7 March—Connecticut likes to call itself The Constitution State because in 1639 the Connecticut Colony council adopted so-called Fundamental Orders that some people consider the first written constitution in the New World. It’s less cumbersome than The Fundamental Orders State.

The Fundamental Orders described the government established by the Connecticut River Puritan towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield for typical religious as well as good old-fashioned capitalist reasons. (They go together). The supreme authority of the colony was assigned to an elected general court—after God, of course—and the British Crown wasn’t even mentioned.

But King Charles II, The Merry Monarch, issued a royal charter recognizing the Connecticut Colony’s right to self-govern in 1662, essentially following the form of the Fundamental Orders.

This is the preamble to the Fundamental Orders:

“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God by the wise disposition of his divine providence so to order and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and upon the River of Connectecotte and the lands thereunto adjoining; and well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require; do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth; and do for ourselves and our successors and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter, enter into Combination and Confederation together, to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess, as also, the discipline of the Churches, which according to the truth of the said Gospel is now practiced amongst us; as also in our civil affairs to be guided and governed according to such Laws, Rules, Orders and Decrees as shall be made, ordered, and decreed as followeth.”

The 11 articles are every bit as tedious as the preamble, even more so than my own prose. That’s the way they wrote back then; and even today legislative language can be overdone. You’d think that legislative commissioners—the people who actually draft the laws—were paid by the word.

It may not be worth noting—but I’ll note it anyway—that the right to bear arms isn’t mentioned in the Fundamental Orders and that God and the Lord Jesus naturally reign supreme. In fact, Connecticut didn’t achieve religious freedom, as mandated by the First Amendment of United States Constitution, until 1818, with the merciful disestablishment of the Congregation Church.

Even now the Preamble to the state’s Constitution is rather oxymoronic on the religious front: “The People of Connecticut acknowledging with gratitude, the good providence of God, in having permitted them to enjoy a free government; do, in order more effectually to define, secure, and perpetuate the liberties, rights and privileges which they have derived from their ancestors; hereby, after a careful consideration and revision, ordain and establish the following constitution and form of civil government.”

Section 15 says: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.” But not for any other reason . . .