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earlyandoftenpodcast · 7 years ago

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(Left: the first page of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Right: the philosopher John Locke, author of the Constitutions.)

Next up: the founding of South Carolina, and its origins both in the high-minded ideals of the philosopher John Locke and in the brutal realities of slavery in the Caribbean. When principles face off against economics, which will win?

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"The people here generally speaking are the vilest race of men upon the earth. They have neither honor, nor honesty, nor religion enough to entitle them to any tolerable character, being a perfect medley or hotch-potch, made up of bankrupt pirates, decayed libertines, sectaries and enthusiasts of all sorts who have transported themselves hither . . . and are the most factious and seditious people in the whole world." Those are the words of an Anglican minister. The location he was talking about? Why, it was none other than the next colony on our list, the subtropical nightmare of South Carolina.

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 15: Locke of the Carolinas.

Last time, we began the story of the Province of Carolina, a new English colony created after the Restoration of Charles II. We heard about the unruly settlers of North Carolina, poor but independent immigrants from Virginia. Today, we’re going to look at the very different origins of South Carolina, which has its roots not in the Chesapeake but in the sugar plantations of Barbados.

But the story of Carolina intersects with the story of John Locke, one of the most important political thinkers ever, so I’m going to discuss him as well, along with some other important English philosophers at the time. The mid-1600s were crucial for the history of English political thought, and thus for American political thought as well. The American colonies were growing and coming into existence right at the time modern ideas about government were coming into focus, as religious factionalism was replaced with ideological factionalism. Men like Locke were read and discussed by the Founders of the United States and their ideas shape debate even today, so I want to introduce some of them early.

We begin by returning yet again to the periphery of the English Civil War. But instead of the swampy Chesapeake or stony New England, this part of our story begins in Paris with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was in his 50s when war broke out in England, and he was riding out the storm in a self-imposed French exile. He was known to the intellectuals of his day. He had met Galileo and he had corresponded with Descartes, who thought that he had “wicked views”. After the Restoration he would debate the leading scientists of the Royal Society. But he was as yet a minor figure.

It was his 1651 book Leviathan that made him both famous and infamous. Leviathan was a work of political philosophy, inspired in large part by the chaos that was engulfing England. Hobbes wanted to understand what it took to make a state stable. To do that, he needed to understand the fundamental source of political authority, what justified the existence of a state which had the right to coerce its subjects into obedience. The traditional answer in Europe was the divine right of kings. God had ordained some men to rule and all others to obey. But Hobbes was a relatively secular thinker and so the divine right of kings was unsatisfying to him.

The answer he came up with won’t surprise listeners of this podcast. Hobbes asked his readers to imagine what life was like in a state of nature, how people lived in a time before political authority when each man was his own master. According to Hobbes, life in a state of nature was terrible -- “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” as he famously put it. Without a state to punish bad behavior all men had to fend for themselves in an anarchic, never-ending struggle. And so it was in the interests of everyone to submit themselves to a government with absolute authority. Hopefully the state would be governed well, but even tyranny is better than anarchy. Thus the state was justified as a social contract between individuals. Everyone was better off with a government. And even if a state hadn’t formed by explicit agreement like that, the same logic of avoiding anarchy still applied.

That’s an oversimplification of Hobbes, but it’s the basic idea. Of course we already saw New Englanders drawing up social contracts for the same reasons, so practice preceded theory in this instance. (I don’t know whether or not Hobbes was aware of those examples though.) In any case, Hobbes’s ideas set off an intellectual firestorm. It wasn’t so much that he’d advocated for absolute power, although that was unpopular with Parliamentarians, it was that he had given an account of government which had little to no use for God. His arguments were centered wholly around self-interest. He was even accused of being an atheist.

But despite all the insults launched at Hobbes, it was his work that set the terms of the debate going forward. From now on, thinkers would be arguing about social contracts and the state of nature.

Enter John Locke. Locke was born in 1632, more than 40 years after Hobbes, so he was just a boy during the English Civil War. He was born to Puritan parents and his father fought for Parliament. Locke went to Oxford, where he studied medicine and became acquainted with modern philosophy and science. He knew scientists like Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Christiaan Huygens, and later became a member of the famous Royal Society. He was, in intellectual terms, a very modern man. But it would be many decades before he made his own mark on philosophy. First, there was his involvement with Carolina.

While in London, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was impressed with the young man and hired him as his personal physician/secretary/advisor. Now, Shaftesbury, as it happened, had an interest in colonization. His father had been involved in the Virginia Company and now that Charles was back on the throne, the time seemed ripe for expansion in the New World.

Shaftesbury became involved in the expansion of the mercantile system, and therefore so did Locke. Locke was made secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, a new agency created to collect information on the colonies. So he was very much near the center of things.

Shaftesbury also became one of those eight men who pushed Charles into creating the Province of Carolina in 1663. As we’ve seen, although Carolina was vast, it was mostly unsettled by Europeans. The Albemarle settlement in North Carolina never amounted to much as far as the Lords Proprietor were concerned. The harbor was bad and rents were too high relative to Virginia, so not many migrants came. And outside of northern Carolina, colonization had been even less impressive. The proprietors had hoped to sit back and just let others start new settlements on their behalf. There were a few attempts but they had all come to nothing.

So the proprietors decided to take a more active hand in promoting migration. Well, at least one proprietor did, Shaftesbury. He got the others to contribute to the outfitting of an expedition to South Carolina. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

He also decided to come up with a new constitution for the province, since the previous government, for those failed colonies, had always been inadequate. (Although this is before Culpeper’s Rebellion, remember.) So he, with the assistance of John Locke, drafted what became known as the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Historians disagree about the authorship of the Fundamental Constitutions, but Locke was probably responsible for at least a good deal of it, so I’m going to talk as though it was primarily his work. Which it may have been -- it would hardly be surprising for someone with such a political mind to have taken the lead -- but we just don’t know. He certainly had a hand in it. So, what sort of constitution did one of the most influential political philosophers of all time come up with? Was it a dramatic break with the past? Not really. There were some innovations, but those weren’t actually very successful.

One of the inspirations for the Fundamental Constitutions was a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana. Oceana had been written by the republican James Harrington, another of the many philosophers produced by the English Civil War. Oceana, which was published during Cromwell’s Protectorate, was a work of Utopian political philosophy. It described the workings of an imaginary nation, Oceana, an ideal constitutional republic. He covered all sorts of ideas, from rotation in office, to secret ballots, to ensuring that there was a large population of landowners, as the basis for political stability. The society of Oceana was divided into three classes: lords, freeholders, and servants. So a republic, but one with an aristocracy. In a sense the king was simply replaced by the constitution. I suppose to a modern reader it seems quite radical in some respects, while surprisingly respectful of the status quo in others. Certainly the combination of republicanism and a hereditary nobility seems incongruous.

