Connecticut forged ahead under this scheme of government until 1818, when the first true constitution was adopted. In 1816, Connecticut was entirely in the control of the Federalist Party and the established Congregationalist Church. Connecticut was known as "the land of steady habits" for its custom of re-electing those in power until they died; the Democratic-Republican party had been organized in 1804, yet Connecticut remained one of the last holdouts of the Federalist party in America. Once Massachusetts passed the 1811 "Religious Freedom Act," Connecticut was last state to effectively have an established state religion in practice and not just on paper; it also had the only Constitution going back to the days of the British Empire. In 1815, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and members of other dissident denominations to the established Congregationalist church combined with the Democratic-Republican party to form the Toleration Party. In 1816, they held a convention and ran a slate of candidates. In 1817, they took control of the state Assembly (lower house), and elected Oliver Wolcott, Jr. as Governor and Jonathan Ingersoll as Lieutenant-governor. In 1639, a year after the founding of the state, the Rev. Thomas Hooker had given a sermon that formed the basis of Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the first state Constitution. Since then, an "Anniversary Election Sermon" was given at the Center Church in Hartford to celebrate the fusion of church and state. A procession of militia, assemblymen, and clerics from all over the state would move through Hartford; then a prominent cleric would preach a political sermon to the assembly. One measure of the event's importance is the attention given to the sometimes long-winded sermons; President Ezra Stiles of Yale preached one in 1783 that lasted five hours and was 99 pages when printed. Governor Wolcott knew that the Toleration Party would soon have the votes to take a slim majority in the upper house, after the spring elections of 1818. He asked Episcopalian Rev. Harry Croswell to give the politically important Anniversary Election Sermon the next year. Croswell was a former Federalist crusading journalist who had been sued for seditious libel by the Jefferson-party in New York in the famous "People v. Croswell" case. He had entirely abandoned politics for religion; he was now the Rector of the large and influential Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven. But he did not give the expected triumphant political sermon, or yet another standard election sermon of the sort that had been delivered since almost the founding of Connecticut in 1638.