THE long wars of William and Anne were succeeded by a quarter-century of comparative peace. In spite of Jacobite conspiracies the Act of Settlement was carried out in 1714, and the succession of George I. marked the victory of parliamentary authority over the hereditary rights of the Stuart line. Essentially foreign in their education, tastes, and interests, the first two Georges depended for their administration of English affairs upon the Whig chiefs by whose support the dynasty had been established. Under these conditions the system of party and parliamentary administration was, in course of time, so strongly founded that it finally prevailed even against the aggressively personal policy of George III.

     The first years of the Whig domination were occupied with struggles for headship in the party; but they soon ended in the supremacy of Sir Robert Walpole, who became prime-minister in 1721, and held the position until 1742. Though he was then

forced to resign by a combination of Tories with dissatisfied Whigs, most of the ministers of the next two decades were men who had been trained in his school. Walpole was a strong though coarse-grained country gentleman and a liberal-minded statesman. He shared the prevailing low standards of public and private morality, and his political power was maintained in part by various forms of parliamentary corruption. His primary policy was to establish securely under Whig auspices the new Protestant succession and to develop the commerce and manufactures of his country. He sought to accomplish these ends by preserving peace abroad, by avoiding extreme measures of any kind which might provoke dangerous antagonism to the existing government, and by some relaxation of commercial restrictions.

     Walpole’s part in the shaping of British colonial policy has never been thoroughly examined. He has been credited with liberal views and particularly with having opposed a proposal for taxing the colonies. During his administration, parliament enacted some laws in the interest of colonial trade; but, on the other hand, one of the harshest legislative measures of the period, the Molasses Act of 1733, which, if enforced, would have seriously injured the trade of the northern colonies, was strongly supported by his followers and seems to have been distinctly an administration measure. His influence was apparently, in the main, the negative

Map Facing This Page: Eastern North America (1715)

one of discouraging over-aggressive schemes of colonial control.¹

     The system of colonial administration remained essentially unchanged throughout the Walpole era, so that the direct charge of colonial interests was, as before, mainly in the hands of the secretary of state for the southern department and the Board of Trade. Until 1724 no one man held the secretaryship long enough to exert much influence for good or ill upon colonial politics. In that year, however, the southern department was given to the Duke of Newcastle, who retained it during the remainder of Walpole’s ministry and for six years longer, in all a period of twenty-four years.

     Newcastle was conspicuous even among his contemporaries for his activity in the lower forms of politics, particularly for his prostitution of the patronage to partisan ends. He was also notoriously inefficient. One of his contemporaries said of him that he did “nothing in the same hurry and agitation as if he did everything.” According to another bon-mot attributed to one of his colleagues, he was always losing “half an hour in the morning, which he is running after the rest of the day without being able to overtake it.” He neglected the colonial correspondence, and his chief interest in American affairs, as in home politics, seemed to be the spoils of office. From a politician of this type

no constructive policy could reasonably be expected.¹

     The personnel of the Board of Trade was hardly of a kind to supply the deficiencies of the secretary. In 1714 the board was completely changed and a number of comparatively obscure men appointed. During the next thirty years about thirty men in all were appointed and the average tenure was fairly long; four members held office for over twenty years. With one exception, none of the men who saw any considerable service in the board under Walpole could be rated as even a respectable politician of the second class. That exception was Colonel Martin Bladen, a veteran of the War of the Spanish Succession, who entered Parliament as a Whig in 1715, was appointed to the board in 1717, and served continuously until his death in 1746. He was one of the most active and influential members of the board, and he also spoke frequently in the House of Commons, where he steadily supported Walpole. He came to be regarded as an expert on commercial and colonial affairs, and as a member of the Board of Trade was said to have gone by the name of “Trade” while his colleagues were called the “Board.”²

     According to Horace Walpole, the Board of Trade

in his father’s time had become almost a “sinecure”; but the colonial papers of the twenties and thirties indicate that the board held frequent meetings and transacted a considerable amount of business. In the course of a parliamentary debate, General Oglethorpe said of its members that they were “as exact and diligent in all the matters which fall under their province as any board in England,” and that it was “one of the most useful boards we have.”¹