There were plenty of works like Oceana being published around this time. Authors like Hobbes and Harrington and later Locke were all trying to rebuild their understanding of government from the ground up, to avoid the preconceived notions of the medieval past. Radical groups like the Levelers and the Diggers wished to transform not just government, but all of society. Change was in the air and ideas were flying around with unprecedented speed, as a man like Locke would have been well aware.

As for Harrington himself, he was thrown into the Tower of London after the Restoration for his troubles, and only escaped real punishment thanks to bribery.

Some of the themes of Oceana are repeated in the Fundamental Constitutions. The three-fold division of society, and the importance of land distribution to political power, especially. For example, two-fifths of land was allotted to the lords and the rest to common freeholders, in order to balance the political power of both classes. But of course Locke was writing on behalf of powerful lords, and so the Constitutions could not simply follow some utopian plan.

The stated purpose of the Fundamental Constitutions was “for the better settlement of the government of the said place, and establishing the interest of the lords proprietors with equality and without confusion; and that the government of this province may be made most agreeable to the monarchy under which we live and of which this province is a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy”. From this statement alone we can see that this isn’t going to be a terribly radical document, even if it had some radical inspirations.

The Lords Proprietor themselves were the source of all authority in Carolina. They could overturn laws passed in America as they wished. If any of them went to Carolina, then he could make himself governor. But that only happened once -- mostly they just sent deputies instead -- and so the governor was appointed from among the greater landowners in the colony.

Like in Maryland, the Lords Proprietor of Carolina were given the right to create their own aristocracy. There’s a lot of discussion of baronies and manors and inheritance. And the proprietorship was hereditary: each of these eight men’s heirs would themselves become Lord Proprietor someday. Locke himself received the hereditary title of Landgrave, not that it ever amounted to anything.

There was to be an Assembly, consisting of the Governor and either the Lords Proprietor or their representatives, along with the nobility of Carolina, plus representatives elected by the freeholders (not freemen) of the colony every two years, all meeting together in a single body. Voting required possession of 50 acres of land, while sitting in the Assembly required 500. Voting was to be by ballot, unusually.

There was also a rather complicated Grand Council, another idea borrowed from Harrington. All legislation in the Assembly had to be passed by the Grand Council first, which significantly limited the Assembly’s independence. According to Robert M. Weir, “the proprietors sought to insure the stability of Carolina by anchoring the political system in the possession of land, balancing the distribution of power accordingly, and then making the superstructure as rigid as possible.”

Unusually for the Southern colonies, there was to be some level of local self-government. The householders of each town were to elect a 24-man council. That council would then choose from itself a smaller group of aldermen. And a mayor would be chosen from those alderman by the deputies of the proprietors. Again, an overly complicated way of doing things, where popular participation was checked by other forces.

Professional lawyers were banned, a practice they apparently copied from Virginia.

Religious toleration was guaranteed, so long as you belonged to any organized religion that believed in God. Even “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion” were to be protected. And special provision was made so that Quakers wouldn’t have to swear oaths. This was done not just because Locke was a firm believer in toleration -- although he was -- but also out of a desire to attract immigrants. As Wesley Craven interestingly points out, many traditionally American liberties have their origins in the economic interests of promoters trying to get men to their colonies by making them more appealing.

The Constitutions were rather more complex than the other provincial governments in British America. Like Maryland, this was another attempt to transplant the English class structure to the New World. The Fundamental Constitutions were, I think -- and this is my own speculation -- an effort, conscious or not, to synthesize three things: English tradition, contemporary political philosophy, and the practices already in place in America. But of those three things, it was mostly just the practices already in place in America that would “stick”.

With the Constitutions written and the preparations complete, a small fleet of three ships left England. After a stop in the Caribbean, it arrived in Carolina in early 1670, carrying some 140 colonists. They were some 300 miles to the southwest of the Albemarle, and about 800 miles from Boston. The site they had chosen, which would become known as Charleston had an excellent harbor, and so it was a natural point of settlement.

The colony survived with no major disasters. There were now men with experience in colonization, and there was now a denser network of outposts in the Americas to trade with, both of which helped in avoiding starvation. Within two years of the founding of Charleston there were hundreds of settlers, two thirds of them adult men, with the rest split about evenly between women and children. The colonists experimented with crops, figuring out what would work best in Carolina’s soil. Tobacco was out, but rice and indigo both grew nicely, and those would become Carolina’s main cash crops.

Now, the proprietors recognized that the Fundamental Constitutions were far too elaborate to be useful in such a small colony, so they hedged their bets. They told the colonists to only put into place the parts of the Constitutions that were practicable, with the expectation that over time the Constitutions would be fully enacted.

That first year the government consisted of a Grand Council of the governor, the deputies of the proprietors, and five men elected by the freemen. This Council was then supposed to help elect an assembly of twenty men, but there were too few freemen to fill the offices and so the elections were delayed until the next year.

From the start there was bickering and scheming. There were disputes about election procedures. The first governor, who was quite old, died in 1671 and there was a contest between two men for the governorship until the proprietors resolved the issue.

Assemblies were elected from that next year onward, but they were never very obedient to the wills of the proprietors. You’d think the proprietors would have learned from the unruliness of all the other legislatures in America, but I guess not. Despite the repeated requests of the Lords Proprietor for the Assembly to pass the Constitutions into law, the Assembly kept delaying. They had no interest in anything so elaborate and ill-suited to their colony. The Lords Proprietor revised the Constitutions several times, with the help of Locke, in order to appease them, but it was to no avail. By the early 1700s they were dead for good.

Of course some provisions like the property requirements were kept, and elections continued to be held at a regular date, rather than whenever the governor called for them. But in practice, I’d say that things mostly just came to resemble the other slaveholding colonies. The Assembly fought for and won the right to initiate legislation, instead of the Grand Council. The legislatures of both North and South Carolina became bicameral in 1691. So similar enough to Virginia in practice.

Elections to the Assembly were run somewhat differently, though. The counties in South Carolina were so big that church parishes became the seats of election, rather than the county courthouse or something like that. In fact, church wardens were generally in charge of administering elections. And elections were held over two days, from 8 to 12 in the morning and then from 2 to 6 in the evening. Voting was still done by ballot, thanks to the Fundamental Constitutions.

I’m not sure if elections to town councils were kept from the Constitutions, but I don’t think so. So, like in the Chesapeake, elections to the Assembly were probably the only sort of voting in Carolina.

