Conceived in Liberty (85 page)

Lord Cornbury was finally removed from office in late 1708. Characteristically, he then had to flee New York to escape creditors to whom he owed several thousand pounds. After very brief terms by Lord Lovelace and Richard Ingoldesby, Robert Hunter became governor in 1710. By now, twenty years had elapsed since the Leisler rebellion, and under the lengthy and soothing rule of Hunter, the Leislerian passions died down and faded away. In one of his first addresses, Hunter warned that no faction would receive any encouragement from him. His appointments to the Council and other offices were consciously designed to be impartial and to allay tempers on both sides. Furthermore, both factions had already begun to cooperate in asserting the power of the Assembly as a check against the excesses of Cornbury. Thus Hunter fought the Assembly for years, and dissolved session after session, but each time “all the same members... [returned] with
greater fury.” Finally, by 1713, Hunter was forced to accept from the Assembly skimpy revenue bills of a purposely short one-year duration. Clearly, New York was beginning to settle down into the governor-versus-Assembly structure that was becoming characteristic of the royal colonies.

But even though the Leislerian movement had faded away, that which had provoked its rise—the quasi-feudal oligarchy—had, unfortunately, not faded too. Although the Leislerian revolution had succeeded in bringing an Assembly to New York, which would become the focus of popular opposition to government, it did not succeed in destroying the feudal oligarchy. Indeed, land monopoly was now aggravated by the grants of Fletcher and Cornbury. Governor Hunter saw the danger, and prophetically warned the Crown that the owners of the vast estates in New York would cripple the growth of population in the colony by insisting on renting out, instead of dividing and selling, their lands. Retaining the land and renting it out, as under feudalism, will not succeed in America, Hunter warned, where full ownership of cheap and fertile land can be obtained in all the other colonies. But Hunter, alas, was not a crusader. So while basically opposed to landed monopoly, his policy of balance and moderation only left the problem of land monopoly and quasi-feudalism a festering sore that would linger in the New York social and political structure for over a century. Hunter did not add to the arbitrary land grants in New York, but, by pursuing moderation instead of principled reform, he made no move to remedy the problem. In fact, Hunter even appeased the landlords by recommending a waiver of the requirement that a certain proportion of each landed estate be settled within three years of the grant. Hunter’s only long-run achievement was to eliminate the one social movement dedicated to the removal of the feudal land monopoly.

*
Jerome R. Reich,
Leister’s Rebellion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 160.

We have seen what happened in the Northern royal colonies after the Glorious Revolution. Connecticut and Rhode Island, alone of all the colonies, continued on their old self-governing path. Connecticut’s charter was reconfirmed, as we have seen, in 1690; Rhode Island’s in late 1693.

Rhode Island was probably the only colony that did not greet the overthrow of Andros with great joy. Not only did Andros and Rhode Island have in common a profound hatred of Massachusetts, but the little colony was thoroughly grateful for Andros’ decision to stand with it on the Narragansett Country question and against the aggressive claims of Connecticut and the Atherton Company.

Upon the overthrow of the Dominion, Rhode Island assumed possession of King’s Province, never to relinquish it again, even though the territorial dispute dragged on for years. In 1703 commissioners from Rhode Island and Connecticut finally settled the dispute. In a compromise, the territory of the Narragansett Country was conceded to Rhode Island; but Rhode Island agreed to ratify all existing land claims to the area, thereby granting victory to the huge, arbitrary Atherton Company land claims. In effect, the decision foisted on the future of the Narragansett Country a large-plantation way of life.

Rhode Island remained one of the most libertarian of the colonies. The Quaker governor John Easton found it impossible, for example, to raise troops in 1691 to join in the war to conquer Canada. The basic cause was inability to impose enough taxation on the colony. The libertarian bent of the colony continued when the non-Quaker Samuel Cranston was elected governor in 1698. A nephew of the former Quaker governor Walter Clarke,
Cranston essentially continued Quaker policy. Thus, tax laws were scarcely enforced, and laws in general almost totally ignored in the colony. In 1698 Edward Randolph ranted that “neither judges, juries, nor witnesses were under any obligation.” His explanation for this unusual breadth of liberty and minimization of government in the colony was that “the management of the government (such as it is) was in the hands of Quakers and Anabaptists” who, for one thing, would take no oath. This included a refusal of the Quaker governor, in 1698, to take the required oath to enforce the navigation laws. Neither did Rhode Island impose any government schooling on its citizens. The elected governors of Rhode Island assumed admiralty powers; hence the Quaker governor Walter Clarke refused to permit the English admiralty judge to function in the province.

