1776? The American Revolution Really Started in the 1600s

At the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hooker’s Party, judges in a cave, and an old oak tree point to 1776.

O ver the past year I’ve written close to 20 pieces about the art of the American Revolution and the preservation of its heritage. With the subjects so vast, I can’t cover everything. So, apologies to the Carolinas, Georgia, tiny Delaware and tinier Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. I’ll get to you when the next revolution comes. Today, I’ll do one last story about Connecticut, the Nutmeg State. After all, another of my natal state’s nicknames is the Constitution State. I’ll start, and this might seem circuitous, with the Hudson River School’s dean, Frederic Church (1826–1900).

Church never painted a Revolutionary War subject and was born 50 years after July 4, 1776, but this year is the bicentennial of his birth, in Hartford, and three of his history paintings from his salad days are on view now in the illuminating, intelligent, beautifully presented Framing American Democracy: Radical Roots at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Church and the exhibition treat three stage-setters for 1776. Hooker’s Party — it’s got a much longer formal name — and The Charter Oak at Hartford, both from 1846, cover the Hartford part of the story, a journey through forests and swamps, a drama unfolding in sudden darkness, and an old oak tree. West Rock, New Haven, from 1849, hints at a notorious regicide and dragnet. All show us how Connecticut supplied democracy and freedom precedents that were the Declaration’s warp and woof.

Let’s time-travel sans mosquitoes and bumpy Indian trails to early June 1636. Then, English-born, Cambridge-educated Thomas Hooker (1586–1647), a Puritan minister in Watertown in Massachusetts, led around 100 men, women, and children from his congregation into the wilderness to what’s now Hartford. Hooker had feuded with his fellow divines in Massachusetts Bay Colony over who should be allowed to vote and to hold office. He wanted universal freemen suffrage, an outré concept in a place where freemen status and Puritan orthodoxy had to go hand in hand.

Word got to Hooker that land a hundred miles southwest, by the Connecticut River, could be made habitable for families. Off they went. Hooker’s best line? “The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people,” not catchy but, in its day, radical, since it elbows God, kings, potentates, and aristocrats.

Church painted Hooker’s Party, a 3.5-by-5-foot showpiece depicting the migration, after training with Thomas Cole. Cole mostly painted imagined landscapes, epics such as The Course of Empire, and Italian landscapes with ruins, while the young Church, at 20, painted a history landscape picture that’s topographical and matter-of-fact but still heroic. The group is near the end of its journey. There’s a view of the fertile Connecticut Valley below. It’s a current-affairs scene, too, since Hooker’s westward move in the 1630s was followed in the 1840s by another westward expansion across America as wilderness became frontier, then towns, then cities, thanks to Christian pioneers.

In olden days, conquistadores came womanless, looking for lucre, and, having looted their charm schools back in Spain, had terrible manners, while real Christians brought families, meant to farm, prized education, and planned to stay for the long haul. Church shows women and children, cows, a dog, and a mattress, all amid clear light, a sunrise rich in color and promise. Call it the Yankee Exodus, though far shorter, no seas parted, and no plague of gnats. For comic relief, when I googled “Hooker’s Party and Church” I got stories on Hookers for Jesus.

Hooker’s views on democracy led to the Fundamental Orders in 1639, the bedrock of the U.S. Constitution. The document, a copy of which is on view at the Connecticut State Library across from the Rococo movie palace of a state capitol, lists eleven laws, or orders, to govern Connecticut Colony, then consisting of Hartford, Windsor — where the Allens, then spelled Allyn, come from — and Wethersfield. It establishes a legislature elected by freemen, a term-limited governor, a secret ballot, the town-meeting form of government for local matters, and the power to tax vested in the legislature. Nowhere are the king and Parliament mentioned. Congregationalism underpins the Orders — every little church is self-governing. All radical indeed. The arc of history, Church suggests, points toward freedom and, implicitly, 1776.

The Charter Oak of Hartford belongs to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme. It’s a nice museum, mostly of Connecticut Impressionism, and newly called the “Flo Gris,” among the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while. It sounds like a tavern or, worse, a skin disease. Charter Oak is sultry and moody, inspired by Cole’s Romantic streak. Minutely detailed, it’s a micro-marvel, but, overall, the tree is majestic and solemn, mighty and full yet gnarled. In 1846, the tree still stood.

The Charter Oak is probably the most famous tree in New England, but why? Of course, much happened in Merry Old England in the decades after 1639. A vicious civil war sent Charles I to the eternal home for the headless. Cromwell and his Puritan regime took power, but the colonies might as well have been on another planet, living life as Hobbits would have.

With the English Commonwealth having eaten itself and the monarchy restored in 1660, with Charles II now as king, Connecticut’s rulers thought it wise to get a royal charter endorsing, in effect, the colony’s  Fundamental Orders and the right to self-government. Hooker never got anyone’s permission to bring his people to Hartford. For more than 20 years, they behaved like Ferris Bueller on his day off and did whatever they wanted. They feared Whitehall’s long arm would reach across the pond, nix their laws, and grab their land.

Governor John Winthrop, another unsung hero, lawyer, doctor, mining engineer, and astronomer, was the man for the job. Courtly and smooth, he met with Charles II in 1662 in London and schmoozed his way into a royal charter most advantageous to the cause of Connecticut self-government. It had more independence than any other colony until 1776.

