Connecticut
to 1763*
Introduction
Connecticut
has long been known as “the land of steady habits”—certainly as
we look about us, the state’s prudence and essential conservatism
are still strikingly apparent today. Our politics are decidedly
moderate. Our social habits and styles, too, are careful and restrained.
Census returns indicate Connecticut people marry less frequently
than those of any other state in New England; have fewer children
on average; divorce less often; even live longer—carefully pondering,
no doubt, the relative merits of the alternatives before committing
themselves to any irrevocable course of action!
Connecticut, too, has long had a national reputation for leadership
in industry, achievement in finance and technology and involvement
in the nation’s defense. The many machine shops and factories
of Bridgeport and New Britain, the great insurance companies
of Hartford and the sprawling industrial complexes of United Technologies
in East Hartford and General Dynamics in Groton all document the
continued significance of these industries in our economic life.
We may boast with considerable justification of our state’s rich
educational and cultural traditions. Certainly the prominence
of Yale and Wesleyan universities, the stature of Hartford’s Wadsworth
Atheneum and New Haven’s Center for British Art and the national
reputations of authors, dramatists and poets such as Malcolm Cowley,
Arthur Miller, William Styron and James Merrill underline the
continued strength and vitality of the state’s educational institutions,
cultural organizations and artistic community.
Our Connecticut is a land of extremes and sharp contrasts.
It is the third smallest state in the Union and the third
most densely populated. For years it has had one of the highest
per capita incomes in the nation and one of the country’s lowest
unemployment rates. Yet amid its affluence are pockets of severe
urban and rural poverty. Both Hartford and New Haven rank among
the country’s ten most disadvantaged cities. The disparity between
the wealth of Hartford’s suburbs and the poverty of its inner-city
residents is the third worst in the nation. The affluent New York
suburbs of Fairfield county enjoy one of the highest standards
of living in the country: outside the state’s economic mainstream,
the small cities and rural towns of the northeast corner of the
state have struggled for decades.
Connecticut is a state of remarkable ethnic and racial diversity
as well. Recent bitter battles over Sunday blue laws indicate
the continued vitality of old Yankee values and traditions; yet
for over eighty years Connecticut has had one of the highest percentages
of foreign-born inhabitants of any state in the nation. The presence
today of substantial communities of Polish, Italian, Portuguese
and French-Canadian immigrants ensures that the percentage of
foreign born in Connecticut’s population remains almost double
the national average. A dramatic migration to Connecticut in recent
years has swelled its Hispanic population. Connecticut’s Black
population, too, is more than double the percentage of any other
New England state. Ethnic and racial diversity has brought great
strength to the state: it has also, upon occasion, brought social
tension and cultural conflict.
None of these essential characteristics of our state emerged overnight.
As William Faulkner wryly reminds us, “The past is not dead. It
is not even past.” Connecticut’s political attitudes and styles,
its cultural vigor, its educational prominence, its industrial
accomplishments and, indeed, its continuing social and economic
difficulties are all very much the products of a long, rich and
exciting history. Intended for the general reader, this booklet
provides a brief introduction to that history, a sketch of the
major forces and events in Connecticut’s past that continue to
shape our lives today.
Geography is the stage of history, and no more so than in Connecticut,
whose history has always been shaped by the severe limitations
of its natural environment.
Connecticut takes its name from its principal geographic feature,
the broad “Quinnetukut” or “long tidal river” that traverses the
state from north to south. Easily navigable from its mouth 45
miles north to the rapids of present-day Windsor Locks, the Connecticut
River from colonial times has provided a broad highway to the
interior and a convenient means of exporting surplus crops and
goods.
Equally important to the development of the state has been its
irregular “drowned” coastline with its many sheltered harbors.
Typical is New London where, as one colonial observer marveled,
“A ship of 500 tunn may go up to the towne and cum so near the
shore that they may toss a biskit ashoare.” Similar ports in
New Haven and Bridgeport and small harbors at Guilford, Milford,
Stratford, Norwalk and Stamford encouraged the growth of the maritime
trades in the 17th and 18th centuries and facilitated a vigorous
commercial life that continues to the present.
Water, however, has been virtually the state’s only natural resource.
With the exception of iron deposits in Salisbury, copper veins
in East Granby and Bristol, and brownstone quarries in Portland,
Connecticut has virtually no mineral wealth, and but for the rich
bottomland of the Connecticut River Valley little fertile farmland.
