THE COLONIES IN 1750.
It is always difficult in history to mark the beginning and end of a
period. Events keep rushing on and do not pause to be divided into
chapters; or, in other words, in the history which really takes place, a
new chapter is always beginning long before the old one is ended. The
divisions we make when we try to describe it are merely marks that we
make for our own convenience. In telling the story of the American
Revolution we must stop somewhere, and the inauguration of President
Washington is a very proper place. We must also begin somewhere, but it
is quite clear that it will not do to begin with the Declaration of
Independence in July, 1776, or even with the midnight ride of Paul
Revere in April, 1775. For if we ask what caused that "hurry of hoofs in
a village street," and what brought together those five-and-fifty
statesmen at Philadelphia, we are not simply led back to the Boston
Tea-Party, and still further to the Stamp Act, but we find it necessary
to refer to events that happened more than a century before the
Revolution can properly be said to have begun. Indeed, if we were going
to take a very wide view of the situation, and try to point out its
relations to the general history of mankind, we should have to go back
many hundreds of years and not only cross the ocean to the England of
King Alfred, but keep on still further to the ancient market-places of
Rome and Athens, and even to the pyramids of Egypt; and in all this long
journey through the ages we should not be merely gratifying an idle
curiosity, but at every step of the way could gather sound practical
lessons, useful in helping us to vote intelligently at the next election
for mayor of the city in which we live or for president of the United
States.
[Sidenote: The half-way station in American History]
We are not now, however, about to start on any such long journey. It is
a much nearer and narrower view of the American Revolution that we wish
to get. There are many points from which we might start, but we must at
any rate choose a point several years earlier than the Declaration of
Independence. People are very apt to leave out of sight the "good old
colony times" and speak of our country as scarcely more than a hundred
years old. Sometimes we hear the presidency of George Washington spoken
of as part of "early American history;" but we ought not to forget that
when Washington was born the commonwealth of Virginia was already one
hundred and twenty-five years old. The first governor of Massachusetts
was born three centuries ago, in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada.
Suppose we take the period of 282 years between the English settlement
of Virginia and the inauguration of President Benjamin Harrison, and
divide it in the middle. That gives us the year 1748 as the half-way
station in the history of the American people. There were just as many
years of continuous American history before 1748 as there have been
since that date. That year was famous for the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle,
which put an end to a war between England and France that had lasted
five years. That war had been waged in America as well as in Europe, and
American troops had played a brilliant part in it. There was now a brief
lull, soon to be followed by another and greater war between the two
mighty rivals, and it was in the course of this latter war that some of
the questions were raised which presently led to the American
Revolution. Let us take the occasion of this lull in the storm to look
over the American world and see what were the circumstances likely to
lead to the throwing off of the British government by the thirteen
colonies, and to their union under a federal government of their own
making.
[Sidenote: The four New England colonies.]
In the middle of the eighteenth century there were four New England
colonies. Massachusetts extended her sway over Maine, and the Green
Mountain territory was an uninhabited wilderness, to which New York and
New Hampshire alike laid claim. The four commonwealths of New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all been in existence,
under one form or another, for more than a century. The men who were in
the prime of life there in 1750 were the great-grandsons and
great-great-grandsons of the men who crossed the ocean between 1620 and
1640 and settled New England. Scarcely two men in a hundred were of other
than English blood. About one in a hundred could say that his family
came from Scotland or the north of Ireland; one in five hundred may have
been the grandchild of a Huguenot. Upon religious and political
questions these people thought very much alike. Extreme poverty was
almost unknown, and there were but few who could not read and write. As
a rule every head of a family owned the house in which he lived and the
land which supported him. There were no cities; and from Boston, which
was a town with 16,000 inhabitants, down to the smallest settlement in
the White Mountains, the government was carried on by town-meetings at
which, almost any grown-up man could be present and speak and vote.
Except upon the sea-coast nearly all the people lived upon farms; but
all along the coast were many who lived by fishing and by building
ships, and in the towns dwelt many merchants grown rich by foreign
trade. In those days Massachusetts was the richest of the thirteen
colonies, and had a larger population than any other except Virginia.
Connecticut was then more populous than New York; and when the four New
England commonwealths acted together--as was likely to be the case in
time of danger--they formed the strongest military power on the American
continent.
