USA > Connecticut > Connecticut in transition: 1775-1818 > Part 2
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14 Richard P. McCormick, The History of Voting in New Jersey (1953), p. 115.
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
they met again, receiving twelve ballots to vote for twelve Assistants from the list of twenty nominees who had polled highest in the state. By ingenious custom rather than statute law, the names of the senior incumbents were called first and voted upon, and the remaining nomi- nees who were not incumbents were called last. Secrecy was virtually nonexistent. A freeman "could sit glowering," remarks Grant, or he could turn in his ballot when a nominee's name was called. Some dis- senters would turn in a blank ballot, preserving the appearance of con- formity but thereby losing one of their twelve votes. If a freeman held back his ballot slips to vote for the last eight nominees, remarks Purcell, he proclaimed himself "in open revolt." Year after year, the system had the effect of electing the twelve whose names were called earliest. In 1801, to meet the first organized opposition of the Jeffersonian party, the Federalist legislature enacted the still more retrogressive Stand-up Law. Putting an end to any secrecy, it abolished written ballots, provid- ing for oral nominations and an open standing vote. Congressional elec- tions were modeled on the inequitable system for Assistants, with four- teen candidates nominated in September and seven of the fourteen elected in April.
Purcell shows that the emergence of an incipient opposition after 1796 produced a particularly strong movement to perpetuate the one- party system. His account offers significant data that confirm analyses of one-party areas by modern political scientists such as V. O. Key and E. E. Schattschneider. The bitter Connecticut campaign to discredit "Jacobins" in the 1790's crushed the first Jeffersonians who sought to win office. During the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts, Con- necticut's senators and congressmen took a leading part in trying to frame these acts in the most stringent form. Purcell's focus on local so- ciety and state politics does not permit him to discuss Connecticut's part in the Alien and Sedition Acts and federal prosecutions of Connecticut newspaper editors, but two recent works make clear the pressure of Con- necticut Federalists for the utmost severity.15
Obviously the Stand-up Law of 1801 was intended to strangle the Jeffersonian party at birth. "The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive," contends Schattschneider. "Democracy is a competitive political system." One-party systems, he notes, are "notoriously useful instruments for the limitation of conflicts and de-
15 Chester McArthur Destler, Joshua Coit, American Federalist, 1758-1798 (1962); James M. Smith, Freedom's Fetters (1956).
xvii
FOREWORD
pression of political participation." 16 Purcell finds that the decline of the popular vote in Connecticut correlated with the degree of success of the Federalist Party in crushing the Jeffersonians and denying them representation. He finds likewise that only an internal split among the Federalists and the subsequent creation of a coalition party made possi- ble the constitutional reforms of 1818. Until these reforms were made, an effective two-party system was not possible.
Purcell's work is, among other things, the only good treatment of the activities of Connecticut's Jeffersonians-their unofficial convention of 1806 calling for a written constitution to limit arbitrary legislative and judicial power, the Assembly's prosecution of five justices who sup- ported the call for a constitution, the collapse of the opposition party, the eventual coalition party, and the final adoption of a written consti- tution, bill of rights, and suffrage reform. Purcell, it is true, wrote be- fore the espionage and sedition acts of World War I; and perhaps be- cause he had no experience with latter-day McCarthyism, he did not entirely appreciate the full significance of some of the proposals for Connecticut's bill of rights.
On the issue of apportionment of legislative seats, Purcell's treatment shows a deep understanding and foresight. Pointing to the inequality of apportionment, he notes that the rural county of Litchfield was so grossly overrepresented that in 1806, a year of heavy Jeffersonian vote, it returned thirty-nine Federalists to the lower house but not one Demo- crat. His final criticism of Federalist delegates who defeated equitable representation according to population in the state constitutional conven- tion of 1818 takes on added significance in the light of the Supreme Court's decision of 1962.
16 E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (1960), pp. 12, 140, 141. On sectionalism and one-party areas, cf. Schattschneider, Party Government (1942), p. 118 and passim.
Middletown, Connecticut.
