A quick recap before I pick up where I left off: Virginia
and Massachusetts were founded by companies of investors and enjoyed varying
levels of success before being reorganized as crown colonies; Pennsylvania and
New York were founded as proprietary colonies, and Pennsylvania remained so
while New York became a crown possession; New Jersey began as a proprietary
colony, was split, and then recombined as a crown colony. So far only
Pennsylvania began and ended its colonial period as an independent venture, and
even then it partially owes its existence to a royal land grant.
So
far Jefferson’s argument isn’t looking so good.
6 Province
of Maryland: a proprietary colony formed via a land grant from Charles I to
Cecil Calvert, Baron Baltimore in 1632, Maryland was intended by Calvert to be
a haven for persecuted English Catholics. Subsequently the Calvert family was
removed from power by a Protestant rebellion in 1688, succeeded by a series of
royal governors, and then restored to their proprietary office in 1715 (where
they remained until 1776). Similar to New Jersey in its rather turbulent
history, Maryland doesn’t quite seem to fit Jefferson’s purported model of
colonial autonomy either.
7 Connecticut
Colony: a merger of several smaller colonies, Connecticut actually began its
existence as an outgrowth of Massachusetts (effectively make it a colony of a
colony). In 1636 a group of Puritans who were dissatisfied with the growing
Anglican dominance in the Bay Colony moved south and founded a settlement at
Hartford on the Connecticut River. This settlement and its surrounding area was
subsequently combined with the Saybrook Colony and the New Haven Colony and
granted a royal charter in 1662. Essentially Massachusetts in microcosm,
Connecticut seems to hew a bit closer to Jefferson’s vision of a colony that
was founded on the exertions of private individuals, made to prosper through
their hard work, and only later granted royal approval.
8 Delaware
Colony: beginning its life as a collection of Dutch and Swedish settlements
founded in the 1640s and 1650s, the territory later known as Delaware passed
into the hands of first the Calverts of Maryland in 1669 and then the Penns of
Pennsylvania in the 1680s. William Penn subsequently attempted to assimilate the
“Lower Counties of the Delaware” into his larger proprietary holdings, but was
stymied by local resistance, granted the region its own assembly, and governed
it as a de-facto autonomous colony. Because of its initially uncertain
governance and ability to resist the centralizing efforts of authorities in
Pennsylvania, Delaware could arguably be said to have been self-founded and
self-governed for most of its early history (thus Jefferson’s description would
not be entirely inaccurate).
9 Province
of Georgia: the youngest colony at the time of the American Revolution, Georgia
was founded via royal charter in 1732 by General James Oglethorpe as a haven
for debtors. For twenty years the colony was governed by a council of trustees,
who among other things banned the sale of rum and the possession of slaves, and
enjoyed annual subsidies from the British government. Indeed, because the
colony was on the frontier of potentially hostile Indian territory, and because
the crown believed that Georgia could serve as a buffer between Spanish Florida
and the Carolinas, they were more inclined to lend direct financial and
military aid than with other colonies. Unfortunately Parliament’s interest in
Georgia waned by the 1750s and in 1752 the trustees, no longer able to
effectively govern, allowed Georgia to be re-chartered as a crown colony.
Because of its historically dependent relationship with the crown, Georgia
seems the least self-sufficient and functionally independent of the Thirteen
Colonies that Jefferson was presumably referring to in 1774.
10 The
Province of North/South Carolina: Though initially founded in 1629, it wasn’t
until Charles II re-chartered the colony and granted it to a group of eight
Lords Proprietors in 1663 that the Province of Carolina really came into being.
After several decades of modest success the Proprietors were forced to grant
separate governments for North and South Carolina in 1712 due to their
increasing inability to act decisively in the face of a colonial rebellion and
recurrent conflicts with local Natives. By 1729 seven of Proprietors had sold
their shares to the crown, and North Carolina and South Carolina were
re-chartered yet again as royal colonies. Another mix of autonomy and
dependence, the Carolinas were settled under the auspices of the Lords
Proprietors and enjoyed several decades of virtual independence from crown
authority, though it was a royal grant that brought them into existence to
begin with. I’d say that Jefferson was right in part on this score, though the
reality was somewhat more complicated than he painted it in the 1770s.
11 Colony
of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: like Connecticut, Rhode Island was in
many ways colony of Massachusetts; and like Delaware, it was formed out of a
collection of smaller settlements that were able to resist being absorbed by
Massachusetts and were granted a royal charter in 1663. Because these initial
settlements were founded by religious dissenters like theologian and preacher
Roger Williams and Puritan radical Anne Hutchinson, Rhode Island developed into
a colony known for its dedication to religious freedom, progressive attitudes
toward debt and capital punishment, and opposition to slavery. Again like
Delaware and Connecticut, Rhode Island seems to conform to Jefferson’s vision
of self-sufficiency more than most of its colonial brethren.
