Connecticut has had a leading role in America’s constitutional history.
It may have had the first written constitution, hence its nickname, “The Constitution State,” as coined by 19th century historian John Fiske, and officially decreed by the state General Assembly in 1959.
On Jan. 14, 1639, colonists from Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield — inspired by a sermon preached by Thomas Hooker, who founded the colony nearly three years earlier — adopted the Fundamental Orders for the “word of God require[d] that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require.” Based on the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governance, the constitution established 11 rules of law, from the frequency of General Assembly and General Court meetings; the election of magistrates and governors; and the court’s operations.
Though the Fundamental Orders were eventually superseded by the colonial charter in 1662, the original constitution was a form of “protection for and guaranty [sic] of the government [the colonists] had already set up for themselves,” explained William Maltbie, a former chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, which was included in Documents of Connecticut Government: The Connecticut Constitution and its Antecedents (2005).
More than a hundred years after the Fundamental Orders’ adoption, Connecticut’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention — Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, and William Samuel Johnson — engineered “The Great Compromise,” instituting the bicameral legislature Americans know today. The proposal, also known as the “Connecticut Compromise,” saved the convention from completely unraveling and, more significantly, prevented the young nation’s disintegration since delegates from small and large states were tensely deadlocked.
The state takes considerable pride in being a leader on constitutional matters. Indeed, Connecticut became the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Yet, ironically, it took state leaders 150 years to approve the Bill of Rights — and Connecticut was the last state to do so.
What caused the lapse? This is the story of when Connecticut ratified the Bill of Rights — in 1939.
Unnecessary and Dangerous?
By Sept. 12, 1787, the Constitutional Convention was in its final days. With institutional governing matters mostly settled (such as the bicameral legislature’s approval in mid-July), delegates were eager to sign the new constitution and return home — though George Mason of Virginia was an exception.
Mason doubted the document contained adequate protections for ordinary citizens from government overreach, wishing the “plan had been prefaced with a Bill of Rights” because it “would give great quiet to the people,” adding “with the aid of the State declarations, a bill might be prepared in a few hours,” according to James Madison’s notes from the debates. He was no stranger to such concerns: he was the principal author behind Virginia’s Declaration of Rights (1776), which “served as the basis for our nation’s Bill of Rights,” the National Archives states.
However, Sherman tried to dispel Mason’s fears, assuring that the “State Declarations of Rights are not repealed by this Constitution” and “being in force are sufficient” than a list of enumerated rights. In his estimation, the federal government had no powers beyond those explicitly clarified in the Constitution, so further provisions would be pointless. The delegates were also tired, longing to return home, and “worried that a prolonged debate on a bill of rights could endanger the success of their project,” according to the Bill of Rights Institute.
Thus, Mason’s proposal was unanimously defeated. Although the Virginia delegate lost the battle, he would not lose the war.
Still, Sherman was not alone in his thinking. After the convention ended Sept. 17, others — like Madison and Alexander Hamilton — criticized a bill of rights for being “not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous,” as the latter wrote in Federalist No. 84. For Hamilton, the U.S. Constitution was itself a bill of rights and such a list “would afford a colourable pretext” for the government to “claim more [powers] than were granted.” A definitive list of rights, therefore, could be perceived as the only protected rights a citizen had, which was antithetical to establishing a limited government.
In his own “A Countryman” letter series, in which he defended the Constitution, Sherman called the bill of rights “mere paper protection,” arguing that the “only real security” is “the nature of your government” by frequent elections. He continued:
“You have a bill of rights in Connecticut (i.e.) your legislature many years since enacted that the subjects of this state should enjoy certain privileges. Every assembly since that time, could, by the same authority, enact that the subjects should enjoy none of those privileges; and the only reason that it has not long since been so enacted, is that your legislature were as strongly interested in preserving those rights as any of the subjects; and this is your only security that it shall not be so enacted at the next session of assembly: and it is security enough.”
