[g] "Now suffer me to say something respecting the unreasonableness of compelling the people of our persuasion to hear or support the minister of another. Can a person who has been redeemed, be so ungrateful as to hire a minister to preach up a doctrine which in his heart he believes to be directly contrary to the institutions of his redeemer? How if one of you should happen to be in the company with a number of Roman Catholicks, who should tell you that if you would not hire a minister to preach transubstantiation and the worshipping of images to your children and to an unlearned people, they would cut off your head; would you do it? Can you any better submit to hire a minister to preach up a doctrine which you in your heart believe contrary to the institution of Christ? I do not doubt but that many of you, and I do not know but that all of you know what it is to experience redeeming love; and if so, now can you take a person of another persuasion, and put him in gaol for a trifling sum, destroy his estate and ruin his family (as you signify the law will bear you out) and when he is careful to support the religion which he in his conscience looks upon to be right, who honestly tells you it is wronging his conscience to pay your minister, and that he may not do so though he suffer?… Is it not shame? Are we sharers in redemption, and do we grudge to support religion? No: let us seek for the truth of the gospel. If we can't think alike, let us not be cruel one to another."
[h]Connecticut Gazette(New Haven) April 1755-Apr. 14, 1764; suspended; revived July 5, 1765-Feb. 19, 1768. TheNew London Gazette, founded in 1763, was after 1768 known as theConnecticut Gazette, except from Dee. 10, 1773, to May 11, 1787, when it was calledThe Connecticut Gazette and Universal Intelligencer.
Maryland published her first newspaper in 1727, Khode Island and SonthCarolina in 1732, Virginia in 1736, North Carolina in 1755, NewHampshire in 1756, while Georgia fell into line in 1763.
[i] Edwards'sNature of True Virtue, written about 1755, was not published until 1765.
[j] This book, otherwise essentially Edwardean, was second only to Edwards'sReligious Affectionsin popularity and in its success in spreading the influence of this school of theology, and it did much, in Connecticut, to break down the opposition to the New Divinity. Edwards himself approved its manuscript, and in his writings recommended it highly.
[k] In 1769-70, Bellamy wrote a series of tracts and dialogues against this practice. They were very effective in causing its abandonment by those conservative churches that had so long clung to its use.
[l] Experience Mayhew in hisGrace Defended, of 1744.
Lemuel Briant'sThe Absurdity and Blasphemy of Depreciating Moral Virtue, 1749. This was replied to in Massachusetts, by Rev. John Porter of North Bridgewater inThe Absurdity and Blasphemy of Substituting the Personal Righteousness of Men, etc.; also by a sermon of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, Dr. Charles Chauncy's colleague; and by Rev. Samuel Niles'sVindication of Divers Important Gospel Doctrines. Jonathan Mayhew, son of Experience, wrote hisSermons(pronouncedly Arian) in 1755, and in 1761 two sermons,Striving to Enter at the Strait Gate.
Other ministers were affected by these unorthodox views, notably Ebenezer Gay, Daniel Shute, and John Rogers. This religious development was cut short by the early death of the leaders and by the Revolutionary contest. Briant died in 1754, Jonathan Mayhew in 1766, and his father in 1758.—See W. Walker,Hist. of the Congregational Churches in the United States, chap. viii.
[m] Hopkins replied in 1765 to Jonathan Mayhew's sermons of 1761. Mayhew died before he could answer, but Moses Hemenway of Wells, Maine, and also Jedediah Mills of Huntington, Conn, (a New Light sympathizer), answered Hopkins's extreme views in 1767 inAn Inquiry concerning the State of the Unregenerate under the Gospel. This involved Hopkins in further argumentation in 1769, and drew into the discussion William Hart (Old Light) of Saybrook, and also Moses Mather of Darien, Conn, (also Old Light). This attack upon Hopkins resulted in 1773 in his greatest work,An Inquiry into the Nature of True Holiness. The whole question at stake between the Old Calvinists and the followers of the New Divinity was how to class men, morally upright, who made no pretensions to religious experience.
[n] West, in hisEssay on Moral Agency, defended Edwards'sFreedom of the Willagainst the Rev. James Dana of New Haven in 1772, but hisScripture Doctrine of Atonement, published in 1785, was his best-known work. In his doctrinal views, he was greatly influenced by Hopkins. Both West and Smalley trained students for the ministry. The latter was the teacher of Nathaniel Emmons. Smalley was settled in what is now New Britain, Conn., from 1757-1820.
[o] Emmons died there, in 1840, at the age of ninety-five. Apart from his influence upon the development of doctrine, he did more than any other man to bring back the early independence of the churches and to create the Congregational polity of the present day.
[p] To fortify their position, this party cited various acts of Parliament and the Act of Union, 1707, wherein Scotland is distinctly released from subjection to the Church of England,—an exemption, they maintained, that had never formally been extended to the colonies.
[q] On January 30, 1750, Jonathan Mayhew preached a forceful sermon upon the danger of being "unmercifully priest-ridden."
[r] Rev. East Apthorpe, S. P. G. missionary at Cambridge, Mass., had replied to a newspaper criticism upon the policy of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England, in hisConsiderations on the Institutions and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Jonathan Mayhew published in answer hisObservations on the Character and Conduct of the Society, censuring the Society not only for intruding itself into New England, but for being the champion of the proposed episcopate, which he denounced. This was in 1763. For two years the controversy raged. There were four replies to Mayhew. Two were unimportant, a third presumably from Rev. Henry Caner, and the fourth,Answer to the Observations, an anonymous English production, really by Archbishop Seeker. Mayhew wrote aDefense, and Apthorpe summed up the whole controversy in hisReview.—A. L. Cross,Anglican Episcopate, p. 145et seq.; footnote 1, p. 147.
[s] John Adams'sWorks, x, 288.
[t] Dr. Charles Chauney attacked the S. P. G. as endeavoring to increase their power, not to proselytize among the Indians, but to episcopize the colonists. Dr. Chandler, of Elizabethtown, N. J., replied inAn Appeal to the Public. Chauney retorted withThe Appeal Answered, and Chandler withThe Appeal Defended. The newspapers of 1768-69 took up the controversy.
[u] In 1767, Dr. Johnson in a letter to Governor Trumbull assured him that "It is not intended, at present, to send any Bishops into the American Colonies,… and should it be done at all, you may be assured that it will be done in such manner as in no degree to prejudice, nor if possible even give the least offense to any denomination of Protestants."—E. E. Beardsley,Hist, of the Epis. Church in Conn., i, 265.
[v] There were nine clergymen from Connecticut, and twenty-five from New York and vicinity.
[w] The Association had sent petitions in behalf of the Baptists to the legislatures of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Both were refused. For its Circular Letter of 1776, see Hovey'sLife of Backus, p. 289; also p. 155.
[x] This year the Royal Society awarded him the Copley medal for his discovery that lightning was a discharge of electricity.
In 1761 the medal of the Royal Society was also awarded to the Rev. Jared Eliot of Killingworth, Conn., for making iron and steel from black ferruginous sand.
[y] John Trumbull, b. 1750, d. in Michigan, 1831; Joel Barlow, b. 1754, d. in Poland, 1812; Gen. David Humphreys, b. 1752, d. in New Haven, 1818. These Yale men, together with Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, were the leadjng spirits in the club known as "The Hartford Wits." Dr. Dwight was a fellow collegian with them. Trumbull and Dwight did much to interest the students in literature. The latter was also tutor in rhetoric and professor of belles-lettres and oratory.
