COLONIZATION AND THE COLONISTS.
17. References.
Bibliographies.--C. Lucas, _Introduction to Historical Geography of British
Colonies_, vii., viii.; Winsor, _Narrative and Critical History_, III., V.;
Larned, _Literature of American History_, 67-76; Avery, _United States_,
II. 409-411; E. Greene, _Provincial America_, ch. xix.; Channing and Hart,
_Guide_, §§ 92, 104, 110.
Historical Maps.--No. 2, this volume (_Epoch Maps_, No. 2); MacCoun,
Winsor, and Avery.
General Accounts.--Colonization: Lucas, as above (colonial policies of the
European states); J. Seeley, _Expansion of England_, chs. iii., iv.; A.
Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, chapter "Of Colonies"; H. Morris, _History of
Colonization_; A. Snow, _Administration of Dependencies_, chs.
i.-v.--English movement: G. Beer, _Origin of British Colonial System_; H.
Merivale, _Colonization and the Colonies_; H. Egerton, _Short History of
British Colonial Policy_, and _Origin and Growth of English Colonies_; W.
Woodward, _Expansion of British Empire_; C. Dilke, _Greater Britain_, and
_Problems of Greater Britain_; E. Creasy, _Imperial and Colonial
Constitutions_; Mill, _Colonial Constitutions_; J. Toner, _Colonies of
North America_; J. Marsden, _Early Puritans_.--Free institutions imported
by American colonists, and colonial government generally: Greene,
_Provincial Governor_; E. Eggleston, _Transit of Civilization_, and
_Beginners of a Nation_; A. Low, _American People_; Wilson, _The State_, §§
832-864; E. Freeman, _English People in its Three Homes_, lecture vi.; H.
Taylor, _English Constitution_, 15-48; Channing, _Town and County
Government_; C. Bishop, _History of Elections in the Colonies_.
Contemporary Accounts.--Published records (chiefly by historical societies)
of the several American colonies. See also Hakluyt, _Voyages_; Holinshed,
_Chronicles_.--Reprints: E. Arber, _Pilgrim Colonists_; A. Brown, _Genesis
of United States_; W. Macdonald, _Documentary Source Book of American
History_; _American History told by Contemporaries_, I. part iii.
18. Colonial Policy of European States.
The time had now come for making the first permanent English settlement in
America. Before we proceed to the story of that famous enterprise, however,
it will be well hastily to summarize the colonial policies of those
European States which have at various times established plantations in the
New World. It will be well also to know what sort of people were the seed
of English colonization, and what institutions they brought with them as
the foundations of American commonwealths.
Sidenote: Motives of colonization.
Four motives, working either singly or conjointly, lead to
colonization,--the spirit of adventurous enterprise, the desire for wealth,
economic or political discontent, and religious sentiment. For instance,
Columbus was quite as much a religious enthusiast desirous of spreading the
gospel in new lands as he was an adventurer; the southern group of English
colonies in America was in the main the outgrowth of a trading spirit
working in conjunction with economic distress in England; and the Puritan
migration to New England was impelled by economic and political causes, as
well as by religious.
Sidenote: Colonization is the expansion of the parent State, though
early viewed as a source of revenue to it.
In a large sense the planting of a colony means merely the expansion of the
parent State. But this was not the view formerly taken by European
governments. For a long time colonies were treated as dependencies of the
mother-country, existing chiefly to furnish revenue to the latter, either
directly in taxes or indirectly in increased trade. It was because the
English colonists in America, taking a broad view of their relationship to
Great Britain, wished to be treated as free Englishmen in Greater Britain,
and not merely as revenue-producing subjects, that they revolted in 1776.
Colonial history is nearly everywhere the history of this obtuseness of
vision on the part of the home government, and it is full of most painful
details.
19. Spanish and Portuguese Policy.
Sidenote: Spain.
