The Charter Oak: Darkness, a Candle, and a Hidden Document
Near Hartford, Connecticut
On the night of October thirty-first, sixteen eighty-seven, something unusual happened inside Hartford's meeting house. Governor Edmund Andros, the royal governor dispatched by King James the Second to consolidate the colonies under tighter English control, had arrived in town demanding Connecticut hand over its royal charter. The charter, granted by King Charles the Second in sixteen sixty-two, had given the colony an extraordinary degree of self-government, essentially allowing it to continue governing itself under the Fundamental Orders.
Andros wanted it extinguished. The Connecticut General Assembly brought the charter out in its mahogany box and laid it on the meeting table. Candles burned.
Arguments stretched on for hours. Then, according to the accounts that have come down to us, the candles went out all at once, whether by accident or by plan is not entirely clear, and in the darkness, Captain Joseph Wadsworth seized the charter and disappeared into the night. He hid it, the story goes, in the hollow of a giant white oak tree on the Wyllys estate.
The tree was already ancient in sixteen eighty-seven, believed to have been growing since the twelfth or thirteenth century. Governor Andros proceeded to govern without the charter, but when William and Mary took the English throne in sixteen eighty-nine, the old charter was restored. The Charter Oak stood on Wyllys Hill for another hundred and sixty-nine years before a storm brought it down in August of eighteen fifty-six.
Hartford mourned it like a citizen. Artists rushed to sketch the ruins. Craftsmen carved souvenirs from the fallen wood.
The tree lives on in the state quarter, on street signs, and in the name of the neighborhood you are moving through now. Connecticut kept its charter. The oak kept its secret until no one needed it anymore.
