The Constitutional Convention and Centralization: The Virginia and New Jersey Plans

The Constitutional Convention was originally only authorized the strengthen the Articles of Confederation, in particular, to give the central government the power to tax and regulate foreign trade.   Instead, the Virginia delegates met before the Convention and developed the Virginia Plan, a whole new system of government that was ultimately adopted and became -- in extremely modified form -- the U.S. Constitution.  That Plan is generally considered to have been primarily the work of James Madison, but his fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph introduced it, and the plan was treated throughout the convention as Randolph's plan.

The Virginians saw only one solution to the young country's problems -- to abandon the old confederated system in favor of what is now called federalism -- a system in which both the central and local governments are independently chartered, and each exercises direct authority over individuals, including the authority to collect taxes, raise armies, and try offenders against federal (but not state) laws.  Direct authority over the individual was proposed immediately and not much disputed among the delegates, which obscures just how sharp a break it was from any previous "federated" system.  As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in the early 19th Century:

In all the confederations that preceded the American Union the federal government, in order to provide for its wants, had to apply to the separate governments; and if what it prescribed was disagreeable to any one of them, means were found to evade its claims. If it was powerful, it then had recourse to arms; if it was weak, it connived at the resistance which the law of the union, its sovereign, met with, and did nothing, under the plea of inability. . . . In America the subjects of the Union are not states, but private citizens: the national government levies a tax, not upon the state of Massachusetts, but upon each inhabitant of Massachusetts. The old confederate governments presided over communities, but that of the Union presides over individuals. Its force is not borrowed, but self-derived; and it is served by its own civil and military officers, its own army, and its own courts of justice.

Other delegates, who considered the Virginia Plan too centralized, proposed their rival New Jersey Plan, introduced by William Paterson of New Jersey, which proposed merely to strengthen the Articles of Confederation, rather than introduce a new form of government.

The differences between the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan were as follows:

Articles of Confederation	Virginia Plan	New Jersey Plan
Unicameral legislature	Bicameral legislature	Unicameral legislature
Each state has one vote	Representation in both houses apportioned by free population or by quota of contribution	Each state has one vote
Delegates elected by the state legislatures	Lower house elected by the people; upper house elected by the lower house	Delegates elected by the state legislatures
Federal government limited to foreign and military matters, coining a common currency, and resolving border disputes among the states.  Money and troops raised by the states	Federal government to have power to legislate “in all cases to which the separate states are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual legislation”	Adds to federal government the power to regulate foreign and interstate trade, tax imports, make a stamp tax, collect taxes if states fail to pay their quotas, and establish a uniform system of naturalization
All state bound by federal statutes and treaties, but federal government has no enforcement power	Congress may veto all state laws contrary to federal law	Federal law to be supreme, anything in state law notwithstanding.  Federal government authorized to use force against state that defy federal law.
No federal executive.  All enforcement powers rest with the states	Federal executive elected by the legislature	Federal executive elected by the legislature
All alterations must be approved by all 13 states	Some system of amendment called for	Some system of amendment called for

The Constitutional Convention and Centralization: Are We National or Federal

One of the outstanding achievements of the Constitutional Convention was the invention of federalism in its modern sense.  Prior to the Constitutional Convention , governments were either what political scientists today would call "unitary" (or people at the time called "national") or "confederated" (or what people at the time called "federal.")  In a unitary system, the central government is clearly supreme and local governments are mere administrative divisions.  In a confederated system, the central government is the creation of its members, joined in a common defense.  The central government has no direct jurisdiction over individuals, only over its member states.

The United States under the Articles of Confederation was a confederated government.  The central government consisted of the Continental Congress, which could legislate for the whole, but left all enforcement to the states.  Each state sent two to seven delegates to Congress, but delegation could cast only one vote, on behalf of the state.  Delegates were elected by state legislatures for one-year terms and bound by instructions by the states they represented, more like ambassadors than a true legislature.  The central government financed itself by determining how much money it needed, and assigning each state a proportionate quota of the total.  Each state was allowed to raise the money as it wished; the central government had no power to collect taxes.  The same rule applied to raising armies -- each state was required to raise troops in proportion to its population, but the central government had no power to raise forces itself.  Not too surprisingly, states regularly failed to proved their full quotas of money or soldiers.  Furthermore, although legislation passed by the Continental Congress was theoretically binding, it had no enforcement powers, so states could regularly defy its will.  The central government had full authority over foreign affairs, and sole authority to negotiate treaties, including trade treaties.  However, with no power to regulate foreign trade, states regularly defied the terms of such treaties.