It chanced that the American discoveries made by Spain were in the region
of rich and physically weak nations. Consequently she won her vast
dominions on this continent by sweeping conquest rather than by commercial
growth. This was in sharp contrast with the slow, steady planting of New
England, where the settlers were obliged to conquer a sterile soil and
brave a rigid climate, where they were hemmed about with savage neighbors
who disputed their establishment, and where they met as well the sharp
opposition, first of the Dutch, and then of the French,--the latter, in
their desire for the Mississippi valley, jealously endeavoring to restrict
Englishmen to the Atlantic slope. The Spaniards were brave, and they could
rule with severity. But they thirsted for adventure, conquest, and wealth,
for which their appetite was early encouraged; their progress in Mexico,
Peru, and the West Indies had been too rapid and brilliant for them to be
satisfied with the dull life and patient development of an agricultural
colony. Had they known in advance the conditions of success on the North
American mainland, it is probable that we should never have been obliged to
chronicle the splendid but disastrous expeditions of Narvaez and De Soto.
They would doubtless have made no attempt to subdue a land which offered
nothing for such appetites as theirs. Their aims were sordid, their State
was loosely knit, their commercial policy was rigidly exclusive, their
morals were lax, and their treatment of the savages was cruel, despite the
tendency of the colonists to amalgamate with the latter, and thus to
descend in the scale of civilization. The effect of the specie so easily
acquired in Mexico and Peru was to make Spain rapidly rich without
manufactures; but her people were thereby demoralized and unfitted for the
ordinary channels of employment, and her rulers were corrupted and
enfeebled; in the end the country was impoverished, declining as rapidly as
it had risen. Spain's glory was fast waning both in the New and the Old
World at the close of the sixteenth century, and France was ready, in the
march of events, to succeed to her place as the leading nation of Europe.
France was to be supplanted a century later by England, which was not known
as a great power until the dispersion of the Armada. We have seen that in
this historical progress Spain unwittingly helped England by driving the
French out from Florida and Carolina; nevertheless the decline of Spain
left France the most formidable rival of the English.
Sidenote: Portugal.
The Portuguese, though impelled by a similar passion for conquest, were
more eager for trade than their powerful and often domineering Spanish
neighbors. They oppressed their colonies, were greedy in their commercial
strivings, maltreated the weak natives of Brazil and the West Indies,
lacked administrative ability and the spirit of progress, and suffered from
want of a well-balanced colonial system. The Portuguese colonies in America
had much the same history as the Spanish, their situation being similar.
Brazil was of no great importance until the early years of the nineteenth
century, and made herself independent in 1822,--thus following the lead of
Mexico, which set up an independent government the previous year.
20. French Policy.
Sidenote: France.
France had no permanent colonies in America before the seventeenth century.
Port Royal was planted in 1604, and Quebec not until four years later. The
French were good fighters, enterprising, and while not eager to colonize,
were capable of adapting themselves to new conditions; they had the
capacity to carry their ideas with them across the seas, and they readily
assimilated with the aborigines. While freely intermarrying with the
natives, unlike the Spaniards they rather improved the savage stock than
were degraded by it. They had the faculty of making the red barbarian a
boon companion, and of inducing him to serve them and fight for them;
indeed, since their colonizing enterprises were based on the fur-trade,
their opposition to the advance of English agricultural possession was,
like that of the Indians, fundamental. The French and the savages were
therefore united in a common cause against a common foe.
