Part 6 (2/2)

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

_America is formed for happiness but not for empire._

RICHARD BURNABY.

_At length one mentioned me, with the observation that I was merely an honest man, and of no sect at all, which prevailed with them to chuse me._

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

I

All accounts agree in celebrating the marvelous growth of the continental colonies in the eighteenth century. When the Ma.s.sachusetts charter was recalled they were in fact British ”plantations”; weak and scattered coast settlements, hemmed in by hostile Indians, separated from each other by long stretches of wilderness; without the inclination or the opportunity for intercourse, they struggled in isolation, often for bare existence. At the time of the pa.s.sage of the Stamp Act they were wealthy and stable communities, whose thrifty and venturesome people had long since joined colony to colony all along the coast, and were already pus.h.i.+ng across the mountains to occupy the great interior valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies born of interrelated interests and the recognition of a common destiny.

In 1689 not more than 80,000 people lived in New England, a trifle more in the Southern, and half as many in the Middle colonies. Seventy years later, when all New France could not boast more than 80,000 people of European birth or descent, New England alone had a population of 473,000, the Middle Colonies about 405,000, and the plantations south, of Delaware 417,000, not including 300,000 negro slaves. Within three quarters of a century the people of the continental colonies had increased nearly eightfold--from 200,000 in 1689, to 1,500,000 in 1760.

And material prosperity had kept pace with the increase in population; so that there was some truth, even if some exaggeration, in the statement of Peter Kalm that ”the English colonies in this part of the world have increased so much in their numbers of inhabitants, and in their riches, that they almost vie with Old England.”

Of this rapid growth the colonists were well aware. They took to themselves full credit, as their descendants have done ever since, for having transformed a wilderness into a land of peace and plenty. With Richard Burnaby they could quite agree that such a town as Philadelphia, planted scarce eighty years, must be the ”object of every one's wonder and admiration.” It was this sense of unparalleled achievement that gave courageous conviction to the steady a.s.sertion of colonial rights. And the form of government in the provinces was well suited to secure for the colonists that independence which they claimed as a birthright, and the practical achievement of which is the cardinal political fact of the century. For it was no part of British policy to burden the English exchequer with the maintenance of the colonial establishments. The normal province was thought to be one in which legislation was entrusted mainly to local a.s.semblies elected by the colonists, while executive and administrative authority rested mainly with a governor and council responsible to the king. At the opening of the eighteenth century, colonial governments mostly conformed to this model: in each colony the owners of property regularly elected an a.s.sembly which levied taxes and made laws; in each colony, except in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the governor, and usually the council as well, were appointed by the Crown.

With authority thus divided, conflict was sure to arise. In theory, the interests of colony and Crown may have been identical; in fact the a.s.semblies looked at the affairs of the colony from the point of view of immediate local needs, while the governor was bound by his instructions to regard his province as but one of many whose special interests must be subordinated to the welfare of the whole empire. Of the a.s.semblies'

many advantages in this perennial conflict, control of the purse was the chief. ”The governor,” says a contemporary, ”has two masters; one who gives him his commission, and one who gives him his pay.” It required no little courage, and was likely to prove useless in the end, to ignore the latter master in obedience to the former. Placemen were little inclined to irritate those who paid them and were on the spot to watch their every move; while even the ablest governors often found themselves deserted by the Crown whose interests they attempted to defend. Before the middle of the century ministers were generally indifferent to the const.i.tutional tendencies in the colonies; repeated recommendations of the Board of Trade for an independent civil list went unheeded, and governors, such as Spotswood, who stirred up trouble by endeavoring to carry out their instructions, were likely to be replaced by others whose adroit concessions to the a.s.semblies created the illusion of a successful administration.

The concrete disputes in which the persistent opposition of governor and a.s.sembly found expression were many--quit-rents in Maryland, control of the judges in New York, taxation of proprietor's estates in Pennsylvania, and everywhere questions growing out of the problem of defense and the demand for paper money. Instructed in English precedent, the a.s.semblies knew well how to condition the grant of salary or necessary revenue upon the governor's surrender to their demands. But more insidious and far-reaching in its const.i.tutional effects was the practice by which the governor's executive and administrative functions were restricted. Money bills, even when unconnected with special riders, were often made minutely specific, both in respect to the purposes for which the money was to be used, and in respect to the officials by whom it was to be expended. Even salaries in the army were sometimes granted by individual appropriation. In many colonies, and notably in New York, it was by the constant and excessive use of specific appropriations that the governors were reduced to the level of executive figureheads--mere agents of the colonial a.s.sembly rather than representatives of the Crown exercising wise and effective administrative discretion. This process was especially rapid during the French wars, when the a.s.semblies were enabled to exact tremendous concessions in return for indispensable aid against the common enemy. ”The New York a.s.sembly,” said Peter Kalm about 1750, ”may be looked upon as a Parliament or Diet in miniature.

