From the “History of Hartford County,” we quote the following:—
The Hartford Times was started at the beginning of the year 1817. Its publisher was Frederick D. Bolles, a practical printer, and at that time a young man full of confidence and enthusiasm in his journal and his cause. That cause was, in the party terms of the day, “TOLERATION.” First, and paramount, of the objects of the Tolerationists was to secure the adoption of a new Constitution for Connecticut. Under the ancient and loose organic law then in force, people of all forms and shades of religious belief were obliged to pay tribute to the established church. Such a state of things permitted no personal liberty, no individual election in the vital matter of a man’s religion; and it naturally created a revolt. The cry of “Toleration” arose. The Federalists met the argument with ridicule. The “Democratic Republicans,” of the Jefferson fold, were the chief users of the Toleration cry, and the Hartford Times was established on that issue, and in support of the movement for a new and more tolerant Constitution. It proved to be a lively year in party politics. The toleration issue became the engrossing theme. The Times had as associate editor, John M. Niles, then a young and but little known lawyer from Poquonock, who subsequently rose to a national reputation in the Senate at Washington. It dealt the Federalists some powerful blows, and enlisted in the cause a number of men of ability, who, but for the peculiar issue presented—one of religious freedom—never would have entered into party politics. Among them were prominent men of other denominations than the orthodox Congregationalists; no wonder; they were struggling for life. There was a good deal of public speaking; circulars and pamphlets were handed from neighbor to neighbor; the “campaign” was, in short, a sharp and bitter one, and the main issue was hotly contested. The excitement was intense. When it began to appear that the Toleration cause was stronger than the Federalists had supposed, there arose a fresh feeling of horrified apprehension, much akin to that which, seventeen years before, had led hundreds of good people in Connecticut, when they heard of the election of the “Infidel Jefferson” to the Presidency, to hide their Bibles—many of them in hay-mows—under the conviction that that evident instrument of the Evil One would seek out and destroy every obtainable copy of the Bible in the land.
The election came on in the spring of 1818, and the Federal party in Connecticut found itself actually overthrown. It was a thing unheard of, not to be believed by good Christians. Lyman Beecher, in his Litchfield pulpit and family prayers, as one out of numerous cases, poured out the bitterness of his heart in declarations that everything was lost and the days of darkness had come.
Was not the soul of John Rogers marching on?
In fact, it proved to be the day of the new Constitution—the existing law of 1818—and under its more tolerant influence other churches rapidly arose; the Episcopalians, the Baptists, and the Methodists all feeling their indebtedness to the party of Toleration.
The Times, successful in the main object of its beginning, after witnessing this peaceful political revolution, continued, with several changes of proprietors. It was about sixty years ago that the paper became the property of Bowles and Francis, as its publishing firm; the Bowles being Samuel Bowles, the founder, many years later, of the Springfield Republican, whose son, the late Samuel Bowles, built up that well-known journal to a high degree of prosperity.
Mrs. Watson, of East Windsor Hill, daughter of Frederick D. Bolles, the founder of the Hartford Times, who courteously furnished us with the above quotations, also sent us a paper containing the following tribute to John M. Niles, early associated with her father in the publication of the Times.
Mr. Niles, then a young man, who perhaps had not dreamed at that time of becoming a Senator of the United States and of making speeches in the Senate Chamber, which, however dry in manner, were to be complimented by Mr. Calhoun as being the most interesting and instructive speeches he was accustomed to hear in the Senate—this then unknown young man was one of the editors. The Times was established on the motto of “Toleration”—the severance of church from state—the exemption of men from paying taxes to a particular church if they did not agree with that church in their consciences. The reform aimed at the establishment of a more liberal rule in Connecticut; a rule which would let Baptists, Methodists, and other denominations rise and grow, as well as the one old dominant and domineering church that had so long reigned, and with which party federalism had become so incorporated as to be looked upon practically as part of its creed and substance. The cause advocated by the Times triumphed; the constitution framed in 1818 established a new order of things. Both Mr. Bolles and Mr. Niles have passed out of the life of earth; but the work which was accomplished by the agitation of the “Toleration” question, sixty years ago, has remained in Connecticut and grown. The old intolerant influence also is not dead; its spirit remains, but its old power for intolerant rule has passed away.
A terrible weight of prejudice rested upon the Rogerenes who first planted that seed in Connecticut, whose outshoot, ingrafted into the constitution of every State in the Union, has become a great tree of religious liberty spreading its branches over all the land, under the shadow of which not only we but immigrants from every clime sit with delight.
This weight of superstition and intolerance was not wholly removed when Mr. Field wrote of the Rogerenes, which is the only excuse we can offer for the statements made by him in his “Discourse Delivered on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the First Church of Christ, in New London, October 19, 1870.” Compared, however, with what John Rogers and his early followers endured at the hands of a tyrannical, bigoted, blinded church, and the falsehoods and scoffs which ecclesiastical historians have promulgated, Mr. Field’s utterances are lighter than a feather.