The Hartford Wits were a group of young writers from Connecticut in the late 18th century including John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, and Lemuel Hopkins.
Their dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation appeared in The Anarchiad in 1786 and 1787, written by Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Trumbull (the oldest Wit), and Hopkins.
In satirizing democratic society, this mock-epic promoted the federal union delineated by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
Trumbull was the only member of the Wits who did not join the Continental Army, but he wrote the satiric poem, "M’Fingal", in which the British cause was mocked.
Dwight became the eighth president of Yale University in 1795 and used his position as a platform from which to continue his attacks on the enemies of social order.