     The board maintained a fairly regular correspondence with colonial governors, inquired into colonial conditions, and made some elaborate reports and recommendations, notably in 1721 and 1732. Though many of these recommendations were disregarded, others were accepted, and much of the colonial legislation of the period was in accordance with their advice. In their efforts to impose their policies upon the colonial assemblies, they were frequently defeated; but this was due, partly at least, to a division of authority which left them almost no power of final action. Ultimate decisions regarding appointments and other subjects were in the hands of the Privy Council, acting usually on the advice of its own “Committee for Plantation Affairs.” An energetic secretary of state acting in full harmony with the members of the board would probably have moulded the colonial policy of the

ministry, but these conditions were never realized during the Newcastle regime. Generally speaking, the lack of co-operation between the ministry and the Board of Trade showed itself not in the adoption by the former of a positive programme at variance with that of the board, but in failure to act upon its recommendations.¹

     Other administrative boards continued to take a considerable part in questions of colonial policy. Thus the admiralty was interested in fostering the production of naval stores in America, and one of its leading members, Sir Charles Wager, was regarded as an expert in American affairs. Horace Walpole the elder, a brother of Sir Robert, and a diplomatist of some reputation, held the profitable office of auditor-general of the colonial revenues. He took part in the parliamentary proceedings of 1731-1733 which ended in the passage of the Molasses Act, and in 1735 he urged upon his brother a closer attention to colonial affairs.²

     Horace Walpole particularly commended “one Coram, the honestest, the most disinterested, and the most knowing person about the plantations I ever talked with.” Coram, after many years residence in Massachusetts, finally settled in London. Having a special interest in colonial trade and shipping

he advocated the bounty on naval stores in 1704; but he also favored the policy of restricting colonial manufactures. He was one of the Georgia trustees, and was also interested in the settlement of Nova Scotia. Doubtless, Coram was only one among a number of more obscure personages who contributed each his small share to the shaping of British official opinion.¹

     A fair test of a colonial administration is its exercise of the appointing power. Newcastle kept the patronage largely in his own hands, and numerous letters among the colonial papers show that their writers looked to him as the dispenser of desirable offices. Even before his time the Board of Trade complained of not being consulted with regard to appointments. Sinecure positions continued to be a serious evil in colonial administration; during the first half of the eighteenth century the important government of Virginia was generally held by a non-resident governor, while the actual work of administration was performed by a lieutenant-governor. The commercial conception of public patronage may be illustrated by the case of Lord Delaware, who, having been appointed governor of New York in 1737, was asked three years later to resign in favor of Lieutenant-Governor Clarke, and was promised one thousand guineas, to be paid when the new appointment had actually been made. A new governor

was appointed, but Clarke’s application was unsuccessful.¹

     Not all appointments, however, were unfit. There were bad governors like Cosby in New York, but he was probably no worse than Lord Cornbury, his predecessor, in Queen Anne’s reign. The Newcastle regime must, on the other hand, be credited with such good appointments as those of Morris in New Jersey and Shirley in Massachusetts. Though disposed to stand for the royal prerogative, both these governors were men of public spirit. Nor was the home government wholly irresponsible in the making of removals. In Massachusetts, it showed its sensitiveness to local sentiment on the death of one governor who had made himself obnoxious to the colonists, by appointing as his successor the agent who had been sent to act against him. Probably the home government was not always reasonably firm in its support of men whose unpopularity arose largely from their vigorous assertion of imperial authority.

     A governor once appointed was supposed to be controlled by his instructions. During the Newcastle period there was no marked change in the general instructions issued to the governor on his appointment, though there were a few additions. Some governors were criticised for failing to make regular reports to the secretary of state and the

Board of Trade; but in other instances a voluminous correspondence was kept up, enough to give the home government a lively picture of provincial conditions, especially on the political side, though the board seems not always to have had full confidence in the accuracy of the returns. The adverse criticism which the board passed upon colonial officials was sometimes reciprocated. In October, 1736, a North Carolina governor wrote that he had had no communication from the board since the previous December, and, with the exception of a short note then, nothing for over a year. A similar complaint was made by Governor Clinton, of New York, a few years later.¹

     Even in this era of “salutary neglect,” colonial legislation was scrutinized with some care, though there was no such wholesale disallowance of provincial statutes as had taken place during the reigns of William and Anne. This may have been due partly to lack of energy in the Board of Trade, but it is explained partly also by the fact that the assemblies had adjusted themselves to a sort of modus vivendi in which some demands of the crown were acquiesced in and others avoided by indirect methods. Governors also were now more definitely instructed with regard to legislation. In the new royal government of North Carolina, out of the first two hundred and seventy-one acts approved by the

governors, only eight were disallowed by the crown, and even in Massachusetts the percentage of royal vetoes was small. In Massachusetts the charter provision that acts not disallowed within three years after presentation to the crown should remain laws until repealed by the provincial assembly, was avoided by postponing presentation. It was a common practice of the Board of Trade to order colonial acts “to lie by probationary,” awaiting examination by legal counsel or objections from any other quarter. Some acts which were not disallowed were adversely criticised by the board or its legal counsel, and sometimes the governor was cautioned against the passage of similar acts in the future.¹