[z] Conn. Col. Rec. xii, Appendix. This was drawn up by the Governor and three members of the General Assembly, May, 1761.
[aa] With grim humor, he turned to one of his escort, saying that he at last realized the description in Revelation of "Death riding a white horse and hell following behind."
[ab] The latter half of the title was omitted about 1775.
[ac] Foster replied: "One man is not to be called a 'heretick,' purely because he differs from another, as to the articles of faith. For either we should all be 'hereticks' or there would be no 'heresy' among us…. Heresy does not consist in opinion or sentiments: it is not an error of head but of will."—Foster,A Defense of Religious Liberty, p. 47.
[ad] This revision of the laws was in charge of Roger Sherman and Richard Law.
[ae] Quakers and Baptists frequently crossed the state line to attend services in Rhode Island.
[af] There was only an occasional Romanist; Unitarians first took their sectarian name in 1815; Universalists were few in number until the second quarter of the new century.
[ag] This sect received its name from Robert Sandeman, the son-in-law of its founder, the Rev. John Glass of Scotland. Sandeman published their doctrines about 1757. In 1764, he left Scotland and came to America, where he began making converts near Boston, in other parts of New England, and in Nova Scotia. He died at Danbury, Connecticut, 1771. The members of the sect are called Glassites in Scotland, where the Rev. John Glass labored. He died there in 1773. See W. Walker, inAmerican Hist. Assoc. Annual Report, 1901, vol. i.
The piping times of peace.
During the fifteen years following the ratification of the Constitution of the United States by Connecticut, January 9, 1788, no conspicuous events mark her history. These years were for the most part years of quiet growth and of expansion in all directions, and, because of this steady advancement, she was soon known as "the land of steady habits" and of general prosperity.
Even in the dark days of the Revolution, Connecticut's energetic people had continued to populate her waste places, and had carved out new towns from old townships,—for the last of the original plats had been marked off in 1763. In 1779-80, the state laid out five towns; from 1784 to 1787, twenty-one,—twelve of them in one year, 1786. [a] Tolland County was divided off in 1786 as Windham had been in 1726, Litchfield in 1751, and Middlesex in 1765. These, with, the four original counties of Fairfield, New Haven, Hartford, and New London, made the present eight counties of the state. The cities of Hartford, New Haven, New London, Middletown, and Norwich were incorporated in 1784. They were scarcely more than villages of to-day, for New Haven approximated 3,000 inhabitants, and Hartford, as late as 1810, only 4,000. The Litchfield of the post-Revolutionary days, ranking, as a trade-centre, fourth in the state, was as familiar with Indians in her streets as the Milwaukee of the late fifties, and "out west" was no farther in miles than the Connecticut Reserve of 3,800,000 acres in Ohio which, in 1786, the state had reserved, when ceding her western lands to the new nation. Thither emigration was turning, since its check on the Susquehanna and Delaware by the award, in 1782, to Pennsylvania of the contested jurisdiction over those lands, and of the little town of Westmoreland, which the Yankees had built there. [b] After the decision new settlements were discouraged by the bitter feuds between the Connecticut and Pennsylvanian claimants to the land.
The Revolution had left Connecticut exhausted in men and in means. Her largest seaboard towns had suffered severely. With her commerce and coasting trade almost destroyed, she found herself, during the period preceding the adoption of the national Constitution and the establishment of the revenue system, a prey to New York's need on the one hand and to Massachusetts' sense of impoverishment on the other; and thus, for every article imported through either state, Connecticut paid an impost tax. It was estimated that she thus provided one third of the cost of government for each of her neighbors. Consequently she attempted to reinstate and to enlarge her early though limited commerce, and was soon sending cargoes, preëminently of the field and pasture, [c] to exchange for West India commodities, while with her larger vessels she developed an East Indian trade. As another means to wealth, the state, in 1791, passed laws for the encouragement of the small factories [d] that the necessity of the war had created; but it was not until after the act of 1833, creating the joint-stock companies, that Connecticut turned from a purely agricultural community to the great manufacturing state we know to-day. She shared in the national prosperity, which, as early as 1792, proved the wisdom of Hamilton's financial policy, and about 1795 her citizens wisely bent themselves to the improvement of internal communication. This was the era of the development of the turnpike and of the multiplicity of stage-lines. Kegular stages plied between the larger cities. Yet up to 1789 there was not a post-office or a mail route in Litchfield county, and the "Monitor" was started as a weekly paper to circulate the news. In 1790 Litchfield had a fortnightly carrier to New York and a weekly one to Hartford, while communication with the second capital [e] of the state was frequent. From 1800, there was a daily stage to Hartford, New Haven, Norwalk, Poughkeepsie, and Albany. [167] Wagons and carriages began to multiply and to replace saddle-bags and pillions, yet as late as 1815 Litchfield town had only "one phaeton, one coachee, and forty-six two-wheeled pleasure-wagons." [168]
Towns continued to commend and encourage good public schools. Every town or parish of seventy families had to keep school eleven months of the year, and those of less population for at least six months. Private schools and academies sprang up. [f] Harvard and Yale, as the best equipped of the New England colleges, competed for its young men, and drew others from the central and southern sections of the nation. Neither had either Divinity or Law School. [g] Young men after completing their college course usually went to some famous minister for graduate training. Rev. Joseph Bellamy, John Smalley, and Jonathan Edwards, Junior, were the foremost teachers in Connecticut, though the first-named had ceased his active work in 1787. [h] The New Divinity was very slowly spreading. Even as late as 1792, President Stiles of Yale declared that none of the churches had accepted it. [i] This versatile minister interested himself in languages, literatures, natural science, and in all religions, as well as in the phases of New England theology. He esteemed piety and sound doctrine, whether in Old or New Divinity men, and welcomed to his communion all of good conscience who belonged to any Christian Protestant sect. He was liberal-minded and tolerant beyond the average of his colleagues. His tolerance, however, was more for the old Calvinistic principles in the New Divinity, and not for its advanced features, for which he had little regard. President Stiles held very firmly to the belief that his ministerial privileges and authority remained with him after he became president of the college, although he was no longer pastor by the election of a particular church.
The first law school in America was established in Litchfield in 1784 by Judge Tappan Reeve, later chief justice of Connecticut. He associated with him in 1798 Judge James Gould. "Judge Keeve loved law as a science and studied it philosophically." He wished "to reduce it to a system, for he considered it as a practical application of moral and religious principles to business life." His students were drilled in the study of the Constitution of the United States and on the current legislation in Congress. Under Judge Gould, the common law was expounded methodically and lucidly, as it could be only by one who knew its principles and their underlying reasons fromatoz. [169] In 1789, Ephraim Kirby of Litchfield published the first law reports ever issued in the United States. [j] Law students from many states were attracted to the town. The roll of the school, kept regularly only after 1798, included over one thousand lawyers, among them one vice-president of the United States, several foreign ministers, five cabinet ministers, [k] two justices of the United States Supreme Court, ten governors of states, sixteen United States senators, fifty members of Congress, forty judges of the higher state courts, and eight chief justices of the state. [170]
Among Connecticut towns, the two capitals of the state were also literary centres, while Norwich, New Haven, and New London were fast becoming commercial ports. Middletown soon had considerable coasting trade. Wethersfield had vessels of her own. Even Saybrook and Milford sent a few vessels to the West and East Indies. Farmington was a big trading centre, shipping produce abroad and importing in vessels of her own that sailed from Wethersfield or New Haven. Some few towns developed a special industry, like Berlin and New Britain, that made the Connecticut tin-peddler a familiar figure even in the Middle and Southern states. There were also several towns with large shipyards, where some of the largest ships were built. But back of all such centres of activity, the whole state was solidly agricultural. Connecticut's commerce was an import commerce exchanging natural products for foreign ones, such as sugar, coffee, and molasses from the West Indies; tea and luxuries from the East; and obtaining, either directly or indirectly, from Europe, all the fine manufactured products, whether stuffs for personal use or tools for labor.
