THE politics of thirteen small communities united to each other only by their common dependence on the mother-country hardly offered an adequate field for the larger kind of statesmanship. The governor’s position gave him, of course, a certain opportunity for leadership, but he was mainly confined within the limits of his particular province. Still more distinctly was this true of the popular leaders. Nevertheless, a few efficient governors showed in their restricted field some of the elements of true statesmanship; and among the colonists there were some aggressive and intelligent champions of the popular will.

     Probably none of the provincial governors had on the whole so interesting a personality or gave so much evidence of political foresight as Alexander Spotswood, who, with the title of lieutenant-governor, was the actual head of the Virginia administration from 1710 to 1722. Spotswood was a Scotchman by descent, but was born in Tangier, where his father was stationed as an army surgeon.

Like several other royal governors of the time, he had had an important military experience, having held the rank of colonel under Marlborough in the Blenheim campaign; yet when he began his career in Virginia he was not quite thirty-five.

     From the beginning of his service as governor, Spotswood showed remarkable energy, public spirit, and breadth of interest. He was an active patron of William and Mary College, concerned himself seriously with the supply of ministers for the Virginia parishes, and corresponded with the bishop of London about the best method of improving the general position of the clergy.

     Spotswood was also deeply interested in the economic development of his province. Much of the credit for breaking up piracy belongs to him. He also saw the value of the iron-mines, and may be regarded as the founder of the iron industry in Virginia. In its interest he secured from the assembly liberal legislation for the encouragement of German settlers, and tried also to enlist the aid of the home government. His largeness of view was perhaps most clearly shown in the emphasis which he laid upon western exploration. He believed that the French plan of connecting Canada with the Mississippi might be thwarted by pushing the English settlements westward along the line of the James River. A few months after his arrival he sent out an exploring company to the mountains, and in 1706 he personally led an expedition over

the Blue Ridge. Two years later he urged upon the English government the desirability of an establishment on Lake Erie.

     With all his strong qualities Spotswood was unfortunate in his relations with his associates in the provincial government. He found a local aristocracy strongly intrenched in the council and accustomed to political control. His plans for a reform of the land administration were contrary to their interests and prejudices, and he asserted his prerogative as governor in ways which seemed to encroach upon their constitutional privileges. He also antagonized James Blair, the commissary of the bishop of London. These difficulties were partially overcome, but he was soon after removed from office.

     He then retired to his country place at Germanna, on the Rapidan, where he engaged, on a considerable scale, in the manufacture of iron. Here he was visited in later years by his former antagonist in the council, William Byrd, who wrote a charming account of the Spotswood establishment. His public career was not, however, completely closed. As governor he already had done what he could towards the development of the colonial postal system under the act of 1710; and in 1730 he became deputy postmaster-general for America. Finally, on the outbreak of the Spanish war, he received the rank of major-general, and at the age of sixty-four was actively engaged in the work of

gathering the colonial forces for an expedition against Carthagena, when his long and varied life was suddenly ended in 1740. His career, taken as a whole, is an admirable example of a royal official identifying himself with American life and sincerely devoted to the solution of its problems.¹

     Two years before Spotswood’s retirement from the Virginia governorship, William Burnet began a short but eventful service in America as governor of New York. Burnet was not so strong nor so picturesque a personality as Spotswood; but the two men were alike in watchful care for English interests in the continental rivalry with France, in zealous assertion of their prerogatives against rival elements in the government, and in the unfortunate antagonisms which marred their official service. William Burnet was a son of Bishop Gilbert Burnet, the famous counsellor of William and Mary and a leading personage in church and state. The son had a university education at Cambridge, supplemented by study abroad, and during his residence in America was recognized as a gentleman of refined and scholarly tastes. Before his appointment as governor he had been in the customs service and had suffered from some unfortunate speculations. In 1720 he succeeded Robert Hunter as governor of New York and held that office until 1728, when his difficulties

with the opposing faction became so serious that he was transferred to the government of Massachusetts, which he held until his death in the following year.

     Burnet’s American career is chiefly notable for two things: his far-sighted policy for the promotion of English influence in the region of the Great Lakes and among the western Indians; and his constitutional conflict with the Massachusetts assembly on the salary issue. Before coming to New York, Burnet had conferred with his predecessor, Hunter, and acquired some knowledge of American conditions. On his arrival he accepted as one of his expert advisers on provincial policy the famous Cadwallader Colden, best known for his History of the Five Indian Nations; and in accordance with Colden’s views he adopted two important measures of policy. One was the establishment of a British trading-post and fort at Oswego on Lake Ontario. In 1726 he secured a small appropriation from the assembly for this purpose, but was obliged to supplement this amount by advances from his own purse, for which he was never fully repaid. Burnet hoped that this would prove the foundation of an important English trade with the western Indians, an expectation which seemed to be justified by the attitude of the French, who regarded the new post as a serious menace to their interests and demanded, though without success, that it should be given up.

