AMONG the historic cities of New England, Hartford claims a foremost place. Not only was its settlement of great consequence at the time, but for historical importance and far-reaching results this colony’s claims to attention are second only to those of Plymouth and Boston. The foundation of Hartford was a further application and development of the ideas that brought the Puritans to this country, and, to quote the historian, Johnston,—
“Here is the first practical assertion of the right of the people, not only to choose, but to limit the powers of their rulers, an assertion which lies at the foundation of the American system.... It is on the banks of the Connecticut, under the mighty preaching of Thomas Hooker, and in the constitution to which he gave life, if not form, that we draw the first breath of that atmosphere which is now so familiar to us. The birthplace of American democracy is Hartford.”
This constitution, first promulgated in Hartford, was the first written constitution in history which was adopted by a people and which also organized a government. John Fiske says:
“The compact drawn up in the Mayflower’s cabin was not, in the strict sense, a constitution, which is a document defining and limiting the functions of government. Magna Charta partook of the nature of a written constitution as far as it went, but it did not create a government.”
On the 14th of January, 1639, the freemen of the three towns, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, assembled at Hartford, and drew up a constitution, consisting of eleven articles, which they called the “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” and under this law the people of Connecticut lived for nearly two centuries, as the Charter granted by King Charles II., in 1662, was simply a royal recognition of the government actually in operation. Another writer says:
“We honor the limitations of despotism which are written in the twelve tables; the repression of monarchical power in Magna Charta, in the Bill of Rights, and
in that whole undefinable creation, as invisible and intangible as the atmosphere but like it full of oxygen and electricity, which we call the British Constitution. But in our Connecticut Constitution we find no limitation upon monarchy, for monarchy is unrecognized; the limitations are upon the legislature, the courts, and executive. It is pure democracy acting through representation, and imposing organic limitations. Even the suffrage qualification of church membership, which was required by our older sister Colony of Massachusetts, was omitted. Here in a New England wilderness a few pilgrims of the pilgrims, alive to the inspirations of the common law and of the British Constitution, so full of Christianity that they felt the great throb of its heart of human brotherhood, and so full of Judaism that they believed themselves in some special sense the people of God, made a written constitution, to be a supreme and organic law for their State.”