The First American Constitutions by Adams Willi Paul;Kimber Rita & Robert;Morris Richard B.;Morris Richard B.;

Author:Adams, Willi Paul;Kimber, Rita & Robert;Morris, Richard B.;Morris, Richard B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1351164
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2013-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

“VIRTUAL” REPRESENTATION AND THE COLONIAL ASSEMBLIES

Distance from England and the administrative form of the first settlement companies had encouraged the early development of a system of representation within the British colonies in North America. As early as 1640, eight colonies had assemblies that represented the interests of the settlers in their dealings with the companies, the king’s governors, or the proprietors. Between 1686 and 1689, the colonists in the Northeast successfully resisted an attempt to consolidate them into a Dominion of New England and place them under the rule of a viceroy and his privy council.622 From the 1690s on, the assemblies regarded themselves more and more as comparable to the House of Commons and followed the rituals of Parliament as closely as they could.623 In countless struggles with the governors and their councils, the assemblies won increasing influence over legislation and administration in the colonies. After 1776 they became the most powerful political institutions in the states. In the period following the Revolution, they tried to retain their position of strength. In the metaphorical language of the day, the legislature was “the soul, the source of life and movement” in the body of the state.624 To persuade the state legislatures to give up part of their power was the major task of the supporters of the Federal Constitution of 1787.

The conflict between the assemblies and Parliament over the Stamp Act resulted in the articulation of two mutually exclusive theories of representation. The colonial assemblies had a fair claim to truly reflecting the interests of their constituencies; voters and representatives were united by residence and land ownership in the same district, and the property qualifications for voting permitted probably three-fourths of the male white adults to vote.625 The parliament at Westminster did not even pretend to be directly representative in this sense. In a pamphlet defending the Stamp Act, Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Whately argued in 1765 that nine-tenths of the English population could not elect representatives either; all the inhabitants of Leeds, Halifax, Birmingham, and Manchester, for example, a population exceeding that of even the largest colony, did not have the right to send a single representative to Westminster. But this was not insufferable, Whately said, because according to the principles of the English constitution, they were “virtually” represented in Parliament, as indeed he thought the colonists were. Years before Edmund Burke’s much noted speech on the nature of representation, Whately formulated the constitutional theory of the elected representative as the guardian of the common good in contrast to the lobbyist for some particular interest:

None are actually, all are virtually represented in Parliament; for every Member of Parliament sits in the House, not as Representative of his own Constituents, but as one of that august Assembly by which all the Commons of Great Britain are represented. Their Rights and their Interests, however his own Borough may be affected by general Dispositions, ought to be the great Objects of his Attention, and the only Rules for his Conduct; and

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