     Burnet also sought to check the trade between Albany and Canada, on the ground that it supplied the French with European goods which they used in the Indian trade. Thus, Burnet argued, the merchants were playing directly into the hands of their French rivals. He secured the passage of several acts of assembly prohibiting or restricting this trade, but the opposition at Albany was so strong as to prevent strict enforcement; and several of these provincial measures were disallowed by the crown.

     The salary dispute in Massachusetts has already been considered.¹ In this episode, as in his measures relating to Oswego, Burnet showed remarkable steadiness in the face of opposition, and commendable readiness to make financial sacrifices in support of what seemed to him a sound public policy. It may, however, be open to question whether more tact and judgment in dealing with men might not have given him greater success in administration.²

     Burnet’s place in the governorship of Massachusetts and New Hampshire was taken by Jonathan Belcher, who served for about eleven years. Unlike Spotswood and Burnet, Belcher was a provincial by birth and early training, coming from a mercantile family in Boston and graduating from Harvard College. He had, however, seen something

of the outside world, not only in England but in continental Europe, and on his return he took an important place among the merchants and politicians of Boston. His correspondence shows the frequent use of religious phrases after the Puritan manner, with some suggestion of sanctimoniousness.

     For many years Belcher was known as a “prerogative” man; but during Burnet’s controversy with the assembly on the salary question he identified himself with the opposition, and was presently sent to England as provincial agent to secure a modification of the governor’s instructions. The home government refused to yield; but soon afterwards Burnet died and Belcher was sent as his successor, apparently on the theory that he would be more successful in bringing the assembly to terms.

     As governor, Belcher had the reputation of being showy in his manner of life, unusually masterful in his dealings with the council, and much inclined to use his power of appointment and removal for personal and political purposes. Though at first popular with both the previously existing parties, he drifted into controversies which aroused bitter an tagonism. On the salary question his instructions were drastic enough; but, on the failure of all attempts at compromise, he finally secured the consent of the Board of Trade to the practical surrender which has already been recorded.¹ On some important

issues, however, Belcher held his ground, and during his administration the house was obliged to give up the practice of issuing money from the treasury by simple resolutions. He also held out firmly against new issues of paper money in Massachusetts.

     Near the end of his term, Belcher earned his chief title to fame by his fight against the Land Bank party, which then controlled the house of representatives. All persons prominently identified with the bank he marked out for political ostracism, rejecting, in 1740, the speaker chosen by the house, and thirteen councillors, besides removing a number of administrative officers. In the fight for sound money, Belcher had the support of the mercantile interests; but by this time there was a formidable combination of dissatisfied elements. The assembly of New Hampshire was convinced that he had not dealt fairly with that province in its recent boundary controversy with Massachusetts, and charged him with having been influenced by a considerable grant of money made to him by the Massachusetts assembly while the controversy was pending. Various political devices were used against him; and in 1741 he was removed in favor of William Shirley, who was to become so prominent a figure in the last two wars with the French.

     Belcher’s removal from his New England governments did not close permanently his political career,

for he was afterwards appointed governor of New Jersey, where he helped to found Princeton College. In New England he left an unfortunate impression of indirect dealing, insincerity, and self-seeking.¹

     Sir William Keith, the proprietary governor of Pennsylvania (1717-1724), may be taken as a good example of the demagogue in the governor’s office. Keith was a Scotchman who had previously served as surveyor-general of customs for the king. Throughout his administration he was notoriously negligent in the observance of his instructionsa serious matter for the proprietors, under the Pennsylvania constitution, which left legislation wholly in the hands of the governor and the representatives. Efforts were made to check him by stringent instructions, requiring him to approve no bill without the consent of a majority of the council. Keith then appealed openly to the people against the proprietary instructions, but this was more than the proprietors would tolerate and he was soon removed.

     After his removal Keith entered the assembly and attempted the rôle of opposition leader, apparently with the purpose of breaking down the proprietary government. He subsequently returned to England, where he was consulted by the Board of Trade as an expert on colonial questions. Keith’s lack of trustworthiness in private as well as public

relations has been recorded for all time by Franklin in his Autobiography; but Franklin, from the point of view of a popular leader, thought that Keith had in the main given good service as governor, especially in the passage of desirable legislation.¹

     The elective governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut were officers of a wholly different type; for they were themselves of the people, chosen representatives of their neighbors. Their authority was closely limited by the charters, and in theory they were little more than the first among the councillors. Yet as spokesmen for the people in negotiations with the neighboring colonies and with the home government they had important parts to play.