In measuring the prosperity and intelligence of the Connecticut people neither the parish library nor the newspaper must be overlooked. "I am acquainted," wrote Noah Webster in 1790, "with parishes where almost every householder, has read the works of Addison, Sherlock, Atterbury, Watts, Young, and other familiar writings: and will conversely handsomely on the subjects of which they treat." [171] "By means of the general circulation of the public papers," wrote the same author, "the people are informed of all political affairs; and their representatives are often prepared to debate upon propositions made in the legislature." [172]
Through the agricultural communities of Connecticut, as well as in the towns, the weekly newspapers of the state began to circulate freely as soon as carriers or mail routes were established. Even by 1785 there was in Connecticut a newspaper circulation of over 8000 weekly copies, which was equal to that published in the whole territory south of Philadelphia. [173] These papers lacked locals and leaders, leaving the former to current gossip, and for the latter substituting, to some extent, letters and correspondence. The newspapers gave foreign news three months old, the proceedings of Congress in from ten to twelve days after their occurrence, and news from the Connecticut elections three weeks late. Subjects relating to religion and politics were heardproandconin articles, or rather letters, signed with grandiloquent pseudonyms and frequently marked "Papers, please copy" in order to secure for them a larger public. Fantastic bits of natural science, or what purported to be such, and stilted admonitions to virtue, as well as poems, eulogies, and obituaries, were admitted to the columns of these colonial papers. In 1786, the "Connecticut Courant" apologized for its meagre reports of legislative proceedings, especially of those of the Upper House, Council, or Senate, and promised to give full details. This reporting was a new thing, and it was fully five years more before the practice became general among the half dozen papers published in Connecticut. [l] Space was also given in the papers to the reproduction of selections, even whole chapters, from current and popular writers. Among such letters was a series on "the Establishment of the Worship of the Deity essential to National Happiness." In one of the letters, the author suggests:—
To secure the advantages … allow me to proposea general and equitable tax collected from all the rateable members of a state, for the support of the public teachers of religion, of all denominations, within the state….Let a moderate poll tax be added to a tax of a specified sum on the pound, and levied on all the subjects of a state and collected with the public tax, and paid out to the public teachers of religion of the several denominations in proportion to the number of polls or families, belonging to each respectively; or according to their estimates. [For]
1. It would be equitable.
2. It would be for the good order of the civil state.
3. All ought to contribute to such a religious education of the people as would conduce to civil order.
4. It would promote the peace in towns and societies.
5. It would do away with the legal expenses consequent upon difficulties in collecting rates.
6. It would "extinguish the ardor of the founders of new delusions and their weak and mercenary abettors."
7. It would prevent separation except upon the firmest principles; "the powerful motive of saving a penny or two in the pound, would cease to operate, because their tax would continue still the same, go where they will." [174]
It was also suggested that the Assembly should fix ministers' salaries at so much per hundred families, and that congregations should be permitted to add to the annual grant by voluntary contributions. These are but examples of the reaching out of the public mind for some equitable method of enforcing the support of public worship,—a principle to which the majority still adhered.
The Laws of the State of Connecticut, under which after the Revolution parishes were organized, contained no reference to the Episcopal church as such. All societies and congregations were placed on the same footing precisely,i.e., they "had power to provide for the support of public worship by the rent or sale of pews or slips in the meeting-house, by the establishment of funds, or in any other way they might deem expedient." With this amount of freedom Episcopalians were content, since by the consecration, in 1784, of Samuel Seabury, Bishop of Connecticut, their ecclesiastical equipment was complete.[m] Further, many of them had been Tories, and, satisfied with the clemency shown them at the close of the war by the authorities, they gladly affiliated with them in all Federal measures of national importance, and also, for over thirty years, in all local issues.
From 1783 to 1787 there was throughout the United States a general disintegration of political parties. [175] Federalists and nascent Anti-Federalists were alike seeking some basis for a safe national existence. The Constitution once established, political parties differentiated themselves as the party in power and the "out-party" developed their respective interpretations of the Constitution and of measures permitted under it. The Anti-Federalist party in Connecticut is sometimes said to have been born in 1783 out of opposition both to the Commutation Act of the Continental Congress, voting five years' full pay instead of half-pay for life to the Revolutionary officers, and to the formation of the Cincinnati. Both of these measures touched the main spring of party difference. America had caste as well as Europe. Though of a different type, it existed in every town and county. There were the people of position, attained by family standing, professional prominence, superior intelligence (rarely by wealth alone), and then, as now, by natural leadership. There were the common people of ordinary abilities and meagre possessions, who looked up to this first class. Between the two there was an invisible barrier. The customs of the day emphasized it. Yet the institutions of the land and its democracy demanded that this barrier, not impassable to men of parts and character who could push up from the masses, should never become insurmountable, as it often did under a monarchy; that it should be steadily leveled by intrusting the governing power more and more to the whole people, rather than to a few leaders; and by educating the masses up to their responsibilities. But many of the leading Federalists preferred to concentrate power in the hands of the few, hesitating to trust the judgment of the great body of citizens with the new and novel government. And to the people at large any measure that bore a remote resemblance to monarchical institutions or monarchical aspirations—however far remote from either—was subject to suspicion and antagonism. The Cincinnati might be the beginning of a nobility, and half-pay or five years' full pay to the officers ignored the common soldiery who had done most of the fighting, and who had suffered even more severely in their fortunes.[n] When the measures of the first Congress pressed hardest upon the impoverished landed proprietors of the South and upon the small farmers in other sections, of the country, they welded the landed aristocracy of the South and the democracy of the North into the Anti-Federal party. Add to their sense of impoverishment, their common hatred of England, and these classes would hold their prejudice longer than the merchants, the lawyers, and the clergy, whose business, studies, and labors would tend to soften the antagonism created by the war. New England, however, was largely Federal, and Connecticut was one of the strongholds of that party, priding herself upon returning Federal electors as long as there was the shadow of the Federal name to vote for. Moreover, the "Presbyterian Consociated Congregational Church" and the Federalists were so closely allied that the party of the government and the party of the Establishment were familiarly and collectively known as the "Standing Order." During the early years of statehood, by far the larger number of the dissenters were also good Federalists. But they drew away from the party at a later date, when the Democratic-Republicans began, in their Connecticut state politics, to call for a broader suffrage and full religious liberty, while the Federal Standing Order still continued to claim, as within its patronage, legal favors, political office, and the honors of judicial, military, and civil life.