Locke’s constitution was pretty clearly a failure. In fairness to Locke, it was never really put into practice, but even if it had been it’s hard to imagine it working. Firstly, the would-be aristocrats of South Carolina never took to calling themselves aristocrats. They were aristocratic to be sure, as we’ll see. But they weren’t proper aristocrats. It just didn’t take. Perhaps it’s because that, although they were landed elites, their relationship to the land was purely one of business rather than of tradition and family heritage. It’s harder to have a family estate if you’re always buying and selling parts of it. I don’t know.

Secondly, the Constitutions were too complicated and perhaps too inflexible for the dynamism of a rapidly growing colony. Although the document was modernizing in ways, in other ways it feels more like an attempt to rationalize an increasingly archaic form of government, so that it can be transplanted to virgin soil. It both went too far and didn’t go far enough. Despite being consciously planned, it’s considerably less radical than what was happening in New England. Less radical, perhaps, even than what had emerged in the Chesapeake. Too much theory, too much tradition. Or at least, that’s my guess.

Not that their failure really made a difference. Carolina learned from other colonies what worked and emulated that. So despite the contributions of such an important political theorist, practice remained more important than theory when it came to government.

No, John Locke did not leave a mark on Carolina. What did, then? Was it just a carbon copy of Virginia? No, actually. For the most part, the settlers didn’t come from either England or Virginia. Instead, they came from the English colonies in the Caribbean, in particular from the island of Barbados. During the 1670s, maybe half of all settlers in South Carolina came from the Caribbean. And through 1737 nearly half of Carolina’s governors were from there or were sons of immigrants from there. So more than anywhere else, it was Barbados that created the culture of South Carolina.

What sort of culture was that? I think that the short answer is “like Virginia, but moreso”.

I haven’t mentioned the colonies in the Caribbean too much, since they didn’t become part of the United States, but at the time they were far more important than New England or the Chesapeake, and they attracted tens of thousands more migrants than either region on the mainland. This was all thanks to sugar. Sugar was one of those always-in-demand commodities that planters could make huge fortunes on, and Barbados had the most developed plantation system in the region.

Barbados was first colonized by the English in the 1620s, along with some other islands in the Caribbean. When sugarcane was introduced, the settlers found that it grew tremendously well and very rapidly sugar plantations sprung up across the region. But they sprung up most rapidly in Barbados.

Unfortunately, work on a sugar plantation was miserable and horribly dangerous. As a result, slavery took off quickly in Barbados, much more so than in mainland British America. The planters brought in shipload after shipload of African slaves, because the cheapest thing to do was to just work them to death and import replacements every few years. Even by the standards of New World slavery, slavery in the Caribbean was astonishingly terrible. Slaves in Barbados died at twice the rate of those in Virginia.

Politically speaking, Barbados was a proprietorship owned by the Earl of Carlisle, but in practice it ran its own affairs for the most part.

From 1639 onwards there was a representative assembly of the freeholders, as well as an appointed governor and appointed councilors. Very similar to Virginia. And during the Protectorate, Barbados had similarly gone through a period of legislative ascendancy, with a much weakened governorship. After the Restoration, Charles II took direct control of the colony, much as his father had in Virginia in the 1620s. So although the specifics were different, the government was similar enough to that in Virginia, at least in form.

South Carolina had a different origin than the other southern colonies, but I don’t wish to overstate the differences. They were all similar enough politically, and they drew from the same pool of ideas.

Now, Barbados is a small island, so it didn’t take long for the planters to run out of land. Hence, moving to Carolina, with its vast uncolonized stretches, was a natural decision, especially for younger sons of wealthy families. They were involved in some of the earlier failed attempts at colonizing Carolina, as well as the successful one. And once Charleston was founded they just kept on coming, importing their culture along with them.

Most obviously, slavery was present in South Carolina from the very start. Whereas in 1670 only 5% of Virginia’s population was enslaved, in South Carolina that number quickly hit 25%, and kept climbing. And that meant that all of slavery’s inhumanity was only magnified. Barbados had a reputation for extraordinary cruelty, and that carried over to Carolina. Punishments for runaway slaves included whipping, branding, castration, having the Achilles tendon severed, and death. On the other hand, the fine for killing someone else’s slave was 50 pounds, according to Colin Woodard “about the cost of a good gentleman’s wig”. These sorts of practices would spread from Carolina to become standard across the South in the 1700s, but we’ll get to that in much later episodes.

Unlike in Virginia, where the racial caste system took time to develop, it was present in South Carolina from the start and racial boundaries there were more rigorously enforced. Race mixing -- even just eating together -- was seen as abhorrent. And that’s to say nothing of the fear of interracial relationships, though of course men raping their slaves was common. With such a large slave population, paranoia about revolts and intermixing were always sky high, so the two populations had to be kept as separate as possible.

And the free black population was much smaller than in the Chesapeake.

The Fundamental Constitutions made race-based slavery explicit from the start. Each planter was to be given 150 acres for each slave or servant they brought. One article stated that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” This was to ensure that conversion to Christianity wasn’t enough to free slaves.

South Carolina also took the lead in enslaving its Indian population. As late as 1708, for instance, a full third of the 4300 slaves in the colony were Indian. And South Carolina exported so many Indian slaves that in 1715 a number of colonies in New England banned any more imports from Carolina.

Surprisingly, however, the vote wasn’t officially restricted to whites until about 1715. And we know for a fact that at least some black men were voting in South Carolina, because we have records of people complaining about it to the Assembly in 1703 and 1704. According to the petition, “free Negroes were received and taken as good Electors as the best Freeholders in the Province.” (They also complained that Jews were voting, by the way.) We saw something similar in Virginia, where despite the existence of discriminatory laws, in local communities it was not uncommon for wealthier free blacks to have some measure of power. It also took a long time for Virgina to add explicit racial qualifications for voting. As racism became institutionalized, these ambiguities would disappear. But do remember that in the early years, although there was already undeniably a huge racial divide, things could be more complicated on the ground.

Apart from that racial divide, there was also a great deal of economic inequality. The wealthiest planters were some of the wealthiest men in all of the Americas, but many whites were dirt poor. But even so, it was not uncommon for poorer whites to own at least a few slaves, thus giving them more of a stake in the racial caste system. There were also complaints about servants voting, so we know that that happened at least sometimes, in defiance of the law.

The planter elite loved to play up their connections to the English aristocracy, following all the latest fashionable trends, in clothing, architecture, you name it. They visited London and sent their children to top-notch English universities. They wished to be as elite as possible. Richard S. Dunn called their culture “a remarkable compound of old world elegance and frontier boisterousness.” It’s surprising that they didn’t adopt the titles of nobility Carolina had to offer, but for whatever reason they didn’t.

