The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn

Author:Bernard Bailyn [Bailyn, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79851-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Though economic groups sought expression in the colonial Assemblies, there were no “functional groupings” in this English sense in pre-Revolutionary America. The economy was too immature, too fresh, too easily exploited, too quickly developing, too shifting, and too unreliable for that.34

An indeterminate leadership and an unstable economic structure were powerful generators of conflict in communities whose ideal was a static polity and whose presumption was that the essential groupings of social forces were in some sense reasonably described by the terms monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. But the sources of factionalism lay deeper even than this. Ultimately they involved the role of government in society; and again, the contrast with England is instructive. The purpose of the general government in eighteenth-century England, Richard Pares has written, was not to legislate but simply “to govern: to maintain order, to wage war and, above all, to conduct foreign affairs.” When foreign affairs were calm “there was nothing to think about … but the control and composition of the executive government itself. Indeed, when there is nothing to do but to govern, no other subject is worth thinking about.” Parliament did, of course, pass some laws relating to social and economic development, “but most of this legislation was private, local, and facultative, setting up local agencies, such as turnpikes, paving, enclosure, or improvement commissioners where such things appeared to be desired by the preponderant local interests.” Such matters were not the concern of public but of private legislation. “The work of the British Government was virtually restricted to preserving the constitution (which meant doing nothing in home affairs) and conducting foreign policy.”35

This was not the case in America. For though it is true that the colonial legislators thought no more in terms of legislative programs than did Members of Parliament, it is also true that the colonial legislatures were led willy-nilly, by the force of circumstance, to exercise creative powers, and in effect to construe as public law what in England was “private, local and facultative.” For there devolved upon them, out of the necessity of the situation, the power of controlling the initial distribution of the primary resource of the society: land. Whether in their own names, as in the chartered colonies, or in the name of higher authority, as in the royal and proprietary colonies, the colonial governments in one or another of their branches came to exercise this essential power; much of colonial politics was concerned with the efforts of individuals and groups to gain the benefits of these bestowals.36

Control of the distribution of land, so crucial in the wilderness setting of eighteenth-century America, was merely one of a number of powers which fell to the colonial governments by virtue of the newness of the society and of the urgency of rapid development. A range of public facilities, which in more settled communities had come into being gradually in the course of innumerable private and public efforts, had here to be created abruptly. Immunities and benefits had to be bestowed—to build

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