Connecticut,
1763-1818*
Connecticut
And The Revolution
An
era of “salutory neglect” ended for Connecticut and for the colonies
with the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Buried under
a massive war debt produced by decades of struggle with the French
and facing an additional round of expenses in administering and
governing its new possessions in the new world, England sought
in the 1760s to increase revenues from her colonial possessions
through a series of new tax acts. Reaction to the Sugar Act (1764),
Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Duties (1767) was particularly
intense in Connecticut where traditional Puritan hostility to
Anglican England combined with a long-standing tradition of self-government
and political independence to produce violent opposition to Britain’s
new policies.
Within Connecticut, the conflict over British policy in the
1760s in great measure became a sectional battle for political
control—with
established west and upstart east pitted in bitter opposition.
Growing trade with the Royal colony of New York in the 1700s
and an increase of Anglicans in the western portion of the colony
had blunted the westerner’s suspicion of England. Thus, when the
Crown announced its new revenue policies in 1764, the westerners,
while unenthusiastic about the new taxes and convinced that the
Charter of 1662 gave only the General Assembly the power to tax
the colony, were resigned to London’s new initiatives. Governor
Fitch, a westerner, reluctantly resolved to enforce the acts.
In contrast, eastern Connecticut, still isolated and rural,
economically undeveloped and politically weak, seethed with
resistance and
lashed out not only at Britain, but at her apologists in the
western portion of the state whose restrictive policies in
land distribution
and currency had long worked to their disadvantage.
Eastern leaders such as Eliphalet Dyer of Windham, Jonathan
Trumbull of Lebanon and Colonel Israel Putnam of Pomfret moved
quickly
to organize “the Sons of Liberty” in Connecticut, to repudiate
the “Tory” policy of the colony’s western leaders and to elect
“patriotic” easterners in their stead. In 1765, eastern newspapers
excoriated Governor Fitch and the western interests he represented,
crowds burned effigies of Connecticut stamp collector Jared
Ingersoll, and at last in September 1766, a mob confronted Ingersoll
in
Wethersfield
and forced him to resign.
The election of 1766 both resolved the question of political
dominance between west and east and determined the colony’s response to
England’s new tax policies. As one Connecticut historian put it,
“Connecticut made her choice between resistance and obedience
to London in 1766—all that followed was but a result of that decision.”
In the election, easterners gained control of the Council, the
upper house of the Assembly and the governorship and successfully
controlled them throughout the Revolutionary period, thus assuring
that Connecticut would hold to an unyielding “Patriot” position
in the growing Anglo-American controversy. In the process,
the balance of power in colony affairs shifted dramatically
from
west
to east.
The signs of a new attitude were quickly apparent. While controversy
raged in other colonies, Connecticut participated enthusiastically
in the non-importation movement of the late 1760s and early 1770s,
in which American colonists boycotted British goods as a means
of economic pressure on the mother country. The colony moved vigorously,
too, in 1774 to support neighboring Massachusetts when the famous
Boston tea party provoked the British into a series of “Coercive
Acts” punishing the colony. Later that year, the General Assembly
sent Roger Sherman, Eliphalet Dyer and Silas Deane to represent
it at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Preparing
for the worst, the colony’s leadership intensified the training
of militia and requested Connecticut towns to double their supplies
of powder, musket balls and flint. Preparation paid off. In April
1775, the battles of Concord and Lexington quickly brought 3,600
Connecticut militiamen to join the Patriot army collecting
in Cambridge.
With the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, Connecticut
moved rapidly to neutralize its substantial Tory population.
Some
2,500 individuals, most of them from such western towns as
Stamford, Fairfield and Danbury were identified, disarmed,
threatened with
loss of property and, in some cases physically abused in order
to coerce their cooperation with the war effort. More than
1,000 Connecticut Loyalists fled to the protection of British-held
New
York, ultimately resettling in England, New Brunswick or Nova
Scotia. Many of the less agile found themselves languishing
in
the damp and cold of Connecticut’s infamous “Old Newgate” prison
in East Granby.
