themselves internally as “compacts.”
5. The oath did not cease to be politically relevant but became the basis for creating and identifying citizens outside of the formal documents of foundation and sometimes in place of them (documents 4, 5, 9, 15, 16, and 47 are examples). During the colonial era it was not unusual for an oath to be used as the entire founding document. Anyone taking the oath was effectively performing the same act as signing the end of a political covenant or compact. Beyond the promise to be a good citizen, however, these “founding” documents had little further specification. Many colonial foundational documents have oaths for citizens and elected officials internal to them in addition to other foundation elements. Today we still use an oath to produce citizens and to activate the formalities of citizenship (such as the oath-taking in court), so in a real sense we still view our Constitution as equivalent to a covenant because it rests on the actual or implied oaths of all citizens. That is, because new citizens are required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution, it must be assumed that citizens born here did something that was equivalent to an explicit oath at some point in their life.
6. During the colonial era, the terms “agreement” and “combination” were used interchangeably with “covenant” and “compact,” both internally and in the titles of documents, to describe what were in fact either political covenants or political compacts.
7. With few exceptions, when the covenant or compact forms were used it was the people who were acting.
8. During the colonial era, when the legislature acted in a founding or foundation amending capacity, the resulting documents were interchangeably termed an “ordinance,” an “act,” or a “code.”
9. With few exceptions, the content of the ordinance form was limited to one or both of the last two foundation elements.
10. During the colonial and early national eras, the terms “frame,” “plan,” and “constitution” were used interchangeably to describe that part of a political compact that created the institutions of decision making.
11. In approximately two-thirds of the colonial foundation documents the last two founding elements are separated, i.e., one element is found in a document without the other. In approximately one-third of the documents these elements are found together in the same document. Thus, colonists were twice as likely to separate these two elements as they were to combine them, which later led to some confusion as to whether state constitutions should include bills of rights. Some combined these founding elements in the body of the document; many separated the two elements into two sections, calling only that section containing the last element the “constitution”; and some did not contain a bill of rights at all. It is interesting that when the elements were combined in the early state constitutions, the bill of rights was always at the front of the document immediately after or as part of the preamble.
12. The colonists were willing to let the legislatures speak for them in matters of self-definition and the creation of governmental institutions but not when it came to forming themselves into a people or founding a government. The exception to the latter is found in those documents founding a federation or confederation of existing towns or colonies. This distinction led to the natural expectation that legislatures could write state constitutions that addressed only the last two elements. When these documents were complete compacts and therefore included the other elements as well, the expectation was that the documents should be approved by the people as well. When the first group of elements was not present, popular ratification was not always expected.
Part 4
EDITORIAL DECISIONS
Whenever one is faced with transcribing historical documents there are a number of decisions that need to be made. One is whether to use the original spelling and grammar. In the case of these documents it was decided to introduce as few emendations as possible and to identify the emendations that might have been introduced earlier by others. One emendation introduced by this transcriber involves the occasional deletion of lists of names at the end of a document. These instances are noted by comments in brackets. Anything else in brackets constitutes an alteration introduced by an earlier transcriber that this one cannot eliminate by reference to the actual text. In many instances this is because the original text no longer exists and we are limited to some transcription in its place. The use of a bracket sometimes indicates a blank or an indecipherable word or words in the original text. In some cases the text that was transcribed had been systematically altered by an earlier transcriber. For example, the oldest surviving text may have been printed during the eighteenth century using the printer’s convention of substituting the German u for v or i for j. For a while it was common practice when transcribing to emend these printer’s conventions, and where an earlier transcriber has done so and that is the text being here transcribed, such transpositions are noted in the introductory remarks to the document or in the footnote at the end.
In every instance the effort has been made to locate a facsimile or accurate transcription for each document. Because there are often competing versions, the texts that are being used for transcription here have been identified in a footnote at the end and then faithfully transcribed. The original text often does not have a formal title at the beginning. In these instances the title used is either the one by which the document has traditionally come to be known, or else a simple descriptive title has been attached. Such traditional or descriptive titles are placed in brackets; any title not in brackets is in the original document.
If one is going to engage in close textual analysis it is crucial that the complete text be made available. This is the practice followed in all but a few documents in this volume. Several of these, such as the Connecticut Code of Law, are so lengthy that to reproduce them completely would extend this volume by several hundred pages. In those limited instances where the complete text is not transcribed, that fact is noted, what is missing is identified, and the place where the complete text can be found is indicated. The editing of these few documents has been based on the presence of repetitive material or material in a given text that is judged at best marginal to the political content. In the occurrences where editing has been used, it was judged better to present a partial text of an important but little-known document rather than to make exclusions because of length.
The order of the documents in the book is based on the universal and essentially invariant practice in early American history to list the colonies (and later the states) in their geographical order from north to south and then to arrange the documents for each colony or state in the historical order of their adoption—from earliest to most recent. Reproducing the documents simply in historical order would result in mixing up those from different colonies, which would make an examination of developments in a given colony quite difficult. Also, because the central colonies were developed much later than those in New England or the South and the latter two areas did not develop at the same rate, a simple historical ordering would also juxtapose documents that had in common only the accident of date. Nor would ordering the colonies alphabetically serve any purpose because it would place, for example, Rhode Island just ahead of South Carolina—a juxtaposition that would lose the benefits of a direct geographical juxtaposition of Rhode Island with Connecticut and South Carolina with Virginia.
Finally, a note is in order concerning dates. The calendar in use through most of the seventeenth century began the new year on March 24—the spring equinox. This resulted in every day between January 1 and March 23 being a year earlier than on our current calendar. Historians frequently list a double date such as February 19, 1634/1635 to indicate that it is 1635 according to our system of reckoning but 1634 according to the system used by the colonists. In every instance in this volume the date given in the title of a document reflects our current calendar system. The date internal to the document may reflect one year earlier. Also, it was common to list a date as “the second day of the first month” or “the second day of the seventh month.” Because the New Year fell in March, the second day of the first month translates as March 2, whereas
