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GOVERNORS' SALARIES AND REVENUE

387 the natural interpretation of much of the procedure of the Assemblies during the first half of the eighteenth century. Sometimes the nominated councils, which with the governor formed the executive, joined with the representatives in their demands. Sometimes they opposed the governor on their own behalf, as when in New York (1729),1 North Carolina, and elsewhere, they successfully challenged his claim to sit and vote in council when acting in a legislative capacity. But more usually they acted with the governor in opposing the claims of the Assemblies. Everywhere, in royal and chartered provinces alike, the constitutional development was practically the same. By precisely the same procedure as was pursued in the West Indies, the legislative Assemblies endeavoured to obtain complete control over finance, the executive and the judiciary. Using the power of the purse to induce governors to disobey the Royal Instructions which, they maintained, were not binding upon themselves, they attempted, by alternate bribery and starvation, to gain control over all officers of State. The growing system of placemen and the permitting holders of Crown appointments in the colonies to act by deputy-an abuse long combated in vain by the Council of Trade-no doubt stimulated their opposition to royal nominees and the desire to appoint their own officers. The peculation and maladministration of bad governors, such as Lord Cornbury in New York, lent a colour of reason to their refusal to vote permanent salaries. But the refusal was maintained equally when there was no such reason. Nor was it a question of hardship. Though poverty was sometimes pleaded as an excuse for not voting governors' salaries, yet Massachusetts, New York, and Jamaica were all ready enough to offer heavier bribes than the salaries demanded, if they could have their way, and to prolong their own sessions at a cost greater than the revenues they were asked to vote. This is the key to the struggle to obtain a permanent and adequate revenue and fixed salaries for governors which was fought out in long and bitter controversies during the first part of the eighteenth century, chiefly in the arenas of Massachusetts, New York, and Jamaica. In Virginia, where the governor's salary was fixed and paid out of the permanent revenue, and the Assembly could therefore put no pressure upon him, political calm reigned. It was not until 1753 that a principle of financial control was raised there. Governor Dinwiddie then claimed the right to levy a tax fixed by himself on all documents requiring the public seal. The Assembly protested to the King. Its appeal was rejected, but the governor saw fit to modify his attitude.

In New York, thanks to the firmness and political genius of Governor Hunter, the issue was temporarily decided in the opening years of this period, and decided in favour of the Crown. In view of the Assembly's prolonged refusal to vote an adequate revenue for the

1 C.O. 5, 1093, ff. 84, 85.

support of the governor and government, threats were made of settling a revenue by Act of Parliament over the Assembly's head. Then Hunter was left in the lurch by the new Tory ministry. The accession of George I and the return of the Whigs came just in time to save him from being ruined and recalled. By his conciliatory skill he succeeded at length in obtaining a vote for a revenue in return for his passing a Naturalisation Act upon which the Assembly had set its heart. When William Burnet, Whig son of a Whig bishop, came out to follow in his footsteps in 1720, the province had been restored to peace and credit. The Assembly voted him a supply for five years, and among its appropriations was a salary of £1560 for the governor. It was not until Governor Clarke succeeded Cosby in 1736 that the opposition, which had been roused by the Zenger case,2 revived in the Assembly all those claims which had lain dormant since Hunter's time, and which, taken together, constituted a deliberate attack upon the executive and the prerogative of the Crown. Clarke himself was kept without a salary and starved into accepting a triennial act and other acts aiming at establishing courts by statute instead of by virtue of the governor's commission; at the appointment of judges during good behaviour; and at rendering the entire executive dependent upon the Assembly by a system of appropriations and annual votes for salaries.3