Independence from England posed no difficulties for the political
system. The Charter of 1662 had provided a secure political
framework for well over century, and little sentiment existed
for any change
in the colony’s form of government. Unlike some states which
suffered extremely difficult periods of political reorganization
following
the Declaration of Independence, Connecticut simply dropped
all references to Great Britain from the charter and continued
all
her political institutions and procedures unchanged!
To guide the state through the war, the General Assembly established
a “Council of Safety” under the direction of Governor Jonathan
Trumbull. The governor’s store in Lebanon was turned into the
state’s War Office where, seated at a battered desk, “Brother
Jonathan” directed the day-to-day management of the state’s
affairs.
Connecticut’s Jonathan Trumbull was one of the truly extraordinary
figures of the American Revolution. A short and imposing man given
to Biblical exhortations and theological explanations of public
affairs, Trumbull was nevertheless a shrewd and energetic administrator.
Under his leadership, Connecticut became known as the “provision
state” during the Revolution, single-handedly coming to the rescue
of Washington’s starving troops at Valley Forge in the winter
of 1777-78 and at Morristown, New Jersey in the winter of 1779-80
with badly needed foodstuffs and livestock. Throughout the conflict,
Connecticut made significant contributions of gunpowder, cannon,
weapons and troops to the Revolutionary cause.
Unlike neighboring Massachusetts or New York, Connecticut escaped
prolonged military campaigns or extended British occupation.
Several minor engagements, however, were fought on Connecticut
soil. In April 1777, Major General William Tryon, the Royal Governor
of New York, led some 2,000 British troops on Danbury and destroyed
supplies stored there for the Continental Army. Two years later,
Tryon led similar attacks on Greenwich, New Haven, Fairfield and
Norwalk, putting hundreds of homes and ships to the torch. The
major Connecticut battle of the war came in September 1781 when
the infamous Benedict Arnold attacked New London. Eighty members
of the garrison of Groton’s Fort Griswold were massacred after
they had surrendered to British troops, and the town of New
London itself was substantially destroyed.
Connecticut’s navy did much to recoup these losses, capturing
over 40 British vessels during the war, while Connecticut privateers,
sailing from such towns as New London, New Haven, Wethersfield,
Hartford and Saybrook, took over 500 British merchantmen as prizes.
A hotbed of Revolutionary sentiment in the pre-war years,
Connecticut effectively translated its patriotic ardor into
action in the
war itself and emerged as one of the mainstays of the Revolutionary
effort.
The state produced more than its share of both heroes and villains
in the Revolutionary struggle. Certainly it produced the most
quotable figures of the period. The daring spy Nathan Hale,
famed for his declaration, “I have but one life to give for my country,”
was a native of Coventry, while General Israel Putnam, author
of the famous Bunker Hill maxim “Don’t fire until you see the
white of their eyes!” was a resident of Pomfret. Norwich’s Benedict
Arnold, whose courage and military skill in the early months of
the Revolution made him a national hero, became one of the war’s
great traitors by attempting to betray West Point and leading
British troops in the savage assault on New London in 1781.
From
Colony To State
Connecticut escaped the political and social turmoil that engulfed
many other states of the new nation in the “critical period” which
preceded the adoption of the Constitution in 1787-89. While neighboring
Massachusetts was rocked by the domestic violence of Shays’ Rebellion
in 1787, the political and religious elite that had governed Connecticut
for decades continued in power unchallenged. The state responded
to the call for a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in
1787 without great enthusiasm. While Connecticut’s Noah Webster
had established a national reputation as an advocate for a strong
central government with the publication in 1785 of Sketches of
American Policy, most citizens preferred a weak national government
that would not threaten Connecticut’s long-standing ability to
control its own affairs. Nevertheless, delegates finally were
sent to Philadelphia where one of them, Roger Sherman, engineered
a major compromise during the convention that made the Constitution
possible. With large and small states deadlocked over whether
representation in the new two-house national legislature should
be based on population in both houses or on a system giving each
state an equal number of representatives, Sherman proposed the
“Connecticut Compromise,” which called for one house based on
population and one on equal representation for each state. His
proposal broke a crippling deadlock at the Convention and produced
the House of Representatives and the Senate as we know them today.
