The Colonial Period 1633-1763

The Colonial Period of Connecticut is the most and best studied of all the state's history. The literature for the era from settlement to 1763 is vast. Nevertheless, works on American and New England history should also be consulted, and Lawrence Gipson's two bibliographic volumes are a good place to start. A Bibliographical Guide to the History of the British Empire, 1748-1776, and A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the History of the British Empire, 1748-1776 (New York: Knopf, 1968, 1970) cover the years before 1776 more than adequately. Two other handy bibliographic sources are Alden T. Vaughan, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, and Jack P. Greene, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 1689-1763 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Goldentree Bibliographies, 1971 and 1969).

The best one-volume study of Connecticut before the Revolution is Robert J. Taylor's Colonial Connecticut: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979). This is not the liveliest work to read, but it is accurate, thorough, well organized, well indexed, and up-to-date. Though Taylor is not a strong proponent of any particular school of thought, he inclines to see consensus and relatively steady habits in Connecticut's early history. His volume updates, but does not supplant, the work of Charles M. Andrews, longtime professor at Yale, who published, in four volumes, The Colonial Period of American History (1934 1938; reissued in paper by Yale University Press in 1964). Connecticut and New Haven colonies are dealt with in three chapters in Volume II (1936), which are essential reading for anyone wishing to know the narrative and institutional history to the time of their amalgamation under the Charter of 1662. Virtually the entire first volume of Norris Galpin Osborn's History of Connecticut in Monographic Form is given over to a cogent discussion of the colonial period by Simeon E. Baldwin. Baldwin's treatment is generally narrative, with many topical subsections. His emphasis is heavily constitutional and legal. Nelson Prentiss Mead's Connecticut as a Corporate Colony (Lancaster, Penna: New Eral Printing Co., 1906) is an institutional study typical of those written during the early period of professional history, when efforts to trace American origins back to Teutonic "germs" were common.

Charles M. Andrews.  "Connecticut:  An isolated Puritan Agricultural Community of Steady Habits," in Our Earliest Colonial Settlements: Their Diversity and Later Characteristics. New York, New York University Press, 1933 Republished by Cornell University Press, 1959.

Stokes Foundation lectures at N.Y.U.  This essay is a popular, unfootnoted presentation of Andrews' considered views and the most accessible presentation of the characterization spelled out in the title and the historical reasons for that characterization.  Connecticut "stood among the other colonies in a class by herself - a small inconspicuous agricultural community . . . .  The position, environment, and connections were peculiarly favorable to the retention of Puritan conformity, unchanged in all essential particulars . . . . the home of a simple, unaffected Puritan life . . . ."  p. 113 .

Herbert L. Osgood.  "Connecticut as A Corporate Colony," Political Science Quarterly 14(1899) 251-80

This is a classic statement establishing the premise that the Connecticut towns were from the start subordinate to the Colony, "Connecticut ???? in no sense formed by a 'consociation' of independent towns, for the simple reasoning that its towns were never independent."  p. 256.

He also discusses the differences between Hooker and Winthrop on governance and shows Hooker to have democratic tendencies, but hardly in the modern sense.  (pf. 257).

He also claims that the Fundamental Orders did  not establish or even imply separation of church and state, but the opposite.

He also emphasizes that Connecticut system and that of Massachusetts were in all respects very similar - between the F.O. and the system in Massachusetts as of 1639 "we shall find no important differences."  p. 259

"In fact, we find brought together in a single document what in Massachusetts and New Plymouth had been formulated in a succession of statutes, and we find nothing more."  p. 261

He concludes, however:  "From the outset she had been a little more modern and progressive  that Massachusetts and slightly more democratic; and these qualities she continued to display throughout the colonial period."   p. 280.

The serious scholar who wishes to know much more about colonial Connecticut than the surveys by Andrews and Taylor provide will have to undertake some heavy reading. For a study that puts Connecticut towns in a New England context, see Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Bruce C. Daniels, in The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), deals with the process of town formation, demography, early urbanization, government, and the increasing complexity of local institutions. Daniels attempts to place the development of the Connecticut town within an historiographic context that juxtaposes three sets of opposites: "Were towns democratic or oligarchic? communal or individualistic? harmonious or contentious?"(p. 173) He concludes that they were all of the above, but generally more harmonious than contentious, and increasingly oligarchic as the eighteenth century wore on. Richard S. Dunn's Puritans and Yankees: the Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 (Princeton: the Princeton University Press, 1962; reissued by W. W. Norton, 1971) and Robert C. Black, III, The Younger John Winthrop (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) trace the colony's founding through biographies of the earliest governors. These are first-rate works by top scholars and must inform the study of anyone seriously interested in colonial Connecticut history.

Many practitioners of the "new social history" have attempted to understand society "from the bottom up," often by attempting a study of the inarticulate classes. The only such studies for Connecticut are the cliometric ones that depend on analysis of masses of quantitative data, which are listed elsewhere in this bibliography, most notably those by Jackson T. Main. Several scholars have attempted to analyze colonial Connecticut society and social attitudes, but only in the traditional manner--from the top down, or perhaps only across the top, for none of them probes deeply beyond the elite. One result of this elitist focus is that they all find Connecticut society to be conservative and stable, though, of course, with one or two exceptions in addition to the dissertation literature, so do those, like Main, who have tried to analyze the social mass.

Jackson Turner Main. Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut: Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Lots of charts and tables showing elements of society: e.g., number of salves per household, age and sex ratios, etc.  Main read every probate inventory available for the colonial period.

