ANTIQUES.

The state of Connecticut has always been governed by an aristocracy, more decisively than the empire of Great Britain is. Half a dozen, or, at most, a dozen families, have controlled that country when a colony, as well as since it has been a state.

John Adams, "Review of the Propositions for Amending the Constitution, Submitted by Mr. [James] Hillhouse to the Senate of the United States, in 1808."

The Puritans who settled Connecticut were born and bred Englishmen--a fact of which they were intensely proud. As Puritans, a central principle of their theology was that God promised salvation to "the Elect," among whom they counted themselves. Shored up by these twin convictions, they limited the government of Connecticut to the elite, "an aristocracy," as John Adams rightly observed.

Connecticut's retention of an essentially undiluted Puritanism well into the eighteenth century was the result of the colony's isolation. It lacked a staple like Massachusetts cod, Carolina rice, or Virginia tobacco to export to the mother country, and it was unable to import large amounts of manufactured goods because of a limited market. Connecticut drifted through the colonial period trading in large part with New York City and Boston. A traveler visiting around 1760 fittingly compared Connecticut "to a cask of good liquor, tapped at both ends, at one of which Boston draws, and New York at the other, till little is left in it but less and settlings."

Believing in the omnipresence of God in the disposal of man's fate, these stern Puritans accepted all that life delivered with an unbreakable will. Caution and conservatism have shaped the Connecticut character since the beginning. In 1797 John Bernard, ...