The Fundamental Orders: The First Written Constitution

On January fourteenth, sixteen thirty-nine, the freemen of three river towns, Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, gathered and ratified a document that historians have called the first written constitution in the Western world. They called it the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. What made it different from a royal charter or a set of instructions from a distant king was the source of its authority.

The Fundamental Orders derived their power from the people themselves. The document created a General Court with three branches: a governor, twelve deputies chosen four from each town, and six magistrates. It set terms, defined how elections would work, and, crucially, did not limit the vote to church members.

Any freeman could participate, regardless of whether he stood in good standing with a congregation. The political historian John Fiske described it as the first written constitution known to history that created a government. That claim is debated by scholars, and the degree to which it anticipated the United States Constitution of seventeen eighty-seven remains a genuine scholarly conversation.

What is not disputed is that the Fundamental Orders were remarkable for their time, and that they helped earn Connecticut the nickname it still carries: the Constitution State. The nickname actually has two competing explanations, the Fundamental Orders of sixteen thirty-nine, and the Connecticut Compromise of seventeen eighty-seven, when Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth helped broker the bicameral legislature that saved the Constitutional Convention from collapse. Both stories are true.

Both happened in Connecticut. Hartford's founders would likely have found it fitting that one small colony contributed so many chapters to the story of American self-government.