September, 1962
Biographical Note
Richard Joseph Purcell, born in Minneapolis in 1887, took his bachelor's degree in 1910 at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for a short time. After completing his graduate work at Yale in 1916, he became head of the Department of History and Government at St. Thomas College, St. Paul. Four years later he joined the History Department at Catholic Univer- sity, Washington, D. C., serving in turn as instructor, professor, and depart- ment head. Much of his work of the next twenty years reflected his associa- tion with Catholic education. His history textbook, The American Nation, published in 1929, was specifically designed for "Catholic high schools, academies, and junior colleges." Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927-1928, he studied Irish immigration; a by-product of this work was a series of articles on Irish educators in America, which appeared in various Catholic periodicals. To the Dublin quarterly Studies he contributed a piece on "An Irish Crusader for American Democracy: Matthew Lyon." A great deal of his work, however, was done for the Dictionary of American Biogra- phy, for which he wrote the prodigious total of some 175 sketches and major articles-among others, on such Connecticut leaders as Zephaniah Swift, Uriah Tracy, and John Cotton Smith, and on distinguished churchmen like Bishops John Carroll, John Hughes, and John Ireland.
In middle life Purcell widened his horizon, earning a law degree at Georgetown University in 1939. During World War II he served for a time with the War Production Board; his study Labor Policies of the N.P.A.C. and O.P.M. was published in 1946. During these years and later, he served as lecturer at Georgetown and at George Washington University. He died in Washington on January 3, 1950.
Preface to the First Edition
T.
HIS study of an epoch in the history of Connecticut was begun at the suggestion of Professor Max Farrand. Under his scholarly guid- ance it gradually took the form of a doctoral dissertation and was sub- mitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University. At the Yale Commencement of 1916 it was awarded the John Addison Porter prize. Since the award to the writer of the Justin Winsor prize, the essay has been revised and somewhat abridged, especially with reference to charts and notes. Among those who have read the manuscript, I de- sire to express my appreciation for suggestions to Mr. Anson Phelps Stokes, the secretary of Yale University, and to Professor Carl Russell Fish of the University of Wisconsin.
College of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota.
RICHARD J. PURCELL
Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818
Introduction
T HE Revolutionary generation and its sons witnessed a remarkable revolution in the character of the old commonwealth of Connecticut; they lived through an era of transition from 1775 to 1818. Connecticut passed from a colonial dependency into a sovereign state. This all men realized. They did not recognize, however, that this was only the be- ginning and that at best it was a change in form rather than in spirit, in theory rather than in practice. Contemporaries were quite unaware of the gradual growth from an aristocratic, paternalistic into a modern democratic state. That they overlooked this is not surprising, for the famed "steady habits" were bettered or undermined, as you will, by a natural movement of forces imperceptibly gradual in action.
Other colonies had internal revolutionary struggles which have been aptly compared with the national revolt from the mother-land. Massa- chusetts, Vermont, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania had seen alignments of the frontier democracy over against the governing aris- tocracy of the settled tide-water regions. There had been virtual Dec- larations of Independence on the part of the West and threatened or actual resort to force, before the East acceded to their demands for adequate representation and protection against the Indians. In Con- necticut such was not the case; for there was no real frontier, no essen- tially frontier grievances, and no racial lines. If anything, recently set- tled, sparsely populated districts were over-represented in comparison to the larger and older towns. Hence, as there was no occasion for an outbreak to force the hand of the ruling element, the transition was
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
left to the quiet, but irresistably levelling evolution of time. This evolu- tion will be considered in its three broad phases: religious, economic, and political or constitutional.
These years marked a vast change in the religious life of the state. The rigorous Puritanism of the past lost much of its dogmatic intoler- ance and repelling harshness. Irreligion, deism and dissent of every brand gained strength among those who revolted from Calvinistic teachings. The religious constitution of the state was modified, so that at least legal toleration was granted to all honest Christians. This was not enough to satisfy the demands of the unorthodox, schismatic, and heretic. Join- ing their suffrages at the polls, they won religious liberty as a right, not a boon. In their struggle for this religious freedom which nearly all the other states guaranteed, they effected the overthrow of Calvinism as an establishment and burst the bonds linking Congregationalism to the state.
