The glorious cause, p.6
The Glorious Cause, page 6
The great landowners along the Hudson Valley in New York and the big planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina may have possessed even greater wealth. A number of these planters owned thousands of acres, cultivated a relatively small portion themselves, and leased the remainder. These landed magnates made up a rural aristocracy, and some consciously imitated English models.
Several of the great landlords owed their start to seventeenth-century charters and land patents. The charters were worthless for more than a hundred years after they were first issued even though they provided that feudal dues—rents, fees, and quit rents—should be paid their holders. The holders, however, could not collect what the charters said was owed them since the population to give these obligations reality did not exist in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, when colonial population virtually exploded, the holders of the original grants—the Penns and the Calverts, for example—made the old charters pay off.
A few “feudal lords,” a large number of great merchants, planters, and wealthy lawyers made their way to the top. There is some evidence that the long-run “trend” in the seventy-five years before the American Revolution entailed an increasing concentration of wealth in such groups. One historian holds that the richest 5 percent in Boston increased its share of taxable wealth between 1687 and 1774 from 30 to 49 percent. In Philadelphia a comparable group built up its holdings from 33 percent to 55 percent. The difficulty with these figures lies in the fact that in 1774 taxable wealth was assessed differently from 1687.16
Several historians have recently compiled a good many other statistics, most of which show that social stratification occurred in the eighteenth century. In Boston and Philadelphia, to cite a different sort of example, the lower half of society held 5 percent of the taxable wealth. Using another sort of measurement, a historian has established that between 1720 and 1770 in Philadelphia the percentage paying no taxes rose from 2.5 percent to 10.6 percent. He estimates that by 1772 one of four adult men in Philadelphia was poor by the standards of the day; of this poor group half either received some sort of public aid or spent part of the year in the workhouse, the almshouse, or the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Sick Poor; the other half owned so little real property that they paid no taxes.17
The abstractness of the statistics conceals the bleakness of the lives of these urban poor. There is little doubt that some went hungry; some lived in dreadfully cramped and unsanitary housing; some did not receive medical treatment when sick. From at least the 1750s on, these poor included new sorts of people—veterans of the midcentury wars and perhaps a larger number of victims of the instabilities produced by the wars and the increasing population growth. Not surprisingly they protested when they found the strength, rioting in the streets for bread and presumably for some public recognition of their problems.
Bread riots in the cities brought very little bread or anything else. None of these riots was large in the eighteenth century; none really threatened the control of public authority. The cities themselves, though major institutions of the colonial economy, contained relatively few people. At least 90 percent of the colonial population lived in towns and villages of no more than 8000 people. And the majority of the 90 percent lived on farms or in hamlets. The impoverished classes of the cities included a very small proportion of native-born Americans. More of the poor lived on farms and plantations than in cities. Even here they were not numerous.18
Although the majority of Americans who worked the soil owned their land, landless laborers lived in all colonies. Many leased land which they cultivated with an independence approaching that of freeholders, a group they hoped to join. Three colonies—New York, Virginia, and Maryland—held the largest numbers of tenants. At first sight, a New World feudalism seemed to have existed in parts of these colonies.
On the surface no area of English America looked more feudal than the Hudson Valley in New York. Large “manors” had been carved out there, with six of the most impressive located on the east side of the river. Their holders, the landlords, may have at times fancied themselves to be Old World feudal “barons,” and they did enjoy some of the privileges and exemptions of the breed. For example, some held patents which authorized them to hold courts leet and baron, exercising criminal and civil jurisdiction; several by the terms of their patents controlled hunting and fishing, the cutting of timber, and the milling of grain. A few could even appoint a clergyman for their manors. Most claimed the right of escheat, and practically all could repossess their property if tenants failed to pay the rent. Landlords could also require their tenants to work a few days a year on fences and roads.19
Practice often diverged from the claims to these rights. For the application of these rights proved uneven and in some cases nonexistent. Courts leet and baron rarely appeared despite the authorization of charters and patents. County courts filled their places and provided judicial services. As for most of the other rights, they remained unexercised or of minor importance when they were enforced.
Tenancy was not a desirable condition though many desired it. Tenants worked the lands of the great Hudson Valley manors and paid their rents along with a certain deference to the great men who ran things. Yet the tenants’ lot was not so bad as these statements may imply, for they did not make up a European peasantry permanently tied down by their obligations to others. The Hudson Valley lords had more land than they could use, and in the eighteenth century they were under pressure from the English government—which wanted the fees that leases of land produced—to get it into production. The presence of squatters and settlers from Connecticut and Massachusetts also helped persuade the landholders to put their lands into production. As a result, landlords began to attempt to lure squatters, who paid nothing, into becoming tenants, who might be made to pay something. The landlords offered leases that required no payments of rent for the first few years, and they also lent tenants tools and livestock.20
These techniques worked, or at least they attracted tenants. But tenants usually aspired to become freeholders, and they signed leases only in order to get a start—not to perpetuate their own dependency. They farmed as tenants, accumulated income, and then bought their own places. By the time of the Revolution the Hudson Valley lords were getting used to a remarkable turnover among their tenants.
