USA > Connecticut > The tercentenary of Connecticut, 1635-1935 : the Connecticut ode, the tercentenary in review, Connecticut celebrates, Connecticut and her founders, the evolution of the government of Connecticut > Part 2
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The aim of this celebration has been to make alive the story of Connecticut in the long perspective of three hundred years. Behind everything that has been done has been an edu- cational motive that we may all understand, the young and the old, our inherited institutions. The first enterprise undertaken was to begin, three years ago, the publication of a series of pamphlets by the most competent hands on significant phases of our history, from the Indian background and the very first English settlements along the rivers and shores onward into the twentieth century, thus bringing the present and the past into one picture.
The great men who have built up our civilization Con- necticut can never forget. There was Roger Ludlow, who cast into legal form the Fundamental Orders of the colony, setting up a frame of government which, though greatly
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altered in important details, still stands as our bulwark of civil liberty. There was John Winthrop, the younger, who obtained the charter granting to our forefathers all the terri- tory north of Virginia and south of Massachusetts from Narragansett Bay, including the islands therein, westward to the South Seas. Eventually we had to let Rhode Island have back some of that land to the east, and we lost most of the land to the west, although our young men and their wives migrated thither in large numbers and left their impress upon Ohio, which they named "New Connecticut." Thence they pushed forward to the Mississippi and across the great river until they reached the South Seas of their dreams. Winthrop, we remember, was not only a statesman; he was a man of science. He set up the first chemical laboratory in the colonies. He was America's first experimental chemist.
There was Jonathan Trumbull, the Governor of the State through the Revolution, the friend of Washington, who when perplexed or discouraged used to ride over to Hartford from his headquarters on the Hudson to consult with Brother Jonathan. There was Roger Sherman who, as a member of the Continental Congress, was on the committee with Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence and who afterwards played an important rôle in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States. There was Oliver Ellsworth who, as a member of the Constitutional Convention, brought forward in an acute crisis a plan of congressional representation in the two houses similar to Connecticut's and by his persuasive eloquence got it adopted; who later, as Senator from Connecticut, drafted the Act organizing the judicial system of the United States and ulti- mately became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Nor in the long line have been forgotten our men of science other than Winthrop. For example, Horace Wells who discovered anaesthesia has been remembered as if he were
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still with us. A road has been named after William Beaumont, the first of our physiologists, who was able through a gunshot wound of an army officer to look directly into a man's stomach and describe the process of digestion. These are but two of many to whom has been paid homage.
Likewise have not been forgotten our universities, colleges, and schools, those centers of culture, science, and professional training which have redounded to the glory of the State.
The 299th anniversary of the first session of our General Court was observed last April by the General Assembly. On that occasion Chief Justice Maltbie gave us an account of the growth of constitutional government in this state. Nearly all the towns have had their own peculiar celebrations accom- panied by pageants, no two anywhere being alike because of differences in the development of our towns out of primitive agricultural communities. And this week all that is common in the history of Connecticut is being brought together in a vast industrial exhibit and in the pageant and the parade here in the Capitol City.
No praise of mine can do justice to the achievement of the Tercentenary Commission, over which first presided Dr. Williams and afterwards Colonel Fisher.
Recently has been published a Connecticut Guide calling attention to places of historic interest, colonial houses, and beautiful villages along our valleys and over our hills. Like- wise has been prepared an aerial map of the entire state. Thus Connecticut may be revealed to visitors in whichever way they may prefer, either by driving over our roads or by flying through our clear elastic air.
May I repeat that through this Tercentenary Celebration one purpose runs, which is to inform the present generation and those who are to come after us what Connecticut has always stood for. Connecticut is a very conservative state. A . man who called in my office not long ago put to me a humorous conundrum. It was : "Why is the Connecticut General Assem-
Connecticut and Her Founders
JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL
"Let us now praise famous men and our fathers, of whom we are begotten .- All these were honor- able men in their generations and were well reported of in their times. There are of them that have left a name behind them, so that their praise shall be spoken of. Their seed shall remain for- ever and their praise shall never be taken away."
