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Illustrated Episode · Volume I, chapter 25 · 31 May 1638

Authority by free consent

A man in black stands at a plain wooden table in a small log meeting room, one hand raised, while townspeople sit on rough benches and a young man writes in a notebook, in shafts of daylight.
Hartford, 31 May 1638. In a log meetinghouse, Thomas Hooker preaches on a verse from Deuteronomy. The foundation of authority, he tells his hearers, is laid in the free consent of the people. A young man takes it down in shorthand. Rothbard calls Hooker scarcely a libertarian and says Connecticut stayed as intolerant as Massachusetts. Yet Hooker largely inspired its Fundamental Orders. Chapter 25 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

On Thursday 31 May 1638 Thomas Hooker, minister of the river town of Hartford, gave his midweek lecture on a verse from Deuteronomy about choosing wise men to be rulers. A young listener, Henry Wolcott Jr. of Windsor, took it down in shorthand on his knee, and in his notes Hooker says that the foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of the people. Rothbard calls it Hooker's election-day sermon and sets it beside the Fundamental Orders of January 1639, which joined Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield under a General Court with the governor subordinate to it, and which he says Hooker largely inspired. He is blunt about the rest. Hooker was scarcely a libertarian, and Connecticut was not significantly less intolerant than Massachusetts: it punished idolatry with death and taxed everyone for the Puritan church. Hooker himself never extended free consent to matters of conscience. The words are in Wolcott's notes all the same, spoken in a log room with an earth floor to farmers on plank benches, with an armed man standing guard at the open door.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 25, pp. 208-213. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. James Hammond Trumbull, 'Abstracts of Two Sermons by Rev. Thomas Hooker,' Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vol. 1 (Hartford, 1860), pp. 19-21, from Henry Wolcott Jr.'s shorthand notebook, as quoted in Besso 2012. Primary source
  3. Michael Besso, 'Thomas Hooker and His May 1638 Sermon,' Early American Studies 10:1 (Winter 2012), pp. 194-226, esp. pp. 194-195, 202-203. Secondary source
  4. 'First Meeting House, Hartford Conn.', Digital Commonwealth catalog entry (Wolcott Cutler collection; accessed 2026-09-29): built 1635-36; logs, board shutters, earth floor, thatch 'probably'; no contemporary description; services guarded by armed men. Secondary source
  5. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 'Massachusetts Dress Ways'. Secondary source
  6. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. IV, pt. 1 (Boston, 1854), pp. 60-61 (apparel law of 1651). Primary source
  7. Pilgrim Hall Museum, 'Arms & Armor' (accessed 2026-09-29). Secondary source