Connecticut

B

Early Settlement

The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in Connecticut. In 1614 the Dutch mariner Adriaen Block explored the southern shore of Long Island Sound and sailed up the Connecticut River, possibly as far as the Enfield rapids, north of present-day Hartford. Later the Dutch acquired land at the mouth of the Connecticut River and carried on a prosperous trade in furs with the native inhabitants.

Early in the 1630s, the fertile river valley began to attract the attention of English settlers from the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies in Massachusetts. In 1633 colonists from Plymouth built a trading post and stockade near the site of present-day Windsor. That same year the Dutch, anxious to protect their claim to the region, erected their first and only fort in Connecticut, at Hartford.

In 1634 and 1635 colonists from Massachusetts Bay founded the towns that formed the core of the Connecticut colony. English trader John Oldham brought a large party from Watertown to settle at Wethersfield. John Winthrop the younger, son of the Massachusetts governor, established Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Named after Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, two of the colony’s founders, it is part of the present-day towns of Deep River and Old Saybrook. Roger Ludlow led colonists from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to establish their own settlement at Windsor. The largest migration occurred in 1636, when a well-known minister, Thomas Hooker, led about 100 colonists from Newtown (now Cambridge, Massachusetts) to settle at Hartford. Within a few years the English-speaking colonists in Windsor, Wethersfield, Saybrook, and Hartford greatly outnumbered the Dutch.

Most of the Native Americans were generally friendly to the colonists. Some native groups invited the English to settle nearby, hoping for trade and for allies against the aggressive Pequots, who dominated the area. Settlers purchased land from the native people, and though whites often encroached on native territory, disputes were usually settled without violence.

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The exception to these friendly relations was friction between the Pequots and settlers, which soon escalated into New England’s first major war, the Pequot War of 1637. The causes of the war are unclear, but it involved a series of killings, raids and reprisals on both sides. In May 1637 Connecticut declared war on the Pequots. With the help of both the Mohegan and the Narragansett to the east, the colonists launched a surprise attack on a Pequot village at Mystic River. They set the village on fire and killed Pequot inhabitants as they fled the flames. Hundreds of native villagers died, including many women and children, and most of the remaining Pequots were killed or captured. The few who survived were scattered throughout New England or sold into slavery, and the Pequot all but disappeared.

In 1638 and 1639, representatives of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, the three principal settlements in the Connecticut River valley, met at Hartford to discuss plans to unite the settlements into a single colony. On January 14, 1639, the colony of Connecticut was formed, and the colonists formally adopted a basic set of laws known as the Fundamental Orders. That document, said to be the first written constitution in history, was a milestone in early American constitutional history. Framed by Hooker, Ludlow, John Haynes, and others, the laws provided for a self-governing colony whose inhabitants were to owe their allegiance to the colony rather than to England. Two general assemblies, one legislative and the other judicial, were set up, and representatives were chosen from each town. Haynes, former governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was chosen as the first governor of the Connecticut colony.

Meanwhile, in 1638, merchant Theophilus Eaton and Puritan minister John Davenport established a trading colony on the former Pequot lands near the site of present-day New Haven. First called Quinnipiac, it was renamed New Haven in 1640. Later settlements at Milford, Stamford, Guilford, Branford, and Southold (on Long Island) joined New Haven to form the New Haven colony. The laws adopted by the New Haven colony were less liberal than the Fundamental Orders of the Connecticut colony. Only members of the Puritan church could vote, and strict laws regulated the religious and moral life of the colonists.

The two colonies remained separate except for a brief period in 1643, when New Haven and Connecticut joined with the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies in a mutual defense pact called the New England Confederation. Both colonies in Connecticut acquired additional settlements, and in 1644 the Connecticut colony purchased the Saybrook colony.

The colonies were never self-sufficient economic units, and engaged in trade from the beginning. The colonists raised grain, especially corn, vegetables, and other crops for their own use, and also kept a few animals. The land in the Connecticut River valley was especially productive and soon provided the colonists with surplus crops and livestock to trade with other settlements on the eastern seaboard. The forests provided wood for fuel and construction, as well as furs, trapped and traded by the Native Americans.

C

Colonial Period

Until 1662 the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven were not recognized in England as legally established colonies. A deed, known as the Warwick Patent, had been given to the founders of Saybrook by the earl of Warwick in 1632, and it was presumably transferred to Connecticut when that colony purchased Saybrook. However, the legality of the grant was questionable. John Winthrop the younger, who had been elected governor of the Connecticut colony in 1657, sailed to England in 1661, and the following year he secured a royal charter from King Charles II. As set forth in the charter, the boundaries of the Connecticut colony extended from Massachusetts south to Long Island Sound and from Narragansett Bay west to the Pacific Ocean. The charter thus ignored the separate existence of New Haven. The New Haven colonists protested their incorporation into Connecticut. However, they agreed to the merger in 1664 in response to the possibility that New Haven, a Puritan colony, might be included in the area granted to the Duke of York; the Church of England was the official religion in that area. Early in 1665 the two Puritan colonies of New Haven and Connecticut were formally merged.

Under the royal charter of 1662, Connecticut retained much of its previous autonomy. The charter incorporated the essential features of the Fundamental Orders, and local government was conducted as before with little interference from the English crown or from Parliament. However, after Charles II died, his successor, James II, attempted to consolidate New England under the administration of Sir Edmund Andros. When Andros arrived in Hartford in 1687 to demand the surrender of Connecticut’s charter, the document mysteriously disappeared. According to tradition it was hidden by the colonists in the hollow of a large oak tree that came to be known as the Charter Oak. Although Andros failed to secure the charter, he ruled Connecticut as a part of New England until 1688, when James II was overthrown. In 1689 Andros was arrested, and colonial self-government was reinstated.

As in the rest of New England, religious matters played a major role in the Puritan society of colonial Connecticut. Although membership in the Congregational Church was not a requirement to vote, all residents were taxed to support the church. By the end of the 17th century, religious disputes among Puritans over church government and congregational autonomy threatened the unity of the colony. To settle the dispute, the legislature summoned delegates to a religious convention at Saybrook in 1708. A compromise solution known as the Saybrook Platform was adopted. It established a single confession of faith, or set of beliefs, as the official religion of the colony, but gave individual congregations substantial autonomy in other matters.

Connecticut suffered little damage in King Philip’s War (1675-1676), the last major resistance by Native Americans to white settlement of southern New England. Most of Connecticut’s tribes remained neutral or aided the colonists when the Wampanoag chief Philip led an alliance of native peoples against the Massachusetts colonies in retaliation for encroachments on native lands. Connecticut troops joined in attacks on the Narragansett in neighboring Rhode Island, killing hundreds when the neutral Narragansett refused to give up Wampanoag refugees.

From the late 1680s until 1763, as Great Britain and France fought for control of North America, Connecticut supplied troops and money but faced little direct threat from the French and their Native American allies.

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.

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.