The Breton and Norman merchant-seamen who went out to Newfoundland and
carried on fisheries and the fur-trade paved the way for the future throng
of emigrants. As colonizers the French worked quietly and persistently, and
would have succeeded, had not their enterprises been ruined by their
unfortunate political and ecclesiastical policy and the mismanagement of
their rulers. Louis XIV. was capricious and extravagant. His court was a
nest of intrigue, corruption, peculation, jealousies, and dissensions. The
Huguenots, who represented the industrial classes, began the French
colonization of America; but we have seen how sadly their government
neglected them in Florida. Finally, when the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes (1685) resulted in driving them from home, and they were eager to
join their lot with that of their countrymen in Canada, priest-rule
prescribed their deliberate exclusion from the colonies,--which they could
have made a New France in fact,--and thus forced them to contribute their
strength to the rival English settlements farther down the coast. The
government was in some respects over-liberal to its North American
colonies,--it aided them financially to an extent unknown elsewhere; but
they were not self-governed, and the king continually interfered with the
commercial companies, which in a large measure controlled the colonies, so
that a favor granted through corrupt influences to-day might to-morrow be
revoked by counter-influences equally corrupt. Paternalism, centralization,
bureaucratic government, official rottenness, instability of system,
religious exclusiveness, and a vicious system of land-tenure were the prime
causes of the ruin of New France; although we must not forget that the
centre of its power had been planted in an inhospitable climate, and that
its far-reaching water-system tempted the inhabitants into the forests and
cultivated the fur-trade at the expense of agriculture, thereby placing the
province at a disadvantage from the start.
21. Dutch and Swedish Policy.
Sidenote: Holland.
The burden of over-population with which Spain, France, and Portugal were
troubled, and to relieve the pressure of which was one of the motives of
their colonizing efforts, was not felt by Holland; for despite the fact
that she sustained a more dense population than any other European State,
her citizens were prosperous. They were not stirred, like neighboring
peoples, by the impulse of emigration. Preeminently a trading nation,
Holland sought commerce rather than extension of empire. Long the chief
carrier of Europe before striking into a broader field, she followed in the
steps of the Portuguese, and by the opening of the seventeenth century took
rank as a colonizing power. Her most fruitful labors were in the East
rather than in the West. It was in the attempt to find the northwest
passage to India that Hudson discovered the river which bears his name.
With the Dutch, though religious reformers, religion was secondary to
trade. So long as trade was good, they were patient under insult and
outrage. Individually they made but little impress upon the community.
Commerce was chiefly conducted through large chartered companies, minutely
managed in Holland. Dutch colonies declined because their commercial system
was non-progressive and unsound; they appear to have been unable to rise
out of the trader state. Yet we must not forget that Holland was of small
size and had overbearing, jealous neighbors; her long and heroic struggle
with Spain tended greatly to delay her efforts to trade in and colonize the
New World.
Sidenote: Sweden.
The Swedish colony on the Delaware was planned by authority of Gustavus
Adolphus on broad, liberal principles; he hoped it would become "the jewel
of his kingdom." But while it throve for a time and gave much promise of
endurance, the Dutch soon overpowered it. Had the Swedish monarch lived to
carry out the design, doubtless he would have proved that Scandinavians
could successfully maintain an independent province in the New World. Like
the Germans, however, they have in later years been in the main content to
colonize as the subjects of foreign governments.
22. English Policy.
Sidenote: England.
England remains the only country which planted populous colonies within the
present United States and retained them long after they were planted. Her
insular position and fine harbors have given her a race of sailors; her
climate has proved favorable for rearing a hardy people, who, secure in
their boundaries and not necessarily entangled in Continental affairs, have
been left free to develop and to push independent enterprises. As regards
American exploration, the fact that England is the westernmost State in
Europe had at first much to do with her pre-eminence. Until the close of
the sixteenth century England's resources were slender, and her government
was not desirous of incurring the hostility of stronger European neighbors
by poaching too freely on their colonial preserves. Cabot went out at his
own cost. Drake's operations, while adding to the glory of England, and
directly favored by Queen Elizabeth, were continually endangering her with
Spain. But in the face of all discouragements, the sixteenth century was a
notable training period for English sea-rovers. The records of the age are
aglow with the deeds of the Cabots, Frobisher, Davis, Drake, Cavendish,
Gilbert, Raleigh, Grenville, and their like, who, while invariably failing
in their persistent efforts at colonization, were charting the American
coast-line, making the New World familiar to their countrymen, and striking
out shorter paths across the Atlantic. At first outstripped by other
European nations, England was becoming one of the principal maritime powers
when the seventeenth century began. Spain, weakened by the defection of the
Netherlands, and still further humiliated by the defeat of the Armada
(1588), was by this time showing evidences of decay, and France was the
growing rival in the West.