So wrote the author of Ecclesiasticus more than 2000 years ago and his words may well be our text this evening.
E are assembled here to pay the tribute of our grateful homage to the little company of intrepid men and women who, amid innumerable perils, in fearless devotion to Almighty God laid deep and strong the foundations of our Commonwealth. And with them we would also honor the long line of loyal citizens who, in the years between, have carried high the torch lighted by the founders to illumine the path of independent self-government, which for 300 years our people have honor- ably trodden.
It is surely appropriate that, while we sound the praises of those who have made our Commonwealth, we seek to under- stand what manner of folk they were and to learn something of the reasons which impelled them to do what they did. And we may well attempt dispassionately to appraise the result and so to see clearly what lies before us as successors who would be worthy of them. Such an effort may lead us to reevaluate
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some of our traditional estimates, may detract at this point or at that from the glamour which time has thrown about their achievements, but it can only serve to establish more firmly our sense of profound obligation for blessings such as few peoples have ever enjoyed.
The beginning of the pageant, which extends across three centuries, must be projected against seventeenth century Eng- land, still torn with the controversies, both religious and political, which had become ever more menacing as the six- teenth century drew to a close. Her life was threatened with dissension from within and with peril of war from without while the settlements in America were only of passing interest and that to a small part of the population. Bishop Laud was making life intolerable for the Puritans; the first Charles was shortly to lose both his throne and his head before the advance of Cromwell and the Round Head forces of Parliament. Half way through the century, the monarchy is restored and Charles II comes to the throne, followed by James II, and later by William Prince of Orange and Mary his Queen.
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the pressure for more land is felt almost from the outset in 1628-1629 and discon- tent with the rigid and autocratic rule of the ecclesiastical authorities is instantly irksome to some. Especially in the towns of Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown are these influences at work, and when Thomas Hooker and his company arrived in Boston in 1633, they at once fell into this atmosphere, being assigned to Newtown which is now Cambridge, where some hundred families were already established upon a few hun- dreds of acres of ground enclosed by a paling fence a mile and a half in length. Hooker and his company sense at once the difficulty of settling down in a community where the important offices are already preëmpted by forceful men with whose views they do not wholly sympathize, and where land seems to them already scarce and not too fertile. In September their desire to migrate was put to the General Court and rejected,
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land being given them instead in the neighboring towns; but they were still dissatisfied. Under such conditions, the familiar story begins :- The sending out in 1634 of prospectors who, like the spies that Moses sent into the Promised Land, come back and report with enthusiasm upon their findings, with the result that the migration of small groups from these Massa- chusetts towns almost immediately begins to Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford, which originally bore the names of the settlements from which the newcomers had just come. Hooker's considerable company arrive in 1636 on the site of Hartford, having driven their cattle before them across country. Here they had been already preceded by a sprinkling of the emigrants from the towns just mentioned.
A little earlier the Dutch had built a fort on the Hartford site and subsequently had tried to establish themselves at what is now Saybrook. The latter attempt was frustrated by the building in 1635 of a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River by the agents of John Winthrop, Jr., representing a company of English gentlemen, and the former undertaking at Hartford was abandoned when it became clear that the English were in too great force to be resisted.
It should perhaps be added that, while these Massachu- setts expeditions represented the first permanent settlements, two trading posts, in addition to that of the Dutch at Hart- ford, had been earlier established in the Connecticut Valley by members of the Plymouth Colony. Edward Winslow of that Colony had been up the River at least as far as Windsor in 1632. In 1633 William Holmes had opened a post where the Farmington River falls into the Connecticut and in 1634, after a preliminary survey the preceding year, John Oldham for purposes of trade had built cabins and spent the winter at Wethersfield.
