[658] Vol. i. p. 306; cf. Trumbull, i. 110; Hutchinson, i. 100, 101.
[659] Vol. i. pp. 77-80, 509-563, 1-384. The twelve Capital Laws of the Connecticut Colony, established in 1642, were taken almost literally from the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts, established in 1641. The preamble to the code of 1650, the paragraph following it, and many, if not all, of the laws were taken from the Massachusetts Book of Laws published in 1649. A copy of the constitution of 1639 was prefixed to the Code. This was first printed in a small volume in 1822 at Hartford, by Silas Andrus, called The Code of 1650, being a Compilation of the Earliest Laws and Orders of the General Court of Connecticut; also, the Constitution, or Civil Compact, entered into and adopted by the Towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Weathersfield, in 1638-39, to which is added some Extracts from the Laws and Judicial Proceedings of New Haven Colony commonly called Blue Laws. There was an edition at Hartford in 1828, 1830, 1838, from the same plates; and in 1861 there appeared at Philadelphia A Collection of the Earliest Statutes, Edited with an Introduction, by Samuel W. Smucker.
[660] Cf. also Trumbull, i. chap. viii.; Caulkins, New London, pp. 27-50.
[661] Vol. i. pp. 259, 260, 404, 405.
[662] Vol. i. 1, et seq.; cf. Trumbull, i. chap. vi.; Hubbard, chap. xlii. See also Davenport’s Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation, Cambridge, 1663, probably written at this early period; Leonard Bacon, Thirteen Historical Discourses, New Haven, 1839; and Professor J. L. Kingsley, Historical Discourse, New Haven, 1838.
[663] [Of Governor Eaton, the first governor of New Haven, there is a memoir by J. B. Moore in 2 N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii. 467.—Ed.]
[664] A copy of the original edition is also in the Library of the Boston Athenæum, not quite perfect. Two copies were in the sale of Mr. Brinley’s library in 1879, and they brought, one $380, the other, not perfect, $310. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, in his learned Introduction to his edition of The True-Blue Laws of Connecticut and New Haven, and the False Blue Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters, etc., Hartford, 1876, says: “Just when or by whom the acts and proceedings of New Haven Colony were first stigmatized as Blue Laws cannot now be ascertained. The presumption, however, is strong that the name had its origin in New York, and that it gained currency in Connecticut among Episcopalian and other dissenters from the established church, between 1720 and 1750” (p. 24). He thinks that “blue” was a convenient epithet for whatever “in colonial laws and proceedings looked over-strict, or queer, or ‘puritanic’” (pp. 24, 27).
Mr. Peters, of course, did not invent the name. He says of these laws: “They consist of a vast multitude, and were very properly termed Blue Laws, i.e., bloody laws.” In his General History of Connecticut, London, 1781, Peters gives some forty-five of these laws as a sample of the whole, “denominated blue laws by the neighboring colonies,” which “were never suffered to be printed.” The greater part of these probably never had an existence as standing laws or otherwise. The archives of the colony fail to reveal such, though we do not forget that the jurisdiction records for nine years are lost. Peters’ laws have often been reprinted, and appear in Mr. Trumbull’s volume above cited, along with authentic documents relating to the foundation of Connecticut and New Haven colonies, already referred to in this paper. (See Peters’ Connecticut, pp. 63, 66; the New-Englander, April, 1871, art. “Blue Laws;” and Methodist Quarterly Review, January, 1878.)
It might be inferred from the conclusion of the titlepage (cited above) of the small volume published by Silas Andrus, at Hartford, in 1822, on bluish paper, bound in blue covers, with a frontispiece representing a constable seizing a tobacco taker, which was stereotyped and subsequently issued at different dates, that the book contained the Peters’ laws; but what related to New Haven here were simply extracts of a few laws and court orders from the records. The Blue Laws of Peters were reprinted by J. W. Barber, in his History and Antiquities of New Haven, 1831, with a note in which the old story is repeated, that the term blue originated from the color of the paper in which the first printed laws were stitched. They were also printed by Mr. Hinman, formerly Secretary of the State of Connecticut, in 1838, in a volume already cited, along with other valuable documents relating to the colony, and with what he called the Blue Laws of Virginia, of Barbadoes, of Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Plymouth.
Peters’ Connecticut (1781) is now a scarce book. The copy in the Menzies sale, no. 1,590, brought $125. Cf. Brinley Catalogue, no. 2,088, etc. The interest in this apocryphal history of Connecticut and in Peters’ Blue Laws was revived in modern times by the publication in 1829 of a new edition of Peters’ History, in 12º., at New Haven, with a preface and eighty-seven pages of supplementary notes. The anonymous editor of the new edition was Sherman Croswell, son of the Rev. Harry Croswell,—a recent graduate of Yale College, who furnished the supplementary notes. Nearly all the type of this edition was set by the late Joel Munsell, then a young man just twenty-one years of age. Mr. Croswell subsequently went to Albany as co-editor with his cousin, Edwin Croswell, of the Albany Argus. (Joel Munsell, Manuscript Note; October, 1871.) Professor Franklin B. Dexter, of Yale College, writes me under date of Feb. 20, 1883, respecting the enterprise of publishing the new edition of Peters’ History: “I have heard that the publisher, Dorus Clarke, used to say that he lost $2,000 by the publication. Sherman Croswell was a young lawyer then living here, a son of the Rev. Dr. Harry Croswell, and brother and classmate (Yale College, 1822) of the more gifted Rev. William Croswell, of the Church of the Advent in Boston. Sherman was born Nov. 10, 1802; removed to Albany in 1831, and became an editor of the Argus with his cousin, Edwin Croswell; returned to New Haven in 1855, and died here March 4, 1859. I have repeatedly heard that he edited this publication, though my authority has never been a very definite one. Munsell’s note I should not hesitate to accept as far as this fact is concerned.” Munsell inadvertently calls Sherman Croswell a brother of Edwin. A spurious edition of this book was published in New York in 1877, edited by a descendant of the author, S. J. McCormick. Cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct. 22, 1877, and N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1877, p. 238.