Connecticut

D

American Revolution

The citizens of Connecticut took an active part in the events leading up to the American Revolution (1775-1783). In 1765 the colony sent delegates to the intercolonial assembly that met in New York City to demand that Parliament repeal the Stamp Act, which required all legal documents, newspapers, and pamphlets to carry a British tax stamp. The colony was also represented at the first Continental Congress in 1774. Two years later, Connecticut legislator and judge Roger Sherman helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Sherman and the other Connecticut delegates, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, and Oliver Wolcott, signed the declaration on behalf of the colony, an action endorsed by the vast majority of the colonists, including Governor Jonathan Trumbull. Reelected annually from 1769 to 1784, Trumbull was the only colonial governor to be retained in office after the outbreak of the revolution.

Except for isolated skirmishes with British troops at Stonington, Danbury, New Haven, and New London, little fighting occurred on Connecticut soil. But Connecticut troops contributed disproportionately to the American cause, and participated in almost every major battle of the revolution. Ethan Allen, Israel Putnam, and Nathan Hale, three heroes of the revolution, were originally from Connecticut, as was Benedict Arnold, the war hero turned traitor, who joined the British in 1779. During the war Connecticut became known as the Provisions State because it supplied food, arms, and ammunition to the Continental Army.

E

After the Revolution

Connecticut was one of the original 13 states of the United States. Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, and William Samuel Johnson served as Connecticut’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which met in Philadelphia in 1787. When the states became deadlocked on the issue of national representation in Congress, Connecticut’s delegation introduced a plan that came to be known as the Connecticut, or Great, Compromise. It established the present form of the Congress of the United States: a lower house in which the states are represented on the basis of population and an upper house in which they are represented equally. On January 9, 1788, Connecticut became the fifth state to ratify the Constitution of the United States.

In 1786 Connecticut ceded to the U.S. government most of the western territory that it held, at least on paper, under the charter of 1662. The state retained only the Western Reserve, a strip of land on the south shore of Lake Erie in what is now Ohio. In 1792 part of the Western Reserve was given to Connecticut citizens as compensation for buildings burned by British raiding parties during the revolution. The remainder was sold in 1795 for $1.2 million, with the proceeds set aside for education.

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In 1790 Connecticut had a total population of 237,946, or about 6 percent of the total population of the United States at that time. The state grew slowly in the next few decades, partly because many Connecticut residents emigrated to areas being settled in northern New England, New York, and Ohio.

F

Connecticut and Early U.S. Politics

At the beginning of the 19th century, Connecticut was a politically conservative state and a stronghold of the Federalist Party, which was led by wealthy commercial interests and sought a stronger central government. Connecticut strongly opposed the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 because Jefferson led the Republican forces opposing the Federalists and advocating individual and states’ rights.

Connecticut and the rest of New England had developed a prosperous maritime trade by 1800. But trade declined sharply after Jefferson initiated the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited U.S. vessels from trading with European nations. The law was an attempt to get France and Britain, which were at war, to respect U.S. neutrality, but it succeeded only in causing economic hardship and widespread discontent among Americans, especially among merchants and sailors in places such as Connecticut. When the United States and Britain went to war over neutrality issues in the War of 1812, Connecticut refused to furnish troops for national service. At the Hartford Convention in 1814, Connecticut Federalists and delegates from other New England states secretly discussed their common grievances against the federal government. Rumors spread that the states were considering seceding from the Union. The war ended soon after the convention, and no secession action was taken, but the Federalist Party was generally discredited and lost control of Connecticut.

In 1816 the Republicans in Connecticut united with religious minorities, especially Baptists and Anglicans, to challenge the influence of the Congregational Church and seek reform. They formed the Toleration Party, whose candidate, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., was elected governor in 1817. The next year a new constitution was adopted to replace the charter of 1662. Under the 1818 constitution, church and state were separated for the first time in Connecticut, with all religions given equal status. In addition, the power of the governor was expanded, courts were made more independent by giving judges lifetime appointments, and voting laws were made more liberal.

G

Development of Industry

Manufacturing had flourished on a small scale in Connecticut since early colonial times. It became increasingly important after Congress passed the Revenue Act in 1792, which authorized high tariffs on imported manufactured goods and encouraged the development of industry in the United States. In 1788 the first woolen mills in New England were established at Hartford, and soon after, cotton mills were built in Manchester, Vernon, Pomfret, and Jewett City. Inventor Eli Whitney began manufacturing his cotton gins, which revolutionized the economy of the South, at New Haven in 1793. In 1798 he helped develop the modern system of mass production, using interchangeable parts to manufacture firearms at Hamden, near New Haven. Inventor Eli Terry began producing machine-made clocks in the 1790s at Plymouth. In 1839 Charles Goodyear of Naugatuck discovered a process called vulcanization that made natural rubber stronger, more elastic and resistant to temperature change—a discovery that revolutionized the rubber goods industry.