Sidenote: The English trading spirit.
English occupation in North America, like the French, began with the
fishermen who, following in Cabot's wake, early sought the banks of
Newfoundland. They were courageous, businesslike men, who soon supplemented
their calling as fishermen with a profitable native trade in peltries. The
trading spirit has always been deeply implanted in the Teutonic races; when
England had gathered sufficient strength to make it discreet to assert
herself, we find that her reachings out for wider territory took the shape
of commercial enterprise. The romantic adventurers of the age of Elizabeth,
as much freebooters as explorers, were now succeeded by prosaic trading
companies, which undertook to plant colonies along the Atlantic coast. In
doing this they were impelled in part by a desire to relieve England from
some of her surplus population; but in the main the colonies were to serve
as trading and supply stations.
Sidenote: Scanty State aid.
In aiding these corporations, which succeeded after a fashion in planting
colonies, but failed for the most part in reaping profits, the State
expected increased revenue rather than the spread of European civilization.
In England, State assistance to such undertakings was always slight and
uncertain; the strength of the early colonies lay in the wealth and
persistence of their promoters.
23. Character of English Emigrants.
Sidenote: English impulse to emigration.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were full of trouble for the
English people. Religious restlessness was succeeded by revolution and
civil war, while crude and oppressive economic conditions induced lawless
disturbance and disaster. Colonizing schemes were readily taken up in such
times of unrest. At first the notion prevailed that the colonies might
profitably be utilized for clearing the mother-country of jail-birds and
paupers, although with these went out many who were worthy pioneers. It
remained for the Plymouth planting to demonstrate that only the honest and
thrifty can work out the salvation of a wilderness. America attracted the
attention alike of traders and settlers because its soil was supposed to be
rich, because the climate was temperate and not unlike that of England,
because there was plenty of room, and because the unknown land attracted
the adventurous.
Sidenotes: Englishmen as colonists.
Their characteristics,
Englishmen were soon found to be the best colonizers in the world. An
intelligent, large, well-built, and handsome race, active in a high degree
and passionately fond of out-door life and manly sports, they are brave and
enterprising, will fight for supremacy, are tenacious of purpose, and carry
with them in their migrations their ideas, their customs, and their laws.
They do not assimilate with other races,--in fact, there is inbred in them
a strong disdain of foreigners, and still more of inferior races; but they
rule with vigor, and make a lasting impress of their characteristics upon
the communities they establish. Although Englishmen in the seventeenth
century, when they colonized America, lacked many of the refinements of
civilization, were coarse in their tastes and sentiments, and much given to
dissipation and petty vices, a fibre of robust morality ran through the
national life. The leaders were educated, they were ambitious for their
race, and there was a healthy tone to their patriotic aspirations. Simple
and reserved in manner, they prided themselves on repressing the utterance
of their feelings, entering upon the serious business of rearing a nation
in the wilds with most becoming gravity. Their conduct was often bad, but
they were schooled in piety and reverence, and were steadfast in high aims.
Sidenote: and their free institutions.
They had been trained in self-government, and were sticklers for healthy
political precedents. They were the heirs of grim and sturdy Teutonic
ancestors who knew no rule but that imposed by "the armed assembly of the
whole people." The germs of modern English free and representative
institutions are to be plainly traced in the forest councils of the
Germanic tribes. In the succeeding ages these institutions had grown
irregularly, but it was a growth founded on the irresistible will of the
people; they had descended to the men of the seventeenth century as the
sacred heirlooms of generations which had freely spent blood and treasure
for the rights of all Englishmen to come. The principle and habit of
self-government were deep rooted in the heart of every English commoner; it
was a part of his nature. And this principle, this habit, he brought with
him to America. English institutions were merely transplanted to the New
World, where they developed with perhaps greater rapidity than at
home,--certainly on somewhat different and characteristic lines; but they
were and still are English institutions.