The brother and successor of Charles II, James II? A royal rat bastard, he tried in 1687 to get the charter back. A Catholic, he didn’t want an extreme Protestant sect, and a prosperous one, in his orbit. Ye olde Yankees in Hartford weren’t giving up the precious document. His appointed governor, Edmund Andros, went to Hartford — on what’s now Halloween — and met with the General Assembly. He came with troops and threatened trouble if he didn’t leave with the charter.

Talk, talk, talk ensued as the sun set. The locals insisted that the charter be read, all 6 feet of it, and they sprinkled each section with coos about their loyalty. Candles were lit. They finally said they’d give it up, and the keeper of official documents, an Allyn, rolled up the charter, inches from Andros’s grasping fingers. Suddenly out the lights went. A scuffle followed, “holy guacamole” and stronger words flew. By the time candles were relit, the charter was gone. Poof. Joseph Wadsworth, a legislator, had grabbed it, fled, and hid it in a cavity in the centuries-old oak tree. Andros, tricked and not treated, left in a huff. The charter remained in effect. In 1688, James II went out with the trash, courtesy of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch-prince husband. William of Orange. Andros soon followed. In 1856, a heavy storm felled what by then was known as the Charter Oak.

The tree had already modeled for Church its last moment in the spotlight. He might have invested it with a wistful touch, not prophetic of its fall but political. The tree is in twilight, not the radiant light of Hooker’s Party. The picket fence is a border, and borders imply the sanctity of private property, among the highest of Yankee values. Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote, and he’s the acme of Yankee highfalutin ideals. Does twilight for the oak mean twilight for these values? That’s a Cole theme. Church, at only 20, was still his master’s pupil.

Radical Roots isn’t a big show — three galleries — and you don’t need to be a Nutmegger to enjoy it. The show’s storytelling is sound and has a giddyap pace. Enough furniture and hokey doodads were made from the fallen Charter Oak to fill an Ethan Allen showroom. Some of it’s on view, adding a touch of camp. And the theme is solid. Alexis de Tocqueville, savant and seer when it comes to American character, was right when he wrote that American democracy owed far more to New England Congregationalism than to anything Roman and Greek or, I’ll add, French.

New Haven started as a Puritan settlement in 1638, but it had a frankly mercantile bent. It never got a royal charter but bought land from the local tribes and devised its Fundamental Agreement, similar to Hartford’s Fundamental Orders. It was Puritan but less of a theocracy, and it was remote from English politics until three of the regicides — the 59 judges who sent Charles I to the chopping block — appeared on its doorstep in 1661. After the Restoration in 1660, Charles II wanted revenge. The three judges were desperate fugitives.

At least 25 regicides were executed — hanged until they gagged in agony and then drawn and quartered while still alive. Those who’d died in their beds during the years of the English Commonwealth, from 1649 to 1660, were exhumed and defiled. Some regicides escaped to the Continent. Three — Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell — went to America, sought refuge in New Haven, and got it. Local ministers and officials hid them and helped them remake their lives unhanged, undrawn, and unquartered.

For months Goffe and Whalley lived in a cave on top of West Rock, a trap-rock ridge about 400 feet high and part of a longer ridge, often higher, running through what is otherwise a flat swath of Connecticut barely above sea level. Dixwell, as a regicide sentenced to die, was believed in London to have already died, in Germany in 1660, so he was never a target of the royal manhunt. He changed his name to John Davids, married, had children, and lived in New Haven quietly until he died in 1689.

West Rock belongs to the wonderful New Britain Museum of American Art. Unlike Hooker’s Party, it’s a faraway, barely peopled view, but its few tiny figures are cultivating the land. Like The Charter Oak, it’s a monument to liberty and one that everyone in Church’s day, at least in Connecticut, would have recognized. In both pictures, the tumult and danger of the colonial days seem a thing of the past. Peace and harmony reign supreme. A spire from a church rises, linking the long-dead regicides and the farmers as doing God’s work. Church was what we’d call a Christian nationalist today, but so was nearly everyone back then and well into the last century.

There’s an obelisk in Dixwell’s memory behind Center Church on the New Haven Green. Whalley and Goffe eventually fled to Hadley in rural western Massachusetts. Whalley seems to have died there in 1674. Goffe had a long, secret correspondence with his wife in England, signing letters as “Ebenezer,” the place in the Bible where the prophet Samuel placed a memorial marked “Eben-Ezer” — stone of help — to honor those who died in a battle with the Philistines. Goffe died lonely and poor, exactly when and where we don’t know.

Today, three boulevards radiating west and north of the Yale campus are named for Dixwell, Whalley, and Goffe. Judges Cave on West Rock is a state park. It’s a group of giant boulders with deep, wide crevices where Whalley and Goffe hid, supplied with food, beer, and blankets by well-wishers below. A monument reads, “Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God.” The American Revolution, in a way, and for America, finished what the English Commonwealth started.

I’ve slammed the Atheneum so many times over the years for the profound wokery of its vain, bourgeois trustees, the DEI plague at its worst, since this is the ilk who rule our nonprofit sector. I always love my visits there, though — the collection is divine, I like the curators, and the long culture of bad trusteeship seems to be diminishing by the way of all flesh. The place has a new CEO, Allison Blais. She played a formative role in the 9/11 Museum, likely the most emotionally fraught but most essential new museum in America. Blais is a very serious, consequential person. So, insofar as the Atheneum and me, it’s cease-fire time. Unlike the mullahs in Iran, I’m not expecting hundreds of billions. I’m in the wrong line of work. Next up, Spain and 1776, then Monticello and, for July Fourth and God willing, a surprise.