     The colonies frequently gave offence by their tariff legislation. Discriminating duties were laid in favor of colonial shipping as against that of Great Britain, and duties on slaves and on goods imported from England were also frequently complained of. Governors were forbidden to pass acts of this kind without at least a clause suspending execution until approved by the crown; and several such acts were disallowed Again, the home government forbade the passage of private acts without the suspending clause, and for several years the Massachusetts general court gave up such legislation altogether.²

     A striking instance of the use of a royal veto to check a strong popular demand was the disallowance of a New York act providing for triennial assemblies. After two long assemblies, lasting ten and nine years respectively, it was felt that more frequent elections were necessary to secure genuine representation. The movement was resisted by Governor Cosby, but in 1737 the triennial act was approved by his successor, Lieutenant Governor Clarke. An elaborate argument was made in its favor, laying stress upon the practice of annual elections in New England and Pennsylvania; but the Board of Trade, accepting the advice of its special counsel, Mr. Fane, recommended the disallowance of the act and an order in council was issued accordingly.¹

     The home government could not always impose its wishes upon the colonial assemblies. Royal instructions did not prevent temporary grants to governors or extravagant issues of paper money. As a solution of this problem, and also in order to control the legislation of the chartered colonies which was not subject to veto, the House of Lords proposed that all colonial laws should be sent to the Board of Trade, and that except in case of urgency none should take effect until approved by the king in council. This drastic measure, however, was not adopted.¹

     Generally speaking, the Whig ministries accepted the mercantilist colonial theories, and governors were carefully instructed to enforce the navigation acts. Colonial enterprises were jealously watched, and the board continued its efforts to check colonial manufactures by encouraging the production of naval stores. Most English statesmen regarded the southern colonies, and more particularly the sugar islands, as deserving special attention and favor, because their trade was more clearly advantageous to the mother-country. In case of conflict, the interests of the northern colonies were likely to be sacrificed to those of the West Indies.

     These views were embodied in a considerable number of acts of Parliament dealing with American affairs. The most vital phase of English foreign relations was the antagonism with Spain, arising from the efforts of enterprising English merchants to secure for themselves more of the Spanish-American trade than they could fairly claim under existing treaties. This subject was almost constantly discussed in Parliament, and a more aggressive policy was urged upon the ministry, until in 1739 it was reluctantly forced into war with Spain. These conditions, of course, made it easier for colonial officials to gain the attention of Parliament.¹

act of 1750 prohibiting the manufacture of that metal beyond the stage of pig or bar iron.¹

     The most important commercial regulation of this period was the Molasses Act, which, after two years of discussion in Parliament, became law in 1733. Its chief importance consists not in its actual economic effects, but in the light which it throws on colonial policy, and in the constitutional questions which were raised while the bill was under discussion. This act, imposing prohibitory duties on molasses, sugar, and rum imported into the continental colonies from the West Indian colonies of other powers than England, was intended to revive the declining trade of the British West Indian planters by compelling the continental colonies to buy of them instead of encouraging their French and Dutch competitors. Its enforcement would have crippled the commerce of the northern colonies, and its passage in the face of their protests shows clearly the relative importance of the West Indies from the official point of view. Sir John Barnard, one of Walpole’s leading antagonists in the House of Commons, and General Oglethorpe, both argued ably but unsuccessfully against this sacrifice of continental interests to those of the islands.²

     Three other acts may be mentioned as marking

some real advance in imperial control. In 1732 Parliament determined to intervene in the judicial administration of the colonies for the protection of British merchants who had complained of legal obstacles in the collection of debts due them in America. It was provided that debts due to residents in Great Britain or to the crown might be proved by testimony taken in England, and that colonial real estate should be “chargeable with all just debts” as “real estates are by the law of England.” In 1741 the Land Bank of Massachusetts was summarily dealt with by applying to the colonies the provisions of a previous statute dealing with similar speculative companies. Finally, in 1751, Parliament undertook to check the paper-money craze in New England by prohibiting the issue of legal-tender bills. The act which destroyed the Land Bank was retroactive and therefore peculiarly arbitrary. Mr. Andrew McF. Davis, the leading authority on this subject, has accepted as “probably true” the opinion of John Adams that this act was more influential than the Stamp Act in the development of opposition to the supremacy of Parliament among the people of Massachusetts. Franklin also thought that the hostility of the home government to colonial currency experiments was a large factor in the growth of colonial discontent.¹