It was generally agreed that this was an unsatisfactory arrangement and that a stronger central government was needed.  But what form would it take?

Introduction to the Constitutional Convention: What Was Truly Groundbreaking

Civics textbooks today are mistaken when they imply that the Constitutional Convention invented the separation of powers into executive, legislative and judicial. In fact, as we have discussed, the concept originates with Montesquieu and was well established at the time.

At the same time, the Constitutional Convention had other groundbreaking achievements that civics textbooks today overlook.

The most impressive was simply in establishing a stable popular government.  Contemporary Europe had very little to offer as models -- tiny Switzerland was about all there was.  The main examples of popular government contemporary Europeans had to look upon were in ancient Greece and Rome -- and these were examples that tore themselves apart with factional strife.  Popular government was generally seen as dangerously unstable and prone to self-destruction.

Admittedly, the Founders had an advantage over contemporary Europeans.  They had another role model to look to -- themselves.  All the colonies had practices elective, popular government to some degree, though most were only partial, with a considerable amount of authority in hands of colonial officers appointed in Britain.*  Upon declaring independence, the states threw off the colonial yoke and established their own governments.  The Convention therefore had the guidance of a century of semi-popular colonial government and a decade of fully popular state government to use as role models.

This leads to another groundbreaking achievement -- the invention of a written constitution.  The term "constitution" had long been in use to mean the general institutions and rules of government, but it differed from a "constitution" in the modern sense in not being written down anywhere so that no one could prove   what the constitution really was.  Written plans of government dated back at least to the Middle Ages, when the king could issue charters to cities, setting forth their forms of government.  This system continued in the colonies, which also received charters laying out their forms of government. All these charters, however, were issues by the king and could be withdrawn by the king.  The practice of a written plan of government, issued by the people to themselves is an American invention, invented by the states during the Revolutionary War, and adopted at the federal level in 1787.  It is often said the the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in use.  A few state constitutions can challenge its claim to the honor, but as a national constitution, the U.S. Constitution is necessarily the worlds oldest, because written constitutions had not been invented before.

Closely related to the concept of a written constitution is the idea of judicial review, i.e., that courts can declare acts of the legislature unconstitutional.  This, in turn, grows out of the older English concept of common law -- that judges are law makers.  In England dating back to the Middle Ages, courts had been required to follow precedent set down by higher courts.  Precedents, in other words, carried the force of law, meaning that judges made binding law.  (Requiring judges to follow the precedents set by appellate courts created a "common law" throughout England, thus the name common law).  Common law precedents could be overturned by legislative enactments, i.e., statutes.  But the English system made no distinction between constitution and ordinary legislation.  The will of the legislature, as set forth in statutes, always trumped the will of the courts as set forth in common law.

This was not the case in the colonies, which had charters that were higher law than ordinary legislation.  And over time, the colonists developed the concept of a "constitution" that stood above ordinary legislation.  The question then arose as to who decided which legislation was and was not constitutional.  The answer turned out to be the courts.  Contrary to what civics textbooks, this power was not illegitimately usurped by the courts, but was part of the plan from the start.  It had occasionally be practiced by state courts even before the U.S. Constitution was prepared, and was discussed in the Convention and in the Federalist Papers.  And it is an American invention.

Finally, the Constitutional Convention invented federalism, as the concept exists today -- two levels of government, both with direct authority over individuals, and neither chartered by or dependent on the other.  I will discuss this at length in my following essays on centralization.

There are three main ways one can look at the Constitutional Convention.  One is a chronological look at the process of the Convention tracing events as they took place and seeing how they Constitution developed and took shape.  Another is is to look at the Convention issue by issue, see what issues were raised, what positions were taken, and what compromises were reached.  A third is to look at the delegates as individuals and try to determine what each one believed in and stood for.

