The First Party System: Deep Dives Part 1
Entrenched Parochial Interests and Systemic Conservatism in Connecticut and Delaware
Connecticut
Connecticut’s first constitution was the Fundamental Orders of 1639. It called for a governor and a general assembly of “magistrates” (senator-judges) and “deputies” (representatives). There were 6 magistrates, two for each of the three towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield, elected annually to one-year terms by pure-majority-threshold approval voting, with any remaining of the 6 seats to be filled from the next runners-up. The deputies were limited to 3-4 per town, elected by first-past-the-post (FPTP) every six months. It also called for governors to be elected by FPTP to one-year terms, and he could not serve consecutive terms, nor more than two. There were also some candidacy rules that would strike us as wierd today: potential magistrates had to be nominated by the sitting magistrates1, and governors had to be former magistrates. The governor was obviously an executive branch, but the magistrates were essentially a joint judicial, executive, and legislative branch.2
The Connecticut Charter of 1662 replaced the Fundamental Orders once the English monarchy was restored at the end of their civil war in 1660, granting the colony royal recognition. It expanded the assembly of magistrates from 6 to 12, changing them to “assistants”, and again limited them to two per town, though without mentioning which towns. The deputies were reduced to two per town as well, and this arrangement stood with only a minor modification in 1698 to formally bicameralize the legislature.
Oddly, Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only two states who retained their royal charters after independence. Colonial Connecticut was notorious for its conservatism and long incumbencies, so this isn’t a stretch. It took until 1818 to adopt a new constitution, which was essentially cribbed from recently-admitted Mississippi’s 1817 constitution. The 1818 constitution retained the apportionment of deputies and assistants, only adding one deputy to any new town, regardless of population. This was only amended in 1828, likely due to the popular wave of Jacksonian Democracy, to apportion both houses into something more like the population-based schemes we’d recognize today; though, interestingly, those amendments also mandated geographically contiguous town-based districting schemes.
From a CIZST standpoint, what’s notable here aren’t the changes themselves, but the overall absence of change. In the colonial and First Party System eras, Connecticut simply never had any major business interests to spur political consolidation or disruption. It was a homogeneous society where religious consensus kept politics stable. In the absence of major internal conflict and any ideological predisposition, there wasn’t much reason to democratize, so it lagged the rest of the country.
Delaware
Delaware is much more interesting. Its earliest colonial political leadership was first Dutch (1630s), then Swedish (1650s), before the English took over in 1664. The mid-to-late-1600s thus saw different parts of present-day Delaware changing hands several different times between the provinces of New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. In the early 1700s, what were called the “Lower Counties” proved too difficult for William Penn to govern it jointly with the rest of Pennsylvania Colony, so it was agreed that the legislatures of the Upper and Lower Counties would meet and govern separately. Delaware wouldn’t adopt its own constitution until 1776, in the wake of independence.
However, what we can tell about Delaware’s colonial electoral systems is that they were based on the same fixed-representation concept as colonial Connecticut, only differing in being derived from the county level, not that of towns3. That is to say, there were multiple representatives per county in both the upper and lower houses, with the usual twists on term limits over the various iterations of the system, and the usual plurality voting systems.
This was a system defined by the nobility: England’s “second sons” who due to primogeniture had no hope for success and glory but to build their own futures in the promising New World. And the symmetry between colonial Delaware and Pennsylvania is amazingly stark: Here we have two regions within the same territorial government (Penn’s), under the same electoral system, but dominated by different populations and their respective elites. In Pennsylvania, Penn and his Quaker Party ruled over a minority of rural German-speakers, until a growing, Anglican-aligned urban mercantile class championed the cause of opposition. In Delaware, the Anglican nobility formed a Court Party closely aligned with the Proprietors, and the Scots-Irish Presbyterians a Country Party to oppose them.
At all levels, we see Pennsylvania Colony’s zero-sum incentives — both formal, like the plurality-based electoral system, and informal, like the vast undeveloped territory just waiting to be claimed — leading to bifurcations along identity-based lines: religion, ethnicity, royally-granted privilege, and economic interests.
Conclusion
Both of these examples lead to an interesting takeaway about CIZST. You can’t draw a straight line from every zero-sum dynamic or intersectional fault-line towards a bifurcated politics. It’s not intended to be an iron law dictating how a million political billiard balls bounce off each other. Rather, the specifics of the identities in question matter. Like chaos theory, perturbations — small differences — in each individual system lead to different outcomes.
This sounds less corrupt when you remember that not many people really understood the law as well as judges did at the time. It’s better to think of this requirement as akin to the fact that by-custom, if not law, we still today require judges to be lawyers. It was a major scandal, after all, when Trump nominated a non-lawyer to the federal bench a few years ago.
Remember, this was at a time when feudalism was still the predominant system of government. The roles we are accustomed to have evolved since then. But it’s probably helpful to note that there was essentially another branch of government: the nobility. Outside of Parliament, the nobility had no recognized right to pass its own laws — and probably for good reason, because most legal disputes were between the nobility! Just as we might find it wierd for judges to write their own laws, it was probably an even worse idea for the nobility to be left to the task. Judges may have been more highly respected as scholars and interpreters of the law, since education was less common at the time, even in the relatively-highly-educated New England colonies.
Delaware, after all, is a Midlands colony per Woodard, settled by the aristocracy’s inheritance-deprived “second sons” rather than Connecticut’s religious zealots. It’s no wonder that they defined their political divisions by counties, trying to fit them into existing English legal structures, while Connecticuters were more interested in defining themselves by the towns which were creations of their shared religious mission.