Serious General Works

When one considers the vastness of the literature of Connecticut history--our preliminary survey turned up about 4,000 items without leaving Sterling Library at Yale, and Kemp lists more than 7,000 in his local history and genealogy bibliography--it is surprising that there are so few adequate general histories of the state. As a matter of fact, two works dominate that field. Albert E. Van Dusen's Connecticut (New York: Random House, 1961). Van Dusen, State Historian 1952-83, emphasizes eleven features of Connecticut's history (pages 3-4):

1) Connecticut's vigorous variety of Puritanism.

2) The remarkable degree of political independence of the colony.

3) The great military and supply contributions during the Revolution. 4) The population's tremendous expansive power, especially westward, during the nineteenth century, and consequent strong influence of Connecticut institutions in many of the new states.

5) The unusual number and importance of inventors who helped revolutionize manufacturing.

6) Unusually heavy provision of men and materiel to the Union cause in 1861-65.

7) Rapid industrial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and accompanying labor legislation.

8) The revolution in the composition of the population since the Civil War, and some of the major effects.

9) The huge volume of war contracts making Connecticut an "arsenal of democracy" in World Wars I and II.

10) The long era of Republican political dominance from 1858 to 1928, and the trend toward the Democrats from 1930 to the present (1960).

11) The vigorous economy of the post World War II period (to 1960).

Most historians would substitute their own selections for some of these items, but none would say that the author was wrong in picking these for emphasis. Van Dusen has avoided both political and historiographic controversy, and, as the list above makes dear, avoids analysis and overarching generalization. Thus his book never made a splash among either Connecticut citizens or the community of scholars in the field. His stylistic and conceptual blandness, however, has the virtue of making the book universally acceptable and, indeed, it is the most commonly found work on Connecticut history. No public or school library should be without it, and very few are. It is still available through used-book dealers at about $20 the last time we asked. All such works contain errors, and Connecticut has its share, but it is as reliable as any. The work includes citations of sources as an aid to deeper research; its index, though not comprehensive, is adequate; and it has about 200 maps and illustrations. This is a work of first reference for all beginning students of Connecticut history.

Somewhat more comprehensive than Van Dusen and perhaps of priority use for the more serious student are the first two volumes of Harold J. Bingham, History of Connecticut (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1962), 4 vols. Volumes I and II are chronological, with full citations at the end of each chapter. The narrative, which continues to 1960, covers more fully than any other general work many aspects of Connecticut history, particularly politics. Volumes III and IV contain short sketches of Connecticut business and industrial firms as they existed in the 1950's and short biographical sketches of several hundred Connecticut citizens alive at the time of writing. They are scarcely worth bothering with, and it is perhaps the addition of these volumes to the others and the expensive glossy paper that makes the set so much less common than Van Dusen's book. Beginning researchers may find Bingham better on political events of the twentieth century but Van Dusen better on the Colonial period. There is no doubt that Van Dusen's single, highly illustrated volume is more attractive and easier to use. Glenn Weaver wrote in 1981 that Van Dusen represents a somewhat "liberal" point of view, while Bingham is somewhat "conservative." (CHS Bulletin April, 1981) We would emphasize the "somewhat"; neither is especially opinionated.

The nineteenth-century equivalent of Van Dusen's Connecticut is Alexander Johnston's Connecticut: A Study of a Commonwealth-Democracy (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1887, 1903). This is a volume in the American Commonwealth Series designed for the intelligent public--that is, popular but not journalistic. Most volumes in the series were written by historians, but not this one. Johnston was a lawyer, and at the time of his death at forty, was professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. His lack of professional historical training is pointed up in the comment of Jarvis M. Morse, a Yale Ph.D., who wrote in 1933 that Johnston's work is "very inaccurate for the years following 1818," Morse's special field. Morse found "on the average, two serious mistakes a page for the chapters covering the middle years of the nineteenth century." (Morse, Under the Constitution of 1818, p. 20).

Johnston's work reflects his legal background· He is not concerned "with the achievements of Connecticut men and women or with those biographical details which often throw the most instructive side-lights on Local history." The purpose of his book, he says, is "to present certain features in the development of Connecticut which have influenced the development of the State system in this country, and of the United States."

He groups these features as follows:

1) The independence of the Connecticut town system.

2) Constitutional government in Amenria as of Connecticut origin.

3) Connecticut as "the exemplar of the rights at which all the colonies finally aimed.

4) Connecticut as the archetype of the combination of democratic and federal principles.

5) Connecticut’s influence in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as determinative.

6) Connecticut's expansion into Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania as the prototype for the method of westward expansion. Johnston's final significant feature sums up not only his opinion but pretty much the conventional wisdom of the late nineteenth century.