The approach I intend to take is primarily the third approach, to look at the individual delegates (at least the ones who were major participants) and see what each one believed in and stood for.  I will break it down by the three main issues at stake -- the degree of centralization of the new government, the degree of democracy it should have, and issues that divided northern and southern states.  For each of these main issues, I will give an overview and then describe the speeches and actions of the delegates, individual by individual, on the subject.

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*Details of state governments will be discussed later.  Connecticut and Rhode Island were unique in having fully autonomous and elective government, even in colonial times.

Introduction to the Constitutional Convention: An Overview

All right.  Now we can begin what I originally started this blog to discuss:  The adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

From May 29 to September 17, 1878, delegates from twelve states (all except Rhode Island) met in Philadelphia, originally intending to strengthen the Articles of Confederation.  Instead, they ended up drawing up an entire new system of government -- the U.S. Constitution, which has survived with some modifications to this day.

James Madison

James Madison, remembered as Father of the Constitution, kept detailed notes of the Convention that allows us to follow how this particular form of government was chosen and why various decisions were made.

Reading over his notes, several things catch the attention.  One is how readable the basic notes are.  Most writing from the time have a stiff and elaborate tone that makes them difficult for the modern reader to struggle through.  Perhaps it should not be surprising that Madison's notes are more accessible -- they are, after all, accounts of speeches, some planned in advance, but most relatively spontaneous.  As such, they are less formal than written language.  Another is Madison's frequent use of abbreviations.  This should not be too surprising, given that he was taking down notes as people were speaking and would naturally have trouble keeping up.  Another is that, in those days before Spellcheck, Madison's spelling and punctuation often leave much to be desired.  Given the circumstances, this is entirely understandable, but somehow there is something reassuring in the thought that the "assembly of demigods" (Jefferson's words) could still misspell their words.  Finally, the writing is often awkward, with all sorts of directions like "see note A," "here insert the speech," or "the following is a literal copy."  Like any handwritten notes, Madison's could have used some polishing.

A few observations are also in order about the convention itself.  One is on who was not present.  Thomas Jefferson was overseas, serving as Minister (ambassador) to France.  John Adams was also abroad, serving as Minister to Britain.  John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry all stayed away, distrusting the general project.  Thomas Paine had returned to England.

John Dickinson

More significant is the hard-headed practicality of the delegates.  Except for occasional lapses by Benjamin Franklin, the Convention was remarkably free of utopianism or appeals to ideological principle.  The focus, instead, was on developing a system of government that would work in the real world.  Usually, this meant looking at the practical experience of England or the states and seeing what should be borrowed and what could be improved on.  John Dickinson made perhaps the strongest statement of this hard-headed outlook when he said,  "Experience must be our only guide, for reason may mislead us."  Of course, this statement should not be taken altogether literally.  Taken too literally, it could mean that nothing new should ever be attempted.  And the very act of holding the Constitutional Convention, to say nothing of the document produced, was definitely something new.  But certainly the delegates all believed that "reason" should be tempered by experience.

"Reason" in this context, means something akin to what we would call ideology or social theory.  The delegates rarely justified their actions in terms of ideology or theory alone, but certainly "reason" lurked in the background, influencing their actions.  The two main social philosophers who influenced the delegates were John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu.  Locke is reasonably known to most modern-day Americans.  He popularized the social contract theory of government -- that government was formed when the people emerged from an anarchical "state of nature" and agreed to submit to a government to protect them. Unclear is how literally Locke mean it.  Did he believe the people mutually agreeing on a government was an actual, historical occurrence, or was it simply a metaphor for saying that that the legitimacy of government depends on the people's consent?  Whatever Locke's actual intention, the delegates intended to take him at his word and form an actual social contract.

Montesquieu

Locke, however, did not prescribe a specific form of government.  As such, he had greater influence on the Declaration of Independence than the Constitution. The outstanding influence on the actual government formed was Montesquieu.  Montesquieu was an early 18th Century French social philosopher who developed the theory of the separation of powers -- that government is divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and that the survival of liberty depends on keeping these powers separate.*  This idea would have immense importance in the drafting of the Constitution, its adoption, and civic textbooks to this day.

So the groundbreaking achievement of the U.S. Constitution was not in the separation of powers (as many textbooks seem to hint today), a concept that was already in existence.  My next post will discuss what its real ground breaking achievements were.