Rising in both the northeastern and northwestern corners of the
state into rugged boulder-strewn highlands, more prominent for
their scenery than their agricultural potential, Connecticut’s
flinty soil long ago prompted the wry colonial adage “Buy meat,
get bone. Buy land, get stone.” Virtually from the first, the
people of Connecticut learned that their success would depend
on gifts of imagination, character and craftsmanship, not on the
bounty of nature.
The
Connecticut the first Europeans saw was hardly a trackless, unpopulated
wilderness. For centuries the region had been inhabited by perhaps
as many as 30,000 Indians whose seasonal migrations and practice
of setting great fires to burn off forest underbrush left Connecticut
crisscrossed with trails and often parklike in appearance.
While the village rather than the tribe was the real center of
Indian life, at least 16 separate tribes existed in the region
in 1620. The Paugussetts and Siwanogs occupied present-day Fairfield
county; the Quinnipiacs, the area around New Haven; the Tunxis,
Podunk and Poquinock Indians the Hartford region; the Nipmuks
and Mohegans the northeast uplands; and the Pequots the coastal
area east of the Thames River.
All these tribes shared a common culture and generally similar
languages. Indian life in New England was inextricably bound to
the rhythms of the seasons; the size and location of their settlements
changing in response to the cycles of nature. Unlike their northern
counterparts, southern New England Indians were skilled farmers,
and their dependence on agriculture made them less nomadic than
the tribes of Maine and New Hampshire. Still, villages regularly
shifted from one location to another as the availability of natural
food resources changed. In the spring, Connecticut’s Indians gathered
together in large villages. Women planted fields of corn and beans
while men fished the massive spring spawning runs of shad, salmon
and alewives. In the summer, as crops ripened, the Indians depended
primarily on game for food, particularly the white-tailed deer.
Men often embarked on extended fishing and hunting expeditions
to the interior and to the shore while women and children remained
behind to till and protect the fields. The arrival of fall saw
the village collected again to harvest crops and to gather acorns,
chestnuts and other wild plants. This was a time of extensive
festivals where hundreds of people gathered in dense settlements
to feast and celebrate the plenty of the season. It was also the
preferred season for war, when food stores of both attacker and
attacked would be at their greatest.
Once the harvest celebrations were over, however, Connecticut’s
Indians dispersed into small bands to conduct the fall hunt when
deer and bear were at their fattest. By late December, when the
snows had come at last, the village was reassembled in heavily
wooded valleys, protected from winter winds and convenient to
essential supplies of firewood. There the Indians rode out the
winter, often enduring long stretches of hunger as supplies of
corn dwindled and the hunt grew more difficult.
The society produced by this nomadic life had no room for advanced
technology or elaborate political arrangements. Since everything
had to be transportable, the Indians’ tools and weapons were
quite simple, their possessions often disposable. Their political
organization was similarly uncluttered. Connecticut’s Indians
had no real notion of “the state”: their loyalties were to individuals
and to relatives, a situation not conducive to strong leadership
or concerted action. As one early missionary noted,
Their
Sachems have not their men in such subjection, but that very frequently
their men will leave them upon distaste or harsh dealing, and
go and live among other Sachems that can protect them; so that
their princes endeavor to carry it obligingly and lovingly unto
their people, lest they should desert them....
Given their vastly different cultures and their sharply divergent
visions of land use and property, it was inevitable that Europeans
and Indians would eventually come into conflict in Connecticut.
Given the great differences between them in technological and
political sophistication, it was also inevitably a conflict the
Indians would eventually lose.
The first blow fell from an invisible hand. In 1633, before the
first Europeans arrived, a great epidemic of smallpox, transmitted
from European settlers to the Indians of Massachusetts and Maine,
swept south, killing hundreds of Indians across Connecticut, depopulating
whole villages. Confined by culture and weakened by disease, Connecticut’s
first inhabitants could do little to resist the waves of English
that would arrive in the next thirty years.
Colonial
Connecticut
The Dutch were the first Europeans to explore Connecticut. In
1614 Adriaen Block sailed up the lower Connecticut River for the
Dutch West Indian Company in search of trading possibilities with
the Native American population, and in 1633 a party of Dutch from
New Netherlands established the first European settlement, a trading
post at present-day Hartford.
