This remarkable document, though deserving all the encomiums passed upon it, was not a constitution in any modern sense of the word and established nothing fundamentally new, because the form of government it outlined differed only in certain particulars from that of Massachusetts and Plymouth. It was made up of two parts, a preamble, which is a plantation covenant like that signed in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, and a series of laws or orders passed either separately or together by the court which drafted them. This court was a lawmaking body and it made public the laws when they were passed. That this body of laws or, as we may not improperly call it, this frame of government was ratified, as Trumbull says, by all the free planters assembled at Hartford on January 14, 1639, is not impossible, though such action would seem unnecessary as the court was a representative body, and unlikely as the time of year was not favorable for holding a mass-meeting at Hartford. Later courts never hesitated to change the articles without referring the changes to the planters. The articles simply confirmed the system of magistrates and deputies already in existence and added provisions for the election of a governor and deputy governor--who had not hitherto been chosen because of doubts regarding the jurisdiction of the English lords and gentlemen.
In matters of detail the Connecticut system differed from that of Massachusetts in three particulars: it imposed no religious test for those entitled to vote, but required only that the governor be a church member, though it is probable that in practice only those would be admitted freemen who were covenanted Christians; it gave less power to the magistrates and more to the freemen; and it placed the election of the governor in the hands of the voters, limiting their choice only to a church member and a former magistrate, and forbidding reëlection until after the expiration of a year. Later the qualifications of a freeman were made such that only about one in every two or three voted in the seventeenth century; the powers of the magistrates were increased; and the governor was allowed to succeed himself. Connecticut was less democratic than Rhode Island in the seventeenth century and, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of the inhabitants exercised the freeman's privilege of voting for the higher officials. By no stretch of the imagination can the political conditions in any of the New England colonies be called popular or democratic. Government was in the hands of a very few men.