INTRODUCTION

When Virginia, the first English colony in America, was founded in 1607, James I and his ministers imposed a form of governance consisting of a council of seven executives appointed by the home authorities. Three years later, those authorities added a governor. The organizers of all the colonies—both corporate and proprietary—established during the next half century employed this form of conciliar government composed of a governor and a council. Half a century later, however, when the restored Stuart court in 1661 once again took up the task of devising a civil government for Jamaica, Charles II and his Privy Council abandoned the conciliar form. Their new design featured both a triadic structure made up of three parts—governor, council, and a representative assembly—and a bicameral legislature with the council as the “upper” and the assembly the“lower” house. Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic regarded this triadic colonial government, then already in operation as an indigenous outgrowth of the settlers' societies in four major colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Barbados—and bearing striking resemblance in structure to the mixed constitution of the King, Lords, and Commons in England, as a colonial imitation of England's celebrated constitution and thus the nominal mode for an English polity.

The formation of this colonial version of a mixed polity in the context of English colonization of America during the first half of the seventeenth century is the central concern of this work. It seeks to achieve a systematic understanding of the formative stages of this type of polity by examining the constitutional development of five colonies: Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Barbados, and Jamaica. Between 1606 and 1660, English people successfully erected fifteen settlements of English immigrants in America stretching from the eastern coastline of continental North America to the islands of the western Atlantic Ocean and the eastern Caribbean islands of the West Indies. Out of a total population of about 133,700, 101,800, or 76 percent, resided in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Barbados, and Jamaica. As the biggest settlements of English America, these five colonies set the pattern of development—not only in the economic and social but also in the constitutional and political realms—of the emerging English Empire of America. Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America, had the first colonial representative assembly. The charter of Maryland, the first proprietary patent based upon the county palatinate of Durham, became the model of proprietary colonies in America. Whereas the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay colony, either by example or as antithesis, was instrumental in shaping the social and political systems of Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Haven, the constitutional development of Barbados influenced the four Leeward Islands: St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua. As the first conquered colony of English America, Jamaica was under the direct control of the metropolitan government from the very beginning of its history, and its constitutional establishment embodied the metropolitan vision of colonial polity after decades of private colonization. That all these five major colonies shared the same pattern of constitutional evolution of developing a triadic polity with a bicameral legislature in the years between 1606 and 1664 is significant. By placing the experience of each colony in the context of the general framework of English colonization as well as in its own particular social circumstances, this study attempts to explore the dynamics of interactions between Old World traditions regarding institutional structures and constitutional theory and the environmental conditions present in the immigrant societies in the New World, and to assess the relative weight of those factors in shaping an indigenous Anglo-American mixed polity.

Scholars have long recognized that, as proclaimed by Jack P. Greene almost two decades ago, “No aspect of Anglo-America colonial life has been any more thoroughly studied than the political” and, one could also add, the constitutional. Indeed, ever since colonial times, constitutional evolution and political events, institutions, and their underlining concepts and assumptions have always been the focal point of historians' attention. Although the rise of the “New” social history in the middle of this century substantially weakened the monopoly of constitutional and political history, the political and constitutional development of the American colonies continued to occupy an eminent place in Anglo-American historiography.

Discounting the work of the Whig persuasion written by amateur historians before the twentieth century, the first generation of professional historians inaugurated the systematic study of this subject during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Influenced by the German historical tradition, these early professional historians led by Herbert Baxter Adams, Albert Bushnell Hart, and Edward Channing devoted enormous energy to searching for the institutional origins of the American political system.

The imperial school, which dominated the study of colonial history in the first decades of this century and was represented by George L. Beer, Herbert Levi Osgood, Charles McLean Andrews, and their students, produced many works on the political institutions and constitutional evolution of the American colonies within the context of the British Empire. Comprehensive in scope and rigorous in nature, their work laid the foundation for further examination of colonial political and constitutional development.

By contrast, the progressive historians of the same period, convinced that social progress occurred through conflicts between social classes, stressed the internal divisions within colonial societies and thus broadened the perspective of colonial political history by introducing social analysis into the study of political institutions. However, they produced few concrete studies in colonial political history and largely followed the imperial historians in their treatment of colonial political development.

Meanwhile, neither the imperial nor the progressive school paid any attention to the conceptual or ideological aspects of the colonial political life and its impact upon the evolution of political institutions. By and large, both ignored the relationship between the outward form of political institutions and the internal content of political ideology and principles.

After World War Two, the imperial school lost its appeal for most younger historians because of its single-minded stress upon political and constitutional development, and the “Neo-Whig” historians questioned the importance of class conflict in colonial political life depicted by the progressive school. Influenced by the analytical frameworks borrowed from other disciplines of social and behavior sciences and armed with renewed sensitivity against anachronism, contemporary historians endeavored to understand the nature of colonial politics from the perspective of the prevailing modes of ideas, values, and beliefs of the period under investigation. This effort stimulated much scholarly interest in the study of political ideology, exemplified by the emergence of the so-called republican synthesis. This synthesis, however, concentrated on the Revolutionary era and gave little attention to colonial political and constitutional history.