English settlement followed some months thereafter, largely individuals
from neighboring Massachusetts quite comfortable with that colony’
s rigid Puritan viewpoint but eager for more ample economic opportunities
offered by the fertile soil of the Connecticut River Valley. Emigrants
from the Pilgrim community in Plymouth settled upriver from the
Dutch in Windsor, and in the following year a party of adventurers,
led by John Oldham, passed the winter in Wethersfield. In 1636,
the Reverend Thomas Hooker, “the father of Connecticut,” and Samuel
Stone arduously moved their congregations 100 miles overland from
Cambridge, Massachusetts to Hartford. Two years later, inspired
by the Reverend John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, two boatloads
of English Puritans settled on the banks of the Quinnipiac River
in New Haven.
For these first settlers, the expected bounty of Connecticut was
often illusory. The winter of 1635-36, for example, took a terrible
toll on the newly-arrived settlers of Windsor. The snows arrived
before sufficient housing could be built. Cattle died and food
supplies ran out. Facing starvation, many fled back to Massachusetts.
Those remaining suffered appalling hardships until released by
the coming of spring.
Despite these rocky beginnings, settlers quickly spread out up
and down the Connecticut River and along the shore from these
early population centers: by the end of the century virtually
the entire coastline and the Connecticut Valley had been settled
and formally organized into towns.
Surrounded by wilderness, far from Massachusetts and frighteningly
distant from England. Connecticut’s early colonists moved quickly
to establish a clear political structure for their new settlements.
In 1639 the “River Towns” of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield
adopted the famous “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” organizing
themselves as an independent commonwealth known as the “Connecticut
Colony.” Long trumpeted as America’s first constitution (from
this the motto “the Constitution State” seen today on Connecticut
automobile license plates), the Fundamental Orders now seem to
us less a full-fledged constitution than a basic outline of areas
in which government should operate. Still, the “Fundamental Orders”
expressed the powerful, and in its day still novel, idea that
government rested in the free consent of the people as expressed
in the electoral process.
In 1662, Governor John Winthrop, Jr. moved to establish the colonists’
clear title to the region. Winthrop, a classic “Renaissance Man”
who successfully pursued simultaneous careers in politics, business
and medicine throughout much of his life, was able to persuade
Charles II to grant the Connecticut colonists an extraordinarily
liberal charter which permitted a remarkable degree of self-government
and independence. The Charter of 1662 absorbed the New Haven Colony
(which greeted union with the more liberal River Towns to the
north with considerable dismay and foot-dragging) and set the
boundary of the new colony from Massachusetts to Long Island Sound
and from Narragansett Bay to the Pacific Ocean! These generous
and ill-defined boundaries turned out to be a true Pandora’s box
of trouble for Connecticut both as a colony and as a state, as
they produced a series of long, drawn-out, highly acrimonious
and occasionally violent border conflicts with Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania lasting well into the
eighteenth century.
Land considerations had earlier brought the colony into conflict
with its more immediate neighbor, the Pequots, who dominated the
Mystic River region of southeastern Connecticut. While the early
colonists had established initially friendly relations with the
tribes of the central portion of the state, the Pequots (whose
name, Roger Williams ominously reported, meant “destroyers of
men”) resisted the English fiercely from the first. A Pequot attack
on the settlement of Saybrook in 1636 and a surprise raid on
Wethersfield in the following year which left nine settlers dead
sharpened the arguments of those eager for an all-out confrontation.
A 90-man expedition under Colonel John Mason attacked the Pequots
in their main encampment in Mystic, killing over 600 men, women
and children in a fierce battle. The remainder of the tribe was
tracked to a swamp in Fairfield and crushed in a second merciless
attack. A pitiful remainder of the Pequots survived to be given
by the victorious colonists to friendly tribes as slaves. With
the exception of minor skirmishes and a brief alarm in King Philip’s
War of 1675, the Pequot war marked the end of Native American
resistance to the English in Connecticut. Those few Indians left
in the colony were soon bent to a European way of life, forced
to settle on fixed parcels of land and adopt European customs
and work habits.
The political independence granted Connecticut under the Charter
of 1662 was briefly threatened in 1685 when James II attempted
to unite the New England colonies under one Royal government.
