Political Development in America: American Revolution and William Penn

The charter granted by Charles II. to William Penn for the government of Pennsylvania was very liberal in its provisions, but not sufficiently so to meet the enlarged views of the proprietor, who at the outstart promised his colonists that they should be a free people and be governed by laws of their own making. In 1682 he published his "frame of government," which was to be submitted to the people of the province for approval. In 1683 this was amended, in the second Assembly of the province, and a charter of liberties granted which made Pennsylvania almost fully a representative democracy. The right of appointment of judicial and executive officers, which was reserved by the proprietors of the other colonies, was surrendered by William Penn to the people, and the government consisted of the proprietor and the Assembly, with no intermediate council, as in Maryland and elsewhere. Yet, liberal as this constitution was, the people soon demanded further concessions and privileges, and Penn, in his last visit to his province, granted a new charter, still more liberal, and conferring greater powers upon the people, who from this time forward possessed a very full measure of political liberty.

The brief review we have here given of the development of political institutions in the English colonies in America will serve to show that they had attained a fair measure of political liberty at the period which we have now reached (the close of the French and Indian War), and had little or no occasion for discontent concerning their governmental rights and privileges. Unlike the French and Spanish colonists, who had no experience of parliamentary government and readily submitted to the rule of despotic governors, the British colonists were thoroughly indoctrinated in legislative principles, and came from a country in which at the period of some of the emigrations the people were rising in defence of their natural rights, and at the period of others had subverted the monarchy and founded a democracy on its ruins. Very naturally, therefore, the American colonists insisted upon a considerable degree of self-government in their new home, and extended this civil liberty even beyond the measure of that of the English Commonwealth, taking advantage of the many opportunities afforded them by the dissensions existing in the mother-country. As a consequence of this persistent struggle for the privilege of self-government, New England became almost a full republic, Pennsylvania was little behind it in the legislative freedom of its people, and the other colonies gained the right of making their own laws, with more or less interference from the royal governors.

So far, therefore, as legislative power and religious freedom were concerned, the colonists had little to complain of, and had there been no deeper cause of discontent the American Revolution would never have taken place. And through this long experience of self-government by the people of the colonies was acquired an extended knowledge of the principles of government, and a vigorous democratic sentiment, which rendered the form of government adopted by independent America an inevitable necessity of the situation, while the political ability displayed by its founders was the resultant of a long experience in self-rule, and no original outburst of legislative genius, as is so generally supposed.

The causes of the discontent which we have now to consider were industrial and executive, not legislative, and consisted of those stringent commercial and manufacturing regulations, and the claim of the crown to unrestricted powers of taxation, which had for a long period been resisted by the colonies. In their earlier and weaker days these evils were of secondary importance, but with every step of growth in population, and of development of the resources of America, the right to trade with whom they pleased and to manufacture what they pleased became of greater importance to the colonists, until finally the restrictions in these respects grew insupportable. In regard to the question of taxation, the people of Massachusetts at an early date strongly disputed the right of taxation without representation. As time went on, this sentiment spread to the other colonies, and had become vigorously implanted in the minds of all Americans by the era immediately preceding the Revolution. That principle which had been long fought for and eventually gained in the home country, that the people, through their representatives, alone had the power to lay taxes, was naturally claimed in America as an essential requisite of a representative government; and it was mainly to the effort of the English authorities to deprive the colonists of this right that the American Revolution was due.