Yet Mason and anti-federalists, like Edmund Randolph (Virginia) and Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts), persuaded the American people otherwise. Although five states, including Connecticut, ratified the Constitution by January 1788, Massachusetts threatened the ratification process, nearly balking due to the lack of enumerated rights. Madison — who is often called the “father” of the Bill of Rights — acquiesced to the pressure. He drafted a list of 17 amendments, and presented it during the first U.S. Congress, June 8, 1789.
Sherman, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, still opposed an enumerated list. Nevertheless, he was appointed to “the eleven-member House committee that drafted the amendments, was an active participant in debates over the specific provisions, and was a member of the six-person conference committee that put the amendments into their final form,” according to the Online Library of Liberty. Moreover, the only copy of the committee’s draft is in Sherman’s handwriting, as noted by Mark David Hall in Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic.
He was joined by his Connecticut colleague Sen. Ellsworth — who was also initially against a bill of rights — to the conference committee to “reconcile the differences” between the House and the Senate on the proposed amendments, according to Hall.
On Sept. 25, after more than two months of deliberations and nearly two years since Mason’s proposal, Congress adopted 12 amendments and sent them for ratification to the states.
That fall, the Connecticut House of Representatives approved 11 of the 12 amendments, rejecting “only the second amendment dealing with compensation for members of Congress,” according to the Center for the Study of the American Constitution. However, Gov. Samuel Huntington and the Senate (then known as the “Council”) supported all 12. Neither side budged during the conference committee, and the Senate voted to push the discussions until the following May.
The talks next spring brought no resolution. On May 18, 1790, the House only approved 10 amendments and, by year’s end, rejected “all of the amendments”; the Senate, meanwhile, still approved all 12. Frustration ran high — but both chambers agreed to postpone the issue until 1791. However, “[n]o further consideration of the amendments [was] recorded,” as noted by Center for the Study of the American Constitution. By Dec. 15, 1791, Virginia became the 11th state to ratify the Bill of Rights, enshrining them into law. (For ratification, the Bill of Rights needed approval by two-thirds of the existing states.)
For Connecticut, adopting the Bill of Rights had become moot, as “there was no legal need” for action as the National Archives states. Indeed, no action was taken for nearly 150 years.
Not Only a Matter of Sentiment
In 1818, Connecticut adopted a state constitution that incorporated rights outlined in the Bill of Rights, such as free speech, assembly, to bear arms, legal protections (like habeas corpus) and even a prohibition on quartering soldiers. More oddly, after the Civil War, Connecticut became the first state to ratify the 14th Amendment — but still without adopting the original ten.
Yet Connecticut was not alone in failing to ratify the Bill of Rights. Massachusetts and Georgia, likewise, did not adopt the amendments in the late 18th century after the two-thirds threshold was surpassed. However, to celebrate the Bill of Rights’ 150th anniversary, both states symbolically ratified them on March 2 and March 24, 1939, respectively.
On March 26, the Hartford Courant editorialized that Massachusetts and Georgia made “suitable amends for their failure” and did so “not only as a matter of sentiment but because they felt it a particularly good time to remind their people that these rights are as much a part of our philosophy of government as they were when ratifications of the Constitution could not have been brought about except for the explicit promise that they would be immediately added to that document.”
The editorial further encouraged the Constitution State’s formal ratification of t the Bill of Rights, especially during the rise of “totalitarian States” in Europe — like Nazism, Italian fascism, and the Soviet Union — writing:
“It is therefore well that nobody should be able to point to Connecticut and say, ‘You may have established certain rights in your Fundamental Orders of 1638-9, you may have included a comprehensive Bill of Rights in your Constitution of 1818, but you never gave your approval to the Bill of Rights that exists for the American citizen everywhere.’ …This record should now be corrected in order that no one shall henceforth be able to say of Connecticut that it is the only State in all the Union where our national Bill of Rights has never received formal approval.”
