Thomas Hooker and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Thomas Hooker preached the opening sermon when the General Court of the Connecticut River towns met in May 1638 to consider how their new settlements should be governed. His text argued that the foundation of political authority rests on the free consent of the people who are to be ruled, and that those who choose their rulers may also set the bounds of their power. Coming from a minister who had fled Archbishop Laud's England less than a decade earlier for preaching without a license, the argument carried the weight of lived experience with unaccountable authority. Eight months later, on 14 January 1639, freemen from Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield ratified the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a compact of eleven orders establishing an annually elected governor, a General Court of elected magistrates and deputies, and a franchise resting on admission as a freeman rather than on membership in a gathered church, a real departure from the church-membership test then governing the vote in Massachusetts Bay. The preamble binds the towns together to maintain the liberty and purity of the gospel while also ordering, in its own words, such a civil government as shall be requisite. Hooker did not draft the Orders himself, and no transcript of his 1638 sermon survives in his own hand; the tradition crediting Connecticut's constitutional turn to him rests on a later secondhand account and on the sermon's evident echo in the language and structure of what the towns went on to ratify. Historians have called the Fundamental Orders the first written constitution to create a government in the English colonies, though the label competes with earlier corporate charters, and later scholarship has cautioned against reading a fully modern constitutional theory back onto a document written to settle a practical question among three neighboring towns.