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of England was established by law. Unhappily, the character of the clergy was deplorable, save in South Carolina, where the Church had to compete with dissenting sects and the ministers were mainly supplied by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.1 Towards the middle of the century, a demand for a resident American bishop was raised by those who wished to improve the status of the colonial clergy. The project was viewed with alarm by the dissenters of New England and the middle colonies. Rather than rouse old controversies, Walpole and Newcastle rejected Bishop Sherlock's proposal. It had been urged also by George Berkeley, Dean of Cloyne, who had settled in Rhode Island with the object of founding a training college for priests of the Established Church. His scheme failed for lack of funds, and perhaps for want of proper direction.

3

It was largely due to the advocacy of Commissary Blair that the venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts had been founded in 1701. Its missionaries laboured not only to convert the Indians and negroes, but also to draw Quakers and other dissenters into the Anglican fold. Their efforts were resented, and the close connection of the Society with the British Government caused it to be regarded as part of a political design to exercise greater control over the colonies. Yet their work was not without effect even in New England, and especially in Connecticut. At Yale College, many undergraduates were converted to the Anglican creed.* It was at Yale that Jonathan Edwards was trained, whose preaching in Massachusetts in 1734 began that great revival of religious enthusiasm known as the "Great Awakening". He was followed by George Whitefield, an ordained priest of the Established Church, who came to Boston from Georgia in 1740 and travelled through the colonies from New England to the south, preaching often in the fields and with Edwards making thousands of converts.5

1 Hawks, F. L., Contributions to the Ecclesiastical History of the United States, 11, 249; Bishop Meade, Old Churches, etc. of Virginia, II, 351.

3 Newcastle Papers, printed in Cross's Anglican Episcopate, app. XI.

3 Fraser, A. C., Works of George Berkeley; Foster, W. E., Amer. Antiquarian Society Proceedings, April, 1892.

4 Osgood, H. L., Amer. Cols. in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, chap. i; Perry, Hist. Amer. Episc. Church, vol. 1; Hist. MSS Comm. Rep. XIV, app. R, p. 32.

Tracy, Joseph, The Great Awakening; Edwards, Jonathan, Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, 1740.

CHAPTER XIV

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EMPIRE, 1660-1763

To discover the origins of government in the British colonies in

America one must examine the efforts of private proprietors, corporations, and individuals to establish order and produce contentment in the Plantations which they were setting up in the New World, for none of the early settlements overseas was projected or carried out as an act of official enterprise. Though Virginia, Barbados, and Bermuda became royal colonies in the seventeenth century, each had already established the main features of its government while still in private hands. Each had a governor, council, and Assembly; each was making its own laws with the approval of its proprietor; and each was subject, within certain limits, to proprietary supervision and control. The Crown, on taking over these colonies, continued, after some consideration of other plans, the forms of government already in operation.

With Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, Massachusetts Bay, and New York-the only other colonies that came into the hands of the Crown in the seventeenth century—the case was somewhat different. Jamaica was a conquered province, the Leeward Islands, though possessing independent governments of their own, remained under Barbados until 1671; Massachusetts Bay, deprived of its charter in 1684, suffered serious curtailment of its self-governing powers, when it was merged in the Dominion of New England in 1686; while New York, likewise a conquered province and for twenty years a propriety under the Duke of York, remained a royal colony without an Assembly for three years, after which it, too, became a part of the same Dominion. In the last two instances, Stuart policy preferred an executive form of government as most suitable for a colony, and rejected the established practice of the older colonies where popular Assemblies had become an accepted part of the colonial system. But with the Revolution of 1689, rule by governor and council without Assembly came to an end. When, in 1691, Massachusetts Bay and New York emerged from the aftermath of the Revolution, each received the familiar form of government by governor, council and Assembly, and these were the last of the seventeenth-century settlements, under the old British system, to reach a self-governing basis. Jamaica and the Leeward Islands offer a different story. One was a newly acquired tropical island, where heat bred animosity and people died very fast and suddenly (as Governor Inchiquin said); the other, a group of four small islands, lying in close proximity to each other, too small

for complete separation, yet too far away and self-sufficient for permanent union under a centralised control.

