THE

TOWN RULE IN CONNECTICUT.

HE present commonwealth of Connecticut traces an illustrious Puritan origin back to two colonies planted at nearly the same date but composed of settlers of different type and acting under divergent political impulses. The founding of New Haven was begun by a band of merchant pioneers led by the Rev. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, who have fittingly been called the Moses and Aaron of the original company which they brought by sea from Boston in 1638 and planted on the present site of New Haven city. Although that company was well endowed with worldly goods and was urged to its new settlement by the material motives of trade and wealth, it, curiously enough, under the masterful personality of Davenport and his sympathetic colleague, Eaton, established a church state in which membership of the ecclesiastical society was the condition of the suffrage; and for some years after it impressed the same sacerdotal rule on the near settlements which sprang from the parent stem. The story of this colony may here be traced but briefly. It fell into trouble; its mercantile ventures failed; its "great shippe" freighted with a large part of its wealth was lost at sea, and an attempt to found trading colonies on the shores of the Delaware was thwarted, with much loss to its projectors, by the Dutch and Swedes. A few years found the colony reduced to poverty and despair, its anomalous church rule relaxed and its authority hard pressed by the more thriving colony on the Connecticut river, by which, after a rancorous and wordy conflict, it was absorbed in 1664, when its separate story ends.

History, therefore, in its bearing on our present subject, focuses upon the rival colony of Connecticut, and goes back to its primitive three towns of Wethersfield, Hartford and Windsor, with which Agawam (now Springfield) in Massachusetts

was temporarily joined. The three towns were planted by emigrants from Massachusetts Bay in 1634 and 1635, several years before the founding of New Haven. In June of the following year the three towns were reinforced and given fixity by the migration to them from Massachusetts of a colony of a hundred souls led by the Rev. Thomas Hooker. The new settlers were impelled to their exodus by controversies with the Massachusetts rulers concerning the powers of church and state which need not be rehearsed in this paper. Suffice it to say

that Hooker's little band, traversing in an arduous two weeks' journey the wilderness between the river and the sea, gave the first firm settlement to the Connecticut colony and sowed the germ of the present commonwealth. The main stem of Connecticut's historical tree is rooted in the three towns which are still fitly symbolized by the three vines cut in the state seal.

Even in those far-away days and at the early dawn of the state, the scant records indicate that each town had its government by town meeting and its local officers. Such, at least, is the natural inference to be drawn from the situation of the little settlements, miles apart, in which some form of local regulation was imperative. Their more common interests were, for a year, controlled by a body of commissioners from Massachusetts; but in 1637 the primitive legislature appears, under the title of General Court, with not only six magistrates but deputies (committees) from the towns, which thus each assumed a representative entity and became an original legislative unit. Two years after, this form of government was confirmed by a set of organic laws (or "orders" as they were then called) which form the celebrated Connecticut constitution of 1639.

This renowned instrument, famed in civic history as the first written constitution ever penned in any land, deserves its prominence as the foundation rock on which Connecticut's present political system was placed. Who wrote it is uncertain; but its democratic principles and still more democratic temper point to Thomas Hooker, who, in a sermon preached in May, 1638, had declared doctrines of popular self-government far in advance of his times. Unlike Davenport in New Haven, who

was a democratic theologian, Hooker, the Moses of the Connecticut exodus, was a theological democrat, holding fast to the idea of a broad suffrage, the consent of the ruled to their scheme of rulership, and the subordination of church to state. The constitution, which he inspired if he did not pen, and which was adopted at a sort of delegate convention held at Hartford on the 24th of January, 1639, omits all reference to the King as well as to the parent Massachusetts colony; substitutes the imperative words "it is ordered, sentenced and decreed" at the opening of each article in place of the old conventional English form "be it enacted," and abounds in other phrases which show that it was a sort of declaration of democratic town independence as well as an organic code of laws. It provided for the election of not less than six magistrates besides the governor, and also for four deputies from each of the three towns. These magistrates and the governor had to be chosen from the patrician class of freemen, made up presumptively from the original freeholders; but the voters included the "admitted inhabitants," a group almost large enough to imply universal suffrage. It attests strikingly the advanced ideas of Hooker and his associates that their constitution provided that a plurality vote at the town meetings should elect the magistrates and governor, the language as to the latter being "he that hath the greatest number of papers [votes] shall be governor for that year"; while the theory of proportional representation was asserted in a clause which set forth that the number of deputies from any newly admitted towns should be "a reasonable proportion to the number of freemen that are in said towns." It is a curious fact, also, that those who defend the existing system of Connecticut representation on the ground of antiquity appear, until lately, to have quite overlooked these provisions of the ancient constitution, which prove that the fathers of the commonwealth laid its foundation broader than the structure which their posterity has reared.