24. Local Government in the Colonies.
Sidenote: The English town and county.
The primary local body in the England which these first colonists to
America knew, was the parish, or town, which had both an ecclesiastical and
a temporal jurisdiction. Next above the parishes was the territorial
division known as the county, with an independent magistracy and a judicial
and military organization adapted to the needs of a large rural area. In
making independent settlements on the American coast, the English
commercial companies and proprietors were not establishing states; what
they planted were but the germs of states. Each detached colony had a
distinct life, and it was natural that, despite the general rules of
government established by the companies, the people should proceed at once
to govern themselves in their local affairs upon either the town or the
county plan, according to circumstances. The flexibility of English
representative institutions has never elsewhere been so well illustrated as
in the different forms they took on in the American colonies, without once
departing from the integrity of historic models.
Sidenote: The county the political unit in the Southern colonies;
In the Southern colonies the country was traversed by deep, broad river
highways, leading far inland; the climate was genial, the savages proved
comparatively friendly, and the introduction of slavery tended to foster an
aristocratic class of landed proprietors,--large plantations, therefore,
were the rule. There were a few small trading villages, but the bulk of the
people were isolated, and township governments were impracticable. The
settlers therefore adopted a primary government akin to the English rural
county, having jurisdiction over a wide tract of country, with a commander
of militia, appointed by the governor and styled a lieutenant, whose duties
and authority were similar to those of the lords-lieutenant at home;
judicial powers being exercised by eight or more gentlemen, also appointed
by the governor, serving as a county court. It should be remembered that
the Southern county was not, as in England, a group of towns,--it was
itself the primary organization. The parish was sometimes, in newly settled
portions, co-extensive with the county; but more often the latter was, for
religious purposes, divided into parishes, the vestries of which had
authority in some civil matters. Again, for the purposes of tax levy and
collection, the county was divided into precincts; and in some districts
conditions were such--among them the hostility of the savages--that the
people of each plantation or small neighborhood assembled for worship by
themselves, and thus became recognized as a separate community, in some
matters self-governed. These differences in local organization account for
the terms "plantation," "congregation," and "hundred," often met with in
early Southern records. The tendency of the Southern political and social
system was to concentrate power in the hands of a few men, in sharp
distinction to the New England plan, where the people governed themselves
in small primary assemblies, only delegating the conduct of details to
their agents, the town officers.
Sidenotes: and the town in New England.
Unconscious reversion to older Teutonic forms.
In New England, the narrowness of the Atlantic slope, the shortness of the
rivers, the severe climate, the hostility of the savages, the neighborhood
of the French, the density of the forests, and the fact that each community
was an organized religious congregation,--people belonging to one church,
who had "resolved to live together,"--led to the establishment of more or
less compact communities, called towns; and these were the political and
ecclesiastical units. Since the conditions were changed, some features of
the English parish were modified to suit the more primitive necessities of
life in the wilderness. Thus we find that here and there in New England was
a reversion to older Teutonic forms, although of this significant fact the
colonists themselves were unaware; for the now familiar truth that the
ancestry of our institutions reaches back to the beginnings of the race,
had not then been discovered. Not only was the English town government
practically reproduced on American soil, with such changes as were adapted
to the new environment, but the titles of the town officials were, in many
cases, borrowed from the mother-land. When the first town meeting was held,
English local government had been successfully grafted upon the New World.
Sidenote: The mixed system in the middle colonies.
In the middle colonies, which partook of the climatic characteristics of
both their Northern and Southern neighbors, and had a population made up of
various nationalities, there were compact trading towns as well as large
agricultural regions; and there we find a mixed system, of both townships
and counties.
Sidenote: Differences only in form.
With all these differences in form, the principle at work was the same.