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* Montesquieu saw liberty as compatible with hereditary monarchy, so long as the monarchy was governed by law, rather than arbitrary, and the separation of powers was maintained.  Likewise, he believed that liberty could survive either a democratic or an aristocratic republic so long as the separation of powers was maintained, but that it would fail in a republic that did not maintain such separation.

Freedom: Quaker and Backcountry

While Puritan and Cavalier notions of liberty are quite foreign to us, Quaker and back country concepts are familiar.  They live on today in the concepts of freedom espoused by the ACLU and the NRA, respectively.

 Quakers

Quakers introduced a radical new idea to the concept of law and order – that people need not all adhere to a common creed or fit into a common hierarchy.  Order simply meant people refraining from intruding on each other’s peace.  Quakers flogged and branded like anyone else in the 17^th Century, but they generally opposed capital punishment, limiting it to cases of treason and murder.*  Sheriffs were semi-elective -- a vote was held among multiple candidates, and the governor choose between the top two vote-getters.  Quakers also had justices of the peace and peace keepers who arbitrated civil disputes.  The Quaker approach to law enforcement must have seemed dangerously permissive to their contemporaries, yet crime rates remained relatively low (though not so low as among the Puritans).  The reason for their low crime rates should be obvious.  They were Quakers (and Amish and Mennonites).  A society of pacifists can control crime by gentler means than other societies.  Local government took place mostly at the county level, by elective commissions and other officials.  Elections were frequent, as often as five times a year, but less demanding than a New England town meeting.  Perhaps as a result, voter turnout was usually lower than in Virginia, but higher than in New England. 

Fitting midway between their concept of local government and their concept of liberty was the matter of how politics were conducted.  Quaker notions of the conscience and the Inner Light meant a recognition of a right of dissent.  Long-standing differences of opinion between large portions of the community regarded as normal, rather than as a source of dangerous disruption.  Political parties began forming in Pennsylvania in the early 18^th Century, about the same time they began forming in England, and well before they began to develop in any of the other colonies.   While local government in New England operated by consensus with strong pressure to conform, and in Virginia it was little more than a spoils system, in Pennsylvania , the whole concept of organized and civilized disagreement that makes democracy possible was being born.

Quaker concepts of freedom were rooted in the Golden Rule – respect in others the freedom you would have others respect in you.  Quakers did not see freedom as a zero sum game.  The saw it as the common right of all, and believed that the loss of freedom by one person(s) diminished the freedom of all.  More remarkably, the Quakers lived up to this ideal.  Power corrupts, and Fischer points out that all too often, people who are fierce in defense of their own freedom when out of power have second thoughts about other people’s freedom when in power.  The Quakers in power extended to everyone else the same freedom they claimed for themselves.  Quakers were also the earliest opponents of slavery.  If it was not their wish to be enslaved, then it could not be right to enslave others.  Fischer believes that there was no material reason slavery could not have flourished in the Delaware Valley; it was kept out because of the strong commitment of the Quakers and Pietists to reject it.  Fischer calls this ideal reciprocal liberty.

Reciprocal liberty had other implications as well.  Limited government was part of reciprocal liberty.  Implicit in it, Fischer says, was a clear distinction between the state and the larger society.  Such a distinction would have been quite foreign to the Puritans.  Also implied were that there were some things that were simply not government’s business (another concept quite foreign to the Puritans).  In particular, government had no business legislating in matters of conscience.  But at the same time, the existence government was essential to reciprocal liberty.  Its role was to keep people from infringing on each other.

Not all these ideas were unique to the Quakers.  They were part of the stirring of the new ideology of classical liberalism that arose in the late 17th Century among the Whigs and their struggle to curb the power of the king.  William Penn, besides Quaker ideals of reciprocal liberty, endorsed the secular liberties of the Whigs.  He guaranteed all colonists the secular rights to their lives, liberty and estate; representative government; and trial by jury.  The right to trial by jury included the right to a speedy trial, to the same right of witness and counsel as the prosecution, and for the jury not to be punished for its verdict.  No coincidentally, these are the same rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution to this day.