Everything relating to the good of the province is here debated.” In 1763 he might have said the same, not of New York alone, but of Ma.s.sachusetts and Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. And the governors of these provinces could have told him, as they repeatedly told the Board of Trade, that not only was everything debated there, but there everything was finally decided.

The a.s.semblies, which had thus so largely taken to themselves the functions of government, claimed to declare the rights and defend the interests of the people. But in fact they represented their colonies very much as Parliament represented England. In every colony a property test restricted the number of those who had a voice in the elections; while political methods and the traditions of society united to place effective control in the hands of the eminent few. No secret ballot or Australian system guarded the independence of the voter. It was not an age in which every individual was supposed to count for one and none for more than one. The rigid maintenance of cla.s.s distinctions, even in New England, where students in Harvard College were seated according to social rank and John Adams was but fourteenth in a cla.s.s of twenty-four, made it presumptuous for the ordinary man to dispute the opinion of his betters or contest their right to leaders.h.i.+p: to look up to his superiors and take his cue from them was regarded as the sufficient exercise of political liberty. The times were thought to be out of joint when effective control of colonial politics rested not with a few men who, through wealth or social standing, through official position, through well-considered marriage connections, had built up the rival or consolidated ”interests” which played, each on its little stage, the part of Bedford or Pelham or Yorke in Old England.

The foundation of this miniature aristocracy was wealth; wealth acquired in the South mainly from the great plantations, in the North mainly from commerce. In South Carolina the unhealthful swamp lands, driving the planters to the coast during most of the year, made Charleston one of the first commercial centers of America. Three hundred and sixty vessels cleared from that port in 1764. Manigault and Mazyck, Laurens and Rutledge, were therefore merchants of note as well as planters, exporting provisions to the West Indies, the staples rice and indigo to England or to the Continent south of Finisterre, and bringing back slaves and English manufactures. In Virginia and Maryland, where there were no cities of importance, the planters turned all their profits into slaves and land. The second William Byrd, inheriting 26,000 acres, left to his son 179,000 acres of the best land in Virginia, and the right to represent his county in the a.s.sembly. All the great planters, Ludlow and Carter, Randolph, Fairfax and Blair, lived on their estates, and from their private wharves exported the tobacco which English commission merchants sold in London, and for which they sent in return such English commodities of all kinds as the planter might order. The great estates along the Hudson, owned by men like Van Rensselaer, a descendant of the old Dutch patroon, or Phillipse and Courtland and Livingston, who had profited by the lavish grants of early English governors, rivaled in extent the plantations of Virginia; and like the planters of South Carolina their owners were often engaged in commerce, and were connected, through business or marriage, with the wealthy merchant families of New York City--the Van Dams, Crugers, Waltons, and Ludlows.

Elsewhere in America there were not, as in these provinces, great estates ranging from two hundred thousand to more than a million acres.

But the thrifty Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania, engaging in less extensive enterprises, were less often in debt than the planters of the South, and no less shrewd at a bargain than the Dutch merchants of New York. Possessed of the best land in the province, or engaged at Philadelphia in the export of provisions to the West Indies, they built up many respectable estates among them, and by effective organization the leaders of the sect controlled the colony for many decades in the interest of a Quaker-merchant aristocracy inhabiting the three eastern counties of the province. And even in New England material interests were transforming the structure of society. Slave-owning planters of Newport now dominated the little colony which Roger Williams had established as an experiment in democracy and soul liberty. Boston shared with New York and Philadelphia the export of provisions with which the farms of the Middle and Northern colonies supplied the West Indies. It was the chief center of the New England fisheries.

s.h.i.+pbuilding was there, as at Newport, a great industry; and there, as at Newport, rum was extensively distilled from mola.s.ses procured in the sugar islands. The vessels of Boston and Newport merchants, loaded with rum and fish and tropical products, traded in many European ports, in the Azores, or on the African coast, returning with wine and slaves and every kind of English manufacture. In this material atmosphere the old Puritan spirit was being strangely subdued to the stuff it worked in.

Wealth and shrewdness were more effective than orthodoxy in achieving social and political eminence. A few names familiar to the seventeenth century are still to be met with in high places--Sewall, Dudley, Quincy, Hutchinson; but in the middle of the eighteenth century the names of repute in the Old Bay colony are mostly new--Oliver, Bowdoin, Boylston, Cooper, Phillips, Cus.h.i.+ng, Thatcher; names rescued from obscurity by men who had won distinction in the pulpit or at the bar, or by men who had made money in trade, and whose descendants, marrying with the old clerical or official families, had pushed their way, in the second or third generation, into the social and political aristocracy of the province.

