The Fundamental Orders, The Constitution State

January fourteenth, sixteen thirty-nine. A cold winter day in Hartford, and a group of Puritan colonists sat down to write something that had never quite existed before: a governing document for a civil body politic that derived its authority not from a royal charter, not from a distant king, but from the free consent of the governed. They called it the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut.

It established a general court, defined the process for electing a governor and magistrates, and extended voting rights, modestly by any modern measure, but genuinely broadly by the standards of the sixteen thirties, to freemen who were not required to be church members, as was the case in Massachusetts. The document said explicitly that the power of choosing magistrates rested with the people. Whether the Fundamental Orders truly constitute the world's first written democratic constitution is a claim historians debate.

The Mayflower Compact preceded it by nearly two decades. Rhode Island would push further in its own experiments. But Connecticut has worn the nickname the Constitution State with justifiable pride since at least the nineteenth century, and serious constitutional historians have argued that the Fundamental Orders influenced the thinking of the men who would draft the United States Constitution a century and a half later.

The document is usually credited to the magistrate Roger Ludlow, but it grew from the ideas of a minister named Thomas Hooker, who had led his congregation out of Massachusetts Bay partly in dissatisfaction with the Bay Colony's concentration of authority in the clergy. Hooker had preached, in a famous sixteen thirty-eight sermon, that the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. Connecticut's nickname is not decoration.

It is an argument the state has been making about itself for nearly four hundred years.