From the beginning the American colonists were hampered in the work of
their general assemblies, at first by commercial companies, and then by
royal and proprietary interference; nevertheless, in the conduct of their
purely local affairs they often exercised a greater degree of freedom than
their brethren in England. It is the purpose of this and succeeding volumes
to show how, amid many shiftings, unions, and divisions, these isolated,
self-governing English colonies, planted independently here and there in
the American wilds, unconscious of the great future before them, were, by
an orderly, logical progression of events, the trend of which was often not
noticeable to the men of the time, successfully merged, at first into
states, and finally into a nation.
25. Colonial Governments.
Sidenote: Social distinctions.
The colonists were accustomed in England to specific ranks and orders of
society. In America, while there were from the first sharp social
distinctions, the fact that the great body of the settlers began life in
the wilderness side by side, on an equal basis, was favorable to a
democratic sentiment. Nobility was connected, in English minds, with great
landed estates, of which there were few in America outside of Virginia,
Maryland, South Carolina, and New York. Under Locke's constitution it was
attempted by the proprietaries formally to divide Carolina society into
groups, with hereditary titles; but the project could not be carried out.
Nevertheless, Southern society was in the main as distinctly stratified,
after the introduction of slavery, as though titles had existed. New
England life was calculated strongly to foster the spirit of independence;
and the slave class was not large enough materially to affect social
conditions. Still, there was an acknowledged and respected aristocracy,
founded on ancestry, education, commercial success, and individual merit,
but lacking staying qualities; for it had neither large estates nor
primogeniture to back it. The scheme of Lord Brooke, Lord Say and Sele, and
others, to introduce hereditary rank in Massachusetts (1636) fortunately
failed to receive popular approval.
Sidenote: Colonial governors.
Used as they were to the exercise of the royal prerogative, the colonists
accepted the free exercise by the governors of the privileges of
appointment and veto, whether those officials were selected by the Crown or
by proprietaries. In addition to these privileges, the governor of a royal
colony was the bearer of royal instructions and the medium of royal
directions; he was the executive officer, the granter of pardons (except in
capital cases), the commander of the military and naval forces, the head of
the established church, and the chief of the judiciary; and he could
summon, prorogue, and dissolve the assembly. The assembly held the
purse-strings, however, and the actual power of the governor was
consequently in a great degree curtailed. The record of colonial politics
is largely made up of disputes between the representatives and the
executive, in which the assembly usually won by withholding supplies until
the governor came to its terms.
Sidenote: The judiciary.
The judiciary system was alike in no two colonies, but there were certain
resemblances in all. There were commonly local justices of the peace, with
jurisdiction limited to petty civil cases; sometimes these were elected by
the freeholders of the district, but generally they were appointed by the
governor. Then came the county courts, the members of which were appointees
of the governor, except in New Jersey, where they were elected. These
county judges were representative gentlemen, and not trained in the law.
They had criminal jurisdiction except in capital cases, and final
jurisdiction in civil cases not involving large amounts; the limit was £20
in Virginia and £2 in Maryland, and elsewhere between these extremes. Next
was the provincial, supreme, or general court: ordinarily this was composed
of the governor, as chancellor, and the members of his council; but in
several colonies this colonial court was a separate body, appointed by the
governor, who, with his council, constituted a still higher court of
appeals and chancery. From the highest courts a suitor could, in important
cases, carry his appeal to the king in council. The common and statute law
of England prevailed when provincial law was silent on the subject.
Sometimes questions arose upon the validity of provincial statutes: when
the courts found that they were not in accordance with the charter, they
declared them void; but the matter could be carried to the English Privy
Council for ultimate decision. This was the germ of the power of the United
States Supreme Court to decide on the constitutionality of a law.
Sidenote: Charters.