Tenants in Maryland, especially those of proprietary manors, led lives rather different from those of tenants in New York. For them tenancy offered little promise of moving up into the freeholder class. Rather they led stable lives, or lived for decades in the same places, usually in poverty, cultivating the same ground. They leased this land for decades, and some inherited their leases from parents who had lived and died on proprietary manors. Still others leased lands near the land leased by their fathers. Only a few owned any land, and probably fewer still owned a slave or two. Those on the eastern shore, where wheat was grown, were better off than those who cultivated tobacco. But for both sorts life went on in miserable circumstances—large families crowded into small houses, farming with primitive techniques, few livestock and barns, and indebtedness the common conditions.21
IV
No political system ever perfectly expresses the needs of its society. No society in the English colonies constructed political arrangements completely faithful to itself. Their governments arose from English sources such as charters, patents, and the instructions of the Crown, and their leaders counted among themselves a number who had been appointed in England by the Crown, or, in the eighteenth century, in Pennsylvania and Maryland, by proprietors.
There were other circumstances distinguishing American politics, and several more important than the English connection in giving them form and substance. Representative government prevailed in all thirteen colonies, and representation was virtually always tied to land. Since even by the middle of the eighteenth century land was still fairly easy to acquire, a majority of white adult males could exercise the vote in provincial elections. Outright ownership—fee simple—was not always among the qualifications required of a voter. A leasehold brought the right to vote in New York, where thousands of tenants trooped to the polls on election day.22
Like the English government, the American divided up the spoils of office, kept the peace, and most of the time at least kept order. But they did more. Colonial assemblies had their versions of Lord Boodle, though the Boodles of America were never lords. These worthies usually held forth in the lower houses, where the real power lay by 1750. The American Boodles worried over much more than the division of political offices. The political loaves and fishes did not amount to much in the colonies, and what there was fell to some dim secretary of state in England or occasionally the royal governor, to distribute. Boodles in America chased bigger game—land which might be held for speculation or seated in plantations. They also had contracts to award, contracts for the supplies and equipment needed in the frequent wars of the century, contracts for roads, bridges, wharves, and other facilities essential to a developing economy.
These activities suggest that colonial governments had much to do compared with their English counterpart, and thirteen little Parliaments, as the assemblies liked to style themselves, offered lively arenas for their energies. With so much at stake the assemblies often found themselves the scene of considerable conflict. And indeed a factionalism sometimes described as noisy and turbulent marked most of their proceedings in the years before the Revolution. But not every colony found itself divided or disturbed by factions. Virginia, one of the greatest of all the colonies, sometimes enjoyed lively elections, but its politics were usually tranquil. A landed elite ran things, most often in the interest of a broad public and only occasionally in its own. Political life flowed a course equally calm in New Hampshire in the twenty-five years before the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 because Benning Wentworth and an elite were in charge. Wentworth and an aristocracy composed of relatives and friends dominated political life in New Hampshire between 1741 and 1767 as no other group did elsewhere. Liberal in dispensing political patronage and grants of land, Wentworth relied on a satisfied Council and judiciary to help him run the government. The lower house also learned to admire him as its members received land—once an entire township—and flattering attention. Wentworth did not just bribe his way into the affections of his constituents, he protected their interests, especially their interests in the trade in masts, lumber, and ships. The mast trade and lumber business so consumed labor in New Hampshire that grain sometimes had to be imported. Protecting this trade often meant that Wentworth had to violate his instructions which called on him to protect the king’s right to the woods. Wentworth never seemed to mind; nor apparently did anyone else in New Hampshire, where safe and stable government prevailed.23
The tranquility that distinguished the politics of Virginia and New Hampshire, and one or two others, set them apart from most colonies. Next door to New Hampshire, politics in Massachusetts followed a course common to most of the colonies with factions struggling for control. In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, much of the strife twisted around the governor, who normally led a miserable life. One of those of the early part of the century, Joseph Dudley, deserved his fate; although his successors, Samuel Shute, William Burnet, and Jonathan Belcher, did not, they endured even more savage struggles with local factions. William Shirley, who served as governor between 1741 and 1757, enjoyed political peace because he had wars with France to fight. Those wars armed him with patronage and contracts to distribute, means he used to disarm his opposition.24
Not even war could keep Pennsylvania’s factions from tearing at one another during much of the eighteenth century. As in Massachusetts, the governor customarily absorbed many blows. But the governor of Pennsylvania had his own peculiar problems—he was the representative of an absentee proprietor, one of the heirs of William Penn, who refused to allow his large holdings of land to be taxed. On the eve of the agitation of the 1760s, disenchantment with Thomas Penn, who had acceded to the proprietorship in 1746, had reached an intensity that led Benjamin Franklin and others to attempt to persuade the Crown to take over the colony’s government.25 Franklin failed, but his effort hardly contributed to a politics of calm.
