34. Assembly Versus Governor

We have so far been discussing events and conditions in the American colonies that have been essentially “domestic,” occurring within a specific colony or within the colonies as a whole. Now we turn to relations and problems that were essentially “foreign”—relations with the home country and, as part of the British Empire, other countries, especially their possessions on the American continent. While a hard and fast line cannot be drawn between domestic and overseas, or internal and external relations of an imperial appendage, we can still delineate such “domestic” developments as the growth of liberal thought (even though heavily influenced from abroad), as against such directly imperial relations as Assembly versus royal governor, mercantilist regulations, or such foreign affairs as war against New France.

By the first half of the eighteenth century, the internal political institutions of the various colonies had reached an uneasy overall quasi-stability, within which a tug-of-war for power raged between an appointed royal governor and Council on the one hand, and an elected Assembly on the other. The governor had an absolute veto over acts of the legislature, and the Council was appointed by the Crown on recommendation of the governor. The notable exception was Massachusetts, where the Council was elected by the Assembly. The governor and Council not only constituted the upper legislative body (with the governor as the supreme executive of the colony), but also constituted the supreme judicial agency creating and appointing the lower courts. Furthermore, governors, as designated vice admirals, also established vice admiralty courts to try Navigation Act violations. Appeals, confined to major cases, could only be taken from judicial decisions of governor and Council to the supreme organ of the Crown (under the king), the Privy Council. Above and beyond the governors, of course, was the Crown, which could disallow the acts of colonial legislatures. The Crown also appointed customs officials to collect customs revenue, and naval officers to enforce the Navigation Acts. While never in command of naval forces, the governors of New York, South Carolina, and Georgia commanded regular troops stationed on the frontier. As controllers of the public domain, the governors also had authority to make grants of land to whom they pleased.

The Assemblies, however, were not without formidable resources of their own. Their major resource was that sine qua non of government: money. Only the Assemblies could levy taxes and appropriate funds for the government, including such crucial items as governors’ salaries. Also, the Assemblies’ consent was needed for any positive legislation in the colonies. In addition, the Assembly established the common-law courts, with their critical guarantee of the right to trial by jury, that is, by the people rather than by royal officials.

The picture was not very different in the proprietary colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland), where the proprietary took on the chief executive role (appointing the governor, trying to collect quitrents, etc.), under the overall watchful eye of the Crown. Only the chartered colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island), which elected their own governors, presented a different picture, and even this virtual independence was subject to the overall regulations of the Crown.

Throughout the colonies, the tug-of-war of royal governor and Council versus the elected Assembly had by the middle of the eighteenth century resulted in marked dominance by the Assembly. In each of the colonies, the critical money power of the Assembly over the governor helped the colony establish a virtual de facto control over the executive, and hence a virtual independence by midcentury. One important reason for the emergent triumph of the colonial Assemblies, as will be seen below, was the deliberate failure of the British government to enforce the numerous mercantile restrictions over the colonies throughout most of the first half of the eighteenth century. But this still does not solve the puzzle of the increasingly feeble executive power in the respective colonies. In his brilliant work The Origins of American Politics, Professor Bernard Bailyn posed the question as follows: How is it that in Britain, where the Parliament was theoretically absolute, the king and his ministers were in practice able to dominate a supine Parliament, whereas in the American colonies, where the governor was theoretically dominant, he invariably lost out to Assembly rule? Why was the executive able to dominate in the home country, but not in the colonies? This disparity, Bailyn pointed out, is particularly puzzling because (a) the colonial governors had the right of absolute veto over legislation, whereas the king had no veto over acts of Parliament; (b) the governors had the legal right to delay or dissolve the legislatures, whereas the king had lost that power in Britain; and (c) the governors constituted the supreme judicial power in the colonies, while the Crown had been forced to accept independent judges in Britain.

How, then, the accretion of power to the executive in Britain, accompanied by its decline in the colonies? Bailyn answered that the crucial difference between the two was what English libertarians of the day denounced as corruption—the ability of the Crown and its ministers to buy up, to put it bluntly, the will of Parliament. In Britain, the patronage at the control of the Crown was enormous, enabling the ministers to purchase parliamentary support. As Bailyn points out, in Britain

some boroughs—twenty-five or thirty—were owned outright by the government in the sense that a majority of their electorates were officeholders who could be dismissed if they opposed the government; in others the election of members favorable to the government could be assured by the proper application of electioneering funds. Beyond this, control of the House was assured by the distribution of the crown patronage available to any administration and by the management of the corps of placemen that resulted. In the middle of the eighteenth century about 200 of the 558 members of the House of Commons held crown places of one sort or another, and another thirty or forty were more loosely tied to government by awards of profitable contracts. Of those who held places, forty at least held offices intimately involved in the government and were absolutely reliable. The other 160 held a variety of sinecures, household offices, pensions, and military posts which brought them well within the grasp of the administration but yet required constant solicitation and management. A fluctuating number of other members were bound to the government less directly, particularly by the gift to their nominees of one or more of the 8,000 excise offices available.*

Bailyn concludes that for executive dominance of the legislature, several preconditions had to exist: notably, the existence of an abundance of patronage and places; and a strictly limited franchise, “for the larger the voting population the greater the government’s difficulty in controlling elections.” England, with a mass of patronage at the disposal of the Crown, its severely limited franchise, and a plethora of “rotten” and “pocket” boroughs represented in Parliament, had these conditions in abundance in the eighteenth century. But, Bailyn points out, these preconditions for executive control and manipulation of the legislature were conspicuous by their absence in the American colonies. While the governors began with limited but yet extensive patronage powers, they were systematically stripped of them by royal prescription and, most importantly, by the alert and continuing pressure of the Assemblies, which won for themselves ever-increasing powers of appointing executive and judicial officials. The Assemblies did so under the guidance of Cato’s Letters and other expressions of libertarian hostility to the deeply corrupting powers of executive patronage.

The Assemblies, in contrast to the Parliament, were moved to assert themselves to obtain such powers by virtue of the far greater representation and the far more extensive franchise in the colonies than in the mother country. There were no rotten or pocket boroughs in the colonies, and representation far more accurately proceeded proportionately to the growth and dispersion of population. Whereas the common forty-shilling land-ownership qualification for voting proved highly restrictive in Britain, it turned out to be highly permissive in the colonies; usually, from fifty to seventy-five percent of the adult male white population in the colonies was eligible to vote. Additional relative advantages enjoyed by the colonial legislatures were: the early growth of express and rigorous instructions by the towns and counties to their representatives, binding them to the will of the voters—a practice which scarcely existed in England; the impermanence of the tenure of the governors, in contrast to the lengthy tenure of the leading assemblymen; and the ability of the colonies to go over the heads of the governors to the authorities in Britain.*

Adding to the virtual independence, by midcentury, of the colonies and their Assemblies was the determination of the British government not to enforce the myriad of mercantilist regulations passed by Parliament, controlling and restricting the trade and industry of the colonies.

*Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 28–29.

*Ibid., pp. 66–95.