Massachusetts Bay in the meanwhile had remained the chief centre of political disturbance. Governor after governor for thirty years was instructed to stop the waste of timber reserved for masts for the Navy, to obtain the grant of a fixed salary, and the rebuilding of the fort at Pemaquid, which with the adjacent country had been abandoned ever since its destruction by the French in 1697, and was of importance as an outpost and for maintaining the title of Great Britain to the territory east of Kennebec River. All these and other reasonable demands were persistently refused. Only when Colonel Dunbar, the Governor of Nova Scotia, resettled Pemaquid (1731), did the New Englanders bestir themselves to assert their claim to it. Colonel Shute's demand for a fixed salary was steadily refused. When Governor Burnet came from New York to succeed him, he was instructed to move the Assembly for a fixed salary of £1000, and to warn it that any further delay would necessitate the intervention of Parliament. The representatives endeavoured in vain to bribe him by voting him larger sums twice a year. His successor, Jonathan Belcher, with similar instructions, met with a similar reception. He could only induce the Assembly to agree to vote his salary annually at the beginning of each session, instead of the half-yearly dole by which since Dudley's time it had determined to retain control over the governor's interest. "They are daily endeavouring to incroach 2 Vide infra, p. 399. 3 N.Y. Ass. Journals, 1, 792 seqq.; cf. N.J. Archives, v, 86 seqq.

1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1714-15, nos. 435, 530.

COLONIAL SEPARATISM

389

upon the little power reserved to the Crown in the Royal Charter", was Belcher's own comment.1

The Privy Council reviewed the Assembly's claims and actions in 1733, and declared that they evidently showed "that their design is to assume to themselves the executive power of the government of the said province, and has a direct tendency to throw off their dependence upon Great Britain".2 Yet, rather than face the issue at this juncture, the British Government yielded. The policy of laisser faire and conciliation prevailed. Belcher was allowed to accept the offer of an annual grant, and victory rested with the colonists.

The representatives, it is evident, were doggedly fighting for control of their own affairs. They had no cause to complain of the character and ability of their governors. Dudley had been a native of Massachusetts; Shute an "independent" in religion, clear-headed, and conscientious; Burnet a mild and honest man of the school of Hunter; Belcher was a Boston shopkeeper, who had acted as agent in London for the representatives' cause, and a virulent antiEpiscopalian. It was not against persons but for a principle that the New Englanders fought. They saw their goal clearly and never swerved from their course. British ministers, vowing they would ne'er consent, consented. It was an ominous precedent for the future. The uniformity of the main lines of the constitutional struggle does not imply that the colonists were unanimous in their views. There was, on the contrary, much bitter partisanship having its origin partly in the different economic conditions of the several provinces, partly in the various origins of the settlements, and partly in the action and reaction of political events in England. There was, for instance, in New York a "country party" whose interests were opposed to those of the merchants of the towns; there were the Dutch and French and inheritors of the Leislerian tradition; in New Jersey, as in South Carolina, the Anglican party was in bitter opposition to the Quakers, Dissenters, and the Proprietary party; in Maryland, Protestants opposed and oppressed Roman Catholics. If the colonies aimed at the management of their own separate affairs, they were not in the least inclined to unite either for their independence or their own defence. The idea that they were endeavouring to throw off their allegiance to the Crown was scouted by Dummer3 as fervently as by the Assembly of New York in 1741;4 whilst observers like Thomas Bannister dismissed the notion of the Plantations ever setting up for themselves as wild and unfounded. "Different schemes, he declared, "interests, notions, religions, customs and manners will for ever divide them from one another and unite them to the Crown."5 Commercial rivalry, as between New

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1 C.O. 5, 898, nos. 84, 84, i, 87.

2 A.P.C., Col. II, 329-34. N.Y. Ass. Journals, 1, 792, 810. 5 "Essay on the Trade of New England"; Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1715, no. 508.

3 Dummer, J., A Defence of N.E. Charters.

York and New England, was one cause of jealousy and separatism. New Jersey, for example, which had been administered by the same governor as New York, demanded and obtained a separate governor on the grounds that the development of the province was hindered by its more opulent and powerful neighbour (1730).1 Boundary disputes provided another cause of cleavage, as between Virginia and North Carolina and Maryland, between New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, and between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Apart from the general unifying influence of language, constitutions, and political ideas inherited from the mother country, any tendency towards unity came from pressure from without, and hitherto with little effect. The colonies were as unwilling to exert themselves in self-defence as they were to unite in defending each other. Planters, engrossed in business, gave a grudging response to the demands of governors for strengthening their fortifications and militias. The pacificism of the Quakers in Pennsylvania left their neighbours unsupported; Virginia held that the British Navy was the true defence of her shores; and the Carolinas reserved their strength for combating the Spaniards in Florida and the Indians on their frontiers.

