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COLONIAL GOVERNORS

417 In truth, there was very little military or naval protection for the colonies before 1756, for England in the first half of the eighteenth century was poorly organised for efficient action in any direction. Not only were the offices of administration widely scattered between Whitehall and the City, at a time when communication was slow and difficult, but corruption, maladministration, and delay prevailed widely, and rivalry and jealousy prevented co-ordination and cooperation among the different departments and offices. With the Admiralty Board at Whitehall, the Navy Office in Seething Lane, the Victualling Office at the end of East Smithfield, the supply of ordnance at the Tower, the officials concerned in despatching a fleet were so far apart as to render mutual action difficult and rapid action impossible. Orders and instructions waited days and even months for execution. The Secretary at War carried little responsibility and performed few duties other than those of a routine character In all matters of policy he was overshadowed by the Privy Council and the Secretary of State. The Treasury was notoriously slow in making payments, either in England or America, while the PaymasterGeneral of the Forces and the Paymaster of Marines spent much time in lining their own pockets and neglecting the interests of sailors, soldiers, and marines, just as the Treasury itself neglected clerks, postmen, labourers, and other lesser folk. The system of administration in England, in all that concerned the colonies, was slow, ineffective, and characterised by a prevailing official attitude of indifference and irresponsibility.

The connecting link between the Crown and the royal colony was the governor, the active agent of the prerogative in America. The governors were divided into three groups: provincials, military and naval officers, and English members of the office-holding class at home, similar to those who were carrying on the real government of England herself. Among the 321 governors-general, governors, and lieutenant-governors were two dukes, nine earls, two viscounts, thirteen barons, five "courtesy" viscounts or lords, six other sons of peers, and forty-seven baronets or knights. There were at least thirtyeight matriculants of Oxford or Cambridge or other British or continental universities, and eleven graduates of American colleges. There were at least twenty-one members of the Inns of Court and eleven Fellows of the Royal Society. Forty-five had had parliamentary experience. Of the 250 men from many different walks and ranks of life, who received their appointments after 1685, a few were "greedy proconsuls" (Fletcher, Cornbury, Parke, Cosby, Crowe); more were men of mediocre powers, lacking tact, ability, and political common-sense (Sloughter, Belcher, Shute, Cranfield, Reynolds); while others were guilty of conduct that led to their peremptory recall (Douglass, Josiah Hardy). Two committed suicide while in office (Osborne, Elliot). By far the greater number, however, were

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men of honour, who did their best in an impossible situation. No one can study the careers of the Codringtons, father and son, Stapleton, Thomas, Payne, Nicholson, Spotswood, Gooch, Shirley, Pownall, Bellomont, Dudley, Sharpe, Eden, Ellis, Wright, the Popples, Grenville, the Wentworths, Hunter, Tryon, Monckton, and Moore, to name only the more conspicuous among them, without realising that they were conscientiously trying to do their duty and represented a fairly high type of official equal to those holding similar office in England at the same time. But they stood for a different idea of government from that which was gradually shaping itself in America--government by royal grace and favour instead of government by consent of the governed and legally were obliged to direct their administration according to the wish and will of the executive authorities at home. They came to their respective colonies endowed with powers that placed them at the head of the government and made them the source of all authority, for without their consent the colony could not function legally as a political organism. They received their commands from men who were 3000 miles away, had never been in America, had no understanding of the convictions that were slowly taking form in the minds of the colonists, and, even if they had understood these convictions, would not have sympathised with them. In all the West Indian colonies, and in all but four of those on the mainland, the system of government, framed in England according to certain preconceived notions regarding a royal colony, was based on ideas already established as to what such a government should be.