In 1638 John Davenport had in a similar manner, after a preliminary survey of the land in 1637, brought his party of settlers from Massachusetts to New Haven and established
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there the colony which was to play so conspicuous a part in the later development of the territory.
Such was the setting for the development of the Connecti- cut River settlements. Their land had been purchased from the Indians, under conditions which, as elsewhere in the early colonies, probably involved no appreciation on the part of the natives that they were permanently alienating their patronage. Some of them were friendly, while some were not, and the colonists were more than once drawn into the tribal warfare between them.
In March of 1636 the Massachusetts General Court had issued a commission to "diverse friends, neighbors, freemen, and members of Newtown, Watertown, Dorchester and other places" who meant to transfer their estates to the Connecticut Valley. This document empowered eight men who were named, all of them either in Connecticut or about to go there, to exer- cise judicial powers, to inflict punishment, to make decrees and issue orders as might be required in the peaceable ordering of the affairs of the Plantation, to exercise military discipline and, if necessary, to make war. They were also empowered to convene the inhabitants under proper conditions that they might proceed to the execution of these powers. With this authority ordered government began in Connecticut at least two months before Thomas Hooker arrived in the valley and three years before the adoption of the celebrated Fundamental Orders. This important circumstance is too often forgotten in the accounts of these early years.
Nothing in the history of Connecticut has been a greater source of pride than the promulgation in January 1639 of these Fundamental Orders, which have been widely proclaimed as the first written constitution establishing a popular form of government which history records. To what extent the docu- ment is properly to be called a constitution, how essentially it differs from the Compact drafted and signed two decades earlier in the cabin of the Mayflower, are questions upon
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which historians are not wholly agreed, and it ill behooves the layman to dogmatize thereon. Unquestionably the docu- ment embodied views which were to some extent foreshadowed in the just mentioned commission issued by the Massachusetts Court to the outward bound Connecticut expedition in 1636. These views had steadily gained force in the Connecticut settlements in the three intervening years and were in many respects similar to those contemporaneously entertained and defended by Roger Williams in Rhode Island. Nevertheless the Orders certainly set forth more clearly and fully than had previously been attempted a framework of popular govern- ment of the kind which in the outside world was for the most part regarded as at once impracticable and obnoxious. Indeed, it would have been held essentially criminal by most of the respectable folk in England. In any case, the formulation was in fact, and probably in purpose, little more than a formal recognition of principles which for several years had been substantially accepted by the Colony-a circumstance which detracts nothing from its profound historical significance. Such evidence as is available indicates that in the form employed the essential ideas largely emanated from that able, wise and forceful leader Thomas Hooker, then in his fiftieth year, and that the draft of the document was executed by Richard Lud- low of Windsor, who was a lawyer by training. In any event, the Orders served as the basis of government for the Colony until a quarter of a century later it received its charter from Charles II in 1662.
The Orders, opening with a recognition of the hand of the Almighty in bringing the colonists to their homes, proceed to pronounce that "We the inhabitants of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield do associate ourselves to be one public state, or commonwealth, to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus, as also the discipline of the churches, and in civil affairs to be guided and governed according to such laws and decrees as shall be determined."
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Then follow eleven paragraphs defining conditions for the establishment and administration of the general court, or assembly, with an annually elected governor. The Orders do not attempt to specify in any detail the duties and powers of the different divisions of the government, nor do they provide, as in modern constitutions, any formal method of amending them, and, as a matter of fact, subsequent assemblies re- peatedly modified their provisions, as might have been done in the case of any ordinary statute.
