History of the United States, Volume 1

by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

Lord Shaftesbury.
In March, 1663, Carolina was constituted a territory, extending from 36
degrees north latitude southward to the river San Matheo, and assigned
to a company of seven distinguished proprietaries, including General
Monk, who had been created Duke of Albemarle, and John Locke's patron,
the famous Lord Ashley Cooper, subsequently Earl of Shaftesbury.
Governor Sir William Berkeley, of Virginia, was also one of the
proprietaries.
[1720]

Seal of the Proprietors of Carolina.
Locke drew up for the province a minute feudal constitution, but it was
too cumbersome to work. Rule by the proprietaries proved radically bad.
They were ignorant, callous to wrongs done by their governors, and
indifferent to everything save their own profits. Many of the settlers
too were turbulent and criminals, fugitives from the justice of other
colonies. The difficulty was aggravated by Indian and Spanish wars, by
negro slavery, so profitable for rice culture, especially in South
Carolina, by strife between dissenters and churchmen, by the question of
revenue, and by that of representation.

John Locke.
[1730-1752]
A proprietary party and a larger popular party were continually at feud,
not seldom with arms, support of the Church allying itself mainly with
the former, dissent with the latter, Zealots for the Church wished to
exclude dissenters from the assembly. Their opponents would keep
Huguenot immigrants, whom the favor of the proprietaries rendered
unwelcome, entirely from the franchise. The popular party passed laws
for electing representatives in every county instead of at Charleston
alone, and for revenue tariffs to pay the debt entailed by war. The
proprietaries vetoed both. They even favored the pirates who harried the
coast. Civil commotions were frequent and growth slow. Interference by
the Crown was therefore most happy. From the time the Carolinas passed
into royal hands, 1729, remarkable prosperity attended them both.
Assuming charge of Carolina, the Crown reserved to itself the Spanish
frontier, and here, in 1732, it settled Oglethorpe, the able and
unselfish founder of Georgia, under the auspices of an organization in
form much like a mercantile company, but benevolent in aim, whose main
purpose was to open a home for the thousands of Englishmen who were in
prison for debt. Many Scotch and many Austrians also came. Full civil
liberty was promised to all, religious liberty to all but papists.
Political strife was warm here, too, particularly respecting the
admission of rum and slaves. Government by the corporators, though
well-meaning, was ill-informed and a failure, and would have been
ruinous to the colony but for Oglethorpe's genius and exertions. To the
advantage of all, therefore, on the lapse of the charter in 1752,
Georgia, like the Carolinas, assumed the status of a royal colony.

Savannah, from a Print of 1741.

