Connecticut; a study of a commonwealth-democracy

Front matter

american Commontoealti^js.

CONNECTICUT.

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Preface

This volume is not meant to deal mainly with the antiquarian history of Connecticut, with the achievements of Connecticut men and women, or with those biographical details which so often throw the most instructive side-lights on local history. These fields have been explored so thor- ‘ oughly by abler hands that it would be presumption for the writer to enter them, unless to take advantage of the materials thus stored up. The volume is one of a “ Commonwealth Series,” and it aims to take the history of Connecticut from another side. Its purpose is to present certain features in the development of Connecticut which have influenced the general development of the State system in this country, and of the United States, and may be grouped as follows : —

I. Connecticut’s town system was, by a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, even more independent of outside control than that of Massachusetts; the principle of local government had here a more complete recognition ; and, in the form in which it has done best service, its beginning was in Connecticut.

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II. The first conscious and deliberate effort on this continent to establish the democratic principle in control of government was the settlement of Connecticut ; and her constitution of 1639, the first written and democratic constitution on record, was the starting-point for the democratic development which has since gained control of all our commonwealths, and now makes the essential feature of our commonwealth government.

III. Democratic institutions enabled the people of Connecticut to maintain throughout their colonial history a form of government so free from crown control that it became really the exemplar of the rights at which all the colonies finally aimed.

IV. Connecticut, being mainly a federation of towns, with neither so much of the centrifugal force as in Rhode Island, nor so much of the centripetal force as in other colonies, maintained for a century and a half that union of the democratic and federative ideas which has at last come to mark the whole United States.

V. The Connecticut delegates in the convention of 1787, by another happy concurrence of circumstances, held a position of unusual influence ; the frame of their commonwealth government, with its equal representation of towns in one branch and its general popular representation in the other, had given them a training which enabled them to bend the form of our national con-

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IX stitution into a corresponding shape ; and the peculiar constitution of our congress, in the different bases of the senate and house of representatives, was thus the result of Connecticut’s long maintenance of a federative democracy.

VI. The first great effort at westward colonization, in the Wyoming country, was managed by Connecticut through her traditional system of free towns ; and the example is enough to account for the subsequent power of this principle in the organization of the great Northwest.

VII. Individual capacity and energy, the natural fruit of a democratic system, have enabled the people of Connecticut to survive and prosper under the industrial revolution of later times, and to show that a commonwealth almost without natural advantages, and forced to rely almost entirely on the conversion of foreign products into other forms, may reach the highest degree of prosperity through the individual mechanical genius of her people.

For these reasons, the writer thinks that Connecticut has a claim to a high place among characteristic commonwealths ; and that the antiquarian, biographical, and other features which usually abound in State histories, should in this instance be made subordinate to the study of her democracy and its influences. So far as the usual details can be given, and as they illustrate the controlling features of the volume, they have been used ; but the volume is not bound to them.

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Connecticut migration has been so great that it has been necessary to resist an almost constant temptation to diverge to the influence of Connecticut men and ideas in Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and other commonwealths. How large that influence has been is not widely known. Hollister states that in 1857 a single county (Litchfleld) had been the birthplace of thirteen United States senators, twenty-two representatives from New York, flfteen supreme court judges in other States, nine presidents of colleges and eighteen other professors, and eleven governors and lieutenant-governors of States. The remark is attributed to Calhoun that he had seen the time when the members of congress born or educated in Connecticut lacked but flve of being a majority. This must be taken with allowance, even if it were exact ; for by no means all those educated in Connecticut have done much to carry Connecticut characteristics elsewhere. But, with all allowance, the foreign influence of Connecticut has been extraordinary. One must sympathize with the astonishment of the Frenchman who, hearing that this and that distinguished man, though a resident of another State, was born in Connecticut, went to the library to And the location of the State, and found that it was “ nothing but a little yellow spot on the map.” If there be anything in the claims for the work of the Connecticut commonwealth, they must be still further

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XI strengthened by the influence which the children of the commonwealth have carried into all sorts of channels.

The original scheme of the Series did not include the feature of foot-notes for authorities, and the writer followed the plan of putting his authorities into a bibliography. It has not seemed necessary to alter the arrangement, and it has been retained as an essay toward a bibliography of the commonwealth for the further use of students.^ It is not meant to be implied that all, or nearly all, the books there named have been used exhaustively ; very many of them have merely been referred to in order to keep the writer from going astray in matters on which their authors are authority and he is not. If he has, nevertheless, erred in these respects, he will feel under great obligations to those who will call his attention to the errors. The whole list is inserted in the hope that it may be of some preliminary service to those who shall further and more effectively prosecute the study of this commonwealth’s great and honest work.

The approaching year 1889 is the 250th anniversary (or, to adopt the modern phrase, the quarter-millennial) of the Constitution of 1639, which seems to the writer the most far-reaching political work of modern times, and from which he conceives there are direct lines of communication running down to all the great events which followed, 1 See Appendix, p. 397.

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— to commonwealth organization and colonial resistance, to national independence and federation, to national union and organization, and even to national self-preservation and reconstruction. During the same year the nation will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of its Constitution, to whose essence and expression Connecticut contributed so largely. This volume has been written in the hope that it may aid in widening the appreciation of Connecticut’s first constitution, so that its birthday shall not pass without its fair share of remembrance.

Princeton, N. J., May 1, 1887.