Connecticut,
1818-1865*
The Land
Of Steady Habits
The Republicans’ stunning triumph in 1816-18 swept the Federalist
party from power but did little to alter the state’s solidly conservative
approach to government. Once in power, Republicans quickly displayed
the same stubborn commitment to the status quo that had characterized
Federalist rule for decades. The Jacksonian Democrats and the
Whigs, successors to the Republicans in the 1830s and 40s, similarly
resisted sudden change or sweeping reform, celebrating instead
the traditional virtues of caution and frugality. Virtually nothing
was done to encourage manufacturing. The state’s once-proud educational
system fell into disarray with an 1820 decision by the General
Assembly to cut state educational appropriations and rely almost
entirely on income produced from the “School Fund,” an endowment
created from the sale of western land in the 1790s. Even agriculture,
long the mainstay of the state’s economy and still the occupation
of many of its legislators, was denied funds for development and
experimentation, even though the productivity of the land had
been in decline for decades.
Only the most extreme situation could shake the state’s leaders
from their commitment to a rigid economy in government. In the
early 1820s, horrified both by the truly wretched conditions evident
at the state’s ancient Old Newgate Prison in East Granby and,
as one historian added, but its “high costs of operation,” the
General Assembly authorized the erection of a new modern facility
in Wethersfield. Completed in 1827, the prison reflected the latest
in penal theory. Operating under the “Auburn” system, Wethersfield
emphasized productive labor and rigid discipline rather than lonely
contemplation to reform the moral character of its charges. Connecticut
thus found itself in the vanguard of the prison reform movement
of the period. In some ways, however, the new prison was firmly
rooted in conservative values. Reflecting a long tradition of
“pay-as-you-go” state expenditure, the prison’s operating budget
depended not on state subsidy but upon the sale of products made
by the inmates themselves. Almost from the first, to the great
relief of the General Assembly, Wethersfield operated at a net
profit.
The poor and the insane were not so fortunate. While the growing
enthusiasm of the day for addressing social problems through institutional
means led other states to the creation of state-run asylums and
poorhouses, in Connecticut the insane were considered a private
burden and the poor largely the responsibility of the individual
towns. Not until 1866 did the General Assembly belatedly authorize
the construction of a state asylum of the insane in Middletown.
Connecticut’s continuing conservatism in the 1830s and 40s rested
on a number of factors. Even though the Congregational church
lost its favored political position with the passage of the Constitution
of 1818, it remained a powerful and influential force in Connecticut
communities for decades. Like their Puritan forebears, Connecticut’s
19th century Congregationalists valued stability and
order above all else and adamantly resisted change and innovation.
The political domination of the General Assembly by the small
towns also substantially reinforced the status quo. By apportioning
representation by towns rather than by population, the Constitution
of 1818 ensured that rural representatives with attitudes shaped
by long years scratching a living from the stony Connecticut soil
would far outnumber urbanites in the legislature. It was thus
inevitable that a conservative, penny-pinching approach to government,
a commitment to self-sufficiency and traditional, simple values
and a suspicion of new ideas and programs would remain at the
heart of the Connecticut political system in the years before
the Civil War.
Contributing, too, to Connecticut’s continued cautious conservatism
in the first half of the 19th century was a massive migration
of people from the state. By the 1760s the state’s limited supply
of fertile land had been exhausted. In an era when large families
were the norm and farming the occupation of the vast majority
of the population, increasing numbers of Connecticut’s young people
were forced to leave the state to establish themselves. Between
1780 and 1840 almost 3/4 million people left Connecticut for greener
pastures, some traveling north to western Massachusetts and Vermont,
others west to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and beyond.
One contemporary observer noted that one third of the U. S. Senate
in 1831 and one fourth of the U. S. House of Representatives
had been born in Connecticut. This massive migration was certainly
a boon to the new states of the west, but it drained off generations
of productive and ambitious young people who, had they stayed
at home, might have challenged the state’s political conservatism.
Paradoxically, while Connecticut was stagnating politically in
these years, it was vigorously alive economically and socially.
The steadily eroding position of Connecticut agriculture and the
lack of other natural resources forced the development of a more
diverse economy in the late 18th century. “Dooryard shops” producing
consumer goods, notably tinware and clocks, blossomed across the
state. Carried to other states by Connecticut’s famous “Yankee
peddlers,” these goods and the profits they produced were the
first sign of Connecticut’s later emergence as a manufacturing
state.
The state’s rapid industrial growth in the 1800s rested in great
measure on a truly extraordinary spirit of innovation and creativity.