[Sidenote: Virginia and Maryland]
Among what we now call southern states there were two that in 1750 were
more than a hundred years old. These were Virginia and Maryland. The
people of these commonwealths, like those of New England, had lived
together in America long enough to become distinctively Americans. Both
New Englander and Virginian had had time to forget their family
relationships with the kindred left behind so long ago in England;
though there were many who did not forget it, and in our time scholars
have by research recovered many of the links that had been lost from
memory. The white people of Virginia were as purely English as those of
Connecticut or Massachusetts. But society in Virginia was very different
from society in New England. The wealth of Virginia consisted chiefly of
tobacco, which was raised by negro slaves. People lived far apart from
each other on great plantations, usually situated near the navigable
streams of which that country has so many. Most of the great planters
had easy access to private wharves, where their crops could be loaded on
ships and sent directly to England in exchange for all sorts of goods.
Accordingly it was but seldom that towns grew up as centres of trade.
Each plantation was a kind of little world in itself. There were no
town-meetings, as the smallest political division was the division into
counties; but there were county-meetings quite vigorous with
political life. Of the leading county families a great many were
descended from able and distinguished Cavaliers or King's-men who had
come over from England during the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell. Skill
in the management of public affairs was hereditary in such families, and
during our revolutionary period Virginia produced more great leaders
than any of the other colonies.
[Sidenote: New York and Delaware]
There were yet two other American commonwealths that in 1750 were more
than a hundred years old. These were New York and little Delaware, which
for some time was a kind of appendage, first to New York, afterward to
Pennsylvania. But there was one important respect in which these two
colonies were different alike from New England and from Virginia. Their
population was far from being purely English. Delaware had been first
settled by Swedes, New York by Dutchmen; and the latter colony had drawn
its settlers from almost every part of western and central Europe. A man
might travel from Penobscot bay to the Harlem river without hearing a
syllable in any other tongue than English; but in crossing Manhattan
island he could listen, if he chose, to more than a dozen languages.
There was almost as much diversity in opinions about religious and
political matters as there was in the languages in which they were
expressed. New York was an English community in so far as it had been
for more than eighty years under an English government, but hardly in
any other sense. Accordingly we shall find New York in the revolutionary
period less prompt and decided in action than Massachusetts and
Virginia. In population New York ranked only seventh among the thirteen
colonies; but in its geographical position it was the most important of
all. It was important commercially because the Mohawk and Hudson rivers
formed a direct avenue for the fur-trade from the region of the great
lakes to the finest harbour on all the Atlantic coast. In a military
sense it was important for two reasons; _first_, because the Mohawk
valley was the home of the most powerful confederacy of Indians on the
continent, the steady allies of the English and deadly foes of the
French; _secondly_, because the centre of the French power was at
Montreal and Quebec, and from those points the route by which the
English colonies could be most easily invaded was formed by Lake
Champlain and the Hudson river. New York was completely interposed
between New England and the rest of the English colonies, so that an
enemy holding possession of it would virtually cut the Atlantic
sea-board in two. For these reasons the political action of New York
was of most critical importance.
[Sidenote: The two Carolinas and Georgia; New Jersey and Pennsylvania]
Of the other colonies in 1750, the two Carolinas and New Jersey were
rather more than eighty years old, while Pennsylvania had been settled
scarcely seventy years. But the growth of these younger colonies had
been rapid, especially in the case of Pennsylvania and North Carolina,
which in populousness ranked third and fourth among the thirteen. This
rapid increase was mainly due to a large immigration from Europe kept up
during the first half of the eighteenth century, so that a large
proportion of the people had either been born in Europe, or were the
children of people born in Europe. In 1750 these colonies had not had
time enough to become so intensely American as Virginia and the New
England colonies. In Georgia, which had been settled only seventeen
years, people had had barely time to get used to this new home on the
wild frontier.
The population of these younger colonies was very much mixed. In South
Carolina, as in New York, probably less than half were English. In both
Carolinas there were a great many Huguenots from France, and immigrants
from Germany and Scotland and the north of Ireland were still pouring
in. Pennsylvania had many Germans and Irish, and settlers from other
parts of Europe, besides its English Quakers. With all this diversity of
race there was a great diversity of opinions about political questions,
as about other matters.
[Sidenote: Why Massachusetts and Virginia took the lead.]
We are now beginning to see why it was that Massachusetts and Virginia
took the lead in bringing on the revolutionary war. Not only were these
two the largest colonies, but their people had become much more
thoroughly welded together in their thoughts and habits and associations
than was as yet possible with the people of the younger colonies. When
the revolutionary war came, there were very few Tories in the New
England colonies and very few in Virginia; but there were a great many
in New York and Pennsylvania and the two Carolinas, so that the action
of these commonwealths was often slow and undecided, and sometimes there
was bitter and bloody fighting between men of opposite opinions,
especially in New York and South Carolina.
