ment of the colonial agent. This important personage, whose origin can be traced to the days of Cromwell and the settlement of Jamaica, had become in the eighteenth century a well-established bond of communication between the colonies and the mother country. The colonies needed representatives in England to look after their interests, and the authorities at home found it advantageous to have on the spot a spokesman for a colony, as is evident from the clause inserted in the charter to Penn in 1681 requiring him to keep an agent in England. The business of the agent was "to stand sentry and be watchful", guarding the welfare of the colony in such matters as the issue of Orders in Council, the passing of Acts of Parliament, the confirmation or disallowance of colonial laws, allowances for defence, disputes about boundaries, and other analogous matters. Long and heated quarrels arose over the questions of authority and control, appointment and tenure. Did the agent represent the colony as a whole, the governor and council, or the Assembly? By whom was he appointed and from whom did he take his orders? Eventually in most of the colonies the Assembly got control, and in some instances the governor was obliged to have his own agent in addition to the official agent of the colony. Such towns as Halifax and Boston had agents also; and in the case of Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Georgia, and the Floridas the agent was appointed in England by the King. The agents were frequently English attorneys, merchants, or even clerks in the Plantation Office, and they were watched over by the Assemblies, who reproved or commended them, examined their accounts, and dismissed them if they failed to give satisfaction. The West Indian agencies were far better organised and more influential than were those of the continental colonies, for West Indian interests called for group action, whereas it was rare for the continental colonies to combine on anything. Important men served in this capacity, and after 1750 the presence of such men in England, ready to act on a colony's behalf, had become a recognised and permanent feature of British colonial administration.1 Additional questions at issue between the governors and the Assemblies were as manifold as were the claims of the royal prerogative, and followed closely the attempt of the governors to maintain the prerogative and obey their instructions. Second only to finance and the control by the Assembly of the civil administration of a colony, was the control of the administration of justice, historically a branch of the prerogative, for as the Board of Trade said: "Her Majesty has an undoubted right of appointing such and so many courts of judicature in the Plantations as she shall think necessary for the distribution of justice".2 The Assemblies refused to 1 See Penson, L. M., The Colonial Agent of the British West Indies; Tanner, Colonial Agencies in England; Bond, The Colonial Agent as a Popular Representative. 2 New York Col. Docs. v, 333. OTHER FORMS OF ENCROACHMENT 435 accept this view of the case, and over and over again took into their own hands the establishment and regulation of the courts of common law for the colonies. Chancery courts and courts of exchequer they frequently opposed on the ground of expense, but they made little serious effort to prevent their erection by the governors. Their attempts to establish systems of judicature by statute were frequently unsuccessful and led to a great deal of friction and consequent ill will. The tenure of judicial employments was also a fruitful source of trouble, for the royal tenure continued only during the King's pleasure, whereas the colonists were coming to believe that judges should hold office during good behaviour or for life.1 The issue was joined in Jamaica, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, and laws were passed to that effect only to be disallowed by the Crown. Even the governors themselves sympathised at times with the position of the Assemblies, as when Edward Trelawney of Jamaica wrote that a standing body of planters made judges for life would have a much greater influence and authority than the governor and council appointed by his Majesty". But the Board of Trade would have none of it. In the end the Crown won a Pyrrhic victory, for though the debate over judicial matters was less violent than that over finance, it involved much bickering and discontent, and marked the increasing dissatisfaction which the colonists felt with appointments made in England to civil and judicial offices in the colonies. 2 Among the minor forms of encroachment upon the King's prerogative of which the Assemblies made use were these. They passed biennial and triennial acts limiting the duration of sitting, which the Crown, with some exceptions (New Hampshire and South Carolina) due perhaps to inadvertence, regularly disallowed because they infringed on the governor's right of summons and dissolution. They excluded certain officials from sitting in the Assembly, fearing the formation of a prerogative party in the House, and they forbade councillors to vote for Assemblymen, much as peers are not allowed to vote for members of the House of Commons to-day. They denied the right of the governor and Secretary of State to appoint clerks and other officials in council and Assembly and in some of the courts, on the ground that these bodies should control their own appointments. They opposed the governor's attempts at various times to see the journals of the lower house or to obtain information from the clerk, who was always sworn to secrecy. Finally, they claimed full right, in conjunction with the council, to shape legislation, and denied that the governor or even the Crown could veto or strike out clauses or riders, the latter a device frequently used to thwart the governor's wishes. In 1752 the Jamaica Assembly, in refusing to use a suspending 1 N. Carolina Recs. v, 1104. 4 2 C.O. 137/25. Instructions, 1761, New York Col. Docs. vII, 479; New Jersey Archives, IX, 322-3. clause or to repass acts modified by the Board of Trade, denied the right of the Board "to direct their procedure by any proposal or decision whatever". The conflict assumed different forms in different colonies, and victory lay sometimes with one side and sometimes with the other. Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire, because he had greater powers of endurance, defeated the Assembly there in the controversy over membership, when the Assembly tried, by starving the province, to bring the governor to terms. But Governor Clinton in New York failed, partly because he was a weaker man in a more defenceless position, and partly because he was not adequately supported by the authorities at home. He wrote with some sarcasm both to the Secretary of State and to the Board of Trade that the prerogative could not be maintained by the governor alone. Upon the Home authorities must rest the ultimate responsibility. They might expostulate in orders, instructions, and letters, but words without continuous and consistent action were a lame and impotent weapon. The Assemblies disregarded the King's commands and gradually reduced to a minimum the governor's power and influence. Governor Knowles of Jamaica wrote in 1752 that the Assembly had succeeded in making itself the preponderant element in the government there, a state of affairs that existed in different measure in all the royal colonies. Thus the royal system of government in America was rapidly disintegrating in the decade before 1763; the prerogative had lost its force and its importance, and the representative Assemblies, themselves doing what Parliament had done a century before, had become the centres of actual government. British subjects in America had attained, in fact if not in law, an equal political status with British subjects in Great Britain, and their governing bodies had won a position of commanding prominence and authority, similar, each in its own sphere, to that which the British Parliament had won in the realm. It was the failure of the British Government to see this fact and to find a solution whereby equality might be substituted for subordination and subservience that in part at least brought on the American Revolution. CHAPTER XV THE ENGLISH SLAVE TRADE AND THE AFRICAN SETTLEMENTS THE English slave trade had a life of about a century and a half as an active branch of national commerce, and during this period it contributed greatly to the building of the overseas Empire on both the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic. To it in no small measure was due the economic progress of some of the American sea-board colonies and of the West Indies, while from the posts established for the pursuit of the trade the British West Africa of to-day has developed. The vital importance of this trade in the seventeenth century as the very foundation of West Indian prosperity has been to some extent obscured, partly by later arbitrary distinctions between commercial history and colonial history, and partly by the work of the humanitarian writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who have made the slave trade appear so dark a disgrace to those who shared in it that there is a natural reluctance to admit its great importance in the overseas Empire of the Stuarts and Hanoverians. No such separation of the interests of the colonies from those of trade existed in the days of the Board of Trade and Plantations, and no reluctance to give the slave trade its due weakened estimates of its value by contemporary writers. An anonymous pamphlet of 1749 expresses views typical of those found in many others: The most approved Judges of the commercial Interests of these Kingdoms have ever been of opinion that our West-India and African Trades are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. It is also allowed on all Hands, that the Trade to Africa is the Branch which renders our American Colonies and Plantations so advantageous to Great Britain: that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant supply of Negroe Servants for the Culture of their Lands in the Produce of Sugars, Tobacco, Rice, Rum, Cotton, Fustick, Pimento, and all other our Plantation Produce: so that the extensive Employment of our Shipping in, to, and from America, the great Brood of Seamen consequent thereupon, and the daily Bread of the most considerable Part of our British Manufactures, are owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes; who, as they were the first happy instruments of raising our Plantations: so their Labour only can support and preserve them, and render them still more and more profitable to their Mother-Kingdom. The Negroe-Trade therefore, and the natural consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.1 The rise of this all-important trade, if the English share only be considered, was extraordinarily rapid. In 1650 England had no organised slave trade, yet twenty-five years later a flourishing trade was being carried on by an English company. Two factors contributed to this rapid progress: the first that though the English had no slave 1 Anon., The national and private advantages of the African Trade considered, London, 1749. trading company in 1650 they had an old-established African trade, and the second, that an Atlantic slave trade had been developed by other European countries so that the pioneer work had already been done when English merchants in the mid-seventeenth century began to share in it. The early English voyages to Africa have been treated in another chapter of this volume,1 and here the story is taken up at the time when royal patronage was openly given to groups of Guinea Adventurers. Part of the price of English support to Don Antonio in his struggle against Spain was the opening of the Portuguese African territories to English enterprise, and in 1588 Queen Elizabeth made the first royal grant of privileges for trade with Africa. Within the district of the Senegal and Gambia only, the Adventurers were allowed a monopoly of the trade. Supported by royal patronage the organisation of the African trade advanced rapidly. In 1618 James I granted a monopoly of the trade in West Africa to Sir William St John and others, under the title of "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of London trading to Gynney and Bynney". These Adventurers, however, failed to serve the object of their charter-the securing of a large supply of gold-and their privileges were adjudged a grievance in the monopoly debates of 1620–1.4 A second company was composed of some of the interlopers who had broken the Gynney Company's monopoly. They united under Sir Nicholas Crisp and received a grant of the sole trade of the African coast for thirty-one years, and the sole right to import any African commodities into England. The special service of this Company to the development of the English African settlements was the building of a fort on the Gold Coast at Cormantine, and a walled factory near Sierra Leone, to protect its trade. These Adventurers continued to be the English monopolists of the African coast until changes were made under the Commonwealth. In spite of their privileges they found difficulty in carrying on the trade because of the heavy burden of defence against European enemies and the rivalry of English interlopers who were extremely active on the coast at the time. The Commonwealth Council of State considered the African trade of sufficient importance to merit careful investigation and in 1650 the Council of Trade was instructed to prepare recommendations "for settling the trade to the best advantage of the Commonwealth". The Council of Trade gave the Company an opportunity to defend itself and after making investigations drew up a report (9 April 1651). Its proposals were based on two serious considerations, first that the quarrels between the Company and the 2 Hakluyt, v, 443-50. 1 See chap. II. 6 * Carr, C. T., Select Charters of Trading Companies (Selden Soc. Publications), xxvII, 99. 4 C.J. 1, 793. 5 Cal. St. Pap. Dom. 1631-3, p. 186. P.R.O., Interregnum Entry Book, 1650, 1, 9. 7 Ibid. 1651, 1, 65. |