Notwithstanding the impressive achievements by those historians, they have not so far provided a coherent interpretative framework for describing formation of colonial English polities in the early seventeenth century. There are three reasons for this neglect—all deeply rooted in the colonial historiography.

First and most self-evident of all, students of Anglo-American constitutional and political history have concentrated disproportionally on the eighteenth century, especially on the decades just before the American Revolution. Records for this later era are far more voluminous, and they make it easier both to delineate the formal structure and functions of political institutions and to undertake social and behavioral analysis. Even the institutional studies produced chiefly by Osgood, Andrews, and their (and Herbert Adams') students in the early twentieth century focused mainly on the eighteenth century. The same is also true of post World War II interpretative studies. As a consequence, the analysis of the formative years of the seventeenth century remains conspicuously in want of both descriptive thickness and analytical depth.

Second, the study of colonial constitutional and political development has not given enough attention to combining institutional description with social and conceptual analysis. Most early studies concentrated on describing the structure and functions of political establishments without linking them to their social environment or ideological background. By contrast, later social and behavioral studies paid practically no attention to old but important problems in constitutional development. To deepen the study of colonial political culture, it is necessary to develop a formulation that is capable of establishing meaningful links between patterns of social grouping, political behavior, and intellectual movement, on the one hand, and the external forms of institutional growth, on the other.

Third and finally, all the interpretative frameworks so far developed by historians to describe the constitutional and political development of the American colonies are limited either by perspective, scope, or subject, with the result that none offers a comprehensive and coherent interpretation of the formation of Anglo-American polities. The admirable studies of such constitutional scholars as Andrew C. McLauglin and Charles H. McIlwain aimed at presenting a general picture of constitutional development along the lines of a few principles and practices. Because they proceeded from the perspective of the origins of American political system rather than the inner logic of the colonial polities, they paid only marginal attention to the chronology and largely ignored temporal and spatial variations. Thus, their interpretative essays are, as Michael Kammen has correctly noted, “more valuable for their suggestions than for their conclusions.” Another group of scholars attempted to trace the development of the colonial peripheries from the center, concentrating especially on the policy-making process in London. They made enormous contributions to understanding the imperial dimension of colonial political development. However, thier concern with metropolitan institutional organization and the motivation, visions, and behavior of imperial officialdom caused them to neglect the impact of the New World social environment on the evolution of colonial polities.

To be sure, a few historians of colonial British America have produced sophisticated modern studies of Anglo-American constitutional development from the viewpoint of the colonies. Although these works have greatly enhanced our knowledge of colonial political history, they tend to deal only with a particular aspect of that history, such as representation or metropolitan-colonial relations. Thus confined by their focus, they have made no effort to develop a comprehensive framework for the Anglo-American constitutional and political development as a whole.

Still other scholars have produced excellent studies of individual colonies. Among others, these include Bernard Bailyn, Wesley Frank Craven, Warren Billings, and Jon Kukla on Virginia, George Lee Haskins, Edmund S. Morgan, and Robert E. Wall on Massachusetts, and David W. Jordan on Maryland. Nevertheless, none of these authors has endeavored to extend their findings to a higher level of generalization to include all or most parts of the Anglo-American world.

Thus, while the existing historiography of early American constitutional and political development has achieved remarkable success in depicting institutional evolution, socio-economic division, political behavior and motivation, as well as the ideological and imperial contexts of colonial American political life, we are still in want of a framework that will permit us to utilize this literature to formulate a comprehensive interpretation of the formation of Anglo-American polities in the first half of the seventeenth century. In seeking for such a framework, I have been inspired by Jack P. Greene's recent synthesization of Anglo-American socio-cultural development. Based on the enormous literature of social history produced in the past three decades, Greene's developmental model depicts a three-stage process of social development—simplification, elaboration, and replication—animated by the interplay between forces of inheritance and experience. Inheritance refers to those social and cultural elements brought from the Old World, especially from England, by emigrating colonists or imposed by the mother country, while experience refers to those new modes of action and thought arising out of conditions in the New World.

This work proposes to apply a similar developmental model, emphasizing the interplay between elements of Old World traditions and the needs and interests of the colonists shaped by the New World environment, to the formation of Anglo-American polities in the early seventeenth century. In this process, three sets of actors were especially prominent. On one side, the metropolitan state in London constituted the political center of the Anglo-American world. As the ultimate source of authority in colonial affairs, the metropolitan state represented Old-World traditions which it sought to impose on colonies to guide the course of their development so as to promote the economic and political interests of England. For this purpose, it strove to maintain political control over the colonies by extending Old-World authority to the New World. On the other side were the colonial settlers. As transplanted Englishmen, they carried with them much English cultural baggages, including knowledge, values, conventions, practices, etc. But their perceptions and standards of behavior were also heavily influenced by the peculiar scio-economic conditions of the New World communities they were creating. In consequence, their purposes and interests, ably articulated by an emerging elite, often conflicted with the intentions of the metropolitan state.

