What Connecticut Gave to the Revolution
The one you usually picture happened somewhere else - a green in Massachusetts, a hall in Philadelphia, a crossing on the Delaware. Meanwhile, in Connecticut, one small state was the Arsenal of the Revolution and the Provisions State that kept Washington’s army fed, secretly armed the victory at Saratoga that brought France into the war, and drew up the compromise that became the U.S. Senate - and paid for it in towns burned to the ground.
The Spark (1765 – 1775)
Before a single shot, Connecticut stopped the king.
The Stamp Act. Parliament taxed the colonies directly for the first time. The cry “no taxation without representation” and the secret Sons of Liberty spread from Boston through all thirteen colonies.
1,000 riders, one road
A mounted column of five hundred to a thousand Sons of Liberty blocked the king’s stamp man near Wethersfield and would not let him pass until he resigned. No shot. No surrender. Just a colony that drew a line across a road.
Sources: Journal of the American Revolution; CT SAR
When the alarm came, the farms emptied into the army.
The shot heard round the world. At Lexington and Concord the first shots of the war were fired, and the militia rose to besiege the British in Boston.
100 miles, on the word of Lexington
News of Lexington reached northeastern Connecticut, and a Pomfret farmer, Israel Putnam, rode roughly a hundred miles to Cambridge and rose to help command at Bunker Hill - leaving, the story goes, his plough standing in the furrow.
Sources: American Battlefield Trust; George Washington’s Mount Vernon
America’s first offensive victory of the war - and a son of Connecticut helped seize it.
Three weeks into the war. The rebellion ringing Boston needed two things it did not have: heavy cannon, and a victory to believe in.
Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold - the latter a son of Norwich, Connecticut - seized Fort Ticonderoga, the first American offensive victory; its captured cannon were hauled to Boston and broke the siege.
Sources: American Battlefield Trust
The Cause (1776)
Most of the colonies’ cannon were cast in a Connecticut hill town.
An army with almost no cannon. The colonies could raise men, but they could barely cast heavy guns - and an army without artillery could not hope to win.
80% of the colonies’ cannon
The iron furnace at Salisbury - built by Ethan Allen before he took Ticonderoga, and seized for the war by Governor Trumbull - cast roughly 80% of the cannon made in the colonies, and earned the name “Arsenal of the Revolution”. Its first gun was cast in May 1776; by the war’s end the furnace had turned out some 850 cannon.
Sources: ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities); Salisbury Association
They tore down the king in New York. Connecticut melted him into bullets.
Thirteen colonies declare themselves free. In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress declared the thirteen colonies free and independent - four of the signers were Connecticut men, and Roger Sherman helped draft it.
42,088 cartridges cast from a king
Days after four Connecticut men signed the Declaration, the toppled lead statue of George III was hauled to Litchfield and cast into 42,088 musket cartridges - counted in Oliver Wolcott’s own account book. The king came back as gunfire.
Sources: U.S. National Archives; Journal of the American Revolution
A schoolteacher gave the only life he had.
Washington needs eyes. Driven off Long Island and out of New York, Washington had almost no way to learn the British army’s plans - and sent for a volunteer to slip behind the lines.
21 years old, hanged in New York
Nathan Hale of Coventry crossed into British-held New York, was caught, and was hanged as a spy at twenty-one. His reported last words - “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” - were maybe never spoken, and outlived him anyway.
Sources: ConnecticutHistory.org
A Connecticut farm boy built the world’s first attack submarine.
The British fleet owns the harbor. The Royal Navy held New York Harbor - a wall of warships the ragged American army had no way to fight.
David Bushnell of Saybrook, a Yale graduate, built the Turtle - a one-man submersible, the first ever used in war - and on the night of September 6, 1776, a sergeant from Lyme steered it beneath HMS Eagle, the British flagship, in New York Harbor. The charge would not bite into the hull, and the pilot slipped away in the dark. It failed - and it was a hundred years ahead of its time.
Sources: ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities); George Washington’s Mount Vernon
The War Comes Home (1777 – 1780)
They brought the war to Connecticut’s door. Connecticut answered.