It is often assumed that the Fundamental Orders estab- lished a true democracy, but in the twentieth century sense of that term, nothing was further from the fact. The agreement was indeed a social compact, providing for representative government, but only a "freeman" could vote for the higher colonial officers and only one authoritatively designated an "inhabitant" for the minor officers. In actual practice, these groups were so closely restricted that the control of the gov- ernment was in the hands of the godly members of the com- munity who possessed property. Indeed, not until 1845-more than 200 years later-did the property qualification for voters disappear. The system has been called a "popular aristocracy". It did provide for a form of popular government whereby authority derived from below and not, as in a monarchy, from above. It rested literally upon the consent of the people, but the "people", so far from meaning all the inhabitants, applied only to those who, in Puritan doctrine, displayed a properly religious carriage. Only those who were Christians of honest and peaceable conversation were held worthy to build up a state and in actual practice they must also possess property giving them a substantial stake in the community. In these respects Connecticut differed from the procedure of the New Haven Colony only in that it set a broader basis for the religious criterion which both in practice employed.
The Fundamental Orders made no reference to the sover- eign, nor to the laws of England, although it is clear that
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there was at that time no thought of challenging the authority of the Crown and much less the basic laws of the realm.
With its popular government thus definitely established, Connecticut entered upon the long and honorable history of which we are witnessing the latest chapters. In the early years the rigors of the climate, the attacks of the Indians, the con- troversies with the neighboring colonies, especially Massa- chusetts and Rhode Island, chiefly over land boundaries, which were in all conscience hopelessly uncertain, resting as they did on conflicting charters, which applied to a territory where no correct surveys existed-all these things called for courage and wisdom of a high character and these were not found wanting.
When through the labors of Governor Winthrop, who went to London for the purpose, the charter of 1662 was secured from King Charles, a period of grave uncertainty came to an end and established the legal rights of the Colony, which had previously been of necessity somewhat uncertain. They had in good faith purchased land from the Indians and taken to themselves certain powers, but royal recognition of their claims they had had none.
The charter was extraordinarily liberal and, while it did not recognize the Colony as a commonwealth, it did in effect confirm all that had been previously done in the establishment of self-government. The territory involved in the charter, in addition to the undisputed regions occupied by the Connecticut settlements, covered all of New Haven, parts of Massachu- setts and Rhode Island, and portions of the Dutch territory to the west. It conveyed to Connecticut land toward the West from Narragansett Bay to the South Sea, which we know as the Pacific Ocean-a modest strip some 3000 miles in length. The purely romantic character of the geography on which this grant was based requires no elaboration, but it gains added charm from the fact that His Royal Majesty, Charles II, introduces the matter with the sonorous phrase, "We of our
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abundant grace, certain knowledge and mere motion, have given, granted and confirmed", and so forth, "the said terri- tory." Had the royal knowledge been more precise, we may safely surmise that his regal and generous grace would have been materially curtailed. However, no great harm was done and Connecticut subsequently made rather a good thing out of the blunder, as will later appear.
New Haven, to her great indignation and disgust was presently obliged to join in 1664 with Connecticut. This choice seemed a lesser evil than that of being absorbed by the royal colony of New York, which fate appeared to be the inevitable alternative. John Davenport, founder of the Colony, grief- stricken at what he considered the ruin of his life work, re- moved from New Haven to Boston, where he presently died, and not a few members of the New Haven Colony migrated to New Jersey, rather than stop under the jurisdiction of Connecticut. So virulent even at that early day was the rivalry of New Haven with the River towns and especially Hartford !
From the granting of the charter down to the Revolution, Connecticut was extremely skilful in keeping out of the sight of the royal government in England. When orders and requests came, they were generally courteously acknowledged, but then for the most part nothing happened, and the home govern- ment, being much preoccupied with more urgent matters, let the situation drift. Undoubtedly the absence of important sea- ports, with the accompanying activities of trade and commerce, served as a great protection to Connecticut in these respects. Even when the ill-omened Andros in 1687 came as Governor of New England to Hartford to demand the charter, which it was intended to revoke and destroy, he was met with cool civility and informed that the document ( of which, by the way, the shrewd Winthrop had had two copies made) was not to be found. Whether or not the tale be true of the assembly room with the suddenly lowered lights and the box containing the charter found empty when, the lights being restored, His
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Excellency went to remove the manuscript; whether either copy was actually hidden in the Charter Oak, as tenacious legend has it, the stories are at least good folk lore and reveal the sturdy resolution of the colonists to hold on at all costs to their most valuable possession.
