The Constitution
of 1818
By
historical coincidence, a number of issues divided Connecticut
voters into agrarian and mercantile-professional factions in the
years surrounding the campaign to hurry through ratification of
the U. S. Constitution of 1787. Then, in the aftermath of ratification
the rise of the Jeffersonian Party and statewide efforts to disestablish
the Congregational church and break the grip of the old elite
converged. The principal rallying point of these anti-establishment
forces was their contention that since 1776, when the General
Assembly had repudiated the King, Connecticut had had in fact,
no constitution. There were some who went so far as to suggest
that even the Fundamental Orders and Charter of 1662 did nor constitute
a constitution, and that Connecticut thus had never had one at
all. In particular, the elections of 1804 saw the popularization
of the idea that the state was actually without a constitution
and so constituted an "elective despotism" rather than
a constitutional republic. Five men who had participated in a
Jeffersonian convention that proclaimed the state constitutionless
were subsequently elected justices of the peace. The General Assembly
peremptorily revoked their commissions, an act which only served
to dramatize the issue and head it toward the final resolution
in 1818.
The
literature of that era consists mostly of newspaper polemics,
but two pamphlets by partisan participants are seminal. They are
Abraham Bishop's articulation of the "unconstitutional"
condition of the state in Oration in honor of the election
of Jefferson and the Peaceable acquisition of Louisiana...
(New Haven, 1804); and David Daggett's Count the Cost, Address
to the People of Connecticut, chiefly on the proposition for a
new constitution by Jonathan Steadfast (Hartford 1804).
The
Constitution of 1818 served with many amendments, as Connecticut's
fundamental governing document for nearly a century and a half
until the state's one-man/one-vote decision in Butterworth
v. Dempsey forced the writing of a new one in 1965. The relevant
primary source is Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention
of Delegates Convened at Hartford, August 26th, 1818
for the Purpose of Forming a Constitution of Civil Government
for the People of the State of Connecticut (Hartford: Case
Lockwood and Brainard printed by order of the General Assembly,
1873). The most detailed and probably most accurate narrative
account of the Convention of 1818 is another work printed at the
direction of the General Assembly, presumably in relation to the
Constitutional Convention of 1902, by J. Hammond Trumbull, distinguished
Connecticut bibliographer, who left the manuscript at his death
in 1897. It is Historical Notes on the Constitutions of Connecticut,
1639-1818 (Hartford: the Comptroller, 1901). The work is subtitled
the Origin and Progress of the Movement which resulted in the
Convention of 1818 and the Adoption of the Present Condition.
It is a very useful little pamphlet of sixty-two pages.
The
story of that political and ideological battle is told in all
general accounts of the struggle for a new constitution, perhaps
the best published being Richard J. Purcell's Connecticut in
Transition, 1776-1818 (Washington, 1918; reprinted by Wesleyan
University Press, 1963). Writing from a Catholic perspective,
Purcell saw the disruption of Connecticut society as due to the
atomization of the Protestant churches into numerous bickering
factions. Less ecclesiastically focused analyses are found in
three doctoral dissertations: Alan William Brownsword "Connecticut
Political Patterns, 1817-1828" (University of Wisconsin,
1962); Normal L. Stamps, "Political Parties in Connecticut,
1787-1819" (Yale University, 1950); and Edmund B. Thomas,
"Politics in the Land of Steady Habits: Connecticut's First
Political Party System, 1789-1820" (Clark University, 1972).
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