As one leaves the New
England colonies, where the Puritan influence was so strong, and looks at the
other colonies, say Virginia and Pennsylvania, one encounters some highly
distinguishing social elements and some common ones as well. What seems to prevail in all the colonies is
a foundational understanding of governance and politics.
That
leads to a set the basic assumptions of how government should be set up and,
therefore, reflects agreement about basic related values. In addition, that similarity led to agreements
about what government is and how it should function. Generally, an overall description of this
similarity can be characterized as federal thinking.
A colony that predated settlement in New England is
Virginia. Thirteen years before the
first settlement in Massachusetts was established in 1620, the Jamestown
settlement of Virginia was established in 1607.
While there were three types of colonial arrangements – property
colonies, charter colonies, royal colonies – given the inability to garner
immediate profits, and in terms of the Crown, indifference, all the colonies
devolved into being free standing entities establishing local governance.
The initial businesses that set up the colonies, for the
most part, were unsuccessful (the Virginia Company went bankrupt in 1622), but
the role the colonies were to play in the prevailing mercantilist system was to
provide natural resources to the mother country, England. Given this overall aim, a lot of policy was
accepted that might have been at least questioned otherwise. That would include the introduction and
furtherance of slavery.
The first slaves were introduced in 1619 as they were brought
to Jamestown.[1] These unfortunates were to work on certain
agricultural products – rice, sugar, tobacco, and eventually cotton. These crops lend themselves to large land
allotments and, given the geography of the area, the development of the
plantation economy quickly came to be.
Another difference between Virginia and New England was
that Virginia was not settled by Puritans.
In that more southern area, Anglicans initially populated that
colony. This was offset a bit with a
level of popularity for Puritanism among the first natural born generation of
Virginians.
Despite
this variance, almost from the beginning, there was a similarity between the
constituting documents written and enacted in New England and those that will guide
the way in Virginia. Donald Lutz reports
on an initial Virginia document:
Under its initial charter, Virginia
was run by a cumbersome double council.
A thirteen-member council in Virginia to carry out its will. The system did not work, and the Virginia
governor had to become a virtual dictator to maintain order. The [Articles, Laws, and Orders, Divine,
Politic, and Martial for the Colony of Virginia, 1610] was issued under martial
law but still reflects the values that were generally accepted by the
colonists. It is equivalent to a code of
law and may be fruitfully compared with the other codes of law [found among the
colonies]. Religion plays an important
role in this Virginia document, as it did in codes elsewhere, and the moral
content looks similar to that of New England codes. … The similarities with the Puritans may have
been due to the predominance of “low church” members, who while remaining securely
in the fold, shared many of the Puritan inclinations against pomp, status, and
other vestiges of what was termed covert popery.[2]
This gave way to
representative governance, defined by compact, shortly afterward.
The general attitude of the English Crown to the
developments in Virginia was to mostly ignore any problems. This led to the company’s employees to
organize themselves that led naturally to a federating model. Naturally, one can attribute their already existing
biases for representative governance due to England’s parliamentary tradition,
but with the Crown being so far off and mostly indifferent, one can see
federated bonding as a normal mode of advancing a structured polity.
And this indifference would last for the greater part of
the 1600s. That is not to say certain
actions by the Crown would have inconsequential effects. It, for example, issued highly generous
grants to its favored parties such as when it granted William Penn Pennsylvania
in 1682, the Carolinas to the Carolina Properties in 1632, New York to the Duke
of York in 1666, and so on.[3] But as the colonies became viable and then lucrative
– along with some uppity biases – the interest among British policy makers
would change.
And then there is the effect that growing Enlightened
attitudes would have. Here, there is a
mixed bag. On the one hand, the
Enlightenment will undercut the authority of religious thinking (as previously
explained in this blog), but on the other, it would also undermine aristocratic
assumptions about people. The whole
notion that well off people are so advantaged due to some godly plan was
seriously questioned.
This
led to republican leanings among Enlightened thinkers – among them one finds
the “social contract” theorists. It was
a historical shift toward equality. One
imported set of ideas was those of John Locke.
While subsequent writers have attributed too much influence on this philosopher,[4] his promotion of a natural
rights view and its introduction to America should be noted.
To
the extent that natural rights was considered and adopted, it presented a
competing sense of what it meant to govern and engage in politics. So, during the 1600s, Virginia was allowed to
organize itself, initiate its basic economic arrangements, and proceed to
establish a viable position within the mercantilist system that was one,
global, and two, highly entrenched. But
before moving on to examine Pennsylvania’s development more closely, the next
posting will give an overall comparison between the natural rights view and
federal theory.
[1] Slavery had already been present in America; the
first slaves were probably introduced on this side of the Atlantic as far back
as the early 1500s with Christopher Columbus transporting them to Hispaniola. See “America’s History of Slavery Long before
Jamestown,” The History Channel (n.d.), accessed May 6, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/american-slavery-before-jamestown-1619#:~:text=The%20arrival%20of%20the%20first,as%20early%20as%20the%201500s.
[2]
Donald S. Lutz (ed.), Colonial Origins of the
American Constitution: A Documentary
History (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund,1998), 314.
[3]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching
Company/The Great Courses, 2005).
[4] See, for example, Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978/2018).