James Oglethorpe.
CHAPTER VI.
GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES
[1750]
The political life, habits, and forms familiar to our fathers were such
as their peculiar surroundings and experience had developed out of
English originals. This process and its results form an interesting
study.
The political unit at the South was the parish; in the North it was the
town. Jury trial prevailed in all the colonies. Local self-government
was vigorous everywhere, yet the most so in the North. The town
regulated its affairs, such as the schools, police, roads, the public
lands, the poor, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut also religion, at
first by pure mass meetings where each citizen represented himself and
which were both legislative and judicial in function, then by combining
these meetings in various ways with the agency of selectmen. Where and
so soon as a colony came to embrace several towns, representative
machinery was set in motion and a colonial legislature formed, having
two chambers nearly everywhere, like Parliament. The county, with the
same character as at present, was instituted later than the oldest towns
and parishes, but itself subsequently became, in thinly settled parts,
the unit of governmental organization and political action, being
divided into towns or parishes only gradually. Voting was subject to a
property qualification, in some colonies to a religious one also; but no
nobility of blood or title got foothold.
The relation of the colonial governments to England is a far more
perplexing matter. From the preceding chapters it appears that we may
distinguish the colonies, if we come down to about 1750, as either (1)
self-governing or charter colonies, in which liberty was most complete
and subjection to England little more than nominal; and (2)
non-self-governing, ruled, theoretically at any rate, in considerable
measure from outside themselves. Rhode Island and Connecticut made up
the former class. Of the latter there were two groups, the royal or
provincial, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts; New York, New
Jersey, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and the proprietary, viz.,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.
Yet we are to bear in mind that many important constitutional and
governmental changes had occurred by 1750. Massachusetts, as we have
seen, had ceased to be self-governing as at first, yet it retained a
charter which conferred large liberty. All the provincial colonies began
as proprietary, and all the proprietary were for a time provincial.
Under Andros, New England stretched from the St. Croix to Delaware Bay.
After 1689 the tendency in all parts of the country was strong toward
civil freedom, which, favored by the changes and apathy of proprietaries
and the ignorance and quarrels of the English ministry, gradually
rendered the other colonies in effect about as well off in this respect
as Rhode Island and Connecticut.
But unfortunately the legal limits and meaning of this freedom were
never determined. Had they been, our Revolution need not have come.
Monarchs continually attempted to stretch hither the royal prerogative,
but how far this was legal was not then, and never can be, decided. The
constitutional scope of a monarch's prerogative in England itself was
one of the great questions of the seventeenth century, and remained
serious and unsettled through the eighteenth. Applied to America the
problem became angrier still, partly because giving a charter--and the
colonies were all founded on such gift--was an act of prerogative.
English lawyers never doubted that acts of Parliament were valid in the
colonies. The colonists opposed both the king's and the Parliament's
pretensions, and held their own legislatures to be coordinate with the
Houses at Westminster. They claimed as rights the protection of habeas
corpus, freedom from taxation without their consent, and all the Great
Charter's guarantees. It was the habit of English theorizing on the
subject to allow them these, if at all, as of grace. Repudiating the
pretence that they were represented in Parliament, they likewise denied
all wish to be so, but desired to have colonial legislatures recognized
as concurrent with the English--each colony joined to the mother-country
by a sort of personal union, or through some such tie as exists between
England and her colonies to-day. Massachusetts theorists used as a valid
analogy the relation of ancient Normandy to the French kings. Though no
longer venturing to do so at home, monarchs freely vetoed legislation in
all the colonies except Rhode Island and Connecticut. It was held that
even these colonies were after all somehow subject to England's
oversight.
On the subject of taxation there was continual dispute,
misunderstanding, recrimination. The colonies did not object to
providing for their own defence. They were willing to do this under
English direction if asked, not commanded. Direct taxation for England's
behoof was never once consented to by America, and till late never
thought of by England. The English navigation laws, however, though
amounting to taxation of America in aid of England, and continually
evaded as unjust, were allowed by the colonies' legislative acts, and
never seriously objected to in any formal way.
CHAPTER VII.
SOCIAL CULTURE IN COLONIAL TIMES
[1750]
American society rose out of mere untitled humanity; monarchy, guilds,
priests, and all aristocracy of a feudal nature having been left behind
in Europe. The year 1700 found in all the American colonies together
some 300,000 people. They were distributed about as follows: New England
had 115,000; New York, 30,000; New Jersey, 15,000; Pennsylvania and
Delaware, 20,000; Maryland, 35,000; Virginia, 70,000; the Carolina
country, 15,000. Perhaps 50,000 were negro slaves, of whom, say, 10,000
were held north of Mason and Dixon's line. What is now New York City
had, in 1697, 4,302 inhabitants.
Passing on to 1754, we find the white population of New England
increased to 425,000; that of the middle colonies, including Maryland,
to 457,000; that of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, to 283,000.
Massachusetts alone now had 207,000; Rhode Island, 35,000; Connecticut,
133,000; New York State (1756), 83,744. There were now not far from
263,000 negroes, of whom 14,000 lived in New England, 4,500 in Rhode
Island. The total population of the thirteen colonies amounted to nearly
a million and a half. At this time Philadelphia about equalled Boston in
size, each having 25,000 inhabitants. At the Revolution Boston had grown
to be the larger. New York, with from 15,000 to 18,000, constituted the
centre of trade and of politics. The city and county of New York
together numbered 13,046 inhabitants in 1756; 21,862 in 1771; 23,614 in
1786. The whole State, in 1771 had 146,144. Connecticut, in 1774, had
197,856. There are said to have been, so late as 1763, woods where the
New York City Hall now stands.
From North to South the population decreased in density, but it
increased in heterogeneity and non-English elements, and in illiteracy.
The South had also the stronger aristocratic feeling. Slaves, as the
above figures show, were far more numerous in that section. Their
condition was also worse there.
A large proportion of the white population everywhere was of
Saxon-Teutonic blood. The colonial leaders, and many others, at least in
the North, were men who would have been eminent in England itself. Not a
few New England theologians and lawyers were peers to the ablest of
their time. Numbers of the common people read, reflected, debated. While
profoundly religious, the colonists, being nearly all Protestants, were
bold and progressive thinkers in every line, prizing discussion,
preferring to settle questions by rational methods rather than through
authority and tradition. We have observed that there are exceptions to
this rule, like the treatment of Roger Williams, but they were
exceptions. The colonists possessed in eminent degree energy,
determination, power of patient endurance and sacrifice. Their political
genius, too, was striking in itself, and it becomes surprising if one
compares Germany, in the unspeakable distraction of the Thirty Years'
War, with America at the same period, 1618-1648, successfully solving by
patience and debate the very problems which were Germany's despair.