3. If indeed there is no Constitution, then the oath which has been
administered in your freemen's meetings for twenty years, by which each
man has sworn "to be true and faithful to the Constitution" of the
state, is worse than impious profanation of the name of God--then your
judges, magistrates and jurors have stripped men of their property,
condemned some to Newgate and others to the Post, the Pillory and the
Gallows without a warrant, and are therefore murderers.--O thou God of
order in this our condition!!! But,

4. We have a Constitution--a free and happy Constitution. It was to our
fathers like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land--it has enabled
them to transmit to us a fair and glorious inheritance--if we suffer
revolutionists to rob us of this birth right "then we are bastards and
not sons."

It is a fact as well authenticated as the settlement of the state, that
a Constitution was formed by the people of the then colony of
Connecticut, before the Charter of King Charles. This Charter was a
guarantee of that Constitution. Trumbull's history of Connecticut gives
us this Constitution and its origin. On our separation from Great-
Britain, the people, thro' their representatives, made the following
declaration on this subject:

"An Act containing an Abstract and Declaration of the Rights and
Privileges of the People of this State, and securing the same. THE
People of this State, being by the Providence of God, free and
independent, have the sole and exclusive Right of governing themselves
as a free, sovereign, and independent State; and having from their
Ancestors derived a free and excellent Constitution of Government
whereby the Legislature depends on the free and annual Election of the