Such were the ”men of considerable estates” in whose hands the English Government was generally well content to leave the control of colonial politics; and as they were the men who profited most by the connection with England, they were the men whose outlook upon the world was least provincial and most European. Planters and merchants of the South, exporting their staples directly to England, were in constant communication with their London agents. Business or politics had taken many of them more than once across the ocean. Not a few had been sent in their youth to be educated in England; and had resided there for some years, forming acquaintance with prominent English families, listening to debates in the Commons or to arguments in the courts of law, diverting themselves in theaters and coffee-houses, acquiring the latest modes and mannerisms, moulding themselves upon some favorite model of a city magnate or country gentleman. In the Northern colonies, trade relations with England were less direct. Business rarely called the merchant to Europe; and Yale or Harvard was regarded as a satisfactory subst.i.tute for Oxford or Cambridge. Yet the merchants of Boston and New York had their agents in many European ports; kept informed of conditions of trade and s.h.i.+pping throughout the world; and eagerly scanned the foreign gazettes which recounted the political and social happenings of Old England. In North and South, the well-to-do, as they were able, built and furnished their houses upon English models, and were not content with modes of dress which were known, twelve months late, not to be the fas.h.i.+on abroad. Especially fortunate were those whose wealth was dignified by distinction of birth, the walls of whose houses were hung with oil portraits of eminent ancestors.

And the genuine colonial aristocrat, such as Colonel Byrd or Governor Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as his house was furnished after the best English fas.h.i.+on. Even more than others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the first gentleman of America. In the middle of the eighteenth century, eccentricity was not yet a mark of genius; and the ”best people in the colonies” learned from English authors what high intellectual merit there was in being close to the center. ”Your authors know but little of the fame they have on this side of the ocean,” Franklin a.s.sured William Strahan when he wrote to order six sets of a new edition of Pope's works. The four thousand volumes at Westover, or the books in Governor Hutchinson's Boston house, would have given any cultivated Englishman a reputation for good taste and discriminating judgment. Colonel Byrd could as readily as Voltaire detect in the fantastic beliefs of an American savage ”the three great articles of Natural Religion.” We find the youthful Adams, who read Bolingbroke for his style and laboriously copied out Berkeley and Tillotson, entering the lists of ”moderns” to defend the advantages of eighteenth-century Boston against those of Rome in the age of Tully, renouncing, with the a.s.surance of Locke, and with some of his phrases, the outworn fallacy of innate ideas, and navely confiding to his journal, after the manner of Diderot, that a man born blind would have never a notion of color. Franklin was only the most distinguished of those who read with pleasure the Queen Anne poets and essayists, who learned in Tillotson that theology might be compatible with reason and common sense, or in Shaftesbury that an enlightened free-thinker might still be a gentleman and a man of virtue. Among the cultivated and the well-bred it was no more than good form to open the mind to all the tolerant liberalisms of the age; and no one in the colonies lost caste who endeavored, in the manner if not in the substance of his thinking, to achieve the polished urbanity of those Englishmen who made a point of being scholars without a touch of pedantry, and men of virtue without the taint of prejudice.

Yet few of these emanc.i.p.ated citizens of the world had permitted the dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an imported fas.h.i.+on, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation of men who lived by custom and guided their steps in the well-worn paths of precedent. In America, as in England, as in France, itself, the formulae of radicalism were well p.r.o.nounced by many whose hearts grew faint at the first rude contact with the thing itself. And of all the phrases of that age, the ones best suited to the temper and purposes of the colonial aristocracies, and understood by them with reservations the most characteristically English, were those employed by Locke to justify the natural right of Englishmen to become free while remaining unequal.

The colonials of substantial estates, long occupied in their a.s.semblies in resisting the governor's authority, thought of themselves often enough as but rehearsing the traditional conflict between Crown and Parliament. Like their prototypes they identified the rights of property with natural right, and translated political liberty in terms of prescriptive privilege. The rights of man and the rights of Englishmen were thus thought to be synonymous terms: a happy confusion by which it was possible for them to defend liberty against the encroachments of their equals in England, without sharing it with their inferiors in the colonies.

II

”My ancestors,” says Devereaux Jarrett, who was born on a small plantation in New Kent County, Virginia, about 1733, ”had the character of honesty and industry, by which they lived in credit among their neighbors, free from real want, and above the frowns of the world. This was also the habit in which my parents were. They always had plenty of plain food and raiment, suitable to their humble station. We made no use of tea or coffee; meat, bread, and milk was the ordinary food of all my acquaintance. I suppose the richer sort might make use of those and other luxuries, but to such people we had no access. We were accustomed to look upon what were called _gentle folks_ as beings of a superior order. For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance. A periwig in those days, was a distinguis.h.i.+ng badge of gentle folk. Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I believe, universal among all my rank and age.”

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