Around that time, a young representative from Hartford — Abraham Ribicoff — filed H.J. 282 to officially adopt the Bill of Rights. Ribicoff had only won a seat in the General Assembly the year prior, but he would have a storied political career as a U.S. Representative (1949-1953); the state’s first Jewish governor (1955-1961); and U.S. Senator (1963-1981).
Eager to pass the resolution, Ribicoff moved to suspend the rules so it could be adopted immediately. However, the proposal ran into the specter of parliamentary procedure once again — and perhaps, rightly so, at least to some. The move was defeated 160-60 with Republican E. Lea Marsh, Jr., of Old Lyme insisting that “the resolution should take its ‘regular course’ through committee and asserted there was no reason for haste after ‘all these years,’” as The Day reported (March 22). Ribicoff, meanwhile, rationalized that every General Assembly “must be familiar” with the Bill of Rights; therefore there was “no reason for committee study of what was ‘merely an expression of sentiment to bring the state of Connecticut into line with the rest of the United States,’” according to The Day (March 22).
No one seemed vocally opposed in principle to the resolution, at least from contemporary newspaper accounts; Republicans simply seemed compelled to adhere to process. H.J. 282 went to the Committee of Federal Relations as members “felt that its phraseology might require careful study,” the Courant reported (March 26).
On March 31, the drafted resolution — in what would become the final approved text — was read aloud at the Federal Relations’ public hearing:
That Articles one to ten, inclusive, of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America be and the same are hereby ratified by the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, and Resolved, that certified copies of the foregoing resolution be forwarded by the Governor of the State of Connecticut to the President of the United States, the Secretary of State of the United States, the President of the Senate of the United States, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States.
No one spoke in favor or opposition during the hearing.
On April 12, the House adopted the resolution “without dissent,” the Courant reported (April 13). After the vote, Gov. Raymond Baldwin, who found the approval “most fitting and proper,” spoke at length to the representatives on Connecticut’s history in “guaranteeing personal liberty and individual freedom upon which every true republic must depend,” saying:
“In order that people may not think that such ratification, at this late date, indicates a lack of interest in Connecticut in a bill of rights protecting human liberty and freedom…This adoption of the resolution ratifying the first ten amendments to the Federal Constitution is likewise a reaffirmation of your faith in our Connecticut Republic, in her firm adherence to the Federal Union of States and an expression of your continuing confidence in free institutions for free people.”
A week later, the Senate unanimously approved the Bill of Rights’ resolution, as well as a resolution “urging federal authorities to speed up action on naturalization papers for aliens” and “an act requiring the display of the United States flag in schoolrooms,” The Day reported (April 19). The governor’s message was read to the Senate, and Sen. Frank Murphy of Hartford called him a “modern Patrick Henry.” The official certification, however, was signed by Sara B. Crawford — Secretary of the State — a few days afterward, on April 24.
The 150-year process was over. The Bill of Rights had been ceremoniously adopted; and Connecticut, at the time, became the last state to do so since both Alaska and Hawaii joined the union in 1959.
For Connecticut to be the first state to enshrine individual liberties and the last to adopt the Bill of Rights certainly places the “Constitution State” in a unique position in American history. Despite the eventual adoption being largely symbolic, it was still a lapse worth properly correcting. And to do so on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War II, in which more than 200,000 men from Connecticut would serve, directly contrasts with other malignant forces restricting and violating human liberties.
The episode is a reminder of the singularity of America and its Constitution. As President Ronald Reagan succinctly and eloquently stated: “Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which we the people tell the government what it is allowed to do.”
The Constitution — and the Bill of Rights — represents our nation’s heart and character. It is a declaration that every individual has the right and capacity to live freely because he or she has the inherent dignity of being human. And for Connecticut to recognize this truth, from 1650 to 1939, should make us consider how we are protecting those liberties for our neighbors today and future generations. How will we preserve the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights?
We — and those yet unborn — cannot afford any lapses.
Till next time —
Your Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Andy Fowler
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