Unlike in Virginia, where the planters lived spread out from one another, in South Carolina the planters prefered to stick to Charleston and leave the management of their plantations to overseers. Charleston quickly became one of the most populous cities in North America. Even during the American Revolution it was the biggest city south of Philadelphia, numbering maybe 15,000 residents. In fact, other than Baltimore, Maryland, it was the only city in the South with a population above 4,000. So remember that when I talk about how rural the South was, I mean rural rural. Like, rural rural.

Charleston’s size was due in large part to its advantageous location. It had a good harbor and was close to the Caribbean, which gave it an advantage in trade, especially in the slave trade. In fact, some 40% of the slaves imported into the United States came through Charleston’s port.

But although South Carolina was proving more attractive to settlers than North Carolina, it was still a disappointment to the proprietors. The colonists were as unruly as their counterparts in the Albemarle. They launched major wars against the Indians and enslaved them, in blatant disregard of orders from the proprietors to keep the peace. In the eyes of the proprietors, the colonists were proving difficult and ungrateful, after all the money they’d invested and the rents they’d waived.

So they tried attracting more migrants by recruiting religious dissenters such as the Huguenots, French Protestants who were fleeing a crackdown by their Catholic government. Some 500 Huguenots came to South Carolina, and they actually formed a reasonable percentage of the population for a time. At first they were largely excluded from elections and from government, as foreigners, but soon enough they swore allegiance to England and were naturalized. Quickly enough after that, Huguenots were serving in the Assembly.

They also tried to attract English dissenters. In the 1680s they named a dissenter, Joseph Morton, as governor, for instance, and at least a few hundred dissenters came. They even changed the electoral procedures of the colony in order to give the areas that had been settled by dissenters disproportionately large representation in the Assembly.

Partly the proprietors wished to weaken the independence of the planters from Barbados. It was hoped that the Huguenots and other dissenters would be more favorable to proprietary interests. But as we’ll see in later episodes, things didn’t really work out the way they’d hoped.

The original Lords Proprietor died off quickly enough, and were replaced by their heirs, who had no particular interest in Carolina except as some property that they happened to own. So administration naturally remained within Carolina itself. Over time, the proprietors sold off their rights to the Crown and eventually lost all influence.

As for Locke himself, he remained attached to Shaftesbury and his family for the rest of his life, and his fortunes rose and fell and rose alongside them. In the 1670s Shaftesbury became involved in the Titus Oates hoax, a crazy anti-Catholic conspiracy which I don’t have time to get into here but which I highly recommend looking up, since it’s pretty wild. He was also involved in unsuccessful efforts to keep Charles’s Catholic brother James from inheriting the throne. Anyway, Shaftesbury wound up imprisoned in the Tower of London twice and eventually went into exile in Holland. Locke followed a few years later, only returning after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which overthrew James II.

After his return, he anonymously published his most important work of political philosophy, the Two Treatises of Government (as well as other important books that don’t concern us here). The first of the Two Treatises is a refutation of the divine right of kings. Instead, he favored the social contract. But unlike Hobbes, who believed that subjects surrendered all their rights to a sovereign, Locke held that the people retained natural rights, and that government was thus fundamentally limited in its reach. It could enforce the peace, but not by violating natural rights. Those limits are the topic of the second treatise.

Let’s return to Hobbes’s state of nature, a state of anarchy with no government or laws. What is there to restrict our behavior, other than self-interest? Hobbes would say nothing (more or less), but Locke had a different answer. He argued that even in a state of nature our actions could be morally constrained by natural rights. What are natural rights? Natural rights are rights which all individuals have regardless of culture or religion or anything else, and which are discoverable purely through reason. Anybody thinking about it properly would come to the same conclusion. According to Locke, we are all equal and we all wish to survive and flourish. From those basic premises, natural rights are derived. For Locke, these rights were still connected with and ultimately derived from God, but from a sort of deistic God rather than one specific to any particular religion.

For instance, when the Declaration of Independence declares that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, that’s a classic statement of natural rights, and one that was influenced by Locke. Natural rights are “self-evident” and “unalienable”.

So for Locke, even in a state of nature, people still had natural rights. Those rights might be hard to realize in practice, but they nevertheless existed in principle. The reason people came together to form governments was to protect these natural rights and to pursue public goods, rather than merely for self-defense, as with Hobbes. This placed natural limits on the power of the sovereign. After all, if the government starts violating people’s natural rights with impunity, then it’s acting in a way contrary to its stated reason for existence, and can therefore be justifiably overthrown in a revolution.

These limits also had implications for the structure of government. Locke advocated a separation of powers, although he didn’t think of the judiciary as a separate branch of government. He also believed that government should be representative, though not necessarily at all levels. In all of this, Locke’s understanding of government is very reminiscent of how the Founders of the United States generally thought about things.

Of course, to single out Locke like this is an oversimplification of history. Locke was indeed read carefully by the Founding Fathers, but there were other, similar thinkers, influential in their time, but forgotten today. Take poor Algernon Sydney, a contemporary of Locke who was executed in the 1680s partly for a plot against the king’s life. Thomas Jefferson cited him alongside “Aristotle, Cicero, [and] Locke” in terms of his importance, yet he’s hardly thought of today. It’s understandable why we use Locke as a stand in for a whole generation of political thought, but it is an oversimplification. Just so you know.

Anyway, Locke’s ideas may sound pretty good, depending on your own personal philosophy, but there’s an obvious gap here: slavery. Surely it was a violation of natural rights for one man to enslave another? According to Locke, for the most part, yes. He allowed that slavery was an acceptable punishment for prisoners of war who would otherwise be executed, since slavery is at least better than death, but that’s it. Certainly he didn’t come up with a theory justifying the intergenerational racial slavery of the New World. He apparently didn’t hold that there were any differences between the races which might justify enslavement. And yet of course, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina explicitly authorize slavery. Those passages may or may not have been written by Locke himself, but the discrepancy remains. Slavery plus a hereditary aristocracy are hardly the elements of lofty theory. And it’s hard to dismiss the Constitutions as just work he did for hire or something. Locke himself praised them as being the very “Model and Form of Government”.

So how did Locke reconcile these two positions? In practice, he seems to have just passed over slavery without commenting on it too much one way or the other. Historians have argued about Locke’s true beliefs, but if I had to guess, I’d say that slavery was simply a distant issue to him, confined to the reports he read on America. A distasteful injustice perhaps, but one among many, and certainly not one that had the terrible weight we give it today. It may have just not been an especially big deal to him. And no matter his personal feelings, pushing too hard on the issue could have cost him his job. But that’s pure speculation. I don’t know more than anyone else.