[Sidenote: The two republics; Connecticut and Rhode Island]
If we look at the governments of the thirteen colonies in the middle of
the eighteenth century, we shall observe some interesting facts. All the
colonies had legislative assemblies elected by the people, and these
assemblies levied the taxes and made the laws. So far as the
legislatures were concerned, therefore, all the colonies governed
themselves. But with regard to the executive department of the
government, there were very important differences. Only two of the
colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, had governors elected by the
people. These two colonies were completely self-governing. In almost
everything but name they were independent of Great Britain, and this was
so true that at the time of the revolutionary war they did not need to
make any new constitutions for themselves, but continued to live on
under their old charters for many years,--Connecticut until 1818, Rhode
Island until 1843. Before the revolution these two colonies had
comparatively few direct grievances to complain of at the hands of Great
Britain; but as they were next neighbours to Massachusetts and closely
connected with its history, they were likely to sympathize promptly with
the kind of grievances by which Massachusetts was disturbed.
[Sidenote: The proprietary governments: Pennsylvania, Delaware,
and Maryland]
Three of the colonies, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, had a
peculiar kind of government, known as _proprietary government_. Their
territories had originally been granted by the crown to a person known
as the Lord Proprietary, and the lord-proprietorship descended from
father to son like a kingdom. In Maryland it was the Calvert family that
reigned for six generations as lords proprietary. Pennsylvania and
Delaware had each its own separate legislature, but over both colonies
reigned the same lord proprietary, who was a member of the Penn family.
These colonies were thus like little hereditary monarchies, and they had
but few direct dealings with the British government. For them the lords
proprietary stood in the place of the king, and appointed the governors.
In Maryland this system ran smoothly. In Pennsylvania there was a good
deal of dissatisfaction, but it generally assumed the form of a wish to
get rid of the lords proprietary and have the governors appointed by the
king; for as this was something they had not tried they were not
prepared to appreciate its evils.
[Sidenote: The crown colonies and their royal governors]
In the other eight colonies--New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New
Jersey, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia--the governors were
appointed by the king, and were commonly known as "royal governors."
They were sometimes natives of the colonies over which they were
appointed, as Dudley and Hutchinson of Massachusetts, and others; but
were more often sent over from England. Some of them, as Pownall of
Massachusetts and Spotswood of Virginia, were men of marked ability.
Some were honest gentlemen, who felt a real interest in the welfare of
the people they came to help govern; some were unprincipled adventurers,
who came to make money by fair means or foul. Their position was one of
much dignity, and they behaved themselves like lesser kings. What with
their crimson velvets and fine laces and stately coaches, they made much
more of a show than any president of the United States would think of
making to-day. They had no fixed terms of office, but remained at their
posts as long as the king, or the king's colonial secretary, saw fit to
keep them there.
[Sidenote: The question as to salaries]
Now it was generally true of the royal governors that, whether they were
natives of America or sent over from England, and whether they were good
men or bad, they were very apt to make themselves disliked by the
people, and they were almost always quarrelling with their legislative
assemblies. Questions were always coming up about which the governor and
the legislature could not agree, because the legislature represented the
views of the people who had chosen it, while the governor represented
his own views or the views which prevailed three thousand miles away
among the king's ministers, who very often knew little about America and
cared less. One of these disputed questions related to the governor's
salary. It was natural that the governor should wish to have a salary of
fixed amount, so that he might know from year to year what he was going
to receive. But the people were afraid that if this were to be done the
governor might become too independent. They preferred that the
legislature should each year make a grant of money such as it should
deem suitable for the governor's expenses, and this sum it might
increase or diminish according to its own good pleasure. This would keep
the governor properly subservient to the legislature. Before 1750 there
had been much bitter wrangling over this question in several of the
colonies, and the governors had one after another been obliged to
submit, though with very ill grace.
Sometimes the thoughts of the royal governors and their friends went
beyond this immediate question. Since the legislatures were so froward
and so niggardly, what an admirable plan it would be to have the
governors paid out of the royal treasury and thus made comparatively
independent of the legislatures! The judges, too, who were quite poorly
paid, might fare much better if remunerated by the crown, and the same
might be said of some other public officers. But if the British
government were to undertake to pay the salaries of its officials in
America, it must raise a revenue for the purpose; and it would naturally
raise such a revenue by levying taxes in America rather than in England.
