), pp. III, 223 ff.
7 Saul Padover, The Complete Madison (1953), p. 306.
xii
CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
atheists, must deposit a certificate of dissent and were compelled by law to pay a church tithe, either to their own professed church, if there was one in their locality, or to the quasi-established church. In sharp contrast, Jefferson's Virginia statute of 1786 provided: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever. . . . All men shall be free to profess .. . their opin- ions in the matter of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or effect their civil capacities." John Leland, Baptist clergy- man from Virginia, who there had valiantly supported Jefferson's bill for religious freedom, summoned Connecticut dissenters to combine and disestablish the Congregational Church, and he called also for a state constitution: "For want of a specific constitution, the rulers run with- out bridle or bit." 8 As Purcell relates, Methodist Bishop Asbury met with indignities in Connecticut, and neither the Episcopalians nor the Methodists could win legal sanction to charter their first Connecticut colleges, Trinity and Wesleyan, until the Constitution of 1818 over- threw the old establishment.
Like Southern sectionalists or state bosses of political machines in later times, Connecticut particularists wanted no federal interference with their proud Standing Order. When Congressman James Madison in 1789 urged the House to approve constitutional amendments to serve as a bill of rights, Roger Sherman replied that his state wanted no bill of rights. Previously Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut had said in the Constitutional Convention that he looked to state governments for the preservation of his rights. Subsequently, urging ratification of the Con- stitution, he advised Connecticut citizens that in a self-governing state there was no need for constitutional guarantees of individual rights; bills of rights were therefore "insignificant." Sherman, also writing for Con- necticut newspapers during the debate over ratification, belittled any need for a bill of rights.
Connecticut's Standing Order could least of all support the pro- posed amendment that was Madison's favorite. The Virginian, arguing the need for protecting civil liberties against intolerant state regimes, urged an amendment that would place checks on the arbitrary power of state governments, prohibiting encroachments on religious freedom, free speech, freedom of the press, and the right to fair jury trial. Such an amendment had no chance at all with Connecticut Federalists, who
8 Cf. infra, pp. 51, 157.
FOREWORD
wished to defend their sectional institutions of church and state. Madi- sons' proposal was defeated, primarily by the numerous Federalists in Congress who were at best lukewarm about any bill of rights. After- ward, when the bill of rights amendments were submitted for state ratification, leaders of the Standing Order deliberately made no drive for quick ratification as they previously had when the Constitution was submitted. Connecticut, in fact, did not act at all at that time on the first ten amendments. Ironically, many generations later, under New Deal impetus, the State of Connecticut at last ratified the national Bill of Rights on April 19, 1939.
Until the system of parties won acceptance and approval, no genuine democracy existed. A Connecticut clergyman of the approved church called newly elected President Jefferson a "howling atheist," and his party was constantly condemned by Connecticut leaders as licentious and disloyal. Even in early American states where two parties were tolerated, the political system might be so rigged as to deny representa- tion to the opposition. "The two party system was not in existence," remarks Charles S. Sydnor, speaking of colonial Virginia; and even later, he points out, it was scarcely the rule in South Carolina: "There were no autonomous local offices in South Carolina where Union men could entrench themselves and live out the storm of nullification. The party that gained control over state government was able to deprive its opponents of nearly every office and instrument of power." 9 Under the logic that gives a favored position to one church, out-groups such as Jews, Catholics, dissenters, and non-believers must be kept in a posi- tion of political and social inferiority and deprived of an equality of rights. In Connecticut, a one-party system was the Federalist answer to the democratic challenge.
Only Delaware matched Connecticut as a one-party state through- out the thirty-year era from 1789 to 1819. Until 1822, every senator from the former state was a Federalist; and John A. Munroe has reason to call Delaware "the Federalist state paramount." 10 In the Connecticut case, every senator was a Federalist until 1819. Delaware Jeffersonians, however, were more successful in creating a party of opposition than their Connecticut counterparts. They elected three Jeffersonian Con- gressmen and two governors before 1818. As Purcell shows, Connecti- cut Federalists held unbroken monopoly of every congressional seat
9 Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders (1952), pp. 120, 126.
