The colony of Connecticut has a truly unique history attached to it. The conflation of churches from towns in the colony of Massachusetts provided the social infrastructure that would eventually become the colony of Connecticut. Connecticut could also have been called the Massachusetts Bay Colony part deux. Settlers originally emigrating west from England to the Massachusetts Bay area continued on west for primarily theological reasons. Connecticut was unique in its inception because before it existed as an official colony under the auspices of the Great Seal of British Imperialism, it operated as an autonomous Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth of Connecticut lasted from 1636 to 1662. Connecticut was a state 152 years before it became an official state of the United States. The Commonwealth even had its own written governing body, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a pre-figuring of the United States Constitution. The birth of Connecticut was in large part the result of a European religious tumult.
When 800 or so Englishmen settled in the Connecticut River valley in 1636, they were six years removed from when a mass exodus from England started. 1629 saw the beginning of the Great Migration, in which thousands of dissident Puritans fled the religious oppression of the Anglican Church. Eighteen years earlier the King James Version of the Christian Bible was printed, bringing literacy and a theological acumen to the masses of common Englishmen. With the accessibility of inspired scripture, many Christians saw the discrepancies between what they read in the New Testament and what the Church of England propagated. 100 years removed from the Protestant Reformation, many English Christians distanced themselves from the clergy of the Crown by calling themselves “Puritans”.
These Puritans believed in the continuation of the Reformation and a truncating of priestly interventions and ordinances resonating a Catholic sentiment. Some of the more radical of those with the Puritan mindset became “separatists” and took advantage of the land discovered in North America and made the “pilgrim-age” in hopes of beginning a new life free from the Church of England. The “non-separatists” were loyal to the purifying of the Church, hence they were pejoratively called by their opposition “Puritans”.
King James I and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud sought to silence and contain the Puritan preaching in an effort to unify the English Church. King James and Archbishop Laud may serve as the antagonists to the formation of Connecticut to the protagonist of Thomas Hooker. Hooker was ousted from his pulpit in England because of his Puritan preaching and eventually accepted a call to pastor a church in the new world town of Hartford, which became part of Connecticut. Jones statesd that “no other man exerted influence over the infant Commonwealth of Connecticut than did Thomas Hooker.”
Jones, Mary Jeanne Anderson. Congregational Commonwealth: Connecticut, 1636-1662. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 1968.