     Some of the more aggressive officials of the Georgian period continued to cherish projects of direct royal government in all of the colonies, and the union of all under one general governor to whom the governors of particular colonies should be subordinate. Little, however, was accomplished in the realization of these ideals.

     At the beginning of this period one backward step was taken. Maryland, which had been administered since 1692 by royal governors, was in 1715 re-established as a proprietary province. The Catholicism of the proprietor had been one of the reasons urged for the institution of royal government, and now the succession of a Protestant heir was considered to justify the restoration of full proprietary rights. The negotiations for the surrender of Pennsylvania had also, as has already been observed, come to nothing. Thus the two proprietorships which had been most seriously threatened during the early years of William III. survived to the close of the colonial era.¹

     One decided advantage was gained, however, by the abolition of proprietary government in the Carolinas, largely on the initiative of the colonists themselves. Both of the Carolina governments had long been under fire for lax administration of the navigation laws and for various other irregularities. The intolerance of the high-church party, supported

by the proprietors, helped to bring on a civil war in North Carolina, while in the southern province it provoked an appeal by the colonists to the crown. In the latter case the prestige of the proprietors was weakened by the queen’s intervention on behalf of the colonists, and the annulling of the charter was seriously considered.¹

     The exposed position of these frontier colonies also showed the need of a stronger government. This need was illustrated by the struggles of South Carolina with the French and Spaniards, and of North Carolina with the Tuscarora Indians; and it was still further emphasized two years after the peace of Utrecht by the Yemassee war. The Yemassee Indians, who were settled in the southern part of South Carolina, were led, partly by unfriendly treatment at the hands of English traders and partly by the instigation of the Spaniards, to take up arms against the province. The invasion was finally repelled by the colonists themselves, with some help from Virginia and North Carolina; but several hundred settlers were massacred, and the proprietors gave no substantial protection. Exasperated by the negligence of the proprie ors, the colonists in 1716 presented through their agent a memorial asking the intervention of the crown.

     Soon afterwards the proprietors gave great offence to the colonists by vetoing a number of popular laws which had been enacted by the assembly.

The most important was one changing the method of election for the members of the assembly, so that instead of being chosen altogether at Charleston they should be elected by the voters in the various districts of the province. This veto seemed to be intended to secure the continued domination of a little group of politicians in Charleston, and led finally to armed resistance. In 1719 the colonists assembled in arms and called upon their governor, Robert Johnson, to renounce the proprietors and assume the government in the name of the crown. This Johnson loyally refused to do. He was, therefore, set aside and Moore elected governor in his place, with the understanding that he was to hold office for the king.¹

     The home government accepted the results of this revolution by appointing Francis Nicholson as the governor of South Carolina, and the attorney-general was ordered to proceed against the charter. No such legal steps were actually taken, however, and the royal government of South Carolina remained for ten years on a purely provisional basis. The proprietors tried at first to recover their control of the government; failing in this attempt, they began negotiations for the surrender of their proprietary rights as a whole. In 1729 these negotiations were consummated by an act of Parliament, and royal governments were then permanently established

in both provinces. Three years after this event the crown granted a charter for the part of this territory lying between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers to the Georgia trustees. The government of the new province was delegated for twenty years to a private corporation, but it was then to revert to the crown.¹

     From time to time the general plan of abolishing all the chartered governments was revived. In 1715 a bill for the “better regulation of Charter and Proprietary Governments” passed the first and second readings in the House of Commons; and in 1721 the Board of Trade urged that all proprietary governments be abolished. To meet attacks of this kind, Jeremiah Dummer, agent in England for the colony of Massachusetts, wrote his famous Defence of the New England Charters, addressing it to Newcastle’s immediate predecessor, Lord Carteret. He defended the colonists effectively against the common charges brought against them, such as lack of zeal in imperial defence, arbitrary government, violation of the navigation acts, and the enactment of laws at variance with those of Great Britain. He asserted strongly the loyalty of the colonists to the mother-country, denied any tendency towards independence, and insisted that the prosperity of the mother-country was bound up with that of the colonies. He held that the prosperity

of the latter was founded on the liberal provisions of the early charters, which could not, therefore, be withdrawn without serious injury to imperial interests. The power of Parliament to resume the charters was not denied; but, he said, “the question here is not about power but right; and shall not the supreme legislature of all the nation do right?”

