The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

It is true of the South, in spite of the fact—influential throughout the history of that section—that its population contained an element drawn from the wealthier classes of the mother country. It has indeed been said that Virginia was “a continuation of English society.” The seeds of privilege may have existed in the Old Dominion, but, nevertheless, in no colony was the spirit of personal independence more signally evinced. “With consistent firmness of character,” to quote again from Bancroft, “the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles that prevailed in their forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.”

With the aims of the English rebellion against Charles I., the American colonies were in full sympathy. Immediately after its outbreak, the general court of Massachusetts directed the governor to omit the oath of allegiance to the king, “seeing that he had violated the privileges of Parliament.” But the civil war had no effect upon the colonial governments. In England, the monarchy, the peerage, and the prelacy were at swords’ points with the people; in America, there was neither peerage nor prelacy, and monarchy was rendered remote by the Atlantic, so that there were no two parties to join battle.

The Restoration opened a new era in the history of the colonies—a period of conflict between royal usurpation and aristocratic oppression on the one hand, and popular liberties on the other; a period that, after many years of difficulty and struggle, culminated in events that gave rationality and independence to the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

It was a period marked in England by the political ascendency of the aristocracy. At the Restoration, the nobility resumed possession of the hereditary branch of the Parliament. Through their influence over elections, they, to a great extent, controlled the House of Commons—and through it the crown, over which the Commons had given recent and striking proofs of power. It was the aristocratic element that dictated the policy which goaded the colonies into secession from the mother country. It supplied the office-holders—“carpet-baggers” they might have been termed in modern political slang—whom the home government quartered upon the colonials by an official system tainted with nepotism and corruption. Its foe—Pitt, the great Commoner—was the friend of America, and one of her few champions in Parliament.

Equally the friend of America was the English democracy—politically far less powerful during the century after the Restoration than in the preceding and the subsequent periods. When the hated Stamp Act was repealed, the “Common People” of London lit bonfires and illuminated the streets, rang the historic Bow Bells, and decked the shipping in the Thames with flags.

But the House of Commons, before whom came the critical measures of legislation for the colonies, reflected the feeling of the aristocracy and not that of the populace. “The majority,” said a member, during a debate on American affairs in 1770, “is no better than an ignorant multitude.” Sir George Saville, a man of rare independence and integrity, replied in strong words. “The greatest evil that can befall this nation,” he declared, “is the invasion of the people’s rights by the authority of this house. I do not say that the members have sold the rights of their constituents; but I do say, I have said, and I shall always say, that they have betrayed them.” But his protest was shouted down as treason, and Parliament blindly pursued its course of usurpation.

Long before that time, there had been in America thoughts of independence as a refuge from usurpation. The colonists cherished a genuine loyalty to the old flag, and a strong pride in the Saxon blood, whose latest and, indeed, most typical product they themselves were. Yet, as far back as 1638, when Charles I. tried to revoke the original patent of Massachusetts, the settlers threatened to “confederate themselves under a new government for their necessary safety and subsistence.”

In 1698, Governor Nicholson, of Virginia, reported that “a great many in the plantations think that no law of England ought to be in force and binding upon them without their own consent.” Three years later, a public document noted that “the independence the colonies thirst after is now notorious.”

The sentiment grew gradually during the reigns of the Georges, slowly overcoming the strength of the old attachment to the mother country. Every encroachment attempted by royalty or officialism aroused a hostility that reinforced the spirit of liberty. For instance, when Samuel Shute, Governor of Massachusetts in 1719, tried to prevent the publication of the Assembly’s answer to one of his speeches, claiming power over the press as his prerogative, he only succeeded in evoking a vigorous resistance, that finally disposed of his pretension, and gave the press untrammeled freedom.