     During the first half of the eighteenth century these little republics showed remarkable steadiness in their treatment of their political leaders. Governor Cranston, of Rhode Island, was elected year after year for twenty-eight years; and from 1707 to 1741 Connecticut had only two governors, both of whom died in office. One of these Connecticut governors was Joseph Talcott, whose tenure of office covered the seventeen years from 1724 to 1741; and his career is of interest not because it showed any remarkable statesmanship, but because it is that of a characteristic republican leader.

     Talcott belonged to one of the old and prominent families of Connecticut, but he had little education of an academic kind. Before becoming governor, however, he served a varied apprenticeship in public employments; first, in the town of Hartford as selectman or townsman, then successively as representative in the assembly, assistant, and deputy-governor. Besides his legislative and executive responsibilities he held various judicial positions extending from that of justice of the peace to judge of the superior court. He performed his share of military service in defending the colony against the Indians, and was also active in the Hartford church. Talcott may therefore be regarded as a typical public servant.

     The period of his governorship brought many perplexing problems, some of which involved the essential principles of the Connecticut constitution. During the early years he was engaged in somewhat vexatious correspondence with New York and Rhode Island regarding boundary disputes, but these were settled during his term of office. More serious and perplexing were his relations with the home government. In 1728 came the news that in the case of Winthrop vs. Lechmere, carried on appeal from the colonial courts, the Privy Council had declared invalid the Connecticut law distributing the property of intestates among the heirs.¹ The enforcement of such a decision would have caused

great confusion in the colony, and during the remainder of his life a large part of Talcott’s correspondence with the Connecticut agents was made up of arguments in favor of maintaining the long-established local usage. The final issue did not appear until after Talcott’s death, when the Privy Council by its decision in the new case of Clarke vs. Toucey, in 1745, practically abandoned the position taken in Winthrop vs. Lechmere.

     These negotiations were peculiarly difficult because all communications with the English government served to direct attention to the somewhat exceptional and anomalous position of Connecticut under the charter. It was noted that her laws were not subject to disallowance like those of most colonies, and that there were not the necessary securities for an exact enforcement of the navigation acts. From time to time there was talk of radical parliamentary action, and of a remodelling of the charter, which at the best would place Connecticut on a footing somewhat like that of Massachusetts. In dealing with these threatening proposals, Talcott showed himself diplomatic as well as firm, making minor concessions when necessary, but holding fast in essentials and constantly defending his people from the charges of insubordination and disloyalty.¹

     The constitutional controversies of the provincial

governments brought out a few men of real capacity for parliamentary leadership. In the south two such leaders may be mentioned, Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, and Daniel Dulany the elder, of Maryland. Pinckney was a native South-Carolinian who had been educated in England. On his return he soon took a prominent place as a lawyer, and in 1732 became attorney-general of the province. He held that position, however, only for a short time, and presently became a member of the “Commons House of Assembly,” serving as speaker from 1736 to 1740. Though a man of considerable wealth, he identified himself with the house in its struggle with the council for exclusive control of money bills. Before he became speaker he draughted some important resolutions on this subject which were adopted by the house and which claimed for the latter in this respect all the powers of the English Commons. The resolutions were strongly worded throughout and ended with this notable paragraph:

     “Resolved, That after the Estimate is closed and added to any Tax Bill, that no additions can or ought to be made thereto, by any other Estate or Power whatsoever, but by and in the Commons House of Assembly.”

     Pinckney showed himself a man of unusually liberal views by claiming equal rights for Protestant dissenters and entering his protest on the journals against a bill to impose upon them as members of

the assembly an objectionable form of oath. He belonged to the second generation of a strong South Carolina family, several of whom played important parts in the later struggle for independence and nationality.¹

     Dulany was active in the Maryland assembly at nearly the same time. Beginning his career in America as a poor Irish immigrant, he became a considerable landholder and founded an important Maryland family. Like Pinckney, he had a high reputation as a lawyer, being considered in his day the best lawyer in the province.

     The chief constitutional question with which Dulany concerned himself was that of the applicability of English statutes in Maryland. Dulany, though holding the office of attorney-general, was also a member of the lower house and accepted the popular theory that the colonists were entitled to all the benefits of English statutes. In 1724 he led the house in demanding that judges should swear to do justice “according to the laws, statutes, and reasonable customs of England and the acts of assembly and usage of this province of Maryland.”

     The proprietors stubbornly resisted this view, and prolonged parliamentary struggles ensued with a series of able state papers from the lower house, usually draughted by Dulany, who was chairman of the

committee on laws. He also wrote a pamphlet in defence of the assembly’s position, entitled “The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws,” which doubtless helped to raise the public excitement to the point described by Governor Ogle in 1731, when he wrote that the country was “as hot as possible about the English statutes and the judge’s oath.” The controversy ended in a compromise which, though not determining the question with precision, was nevertheless regarded as a victory for the lower house. Yet Dulany objected when Bishop Gibson’s commissary undertook to apply the same principle to ecclesiastical law and custom.