People in England felt that they were already taxed as heavily as they
could bear, in order to pay the expenses of their own government. They
could not be expected to submit to further taxation for the sake of
paying the expenses of governing the American colonies. If further taxes
were to be laid for such a purpose, they must in fairness be laid upon
Americans, not upon Englishmen in the old country.
Such was the view which people in England would naturally be expected to
take, and such was the view which they generally did take. But there was
another side to the question which was very clearly seen by most people
in America. If the royal governors were to be paid by the crown and thus
made independent of their legislatures, there would be danger of their
becoming petty tyrants and interfering in many ways with the liberties
of the people. Still greater would be the danger if the judges were to
be paid by the crown, for then they would feel themselves responsible to
the king or to the royal governor, rather than to their fellow-citizens;
and it would be easy for the governors, by appointing corrupt men as
judges, to prevent the proper administration of justice by the courts,
and thus to make men's lives and property insecure. Most Americans in
1750 felt this danger very keenly. They had not forgotten how, in the
times of their grandfathers, two of the noblest of Englishmen, Lord
William Russell and Colonel Algernon Sidney, had been murdered by the
iniquitous sentence of time-serving judges. They had not forgotten the
ruffian George Jeffreys and his "bloody assizes" of 1685. They well
remembered how their kinsmen in England had driven into exile the Stuart
family of kings, who were even yet, in 1745, making efforts to recover
their lost throne. They remembered how the beginnings of New England had
been made by stout-hearted men who could not endure the tyranny of these
same Stuarts; and they knew well that one of the worst of the evils upon
which Stuart tyranny had fattened had been the corruption of the courts
of justice. The Americans believed with some reason, that even now, in
the middle of the eighteenth century, the administration of justice in
their own commonwealths was decidedly better than in Great Britain; and
they had no mind to have it disturbed.
[Sidenote: "No taxation without representation."]
But worse than all, if the expenses of governing America were to be paid
by taxes levied upon Americans and collected from them by king or
parliament or any power whatsoever residing in Great Britain, then the
inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies would at once cease to be
free people. A free country is one in which the government cannot take
away people's money, in the shape of taxes, except for strictly public
purposes and with the consent of the people themselves, as expressed by
some body of representatives whom the people have chosen. If people's
money can be taken from them without their consent, no matter how small
the amount, even if it be less than one dollar out of every thousand,
then they are not politically free. They do not govern, but the power
that thus takes their money without their consent is the power that
governs; and there is nothing to prevent such a power from using the
money thus obtained to strengthen itself until it can trample upon
people's rights in every direction, and rob them of their homes and
lives as well as of their money. If the British government could tax the
Americans without their consent, it might use the money for supporting a
British army in America, and such an army might be employed in
intimidating the legislatures, in dispersing town-meetings, in
destroying newspaper-offices, or in other acts of tyranny.
[Sidenote: It was the fundamental principle of English liberty.]
The Americans in the middle of the eighteenth century well understood
that the principle of "no taxation without representation" is the
fundamental principle of free government. It was the principle for which
their forefathers had contended again and again in England, and upon
which the noble edifice of English liberty had been raised and
consolidated since the grand struggle between king and barons in the
thirteenth century. It had passed into a tradition, both in England and
in America, that in order to prevent the crown from becoming despotic,
it was necessary that it should only wield such revenues as the
representatives of the people might be pleased to grant it. In England
the body which represented the people was the House of Commons, in each
of the American colonies it was the colonial legislature; and in
dealing with the royal governors, the legislatures acted upon the same
general principles as the House of Commons in dealing with the king.
[Sidenote: Sometimes the royal governors were in the right, as to
the particular question.]
It was not until some time after 1750 that any grand assault was made
upon the principle of "no taxation without representation," but the
frequent disputes with the royal governors were such as to keep people
from losing sight of this principle, and to make them sensitive about
acts that might lead to violations of it. In the particular disputes the
governors were sometimes clearly right and the people wrong. One of the
principal objects, as we shall presently see, for which the governors
wanted money, was to maintain troops for defence against the French and
the Indians; and the legislatures were apt to be short-sighted and
unreasonably stingy about such matters. Again, the people were sometimes
seized with a silly craze for "paper money" and "wild-cat
banks"--devices for making money out of nothing--and sometimes the
governors were sensible enough to oppose such delusions but not
altogether sensible in their manner of doing it. Thus in 1740 there was
fierce excitement in Massachusetts over a quarrel between the governor
and the legislature about the famous "silver bank" and "land bank."
These institutions were a public nuisance and deserved to be suppressed,
but the governor was obliged to appeal to parliament in order to
succeed in doing it. This led many people to ask, "What business has a
parliament sitting the other side of the ocean to be making laws for
us?" and the grumbling was loud and bitter enough to show that this was
a very dangerous question to raise.