Since the Crown could not control Rhode Island by appointing a governor, it tried to bring the colony’s militia under neighboring royal governors. Governor Phips of Massachusetts tried to send agents to take over the Rhode Island militia in 1692, but the Assembly and government fought back, ordered their own officers to retain command, and asked the king for redress. Rhode Island also pointed out that several Massachusetts councillors had a vested interest in the Narragansett Country, and thus in bringing Rhode Island to heel. The Crown replied against Rhode Island, but shifted the militia power to New York. It did concede Rhode Island’s control of its own militia in peacetime.

Ironically, Rhode Island’s gravest conflict with the governors of New York came under the relatively liberal Bellomont administration. One of Bellomont’s nonliberal traits was an excessive zeal in hunting down pirates, a practice which absorbed a good deal of his energies during his brief term. Unquestionably, Rhode Island governors had aided and abetted piracy during the war with France in the 1690s by commissioning “privateers,” whose only difference from pirates was an official license to plunder. Bellomont, investigating conditions in Rhode Island during 1699, was already prejudiced against Rhode Island, and denounced its leaders as poor, lower-class, and generally “Quakers and sectaries.” He was particularly bitter at the absence of religious orthodoxy among them and the lack of governmental schools. Bellomont’s liberalism, so refreshingly intense in benighted New York, virtually disappeared in the highly individualistic colony of Rhode Island.

So far, no outside governor had successfully made good his claim to command of Rhode Island’s militia. But the tyrannical Joseph Dudley, who had lobbied in England for abolition of the Rhode Island charter, dearly tried. On assuming the governorship of Massachusetts in 1702, Dudley attempted to assume command of the colony’s militia as well as impose an admiralty judge on Rhode Island. Going to Rhode Island, he pressed his militia claim, but the Rhode Island governor and Council refused, and asserted their own authority. Dudley ordered the militia major to serve under him, but the major stood with Rhode Island. In more turbulent King’s Province,
Dudley was more successful and the militia joined his command. But the Rhode Island officials soon went to the Narragansett Country and won the militia back again.

Dudley’s exercise of admiralty jurisdiction also greatly angered the colony. Dudley, as had Bellomont, objected to Rhode Island commissions to privateer-pirates, and when his admiralty judge, Nathaniel Byfield, released a French prize captured by a Rhode Island privateer, he was hooted down the street by an angry Newport mob.

Once again, Rhode Island’s disdain for war and the state, its quite obvious lack of patriotic exultation in killing officially declared enemies, brought down upon its head numerous denunciations for being a “rogue’s land.” Dudley complained to the Crown that the colony was “a perfect receptacle of rogues and pirates.” He was particularly bitter that the Quakerrun colony would contribute neither men nor money to the great war to conquer French Canada, which had been resumed in 1701. In fact, the Rhode Islanders went so far as to shelter deserters from the army. In this, of course, Rhode Island was following in its great tradition of being the haven for refugees from all types of state persecution. Dudley was also bitter at Rhode Island’s low taxes; while Massachusetts strained and groaned under a tax burden of 2,200 pounds per month to pay for war against France, Dudley noted that Rhode Island relaxed happily with taxes of less than one penny on the pound.

Dudley kept up his harangue and charges against Rhode Island, and by late 1705 they were endorsed by the Board of Trade. Beginning in 1701 the board had tried several times, but failed, to induce Parliament to liquidate the self-governing and proprietary colonies, that is, those not under direct control of the Crown. The proposal had largely been engineered by Randolph and Dudley, the old enemies of the American colonies. Now, in 1704–05, the board took its case to a more sympathetic Crown, and urged that the queen appoint royal governors for Rhode Island and Connecticut. The leader in the drive to smash Connecticut’s and Rhode Island’s independence was again Joseph Dudley, but the tide was stemmed by Sir Henry Ashurst, the indefatigable English liberal and now an agent of Connecticut, who was aided by Robert Livingston and William Penn.