10 John A. Munroe, Federalist Delaware (1954).
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
until 1819. They held every seat in the upper house of the state legis- lature until 1818; and no Jeffersonian sat in the governor's chair, al- though a coalition of Jeffersonians and disaffected Federalists at long last elected Washington's and Adams' secretary of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, in his later years a moderate Federalist though never a Jeffer- sonian.
A useful hypothesis to explain continued re-election and long tenure in office is the quality of leadership in the dominant party. Leonard W. Labaree suggests that "repeated re-election of the same men" indicated that the freemen "were satisfied with their political state." 11 Purcell does not question the sincerity or capacity of the Federalists, and he does not neglect to present sincere and forceful justifications urged by spokesmen of the Standing Order. Commenting on long terms of serv- ice in office, he remarks the Connecticut "disposition to re-elect men of merit." However, he presents evidence of repeated protests against inequities in taxes; discriminatory legislation favoring the Congrega- tional system of church and state; long tenure in office; the inequitable apportionment of legislative seats, which resulted in overrepresenting the rural areas; and in general, election laws that ran counter to the principles of a right to vote, free elections, and representation accord- ing to population.
Considering the frequency of such protests, Purcell seeks to answer the puzzling questions of why inequities were perduring despite pro- tests by the opposition party, why Federalist dominance persisted for thirty years, and why the monopoly broke down in 1818. Munroe at- tributes the party's long domination to the foresight with which Dela- ware's Federalist leaders made "the state government and their party organization progressively more democratic"-including reform of the nominating system.12 Purcell finds no evidence of such foresight in Connecticut's Standing Order. The reforms, when they finally came, were made by dissenting Baptist and Methodist Jeffersonians in coali- tion with ex-Federalists, a few of whom were Congregational moderates although most were disgruntled Episcopalians.
Though Connecticut had annual elections, Purcell concludes that the nominating system and the voting system, especially after the Jeffer- sonian challenge of 1800 and the Stand-up Law of 1801, were so rigged
11 Leonard W. Labaree, Conservatism in Early American History (1948), pp. 22 f.
12 Munroe, op. cit.
XV
FOREWORD
that it was relatively easy for the well-organized Federalists to deny the opposition any effective representation in the state legislature. More- over, by clinging to a general ticket instead of the district system for elections to Congress, and by employing a unique nominating and bal- loting system, Federalists prevented any representation of their op- ponents in Congress. While the property test to limit the electorate was defended by Federalists, the voting laws may not actually have been as much of a factor as Purcell supposes. His reliance upon early books on the suffrage may need correction by use of the new techniques em- ployed by Charles S. Grant and Chilton Williamson in their studies of Kent and East Guilford.13 In his workmanlike study of the overwhelm- ingly Congregationalist "frontier town" of Kent, Grant concludes that "Connecticut was governed by a clique of directors," but their "benev- olent paternalism" was acceptable to the town freemen "who willingly supported the established order." He reinforces Purcell's economic and religious interpretations and reveals that top leaders tended to be "among the wealthiest men." Out of 83 poor men in Kent, 2 were officeholders; of 91 of the lower middle class, 14 were officeholders; of 146 of the upper middle class, 70 were officials-that is, 82 per cent of all office- holders belonged to the last-named class. Kent, overwhelmingly Fed- eralist as well as Congregationalist, favored ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788 and strongly opposed ratification of the Connecticut Constitution in 1818.
Only Connecticut and Rhode Island failed to frame a state constitu- tion after the Declaration of Independence, and both states lagged be- hind others in the reform of election laws. An ideal election system, observes Richard P. McCormick, "will enable the voter to record his own honest convictions, secretly and without fear or improper induce- ments." 14 Purcell notes the unsuccessful efforts of Colonel Ephraim Kirby and others in 1802 and thereafter to win Federalist support for a secret ballot. Both Purcell and Grant demonstrate how the eighteenth- century town system of nominating and electing Assistants to the upper house contained a "gimmick" adverse to opponents of the twelve in- cumbents. Town voters first chose nominees in September; next April
13 Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (1961), esp. p. 152; Chilton Williamson, "The Connecticut Property Test and the East Guilford Voter: 1800," Conn. Hist. Soc. Bulletin, Vol. IX (October 1954).
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