     During the next quarter-century schemes for the reorganization of the colonial governments were frequently proposed; in 1723 Rhode Island and Connecticut were asked to submit to union with the royal province of New Hampshire; and in 1744 Governor Clinton of New York referred to a printed proposal which he had seen for a general governor over all the continental colonies.¹

     In the same letter Governor Clinton referred to a closely related proposal for colonial taxation. The possibility of taxation by Parliament for the support of colonial administration was discussed at intervals throughout the eighteenth century. In an essay submitted by Bladen to Lord Townshend in 1726, a stamp duty was suggested as a means by which Parliament might raise a revenue in the colonies, and this was the particular form of tax referred to by Clinton in 1744. Clinton declared the colonists were “quite strangers to any duty, but such as they raise themselves,” and that the

proposed tax “might prove a dangerous consequence to His Majesty’s interests.”¹

     The most important parliamentary discussion of taxation and representation took place in the debate on the Molasses Act in 1733, with special reference to a Rhode Island petition against the bill. Sir William Yonge, in arguing against receiving the petition, objected to a clause declaring the bill “prejudicial to their charter,” “as if this House had not a power to tax them, or to make any laws for the regulating of the affairs of their colony.” Another speaker was sure that “they can have no such charter” which “debars this House from taxing them as well as any other subject of this nation.” Sir John Barnard, speaking for the petitioners, argued that the colonists had a special claim to be heard by petition, because “the people of every part of Great Britain have a representative in this House who is to take care of their particular interest, as well as of the general interest of the nation . . . but the people who are the petitioners . . . have no particular representatives in this House; and, therefore, they have no other way of applying or of offering their reasons to this, but in the way of being heard at the bar of the House by their agent here in England.” As against this view of Barnard, however, another member, Mr. Conduit, set forth the orthodox theory of virtual representation,

that as the colonies were “all a part of the people of Great Britain they are generally represented in this House as well as the rest of the people are.”¹

     In the Annual Register in 1765, for which Edmund Burke was then writing, the statement is made that a scheme for taxing the colonies was proposed to Walpole and rejected by him, with the remark that he would leave that “to some of my successors who may have more courage than I have.” In his opinion, the royal exchequer would gain more indirectly by the development of colonial commerce, which would be “taxing them more agreeably to their own constitution and to ours.”²

     It has been customary to speak of this period of British colonial policy as one of “salutary neglect,” but this, like some other attractive generalizations, cannot be accepted without many qualifications. Though the trade laws were less vigorously enforced than they were in later years, and though the proposal of taxation by Parliament was never carried out, the colonists were by no means left to themselves. Popular legislation was repeatedly defeated by the royal veto, and Parliament exerted its authority over the colonies even in the face of strong resistance. Sometimes, as in the suppression of the Massachusetts Land Bank, these assertions of parliamentary authority left a smouldering fire of discontent to trouble the statesmen of a later time.

     It is not easy to determine with precision what in this period were the theories and feelings of the colonists regarding the authority of the home government. If the views of aggressive imperialists had been carried out, if Parliament had remodelled the colonial governments and levied a stamp tax, radical theories like those of Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson would probably have come earlier to light. There were, indeed, royal officials under George II., as under Queen Anne, who thought the colonial assemblies were moving clearly towards independence. Attorney-General Bradley of New York set forth this theory at length in 1729, pointing out the difficulty of suppressing a revolt if the colonists were once united; and Dummer thought it necessary to discuss the question in his Defence of the New England Charters.¹

     Nevertheless, the colonists generally were loyal to the king and did not question the supremacy of Parliament. Dummer, in his argument against legislative resumption of the charters, insisted that the colonists were unreservedly loyal and would accept a decision by Parliament as final, even if it abolished their chartered privileges. He admitted that “the legislative power is absolute and unaccountable, and King, Lords, and Commons may do what they please.” Doubtless, as Clinton intimated, there was an underlying assumption that

taxation by Parliament would be a violation of colonial rights, but the colonists had not yet been obliged to define with precision their theories of constitutional limitations.¹