CONNECTICUT

Connecticut's geographic location, small area, and colonial origins profoundly shaped its first half-century of statehood. Wedged on a mere 5,009 square miles between the much larger states of Massachusetts and New York, Connecticut's 206,447 citizens confronted some disquieting possibilities in 1780 as they contemplated life outside the British Empire and inside an exhilaratingly new but undefined nation. Not only did the state's size make it potentially vulnerable to excessive political influence from its powerful neighbors, but the smallness also threatened its economic development and prosperity. As the second–most crowded state, with 41.23 residents per square mile, Connecticut seemed

already overpopulated for an agricultural society. Thus, as the national era opened, Connecticut's citizens viewed their future with a mixture of optimism and anxiety.

transition to statehood

Connecticut emerged from the military phase of the Revolution less ravaged than many states. No major battles took place on Connecticut soil, although the British attacked and burned portions of several coastal towns (New London, Groton, Fairfield, and New Haven) and one interior village (Danbury). Connecticut played a much-admired role as a supplier of provisions for the Continental Army largely through the work of Governor Jonathan Trumbull and his two sons—Joseph Trumbull, commissary general of the Continental Army, and Jonathan Trumbull Jr., George Washington's personal secretary. Loyalists to the crown proved to be less numerous and troubling than in most states and tended to be concentrated in Fairfield County, which was close to New York City. Although the war disrupted trade and distended parts of the economy, it also had a salutary effect on manufacturing, which grew dramatically in the eastern part of the state.

Therefore, despite the wartime exigencies and postwar uncertainties that gripped Connecticut, the colony made a smooth transition to statehood as was best symbolized by the remarkable fact that Governor Trumbull served in office before, throughout, and after the Revolutionary War, the only colonial governor to do so. Connecticut and Rhode Island had been the only two colonies to maintain their seventeenth-century governing charters throughout their colonial existence, and during the Revolutionary era they were the only two new states not to write a new constitution. Connecticut continued to govern itself under the structure of the Charter of 1662, which, although a royal proclamation, had been written by John Winthrop Jr., and was based on the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and the Connecticut Law Code of 1650, both of which had been made-in-Connecticut documents.

Some changes did occur, of course, during the Revolutionary era: in 1783 the General Assembly adopted a new law code, and between 1767 and 1790, 29 new towns were carved out of preexisting ones to bring the total number of towns to 101, thereby vastly enlarging the rate of political participation at the local level. Perhaps most important, the General Assembly in 1784 started the process of ending slavery by passing a law that freed all slaves at age twenty-five: in 1792, the General Assembly reduced the age for freedom to twenty-one.

constitution making and politics

Connecticut escaped much of the political turmoil in the 1780s that bedeviled its three neighbors, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, and lent its name to the solution brokered by Roger Sherman to solve the logjam between the large and small states at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The Connecticut Compromise proposed making representation in the Senate equal for all states and proportional to population in the House of Representatives. By a vote of 128 to 40, a convention in Hartford ratified the new United States Constitution on 9 January 1788, making Connecticut the fifth state to do so. Thus, the new state entered the new Union with a near unanimity in support of the governing charter and an overwhelming majority in favor of the new federal Union.

The rise of political parties destroyed Connecticut's political tranquility for nearly two decades. A symbol of autonomy in the colonial era and a symbol of stability in the Revolutionary years, the charter became the symbol of the Federalist Party in the 1790s. By 1796 the Jeffersonian Republicans regarded the charter as a shield behind which the Federalists grouped to resist all change. Connecticut's Jeffersonians repeatedly called for a new constitution and eventually got their wish after electing Oliver Wolcott Jr. as the first Republican governor in 1817. Wolcott stitched together a coalition called the Tolerationists, made up of religious minorities who wanted to disestablish the Congregational Church, Republicans who wanted to gain control of the state government, and Union loyalists who were horrified by the Federalist Party's flirtation with secession during the War of 1812. After much partisan wrangling, voters narrowly ratified the Constitution of 1818 by a margin of 13,918 to 12,364.

