Blue Laws (Connecticut)

The Blue Laws of the Colony of Connecticut are an invented set of harsh statutes governing conduct in the Puritan colony, listed in a history of Connecticut that was published in 1781 in London by the Reverend Samuel Peters, an Anglican who had been forced to leave America. Peters' book popularized the term "blue laws", referring to laws restricting activities on Sunday.

Peters was an Anglican priest hostile to the cause of American independence and had been forced to flee to London in late 1774, shortly before the Revolutionary War broke out; he made up 45 harsh laws as a hoax to discredit America as backwards and fanatical, and in 1781 published them in a book called A General History of Connecticut, which contains numerous other tall tales.

According to Peters the blue laws "were never suffered to be printed", but especially in the 19th century they were confused with the Code of 1650 of the colonists of Connecticut and with the statutes drafted in 1655 by Governor Theophilus Eaton for the then unconnected Colony of New Haven, for which he drew on the writings of the Reverend John Cotton and the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and which were printed in London in blue covers for the use of the colonists.

Peters was probably the first to popularize the term "blue laws". Its etymology is unclear, but he implied a relationship to the expletive "bloody", saying that they "were very properly termed Blue Laws, i.e. Bloody Laws, for they were all sanctified with excommunication, confiscation, fines, banishment, whippings, cutting off the ears, burning the tongue, and death."

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