A notable contribution to the literature, done conventionally, largely from published writings of the upperclass, is that of Richard L. Bushman, based on his Harvard dissertation (l961): From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). Bushman believes that the years between 1690 and 1765 saw the disintegration of the Godly Puritan and the rise of the secular and materialist Yankee. He predicates a "Puritan" homogeneity and social stasis in Connecticut towns in the period before 1690. By 1765, Bushman says, the town-governing institutions had become severely weakened "and economic ambitions played havoc with community coherence." While Bushman's characterizations are nicely drawn and were generally well received, his periodization has not been so well accepted. Many historians question the tranquility and homogeneity of pre-1690 society and maintain that the secularization depicted by Bushman began at the point of departure from Massachusetts Bay and continued on--to the present day. This point was debated by Bushman and Rupert Charles Loucks in The Connecticut History Newsletter 2(May, 1968). Bushman manifests a tendency, evident also in several other major Connecticut historians, to perceive conflict and change in the period on which they focus, while assuming consensus and stability in all other historical eras. This is a natural tendency, but of course historians can deal only with relative changes and, when compared with those of neighboring colonies, Connecticut government and society have been stable throughout her entire history, from 1634 to the present.

Dale Joseph Schmitt's doctoral dissertation, "The Response to Social Problems in Seventeenth-Century Connecticut" (University of Kansas, 1970) is an attempt "to explore the interaction between Puritan social thought and problems of frontier existence ... in a perfect setting for a true experiment in Puritan government." Schmitt examines the town as the focus of social organization, the family, attitudes towards commerce and labor, moral Legislation, and the problems of assimilating the Indians. "Throughout the Seventeenth century the belief that the general welfare of the community was more important than that of any individual was the dominant force of Puritan society. It was the refusal to compromise on this point which eventually led to the failure of the Puritan experiment in Connecticut. This study, however, is a survey of the successes of the Seventeenth century and of the nature of the responses to the social problems of that century." (from the abstract)

Another dissertation, "Preserving the Old Ways: Connecticut, 1690-1740," by James Mark Poteet (University of Virginia, 1973) is a response to Richard Bushman's From Puritan to Yankee. Where Bushman saw stability cracking after 1690 and gone by the middle of the eighteenth century, Poteet writes, "In Connecticut, Puritan social values demonstrated remarkable vitality, surviving until at least halfway through the eighteenth century. The greater continuity of Connecticut's colonial history is explained in part by the isolation of a small agricultural colony and in part by the corporate nature of the colony which guaranteed an unusual degree of autonomy within the British empire. The colony's commitment to order and unity is, however, also explained by the purposeful action of a group of leaders influenced by events in the 1690s who fixed the colony on a course of orthodoxy. (from the abstract) But Holdsworth (check index for entry) claims that " ... the decade 1602-1672 was, for Connecticut, the most critical period in the seventeenth century; possibly the whole colonial period." (p. 491)"By 1665, men were preoccupied with their own affairs to a greater extent than their fathers had been," Holdsworth says, "or to put it another way, they tended more and more to identify their economic interests with the will of God; their worldly ambitions with their religious commitments." (p. 499)

On the colonial militia, see the dissertation by Richard Marcus in the "Military History" section below. For the militia as a cohesive institution in the colonial period, see in the same section the dissertation by Stewart Gates. On the historical geography of settlement, a piece not to be missed is Martha Krug Genthe's "Valley Towns of Connecticut," Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 39(September, 1970):513-44. Ms. Genthe deals with the Valley, not the River, so that she does not follow the water south of Middletown. This is an excellent analysis of the geographic factors that determined the points of original settlement, principally Springfield, Hartford, and New Haven, which also lies in the Central Lowlands. Genthe explains why New Haven grew away from the River towns, why Saybrook did not develop, and what the geographic and economic factors of significance were.

No such essay as this can be complete without discussion of two eighteenth-century works of great significance. An Anglican minister who was driven from his pulpit in Hebron in 1776 and forced to flee to England, Samuel Peters, wrote a bitter polemical history and description of Connecticut, with emphasis on the coming of the Revolution. Published in England in 1781, the book is a marvelous illustration of the Tory mentality, and it provides all sorts of insights into Connecticut society in the colonial era. Peters's General History of Connecticut from the First Settlement under George Fenwick ... cannot be relied on for facts. Sometimes referred to as "Parson Peters' Lying History of Connecticut," it was republished in 1880 in an edition prepared by a descendent, "with editorial variations of the original work designed as a means of defense of the author," wrote Charles Hammond in a distinctly hostile twenty-five-page review in Papers and Proceedings of the Connecticut Valley Historical Society,

1876-1878 (Springfield, 1881). Hammond Lists scores of inaccuracies, errors, and falsifications in Peters's work. Hammond had earlier published his expose in The True Blue-Laws of Connecticut and New Haven and the False Blue-Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1876). A similar approach is taken by Sheldon S. Cohen in "Samuel Peters: Connecticut's Eccentric Historian," in The New England Galaxy 4(Spring, 1972). The work is now available in an edition published by Transcendental Books, Hartford, in 1967: The Works of Samuel Peters of Hebron, Connecticut, Kenneth Cameron, ed.

There are still historians of Connecticut who insist that any study of the colonial period must start with Benjamin Trumbull's A Complete History of Connecticut Civil and Ecclesiastical. First published in 1797, it has been printed in several editions, the most readily available that published by H. D. Utley in 1898. This work is a gold mine of information about the establishment of towns, colony-wide legislation, military history, relations With the Indians and, most of all, religious issues and personalities. The style is, of course, archaic, but it is never hard to understand, and it is perhaps as reliable as any work published in the modern era. Both Trumbull and Peters were born in Hebron-a month apart--and Sheldon S. Cohen deals with the two eighteenth-century figures in "The Correspondence of Samuel Peters and Benjamin Trumbull," CHS Bulletin 32(July, 1967).