Colonial Government, Religion & Unequal Participation · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · The power of the purse

Virginia's House of Burgesses first met in 1619, the earliest elected assembly in English America. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was a different thing — an agreement among passengers to form a civil body and obey its laws, signed because the ship had landed outside the bounds of its patent — but both became part of a habit of self-government that took root early.

In New England the town meeting handled local business directly: roads, the minister's salary, the common fields, the schoolmaster. Elsewhere counties were governed by appointed justices, and the elected assembly sat at the colonial capital. The forms varied; the fact of election did not.

The assemblies' real leverage was money. London appointed governors in the royal colonies, but the assemblies voted the revenue, and in several colonies they refused to grant a governor a permanent salary, voting it instead year by year. A governor who crossed the assembly could find himself unpaid. London tolerated this for decades largely because the colonies were profitable and distant, and intervening cost more than it was worth — an arrangement later called salutary neglect, and the thing whose end sets off the next chapter.

Part 2 · Counting who could vote

The property requirement is where the arithmetic bites. Take a town with 80 adult men. If the freehold requirement leaves 30 of them qualified, that is 37.5 per cent of adult men — well under half before anyone has considered turnout, weather or distance to the polling place.

Then count who actually voted. If 24 of those 30 turn out, participation among the eligible is high by modern standards, but 24 out of the original 80 adult men is 30 per cent. And adult men were themselves only about a quarter of the total population once women and children are counted, so the share of everyone living in the town who had any voice was in the region of one in thirteen.

The qualification also moved with the property market rather than with any principle. A requirement fixed in acres meant more men qualified as land was cleared and subdivided, and fewer as holdings consolidated; a requirement fixed in pounds let inflation quietly widen the franchise over decades. Nobody debated these shifts, because nobody had decided them. Who could vote drifted with the price of land.

The exclusions were not accidental and were defended openly. Property was held to give a man a stake and independence of judgement; a man without it was thought liable to vote as his landlord or employer told him. Women were excluded as represented by husbands or fathers. Enslaved people were property, and free Black men were barred by statute in colony after colony. Catholics and Jews faced disabilities in several colonies.

Part 3 · Religion, establishment and dissent

Most colonies had an established church supported by taxes — Congregational in most of New England, Anglican in Virginia and the South. Being outside it cost money and sometimes office, and in early Massachusetts the franchise itself was tied to church membership.

Dissent carved out exceptions, often by people who had been expelled. Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts, founded Rhode Island in 1636 with no established church at all. Maryland's Toleration Act of 1649 protected Trinitarian Christians — and prescribed death for denying the Trinity, which shows how narrow toleration could be while still being real. Pennsylvania admitted dissenters by design, and the Flushing residents of 1657 argued for conscience in a Dutch colony.

Religion also supplied the machinery of local life in ways that had nothing to do with belief. The parish recorded births and deaths, relieved the poor, and in Virginia its vestry of leading men effectively governed the neighbourhood. Attendance was compulsory in several colonies and fines were levied for missing it. For most colonists the church was the one institution they encountered every week, which is why a religious upheaval was never only religious.

Then in the 1730s and 1740s the Great Awakening swept the colonies: travelling preachers drawing enormous outdoor crowds, dividing congregations, and telling ordinary people that their own judgement about their salvation outranked their minister's. It produced new denominations, new colleges, and a habit of questioning established authority that was not confined to religion for long.

Part 4 · What the colonists meant by their rights

When colonists later claimed the rights of Englishmen, they meant something concrete that they had been exercising: trial by jury, no taxation except by a body you had a hand in electing, and an assembly that controlled the money. These were not abstractions imported from books but daily practice in Boston, Williamsburg and New York.

The John Peter Zenger trial in New York in 1735 shows the practice sharpening. Zenger printed criticism of the governor and was tried for seditious libel, where the law held that truth was no defence. His lawyer argued to the jury that a true statement could not be libel, and the jury acquitted against the judge's direction. It changed no statute, but it established something durable about what a New York jury would do.

The press those rights protected was growing fast. The colonies had roughly a dozen newspapers by 1750 and more than twice that by 1775, most of them four pages, printed weekly, and passed hand to hand in taverns and coffee houses so that each copy reached many readers. A colonial printer was also usually the postmaster, which meant news from other colonies arrived at his door. That network is how thirteen separate societies came to argue about the same grievances at the same time.

Hold this alongside the arithmetic from earlier. The same societies that practised jury trial, elected assemblies and a vigorous press also excluded most of the people living in them from any voice at all. Both are true, and the chapters ahead — a revolution fought for liberty by slaveholders, a constitution that counted some people as three-fifths of a person — make no sense unless both are held at once.