Volume I Part 17 (1/2)
[1720]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Seal of the Proprietors of Carolina.]
Locke drew up for the province a minute feudal const.i.tution, but it was too c.u.mbersome 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sembly. Their opponents would keep Huguenot immigrants, whom the favor of the proprietaries rendered unwelcome, entirely from the franchise. The popular party pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed into royal hands, 1729, remarkable prosperity attended them both.
a.s.suming 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, a.s.sumed the status of a royal colony.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Savannah, from a Print of 1741.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: James Oglethorpe.]
CHAPTER VI.
GOVERNMENTAL INSt.i.tUTIONS 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 Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut also religion, at first by pure ma.s.s 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 inst.i.tuted 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 n.o.bility of blood or t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s. Of the latter there were two groups, the royal or provincial, including New Hamps.h.i.+re, Ma.s.sachusetts; 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 const.i.tutional and governmental changes had occurred by 1750. Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 const.i.tutional 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. Ma.s.sachusetts theorists used as a valid a.n.a.logy 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 unt.i.tled 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.