Connecticut Supreme Court History
Volume II (2007)

THE PUBLIC RECORDS PROJECT AND THE CONSTITUTION OF 1818

Douglas M. Arnold

Abstract

Two newly published volumes of The Public Records of the State of Connecticut document the transformations that changed the face of public life in the state after the War of 1812, with a focus on the movement toward a new state constitution in 1818. This essay provides an extended overview of these volumes.

Volume XVIII, which covers the years 1816 and 1817, provides a record of the emergence of a Reform coalition of Jeffersonian Republicans and other disaffected groups, including religious dissenters, which attacked the decades-old political dominance of the Federalist party. Even more fundamentally, the Reformers challenged Connecticut’s centuries-old constitutional system under the royal Charter of 1662 and the state’s long-standing arrangements for the public support of religion. The election of Oliver Wolcott as Reform governor, the coalition’s capture of the state House of Representatives, and the beginnings of concrete efforts to change the state’s electoral laws, judicial organization, public financial system, and religious statutes are central themes of this volume.

Volume XIX focuses on the crucial year 1818, when the Reformers gained control of the Council or Upper House of the General Assembly, the last bastion of Federalist legislative power. This victory opened the doors for the centerpiece of reform, the calling of a convention to write a new Constitution for the state. The volume highlights the crucial preparatory actions taken by the state legislature in its spring session, the work of the Constitutional Convention itself during the summer, and the statutory fine-tuning of the governmental system that began at the fall session of the General Assembly.

Historians, political scientists, and legal scholars will probably be most interested in the proceedings and debates of the Convention found in Volume XIX, which has been newly edited from the original documents. This section of the volume contains a literal rendition of the Convention’s manuscript Journal, housed at the Connecticut State Library; this includes a record of crossed-out passages to give a sense of the speed at which the Convention worked as well as the nature of the revisions. It also contains transcriptions, with original marginal annotations, of the printed drafts of the Constitution and a transcription of the version of the final Constitution recorded in the manuscript Public Records register. In addition, it includes a rendition of two versions of the Convention’s debates, one from the state’s Federalist newspapers and the other from newspapers associated with the Reform coalition.

Connecticut Supreme Court History, Vol. II | Publications