Between these two groups stood the private organizers of American colonization, leaders of trading companies and recipients of proprietary grants. Like the metropolitan state, these private undertakers (many of them were themselves officials of the English government) represented Old World authority and endeavored to exert political control over the colonies. At the same time, however, their economic interests in colonization were so intimately connected with maintaining a harmonious social and political colonial order that they were much more willing than metropolitan officials to make concessions to settler demands. Thus driven by economic interests, private undertakers played an essential role in modifying transplanted English social and political systems in ways that would make them acceptable to the settler population, especially to its elite class.

The contention of this work is that the formation of Anglo-American polities in the early seventeenth century can be understood in terms of four consecutive stages. The first stage covers only the initial four years of English colonization in America. When the English nation began its colonizing experiment in America in 1606, the metropolitan state under James I intended to supervise its American possessions directly. For this purpose, it designed a dual council system, under which Virginia was to be governed by a local resident council appointed by and responsible to a higher council in London.

This two-level council scheme lasted only three years. In 1609 the metropolitan government, recognizing that it did not have the resources to develop overseas colonies, inaugurated the policy of farming out colonial enterprises to either incorporated trading companies or private proprietors. In both company and proprietary colonies, the owners of the colonial enterprises initially attempted to establish tight control by imposing a conciliar form of administration. Under the direction of a governor and an advisory council, the settlement was transformed from temporary outpost into a permanent colony, and an indigenous social order began to take shape. Along with this transition, these colonial enterprizers quickly recognized that it was in their interest to obtain cooperation from the free population of the colony in affairs of governance and to attract additional voluntary settlers to America. These practical considerations prompted them to introduce elements of representation, which had long existed in both corporate organizations and metropolitan precedents for proprietorships, into colonial government. A second stage of the formation of Anglo-American polities thus centered around the establishment of a representative assembly that made the colonial government a tri-partite phenomenon of governor, council, and assembly.

Roughly at the same time that assemblies appeared in the colonies, local elites began to emerge in each of the new colonial societies. Population increase, resulting from a mixture of new immigrants and natural reproduction, led to an expansion of settlement. As the settled area exceeded the administrative capacity of the initial governmental units, they established local governments that became the power base of the colonial elites. The rise of localities not only enhanced the political strength of these elites but also highlighted the distinctions between the representatives in the assemblies who were elected from local communities and councilors who were appointed by external authorities in England. Supported by their constituents and local establishments, representatives in the provincial assemblies aspired to acquire an independent status and demanded above all to have an equal share of legislative power with the councils. Their quest for status and power resulted in the institutional separation of the colonial legislature into two houses, with the councils as the upper and the assemblies as the lower chambers. This process of bicameralization, accomplished respectively and independently in four major colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Barbados—during the decade from the early 1640s to the early 1650s, marked the third stage of the formation of Anglo-American polities. In each case, a set of social and political conditions deriving from the peculiar structure of the settlers' Anglo-colonial society determined its course. In sharp contrast to the first stage when the metropolitan state single-handedly contemplated a conciliar government for Virginia, bicameralization came not as a design from the Old World but as a pragmatic response to the colonists' political experiences in New World communities.

The last stage of the formation of Anglo-American polities featured a return from the colonial scene to the metropolis. The separation of colonial legislatures into two houses was by no means a conscious act to replicate the national government of King, Lords, and Commons. However, once the system of a bicameral legislature had been established in America, it immediately impressed Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic with its structural likeness to the home government. Meanwhile, the constitutional debates between Crown and Parliament on the eve of the Civil War led to the royal recognition of the mixed government theory as the official interpretation of the English constitution. With the pervasive proliferation of this classical theory of constitutionalism in the Anglophone world, the indigenous colonial tri-partite government of governor, council, and assembly quickly acquired theoretical justification in terms of the theory of mixed government. Before long these Anglo-American “mixed”polities, especially those of Virginia and Massachusetts, replaced the conciliar administration to become the normative form of colonial government in the English mind. This conceptual transformation received official sanction when the restored Stuart monarchy introduced just such a government into Jamaica in 1661. In doing so, the King's ministers, unlike their predecessors in 1606, acted under explicit instructions from Charles II to proceed “according to such good, just and reasonable customs and constitutions as are exercised and settled in our colonies and plantations.”

Metropolitan acknowledgement of the mixed polity at the time of the Restoration marked the end of the formative period for the Anglo-American constitutional development. By the 1660s, colonial governments had assumed a settled institutional structure and were set to enter on a new era of stabilization and refinement in which the language of mixed government would be the prevailing medium of intellectual and political discourse on government in the Anglo-American world. Within this institutional framework, the political history of colonial British America would unfold over the next century and a half.