After the Revolution, the rapidly increasing Baptists continued their warfare waged against certificates and in behalf of religious liberty. Methodists soon sympathized, for Methodist itinerants, entering Connecticut in 1789, gained a footing, in spite of much opposition and real oppression through fines and imprisonments, [o] and quickly made many converts. Their preachers urged upon penurious and backward members the importance of voluntary support of the gospel in almost the same words as those of the Baptist leader: "It is as realrobberyto neglect theordinancesof God, as it is to force people to support preachers who will not trust his influence for a temporal living." [176] Baptists, Methodists, and many other dissenters were far from satisfied with their status, and the government from time to time was forced to take notice of the dissatisfaction. Temporary legislation was enacted to allay the unrest, but, as there was a settled determination to protect the Establishment and to keep the political leadership among its friends, the various measures were not successful. For instance, the legislature in 1785-86 had arranged for the sale of the Western Lands and for the money expected from their sale to be divided among the various Christian bodies, and it had also enacted—
that there shall be reserved to the public five hundred acres of land in each township for the support of the gospel ministry and five hundred acres more for the support of schools in such towns forever; and two hundred and forty acres of good ground in each town to be granted in fee simple to the first gospel minister who shall settle in such town. [177]
Nothing is here said of the Presbyterians, or of any other sect, yet that denomination was sure to receive the greater benefit under the working of the law. They were a wealthy body, and in the next year, they began, under the General Association of Connecticut, to renew their earlier efforts for an organized planting of missions. Attempts to establish missionary posts were begun as early as 1774, but they had been interrupted by the war, and were not revived until 1780, when two missionaries were sent to Vermont. After a little, the missionary spirit languished through lack of support; but interest had been roused again by the promised lands and money from the sales in the Western Reserve, and by the contributions that, flowing in from 1788 to 1791, warranted the dispatch of missionaries into the western field in 1792, and regularly thereafter. [178]
Turning to the religious and more strictly theological side of the development of toleration, there was within the Establishment itself a gradual modification of opinion concerning membership. It was witnessed to by the contents of a book entitled "Christian Forbearance to Weak Consciences a Duty of the Gospel," by John Lewis of Stepney parish, Wethersfield. It was sent out in 1789 for the purpose of "Attempting to prove that Persons, absenting themselves from the Lord's Table, through honest scruples of Conscience, is not such a breach of Covenant but that they partake other Privileges." One may recall that twenty years previous, 1769-71, Dr. Bellamy was thundering not only against the Half-Way Covenant, but also against the Stoddardean view of the Lord's Supper as a "means" of grace,—as a sacrament the partaking of which would help unworthy or unconverted men to conversion and to the leading of moral and holy lives. One might, for a moment, anticipate that the Wethersfield pastor was harking back to the old idea. But this was not his point of view. "I reprobate," he writes,"the idea of a Half-Way Covenant, or sealing of such a covenant." [179] Lewis contended that all seekers after holiness were to enter the church through the "very same covenant," but that to all of them were to be extended the same and all church privileges, and that they were to accept them "as far as in their conscience they can see their way clear, hoping for further light." If they could accept baptism and church oversight, and could not, because of honest scruples of conscience (lest they were not worthy), approach the Lord's Table, they were not for that reason to be considered reprobates. As to such charity opening a way for persons of immoral lives to creep into the churches or to put off willfully the partaking of communion, the author's experience of many years had proved the contrary, though he could not deny that the possibility of hypocrisy and backsliding might exist under any form of membership.
As a side light upon the growth of toleration during twenty years within the churches of the Establishment, two entries in President Stiles's diary may be quoted. Writing in 1769, to the Rev. Noah Wells of Stamford, Conn., with reference to the call of the Rev. Samuel Hopkins to a pastorate in Newport, R. I., where Dr. Stiles was then preaching, the latter says: "If I find him (Hopkins) of a Disposition to live in an honorable Friendship, I shall gladly cultivate it. But he must not expect that I recede from my Sentiments both in Theology and ecclesiastical Polity more than he from his, in which I presume he is immovably fixed. We shall certainly differ in some things. I shall endeavor to my utmost to live with him as a Brother; as I think (it) dishonorable that in almost every populous place on this Continent, where there are two or more Presb.[yterian] or Cong.[regational] Chhs. [churches], they should be at greater variance than Prot. [estants] and Romanists: witness every city or Town from Georgia to Nova Scotia (except Portsm'th) [p] where there are more Presb. chhs than one. The Wound is well nigh healed here, may it not break out again." [180] Writing some two years after the appearance of Lewis's book, President Stiles, commenting upon the fact that each dissenting sect was so absolutely sure that it alone had the only perfect type of faith and polity, notes the greater tolerance among the Congregational churches, for the latter were not as a rule close communion churches, as were those of the dissenting sects.
Indeed, the intolerance shown towards dissenters was by this time not so much sectarian, not so much a lack of tolerance toward slightly varying fundamentals of faith, form of worship, and organization, as an intolerance based upon the conviction that the body politic must be protected by a state church. There was, of course, a little of the exasperating sense of superiority in belonging to the favored Establishment. The old objection to dissent as heresy—as a sin for which the community was responsible—had for the most part given way to opposition to it as introducing a system of voluntary contributions for the support of religion. And there was a very general and well-defined fear that such a support would prove inadequate. If so, deterioration of the state and of its people would follow. For individual worth and character, many among the dissenters were highly respected, and the great body of them were esteemed good citizens. Among the churches, some few of the established ones were beginning to have their own services occasionally conducted by dissenting ministers. The First Society of Canterbury entered a vote to this effect in 1791. As the churches translated more liberally the Articles of the Saybrook Platform, they approached a polity more in common with that of Separatist and Baptist. By 1800, the teachings of John Wise of Ipswich, reinforced by those of Nathaniel Emmons, "the father of modern Congregationalism," had permeated all New England. Wise, in his efforts to revive the independence of the single churches, had exploded the Barrowism which New England usage had introduced into original Congregationalism, and the rebound had carried the churches as far beyond the Cambridge Platform towards original Brownism as the Presbyterian movement had carried their polity away from the Cambridge instrument. The later Edwardean school had devoted itself to the discussion of doctrine rather than to polity, and, in the alliance with Presbyterianism outside of Connecticut, it had affiliated without attaching much weight to differences in church government. Their common interest, at first, was to unite against a possible supremacy of the Church of England, and against the danger to their own churches and to good government from the increase of dissenters. Later, their united efforts were directed to forwarding Christian missions in order that the gospel might not be left out of the civilization on the frontier. In this later work, they had competitors as soon as the Baptists and Methodists became strongly organized bodies. Accordingly Presbyterians and Congregationalists still further sank their differences of discipline in the Plan of Union of 1801, formed for the furtherance of the mission work. Thus it was many years before questions of polity again took front rank in the Congregational churches. Already their very indifference to it, the long years of the gradual abandonment of the Saybrook system, together with the development in civil life of a broader conception of humanity, had tended to bring back the independence of the individual church, while custom had preserved the inroojted principle of church-fellowship. It needed only Nathaniel Emmons to embody practice and opinion in a system that should break away from the aristocratic Congregationalism, the semi-Presbyterianized Congregationalism of the eighteenth century, and give to the nineteenth a democracy in the Church equivalent to that in the State. Emmons, however, carried his theory to extremes [q] when opposing ministerial associations; yet with some modifications modern Congregationalism is essentially that of his school. Church polity, however, did not become a topic of general interest for at least half a century more, nor was it formulated anew until the Albany Convention of 1862 passed "upon the local work and responsibility of a Congregational Church."
