The Famous Charter Oak Affair

IN DECEMBER, 1686, the Hartford authorities were called upon to measure their strength again with their old antagonist, Sir Edmund Andros. Andros had landed at Boston, commissioned as governor of all New England, and bent on abrogating the charters. Following Joseph Dudley’s [a colonial Governor of Massachusetts] lead, he wrote to Robert Treat [a colonial Governor of Connecticut, whose term of office was interrupted by Andros], suggesting that by this time the trial of the writs had certainly gone against the colony; and that the authorities would do much to commend the colony to his majesty’s good pleasure by entering a formal surrender of the charter. The colony authorities were possibly as well versed in the law of the case as Andros, and they took good care to do nothing of the sort; and, as the event showed, they thus saved the charter.

The assembly met as usual in October, 1687; but their records show that they were in profound doubt and distress. Andros was with them, accompanied by some sixty regular soldiers, to enforce his demand for the charter. It is certain that he did not get it, though the records, as usual, are cautious enough to give no reason why. Tradition is responsible for the story of the charter oak. The assembly had met the royal governor in the meeting-house; the demand for the charter had been made; and the assembly had exhausted the resources of language to show to Andros how dear it was to them, and how impossible it was to give it up. Andros was immovable; he had watched that charter with longing eyes from the banks of the Hudson, and he had no intention of giving up his object now that the king had put him in power on the banks of the Connecticut.

Toward evening the case had become desperate. The little democracy was at last driven into a corner, where its old policy seemed no longer available; it must resist openly, or make a formal surrender of its charter. Just as the lights were lighted, the legal authorities yielded so far as to order the precious document to be brought in and laid on the table before the eyes of Andros. Then came a little more debate. Suddenly the lights were blown out; Captain Wadsworth, of Hartford, carried off the charter, and hid it in a hollow oak-tree on the estate of the Wyllyses, just across the "riveret"; and when the lights were relighted the colony was no longer able to comply with Andros’s demand for a surrender.

Although the account of the affair is traditional, it is difficult to see any good grounds for impeaching it on that account. It supplies, in the simplest and most natural manner, a_blank in the Hartford proceedings of Andros which would otherwise be quite unaccountable. His plain purpose was to force Connecticut into a position where she must either surrender the charter or resist openly. He failed: the charter never was in his possession; and the official records assign no reason for his failure. The colony was too prudent, and Andros too proud to put the true reason on record. Tradition supplies the gap with an exactness which proves itself.

"At a General Court at Hartford, October 31st, 1687, his excellency, Sir Edmund Andross, knight and Captain General and Governor of His Majesty’s territories and dominions in New England, by order of His Majesty James the Second, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, the 3lst of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of the colony of Connecticut, it being by His Majesty annexed to Massachusetts and other colonies under his excellency’s government.

The government was destined to last far longer than either the governor or his government. But, while it lasted, Andros’s government was bitterly hated, and with good reason. The reasons are more peculiarly appropriate to the history of Massachusetts, where they were felt more keenly than in Connecticut; but even in Connecticut, poor as was the field for plunder, and distant as it was from the "ring" which surrounded Andros, the exactions of the new system were well-nigh intolerable to a people whose annual expense of government had been carefully kept down to the lowest limits, so that, says Bancroft, they "did not exceed four thousand dollars; and the wages of the chief justice were ten shillings a day while on service….

April, 1689, came at last. The people of Boston, at the first news of the English Revolution, clapped Andros into custody. May 9, the old Connecticut authorities quietly resumed their functions, and called the assembly together for the following month. William and Mary were proclaimed with great favor. Not a word was said about the disappearance or reappearance of the charter; but the charter government was put into full effect again, as if Andros had never interrupted it. An address was sent to the king, asking that the charter be no further interfered with; but operations under it went on as before. No decided action was taken by the home government for some years, except that its appointment of the New York governor, Fletcher, to the command of the Connecticut militia, implied a decision that the Connecticut charter had been superseded.

Late in 1693 Fitz-John Winthrop was sent to England as agent to obtain a confirmation of the charter. He secured an emphatic legal opinion from Attorney General Somers, backed by those of Treby and Ward, that the charter was entirely valid…. It had escaped its enemies at last and its escape is a monument of one of the advantages of a real democracy.