Thomas Hooker: Puritanism and Democratic Citizenship: A Preliminary Inquiry into Some Relationships of Religion and American Civic Responsibility
In a special advertising supplement to the New York Times (May 6, 1962) the State of Connecticut sponsored an old claim: “The world's first written constitution, creating government by consent of the governed, appeared in Connecticut in 1639.” The diverse implications of this venerable assertio...
| Published in: | Church history |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
[1963]
|
| In: |
Church history
|
| IxTheo Classification: | KAG Church history 1500-1648; Reformation; humanism; Renaissance KBQ North America |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
|
| Summary: | In a special advertising supplement to the New York Times (May 6, 1962) the State of Connecticut sponsored an old claim: “The world's first written constitution, creating government by consent of the governed, appeared in Connecticut in 1639.” The diverse implications of this venerable assertion and their relation to the Rev. Thomas Hooker are the subject of the present essay. Intimations that Hooker deserved remembrance as a champion of liberty date at least to William Hubbard's General History of New England, written in the 1670's. But full-blown theories came after 1776, and especially after Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's discovery in 1860 of a remarkable notebook of sermon notes taken down in cipher between April, 1638, and April, 1641, by Henry Wolcott, Jr. of Windsor. Herein was found an outline of Hooker's now famous sermon to the Connecticut Court on May 31, 1638, as that body began its historic deliberations on a “Frame of Government.” George Bancroft would reflect the impact of this find in the revised edition of his widely read History of the United States. He saw in Hooker's pronouncements the “seed” whence flowered the “first of the series of written American constitutions.” Paraphrasing Ezekiel Roger's epitaph, Bancroft refers to Hooker as “the one rich pearl with which Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.” John Fiske in his work on The Beginnings of New England (1889) would claim even more stridently that Thomas Hooker “deserves more than any other man to be called the father [of American democracy].” George Leon Walker accepted Fiske's judgment and subtitled his biography “Preacher, Founder, Democrat.” |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0009-6407 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3163290 |