[Sidenote: Bitter memories; in Virginia.]
It was in the eight colonies which had royal governors that troubles of
a revolutionary character were more likely to arise than in the other
five, but there were special reasons, besides those already mentioned,
why Massachusetts and Virginia should prove more refractory than any of
the others. Both these great commonwealths had bitter memories. Things
had happened in both which might serve as a warning, and which some of
the old men still living in 1750 could distinctly remember. In Virginia
the misgovernment of the royal governor Sir William Berkeley had led in
1675 to the famous rebellion headed by Nathaniel Bacon, and this
rebellion had been suppressed with much harshness. Many leading citizens
had been sent to the gallows and their estates had been confiscated. In
Massachusetts, though there were no such scenes of cruelty to remember,
the grievance was much more deep-seated and enduring.
[Sidenote: And in Massachusetts.]
Massachusetts had not been originally a royal province, with its
governors appointed by the king. At first it had been a republic, such
as Connecticut and Rhode Island now were, with governors chosen by the
people. From its foundation in 1629 down to 1684 the commonwealth of
Massachusetts had managed its own affairs at its own good pleasure.
Practically it had been not only self-governing but almost independent.
That was because affairs in England were in such confusion that until
after 1660 comparatively little attention was paid to what was going on
in America, and the liberties of Massachusetts prospered through the
neglect of what was then called the "home government." After Charles II.
came to the throne in 1660 he began to interfere with the affairs of
Massachusetts, and so the very first generation of men that had been
born on the soil of that commonwealth were engaged in a long struggle
against the British king for the right of managing their own affairs.
After more than twenty years of this struggle, which by 1675 had come to
be quite bitter, the charter of Massachusetts was annulled in 1684 and
its free government was for the moment destroyed. Presently a viceroy
was sent over from England, to govern Massachusetts (as well as several
other northern colonies) despotically. This viceroy, Sir Edmund Andros,
seems to have been a fairly well meaning man. He was not especially
harsh or cruel, but his rule was a despotism, because he was not
responsible to the people for what he did, but only to the king. In
point of fact the two-and-a-half years of his administration were
characterized by arbitrary arrests and by interference with private
property and with the freedom of the press. It was so vexatious that
early in 1689, taking advantage of the Revolution then going on in
England, the people of Boston rose in rebellion, seized Andros and threw
him into jail, and set up for themselves a provisional government. When
the affairs of New England were settled after the accession of William
and Mary to the throne, Connecticut and Rhode Island were allowed to
keep their old governments; but Massachusetts in 1693 was obliged to
take a new charter instead of her old one, and although this new charter
revived the election of legislatures by the people, it left the
governors henceforth to be appointed by the king.
In the political controversies of Massachusetts, therefore, in the
eighteenth century, the people were animated by the recollection of what
they had lost. They were somewhat less free and independent than their
grandfathers had been, and they had learned what it was to have an
irresponsible ruler sitting at his desk in Boston and signing warrants
for the arrest of loved and respected citizens who dared criticise his
sayings and doings. "Taxation without representation" was not for them a
mere abstract theory; they knew what it meant. It was as near to them as
the presidency of Andrew Jackson is to us; there had not been time
enough to forget it. In every contest between the popular legislature
and the royal governor there was some broad principle involved which
there were plenty of well-remembered facts to illustrate.
[Sidenote: Grounds of sympathy between Massachusetts and Virginia.]
These contests also helped to arouse a strong sympathy between the
popular leaders in Massachusetts and in Virginia. Between the people of
the two colonies there was not much real sympathy, because there was a
good deal of difference between their ways of life and their opinions
about things; and people, unless they are unusually wise and generous of
nature, are apt to dislike and despise those who differ from them in
opinions and habits. So there was little cordiality of feeling between
the people of Massachusetts and the people of Virginia, but in spite of
this there was a great and growing political sympathy. This was because,
ever since 1693, they had been obliged to deal with the same kind of
political questions. It became intensely interesting to a Virginian to
watch the progress of a dispute between the governor and legislature of
Massachusetts, because whatever principle might be victorious in the
course of such a dispute, it was sure soon to find a practical
application in Virginia. Hence by the middle of the eighteenth century
the two colonies were keenly observant of each other, and either one was
exceedingly prompt in taking its cue from the other. It is worth while
to remember this fact, for without it there would doubtless have been
rebellions or revolutions of American colonies, but there would hardly
have been one American Revolution, ending in a grand American Union.