Connecticut resisted the plan vigorously but in vain. On October
31, 1687, Edmund Andros, the governor of this “Dominion of new
England,” arrived in Hartford to take control of the Connecticut
government and take possession of the charter. As legend has it,
at an evening meeting between Andros and the colony’s leadership,
the candles were suddenly extinguished, and the charter was quickly
spirited out of danger. Hidden in a nearby hollow tree—the famous
“Charter Oak”—by Joseph Wadsworth, Connecticut’s revered charter
never fell into royal hands. Denied the charter itself, Andros
dissolved the colony’s government nevertheless and imposed an
autocratic rule that lasted until the overthrow of James II in
the Glorious Revolution when the colony, in 1689, resumed government
under the charter of 1662 as before. But for this brief exception,
Connecticut’s first century was characterized by virtual independence
from Royal control.
Unchecked by outside influence, the tenets of Puritanism shaped
every aspect of life in Connecticut in its first century. Like
their fellow Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and elsewhere.
Connecticut’s early settlers believed the Anglican Church in England
had not gone far enough in purging itself of the rituals and practices
of the Catholic Church. They objected, in particular, to the hierarchical
organization of the Church of England and its ostentatious and
elaborate ritual. Their hopes to “purify” the church by freeing
individual congregations of any higher control and by simplifying
the ritual and form of the church put them in intense conflict
with both James II and Charles II of England in the early decades
of the 17th century. A series of punitive acts in the 1620s finally
convinced many Puritans to abandon England for the New World where
they could practice their faith freely and establish a model society,
“a citty on a hill,” as John Winthrop put it, that would serve
as an example of proper living to others.
The idea of “the Elect” dominated Connecticut’s political and
social life throughout the colonial period. Connecticut’s early
settlers were convinced that the vast majority of men and women
in their society were damned no matter how godly their outward
lives. Only a few, “the Elect,” were preordained or “predestined”
by God to achieve salvation. Where one fit in this stern scheme
was, of course, a matter of considerable individual interest.
One might know if one were indeed among the Elect by experiencing
“saving grace,” an almost mystical-intense experience of God’s
redemptive love. Although a complete adherence to Puritanism’s
strict religious and moral code was expected of all members of
Connecticut society, for many years only “the Elect” could actually
become members of the church, and it was from this small pool,
never more than a fraction of the total population, that the colony’s
religious and political leaders were drawn.
While Hartford’s Thomas Hooker was more sympathetic to democratic
ideals than others of his day, Connecticut’s Puritan settlers
as a whole had no enthusiasm for wide popular involvement in
public affairs. The franchise was limited to those owning land
and property worth at least 50 shillings. Voters were to be men
of “sober conversation,” “of quiet and peaceable behavior and
civil conversation.” Their credentials were carefully reviewed
by the town’s freemen and selectmen. Excluded from the larger
political process by these narrow criteria were all women, apprentices
and indentured servants, slaves, blacks and Indians and, indeed,
a sizable percentage of the adult white male population, although
political participation in town politics was considerably more
open. In 1669 there were but 1,789 qualified voters in an adult
male population of over 3,000. Dominating this narrow political
structure was a small Puritan elite who completely controlled
the colony’s political affairs, largely, it should be added, with
the acquiescence of the “lesser sort.” In the rigidly hierarchical
society of 17th century Connecticut, it was axiomatic that the
“better sort” should lead.
Similarly accepted across the colony was the importance of education,
although of a sort foreign to us today. Education in colonial
Connecticut was largely intended to foil “that old deluder Satan.”
Since children reflected the fundamentally sinful nature of all
men, the primary function of education was more to restrain their
naturally evil impulses than to promote intellectual curiosity.
Instruction, often by rote-learning, served more to produce obedience
and respect for the standing order than encourage independent
thinking.
At the acme of Connecticut’s educational system was Yale University,
established as the Collegiate School in Saybrook in 1701 and removed
in bitterness and controversy to New Haven in 1717. Founded to
ensure an educated clergy for the colony, Yale did far more, producing
for decades the political elite of the state. In 1775, for example,
of the 12 members of the colony’s upper house, eight were Yale
graduates: the colonial secretary was a Yale graduate as were
all of the judges of the court and a significant percentage of
the General Assembly.
The Puritanism of colonial Connecticut was a social blueprint
as well as a political and religious system. The Puritans had
fled the economic and social disorder of England as much as its
religious persecution, and they sought to establish communities
in the new world that were cohesive and orderly as well as religiously
pure. The family was the pivot of the Puritan social system in
early Connecticut, in no small measure because of the immense
array of social responsibilities it carried out which in our society
are delegated to outside institutions. In an age which lacked
hospitals, asylums, nursing homes, prisons, vocational training
centers and the like, the family served as the primary economic
and social unit, trained the young, nursed the sick, the insane
and the aged and disciplined the lawbreaker. Both the church and
the political system in Connecticut as a consequence exercised
considerable vigilance over the “good order” of families, carefully
defined the rights and responsibilities of their members and quickly
stepped in when transgressions occurred.
