Connecticut's Freemen: The First Forty Years

Abstract

IN early days of Connecticut colony, remarked George Bancroft in |i843, the minds of yeomanry were kept active by constant exercise of elective franchise.... Connecticut, from first, possessed unmixed popular liberty . . ., citizenship was acquired by inhabitancy, was lost by removal. Each town-meeting was a little legislature, and all inhabitants, affluent and more needy, wise and foolish, were members with equal franchises. To Bancroft, Connecticut's early history was the picture of colonial happiness. ' The historian's stress on liberal franchise in describing this seventeenth-century pastoral paradise is significant. In an America which regards free use of ballot as obvious means of political salvation, writers have generally taken suffrage laws and practices as guides to extent of political democracy in a place or an era. But Bancroft based his account of democracy in Connecticut largely on evidence of town, rather than colonial, government. He drew his conclusions about colonial franchise from laws, which were undoubtedly liberal for that day, rather than from evidence of actual practice. Later historians, noticing that number of freemen-those males who could vote in all colonial elections as well as in town meetings-appeared to be small, have expressed doubt that Connecticut's franchise was really so broad as Bancroft supposed. Some writers have suggested that strong influence of Puritan clergy was used unofficially to ensure a small but godly electorate.2