In any case, Locke’s inability to overcome the divide between the equality implied by natural rights and the inequality that actually existed in practice in America did not bode well for the future of the United States. His New World disciples would be even less successful in embodying their self-declared ideals. And sometimes, when you declare that “all men are created equal”, people will take you at your word.

As for Locke himself, after the publication of his major philosophical works, he spent a few more years on the Board of Trade overseeing England’s colonies. He died in 1704.

Next episode, we’ll be moving up north to the Middle Colonies. That is, all of the provinces between the Chesapeake and New England. Before they became English possessions, the Middle Colonies were part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. But I’m going to go back even further than that to discuss the politics of the Iroquois Confederacy, the most sophisticated government in what would become the United States. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume II by Charles M. Andrews

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government by David Armitage

"The Sinke of America": Society in the Albemarle Borderlands of North Carolina, 1663—1729 by Jonathan Edward Barth

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia by Warren M. Billings

History of Elections in the American Colonies by Cortlandt F. Bishop

The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 by Wesley Frank Craven

Declaration of Independence

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

Thomas Hobbes by Stewart Duncan

The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina by Richard S. Dunn

Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery by James Farr

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 7 years ago

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(John Winthrop, an early governor of Massachusetts)

In this episode we look at the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as its early struggles over the proper role of popular participation in government.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 10: The Pig Who Invented Bicameralism.

Last time, we followed the Pilgrims as they established a small colony at Plymouth Bay in what is now Massachusetts in 1620. The Pilgrims proved quite disruptive to the fragile balance of power in the region, but even after 10 years Plymouth’s population was only about 300. But although Plymouth wasn’t too successful, its presence paved the way for bigger things.

In 1629, just a few years before the founding of Maryland, Puritans began streaming into Massachusetts, totally swamping everything and everyone that had been there before. Within a decade over 20,000 settlers would arrive. This was the real founding of New England, much as the real foundations for Virginia were only laid a decade after the settlement of Jamestown.

Back when the Separatists had left England for the Netherlands in the early 1600s, their rejection of the Anglican Church was very much a minority position. The Church of England hadn’t adopted too many Puritan ideas, but it was close enough to their beliefs, and it had taken a live-and-let-live attitude for the most part. There were plenty of Puritan ministers and Puritan sympathizers within the Church. But James I had proven less sympathetic to the Puritans than his predecessor Elizabeth had. And his son Charles I was even less sympathetic than his father. Charles, remember, was married to a French Catholic.

So throughout the 1620s and ‘30s the Church clamped down on dissent and more rigorously enforced Anglican orthodoxy. Puritan-sympathizing ministers were removed from their posts and Catholic-style practices were reintroduced. All of which goes a long way towards explaining why, during the English Civil War in the next decade, Puritans so resolutely sided with Parliament, and why when Parliament won, it was in large part a Puritan victory.

In the face of this official pressure, it was only natural that true believers might start considering immigration. The fringe beliefs of the Pilgrims started to seem more sensible to mainstream Puritans. And tens of thousands of Puritans did in fact pour out of England. Some went to the Netherlands, some went to the Caribbean or to Central America. Those migrations would be largely forgotten in time. But a large minority followed the Pilgrims to New England, where they managed to create for themselves an entire culture of their own that would last for centuries.

In the late 1620s a group of men, mostly prominent and wealthy Puritans or at least Puritan-sympathizers, began meeting to plan out a new colonization effort in New England. Things came together quickly, and in 1629 they secured approval from King Charles for the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint stock company like in Virginia. Indeed, the document was modeled on one of the Virginia Company’s charters. This new company absorbed all the preexisting land claims in the region, with the exception of Plymouth Colony.

The Company’s charter gave them the right to create a government for their colony and to administer it as they saw fit. The inhabitants were to retain all the rights of Englishmen. The same sorts of things I mentioned for Virginia back in Episode 2. In principle, legally this was very similar to other past colonization efforts. But while the Company’s official goal was to turn a profit, for the most part religious concerns were the actual motivation. Although I’m sure they didn’t make that clear to the King, nor did they talk about just how independent they wanted to be from his control.

While the legal wrangling was going on, in 1628 they had sent John Endecott to New England to prepare the way for a larger colonization effort. Endecott would go on to become governor of Massachusetts for 16 years, but very little is known of his life before this period. Personality-wise, Endecott was typical of the Puritan leadership, zealous and uncompromising. He was certainly willing to persecute Indians and religious dissenters when called on to do so.

Endecott arrived at what was soon named Salem, Massachusetts, of later Salem witch trial fame. This was the site of a previous failed colony, but there were still a few settlers eking out a living. Endecott and the other new arrivals took over and began constructing buildings to prepare for the coming migration.

After Endecott had been there a few months, in April 1629 the main fleet set off for Massachusetts. There were five ships carrying maybe 300 passengers. This expedition was far better equipped and better prepared than any previous one to date. No doubt learning from past failures helped. At least they sent an advance party instead of just showing up and hoping for the best.

The Puritans who were traveling to Massachusetts resembled the Pilgrims in many ways. A very large majority were coming in family groups rather than as individuals. Even the servants who came, came as part of a household rather than being unattached. Forty percent were female, and according to David Hackett Fischer, “nearly half were children under sixteen.”

They were somewhat better off economically than the Pilgrims had been, and much better off than the average indentured servant in Virginia. The Puritan immigrants were generally what we’d call middle class. And basically no aristocrats went, so the top of the social hierarchy was missing as well. They were artisans and merchants, as well as farmers who owned their own land. But farmers were a minority. Instead, the migration was very disproportionately urban. They were unusually well-educated too. Two thirds of men were at least literate enough to sign their own names. And there was a large group of highly educated ministers as well.

So the Puritans were educated, egalitarian, middle-class, and hyper religious. And that was what New England would be, for a long time to come.

After an easy voyage, the Puritans arrived at Salem that summer and were met by Endecott. There were no moments of big drama like in Jamestown or Plymouth. They just got to work. Thanks to the healthy climate and adequate preparations, there was no big die off that first year. Everything went well, for once.

The success was encouraging. The next year an even larger fleet of eleven ships carrying a thousand passengers set sail. This fleet was led by John Winthrop, aged about 42, who would go on to be governor of Massachusetts for 12 years. He’s important, so let me give you some background.

John Winthrop was born in 1587, the son of a prosperous lawyer/landowner. As a young man, Winthrop followed his father to Cambridge University. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was becoming extremely devout and concerned for the state of his soul. He soon became a staunch Calvinist. He held various minor offices and basically behaved as someone with his status was expected to. He was by disposition inegalitarian. Social inequality was part of God’s will, after all. In his words, “in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in [subjection].” Great men were to show mercy to their inferiors, and lesser men were to show obedience to their betters.