The turning point. Far to the north, the American victory at Saratoga brought France into the war as an ally - the turning point of the Revolution.
British troops landed and burned the Danbury supply depot; at Ridgefield - the only inland battle fought in Connecticut - General David Wooster fell, mortally wounded, holding the line.
Sources: American Battlefield Trust; ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities)
The man who secretly armed Saratoga was a Wethersfield merchant - and it ruined him.
France joins the war. After Saratoga, France allied openly with the United States - the foreign help without which the war was very likely lost.
Silas Deane of Wethersfield, Congress’s first diplomat sent abroad, funneled the French arms - some 200 cannon and gear for 30,000 men - that helped make the victory at Saratoga possible. Then a rival accused him of profiteering, France withheld the records that might have cleared him, and Congress recalled him in disgrace; he died years later aboard ship, broke and homeward bound, in circumstances never fully explained.
The army survived on what one small colony kept sending.
The winter that nearly ended it. At Valley Forge the Continental Army froze and starved through the winter of 1777–78 - thousands of men without food, shoes, or pay.
1,000+ war councils, one small green
Connecticut earned its nickname the hard way. Governor Jonathan Trumbull - the only colonial governor to back the Revolution - ran the war’s supply effort from a converted store on the Lebanon green, where his Council of Safety met more than a thousand times to keep the army fed, clothed, and armed. Hartford’s Jeremiah Wadsworth ran the supply day-to-day as Commissary General - Washington called his provisions “good and ample” - and went on to feed Rochambeau’s French army too. By tradition it supplied close to 60% of the army’s provisions - the name that stuck: the Provisions State.
Sources: Connecticut State Library; ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities)
Connecticut had its own Valley Forge - it just has the quieter name.
The army’s deadliest enemy was winter. Valley Forge had nearly destroyed the Continental Army the winter before; cold and hunger in camp killed more men than the battles did.
3,000 men in the Redding huts
In the winter of 1778–79 about three thousand of Putnam’s troops camped at Redding to guard the Danbury supply depot and the coast - many of them men who had already survived Valley Forge - through cold, short rations, and a near-mutiny their general talked down. It is remembered now as Connecticut’s Valley Forge.
Sources: American Battlefield Trust
They burned the coast to break its will. It didn’t work.
A war without end in sight. In its fifth year the war ground on, the main fight shifting south toward Georgia and the Carolinas, the outcome still anyone’s to claim.
500,000 acres - the Firelands
General Tryon torched New Haven, Fairfield, and Norwalk, town by town. The colony did not quit. In 1792 the state reimbursed the fire sufferers with half a million acres in Ohio - the Firelands - divided among them by their losses - said to be the only time civilians were ever repaid for war losses in land.
Sources: George Washington’s Mount Vernon; Connecticut State Library
The Union Forms (1781 – 1782)
The road that won American independence ran straight through Connecticut.
The march to Yorktown. Washington and his French allies turned south for the campaign that would trap Cornwallis on the Virginia coast.
1 / 5 of the whole road to victory
Six thousand French troops under Rochambeau marched the full width of Connecticut to join Washington and win at Yorktown - one-fifth of the entire route, more than any other state. The same summer carried a shadow: Arnold, now a traitor in British uniform, burned New London - punishing the harbor whose privateers had been preying on British shipping.
Sources: National Park Service; Connecticut DEEP; ConnecticutHistory.org
The man presiding over Congress that day was from Norwich.
A nation gets its name. On March 1, 1781, the last state ratified the Articles of Confederation, and the thirteen states became, in law, a single nation: the United States.
Samuel Huntington signed the Declaration as one of Connecticut’s delegates and was President of the Continental Congress when the Articles of Confederation took effect on March 1, 1781. From that day his title became “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” - which is why Connecticut claims him, with a careful wink, as the first president of the United States.
Sources: Connecticut Museum of History; National Constitution Center; Connecticut SAR
Connecticut’s reach into Pennsylvania became the first court case ever fought between two American states.
Could the states settle their own quarrels?. Independence raised a question the colonies had never had to answer: when two American states claimed the same ground, who would decide - and would the loser obey?
