Public Records of The

The Public Records of the STATE OF CONNECTICUT FROM 1821 TO 1822 VOLUME XXI Edited in accordance with an Act of The General Assembly Douglas M. Arnold Editor Shelby Shapiro Bevi Chagnon Associate Editor Production Consultant Hartford 2015 Published by The Connecticut State Library Kendall F. Wiggin Lizette Pelletier State Librarian State Archivist © 2015 Connecticut State Library PREFACE This volume contains a transcription of the positive actions of the General As- sembly of Connecticut during the years 1821 and 1822. The manuscript which forms the core of this volume—and of the entire Public Records series—is the official record of the acts, resolutions, and appointments made by the General Assembly. It is housed at the Connecticut State Library [CSL] in Hartford in Archives Record Group 1. The records of the 1821 session reproduced here can be found on pages 407–561 of Volume 13 of the manuscript; those for 1822 can be found on pages 8–231 of Volume 14. The appendices to each session reproduce selected supplementary documents culled from the records of the executive department at the CSL and from contemporary newspapers. Time constraints did not permit exhaustive research. The footnotes high- light the major activities of the General Assembly, identify some significant themes and developments, indicate where additional primary source materials can be found in manuscript series at the CSL, and provide information about important public figures. Brief biographies usually appear in footnotes on the first appearance of an individual in a major office and other key figures are occasionally identified when appropriate. Cross-references point to matters discussed elsewhere in this and earlier volumes of the series. Since we have not been able to reference all the material in the collection of bills and peti- tions rejected by the Assembly, researchers are advised to consult the boxes of Rejected Bills at the CSL; the items are arranged by year, and contain much of interest relating to the affairs of towns, churches, schools, turnpike companies, bridge companies, ferries, fisheries, and other entities, as well as individual petitioners. The legislative journals of the House and Senate contain useful information about the timing of legislative bills and appointments. This is the first full volume of the Public Records that has not had the ben- efit of the fully-indexed manuscript series known as the Connecticut Archives. Hence we have relied on the manuscripts collected in the General Assem- bly Papers, the Executive Journal, and the Governor’s Correspondence, also housed at the CSL. These collections contain materials that would have been included in the Connecticut Archives if that series had been continued past 1820. As in the case of the Rejected Bills, researchers are advised to consult the General Assembly Papers carefully for additional supporting material related to specific legislative matters, including appointments to office, the School Fund, routine militia business, finances of public and private corporations, and requests from aliens, prisoners, and other individuals. The Executive Journal and the Governor’s Correspondence contain useful material about the day-to- day operations of the executive branch of state government, including the periods when the General Assembly was not in session. These files document, among other matters, Governor Wolcott’s close involvement as commander in iv PREFACE chief with the affairs of the state militia, his correspondence with federal of- ficials, and his letters of reference and recommendation for individuals. The years covered by this volume witnessed a further reduction in the amount of space contemporary newspapers allotted to the coverage of legislative affairs, no doubt because the issues before the General Assembly were not considered as momentous as those matters of constitutional, ecclesiasti- cal, and fiscal reform which dominated discussions during the preceding four years. Still, the newspapers are an invaluable supplementary source. Our general practice in recent volumes has been to rely on two newspaper versions of the legislative proceedings and debates for each session, one from a paper associated with the Federalist party, the other from a Republican-Tolerationist journal. In 1821 and 1822, however, the newspapers combined their efforts at reportage across party lines, with the result that we have simply selected the two most complete versions, those of the Connecticut Mirror in 1821 and the Connecticut Courant in 1822, both Hartford newspapers which had a traditionally Federalist slant, to provide basic information about proceedings and debates. We have supplemented those accounts with editorials and other opinion pieces from a range of additional newspapers, including the American Mercury and The Times in Hartford and the Connecticut Herald in New Haven, all of which were traditionally Republican or Tolerationist. Researchers interested in specific legislative matters are advised to consult the newspapers themselves, since there is much information we have been unable to include. Finally, a decision was made to conduct no research in manuscripts relating to individual political figures, except for Governor Oliver Wolcott’s formal executive papers at the CSL. We hope that the timely publication of the basic historical documents contained in this volume will compensate for this lack of completeness. Support for this project has come from the Connecticut State Library. Ken- dall F. Wiggin, the State Librarian, made the decision to fund the production, printing, and distribution of the volumes. The funding itself is from the Histori- cal Documents Preservation Fund, administered by the Connecticut State Li- brary through the Office of Public Records Administrator LeAnn Power. Mark Jones, Paul Baran, Allen Ramsey, and Lizette Pelletier of the State Archvist’s Office served as project liaisons. We deeply regret Paul Baran’s untimely death during the time that the volume was being edited. We appreciate the efficient fiscal support of Mark Smith at the CSL and Brian Saczawa at the DAS Busi- ness Office. We are especially indebted to Carolyn Picciano and the staff of the History and Genealogy Unit of the State Library for their expert help in using their collections. In addition, the staff of the Library of Congress provided invaluable assistance. Professor Richard Buel, Jr., Professor Walter Woodward, the Connecticut State Historian, and Professor Christopher Collier, State His- torian Emeritus, reviewed and made key suggestions for the volume’s Intro- duction. Any errors that remain in the volume are, of course, the responsibility PREFACE v of the volume’s editor-in-chief. Ace Transcription Service of Washington, D.C. achieved an exemplary level of accuracy in the initial document transcriptions. Bevi Chagnon of PubCom, Inc., of Takoma Park, Maryland, provided invaluable design and production services. I especially want to acknowledge Shelby Shapiro for his major contributions to the core editorial tasks of the volume. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Margo for her love and support through- out the project. ***** The printed format for acts, resolutions, lists of appointments, and the like follows standards set in previous volumes of this long-established series, as does textual policy. In some instances, noted here, the edition departs from a literal rendition of the text, and the present volume maintains those established practices in the interest of consistency of presentation and cost effectiveness. Thus, the lists of state representatives follow a standard format, with the names of delegates for each town rendered in sequence and with commas and the word “from” silently inserted. Similarly, in the appointment lists for justices of the peace repetitious language has been omitted and names consolidated into single paragraphs. In addition, line spaces inconsistently inserted by the copyist between sections of acts and between resolutions and their attendant preambles have been silently removed. The following points are an expanded version of the textual principles for the presentation of handwritten manuscripts enunciated by Dorothy Lipson in Volume XII of this series and elaborated in practice in Volumes XIII–XX: 1. The original nineteenth-century spelling is retained. Likewise, such idio- syncrasies as the mixing of Roman and Arabic numerals in the numbering of sections in legislative acts are preserved. 2. By a convention of the series, periods and commas are silently added, as appropriate, at the end of sentences, after abbreviations, and for words in a series; they are silently removed after usages such as “2d” and “15th.” Pa- rentheses and quotation marks are silently closed, unless our reading is highly conjectural, when they are bracketed. Quotation marks are kept around names of acts in the text where the copyist included them. On occasion, bracketed punctuation is added for clarity, usually a semicolon or a question mark. Other- wise, the original punctuation is not altered. The most challenging issue in rep- resenting manuscript punctuation is the proliferation of indistinct and ambigu- ous marks within sentences. Recognizing that the use of commas was more generous in this period than in modern practice, we have retained these marks wherever they make grammatical sense; however, we have silently omitted them where it appears that the copyist simply dropped pen to paper without intending a punctuation mark. vi PREFACE 3. Superscripts

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