The laws of the state should be based on those found in the Bible, though with additions as needed. The common people were incapable of self-government. He didn’t believe in natural rights or liberty or anything like that. Rather, he instead believed that men submitted themselves to a divinely ordained central authority, and then that central authority could grant its subjects rights on a case by case basis. The authorities themselves shouldn’t have too many constraints on their power, other than their individual consciences and their devotion to God. This was a rather Hobbesian view, although he was writing decades before Thomas Hobbes penned Leviathan.

But Winthrop had more immediate concerns than political philosophy. He was facing financial problems, and Charles had just stopped calling Parliaments and was trying to rule on his own. The Puritan cause seemed weak. So Winthrop, disheartened both personally and politically, contacted the Massachusetts Bay Company and helped organize a fleet. Thanks to his status and his drive, he immediately became an important figure in the project, and was soon elected as the next governor of Massachusetts.

He also helped come up with a clever idea to secure greater Puritan control over the colony. It was proposed that, basically, the Puritans in Massachusetts buy out the investors in the Company who were in England and transfer the entire Company from London to America. That would transfer almost total control to the Puritans. This was questionable legally, and certainly against the intention of the colony’s charter. But they did it anyway. Now, with the Company nothing more than a legal formality, Massachusetts would have almost total independence, and almost no duties or obligations toward England. The Company was fast becoming just a government.

Winthrop’s fleet of eleven ships set sail in the summer of 1630. While at sea Winthrop gave the famous “City Upon A Hill Speech”, where he said that “The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God, and all professors for God's sake.” In other words, Massachusetts was to be a model for right Christian living, and its failure would damage true Christianity the world over.

Winthrop arrived at Salem, but the Puritans found the town to be too small for their needs, so settlers spread out quickly along the coast, founding a number of new towns including Boston, which soon became the capital, thanks to its advantageous harbor. Two hundred colonists died that winter, though that was about the worst of it. Conditions improved rapidly and the Puritans set out building their new society.

As far as the economy goes, from an early date, the New England colonies were engaged in trades such as fishing and shipping. Shipyards were opened in the 1640s, and a small commercial culture began to grow as soon as the initial settlement phase was over. Boston in particular became relatively cosmopolitan.

But of course most New Englanders were still just farmers living in small towns scattered throughout the region. In the more northerly climate of New England, it was much harder to profitably grow cash crops like in the Chesapeake, so big plantations never emerged. Family farms were the norm, and these tended to be similar enough in size. In a typical town the largest farm might be no more than a few times bigger than the average one. There were no landowners who had orders of magnitude more than their neighbors. In fact, in some towns, plots of land were given out at random, with each family drawing lots.

Some families were wealthier than others, of course, but there were few poor and few rich. Indeed, the poor and to a lesser extent the aristocracy were actively discouraged from migrating. There were still ranks, but the top and bottom were closer than usual. Cities and ports were less egalitarian, but they were just a small part of New England’s social fabric.

Another important difference with the Chesapeake is that there was less fertile soil, and there were fewer navigable rivers. These factors encouraged the settlers to live in towns, rather than spread out across far-flung plantations. These small towns became the religious and political centers of New England life.

By far the most important building in any town was the church. Puritan churches, or “meetinghouses”, were tremendously ascetic, made of unpainted wood and entirely undecorated inside, other than a single, staring eye painted on the pulpit to remind them of God’s omnipresence. Each Sunday parishioners sat through two separate hours-long sermons, each analyzing some fragment of the Bible. They were a very, very grim people, paranoid about their spiritual health and about unnaturalness. According to Fischer, “90 percent of executions for witchcraft in British America occurred in the Puritan colonies.”

From the very first church in Salem onwards, the Puritans followed a Congregational model, where each community had an independent compact with God and was largely in charge of its own affairs. They hired their own ministers, and admitted new members themselves. (Just to clarify, people who weren’t members of their local church would have still attended church, they just weren’t official members, that’s all.) There was some overarching authority, of course, but nothing like you’d find in the Church of England. The government could call for synods to be held, meetings that would keep the various churches on the same track, but they were still all ultimately independent. They weren’t totally breaking away from Anglican authority, at least not officially, but they were coming pretty close.

Of course, not everyone in Massachusetts was a Puritan. But two thirds or more of the colonists were, and half of the remainder were servants of the Puritans anyway, so that was still the dominant way of thinking. And this overwhelming religiosity permeated the government as much as it did everything else.

There were distinctions between civil and religious authority. In fact, the separation between religious and civil officials was much greater than in England, where the positions often overlapped. In England, a minister might also have a role in town government, but not in New England. Puritans of course saw this as a return to the original church, before it had been corrupted by involvement in politics. But still, government officials saw it as their duty to enforce Puritan beliefs with the full force of the law. Religious dissenters were sometimes executed. Quakers, who were heretics in Puritan eyes, had their faces branded or their ears cut off.

And there were plenty of laws that may not have been religious per se, but were certainly grounded in a desire to enforce the community’s sense of upright behavior. The Puritans strictly regulated how people lived. Nobody was allowed to live on their own. Single men in their own houses were forced to move in with families. The profits of businessmen were curtailed and idleness was strictly punished. These weren’t all unusual. Other societies were opposed to excessive profits and idleness, but the Puritans were far more rigorous in their control. Punishments went all the way up to being burned alive, though hanging was more usual. Not for idleness, of course. For lesser crimes, public humiliation was common. But although these laws were strict, they didn’t need to be enforced all that frequently since lawbreaking was relatively uncommon. Life in Massachusetts wasn’t actually an endless parade of punishment or anything.

Interestingly, because of their strict reading of the Bible, marriage was seen as a civil matter rather than a religious one, and divorce was relatively easier than elsewhere at the time. So as you can see, the fact that the Puritans were so religious didn’t always mean that everything was subordinated to the church. There were separate sources of authority, even if those separate sources were still ultimately secondary to the will of God.

Despite the presence of elections, the goal of a Puritan government was not to follow the will of the people, or to ensure individual liberty. What “liberty” there was, was the liberty to be a proper Puritan. Popular participation in government was a means to an end, the establishment of a Godly regime. They didn’t consider themselves democratic, although they did believe that power in society came from the bottom up rather than the top down. But that bottom up power meant different things to different people. To Governor Winthrop, it meant that the people surrendered themselves to a rather absolute authority. To others, it meant genuine popular control. The fight between those two views was played out in the fight over the colony’s charter.