12 Province
of New Hampshire: initially settled via a series of land grants in the 1620s,
New Hampshire effectively became a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
1641. In 1679 a charter was granted that restored the colony’s independence,
which was again rescinded in 1686 and restored once more in 1691. Like several
of its fellow New England colonies New Hampshire was settled by a combination
of English transplants and religious and political exiles from Massachusetts,
and though it was eventually made a crown colony it spent a good portion of its
early existence being either loosely governed or possessing no formal
government at all. Once more I would argue that Jefferson’s theory may apply,
but only loosely.
Now I’ll bet you’re wondering what the point of all that
was. Well, besides being an interesting exercise in and of itself, I hope that
a few things have now become clear about how the various Thirteen Colonies were
founded, and why Jefferson’s argument in A
Summary View is significant in light of these facts.
To begin, Jefferson’s vision of the colonial founding,
wherein industrious colonists worked their hands to the bone to carve out a
slice of civilization in a hostile foreign environment only to have the fruits
of their labours seized by greedy crown officials, doesn’t quite grasp how
complicated the early history of many of the colonies where. Though some
started out as joint-stock ventures or were founded as independent settlements
of religious dissenters, others began as land grants to private individuals or
members of the British aristocracy. Some required frequent royal assistance,
like Georgia; others had to be taken under royal control after their
independent governors failed to adequately administer them, like Virginia. Some
even spent significant portions of their early history operating under little
or no formal government, like Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. All
told, no two colonies could be said to have followed the same path, and though
most of them ended up being administered by the British crown, the ways by
which they arrived at that conclusion were many and varied.
But more to the point, I think, is the fact that none of the
colonies operated entirely outside of the apparatus of British government. Though
Pennsylvania was the personal property of the Penn family, and Maryland of the
Calverts, both came into being thanks to land grants made by the reigning
monarch. Just so, Massachusetts and Virginia began as business enterprises that
derived their legitimacy from royal charters, and even independently founded
colonies like Connecticut and Rhode Island sought out royal approval in an
effort to maintain their autonomy,
not from the British government but from other colonies. Indeed, there was no
colony among the Thirteen that didn’t eventually seek royal approval for their
existence in some form or another. So in point of fact Jefferson’s blanket
description of the colonies as self-founded and fully autonomous political
entities is something of an oversimplification. Rather than viewing them as
either independent entities or subsidiaries of the British government, it would
perhaps be more accurate to characterize the relationship between the colonies
and the Crown as a fluctuating network of autonomy and dependency, resistance
and compliance.
But the point of this exercise wasn’t necessarily to prove
that Jefferson was wrong, though what he seemed to believe was at least
partially at variance with reality. No, the point is that Jefferson believed he
was right, and that the colonies were, and had always been, functionally
independent. In his mind, and the minds of others no doubt, the right of the
colonies to refuse to comply with British legislation was derived from the
nature of their foundation, indeed their very existence, as sovereign states.
If Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, were founded by free British
citizens, and those citizens possessed certain natural rights, then the governments
that they founded must also be free and retain similar rights. Unless at some
point in their history the colonist voluntary gave up some of the privileges
they enjoyed, and Jefferson certainly didn’t think that was the case, then
there was no way to explain how the colonial governments could have become
beholden to Parliament (a reality Jefferson refused to acknowledge). Within
this particular historical arrangement, therefore, the American Revolution was
less a violent rupture of an existing relationship than an acknowledgement of
fact: the colonies were independent because they always had been.
In all I’d say there are two things particularly worth
taking away from this exercise, and from this initial reading of A Summary View. The first is that the colonial
foundings, and indeed the American Revolution itself, were complex events that
have often been collapsed and simplified by how they are remembered. Jefferson
seemed to see colonial history as a relatively straightforward progression of
settlement, toil, personal sacrifice, and attempted British usurpation. Just
so, people have tended to characterize the Revolution as just about taxes, or
just about freedom. In both cases, real understanding can only be attempted
once the true complexity of events is fully embraced. It is, I think, the
essential difference between a myth and a fact: myths tell us who we think we
are; facts tell us who we really are.
But there is still value to be found in myths. Jefferson
believed in the myth of colonial autonomy, however much it may have ignored
certain facts. It was of value to him, and to others, because it helped him to
explain and to understand the world in which he was living, and the problems
that he and his fellow colonists were preparing to confront. Attempting to
understand how and why Jefferson came to believe in this myth is central to
understanding how the colonists viewed themselves and their history, how they
made certain decisions, and perhaps why they were ultimately driven to seek
complete and formal independence from the most powerful empire in the history
of the world.
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