Which leads to an important point.  The ideals that created the American Revolution were ones developed in the late 17^th Century by John Locke and other English Whigs.  These ideas were not unique to the Quakers; indeed, it was Jefferson, descendant of the Cavaliers who set them forth in the Declaration of Independence and Madison, another such descendant, who enshrined them in the Bill of Rights. 

Back Country

Back Country ideals of liberty are also familiar to us.  They can be found in any pronouncement by the NRA or the gun lobby in general.  The back country was settled by people long excluded from political power, either in contemporary England, or in the colonies in their early days.  As a result back countrymen came to look upon any formal government as something hostile, alien, and inherently oppressive.  This went far beyond Quaker (or Cavalier) notions of limited government to an ideal (at least in theory) of no formal government.  Fischer calls this natural liberty, perhaps because back countrymen so often seemed to aspire to an anarchical “state of nature” that the other cultures dreaded.

Of course, the back country was never able to exclude formal government altogether.  But they generally sought to limit its influence.  Sheriffs, courts, and other official means of keeping order coexisted with vigilante violence and order maintained by private revenge.  Fischer cites the case of a judge who punished hog stealing with hanging, and the rape of a five-year-old girl with a one shilling fine.  What is does not add is that this did not necessarily mean the judge took child rape lightly.  He may just have wanted to allow the girl’s family the satisfaction of inflicting the punishment themselves.  "Order" in the back country meant retaliation in kind for any wrong done.  And if formal government was regarded with deep distrust, they were not without leadership.  Leaders were strong, charismatic individuals with a knack for getting things done, people like Andrew Jackson, who when a fire broke out in a stable, organized the townsmen to fight it, decked anyone who opposed him, and saved the town from burning down.  And he did it through is own forceful personality, not any trappings of formal office.  That was the sort of leader the backcountry respected.

Particularly strong in the back country concept of freedom was not only the ideal that all government was inherently dangerous to liberty, but that armed rebellion was the proper response the moment it stepped out of line.  Fischer gives the example of Patrick Henry, a back countryman to the core.  Patrick Henry was not just one of the most impassioned leaders of the American Revolution.  Before any stirrings of rebellion began, as a lawyer he argued to a back country jury that the king, by disallowing some obscure act, had degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all rights to their obedience.  Cavalier gentlemen were shocked, but the back country jury responded favorably.  He famously shocked low country gentlemen as well at the time of the Stamp Act, appearing to call for rebellion well before most people were even considering such a thing. At the same time, he did not hesitate to call anyone who opposed the Virginia Resolves and enemy of the colony.  Natural liberty, Fischer comments, was not reciprocal.  Respect for the rights of others was not a part of liberty in the back country.

I must confess to finding this the most puzzling part of "natural liberty," either as Fischer sets forth in his book, or in the NRA and gun lobby today.  I can more or less understand that people who see freedom as a thing for every man to vindicate with his gun not being concerned with the rights of others.  Presumably my neighbor has a gun of his own and is just as capable of vindicating his liberty as I am.  This is the NRA view of freedom as an armed standoff, with no one daring to infringe on the rights of others for fear of armed retaliation.  What I cannot understand is people who regard the proper response to the slightest provocation by the state as armed resistance simultaneously being willing to use the state to suppress people who disagree with them.  This tendency has continued from Patrick Henry's calling opponents enemies of the colony to present day NRA calls to deport Piers Morgan for disagreeing with them over guns.  Such an outlook, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to endless civil war, as the "ins" use the power of the state to suppress the "outs" while the "outs" vindicate their rights with firearms.

In another work, Fischer comments that "Don't Tread on Me," with its emphasis on the first person singular, is very much a back country concept of freedom.  Extending it a little further, the Puritan equivalent might be "Don't Treat on Us," the Quakers might say, "Don't Treat on Others," and the Cavaliers, "I Do the Treading."

Fischer proceeds to take his thesis too far, reducing almost everything that happens in US history to the interplay of the four cultures, which is certainly a great oversimplification.  But it is a useful analysis nonetheless; one that I intend to make future use of.

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*One thing I learned in law school was that today’s concept of first degree and second degree murder was invented by the Quakers as a way of reducing the number of executions.