When South Carolina appealed to the northern colonies for aid against the Yamassees, the Virginians alone were persuaded by their lieutenant-governor, Colonel Spotswood, to send troops to their assistance. He, and men of vision like himself, began to urge some scheme of organised contributory defence.2 In 1728 Sir William Keith, ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Pennsylvania, proposed the imposition of a stamp tax in the Plantations in order to provide a general fund for the upkeep of a standing army and the administration and development of the colonies.3

In 1721, the Council of Trade, in order to remedy faults of administration and the evasion of laws relating to trade, quit-rents, the taking up of land, and the preservation of the woods, and also to secure co-operation in colonial defence, had suggested the appointment of a captain-general over all the colonies who should be advised by two councillors from each province. It urged that the danger of the French advance along the line of the Mississippi should be countered by building forts along the frontiers, strengthening Nova Scotia and South Carolina, and planting settlements beyond the mountains. It also approved Spotswood's plan for a fort on Lake Erie, and Burnet's scheme for occupying Niagara. Burnet had worked hard to prevent the selling to the French of goods which they resold to the Indians and thereby maintained their influence over them. To control the Indian trade, he established posts at Saratoga and Oswego (1727). The opposition of the Dutch and other merchants at Albany proved too strong, and Burnet's provisions were repealed 2 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1715, nos. 651, 389, i.

1 C.O. 5/4, nos. 44, 45; 5, 980, no. 48. 3 C.O. 5/4, no. 37, i.

N.Y. Col. Docs. v, 591.

SCHEMES FOR DEFENCE

391 in 1729. But to the founding of Oswego the French replied by establishing themselves at Crown Point (Fort St Frederic), an encroachment on the territory of the Six Nations of Indians which secured them the control of Lake Champlain (1730). The ink was scarcely dry upon the Treaties of Utrecht ere the French began to fortify Cape Breton, to interpret the cession of Acadia as embracing only the eastern part of the peninsula, to intrigue with the Northern Indians and the Six Nations, and to complete a line of forts along the Mississippi valley, from Detroit to New Orleans (1720), connecting it with Canada. Plainly their guns pointed at the back of the British colonies, and their expansion barred British development westwards. Strategically the most important point along the line threatened by the French was the frontier of New York. Its defence was a vital concern for all the colonies. The key to it was held by the Six Nations. Occupying the Mohawk valley, they not only commanded the most direct communications with the western prairies, but also, by their conquests over adjacent Indian tribes, extended their influence to the Mississippi. They acted, therefore, not only as a check to French development westwards but also enabled the British fur traders to get into touch with the Indians of the Huron and Michigan region and the upper Mississippi valley. With the Six Nations, by frequent conferences and presents at Albany, "the chain of the Covenant was kept bright", in spite of unremitting French intrigues. At the request of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Indians themselves, the sale of intoxicating liquor to them was prohibited. Too often it had been used by unscrupulous traders to cheat them of their goods and lands. The wars with the Tuscaroras and Yamassees had cleared the Carolinas of enemy Indians, and at the same time brought them into touch with the Creeks and Cherokees beyond the frontier, and the Indians in the south-west more directly under the influence of the French. Whilst Carolina controlled relations with the Indians to the south, Virginia, halfway between them and the Six Nations, was affected by both.

In these circumstances it might have been expected that common interest in the loyalty of the Indians would have drawn the several governments closer together. Actually, events demonstrated their deep-seated separatism. A congress of governors at Albany in 1722, called to settle questions that had arisen over the relations of the Six Nations with the Indians of the Virginia frontier, revealed differences of opinion between New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and made it evident that there was little hope of the several governments combining in a comprehensive Indian policy.

But when at length rupture with France was clearly imminent, a conference at Albany was summoned by William Shirley, the able and energetic Governor of New England, by direction of the Council of Trade, in order to make a joint agreement with the Six Nations. 1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1712-14, nos. 295,521,522; 1714-15, pp. viii-x; cf. C.O. 5, 1093, f. 155.

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