Political Development in America

The French and Indian War had other important results than that of removing the great rival to English power in America. In this it cleared the field for another and greater war yet to come, while it educated the colonists in the military art, and prepared them for the task of encountering the ablest soldiers of Europe in deadly conflict on their own soil. It served, also, as a school of training for many of the officers who were afterwards to grow prominent in the Revolutionary War, and in particular gave to George Washington his first lessons in that art in which he was soon to acquire a world-wide fame. Names crop up throughout the course of this conflict which we shall meet in marked prominence in the events next to be described,--names not only of soldiers, but also of statesmen, for it is a political as well as a military revolution with which we have to deal, and its grand results are due to the legislator quite as much as to the soldier. The military struggle, indeed, was preceded by a long and fierce political contest, of which it formed the inevitable conclusion. For this contest the people of America had been prepared, not by their years of war, but by their years of peace, for the whole political history of the American colonies is a history of instruction in the principles of democracy, and the republic of the United States was only in an immediate sense the work of the men of the Revolution, but in its fullest sense was the work of the colonists of America from their first entrance upon the trans-Atlantic shores. A consideration of the political struggle leading to the war of independence, therefore, properly requires a preceding review of the political history of the colonies from their first settlement, since only in this way can we comprehend the preparation of the whole people for the radical change of government they were so soon to undergo, and the strong spirit of democracy which stood behind the labors of congresses and conventions and gave the cue to the work which they were to perform. In default of finding any sufficiently brief statement of this political evolution in the works of historians, the editor offers the following outline sketch, as an essential preliminary to the chapter of American history which now demands our attention.

THE several British colonies of America were formed under a variety of differing conditions. The settlement of Virginia was the work of a company of London merchants, that of New England of a body of Puritan refugees from persecution. Most of the other colonies were formed through the efforts of proprietors, to whom the king had made large grants of territory. None of them were of royal or parliamentary establishment, the nearest to this being the colony of New York, which was appropriated from its Dutch founders by the king's brother,--soon to become king himself. The government of the mother-country, therefore, took no part in the original formation of the government of the colonies, except in the somewhat flexible requirements of the charters granted to the proprietors. Lord Baltimore was left at full liberty to establish a form of government for Maryland, William Penn for Pennsylvania, and the body of proprietors for the Carolinas, while the London Company of merchants largely used their own discretion in modelling that of Virginia. As for the government of Plymouth, it was formed without any restriction or suggestion from abroad, by a body of men who had crossed the ocean to enjoy religious liberty and who were prepared by their previous history for the duties of self-government. The Massachusetts colony was a chartered one, but from the first it took its government into its own hands, and began to exist under that same simple form of democracy which had been established by its Plymouth predecessor. In fact, a colony composed of equals, unprovided with a royal governor, and to a large extent unrestricted in its action, could scarcely assume any other than the one form of government, that of a democracy in which every man was a citizen and had a full voice in the management of affairs. There was only one restriction to this universal suffrage and self government,--that of religious orthodoxy. The colonists were Puritan sectaries, and were determined that their form of religion alone should prevail in the colony. Not only were those of heterodox views incapable of exercising full rights of citizenship, but they were soon driven from the community, as an element of discordance hostile to the well-being of this bigoted body politic. To the extent here indicated, therefore, democracy in America was first established in 1620, not in 1776. And it made considerable progress in New England and elsewhere ere it encountered any decided interference from the crown. The growth of this democratic spirit is of high interest, and is worthy of a much fuller consideration than we have space to devote to it.