Connecticut had always had a tradition of “Yankee ingenuity”:
the “Yankee tinkerer” was virtually as famous as the “Yankee
peddler.” During the Revolutionary War, for example, Saybrook’s
David Bushnell perfected the first submarine, The Turtle, and
in 1787 South Windsor’s John Fitch was the first to successfully
test the steamboat. In the 1800s, a wave of Connecticut inventors
became nationally famous for a wide range of new discoveries.
Hartford’s Horace Wells did pioneering work in the development
of anesthesia that in turn made possible great strides in medicine
and health care. Hamden’s Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin
that made the cultivation of cotton profitable and profoundly
shaped the history of both North and South. New Haven’s Charles
Goodyear discovered the vulcanizing process that made the rubber
industry possible. East Windsor’s Eli Terry became a revolutionary
figure in the design of clocks. Thousands of other inventions
and gadgets sprang from the minds of Connecticut innovators and
inundated the U.S. Patent Office. Between 1790 and 1930, Connecticut
regularly led all states in the number of patents granted.
Two Connecticut inventors made particularly significant contributions
to the transformation not only of the state’s but the nation’s
economic life in this period. Eli Whitney, who operated a firearms
factory in New Haven from the 1790s to his death in 1825, has
often been called the “father of American technology” for his
contributions to the concept of interchangeable parts, an idea
that revolutionized manufacturing and made the industrial process
inevitable.
Two decades later, Hartford’s Samuel Colt adopted Whitney’s ideas
on a grand scale, producing an incredible 250 weapons a day by
using a 250-horsepower steam engine to drive some 400 machines
in his Hartford factory. Colt’s factory was significant, too,
as a training ground for future entrepreneurs in the new precision
metalworking technology, among them Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney.
Ample supplies of labor, an efficient transportation system of
turnpikes and railroads, and abundant sources of capital supplied
by the growth of the banking and insurance industries in the state
provided favorable conditions for these innovative ideas to take
hold. By the 1850s Connecticut was nationally known for the range
and quality of its manufactured goods. Textiles, made mostly in
eastern Connecticut, were the state’s leading manufactured product,
but Connecticut clocks, firearms, hardware and tools, carriages
and locks were increasingly significant in a national economy.
The growth of manufacturing in the 1830s and 40s, while it reinvigorated
a stagnating economy, was not an unmixed blessing for the state.
The rigid schedules and unyielding discipline of the factory
dismayed many workers accustomed to the more flexible style of
the artisan shop and the farm. Low pay, long hours, dangerous
and often unhealthy working conditions, and abundant use of child
labor were the rule. The last was particularly pernicious because
factory work effectively precluded formal education. Parents who
brought their children into the factories at an early age in a
desperate attempt to make ends meet only sacrificed their futures
for meager short-run gains. Observers considered it a great victory
when, in 1842, the General Assembly finally put a cap on child
labor in Connecticut. Thereafter, no child under 14 could work
for more than ten hours a day in the state’s textile mills.
Little could be done in the early years of industrialization to
improve the lot of Connecticut workers. Few challenged the prevailing
views of the day that the workplace should be entirely governed
by the “natural” rules of supply and demand or that increased
leisure promoted idleness and intemperance. For years, in fact,
attempts by workers to organize to raise wages and cut hours were
seen as “criminal” conspiracies and punished by law. As a consequence,
Connecticut was not the scene of great labor activity in the pre-Civil
War period, although one major strike, of carpetmakers in Thompsonville,
resulted in a landmark state supreme court case in 1836 which
upheld, for the first time, the right of workers to combine into
organizations.
Despite all this, the many reform currents of the day were readily
apparent, if often running under the icy official conservatism
of the state itself. When the General Assembly abjured any responsibility
for the insane, New Haven’s Eli Todd mobilized the state’s medical
community in the 1820s to address the problem themselves and eventually
secured sufficient funding to open a private institution for the
insane, the Hartford Retreat. Employing the latest European techniques,
the Retreat soon became a national model for the enlightened care
of the mentally disturbed. Private efforts brought Connecticut
similar national stature for its treatment of the hearing impaired.
After extensive research in France, the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet
returned to Connecticut in 1817 to establish the American School
for the Deaf, which soon achieved international recognition for
its pathbreaking educational techniques.
The first half of the nineteenth century was also a time of great
activity in the area of women’s rights, and Connecticut boasted
more than its share of strong figures in that effort. Most notable
was Catherine Beecher who led an energetic and successful campaign
in the 1820s to end the imprisonment of female debtors and was
a vigorous champion throughout her life of women’s education.