Under its old sea-to-sea charter, Connecticut chartered a town called Westmoreland in 1774 and attached it to Litchfield County - two hundred miles west, inside what is now Pennsylvania. The claim turned bloody - on July 3, 1778, a Loyalist and Iroquois force overwhelmed the Connecticut settlers there, mostly old men and boys, and hundreds were killed. But it ended in a courtroom, not on a field: the Decree of Trenton in 1782 was the first dispute between two states ever decided by a federal court under the Articles of Confederation - it gave the land to Pennsylvania, and Connecticut obeyed. The rule of law between American states began here.
Sources: ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities); Connecticut State Library; Founders Online (National Archives); Journal of the American Revolution
A New Nation (1783 – 1787)
By name, in a treaty with a king: free, sovereign, and independent.
Independence won. The Treaty of Paris ended the war; Britain acknowledged the United States as free and independent.
The Treaty of Paris’ very first article has the British Crown acknowledge the thirteen states - Connecticut among them, by name - to be “free, sovereign and independent”. The roadblock of 1765 was now a sovereign state.
Sources: U.S. National Archives; Avalon Project
A West Hartford schoolteacher decided America should have its own.
A country with no words of its own. A new nation still spelled, read, and learned from British books - its very language on loan from the country it had just left.
100M copies of his speller
Noah Webster was born in West Hartford and schooled at Yale. In 1783 he published the speller known by its blue cover, convinced the new country needed its own textbooks and a language to unite around: “Let us … establish a national language as well as a national government.” It sold on the order of 100 million copies and taught generations of Americans to read. His American dictionary followed in 1828.
The United States Senate exists because of Connecticut.
A new nation, nearly broken. In Philadelphia the Constitutional Convention deadlocked: should states be represented by population, or equally? The union itself hung on the answer.
1 vote - the entire margin
Two Connecticut men - Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Windsor - proposed the answer: a House by population, a Senate equal per state, adopted by a single vote. Roger Sherman alone signed all four of the nation’s founding documents - the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. The small colony that began with a roadblock had designed the Congress we still have.
Sources: U.S. Senate Historical Office; ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities)
The man who painted them was a Connecticut soldier.
How a nation pictures itself. The four scenes in the Capitol Rotunda - the Declaration, Saratoga, Yorktown, and Washington laying down his sword - are how Americans still picture their own founding.
John Trumbull was born in Lebanon, son of the governor who ran Connecticut’s war from that same green. Early in the war he served as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp, sketching the British defenses; decades later Congress had him paint the four great scenes of the Revolution for the Capitol Rotunda. His Declaration is the image engraved on the back of the two-dollar bill. The father supplied the war; the son painted its memory.
Sources: Architect of the Capitol; Today in Connecticut History (CT State Library); Architect of the Capitol
More than the famous names.
Connecticut’s 1784 act of gradual abolition freed no one already enslaved, in the New England state that then held the most enslaved people; slavery was not fully abolished here until 1848. The record holds these too:
- Lemuel Haynes - a Black minuteman who stood garrison at Ticonderoga and, in 1776, wrote “Liberty Further Extended,” arguing the liberty the Revolution claimed had to reach the enslaved; he became the first Black man ordained to the ministry in the United States.
- Venture Smith - carried through the Middle Passage as a child, he bought his own freedom and then his family’s and settled in East Haddam as a landowner and trader; in 1798 he published one of the earliest African American autobiographies, calling his freedom not a gift of the age but something he had earned by his own labor.
- Jordan Freeman and Lambert Latham - Black men, died defending Fort Griswold.
- An all-Black company served in the Connecticut Line, some of its men winning their freedom by enlisting.
- Hannah Bunce Watson ran the Connecticut Courant, the largest paper in the colonies, through the war as a widow.
- The Loyalists who chose the other side were jailed underground at New-Gate, a converted copper mine that was America’s first state prison.
Sources: ConnecticutHistory.org; National Park Service; Gilder Lehrman Institute; ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities); Library of Congress; ConnecticutHistory.org (CT Humanities); Connecticut DEEP; Connecticut State Library; CT Women’s Hall of Fame; Connecticut SHPO; ConnecticutHistory.org