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Though the appointment of a governor was made in the name of the King, and though the Secretary of State, except for the years from 1752 to 1761, when the Board of Trade controlled patronage, generally exercised the right of nomination, many influences, personal and political, were brought to bear to aid one candidate or another.2 In 1754, when the Earl of Albemarle, titular governor of Virginia, died, no less than five British noblemen, we are told, were mentioned for the post. There were always a number of applicants for the Secretary to choose from, and in some cases the competition took the form of a scramble for office. On the other hand, between 1702 and 1737 thirteen appointees failed to enter upon their governorships. One was bought off, four died before sailing, one was drowned in the Thames, one was drowned en route, and one was captured by the French; but in the cases of the others the reasons are not known. It is quite likely that they got better posts.

The instructions which the governor received, though legally the private orders of the King, were in fact a composite draft, showing the handiwork of nearly every prominent official who had to do with the 1 A.P.C., Col. IV, 154-7.

2 Lincoln, C. H., Correspondence of William Shirley, 1, passim.

3 Brit. Mus., Newcastle Papers, Add. MSS, 32,737, ff. 505-6, 514.
4 Matthews, A., "Elizeus Burges" Proc. Col. Soc., Mass. XIV, 360–372.

GOVERNORS' INSTRUCTIONS

419 colonies. The Board of Trade, in whose office these instructions were drawn up, sought assistance from many quarters. It called on former governors, merchants, and colonists resident in England. It sometimes allowed the appointee to make suggestions, as in the case of Alured Popple, its former secretary, whom it permitted to draft many clauses. It introduced articles composed or revised by the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Commissioners of the Customs, the Auditor-General of the Plantation Revenues, and the Bishop of London. Thus the instructions were a co-operative affair, the product of many official minds, expressing the best that the British authorities could bring forth. They were not mere formal documents, drafted to cloak a more liberal policy on the part of these authorities. The Secretary of State rarely meddled with matters of civil administration in the colonies, and the Board of Trade, in its hundreds of letters to the governors, adhered with the utmost tenacity to a strict interpretation of the text. It is doubtful whether the Board ever wittingly or intentionally connived at a governor's departure from the literal interpretation of his orders. On the contrary, it not infrequently reprimanded him for violation of his instructions, when, as sometimes happened, he was forced to yield to pressure from the Assembly, and it was constantly reminding him of the fact that the instructions, representing the "true principles of a colonial constitution", were given him to be obeyed. There was no discrepancy between the policy laid down in the instructions and that adopted by the Board in its correspondence with the governors.

In the eighteenth century the instructions generally followed a common pattern, admitting alterations only in matters of arrangement and detail. Though in the twenty-five years before the American Revolution three attempts were made to revise them (1752, 1768, 1782), only once, in 1752, under Halifax as president of the Board of Trade, was any serious effort expended upon them, and even then none of the changes, though numerous, was marked by any modification in the mercantilist point of view held by the Board of Trade and by British officials generally. Probably the mercantilist tendencies in England were never stronger than during the period of twenty years from 1755 to 1775. Thus, during a critical time when the colonial Assemblies were losing their respect for the King's instructions and denying their mandatory character, the authorities at home, determined to preserve unchanged the dependent status of the King's possessions across the seas, were insisting more strenuously than before on a complete obedience to the King's instructions and the full maintenance of the royal prerogative in the colonies. The failure of the Board of Trade to seize the opportunity of 1752 to adapt the instructions to the needs and sentiments of the colonists aroused resentment in America and became a landmark in the divergence which was taking place between that which was English and that which

was American. The English system was already breaking down before the persistent refusal of the colonists to accept in its entirety a method of control that was already showing itself opposed to their convictions and ill-adapted to their needs.

With his commission and instructions in hand, the governor prepared to set sail for his post across the Atlantic. The Admiralty furnished a vessel for his transportation and for that of his family, his servants, and his belongings, often covering a wide selection of household furnishings, and the voyage lasted for six or seven or even more weeks. Arriving at his destination, he was greeted with the respect due to one of his station, and after a proper exchange of greetings and compliments was escorted to the town hall or government house or other building in which was the council chamber. There he read his commission, took the required oaths, and administered the same to the members of the council. Following English precedent, he then issued a proclamation announcing his appointment and requesting all officials to retain their posts until further orders. After this proclamation had been read from the balcony or steps to the assembled people, the procession reformed, and the governor was conducted to a neighbouring tavern where entertainment was provided at the expense of the public purse. The celebration, accompanied by speeches and fireworks, sometimes lasted for several days, the details of which were printed in the local newspapers, if such there were, and formed a fitting subject for local congratulation and gossip.