"Connecticut, the land of steady habits" is a slogan which has been heard a good deal of late, since our people awakened to the fact that we are three hundred years old and pressing hard on the heels of Methuselah. But there are definite dis- advantages which may attach to the possession of steady habits. It was the prodigal son who got the fatted calf and the soft raiment, and not his worthy brother of far more admi- rable and steady habits, and so it may be with a state. Certainly one can think of colonies and states to which history has ac- corded more picturesque estimates than to Connecticut, but none which are intrinsically more deserving and none whose solid achievements are entitled to a higher rating. To be sure, the steady life may prove a bit drab and even dull, but early colonial life in Connecticut was certainly not often dull. The Indians saw to that, aided and abetted by the French. From that day to this Connecticut has indeed been a land where steady sobriety has prevailed and where men have enjoyed the just fruits of honest toil and honorable industry.
One of the most striking features of the Connecticut group was the insatiable land hunger which they revealed. No sooner had Hooker come into the valley and taken up land than these centrifugal tendencies began to appear. Adventurous men in- stantly started to push up the valleys and over the hills, always seeking new and better lands, more elbow room, more com- plete individual freedom, until they had penetrated to the farthest confines of the Connecticut territory and even beyond. Long Island was thus early invaded by Connecticut settlers and by 1662 a number of towns had there sprung up owing allegiance either to Connecticut or to New Haven. This dis- persive tendency, which was indeed a dominant factor in
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the migration from Massachusetts of the first Connecticut settlers themselves, has to this day remained characteristic. Western Massachusetts, northern New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, early received many Connecticut settlers, who founded towns, often giving them Connecticut names. Even Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi had Connecti- cut emigrants. From the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Coast beyond, there is no state in which will not be found appreciable numbers of the sons of Connecti- cut and in some of them these groups have been so large as distinctly to affect the development of the commonwealth.
The greatest organized venture was doubtless that of the Susquehanna Company in 1755, but time does not permit any account of it. The occupancy of extended portions of the Western Reserve in Ohio, bordering on Lake Erie, much of it at a considerably later period, also deserves mention. The claims upon these latter two regions derive from the charter of 1662, which, as already indicated, gave Connecticut the land westward from Narragansett Bay to the South Sea. The Penn- sylvania claim was only settled after long and turbulent strug- gle with the Pennsylvania authorities, whose peaceful Quaker tenets did not prevent them from putting up a stiff fight. Much of the Western Reserve was later ceded to Connecticut settlers to compensate for losses suffered in the Revolution. The rest was ultimately sold for over a million dollars and the proceeds set up as a permanent school fund. All of which is chargeable to the geographical ignorance of his most gracious Majesty Charles II.
All but exclusively agricultural and pastoral during her early years, Connecticut gradually developed commerce and trade and fisheries, until in her second century these interests shared with agriculture in importance. Early in the nineteenth century, the industrial movement got under way, leading to the outstanding position which Connecticut now enjoys in the man- ufacturing world. Contributory to this development has been
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the amazing ingenuity of her inventors, the mechanical skill, industry, and honesty of her workers and the sturdy character of her manufacturers. It is difficult, and a bit ungracious, to pick from the long list of her inventors any limited group of names; but Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, whose device revolutionized an industry and transformed the com- merce of the world, Charles Goodyear, whose vulcanizing in- ventions created the rubber goods industry, and David Bush- nell, inventor of the submarine, are too conspicuous to omit. The inventor of the wooden nutmeg, upon which unfriendly citizens of other states have dwelt so needlessly, is unknown to history and I cannot find any basis for the assumption that these indigestible but otherwise harmless objects were ever produced in Connecticut at all.
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