Throughout this antique constitution the idea of town entity in the little federation as well as of town autonomy is conspicuous. In matters apart from the somewhat vague authority

granted under the compact, the towns had control of their local affairs. The "town unit" was recognized in the arrangement for separate sets of deputies from each, elected at town meeting; and there was a provision by which the towns, in case the governor and magistrates usurped powers, could, acting in separate capacities, create a new legislative body. The old constitution, however, did little more than ratify a system of town rule that had existed previously as the natural outcome of the condition of independence and isolation in which the early Connecticut settlements were placed. It gave popular consent and formal certification to an antecedent fact.

II.

Under that old constitution of 1639 Connecticut's laws were made and administered until 1662. But in 1661 the colony, craving a royal guaranty of its own existence, sent Governor Winthrop as a commissioner to the court of King Charles the Second. Winthrop succeeded in securing for the colony in 1662 a charter so liberal in its concessions that historians variously attribute it to the uncommon shrewdness of the commissioner, to his dextrous use of money at the corrupt court, and to the profound ignorance in England as to the importance of the remote Connecticut colony. Aside from the immense geographical boundaries which the charter assigned to Connecticut (reaching westward to the Pacific ocean), it was practically not much more than a confirmation by royal patent of the old constitution. It continued the former system, with a governor, deputy governor, twelve magistrates (thereafter, until 1819, called assistants) and deputies from the towns chosen by the suffrages of the voters at town meetings. It, however, limited the number of deputies to not more than two from each town; and in the provisions for the election of these deputies, as in those concerning the choice of governor and assistants, the words "major part" of the voters suggest election by majorities and not by pluralities. This interpretation of the charter is somewhat strengthened by a later enact

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ment (1742) of the General Assembly, according to which, in the event of a clear majority of the popular vote not being cast for the governor and other officers, the legislature assumed the power of electing them. No such law would have been passed had the words of the charter been deemed explicit and final.2

Except during sixteen months-beginning on the 31st of October, 1687, when the old government was suspended by the autocratic Andros - Connecticut governed herself, nominally at least, under the King Charles charter from 1662 until 1818. During that long span of 156 years there were some essential modifications of her system, but none that seriously affected the powers of the towns or altered the principle of representation. In 1666 four counties were organized, and early in the eighteenth century the judicial powers of the governor and assembly were modified by a new set of courts. In 1698 it was ordered that the General Assembly, instead of legislating as a single body, should consist of two, the assistants and deputies, - and that both must assent to a bill before it became law. It was enacted in 1707 that the voters could go outside the assistants and choose any freeman as their governor. As new towns were taken in, the size of the lower house grew rapidly. In 1784 five cities-New Haven, Hartford, Middletown, Norwich and New London - were incorporated. As to the representation from the towns, the changes were trifling. In general each town, on entering the Connecticut federation, appears to have taken the full privilege of choosing two representatives by the terms of the charter. The meagre legislative records of the middle of the eighteenth century show that four

1 The charter name of the legislature.

3

2 It will thus be noted that the transfer of the election of the governor and other state officers to the legislature when a majority vote is not polled by the people, which is now an active question in Connecticut politics, originated not in the old constitution nor in the King Charles charter, but in a simple rule of the legislature itself, which, up to the adoption of the constitution of 1818, any subsequent legislature could have repealed.

3 At one election in the autumn the voters in town meeting voted for twenty persons, who were thus formally put in nomination, and, from them, the governor and twelve assistants - the lineal predecessors of the present Senate- were chosen by a second election at the town meetings in the following spring.