New Yorkers found other reasons for dividing into factions which contested with one another as vigorously as they did with the royal governor. Rhode Island elected its governor and scarcely even saw a royal official other than those in the Customs service. But factions appeared nonetheless and added to the colony’s reputation of crankiness. Maryland and
North Carolina differed from Rhode Island in many ways, and from one another, but periodically they too tied themselves and their governor in factional knots.26
Factions nourished themselves from offices and from the resources in the hands of the powerful. They also drew sustenance from conflict, but they did not tear the political society apart. They recognized that limits existed and that exceeding them might bring the political system to collapse. For there were rules by which the factional game was played. The rules barred the use of violence against the opposition. The colonial Boodle knew enough history to recognize the dangers of force. In the seventeenth century most of the major colonies had endured rebellion. Such upheaval dismayed men of the next century who also knew of the English Civil War. They recognized that there was much at stake—political offices, an undeveloped continent, and social order itself. The opportunities for able men to grab and then to grab more enticed many into unprincipled action and made for political struggle. But these opportunities also helped keep them in bounds, made them reluctant to go too far, and made them wary of conflict over principles from which there would be no turning back.
Factionalism thus took form in the enveloping stability of the century. The forces that made for conflict, paradoxically, contributed to political order as well. In the colonial constituencies, for example, most white men could vote. A large electorate could induce strenuous electioneering, but it gave men a sense that they had been included within the political system. Governments with considerable powers may have tempted men to strive to control them, but they also induced restraint, an accommodation to the reality of the relationships among the institutions of society.
The sense of these relationships in the eighteenth century was weaker than it had been when the colonies were founded, but it retained importance nonetheless. At its heart lay the belief that the agencies of the state were connected to all other institutions—families, churches, even schools and colleges. The precise nature of the connections appeared indistinct, yet the connections were there. Men of affairs undoubtedly took reassurance from the persistence of patrician leadership, for in virtually every colonial institution the “better sort” led the way. This leadership, drawn from the comfortable classes generation after generation, gave evidence to lesser men of the permanence of society and political institutions.
Thus colonial politics and society contained some contradictions and some surprising agreements and unities. Though dominated by property owners and entrepreneurs, the economy remained colonial—subject to regulation from abroad which aimed among other things to restrict its growth. Yet it grew nonetheless. Society on the eve of the Revolution was heavily English in composition; yet it had absorbed large numbers of migrants from the European continent. The political order, modeled in rough on the representative institutions of England, was presided over by governors who, except in Connecticut and Rhode Island, were appointed in the home country. Yet local interest managed to get their way in most matters despite instructions to the contrary that these governors carried with them. And though eagerness to govern themselves often led the American colonials to fall into factions, they observed rules that made politics tolerable.
V
Religion, especially after 1740, displayed similar contradictions. In nine colonies an established church—one that received public taxes—held forth. But the most fervent believers remained outside its doors with no intention of applying for admission. They followed the call of the Spirit and despised the formality and the rationalism—they called it sin—in the established bodies. Even these enthusiasts differed among themselves on many matters. The sacraments aroused disagreements, as did the qualifications of their clergy, the education of their children, and the order of worship.27
Congregationalists with a desire for purity had settled New England in the seventeenth century, and they continued to insist on their version of it for themselves, though not for others, in the eighteenth. After the turn of the century they had to contend with increasingly powerful groups of Anglicans, Quakers, and Baptists who fought for exemptions from paying taxes to the Congregational establishment and thereby demonstrated an aversion in common. But these groups agreed on little else. Nor did harmony prevail within the individual groups. Bitter disputes threatened unity, especially after the Great Awakening, the religious revival of the 1740s that shattered so much that was conventional in Protestantism. The Baptists, for example, divided into “separate” and “regular” branches, and struggles between “New Lights” and “Old Lights” rent the established order. Still, the Congregationalists proved their staying power, especially in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where they received public support well into the nineteenth century.28
The New England churches look tame compared with those of the middle colonies. There a genuine religious pluralism prevailed by the mid-eighteenth century. Pluralism helped create religious freedom eventually, but for much of the century a spirit of toleration barely breathed. Even the Quakers, who had taken the lead in founding Pennsylvania late in the seventeenth century and who had clung together under persecution in England, often disputed among themselves in America. In any case, the eighteenth century was only about twenty years old when other sects and churches in the colony could count more members. But although they were outnumbered, the Quakers continued to dominate the government until midcentury wars and the Presbyterians eased them out of power.