Jamaica for the first five years was under military rule; in 1661 civil government was set up with governor and council, though an Assembly was not called until 1663. For a short time laws were passed either by the governor and council or by the Assembly; but in 1664 this dual system was given up, and governor, council, and Assembly became the law-making body. However, as the laws thus passed lasted for only two years unless confirmed by the Crown, and as in fact they remained without attention from the Privy Council for more than ten years, the colony was obliged to hold biennial Assemblies in order that the people should not be without the necessary legislation. Among these laws, passed in 1664, was one declaring the laws of England in force in the island and designed, as Governor Modyford wrote, to make the colonists "partakers of the most perfectly incomparable laws" of their native country. These together with its own "municipal laws", as he called them, were expected to meet the needs of the colony. But in 1677, the Lords of Trade, newly in office and the first body to give serious thought to the form a governor's instructions should take, found themselves facing a perplexing situation in the colony: laws in force for but two years unless confirmed; laws not confirmed in England for ten years; the colony holding biennial sessions; revenue insufficient and temporary; fortifications out of repair and no funds with which to improve them.1 They, therefore, made a new experiment in colonial history. Construing Jamaica and Virginia as in the same class with IrelandPlantations under the Crown-they decided to apply to them Poynings's Law. In 1677 in the instructions to Carlisle (Jamaica) and in 1679 in the instructions to Culpeper (Virginia) they recommended, and the Privy Council consequently ordered, that the Assemblies meet only at the direction of the King, and that all laws already passed be sent to England and thence returned for the consent of the Assemblies, "as laws originally coming from your Majesty". Such laws were to be passed under the style "Be it enacted by the King's most excellent Majesty by and with the consent of the General Assembly". Had this instruction been enforced it would have taken away from the Assembly all powers of initiation and deliberation, particularly in matters of revenue. There is nothing to show that Culpeper ever disclosed his instructions to the Assembly in Virginia, and the matter is taken much too seriously by Virginia historians. The Assembly there, willingly enough, passed the three acts which he brought over-a naturalisation act, a revenue act, and a Bacon's rebellion act-even though these acts were drawn up in 1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1677-80, p. 368.

3

A.P.C., Col. 1, no. 1177; Cal. Št. Pap. Col. 1677-80, nos. 412, 480, 641.

Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1677-80, nos. 971, 973, 1210, 1211; P.R.O., Colonial Office, 5/1355, p. 334; Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, p. 226.

EARLY EXPERIMENTS

407

England; and the interference went no further. But the Jamaica Assembly, aroused by Governor Vaughan to a sense of its own parliamentary importance, rejected the plan completely and gave its reasons therefor, among which was the "superiority of the former system". The Lords of Trade, taking a very exalted view of the King's prerogative, answered the objections of the Assembly, threatening to revert to an executive form of government and declaring that the Assembly had no right except by the King's favour to meet or to pass laws at all. But in the end they capitulated without reserve. In 1680 they agreed that the Assembly in Jamaica was to meet "after the manner and form now in practice, to make laws with the advice and consent of the governor and council, such laws to be agreeable, so far as may be, with the laws of England, and every one thereof to be transmitted to England within three months. The King reserves the right of disallowing laws and gives the governor the power of veto".1 The most important outcome of this experiment was the obtaining for the King's use in Virginia the two shillings a hogshead export duty in perpetuity and the starting of a train of events in Jamaica which led to the passage of the permanent revenue act of 1728, in return for the Crown's consent that the island enjoy all such laws and statutes as had been "at any time esteemed, introduced, accepted or received" there.

