HARTFORD, Conn. & JERUSALEM — The idea that liberty should reign in America didn’t start with the Declaration of Independence or the 4th of July, 1776. The seeds were planted more than a hundred years before in the soil of the New World. One of the most important was in what would become Connecticut.
A vast wilderness awaited the hundred, hardy Christians who left Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1636 with the Rev. Thomas Hooker to settle what is now Hartford, Connecticut.
In such a wild land, they asked the popular pastor how they should govern it. What Rev. Hooker preached on May 31st, 1638 was so profound it “sowed the seeds of free Constitutional government in America.” That’s what it says at the base of a statue of Hooker that stands in Hartford to commemorate the man who helped form a free nation.
‘Free Consent of the People’
The key words in that sermon were ‘”the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”
In other words, not that a king or emperor should rule them, but the people themselves should be the rulers.
His pushing this idea is why some historians have labeled Hooker “the father
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