When foreign trade was cut off during the War of 1812, many New England shippers and traders invested their idle capital in manufacturing. Yankee peddlers developed a market for Connecticut products. They traveled as far as the South and Midwest selling buttons, pins, needles, hats, combs, tinware, brassware, clocks, rifles, tableware, and other items. Railroads and canals encouraged large-scale industry. The Civil War (1861-1865), with its heavy demand for weapons, munitions and textiles, further stimulated the state’s industrial output. Thousands of European immigrants arrived, providing relatively inexpensive labor for Connecticut’s factories and mills. By the end of the 19th century, Connecticut was predominantly industrial and famous for a variety of products: Colt and Winchester firearms, International silverware, Seth Thomas clocks, Hitchcock chairs, Stanley tools, Royal typewriters, Scovill brass, and a wide range of precision metal goods.

Beginning in 1784, Connecticut had gradually abolished slavery, and during the Civil War, Connecticut strongly supported the Union. The Republican Party, which began as an antislavery party, dominated state politics from the end of the war until 1930.

H

20th Century

By the first decades of the 20th century, Connecticut was becoming primarily an urban, immigrant state, while the system for electing legislators still gave rural areas more power than city dwellers. Once overwhelmingly Protestant, the population was swelled by newcomers from Ireland, Italy, as well as from Poland and other Eastern European countries, who made Roman Catholicism the largest religious denomination. A number of Jewish immigrants also settled in Connecticut. By 1910 about 30 percent of the population was foreign-born.

As had the Civil War, World War I (1914-1918) stimulated Connecticut industry, especially in munitions. After the war ended the state remained prosperous until the Great Depression, the economic hard times of the 1930s. Important industries were machine tools, consumer goods, and financial services—especially insurance, which was centered in Hartford. During the Depression rising unemployment, coupled with alienation from the Republican business establishment, brought Democrats into power. Led by a Yale University professor of English, Governor Wilbur L. Cross (1931-1939), the state introduced public works programs to provide jobs and passed laws to establish a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and protection against job discrimination. Democrats also improved state colleges, hospitals, and prisons, and tightened regulation of business.

In 1938, however, a municipal corruption scandal helped the Republican Party return to power, with the election of Governor Raymond E. Baldwin. Since that time, Connecticut has remained a competitive, two-party state.

World War II (1939-1945) restored Connecticut prosperity as new military products, such as Pratt and Whitney airplane engines, Hamilton Standard propellers, Cheney silk parachutes, and Electric Boat submarines, joined old ones such as ships, artillery, guns, munitions, and uniforms. When the war ended, high-wage union jobs in these factories were cut back, but production increased again during the Cold War, the diplomatic and economic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that followed World War II. Connecticut became the first producer of nuclear-powered submarines and a major supplier of Sikorsky military helicopters. By 1960 Connecticut was one of the nation’s richest states, based on income per person.

From the 1950s through the 1980s Connecticut thrived, except for short downturns during national recessions. Many major corporations, such as General Electric, American Brands, and Union Carbide, moved their headquarters to the state’s southwest corner near New York City. The economic boom, fueled by defense spending and financial services industries, made Connecticut a mostly middle-class, suburban state, with scattered, undeveloped rural pockets located away from its cities and interstate highways.

However, Connecticut’s growing population of blacks and Hispanics did not share in the prosperity. As whites left for the suburbs, Connecticut’s cities became increasingly poor and segregated. In the 1960s, militant black and student activists pushed for reforms, as the state made efforts to rebuild urban neighborhoods and desegregate school systems. Race riots occurred in major cities during the summers from 1967 to 1969.

A 1964 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States forced Connecticut to reapportion its legislature and adopt a new constitution to comply with the principle of “one person, one vote.” This constitution finally broke the dominance of the legislature by more rural areas at the expense of cities.

In 1974 Ella T. Grasso was elected governor of Connecticut, becoming the state’s first female chief executive and the first woman in the United States elected governor in her own right, rather than as her husband’s successor.

At the end of the 1980s, cutbacks in defense spending, coupled with major changes in American business and a national recession, put an end to Connecticut’s 50-year economic boom. In the first half of the 1990s Connecticut lost population, as young people left in search of jobs and retirees moved to warmer climates where taxes were lower. The state lost more than 125,000 manufacturing jobs; the famous Colt firearms company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and defense-related companies such as United Technologies and the Electric Boat Shipyard laid off thousands of workers. To balance the budget, the state was forced to impose a tax on earned income for the first time in 1991.

However, the 1990s saw progress for some of Connecticut’s Native American people. In 1983 one of two surviving groups of Pequot, the Mashantucket Pequots of Ledyard, gained federal recognition and settled a land claim. The group, with 200 to 300 members, opened a gambling casino on their reservation in 1992, and their large profits made them an economic force in the area. Revenue from the casino paid for many improvements on the reservation as well as the construction of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The Mohegan won federal recognition in 1994 and also operated a successful casino near Uncasville.

In the mid-1990s Connecticut led the nation in per capita wealth, but its three largest cities—Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven—were among the nation’s poorest. Housing and school segregation continued for black and Hispanic residents, as Connecticut, like much of the United States, grappled with stark economic, racial, and ethnic division.

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