Connecticut ratified the Constitution decisively in January 1788
by a vote of 128 to 40, the fifth state to do so.
The new nation in the 1790s soon found itself split between Alexander
Hamilton’s hopes for a centralized, urban, manufacturing society
and Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a decentralized, rural, agrarian
republic. Political parties, hitherto scorned as corruptions of
the political process, grew up to promote these competing blueprints
for American society—the Federalists in support of Hamilton and
the Republicans in support of Jefferson. Connecticut’s “standing
order” was fiercely Federalist and sought to maintain their hold
on government through such devices as the “stand-up” law, passed
in 1801, which required nominations for elected officials to
be
affirmed or denied by a rising vote (standing up), or a show
of hands, thus forcing opponents of the establishment openly
to declare
themselves in public. Despite vigorous campaigning Republicans
were unable to weaken Federalist control. In the national election
of 1804, handily won by Jefferson and his Republicans, Connecticut
was one of only two states in the nation to support the Federalist
ticket.
Connecticut’s opposition to Jefferson soon rested on foreign policy
considerations as well as domestic disagreements. In 1807, to
protect American shipping and seamen from attacks by both the
French and the British who had been intermittently at war since
1793, Jefferson prohibited American vessels from sailing to any
foreign port, hoping that the loss of American goods would force
the European belligerents to respect American shipping rights.
The embargo was an economic disaster for Connecticut. Trade dried
up completely, the economy soured and hundreds lost their jobs.
Connecticut’s hostility to the foreign policies of the Republican
central government prompted open opposition to the War of 1812
with Britain. Governor Roger Griswold, backed by the Legislature,
refused to permit the Connecticut militia to be put under the
control of the U.S. Army and prohibited the removal of troops
from the state! Editorials cried out against “an unnecessary war
undertaken without necessary preparation producing little besides
disaster and disgrace.” Connecticut soon had more specific complaints
as the British invaded Essex in April 1814, destroyed 20 ships
and bombarded Stonington four months later, leveling large sections
of the town.
Convinced that they had been left undefended during the war and
nursing a string of other grievances, representatives of the
New
England states finally met at the Old State House in Hartford
in late 1814 to discuss their opposition the war. Amid rumors
of secession and the possible establishment of a “New England
Confederacy,” the famous Hartford Convention finally adopted a
series of daring resolutions and proposed Constitutional amendments
to protect the New England states against “deliberate, dangerous
and palpable infractions of the Constitution” by the Federal
government. Yet before any action could be taken on their recommendations,
the War of 1812 came to an end with the signing of the Treaty
of Ghent. The roar of patriotism that followed turned doubts
into
disloyalty.
Connecticut’s Republicans quickly seized on the “traitorous Hartford
Convention” to renew their quest for power in the state. Joining
with Episcopalians and Baptists disaffected by the Federalists’
support for the Congregational church, the Jeffersonian-Republicans
formed the “Toleration Party” which appealed for the disestablishment
of religion and called for a convention to draft a new state
constitution.
Under the leadership of Oliver Wolcott, the party swept all before
it. Wolcott was elected governor in 1817, and a constitutional
convention was convened the following summer.
In disestablishing the Congregational church, the Constitution
of 1818 marked the passing of the Puritan commonwealth and the
adoption at last of a true constitution. In the long run, however,
its major significance came in consolidating legislative power
in the hands of the established towns. Under the new constitution
all existing towns were entitled to two representatives in the
lower house of the General Assembly. New towns created after
1818
were entitled to only one representative. This provision, which
ultimately would vest extraordinary power in Connecticut’s old
rural towns, was to have increasing impact on the political
life of the state as the century progressed.
By Bruce Fraser
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