Conceived in Liberty (98 page)

For decades, American historians have quarreled about “conflict” or “consensus” as the guiding
leitmotif
of the American past. Clearly, I belong in the “conflict” rather than the “consensus” camp, with the proviso that I see the central conflict as not between classes (social or economic), or between ideologies, but between Power and Liberty, State and Society. The social or ideological conflicts have been ancillary to the central one, which concerns: Who will control the state, and what power will the state exercise over the citizenry? To take a common example from American history, there are in my view no inherent conflicts between merchants and farmers in the free market. On the contrary, in the market, the sphere of liberty, the interests of merchants and farmers are harmonious, with each buying and selling the products of the other. Conflicts arise only through the attempts of various groups of merchants or farmers to seize control over the machinery of government and to use it to privilege themselves at the expense of the others. It is only through and by state action that “class” conflicts can ever arise.

This volume is the history of the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is generally dismissed in the history texts as a quiet period too uneventful to contemplate. But it was far from quiet, for the seeds were germinating that would soon blossom into the American Revolution. At the beginning of the century, the British government believed that it had successfully brought the previously rebellious colonists to heel: royally appointed governors would run the separate colonies, and mercantilist laws would control and confine American trade and production for the benefit of British merchants and manufacturers. But this control was not to be, and, for most of this period, the colonies found themselves to be virtually independent. Using their power of the purse, and their support among the bulk of the population, the colonial Assemblies were, gradually but surely, able to wrest almost complete power over their affairs from the supposedly all-powerful governors. And, furthermore, as a result of the classical liberal policies of “salutary neglect” imposed against the wishes of the remainder of the British government by Robert Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle, the Americans happily discovered that the mercantilist restrictions were simply not being enforced. Strengthening their spirit of rebellious independence, the colonists eagerly
and widely imbibed the writings of English libertarians, writings which inculcated in them a healthy spirit of deep suspicion of the designs of all government—the English government in particular—on their rights and liberties. Consequently, when after midcentury the English, having deposed Walpole and Newcastle and ousted the French from North America, determined to reimpose their original designs for control, the Americans would not stand for it. And the great conflict with the mother country got under way.

My intellectual debts for this volume are simply too numerous to mention, especially since an historian must bring to bear not only his own discipline but also his knowledge of economics, of political philosophy, and of mankind in general. Here I would just like to mention, for his methodology of history, Ludwig von Mises, especially his much neglected volume,
Theory and History;
and Lord Acton, for his emphasis on the grievously overlooked moral dimension. For his political philosophy and general outlook on American history, Albert Jay Nock, particularly his
Our Enemy the State.

As for my personal debts, I am happy to be more specific. This series of volumes would never have been attempted, much less seen the light of day, without the inspiration, encouragement, and support provided by Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., now of the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, California. I hope that he won’t be overly disappointed with these volumes. I am grateful to the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, Chicago, for enabling me to work full time on the volumes, and to Dr. David S. Collier of the Foundation for his help and efficient administration. Others who have helped with ideas and aid in various stages of the manuscript are Charles G. Koch and George Pearson of Wichita, Kansas, and Robert D. Kephart of
Human Events,
Washington, D.C.

To my first mentor in the field of American history, Joseph Dorfman, now Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, I owe in particular the rigorous training that is typical of that keen and thorough scholar.

But my greatest debt is to Leonard P. Liggio, of City College, CUNY, whose truly phenomenal breadth of knowledge and insight into numerous fields and areas of history are an inspiration to all who know him. Liggio’s help was indispensable in the writing of this volume, in particular his knowledge of the European background.

Over the years in which this manuscript took shape, I was fortunate in having several congenial typists—in particular, Willette Murphey Klausner of Los Angeles, and the now distinguished intellectual historian and social philosopher, Dr. Ronald Hamowy of the University of Alberta. I would particularly like to thank Louise Williams of New York City for her heroic service of typing the entire manuscript in its final form.

The responsibility for the final product is, of course, wholly my own.

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

February 1975

After the upheavals of the period of the Glorious Revolution in England (late 1680s–early 1690s), the American colonies had settled down into an uneasy truce by the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century. During the first half of the eighteenth century—or, more precisely, from about 1710 until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763—the colonies settled into a relatively stable society and form of government. Stable, relative to the swift and dramatic changes of the preceding century, when the American colonies were founded. The history of the colonies during this period can therefore be examined in a far more cross-sectional, and less chronological, manner than can the earlier century, or the dramatic and exciting pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary eras that followed.

But the first half of the eighteenth century was not only a stable time for the colonies. It also saw far greater uniformity between the separate colonies than could have been imagined in the preceding century. The diversity—of religion, of motivation, of government, of culture—between the various colonies had been enormous. What possible connection could there be between the grim Puritan theocrats of Massachusetts Bay and the tolerant, pacific, and enterprising Quakers of Pennsylvania; between the Puritans and the aristocratic landed elite of tobacco-growing Virginia; or between the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the Swedes on the Delaware? But the events and upheavals of the 1680s and 1690s had sewn, for the first time, a firm thread of uniformity throughout the colonies. The common imposition of political institutions; a common relationship to the mother country, Great Britain—these common experiences were, slowly but surely, to weld a solidarity between these once totally disparate settlements, a solidarity that would ripen. Without these unifying experiences over the first half of the century, the united effort of the
American Revolution would have been impossible. Politically, virtually every colony had a royally appointed governor, an upper house, or Council, and a democratically elected lower house, or Assembly, engaged in a quiet but critical power struggle with the royal appointees. Those colonies that remained proprietary (owned by an English recipient of royal largesse)—Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—were governed very similarly, the only difference being that the governors were appointed by a proprietor instead of by the Crown. Only the anomalous self-governing colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island were exceptions to this common experience of government during the eighteenth century.