The Board of Trade made its last attempt to cripple the Rhode Island and Connecticut charters in a parliamentary bill of 1706. Ashurst was again easily able to defeat the bill. Moreover, the Board of Trade was by now losing its power and its Tory drive; the war against France was going well; Edward Randolph, the board’s great champion of aggressive imperialism, had died in 1703; and Blathwayt and the other high Tory members of the board were to be dismissed in 1707 and succeeded by far more moderate and liberal members.

As the war with France dragged on, however, Rhode Island began to drift from pacifist and libertarian principles and to tax its resources heavily by contributing men and material. As we shall see in a later volume,
Rhode Island, following the lead of Massachusetts, financed the ruinous expeditions against the French by turning to a dangerous and mischievous instrument completely new to the Western world: the creation of paper money. And with the Quakers losing control of the provincial government, the non-Quaker Assembly decided to shift control of the militia to the central government from the towns, where Quaker influence was still strong.

Connecticut, of course, in these years followed much the same path as her sister colony, Rhode Island. It similarly rebuffed attempts by Massachusetts and New York to assume command over its militia, and led in repelling attempts by Dudley, Randolph, and the Board of Trade to liquidate its independence. Connecticut too hung back at first in the resumed war against France, but at the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century was zealously participating in attempts to invade Canada. Connecticut, however, continued to handle her own meager maritime cases, even though she was technically under New York’s jurisdiction.

When Connecticut effected its revolution against the Dominion in 1689, the true leadership of its government rested in the hands of the main architect of the revolution, the pro-Leislerian James Fitch. As leader of the popular liberal party, Fitch, though only a councillor, dominated the government. Fitch drove through a democratic extension of the franchise to freeholders of forty shillings, as well as a uniquely democratic method of selecting public officials. Taking his stand squarely for the old charter, Fitch threatened reprisals against the partisans of the royal oligarchy. The archreactionary party continued, well after 1690, its desperate attempts to restore royal government in Connecticut. Thus Gershom Bulkeley, Edward Palmes, and William Rosewell, aided by the Tory governor Fletcher of New York, petitioned the king in 1690 to restore royal government. Bulkeley expanded his diatribe against the charter government into a book,
Will and Doom
(1692), which remained unpublished, but which furnished ammunition for all the Board of Trade attempts of the following decade to liquidate independent Connecticut.

Governor Fletcher, after command of the militia was transferred from Massachusetts in 1693, tried to assume control of the militia in Connecticut. The Connecticut government resisted Fletcher’s demands, and the threat of bloodshed forced Fletcher to return to New York. Fletcher finally obtained the limited power to requisition a quota of troops in the colony, but Connecticut managed to resist this as well.

The liberal revolutionaries headed by Fitch were, however, destined to go down to defeat—not at the hands of Tory opponents of Connecticut independence, such as Bulkeley and Palmes, but at the hands of more subtle middle-of-the-roaders headed by Fitz-John Winthrop. Having headed off various assaults on Connecticut’s charter during his stay in England, Winthrop returned to Connecticut a popular hero in 1698. He won election as governor that year, and Fitch was ousted from his Council post. Winthrop’s method was deadly to the liberal cause: while disarming the liberals by
successfully defending Connecticut’s charter against Tory assault, Winthrop reimposed government power and oligarchic rule at home. Winthrop moved quickly to enlarge the powers of the governor, only nominal during the liberal days of Fitch. The Assembly granted Winthrop more power to act between legislative sessions, to appoint government officials, and to manage military affairs. Furthermore, in 1699 Connecticut, like Rhode Island three years earlier, split its legislature into two chambers. This bicameral split was a maneuver to increase executive and oligarchic power, for now the governor and his upper House of Assistants were able to veto the popularly elected deputies. Furthermore, the judicial system was converted into an independent oligarchic power; whereas before 1698, judges were elected annually in each county, now county judges remained independently in office on good behavior. In this way, the judges were freed of the checks put on their power by popular elections, and were transformed into a quasi-permanent oligarchic bureaucracy. Or as the reactionary Samuel Willys put it, they were freed from “the arbitrary humors of the people.”