From the politico-ecclesiastical point of view, the legislative measures in the history of Connecticut, during the fifteen years after the colony became a state, that are of chief importance are the Certificate Laws and Western Land bills. In order to properly appreciate their significance this summary of the industrial, social, and religious life of the Connecticut people during the years following the Revolution was necessary.
[a] Five towns were laid out in 1785; from 1784 to 1787, twenty-one in all; from 1787 to 1800, ten; and from 1800 to 1818, eleven.—Hollister,Hist, of Connecticut, pp. 469-70.
[b] Of the seven hundred members of the Susquehanna Land Company, formed in 1754, six hundred and thirty-eight were Connecticut men. A summer settlement was made on the Delaware in 1757 and on the Susquehanna in 1762. The first permanent settlement was in 1769. At the close of the Revolution, renewed attempts to colonize resulted in a reign of lawlessness and bloodshed.
[c] Horses, cattle, beef, pork, stages, flour, grain. During the European wars, the United States exported foodstuffs in great quantities, to feed both French and English armies, amounting to over 100,000 men.
[d] President Stiles was interested in silk culture and in the manufacture of silk. His commencement gown in 1789 was of Connecticut make. Through the efforts of General Humphreys (1784-94) attempts were made to introduce the Spanish merino sheep and to establish factories for fine broadcloth. Iron works were set up in different parts of the state. The earliest cotton factories centred about Pomfret. Clocks, watches, cut shingle-nails, paper, stone, and earthenware pottery, were among the manufactures started in Norwalk between 1767 and 1773, while in Windham, hosiery, silk and tacks were manufactured.
[e] In 1701 the General Court enacted that the May session of the Legislature should be held at New Haven, and the October one at Hartford. This was a concession to the former sovereignty of the New Haven Colony. The arrangement continued until 1873. The biennial sessions, introduced by the constitution of 1818, alternated between the two capitols.
[f] "Mr. Dwight is enlarging hia School to comprehend the Ladies, … promising to carry them through a course of belles Lettres, Geography, Philosophy, and Astronomy. The spirit for Academy making is vigorous."—Stiles Diary, iii, 247.
Of the academies, the more famous were Lebanon, Plainfield, Greenfield(under Dr. Dwight), Norwich, Windham, Waterbury (for both sexes), andStratfield from 1783 to 1786. There was also a second school inNorwich from 1783 to 1786. SeeStiles Diary, iii, 248.
[g] Harvard Divinity School was established 1815; Yale, 1822. Previously both universities had each a professor of divinity.
[h] "For three years and three months before his [Bellamy's] death he was disabled by a paralytic Shock, we impaired his Intellect as well as debilitated his Body. Few were equal to him in the Desk & he was Communicative and instructive in Conversation upon religious Subjects." The passage closes with the prophecy, "His numerous noisy Writings have blazed their day, and one Generation more will put them to sleep."—Stiles Diary, March 16, 1790 (on hearing the news of Bellamy's death). See vol. iii, pp. 384-385. See Trumbull, ii, 159, for a more favorable opinion.
[i] Referring to the successor of Dr. Wales in the Yale chair of divinity, Pres. Stiles wrote, "An Old Divinity man will be acceptable to all the Old Divy.Ministers & to all the Churches: a New Divt man will be acceptable to all the New Divy. Ministers and toNone of the Churches, as none of the Chhs. in New Engl. are New Divt."—Stiles Diary, iii, 506, note (Sept. 8, 1793). See also under date of Nov. 16, 1786, where churches are said to take New Divinity pastors "because they can get no others, but persons in the parish know nothing of the New Theology."
[j] "Law Reports of the Superior and Supreme Courts, 1785-1788, by E. Kirby. Just published at this office and ready for subscribers and gentlemen disposed to purchase, for which most kinds of country produce will be received."—Advertisement inLitchfield Monitorof Apr. 13, 1789.
[k] Calhoun, Woodbury, Mason, Clayton, and Hubbard. Judge Reeve retired in 1820; Judge Gould in 1833.
[l] Reporters were admitted to the national House of Representatives in 1790 and to the Senate in 1802.
[m] Bishop Seabnry was consecrated by the Scotch non-juring bishops, Nov. 14, 1786. The latter, about four years later, were restored to their position as an integral part of the Anglican hierarchy. Meanwhile, Dr. Samuel Provoost of New York and Dr. William White of Pennsylvania, on Feb. 4, 1787, were consecrated by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, assisted by the Bishops of Wells and Peterborough, after a special Act of Parliament permitting the consecration to take place without the usual oaths of allegiance to the King as head of the church. In 1789, Bishop Seabury became president of the House of Bishops thus formed in America. The following year, James Madison of Virginia was consecrated by the English bishops, thus giving to the United States three bishops after the English succession, so that the validity of the Scottish rite should hot be questioned in the consecration of future American bishops.
[n] The eighty dollars proposed for privates would not go far toward mending broken fortunes, or care for broken constitutions and crippled bodies.
At the Middletown Convention, Sept. 3, 1783, delegates from Hartford, Wethersfield, and Glastonbury met to denounce the Commutation Act. At its adjourned meeting on Sept. 30 fifty towns, a majority in the state, disapproved the Act in an address to the General Assembly, and called attention to the Society of the Cincinnati. At the last meeting, March, 1784, an address to the people of the state was framed which condemned both the Commutation Act and the Cincinnati.— J. H. Trumbull,Notes on the Constitution, p. 18. Noah Webster,History of the Parties in the United States, pp. 317-320.
[o] Methodism was twenty-eight years old, when, in 1766, Robert Strawbridge introduced it into New York, and Philip Embury preached his first sermon in a sail-loft. In 1771, Francis Asbury, later Bishop Asbury, was appointed John Wesley's "Assistant" in America. In 1773, the first Annual Conference was held. Methodism rapidly spread in the Middle and Southern states. By the year 1773-74, the year's increase in members was nine hundred and thirteen; in 1774-75, ten hundred and seventy-three. The preachers traveled on foot or on horseback, preaching as they went; living on the smallest allowance; sleeping where night overtook them; and meeting often with grudging hospitality, suspicion, and, sometimes, open violence.
Methodism "began when Episcopacy was at its lowest point, both in efficiency, and in the good-will of the people." It agreed with Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal religion, and separated from the Church of England in this, the Methodist's central principle of "conscious conversion" or "emotional experience." Later in New England, Wesley's missionaries united in Methodist societies many of the converts to the Edwardean theology.
At the opening of the Revolution, the whole body of Methodists were within the Church of England. Of the English missionaries only Asbury, Dempster, and Wharcott remained in America to carry on, with native preachers, the work of proselytizing. It was "the only form of religion that advanced in America during that dark period, and during the war, it more than quadrupled both its ministry and members." At the beginning of the war, it had eighty traveling preachers, beside local preachers and exhorters; a membership of one thousand, and auditors ten thousand. In 1784, there was a year's increase of fourteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight members, and of one hundred and four preachers to rejoice in the consecration of Bishop Asbury. In the November of that year, Bishops Coke and Asbury, organizing the "American Episcopal Church," in spite of Wesley's anathemas probably led out one hundred thousand souls as the nucleus of the new church.