Massachusetts’s charter was a de facto constitution which detailed how the government was supposed to operate. Overall, it was somewhat similar to that in Virginia, at least structurally. There was to be a governor, a deputy governor, and 18 Assistants or magistrates, who had a somewhat similar role to the Councilors in Virginia, forming a sort of executive council. Unlike in the Chesapeake, all of these positions were to be filled by annual elections, with the freemen of the colony voting each spring, unlike the irregularly scheduled elections for just the Burgesses in Virginia.

Additionally, there was to be a General Court, which was the equivalent of the General Assembly. This was a unicameral body consisting of the Governor, Deputy Governor, Magistrates, and the freemen of the colony, or at least their representatives, although the exact nature of that representation was kept vague in the charter. The General Court was to meet four times a year and it had the power to pass laws and appoint men to various offices.

So like I said, this was similar enough to Virginia at the time. But of course the fact that all of these offices were all to be elected was a quite significant departure. However, the colony’s leaders weren’t always willing to adhere to the charter’s generous provisions.

In the colony’s first few years, things were simply too unsettled for the charter to be followed. Endecott, since he was the leader on site, served as governor, but there was no real formal structure beyond that. And the arrival of Winthrop upended things yet again.

Winthrop became governor, but his first term was irregular. He was appointed in England, rather than elected, and his term both began before it was supposed to begin, and ended after it was supposed to end. In other words, they were winging it. In fact, when Winthrop got to Massachusetts, the earliest meetings of the government were simply held under a tree.

But although things in the colony soon settled down and moved indoors, that didn’t mean that the charter was now going to be followed. None of these earliest officials were elected, and frankly Governor Winthrop would have been happy to keep it that way. Democracy was, in the words of Winthrop, “the meanest and worst of all formes of Government”, and more importantly democracy lacked Biblical sanction, unlike monarchy. He sure didn’t believe in representative government and so he tried to limit the representative nature of government as much as possible. In his mind, and in the minds of many leaders of the colony, at most elections were there for the leaders merely to affirm their positions. Representation existed to justify a de facto oligarchy. Elections weren’t supposed to be a real outlet for popular opinion or anything like that. At least, that was the idea according to some.

Now, the charter called for a General Court to be held four times a year to represent the freemen. But “freemen” was, as always, a vague term, especially in a colony with so few servants. So the very earliest General Courts that first year in 1630 were, I think, just meetings of whichever colonists showed up. Obviously this would not do.

So in 1631 Governor Winthrop decided that “noe man shalbe admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limitts of the same." Political participation was being limited to men who were members of their local church. In other words, to just the Puritans of the colony, since they were the ones setting up the churches. This religious test was in quite flagrant violation of the rights that had been given to all freemen, but who was going to stop it?

Also contrary to the charter was the decision to cut meetings of the General Court from four times a year down to one. Many of the eighteen Magistrate positions were left vacant. They also ended the direct elections of the governor and deputy governor. Instead, the Magistrates were to pick governors from among themselves. And the ability to create laws was taken away from the General Court and given to just the governor and his Magistrates. Winthrop raised taxes without popular consent, which of course raised fears of Stuart despotism. The Governor and his allies were moving hard and fast against elections, and breaking the law to do so. If he’d had his way, elections would have had no real connection to any actual power.

However, all of these arbitrary and illegal limits on popular government got pushback from the colonists and even from the deputy governor, and so many of Winthrop’s changes had to be rolled back within a few years. The direct elections of governor and deputy governor were restored in 1632, though not completely. Voters were still limited to choosing men who had also been elected as Magistrates. And lawmaking was returned to the General Court, which was additionally given the exclusive power to raise taxes, as with any good English legislature. Two years later the General Assembly was again called to meet four times a year.

In this modified system, the freemen of each town were to send two or three men to meet in three General Courts a year, while the freemen themselves would all meet together for the fourth General Court, to vote for the Governor and Magistrates.

So some, but not all, of the changes were successfully reversed. Most importantly, the restriction of voting rights to church members was kept in place. Although most colonists were Puritans, that didn’t mean that they were all formally members of their local church, since gaining membership was an arduous process involving lengthy interviews where you had to prove your religious sincerity. And of those who were church members, not all bothered to formally become freemen, either, since that could mean more work with little benefit. But maybe half of all adult men were freemen in those first few decades, though estimates vary. Very high by the standards of the day at least. Plus towns often had looser requirements for voting than the Court did, which I’ll talk about in a few episodes.

Women could and did send petitions to the Court, but that was the extent of their formal participation.

Moving on to the elections themselves. Officials in the first few years of Massachusetts history weren’t elected the way officials are today, with voters showing up to the precinct nearest them to cast their ballots, which are then all counted up. Instead, voters had to actually be in Boston on election day to cast their votes. This was called the Court of Election. Of course this system meant that the well-to-do and those who lived in Boston had an advantage over everyone else, thanks to their simple ability to show up. So this system was modified quickly, in 1634. Now, the men of a town could write their votes on paper ballots and send a deputy to Boston to deliver their votes to be counted. If no candidate received a majority, the election was decided by the General Court. This was a practice distinctive to the region. England and the other American colonies all still voted by voice or by show of hands.

Although voting was now done with ballots, this system was still, at best, semi-anonymous. Certainly anonymity wasn’t a goal anyone had in mind at the time. You didn’t have to sign your name on your ballot generally, but you still would have had to hand it in, visible for all to see. There were no special precautions for privacy yet.

Actually, for a few decades people voted for the magistrates not with a paper ballot but with kernels of corn. If you wished to approve of someone’s nomination as a magistrate, you would drop a white kernel of corn in a hat. If you disapproved, you would drop in a black kernel. The deputy from your town would then take the corn to Boston to be counted, avoiding as many birds as possible I assume.

But as Massachusetts grew, so did the number of deputies, until even this system proved unwieldy. There were multiple attempts to cut back on the number of deputies, but the towns would have none of it. It seems to me like it would have been simpler to just tabulate the votes in each town and send those totals to Boston instead of this more elaborate procedure, but perhaps there were concerns about fraud. Or perhaps it was just traditional and no one thought to change it. But in any case, similar systems of paper ballots (and corn) would be adopted by several other of the New England Colonies.

Elections in Massachusetts began at 8 AM with a no-doubt rousing election day sermon. Soon election day in the towns became a festive holiday, with the serving of “election cakes” and “election beer”, a tradition sadly forgotten today. I actually found a recipe for election cake, though it’s from over a century later and may have been different from what was served in these first few decades. The recipe, for one extremely large fruitcake, reads as follows:

“Thirty quarts flour, ten pounds butter, fourteen pounds sugar, twelve pounds raisins, three dozen eggs, one pint wine, one quart brandy, four ounces cinnamon, four ounces fine colander seed, three ounces ground alspice; wet the flour with the milk to the consistency of bread over night, adding one quart yeast, the next morning work the butter and sugar together for half an hour, which will render the cake much lighter and whiter; when it has risen light, work in every other ingredient except the plumbs, which [you] work in when going into the oven.”