The first branch of the administration with which the governor came into official contact was the provincial council, a body which more nearly resembled the Privy Council than it did the House of Lords, and in the eyes of the British Government was deemed scarcely less important than the governor himself. It was composed of leading men of the colony, "of good life, well affected to the government, of good estates and abilities and not necessitous people or much in debt",1 and in numbers ran from ten to twenty-eight, with a quorum of from three to seven. It was made up largely from the provincial aristocracy, but it did not represent the colony. Its members were appointed by the Crown, on representation from the Board of Trade after approval by the Privy Council The governor had an important part in naming his council, but so did the Secretary of State and others who sent in recommendations to the Board, so that the governor was never certain of the extent of his own patronage. Sometimes he was ordered, to his chagrin and loss of local prestige, to reinstate a councillor whom he had suspended. The councillors served in three important capacities: as an advisory board to the governor, when sitting as an executive body; as the upper house of the legislature, when sitting as council in Assembly; and as a court of chancery 1 From the governors' instructions, e.g. N.Y. Col. Docs. v. 125.

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with the governor (as early as 1641 in Barbados1) and the highest court of appeals in the colony, when exercising judicial functions. But they had no executive powers apart from the governor, and even in the case of the latter's death or absence, where there was no lieutenant-governor, and the headship of the colony devolved, after 1707,2 on the president of the council, they were not expected to do much more than keep the government going until the governor returned or the next incumbent arrived.

Their legislative independence was considerably curtailed by the governor's habit of sitting and voting with them when acting as an upper house, as in New York, Massachusetts, and North Carolinaa right not recognised in some of the colonies-and by the insistence of the lower house that they had no power to initiate legislation or to originate or amend money bills. În Barbados, the lower house frequently conferred with the council on money bills and occasionally the council amended such measures. Certainly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the lower house did not insist on the sole right to originate bills of this kind. Many battles royal were fought over this question, first in Jamaica3 and later in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, St Christopher, and elsewhere, for the Board of Trade ruled in 1706 that the council had "as much to do in framing bills for the raising and granting of money as the Assembly has", and in 1718– 20 the King sent a general instruction to that effect to all the governors. But this instruction was not obeyed, the Assembly in North Carolina declaring that for the council to amend money bills was "contrary to the custom and usage of Parliament and...tends to infringe the rights and liberties of the Assembly who have always enjoyed uninterrupted the privileges of framing and modelling all bills by virtue of which money has been levied on the subject by an aid for his Majesty”. The Board in reply declared vehemently that no Assembly in the Plantations ought to pretend to all the privileges of the House of Commons, "which will be no more allowed than it would be to the councils if they should pretend to all the privileges of the House of Lords". But there was never any danger, either in the West Indies or on the mainland, that the members of the council would make any such pretension. Though their influence varied in the different colonies, due to the personal prominence of the members, who in New York and Virginia were a powerful clique, bound together by inter-marriage, blood relationship, and common interests, and holding office for life, nevertheless as an institution they were completely overshadowed by the governor and the Assembly. Representing neither the colony nor the King, lacking both responsibility and

1 Bell and Parker, Guide, p. 334.

2 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1706-8, nos. 575, 697, Iv, v, 831, i, 948, i.

3 C.O. 137/10, 11, 13; 138/14, 16. The instruction was first sent to Jamaica in 1718. N.Y. Col. Docs. IV, 1171-3; N. Carolina Recs. v, 287, vi, 909; Smith, W. R., South Carolina as a Royal Province, pp. 289-90, 294-5, 306–12, 317-19, 321-9.

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