Of equal interest, constitutionally speaking, was the experiment tested in the Leeward Islands, where the imperative demands of war, the need of unity in legislation, and the desirability of financial cooperation called into being a remarkable attempt at a form of federal organisation. The four islands, Antigua, the largest and wealthiest, St Christopher, the mother island, Nevis, and Montserrat, were settled in the years following 1623 and almost from the first had local Assemblies, each with a deputy-governor, under a governor-in-chief, Sir Thomas Warner, the earliest of England's colonisers in the West Indies.2 Warner, appointed governor of St Christopher in 1629 by the Earl of Carlisle, whose proprietary claims had been finally established in that year, and a third time "governor and lieutenantgeneral of the Caribbee Islands" by the parliamentary commissioners for Plantations in 1643, laid the foundations so strongly that the system weathered the Restoration and the separation from Barbados in 1671. Under Wheler, the first royal governor-in-chief, properly so called, of the Leeward Islands, each island had its lieutenant-governor, council, and Assembly and continued to retain this familiar form of local government throughout the eighteenth century. 3 The Assemblies

1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1677-80, nos. 954, 1009, 1030, 1239, 1570, 1648.

* Vide supra, p. 143.

Harlow, V. T. (ed.), Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-67 (Hakluyt Soc.) and Hist. of Barbados, 1625-85; Watts, A. P., Colonies anglaises aux Antilles, 1649-60; Williamson, J. A., Proprietary Government in the Caribbees; Higham, C. S. S., "General Assembly of the Leeward Islands", E.H.R. April-July, 1926.

were small in size and in later years the councils tended to play a dominant part in the administration, the lieutenant-governor being seldom resident.1 In the eyes of the British Government these islands formed a single royal colony, with a single governor-general, but in fact they constituted four separate governments, each with its local interests, prejudices, jealousies, and rivalries, which created among them strong individualistic traits. Communication between the islands was difficult and slow, and the governor frequently spent four or five months making his yearly tour of them.

In 1674 Wheler was recalled and Sir William Stapleton, "one of the best governors the King had in any of his Plantations", was sent out in his place. As sole governor he soon felt the need, particularly in time of war, of greater co-operation and advice, and early began to call into consultation members of the local councils and Assemblies of the four islands. Soon he conceived the idea of a kind of General or Federal Assembly with legislative powers-"A General Council and Assembly of the Islands", it was usually called-and he outlined his plan in a letter to the Lords of Trade, 16 August 1682. This body was to be made up of two or three members of each council and a like number of representatives, locally appointed or elected on instructions from the governor-general. The home authorities raised no objection to the plan either at this time or afterwards. The first meeting was held at Nevis in November 1682, and others, at intermittent periods on the call of the governor, were held until 1711. The federal machinery consisted of a council (eight), and an Assembly (twelve), the latter after 1692 elected in each island by the freeholders. While the General Assembly was in session, the local Assemblies were supposed to dissolve, though there appears to have been some difference of opinion on this point. The new legislative body encountered two main obstacles: one, the unwillingness of each colony to accept as binding any act of the General Assembly that was not formally approved by their representatives present or that conflicted in any way with their local law; and the other, their unwillingness to consider the creation of a federal fund or any form of federal levy, so that all expenditure had to be met by joint action among the local treasurers. The elder Codrington, whose letters are always breezy, became at one time so exasperated that he recommended the annexation of the colonies to the kingdom of England with representation in the English Parliament, in order that he might be delivered from their "turbulent practices", and begged that the local militia be subjected to the discipline of the King's troops, for, he added, "the trouble of governing a voluntary army is inexpressible"."

But as long as the islands suffered from the menace and danger of 1 Edwards, Bryan, West Indies (1801), 11, 396-7. 3 Higham, p. 194. Ibid. 1681-5, no. 654.

a Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1677-80, no. 732.

Higham, pp. 197-8; Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1701, no. 1132.
Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1689-92, pp. 355, 356.

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