For a while the Connecticut authorities refused to recognize "as sober Dissenters" any converts other than the stationed preachers and their charges. The persecutions which the Methodists suffered were those of slander, the refusal to them of halls, churches, or public buildings; the refusal to permit their ministers, unless located, to perform the marriage ceremony; and petty fines, with occasional unjust imprisonment.
[p] Portsmouth, N. H.
[q] "A pure democracy which places every member of the church upon a level and gives him perfect liberty with order." Under such a definition of a church as this, its pastor becomes only a moderator at its meetings, and every church is absolutely independent. It would follow that from its decisions there could be no appeal. Emmons was fond of declaring that "Association leads to Consociation; Consociation leads to Presbyterianism; Presbyterianism leads to Episcopacy; Episcopacy to Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholicism is an ultimate fact."
In spite of his teaching as to democracy, Emmons was as intolerant of it in the State as he was earnest for it in the Church.
And make the bounds of Freedom wider yet.—Alfred Tennyson.
The legal recognition of conscience, the acknowledgment of fundamental dogmas held in common, the gradual approachment of the various religious organizations in polity, their common interest in education and good government, would seem to furnish grounds for such mutual esteem that the government would willingly do away with the objectionable certificates. On the contrary, the old conception of a state church, and of its value to the body politic, was so strongly intrenched in the hearts of the majority of the people that they felt it incumbent upon them to require the certificates as guarantees that those who were without the Establishment were fulfilling their religious duties. Particularly was this the case when new sects continued to increase and radical opinions to spread among the masses. And as the government saw these apparently destructive ideas permeating the people, it endeavored, rather unwisely, to hem dissent in closer bounds, and to favor still more Cougregationalists and Presbyterian-Congregationalists.
The aggressively successful proselytizing by the Methodists revived the old dislike of rash exhorters and itinerant preachers, and the old contempt for an ignorant and unlearned ministry. The proselytizing movement had also created a suspicion that it was hypocritical, and that it was masking a deliberate attempt to undermine the Establishment. Outside this Methodist propaganda there were also all sorts of unorthodox ideas that were spreading notions of Universalism, Arianism, deism, atheism, and freethinking, and making many converts. These proselytes were frequent among the untutored and irresponsible members of society who caught at the doctrines of greater freedom, and sometimes translated them, theoretically at least, into principles of greater personal license; and where they did not do this, the authorities felt sure that they would soon, and if unrestrained by ecclesiastical law, would quickly become lawless, first in religious affairs and then, as a consequence, in moral ones. Not only in this radical class, but among the recognized dissenters and among a minority of other, religious folk, there was a tendency to question both the authority and the justice of the government in its restrictive religious laws, its ecclesiastical taxation, and its Sabbath-day legislation. Particularly was there opposition to the fine for absence from public worship on Sunday, unless excused by weighty reasons, and to the assessment upon every one of a tax for the support of some form of recognized public worship, even though the tax-payer had no personal interest or liking for that which he was obliged to support. The feeling that such injustice ought not to continue was strong among some members of the Establishment. They found a powerful advocate in Judge Zephaniah Swift of Windham, the author of the "System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut."
Judge Swift was a thorough-going Federalist, but so bitter an opponent of the union of Church and State that his enemies, and even members of his own party, taunted him with being a freethinker,—a serious charge in those days. Nevertheless, Judge Swift held the loyalty of a county and of one rather tolerant of dissent. "The Phenix or Windham Herald," founded in 1790, though Federal in politics, became Judge Swift's organ; and so acceptable were his opinions, taken all in all, to the community, that from 1787 to 1793 it returned this arch-enemy of the Establishment as its deputy to the House, and then his congressional district honored him with a seat in the national council until 1799. He became chief justice in 1806, and died in 1819, having lived to see the charter constitution set aside and Church and State divorced.
The small Anti-Federal party in the state, though making but very few converts at this time, and though of very little importance politically, were the pronounced advocates of a wider suffrage, a larger tolerance, and of radical changes in the method of government. The last they believed necessary before any great improvement in the terms of the franchise or in those of religious toleration could be secured. "An Address to the Baptists, Quakers, Rogerines, and all other denominations of Christians in Connecticut, freed by law from supporting what has been called the 'Established Religion,'" went the rounds of the newspapers urging continued resistance to the support of any religious system that enforced a tax. The "Address" closed with the cheerful prediction that, as their numbers were increasing very rapidly, they might hope yet "to carry the vote against those who have put on haughty airs and affected to treat us as their inferiors."
Such seething opposition among various classes induced the government to enact some special legislation; but it was unfortunately not of a conciliatory character. In May, 1791, a law was passed varying the old requirement that certificates, after being signed by a church officer, should be lodged with the Society clerk, to the demand that they be signed by two civil officers, or, where there was only one, by the justice of the peace of the town in which the dissenter lived. Considering that the justices were mostly Congregationalists, the enactment amounted to an intrenchment of the Standing Order at the expense of the dissenters. With these officers lay full power to pass upon the validity of the certificates and upon the honesty of intent on the part of the persons presenting them. The certificates read:—
We have examined the claim of —— who says he is a Dissenter from the Established Society of —— and hath joined himself to a church or Congregation of the name of ——; and that he ordinarily attends upon the public worship of such Church or Congregation; and that he contributes his share and proportion toward supporting the public worship and ministry thereof, do upon examination find that the above facts are true.
Dated
Justice of the Peace. [182]
A veritable doubt, spite, malice, prejudice, or mistaken zeal, might determine the granting of the certificate to the dissenter.
The authorities defended this measure upon the ground that it was thecivileffect of preaching that gives thecivilmagistrate jurisdiction. "The law," they said, "has nothing to do withconscienceandprinciples." [183] They further declared that there were persons who were taking undue advantage of the certificate exemptions, and that there were good reasons, to doubt the validity of many of the certificates.
This Certificate Act roused the dissenters throughout the state. "In public society meetings and in speaking universal abroad, sensible that their numbers though scattered were large," they strove to create a sentiment that should send to the next legislature a "body of representatives who would remember their petition and see that equal religious liberty should be established."
In regard to the certificates, a writer in the "Courant" exclaims:—
It is sometimes said that the giving of a certificate once a year or once in a man's life is but a trifle, and none but the obstinate will refuse it as none but the covetous desire it. True it is but a trifle—ten times as much would be but a trifle if it was right. If it must be done, let them who plead for it do the little trifle; they have no scruples of conscience about it…. The certificate law is as much worse than the tax on tea as religious fetters are worse than civil. [184]
The Rev. John Leland's "The Rights of Conscience inalienable; therefore Religious Opinions not cognizable by Law; Or The High flying Churchman, stript of his legal Robe appears a yaho" was a powerful arraignment of the government and defense of the right of all to worship as conscience bade them. Leland had recently come from Virginia and settled in New London. In the southern state he had been one of the most influential among the Baptist ministers and a great power in politics. In Virginia he had seen the separation of Church and State in 1785, and had witnessed the benefits following that policy. After the publication of his "Rights of Conscience" the question before the Connecticut people became one of establishment or disestablishment, because Leland, not content with showing the falsity of the position that civil necessities required an established church, or with a logical demonstration of the inalienable rights of conscience, proceeded to boldly attack the Charter of Charles II as being in no rightful sense the constitution of the state of Connecticut. He maintained that, "Constitution" though it was called, it was not such, because it had been enforced upon the people by a mere vote of the legislature [a] and was a "constitution" never "assented to further than passive obedience and non resistance" by the people at large; a constitution—
contrary to the known sentiments of a far greater part of the States in the Union; and inconsistent with the clear light of liberty, which is spreading over the world in meridian splendor, and dissipating those antique glooms of tyrannical darkness which were ever opposed to free, equal, religious liberty among men.