Sounds like quite a production! You can find modernized recipes for smaller election cakes online if you just Google “election cake”. Let me know if you make one.

Given all the effort that went into them, it's clear that New Englanders cared a great deal about elections. Remember, they did all that each and every year. It wasn’t just for show. There were in fact some contested elections and changes in power. For instance, after Governor Winthrop’s attempts to limit popular participation were rebuffed he lost the next election to one of his rivals and was out of power for a few years, though he’d be back.

But elections were still much less partisan than today, and the turnover of officials wasn’t that rapid either, apart from the first decade. Officials were more likely to step down of their own accord than to lose reelection. I mean, the governorship was held by a rotating group of just four men for 41 of the next 43 years. So stability was pretty high.

There’s one other early political development to discuss: the division of the General Court into an upper and lower house. In Virginia and Maryland, the split was due to the division between the unelected Councilors and the elected representatives. In Massachusetts both the Deputies and the Magistrates were elected, but there was still a split. The Delegates were more in tune with popular opinion while the Magistrates were a bit more elite.

It didn’t take long for the two groups to become irrevocably at odds, and it was all thanks to a completely minor disagreement over a single pig. More specifically, a lawsuit over a sow. In 1636 there was a stray pig wandering around Boston. No one else claimed it, so it was taken by

Robert Keayne, a wealthy moneylender. When a year went by and still no one had claimed the sow, Keayne had it slaughtered. But after the pig was dead, a lawsuit was brought against Keayne by Goodwife Sherman on behalf of her husband, who was in England at the time. Sherman claimed that they had lost a pig of their own and that it was the same one which Keayne had unjustly taken and killed.

The evidence was apparently against her, and she lost her suit. However, popular sympathy was with Sherman, since she was from a poorer, but well known and well liked family, while Keayne was rich and unpopular. Keayne brought a countersuit for defamation which went before the General Court, which at this time also sometimes acted like a real court, not just a legislature.

The case split the Court in two. Most Magistrates found for Keayne, but most Deputies found for Sherman. There were more Deputies than Magistrates so Sherman got the most support, but unfortunately for her, just getting a majority was insufficient. You also had to get the approval of the Magistrates specifically, since they could on their own block any action from the Delegates, just like how in Virginia the Council could veto laws passed by the Burgesses. This Negative Vote, as it was called, was a way for the Magistrates to keep the Deputies in check. It gave the elite a way to negate popular power. This led to a quite acrimonious dispute between the Deputies and the Magistrates, over whether this Negative Vote should be kept. This was basically a continuation of the disagreement between Winthrop and the Deputies over the powers of the legislature, with the Deputies still pushing to increase their own power.

Relations between the two factions got pretty acrimonious and in 1644 the dispute was finally resolved by dividing the General Court into an upper and lower house, both of which had to approve all legislation. Now, both the Magistrates and the Deputies could block laws. This was right about at the same time as when Governor Berkeley probably split the General Assembly, and just six years before Maryland’s Assembly became bicameral.

But the running dispute between the Deputies and the Magistrates continued, over various constitutional issues like who should be in charge when the General Court was out of session.

And there were further attempts to place some officials beyond the reach of elections altogether. For instance, some of the Magistrates tried to form a new body where a few of them could just serve for life, but that attempt was blocked. Winthrop even tried to block the Court from writing a law code, since he thought that would impinge upon the freedom of the magistrates to do as they wished. He argued that there was no need for a law code, since the magistrates’ oath of office pledging to protect the well-being of the state was sufficient to keep them from behaving tyrannically, even without any formal limits on their power. That argument was rejected, but the disputes were such that it took some 15 years for a satisfactory law code to be passed.

But eventually things settled down after both sides had reached a compromise position. In essence, elections remained the ultimate source of authority, but the governor and magistrates remained powerful in their own right. And voting was still limited to church members. The colony’s charter wasn’t being precisely followed, but neither had it been thrown out completely.

As its form of government was being worked out, Massachusetts was developing in other ways. During the 1630s some 200 ships carrying some 20,000 colonists came to New England. By 1647 there were 33 different towns in Massachusetts.

Laws were passed in the New England colonies mandating that all children be taught to read. According to Fischer, another law “compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school which offered instruction in Latin and Greek”. And children in Massachusetts got twice as much schooling as those in Virginia. This was mostly to teach kids the Bible, but of course literacy has many other benefits.

Harvard University was established in 1636, while the first college in Virginia, William and Mary, would only be founded in 1693. Now, Harvard at the time wasn’t a prestigious and world renowned university like it is today. It was mainly just a school for the training of ministers, but the difference is still striking. And the first printing press in New England was set up in 1638, a full 90 years before the first one in Virginia.

Perhaps partly because of this focus on education, the Puritans proved to be financially successful. The colonies wasn’t profitable in the way that the plantations of the Caribbean were, but the colonists themselves were able to live quite well by the standards of the day. The Puritan migrants had been middle class in England and they remained middle class in New England.

They were allowed to do all this, to build their own quite distinct society, without any real interference from the Crown. Which may seem surprising, given Charles’s obvious hostility to the Puritans. Why did he let this happen? After all, it’s not like Massachusetts was totally cut off. People went back and forth and word certainly got out about what kind of society the Puritans were building, and how hostile it was to the English establishment. I mean, they acknowledged the King’s authority only grudgingly and their churches had completely broken away from the Anglican bishops. Well, there were concerns raised, but there was only so much that could be done. Remember, this is the decade when King Charles was ruling without Parliament, so he was busy just keeping everything together in England, and by the end of the decade he was sucked into a war in Scotland. And of course after that, the English Civil War hit, and no one at all in England cared about the colonies. And in any case, the Puritans were less of a threat over there than at home. So despite various worries, New England was mostly left to do its own thing, at least for the time being.

Next episode, we’ll talk about the other colonies of New England, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and how they built upon the Massachusetts way of doing things while making significant innovations of their own. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume I by Charles M. Andrews

History of Elections in the American Colonies by Cortlandt F. Bishop

Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction by Francis J. Bremer

The Charter of Massachusetts Bay

Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America by Joseph A. Conforti

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Political Thought of John Winthrop by Stanley Gray

A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England by David D. Hall

A History Of Election Cake And Why Bakers Want To #MakeAmericaCakeAgain

The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch

'Election Cake' Makes a Modern Day Resurgence by Keia Mastrianni

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

A Model of Christian Charity by John Winthrop

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