Great was the economic awakening of this period with its shift in the industrial life of the community. Agriculture was giving way to manufacturing. Newly established banks were displacing the country merchant as a money loaner and broker. Insurance companies were founded. Money became available as wealth rapidly increased. Western emigration increased to such dangerous proportions that to induce men to remain at home, it was found necessary to stimulate domestic indus- try, improve agriculture, and build roads. Schools were bettered; li- braries were established; agricultural and scientific organizations were incorporated. As population turned from the country to the cities, a laboring class was being developed. Only through an understanding of these changes can one interpret the long struggle for democracy and reforms, governmental and social.
The religious and economic changes in the community life afford an explanation of the political contest. Men called for religious and social equality, practical democracy and popular sovereignty. Their demands were but the expression of the ideas of the American and French revo- lutions. They would emancipate themselves from the rule of an aristo- cratic, clerical class. They were the more insistent, for they knew of the freedom of the West through reading letters from emigrants and from the omnipresent Yankee peddler. For the fulfillment of their de- sires they soon realized the need of a reorganization in the structure of the government. Hence through an opposition party, the Democratic- Republican and later Toleration party, they sought the adoption of a
5
INTRODUCTION
constitution, with a bill of rights guaranteeing the natural privileges of republican citizens instead of the royal charter. This was done by wag- ing a generation-long campaign by which the people were convinced of the justice of the demands and the safety with which they could be granted. The result was the bloodless Revolution of 1818, which gave the state a constitution as democratic as any then in existence.
CHAPTER I
1. The Rise of Infidelity to 1801
T HIS era, 1775-1818, of the breaking down of the old religious life of Connecticut was marked by the inception and rapid spread of infi- delity. Irreligion finally permeated all ranks of society. Gaining strength, it took the offensive, becoming aggressive in thought and radical in poli- tics. Hence, aside from the academic interest in the history of liberal- ism, there is a practical one in computing the numerical strength of those whom their fellow freemen termed infidels.
Connecticut Congregationalism was at a low ebb in the second half of the eighteenth century. Revivals were as rare as great divines. The moral rigor of seventeenth-century Puritanism had disappeared. It is to this fact that the inflow of deistic thought must be ascribed. The Great Awakening of 1740 accomplished wonders for a time in invigorating the religious life, yet its results from the viewpoint of the Standing Order were not entirely advantageous. It caused the schism of the Separates or, as they styled themselves, the strict Congregationalists and paved the way for those enthusiastic exhorters who were to win over so many moribund Congregationalists to the infant Baptist and Methodist organi- zations. A decided impetus was given to the Church of England. In a word, while the revival stimulated religious interests and instilled a pass- ing vitalizing force into the established church, there came in its wake sectarianism and dissent. Excesses to be deprecated rather than over- looked aroused skepticism and furthered the introduction of infidelity.
While the French and Indian War was generally regarded as the first milestone in the progress of infidelity in the staid and steady old com- monwealth, deism was known in America much earlier.1 Men like Dean Berkeley and Samuel Johnson were affected by a sort of idealism, at times
1 I. Woodbridge Riley, The Founder of Mormonism, p. 151; in the same author's American Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism there is a discussion of infidelity during this period.
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
dangerously deistic. Ezra Stiles as student and tutor, having read the thirty or so deistic books included in the Berkeley donation to the Yale Library, had passed through a painful skepticism.2 Rector Thomas Clap was said to have depended largely on Woolaston's Religion of Nature for his philosophy. There may have been considerable skepticism among the literati, in the form of a rational protest against the harshness and determinism of Calvinism, though this was not true among the people at large, many of whom might have been unreligious without being irreligious.