     Dulany subsequently became a councillor and one of the governor’s supporters, though he showed his moderation by helping to bring about a reduction of officers’ fees. Like Pinckney, he had a distinguished son, Daniel Dulany the younger, who took a prominent part on the colonial side in the great Stamp-Act debate of 1765.¹

     Pinckney and Dulany, though parliamentary leaders of the popular party, allied themselves at one time or another with the administration and held important appointments. The middle colonies produced a similar personage in Lewis Morris,

of New York and New Jersey, a severe critic of arbitrary government during Governor Cosby’s administration, but a man of aristocratic temperament, who afterwards became a royal governor himself and was involved in the usual constitutional controversies with his assembly.

     One of the most representative leaders of provincial democracy was Andrew Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, who is notable also because of the intercolonial range of his influence. Hamilton’s public career began in the Maryland assembly, and in 1715 a committee of which he was a member framed a code for that province which “remained the law, with little change,” during the rest of the colonial era. Already, however, Hamilton had an important practice in Pennsylvania, and in 1717 he became attorney-general of that province. A few years later he entered the assembly, was for several years its speaker, and in 1739 made a valedictory speech in which he congratulated the province on its comparatively democratic forms of government, with officers generally elected by the people or their representatives, and an assembly which sat upon its own adjournments “when we please and as long as we think necessary.”

     The most memorable incident of his life took place in another province when, in the trial already mentioned, he argued before Chief-Justice De Lancey, of New York, the case of John Peter Zenger. That speech is significant not merely as an incident in

the history of the struggle for freedom of the press; but also as a recognition of political principles held in common by Americans of the provincial era.¹

     In Massachusetts the most important radical leaders of the early eighteenth century were the two Elisha Cookes, father and son, whose careers taken together cover about half a century of provincial politics. The importance of the elder Cooke as an opposition leader has already been noted, and his son was equally conspicuous in the constitutional controversies of the early Georgian period. In 1718 the younger Cooke defended in the house of representatives the right of the colonists to cut pine-trees on their own estates, notwithstanding the prohibition of the royal surveyor of the woods. The house supported him, and in 1720 showed its defiant spirit by electing him as speaker. Governor Shute met the challenge by vetoing the election, and the quarrel which followed prevented the transaction of business during that session. The next house chose another speaker; but Cooke retained his leadership, and the governor, though afterwards sustained in principle by the explanatory charter of 1725, was forced to leave the province.

     During Burnet’s administration Cooke pursued his father’s policy of insisting upon temporary grants; and though under Belcher, to whom he was

more friendly, he was willing to make some concessions, he refused to yield the essential principle at issue. The historian Hutchinson, who was just beginning his public career as Cooke’s drew to a close, said that he had “the character of a fair and open enemy,” and remarked on his unusual success during the earlier part of his career in “keeping the people steady in applause of his measures.”¹

     During the second quarter of the eighteenth century a few men were rising into prominence who were to play still larger parts in the revolutionary era. In Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, as a representative from Boston in the general court, was already a leader in the fight for sound money against the Land Bank and paper-money faction, and was urging, without effect at first, but with final success, the redemption of the currency in specie. Then, as in later years, he showed his readiness to resist a strong popular movement which seemed to him mistaken.²

     Franklin also had begun his long and varied career of public service. Born in Boston, he had while still a boy assisted his brother in publishing the New England Courant, and thus seen something of party politics in Massachusetts. His stay in England from 1724 to 1726 gave him a broader

knowledge of the world than most of his contemporaries, and before he was twenty he had made the acquaintance of some of the most prominent men of his time both in England and America. In 1729, at the age of twenty-three, he took charge of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which soon became the principal paper of the province; and three years later came the first issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac. During these early years he showed that combination of business shrewdness with public spirit which was to distinguish him through life. Before 1740 he had been appointed postmaster at Philadelphia, and had set on foot a number of important public enterprises in the city, including its fire company and its public library.

     From the beginning he took a keen interest in provincial politics. In support of the paper-money policy he published in 1729 his Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, which, though not in accord with modern economic views, was above the average level of contemporary publications on that subject. In 1736 he began his long service as clerk of the assembly, and soon became a recognized leader of the popular party. In 1748 one of the proprietors characterized his “doctrine that obedience to governors is no more due than protection to the people” as “not fit to be in the heads of the unthinking multitude,” adding, “He is a dangerous man, and I should be glad if he inhabited another country, as I believe him of a

very uneasy spirit. However, as he is a sort of tribune of the people, he must be treated with regard.”¹