Connecticut and the Civil War
Connecticut’s political somnolence was rudely shattered in the
1850s as an explosion of political parties signaled the impending
crisis of the Civil War. National issues increasingly dominated
state discussions as Free Soilers, Whigs, Anti-Masons, “Know-Nothings,”
Republicans, Democrats and Union party members hotly debated the
merits of slavery and its expansion, of secession and of preservation
of the Union. Despite these divisions, Connecticut was solidly
in the Union or Republican camp in 1861 as the war began.
For most Connecticuters, steeped in a long conservative tradition
of respect for authority, allegiance to the Union cause was axiomatic.
For many, the issue took on religious overtones. Hartford’s Horace
Bushnell, famed in the 1840s and 50s for his liberalizing influence
on Congregational theology, argued passionately in the early
1860s that the very notion of civil government and the Union cause
were inseparable. Since for Bushnell and many other Congregationalists
civil government was divinely ordained, it followed that secession
was not only treason but a denial of Divine law.
The slavery issue excited strong passions across the state. Many
residents joined abolitionist societies. Others played active
roles in the Underground Railroad which assisted fugitive slaves
to escape into Canada. The famous Amistad incident of 1839 amply
documented Connecticut attitudes about slavery. The Amistad,
a Cuban slave ship, was taken over by its cargo and then captured
by a U.S. naval vessel. Former slaves and their masters were put
ashore in New Haven, where a long struggle commenced with the
Spanish government seeking return of the ship and the slaves,
while the slaves sought their freedom. Prominent Connecticut citizens
helped the Africans to find legal counsel and to argue their case
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld a Connecticut
judicial decision that the slaves should go free. Most famous
of Connecticut’s many outspoken opponents of slavery was Litchfield-born
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in
Brunswick, Maine in 1852 while her husband taught at Bowdoin College,
galvanized the North in opposition to “the peculiar institution.”
While Connecticut was opposed to the idea of slavery, racial prejudice
nevertheless existed in full measure in prewar society. Slavery
itself had ended in Connecticut in 1848; still, the state’s free
black population enjoyed few of the rights and opportunities the
state’s whites took for granted. Connecticut Blacks encountered
great discrimination in employment, in public accommodations
and in transportation. Most appalling was the lack of educational
opportunity. In the 1830, for example, New Haveners vigorously
and successfully opposed plans to establish a school for free
Blacks that would offer academic and vocational training. In
eastern Connecticut, Prudence Crandall’s attempt first to conduct
integrated classes in her girls’ academy and later to set up an
all-Black school stirred up similarly passionate opposition. Crandall
was arrested and imprisoned, and the school itself repeatedly
vandalized. Finally in 1834 she abandoned her experiment in failure.
After a decade of rising tensions, the Southern assault on Fort
Sumter on April 11, 1861 signaled the beginning of the Civil War.
Dominating the affairs of the state was Republican Governor William
Buckingham, an able leader and imposing personality remarkably
similar in style and approach to Connecticut’s first “war governor,”
Jonathan Trumbull. Like Trumbull, Buckingham was a model of Yankee
rectitude and integrity. Like Trumbull, he presided over a wartime
society whose economic resources, particularly in the areas of
firearms and textiles, were crucial to the war effort, but whose
loyalties were not fully assured. Like Trumbull, Buckingham ruled
the state with an iron hand, vigorously suppressing “Copperheads”
wherever he found them and ensuring that the state would meet
its commitments of men and materials to the Union cause as the
war progressed.
Ultimately, over 55,000 Connecticut troops served in the conflict,
drawn from a total population of less than 500,000. Almost 20,000
suffered casualties. It has been estimated that the Colt factory
in Hartford alone produced enough rifles to outfit the Army of
the Potomac and enough revolvers for all the Union fighting men.
The rubber industry that had grown up in Naugatuck and New Haven
following Charles Goodyear’s discovery of vulcanization produced
vast amounts of rubber ponchos, boots and sheets. The Collinsville
Axe Company turned out thousands of bayonets, while the New Haven
carriage industry became a major producer of military wagons.
Textile makers went into the uniform business. Mystic, with a
population under 400, built 36 steamships for the Union effort.
Voluntary aid societies collected clothing and food for the men
at the front and cared for their dependents left behind.
As in the Revolution, too, several prominent military figures
in the war effort came from Connecticut. Most significant was
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, whose “Connecticut” virtues
of independence, integrity and receptivity to technological innovation
made the Union Navy a powerful and effective force in the conflict.
As it had in the Revolution, then, Connecticut established itself
as a major contributor to the war effort despite its small size
and relatively modest population.
By Bruce Fraser
* Under revision.
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