Writing in 1759 relative to the probable effect of the war on religion and morals, Stiles noted:
I imagine the American Morals & Religion were never in so much danger as from our concern with the Europeans in the present War. They put on indeed in their public Conduct the Mark of public Virtue-and the Officers endeavor to restrain the vices of the private Soldiery while on duty. But I take it the Religion of the Army is Infidelity & Gratification of the appetites. ... They propagate in a genteel & insensible Manner the most corrupting and debauching Principles of Behavior. It is doubted by many Officers if in fact the Soul survives the Body-but if it does, they ridicule the notion of moral accountableness, Rewards and Punishments in another life. . . . I look upon it that our Officers are in danger of being corrupted with vicious principles, and many of them I doubt not will in the End of the War come home minute philosophers initiated in the polite Mysteries and vitiated morals of Deism. And this will have an unhappy Effect on a sudden to spread Deism or at least Skepticism thro' these Colonies. And I make no doubt, instead of the Contro- versies of Orthodoxy and Heresy, we shall soon be called to the defence of the Gospel itself. ... The Bellamys &c. of New England will stand no chance with the corruptions of Deism, which, I take it are spreading apace in this Country.3
Stiles was right. The British regular from the barracks, where loose morals and looser free thinking prevailed, proved a dangerous associate for the colonial militiaman. The rank and file were familiar with the Anglican Church of the Georges and the officers were frequently im- bued with the prevalent continental philosophy or its echoed English rationalism. Their unorthodox thinking impressed men, and their phi- losophy was assiduously copied as having a foreign style. Thus the militiaman on returning from the campaign introduced his newly ac- quired habits of thinking and of life among the humble people of his
2 Rev. Abiel Holmes, The Life of Ezra Stiles, pp. 42, 43-63.
3 Stiles Mss., letter dated Newport, Sept. 24, 1759, quoted in Riley, American Thought, p. 215.
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THE RISE OF INFIDELITY TO 1801
town or wayside hamlet. Judging from the reported change in the reli- gious tone of such a town as New Britain, no society was too secluded to escape the baneful contagion.4 Thus the infidel philosophy of the old world gained a foothold in the new.
The trying years of the Revolution were critical for New England orthodoxy. It was an unsettled period filled with demoralizing tenden- cies. The use of intoxicants was well-nigh universal. Sabbath violations were winked at by the authorities; swearing, profanity, and night-walk- ing passed all but unnoticed. Depreciated money encouraged speculation and avarice. Hard times broke into patriotism. Unmoral business ethics was too apparent, if one may judge from the acts and their supplemen- tary re-enactments, to prevent engrossing and exporting goods out of the colony, and to establish a minimum wage and a maximum price for articles of consumption.5 Men were becoming materialistic. The minister was fast losing his autocratic sway in the parish. Congregationalism was seriously weakened. The Church of England was all but destroyed, for as a religious body it was discredited as being Tory at heart. Its churches were closed and its ministers silenced. Hence one is not surprised at the inroads "nothingarianism" 6 made into the established order. A reader of the records finds no difficulty in accounting for President Dwight's ob- servation that war is fatal to morals.
Dwight wrote a few years later of the revolutionary days as follows:
At this period Infidelity began to obtain, in this country, an extensive currency and reception. As this subject constitutes far the most interesting and prominent characteristic of the past Century, it would not be amiss to exhibit it with some degree of minuteness and to trace through several par- ticulars the steps of its progress.7
The positive responsibility was placed again on the intercourse with "corrupted foreigners." French free-thinking proved dangerously con- tagious. In the first place, the French brothers-in-arms, as America's brave allies, commanded both our gratitude and respect. In the second place, denying where the English doubted, their thought was agressively destructive rather than apologetic. As men of some learning and of an insinuating, polished address, they were skillful proselytizers, answering
4 David N. Camp, History of New Britain, p. 56.
5 Conn. Col. Records, XV, index; State Records, I, 6, 9, 62, 65, 97, 230, 413, 524, 528. II, 13, 103, 132, 164, 174, 222, 266, 272, 483.
6 James Dana, Two Discourses, p. 65, made use of this apt term.
7 Discourse (1801), p. 19; cf. Travels, IV, 355 ff.
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
arguments with a sneering smile or effective shrug. Thus, American officers imbibed the ideas of the continental philosophers without nec- essarily intimately knowing at first hand their writings.