Leland arraigns a union of Church and State that presupposes a need of legislative support for religion, which the example of other states has proved unnecessary; and which the experience of communities, persisting in such union, has shown to be productive of evil, of ignorance, superstition, persecution, lying and hypocrisy, a weakness to the civil state, and a conversion of the Bible and of religion to tools of statecraft and political trickery.
Government has no more to do with religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics…. Truth disdains the aid of law for its defence, … it will stand upon its own merit…. Is it just to balance the Establishment against the rights guaranteed in the charter, and to enact a law which has no saving clause to prevent taxation of Jew, Turk, Papist, Deist, Atheist, for the support of a ministry in which they would not share and which violated their conscience? [185]
Many Federalists of Judge Swift's type sympathized with Leland's bold arraignment of the Establishment, if not with his view of the unconstitutionality of the charter government. These men repudiated the new certificate law.
The authorities felt that they had gone too far, and in October, 1791, after an existence of only six months, they repealed the certificate law by one hundred and five yeas to fifty-seven nays. The new law that was substituted permitted each dissenter to write his own certificate, release, or "sign-off," as the papers were colloquially called, and required him to file it with the clerk of the Established Society wherein he dwelt. [186] This favor was not so great a privilege as it seemed. It bore hard upon the dissenters in two ways. It created "Neuters," people who wished to be relieved from the ecclesiastical taxes, but who were too indifferent to the principles and welfare of the churches to which they allied themselves to faithfully support them. For their churches to complain of such persons to the authorities would only give the latter reasons for enforcing the laws for the support of the Establishment. Then again, the new certificate law did not relieve the dissenters who lived too far from their churches to ordinarily attend them from petty fines and from court wrangles as to the justice of them, for with the judges lay the determination of what the words "far" and "near" and "ordinarily do attend" in the laws meant. [b] The important question of how many absences from church would prevent a man from claiming that he was a regular attendant was thus left in the hands of judges, who were for the most part prejudiced or partial. Many amusing and exasperating legal quibbles occurred in the courts between judges, who were determined to sentence for neglect of public worship, and defendants, who were equally positive of their rights. Many dissenters attempted later to ridicule the law out of existence by substituting for the formal—
I certify that I differ in sentiment from the worship and ministry in the ecclesiastical society of —— in the town of —— constituted bylaw within certain local bounds, and have chosen to join myself to the (Insert here the name of society you have joined) in the town of ——.
Dated at —— this —— day of —— A. D.
declarations, undignified in wording and sometimes written in doggerel rhyme. While granting the new certificate law, the Assembly were careful to pass a minor ecclesiastical statute enforcing a fine of from six to twelve shillings upon all who should neglect to observe all public fasts and thanksgivings. [187] This law at times proved unsatisfactory to the Episcopalians, for the Congregational fasts and feasts were appointed by the authorities, who naturally did not consider the Churchman's feeling when called upon to celebrate a feast or thanksgiving during an Episcopalian season of fasting, or to observe a public fast, to go in sackcloth, upon an anniversary that should be marked by joy and praise.
In 1792, the year following the attempt to remodel the certificate laws, certain legislative measures with reference to Yale College fed the discontent among the dissenting sects. For some years there had been an increasing dissatisfaction with the management of the college. It culminated in 1792 in the reorganization of the governing board, to which were added eight civilians, including the governor, lieutenant-governor, and the six senior councilors or state senators. At the same time, and in consideration of the admission of laymen to the board, $40,000 was given to the college. [c] This money was a part of the taxes which had been collected to meet the expenses of the Revolutionary war, and which were in the state treasury when the United States government offered to refund the state for such expense. It was granted to the college on condition that she should invest it in the new United States bonds, and that half the profits of the investment should be at the disposal of the state. This arrangement relieved the crippled finances of the college and gratified many of its friends. But there were many who regarded the measure as out-and-out favoritism to a Congregational college, and who put no faith in the proposed half-sharing of profits. They maintained that eventually the college would get the whole benefit of the money that had been collected for other purposes, and from many persons who could derive no benefit from such a disposal of it. These prophets were not far wrong, for after Yale had paid into the state treasury a little more than $13,000 she was relieved from further payments by a repeal, in 1796, of the conditional clause of the grant.
This favoritism to Yale was not the only legislation to anger the dissenters, and especially the Baptists. Another measure, mooted at the same time as the certificate acts and the special grant to the college, was accepted as a further mark of the government's determination to ignore the rights of dissenters. In 1785-86 the Assembly had granted lands for the support of the Gospel ministry, for schools, and to the first minister to settle in each township of the Western Reserve. This act, as has been shown, was considered to unduly favor the Presbyterians. But little had come of this legislation beyond the survey of the land and the opening of a land office there for its sale. Five years later, in 1791, even though no part of the tract had been sold, the Assembly introduced a new bill appropriating the anticipated proceeds from the sale of the land to the several ecclesiastical societies as a fund with which to pay their ministers so as to enable them to do away with the tax for salaries. But the excitement roused by the first certificate law—of 1791—was so great that it was deemed prudent to continue this Western Land bill over to the next session of the legislature, and there it was lost. The session of May, 1792, contented itself with only such legislation in regard to the Western Reserve as that by which it granted the "Fire Lands," so called, a grant of 500,000 acres as indemnity to the citizens of New London, Groton, Fairfield, Norwalk, and Danbury, for the destruction of their property in the burning of their towns by British troops.
As the lands of the Western Reserve did not sell well, [d] the Assembly, in 1793, appointed a committee to dispose of the tract to the highest bidder if the amount offered should be duly guaranteed with interest; principal and interest payable to the state within four or six years, whether paid in lump sum on demand, or by installments. The sale was widely advertised both within and without the state. It was now calculated that the amount realized from the sale of the lands would be a sum yielding an annual interest of $60,000, or an average of $600 to a town, beside a bonus to Yale of $8000. Therefore, the Assembly, in October, 1793, voted that—
moneys arising from the sale of the territory belonging to the State, lying west of the state of Pennsylvania, be, and the same is hereby established a perpetual fund, the interest whereof is granted, and shall be appropriated to the use and benefit of the several ecclesiastical societies, churches, congregations of alldenominationsin this State, to be by them applied to the support of their respective ministers or preachers of the Gospel, and schools of education, under such rules and regulations as shall be adopted by this or some future session of the General Assembly. [188]
An earlier bill had been proposed, discussed, and tabled. This act was originally a resolution framed by a large committee whose members represented both the friends and opponents of the proposal for the immediate sale of the lands. When the vote passed, it was by eighty-three yeas to seventy nays in the House and by a large and favorable majority in the Council.
One fault that the dissenters found with the law was that, under the rules and regulations adopted by the Assembly, they believed that the alternative which the law allowed of voting the money to the ministerial fund, or to the school, would work to their disadvantage. Where there were few dissenters, the Presbyterian vote would carry the money over to the minister's use, and where there were many, the same vote would be sufficient, if thrown, as it probably would be, to direct the money to the school appropriation. It would follow that the dissenters might never have the use of the money for the support of their own worship.
