ANTIQUES

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2005 by Wendell Garrett

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, an English actor and writer, characterized the typical Connecticut resident as a "cunning, calculating, persevering personage with an infusion of Scotch hardiness and love of wandering," preferably remaining just within the law ("going to jail he also considers not so a disgrace as a waste of time"). Bernard observed that the citizens of Connecticut had migrated so widely that "Yankee" had come to denote a quality of character rather than a locality.

Those who remained in their isolation in Connecticut were provincial to the core, yet as artists and craftsmen they were free of the shackles of academic standards. Their creations had a freshness and vigor that threatened to recast the canonical system of arts and crafts that ruled in the cities and in the Old World.

The artist Ralph Earl created stiffly posed portraits of sitters with the resolute faces of those around him. The cabinetmaker Eliphalet Chapin constructed graceful, well-made, and plain cherry furniture that satisfied his patrons--insular aristocrats who lacked the grand magnificence of their urban counterparts. Roger Sherman, a self-taught shoemaker, was also a farmer, surveyor, lawyer, merchant, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and chairman of the committee at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia that created the bicameral structure of the United States Congress.

These men knew they were living on the border of a civilization whose focal points were the metropolitan centers on both sides of the Atlantic. But their very provincialism nourished their aesthetic and cultural aspirations to create a style that took on a life of its own. As Thomas Paine put it, they were prepared to begin the world anew.