Page 127 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Colonial governments were not democracies in the modern sense. Possessing the
4.1 right to vote was one thing, exercising it another. Americans participated in elections
when major issues were at stake—the formation of banks in mid-eighteenth-century
Massachusetts, for example—but usually they were content to let members of the rural
4.2 Quick Check and urban gentry represent them in the assemblies. To be sure, unlike modern democra-
What was the structure of royal cies, colonial politics excluded women and nonwhites from voting. The point to remem-
government in eighteenth-century ber, however, is that American voters always had the power to expel legislative rascals. This
America?
4.3 political reality kept autocratic gentlemen from straying too far from the will of the people.

colonial Assemblies
4.4
Elected members of the colonial assemblies believed that they had an obligation to
preserve colonial liberties. They perceived any attack on the legislature as an assault on
the rights of Americans. The representatives brooked no criticism, and several colonial
4.5
printers were jailed because they criticized actions taken by a lower house.
So aggressive were these bodies in seizing privileges, determining procedures, and
controlling money bills that historians have described the political development of
eighteenth-century America as “the rise of the assemblies.” No doubt this is exagger-
ated, but the long series of imperial wars against the French, demanding large public
expenditures, transformed the small, amateurish assemblies of the seventeenth century
into the more professional, vigilant legislatures of the eighteenth.
This political system seemed designed to generate hostility. Colonial legislators
had no reason to cooperate with appointed royal governors. Alexander Spotswood,
Virginia’s governor from 1710 to 1722, for example, attempted to institute a new land
program backed by the crown. When persuasion and gifts failed, he tried chicanery. But
the members of the House of Burgesses refused to support a plan that did not suit their
own interests. Before leaving office, Spotswood gave up trying to carry out royal policy.
Instead, he allied himself with the gentry who controlled the House and the Council and
became a wealthy man because they rewarded their new friend with large tracts of land.
A few governors managed briefly to re-create in America the political culture of
patronage, a system that eighteenth-century Englishmen took for granted. Most success-
ful in this endeavor was William Shirley, who held office in Massachusetts from 1741 to
1757. The secret to his political successes in America was connection to people who held
high office in Britain. But Shirley’s practices—and those of men like him—clashed with
the colonists’ perception of politics. They really believed in the purity of the balanced
constitution. They insisted on complete separation of executive and legislative authority.
A major source of shared political information was the weekly journal, a new
and vigorous institution in American life. In New York and Massachusetts especially,
weekly journals urged readers to preserve civic virtue and be vigilant against the spread
of privileged power.
The rise of the assemblies also shaped American culture in subtler ways. During
the century, the law became increasingly English in character. The Board of Trade,
the Privy Council that advised the king in London and acted as a court of appeals for
the colonies, and Parliament scrutinized court decisions and legislative actions from
all 13 mainland colonies. As a result, local legal practices that had been widespread
during the seventeenth century became standardized. Indeed, according to one histo-
rian, the colonial legal system by 1750 “was substantially that of the mother country.”
Not surprisingly, many men who served in colonial assemblies were either lawyers
or had received legal training. When Americans from different regions met—as they
frequently did before the Revolution—they discovered that they shared a commitment
to preserving the English common law.
As political developments drew the colonists closer to the mother country, they
Quick Check also made Americans more aware of each other. As their horizons widened, they
Why were the plans of royal learned they operated within the same general imperial system. Like the revivalists and
governors so often defeated by merchants—people who crossed old boundaries—colonial legislators laid the founda-
colonial assemblies?
tion for a larger cultural identity.
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