Harmony in early Connecticut was produced, too, by the uniformity
of life. Agriculture was the principal occupation of the vast
majority of the population. While some farmers produced crops
for export—principally corn, grain, flaxseeds, onions, livestock
and, increasingly from the late 1600s, tobacco—most were subsistence
farmers, growing solely for themselves, following the same patterns
of work and leisure as their neighbors, living generally comfortable,
if not affluent, lives.
Harmony came as well from isolation. Despite its fine harbors
and its vigorous shipbuilding industry, Connecticut rarely engaged
in direct trade with England. Most commercial activity was directed
either north to Boston or south to New York. This situation prompted
one colonist to describe the colony as “a cache of good liquor,
tapped at both ends...until little remains but lees and settlings.”
Whatever its economic consequences, the limitations of Connecticut
commerce effectively protected the colony’s Puritan system from
the influx of new ideas and new lifestyles that inevitably accompanied
international connections and cosmopolitan influence.
Harmony was insured, too, by a rigorous exclusion of nonbelievers,
Quakers were banished as soon as they appeared in both Hartford
and New Haven. Other nonconforming religious views were similarly
discouraged while undesirables and vagabonds were “warned out”
of Connecticut towns if they failed to meet community standards.
An appetite for hard work, a passion for self-reliance and political
independence nurtured by the protective Charter of 1662, a rigidity
in principles and in religion and an ongoing suspicion of social
change and innovation characterized the Connecticut personality
at the close of the 17th century.
Bolstered by these factors, Puritanism in Connecticut retained
its vigor much longer than in other areas of New England. Nevertheless,
by the earl 1700s the Puritan experiment was clearly unraveling.
Expansion into the eastern and western highlands created considerable
political tension in the colony as the General Assembly became
increasingly involved in settling rancorous issues of land distribution
and in contending with the new settlers’ demands for easy credit
and an inflated currency.
The values of individual towns were changing as well. Land speculation
and the desire for individual economic advancement, rather than
the practice of religious ideals or the protection of group values,
increasingly inspired the settlement of new towns in the northwest
and northeast corners of the state. In old towns like Wethersfield
and Simsbury, the same growing spirit of economic individualism
steadily undermined the cooperative, community-centered ideal
of the Puritans. Connecticut’s people, as one historian put it,
were inexorably changing from “Puritans” to “Yankees.”
This growing strain became more and more evident in town politics
as the 18th century progressed. While wealthy elites continued
o dominate local affairs, local politics became increasingly more
contentious and combative. Office holders were turned out of office
by irate factions with increasing regularity. The courts were
jammed with suits for collection of debts, often very small in
size. “Peaceable kingdoms” in the 17th century, Connecticut towns
found themselves increasingly riven by controversies over property
and money as the 18th century wore on.
Waning, too, was the influence of the Congregational church. Once
utterly dominant in the colony, Congregationalists saw Baptists,
Quakers and even Anglicans establish congregations in Connecticut
in the early 1700s. In the 1740s a wave of intensely emotional
religious revivals, known as the “Great Awakening,” swept the
colony, further weakening the established church. The “Great Awakening”
provided deep divisions in the Congregational church between “Old
Lights,” true to the established Congregational church, and “New
Lights,” who favored a less rational, more emotional and often
anti-establishment approach to religious experience. “Old Lights”
were appalled by the “screechings, cryingsout, faintings and convulsions”
that accompanied the preaching of such celebrated ministers by
George Whitefield and James Davenport: but these preachers succeeded
in pulling many followers from the established church, particularly
in eastern Connecticut. Many “New Lights” abandoned the church
for evangelical sects more sympathetic to their views and became
Baptists and Methodists. Some “Old Lights,” repelled by the excesses
of the Great Awakening, sought order and reason among the Anglicans.
The Congregational church never recovered from these blows. The
basic values and ideals of the Puritans would continue to influence
Connecticut for decades, but by the 1750s their utter dominance
had ended and a new, more individualistic, religiously diverse
and far more economically aggressive society had emerged.
By Bruce Fraser
* Under revision.
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