The creation of the House of Burgesses in the Jamestown Colony (1619) and the drafting and signing of The Mayflower Compact (1620) had begun a movement by English colonists toward self-government as opposed to the laws and taxes imposed by a distant English Parliament and King George III. A third effort to codify self-government began in Massachusetts, too.
The Reverend Thomas Hooker arrived in Newtown (now Cambridge), Massachusetts, in 1633 and almost immediately found himself in disagreement with the Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders, including John Cotton. The governmental leadership, also the leadership of the dominant Puritan faith, had limited voting rights strictly to male church members.
Hooker disagreed publicly, reminding the church officials that the merging of church and state in England had been one of the motivating factors for immigration to the colonies. The Puritan response was that, while the Church of England (Anglican) was the incorrect doctrine, their chosen doctrines were divinely inspired.
The tension between those advocating a separation of church and state and those leaning toward a theocracy intensified.
In June 1636, Hooker and the Reverend Samuel Stone led a group of about 100 people through the wilderness to the Connecticut River Valley to seek religious and political freedom. The community they established became known as Hartford.
Two years later, Hooker preached a now-famous sermon to the colony’s General Court declaring that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” His scriptural text was Deuteronomy 1:13 — “Choose wise, understanding and knowledgeable men…” — and the minister argued that the privilege of choosing magistrates belongs to the people by God’s allowance. In an era where the “divine right of kings” justified almost any action by the crowned leader, Hooker was proposing that political power actually comes upward from the people rather than downward from a monarch.
Hooker’s assertion was a revolutionary idea.
At that time in Europe, all countries were either governed by a “divine right” monarch or, in Central Europe, by a Holy Roman Emperor, “crowned” by the pope. While even the England Monarch Charles I would find his throne challenged by the Puritan Roundheads less than a decade later, in 1636, Hooker was stepping out into a new political territory. He ended that famous sermon with the words, “As God has given us liberty, let us take it.”
From that sermon and other gatherings in which Hooker spoke, Roger Ludlow, a legal scholar by training, helped construct the document that would become the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The preamble refrained from mentioning the British Crown, instead acknowledging that they were operating on the authority of the “admitted inhabitants” and “freemen” of the colony.
Was it a truly democratic document? No. But it did outline a General Court combining legislative, executive, and judicial roles, directed by an elected governor, magistrates, and representative deputies from each town. Elections were to be held annually, and the governor could not succeed himself in office, lessening the “monopoly on power.” Rules were given to protect the voting process, including the use of the secret ballot and a counting of the ballots by a small group of varied positions in the towns.
In truth, power remained concentrated in the hands of prominent families; a gap was evident between the democratic ideal of Hooker’s Orders and the actual practice. While there was no religious test for voting — unlike other colonies — only male property owners could exercise the franchise.
The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut are important in our evolutionary movement toward self-government. Hooker’s decision to frame self-governance as a natural right and a spiritual duty led to the creation of the first constitution in the English colonies. From a dissenter leading followers into the wilderness to “Father of American Democracy” was quite a journey.