Stiles had declared that cries of orthodoxy would not suffice, but that Scripture must be explained on logical, rational grounds so as to appeal to critical minds. In his Election Sermon of 1783, driven by fear of deism, he emphasized the dependence of Luther and Calvin on the Church Fathers and predicted evolutionary changes in the "fashions in religion." "We despise the fathers and the pious and learned divines of the middle ages," he wrote. "Pious posterity will do the same by us; and twirl over our most favorite authors with the same ignorant pity and neglect: happy they, if their favorite authors contain the same blessed truths." 8 This was dangerously tolerant. Congregationalism had to turn away and await a different type of Yale president to defend her from the onslaughts of deism and its disciples.
The religious status of most towns after the Revolution was that of Windham, whose historian writes:
Her secular affairs were most flourishing. It was a transition period-a day of upheaval, over-turning, uprootal. Infidelity and Universalism had come in with the Revolution and drawn multitudes from the religious faith of their fathers. Free-thinking and free-drinking were alike in vogue. Great looseness of manners and morals had replaced the ancient Puritanic strict- ness .. . . Now, sons of those honored fathers and the great majority of those in active life, were sceptics and scoffers, and men were placed in office who never entered the House of God except for town meetings and secular oc- casions.9
Without doubt, growing irreligion had much to do with the preva- lence of vice. The increasing infidelity in weakening the awful grip with which the Calvinists' 'hereafter' once held their minds, removed the greatest influence enforcing the stern old Puritan morality.
The years of peace wrought little in the way of restraining the ir- religious propensities. Some were constrained to believe that men were more religious during the war than in the period immediately follow- ing, when, with trials removed, they became even more worldly.10 It was pointed out that "infidelity assumed an air of importance." It was half feared that the augury of an American philosopher who had pre- dicted some years before to David Hume that another century would
8 Stiles, Sermon, May, 1783, p. 96.
9 Ellen D. Larned, History of Windham County, II, 220.
10 Two Brothers, pp. 6 ff .; Samuel Wales, Sermon, May, 1785.
II
THE RISE OF INFIDELITY TO 1801
see the extermination of religion in America, was prophetic.11 Yet con- sidered retrospectively President Stiles's survey of the nation's future religious life struck nearer the mark:
As to nominal Christianity, I have no doubt but that it will be upheld for ages in these states. Through the liberty enjoyed here, all religious sects will grow up into large and respectable bodies.12
Yet Stiles feared the headway deism was making and took advantage of this Election Sermon to trumpet aloud its dangers. His attack was too scholarly to be effective outside the cloister. The average man could not follow his refutation of Hume, Voltaire, Tindal, or Shaftesbury, the last of whom he termed the "amiable Confucius of Deism," and condemnation of their usual glorification of other systems above Chris- tianity.
Some caution is necessary, as these are contemporary accounts by severe moralists to whom the present is ever likely to appear hopeless and dark, and the past alone bright. With the vantage of several years perspective the same men may see much that was light in the once gloomy vista. Such was the case with President Dwight, who wrote from memory some thirty years later that infidelity decreasing after 1783 gave way to the ancient virtues of New England, and became only a by-word for immorality while at the same time business standards reached a higher plane.13 To a certain extent this may have been true, and the desperate conditions which Dwight painted after 1795 in his contemporary sermons may have been due to the baneful influences of the French Revolution, which counteracted the work of the reformers. Such a theory is not untenable in the light of facts. If, however, Dwight was correct in defining the beginning of the reform movement, he was mistaken in not stating or, more likely, in not perceiving its cause.
In 1784 Connecticut passed a general toleration act which revealed the tolerant spirit seen in the Virginia act of the same year and the clauses in the new state constitutions. As this act made dissent halfway respectable by freeing a dissenter, who presented a certificate declaring himself a member of some regular society recognized by law, from the payment of a Congregational tithe, it no doubt served to increase the adherents of non-Congregational churches. Still it must also have de- creased the irreligious propaganda; for the legal disestablishment of
11 Dwight, Address, July 4, 1798, p. 18.
12 Stiles, Sermon, May, 1783, pp. 73, 78-86.
13 Dwight, Travels, IV, 355-361.
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CONNECTICUT IN TRANSITION: 1775-1818
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