Another vital unifying factor was the spread of a concious libertarian ideology throughout the colonies during this period, influenced directly by English libertarians who engaged not only in trenchant theoretical arguments but also in a caustic and powerful critique of the political institutions within Britain itself. In the vital field of religion, the contrasting deistic movement and the Great Awakening spread throughout the colonies; if the result was a deep and long-lasting split between the rationalistic elite and the evangelical masses, still both movements served to unify the colonies by cutting across the previously disparate and contrasting religious passions of the separate colonies.

Before turning to these common experiences, which tended to unify the colonies and which set the stage, directly or indirectly, for the new nation in the latter part of the century, let us turn to a rundown of the separate colonies, which, after all, were still separate and diverse in the first half of the century.

The first half of the eighteenth century was a relatively stable period for the colonies in many ways, especially in internal political institutions. As was true for most of the other colonies, Massachusetts politics became a tug of war between the royal governor and the popularly elected Assembly. A key to the power of the lower house was its control over the purse strings of government, and it steadfastly refused to vote a permanent salary for the governor. Not only was the voted sum generally far smaller than the governor wished, but the salary was granted at the
end
of the year, after the legislature had had a chance to appraise his actions. In short, the governor’s salary was always based on good behavior. By 1731, the British government had authorized the governor to accept annual grants of salary, a final victory for the prerogative of the lower house.

The lower house was not as successful in the controversy over selection of its Speaker. The Assembly contended, quite properly, that it had a right to choose its officers, but it was finally overruled in 1725, in favor of the governor’s assertion of the right of veto over the post of Speaker. Leadership of the house opposition to the executive was directed by Elisha Cooke, who at his death in 1715 was succeeded by the equally popular Elisha Cooke, Jr.

One highly significant development in Massachusetts was the disintegration of the attempt to impose comprehensive wage-and-price controls. Having lapsed by the mid-seventeenth century after repeated failures, a bill for comprehensive maximum-wage controls, attempting to compel wage rates lower than the market, was introduced in 1670 and in 1672. The more oligarchic Council of Magistrates twice approved the bill, but the more popular lower house twice defeated the plan. The Committee of Nine of the Massachusetts
General Court, representing the views of the small-scale artisan employers, lamented the “oppression” of tanners, glovers, and shoemakers by their being obliged by the market to pay journeymen employees wages that they deemed “too high.” The committee also attacked the gall of journeymen in daring to desire and wear expensive clothes, and in asking for wages that would pay for them. There seemed to be no understanding of how wages are set in an unhampered market. Finally, in 1675, an extensive but less-comprehensive piece of maximum-wage control and sumptuary legislation was passed. The legislation was clearly designed to keep the lower orders “in their place.” Significant of the class bias of the regulations was the fact that only laborers were to be punished and heavily fined for receiving wages above the legal maximum; no penalties were to be levied on employers paying those wages. By 1690, however, enforcement of the legislation had begun to break down, and from then on the laws proved to be increasingly ineffective and obsolete. The collapse of the regulations and of their enforcement accelerated after 1720.

It was not only in the South that the proportion of Negro slaves to white bondservants greatly increased after the turn of the eighteenth century. Although forced labor played a less dominant role in the Northern economy, a similar shift occurred in Massachusetts. From a class of young English servants bonded to family masters, the coerced laborers became largely an alienated heterogeneous group of non-English whites and Negro slaves. In the 1630s, ninety-five percent of forced labor in Massachusetts was white and five percent Negro; by the 1740s, however, twenty-five percent of forced labor was white and seventy-five percent Negro. The increasing alienation of the slaves and the servants led the Puritan members of the oligarchy to try to win their allegiance by rationalizing their ordeal as somehow natural, righteous, and divine. So have tyrants always tried to dupe their subjects into approving—or at least remaining resigned to—their fate. Hence, the Reverend Samuel Willard, in his
A Complete Body of Divinity
(1726), slyly linked the supposed hierarchical order of heaven to the existing order on earth, to the “ranks and orders among mankind in this world,” which “God rather than the oligarchy hath appointed.” Especially, the subjection of servants to masters was divinely appointed, made necessary by man’s fall: “All servitude began in Curse....” Servants, according to the emphatically non-servant Willard, were duty-bound to revere and obey their masters, to serve them diligently and cheerfully, and to be patient and submissive even to the cruelest master. A convenient ideology indeed for the masters! Unfortunately, the Reverend Mr. Willard lamented, some masters are indeed insufferably harsh and hence provoke their subjects; and some servants are “disorderly” enough to be “uneasy, and not willing to bear the Yoke or be under any Command.”

The Reverend Cotton Mather, always an eloquent and leading spokesman
for despotism, warned the slaves and servants in a sermon that “there is a Fondness for Freedom in many of you.” Mather advised the slaves that they were living better materially than they would be under freedom; furthermore, slavery had been appointed for them by God. Singing—for others—the siren song of supposedly contented and blissful security, Mather purred: “Your servitude is gentle... you are treated, with more than mere humanity, and fed and clothed and lodged as well as you can wish for, and you have no cares upon you, but only to come when you are called, and to do what you are bidden.” All the subjects must do, in short, was to surrender their natural-born gift of freedom and independence, to subject themselves completely to the whims and commands of others, who could then be blindly trusted to “take care” of them permanently. How justify such unreasoning trust? Mather’s role, of course, was not to engage in disinterested inquiry into the well-being of the slaves.
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