The Constitution of 1818 was undoubtedly the most important legal document in nineteenth-century Connecticut's history. Despite the political heat it generated, it did not represent a dramatic break with the past. Hartford and New Haven continued to serve as co-capitals, the rights and privileges of town government were preserved, a nominal property requirement was maintained for suffrage, and the inequitable apportioning of representatives to the General Assembly, which favored the older and more rural towns, was kept intact. Moreover, despite its razor-thin margin of ratification, the Constitution of 1818 proved popular, and the rancorous political discord that accompanied its creation subsided. The new document did embed two important changes into constitutional law: it formally separated the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government, and it disestablished the Congregational Church from its privileged legal position. Both changes had been in the works for nearly a century, however. Additionally, although the new constitution demonstrated a great respect for Connecticut's institutional past, it did have a potent effect on politics by signaling the end of the Federalist Party and the beginning of Republican domination.

economy

As Connecticut moved through a Federalist to a Republican era, its economy thrived owing to structural changes initiated by public and private enterprise. These changes accelerated the process of reducing Connecticut's dependence on agriculture. The twin specters of depopulation and loss of prosperity never materialized, although the population did grow at a slower rate in the early national years than it had in the colonial period. As early as the 1750s, when Connecticut first felt a demographic squeeze from its rapidly growing person-to-land ratio, merchants and farmers had begun to develop better transportation routes for exporting goods and to put resources into agricultural manufacturing such as meatpacking and dairy processing. During and after the Revolution, this transformation proceeded apace. In 1784 Connecticut incorporated New England's first five cities, Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, New London, and Norwich, in order to create municipal governments that would be better able to promote trade than were town-meeting governments. In 1792 Hartford, New Haven, and New London established Connecticut's first banks, and in 1795 Norwich incorporated an insurance company. In 1799 Eli Whitney of New Haven received his first federal musket contract, and in 1802 Abel Porter began the state's brass industry in Waterbury. By 1830, Connecticut and its two southern New England neighbors, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, had created a new milling, manufacturing, and trading regional economic identity to replace their former religious one.

culture

Connecticut's cultural and intellectual life thrived as well in the early national era. During the revolutionary era, a remarkable group of poets, satirists, and playwrights known collectively as the Hartford Wits constituted the leading American literary society of their time. John Trumbull's mocking epic, M'Fingal (1776), Timothy Dwight's allegory The Conquest of Canaan (1785), and Joel Barlow's wonderfully funny Hasty Pudding (1796) all spoofed the excessive seriousness of the young republic's zealous politicians. Noah Webster, whose name has become synonymous with America's dictionaries, lived in Hartford and published a preliminary dictionary in 1806 and his magnificent American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. Three new extraordinary institutions of higher learning opened in Connecticut in the early national era to join Yale College (1701) and catapult the state into a leading role in education: the Litchfield Law School (1784), the first law school in the nation; Trinity College in Hartford (1823); and Wesleyan College, in Middletown (1831), the first American Methodist college.

Presumably the founders of the state of Connecticut in 1776 would have been pleased by what their creation had evolved into by the 1830s: a stable society whose governing arrangements drew heavily on its institutional heritage, a productive society whose booming economy overcame disadvantageous circumstances by hard work and serious planning; and a cosmopolitan society that provided educational leadership to its fellow citizens.

See alsoCongregationalists; Constitutional Convention; Constitutionalism: State Constitution Making; Hartford Convention; New England .

bibliography

Collier, Christopher. All Politics Is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003.

Daniels, Bruce C. The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635–1790. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.

Grasso, Christopher. A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Howard, Leon. The Connecticut Wits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.

Lamar, Howard R., ed. Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns, 1800–1832. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003.

Purcell, Richard J. Connecticut in Transition: 1775–1818. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963.

Bruce C. Daniels