The Baptists voiced the general opposition among the dissenters,—an opposition so strong that it appealed to some of the conservatives as sufficient reason in itself to condemn the law. "A Friend to Society" wrote to the "Hartford Courant" that—
if a religion whose principles are universal love and harmony is to be supported and promoted by a means which will blow up the sparks of faction and party strife into a violent flame, it is a new way of promoting religion. Much better would it be for the State of Connecticut that their Western Lands should be sunk by an earthquake and form part of the adjoining lake than that they should be transplanted hither for a bone of contention.
Apart from sectarian interests, the law met with hostility. There were those who thought that the money ought to be applied at once to the remaining indebtedness of the state, rather than for it to wait for another installment on the Revolutionary debt that was still due from the national government. There were more who thought that the money ought to go for the expenses of government, or for direct advantages, such as the repair of bridges and highways. But the expenses of government were light, [e] and, as a rule, the people were willing to keep the highways in repair. There was still another party who contended that the money should go for schools, both because they were needed in larger numbers, and because they ought to be able to pay larger salaries and not ones so small as to tempt only the farmer lad, or the ambitious student, to keep a country school for a few months in winter, or a somewhat similarly equipped woman to teach in summer. And there was yet another party who were convinced that the money should go to the support of the ministry, for they believed that morality could be taught only by religion, and that the people were losing interest in the latter because of the inferiority of the preachers whom the small salaries and insecure support kept in the field. [189]
While this discussion of certificate laws, of grants to Yale, and of grants of land and money to the ecclesiastical societies had been constantly before the public, there had also been present a minor grievance due to the Assembly's interest in the missionary work that the General Association had extended to include parts of Vermont, western New York, Pennsylvania, and the outlying settlements in Ohio. In the western field the missionaries sent by Connecticut frequently met those sent out by the Presbyterian General Assembly. Drawn together by their interests in these missions in 1794, the practice was begun of having three delegates from the General Association meet with the Presbyterian General Assembly in their annual convention, and three delegates from the General Assembly take their seats in the yearly convocation of the General Association of Connecticut. So long as the Connecticut churches were strongly Presbyterian in sentiment, there was no clashing of interests among the workers in the mission field. Naturally, Connecticut wanted to do her full share of missionary work; and feeling the need of more money for the purpose, the General Association, in 1792, appealed to the legislature for permission to take up an annual collection for three years. The Association hesitated to take up such a collection in all the churches, dissenting or Established, without such permission. The Baptists expressed their indignation at the wording of Governor Huntington's proclamation, "that there be a contribution taken up in every congregation for the support of the Presbyterian Missions in the western territory." More than that, they refused to contribute, on the ground that if the collection had been "recommended" they would gladly have helped a Christian cause, but that it was inexpedient to yield to a demand that all societies should contribute to the support of missions that were entirely under the control of one religious body. Furthermore, with reference to the appropriation of money from the Western Lands, they would join with other dissenters in opposing it, on the ground that, in order to obtain their share of the money, they would have to admit their inferiority through the showing of the compulsory certificates. Moreover, even the scant favor secured through these was in danger from the continual favoritism of the legislature, with its treasury open at all times to its Congregational college, and with its enactments in favor of the Established Churches.
At the May session of the Assembly, 1794, the Baptists from all over the state thronged the steps of the capitol at Hartford, angered almost to the point of precipitating civil war. There John Leland addressed them, urging the necessity of government; the power of constitutional reform; arguing for rights of conscience, citing both European and colonial history to prove their reasonableness and their value to the body politic; and setting forth Connecticut's departure from the glorious freedom mapped out by her founders. He declared to that great and angry crowd:—
Government is a necessary evil and so a chosen good. Its business is to preserve the life, liberty and property of the many units that form the body politic…. When a constitution of government is formed, it should be simple and explicit; the powers that are vested in, and work to be performed by each department should be defined with the utmost perspicuity; and this constitution should be attended to as scrupulously by men in office as the Bible should be by all religionists…. Let the people first be convinced of the deficiency of the constitution, and remove the defects thereof, and then, those in office can change the administration upon constitutional grounds.
* * * * *
[The right to worship] God according to the dictates of conscience, without being prohibited, directed or controlled therein by human law, either intime, place or manner, cannot be surrendered up to the general government for an equivalent. [190]
Had not Governor Haynes said to Roger Williams, "The Most High God hath provided and cut out this part of the world for a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences?" How had not Connecticut fallen? How passed her ancient glory, how ignored her charter's rights? How firm a grip upon her had that incubus of her own raising, the pernicious union of Church and State? Break that, as elsewhere it had been broken, and then as freemen demand a constitution guaranteeing both civil and religious liberty.
The result of the widespread hostility was the attempt at the May session of 1794 to repeal the offensive law. The Lower House did repeal it, after a lively debate, by a vote of 109 yeas to 58 nays, but the Council, or Upper House, where the conservatives were intrenched, refused to pass the bill. However, they were induced to pass a resolution suspending the sale of the lands. The debate in the House was published verbatim in the "Hartford Gazette" of May 19, 1794, and was copied by the papers throughout the state. In the following October a bill was passed by the Council, but continued over by the House and ordered to be printed in all the papers, that the people might have opportunity to consider it before it should come up to be passed upon by their representatives in the May session of 1795. [191] The terms of the bill were that the principal sum of money received from the sale of the Western Lands should be apportioned among the several school societies according to the list of polls and rateable estates, and that the interest arising from the money so divided should be appropriated to the support of schools that were kept according to the law, or to the support of the public worship of God and the Christian ministry, "as the majority of the legal voters should annually determine." [192]
The proposed law was subjected to public scrutiny of all sorts. It was agitated in town meetings, and the discussions for and against it were noticed in the newspapers, where much space was given to its consideration. Ministers made it the subject of their sermons. Dr. Dwight discoursed upon the subject in his Thanksgiving sermon. [193] When the proposed bill came up before the legislature, it encountered considerable opposition, but after some modifications it became a law. As in school societies the dissenters had an equal vote, and in all town affairs were worth conciliating, there was more justice in the new law than in the old, where the ecclesiastical society was made the unit of division. From 1717 to 1793 the towns, parishes, and occasionally the ecclesiastical societies had charge of the schools. [194] But in 1794 school districts were authorized and the change to them begun. Such districts could, upon the vote of two thirds of all the qualified voters, locate schools, lay taxes to build and repair them, and appoint a collector to gather such rates. The act of May, 1795, appropriating the money from the Western Lands to the schools, provided also that the school districts should be erected into school societies to whom the money should be distributed, and by whom the interest thereon should be expended; and that it should go "to no other Use or Purpose whatsoever; except in the Case and under the circumstances hereafter mentioned." The circumstances here referred to were in cases where two thirds of the legal voters in a school society meeting, legally warned, voted to use the interest money for the support of the ministry in that Society, and appealed to the General Assembly for permission to so use the money. Upon such an expression of the wish of voters, the General Assembly was empowered to answer in the affirmative. The act also repealed that of 1793. The legislature appointed another commission for the sale of the lands. They were sold in the following October for $1,200,000. By this legislation was laid the foundation of Connecticut's School Fund. The Connecticut Land Company, which had made the purchase, petitioned the legislature in 1797 that Connecticut should surrender her jurisdiction over the lands to the United States. The state complied. In 1798 the organization of the new school societies was perfected, and the control of the schools passed entirely into their hands until the district system of 1856 was adopted.