Connecticut Colony

The Connecticut Colony, first called the Connecticut River Colony, was an English colony in New England that became the state of Connecticut. It was organised on 3 March 1636 for the Puritan congregation that Thomas Hooker led out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it began as three separate settlements. Adriaen Block had sailed up the river for the Dutch in the 1610s, buying land from the Pequot sachem Wopigwooit in 1633, and the Dutch trading post and redoubt at the future sites of Saybrook and Hartford marked the first European buildings. English control was only secured in the Pequot War. The colony's founding document was the Fundamental Orders adopted in January 1639, probably drafted by Roger Ludlow, the only trained lawyer in the colonies, which united Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield, made freemen elect both governor and legislature, and has been called the first written democratic constitution. Fears that Charles II would strip self-government sent John Winthrop the Younger to London, and the charter he brought back in 1662 was so egalitarian that Connecticut was one of only two colonies where freemen chose the whole government. The colony absorbed New Haven and Saybrook, bore the Dominion of New England, hiding its charter inside an oak, and in 1776 became the state of Connecticut.