7) "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." (p. ix)

Johnston's organization is traditional, however, and he takes 315 out of 385 pages to get through the Constitutional Convention. One chapter deals with industrial development and another with the Civil War. The 1903 edition includes a new chapter by a professor of economic history at Yale, Clive Day (Johnston had died in 1889), called "Recent Development," which deals largely with economic affairs. The book is still useful to professional historians for its thematic treatment of political institutions: town government, constitutional development, and inter-colonial and imperial relations dominate the narrative. Non-professionals should be aware, however, that a hundred years of scholarship has qualified, altered, and in some cases overturned many of Johnston's interpretations, as well as correcting his misstatements. Johnston's other relevant publication, The Genesis of a New England State (Baltimore, 1883), is a twenty-nine page pamphlet reprinting a speech.

An older work, really only the second general history of Connecticut published--the first was Benjamin Trumbull's, discussed below--is G. H. Hollister's The History of Connecticut, From the Settlement of the Colony…  (Hartford: The American Subscription House, 1855, rev. 1858). Hollister follows the conventions of citation at the primitive level customary in the pre-professional era of historiography, and thus his book must be considered "serious" rather than "popular" history, but the distinction is not really applicable to those days, when the book-reading public could and would handle pretty heavy stuff. On the other hand, Hollister makes no attempt at objectivity and would, indeed, probably say that a value-free approach was the last thing he intended. His main objective, he writes, was "to turn the attention of the descendants of the Connecticut emigrants from the present to the glorious past; to remind them of the sacrifices, the toils, the sufferings of their fathers' fathers; and to awaken, though it be with a momentary breath, the coals that once glowed like the vestal fire day and night upon the altar of freedom." No state, Hollister reminded his readers, "since the fall of Lacedaemon (in 371 B.C.) has ever, in the history of the world, waged so many wars in the same number of years, with equal success, or voluntarily borne such heavy burdens, as Connecticut." (Preface to the second edition) For the second edition Hollister added indexes and biographical sketches and, perhaps in the hope that the work would serve a pedantic purpose, a list of questions for each chapter. These questions reflect the primitive state of mid-nineteenth century pedagogy more than anything else: "What is said by way of introduction?" and "When was the County of Windham organized?" are the first two questions in the second volume. In all, the book, though full of information, much of it buttressed with citations of sources and authorities, is now more an historiographic artifact than a useful history. It will tell you a great deal about the attitudes of Connecticut's literate population in the middle of the nineteenth century.

A work that continues to be of considerable usefulness is Norris Galpin Osborn's The History of Connecticut in Monographic Form (New York: States History Company, 1925). Long topical sections--sometimes over 200 pages--each written by a sound authority, comprise Osborn's four volumes. Jenkins on "Agriculture," for instance, or Duggan on "The Catholic Church," or Countryman on "Transportation" are still useful sources. There is a separately printed index in a thin fifth volume. Almost all the essays are written by men close to their subjects and therefore are highly informed articles. However, only a few of the authors are trained scholars, so that there is little analysis and not much insight in most of the monographs. The authors are biographed at the beginning of each study. Most of the authors are Congregational Republicans, and when they depart from presenting mere information, their biases are clear. Nevertheless, many of the monographs are extremely useful, despite the passage of over half a century, and we have listed them in relevant categories. For lack of a better place to put it, we include here Norris G. Osborn's "Political Progress," pages 1 to 55 in volume II of his History of Connecticut. Osborn covers political developments from 1814 to the early part of the twentieth century and provides much interesting information not elsewhere available. See, for instance, his quick run-through of party label for 1832 to 1854 on pages 19-20.

The New England States, Their Constitutional, Judicial, Educational, Commercial, Professional and Industrial History, ed, by William T. Davis (Boston: D. H. Hurd, 1897), 4 vols., is organized in the same way as Osborn's work with topical essays, each written by a different authority. Volumes I an II deal with Connecticut. There are chapters on various manufactures and political themes for all of New England, and then six chapters on Connecticut constitutional and judicial history, insurance, currency and banking, medicine, and education. Yale, Wesleyan, Trinity, and Berkeley Divinity School each gets a chapter; and the manufacturing interests of each of Connecticut's major cities take up about six more chapters. The set has some value, though Osborn--a generation more recent--is to be preferred. The Davis essays are noted where appropriate throughout this bibliography. They are among the most boring we have read in a quarter century of the study of Connecticut history.

Another multi-volume, multi-authored work is Forrest Morgan, ed., Connecticut as a Colony and as a State. Morgan's chapters are organized chronologically, with a few topical chapters interspersed, some signed with initials, but most anonymous. Glenn Weaver has called it a "production-line job of little merit." (Jonathan Trumbull. p. 170) Volume IV, which deals with the Civil War to 1900, is especially useful, both for information about that era and as a primary source for late nineteenth-century perspectives. There is an index to all volumes at the end of Volume IV.