At first American territory was granted to chartered commercial
companies,--notably the Virginia Company and the Council for New
England,--which sought to control their colonies from England, under the
supervision of the Crown. The Virginia colony was early deprived of its
charter by the Crown (1624); but members of the Massachusetts Company
boldly emigrated to America, and taking advantage of the confusion in
England, kept up a practically independent state for two generations;
though at last (1692) the people were obliged to accept a new charter
establishing a royal governor. The colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut
obtained charters direct from England, with privileges of self-government,
and lived under them till long after they had become States. New Hampshire,
after having been governed by Massachusetts, became a royal province
without having passed through the charter or proprietary stage. The other
colonies were proprietary, but all finally reverted to the Crown. Maryland
and Pennsylvania and Delaware were still proprietary at the outbreak of the
Revolution, having been restored to the proprietors after reversion.
Sidenote: Two houses.
The two houses of Parliament had made the colonists accustomed to the
bicameral system. In Virginia under company management the corporation
council in England served in a measure as the upper house, with powers of
general direction. In Massachusetts (where the company was technically
resident in the colony), and in the proprietary and royal colonies as well,
there was for a long time but one house. Finally, often as the result of
dissensions between the deputies and the officials, the former came to sit
apart,--the colonies thus in most cases returning to the English system of
two houses; but the council was small, and had administrative functions
which made it very different from the House of Lords. These colonial
assemblies were schools for the cultivation of the spirit of independence.
Burke said the colonists "had formed within themselves, either by royal
instruction or royal charter, assemblies so exceedingly resembling a
parliament in all their forms, functions, and powers that it was impossible
they should not imbibe some opinion of a similar authority."
26. Privileges of the Colonists.
Sidenote: The suffrage.
Electoral qualifications varied greatly. In the consideration of this, as
well as of other institutions, Massachusetts and Virginia must be taken as
types of opposite systems, the other colonies departing more or less from
them, according to proximity. Originally in Massachusetts, "any person
inhabiting within the town" could vote at town-meetings; later, with the
arrival of objectionable immigrants, this privilege was restricted (1634)
to freemen,--practically all the members of the church,--and still later
(1691), to "the possessors of an estate of freehold in land to the value of
40s. per annum, or other estate to the value of £40." In Virginia, at the
start, all freemen were allowed to vote. But it was afterwards decided
(1670) that the "usuall way of chuseing burgesses by the votes of all
persons who, haveing served their time, are freemen of this country," was
detrimental to the colony; and the principle was laid down that "a voyce in
such election" should be given "only to such as by their estates, real or
personall, have interest enough to tye them to the endeavour of the
publique good." By the beginning of the eighteenth century a freehold test
obtained in most, if not in all, the colonies. In 1746 Parliament added a
further qualification, in the guise of a general naturalization law,
providing that a voter must have resided seven years in his colony, taken
the oath of allegiance, and professed the "Protestant Christian faith."
Sidenote: Representation.
The principle of representation, by which a few are charged with acting and
speaking for the many in the conduct of public affairs, has been familiar
to Englishmen since the time when a parliament was convoked during the
contest between John and the barons (1213). The practice was adopted early
in the history of the colonies,--the first house of burgesses of Virginia
meeting in 1619; while in Massachusetts, the refusal of Watertown (1632) to
be taxed without representation caused the adoption of the plan of sending
deputies to the General Court. The American colonial assemblies were more
truly representative of the great body of the people than the English
Parliament of the period; to-day, male suffrage is nearly universal in
England, and entirely so in all the British dependencies, with the
exception of the Crown colonies.
Sidenote: Rights of the colonists.
In the American colonies the execution of the laws was as a rule
comparatively an easy task. The English colonists had been trained in the
political art of self-control; they had an abounding regard for just laws
and the courts; they respected precedent, and stoutly stood for the common
law, or recognized customs of their race. They were restive under statutes
which conflicted with the customary rights of Englishmen, which had come
down to them from the earliest times, and had been confirmed by Magna
Charta. These rights had not been strictly observed by the Tudor
sovereigns, and many of the earlier settlers had in the mother-country
assisted in agitation for their renewal. Now that they were transplanted to
America, the struggle was continued at long range with the Stuarts, thus
developing in the colonists a habit of resistance which was to stand them
in good stead in the troublous period leading up to the American
Revolution.