Freedom: Puritan and Cavalier

The subjects of how these four societies maintained law and order, their forms of local government, and their concepts of liberty, are closely interconnected.  They may also be significant in forming our concepts of liberty to this day.  It should be noted, all four cultures valued freedom highly.  Indeed, all may be said in some degree to have  migrated in search of freedom that they felt denied at home.  But they had very different concepts of freedom – some familiar to us, and some quite foreign.  Because this is a complex subject, I will split this post in two.

New England

Puritan New England had very low crime rates.  Furthermore, crimes of violence were especially rare, with property crimes more common and trivial offenses against “order” the most common of all.  How was this achieved?  Most today people would say, because of the Puritans’ severity with law breakers.  The harshness of their punishments – the pillory, the stocks, flogging and branding and so forth – are famous to this day.  But such severity is unlikely to be the explanation.  Barbaric as such punishments may seem to us, they were universal in 17^th Century Europe.  Virginia, contemporary England, and continental Europe all did much the same.  Even the gentle Quakers flogged and branded.  Indeed, in at least one respect, the Puritans were less severe than most of their contemporaries – they had fewer capital crimes.*  In another way, they were very strict.  Colonial New England might be considered an early example of the zero tolerance approach.  Just about everyone was prosecuted at some time for some minor offense such as breaking the Sabbath, idleness, lying, swearing, and the all-encompassing “exceeding the bounds of moderation.”  One colonist was prosecuted for presenting a petition on an insufficient size and grade of paper!  The penalties for these offenses were usually not too harsh – rarely more than a few shillings' fine – but warning was ever present.

So if severity of punishment does not explain the Puritans’ success in keeping crime down, what does?  For one thing, as discussed earlier, they lived in small, close-knit villages where everyone could keep an eye on everyone else and bring pressure to bear on deviants.  For another, the Puritans were selective in who they admitted, screening out people who did not share their basic outlook and values.  Their form of local government also played a role -- the famous New England town meeting.   Although Fischer emphasized that the concept originated in England, town meetings in England meant vastly different things in different towns.  In New England, town meetings were standardized.  The townsmen met, elected their officials, and enacted town ordinances.  (They also elected their representatives to the colonial legislature and instructed them on how to vote).  Every effort was made to achieve consensus.  Hence decisions were made by discussion, persuasion and adjustment of differences, together with strong pressure to conform.  The result was to greatly strengthen the moral authority of the law.  Who can object, after all, to being bound by rules enacted by one’s fellow townsmen, including oneself?  Law enforcement was the job of the village constable, also elected by the consensus of his fellow townsmen, which, again, greatly enhanced his moral authority.  The whole concept of a hostile or defiant attitude toward authority was foreign to New England because the people were the authority.  What they were hostile toward was any outside meddling.

Such a regime was possible only for a people whose concept of liberty was very different from our own.  Fischer describes it as “ordered liberty.”  It was the view that liberty was not the absence of constraints on the individual, but membership in a self-governing community that decided for itself what restraints to impose.   The New England authorities established many restraints on the individual.  They forbade people in frontier communities from moving without permission of the authorities.  They mandated Sabbath observance and church attendance.  One community forbade any bachelor from marrying until he killed six blackbirds and a crow.  Another forbade any farmer from slopping his pigs until two others confirmed what he was giving was unfit for human consumption.  Liberty, in short, belonged to the community, not the individual.  Individuals merely had “liberties,” something between our concept of rights and privileges.   These were not inalienable rights, but privileges the community granted and could withdraw at will.  In short, the Puritan concept of liberty has fallen by the wayside and is quite alien to our own.

Virginia

Rates of violence were higher in Virginia than in New England, but violence, like so much else, was rigidly hierarchical.  Violence by social superiors against inferiors was common.  Violence among social equals was intermediate.  But violence by social inferiors against social superiors was rare and subject to terrible retaliation.  The head of law enforcement in Virginia was the sheriff.  In New England, law enforcement was in the hands of the village constable, while the office of sheriff was abolished as what Fischer calls a “hated symbol of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege.”  Alas, he does not explain what a sheriff was, or what made him such a symbol, other than that the sheriff was necessarily a country gentlemen.  The same shortcoming applies to his description of many other offices as well.  The vestry was the administration of the parish, which managed church matters, as well as “much other secular business," such as administering the poor law.  Alas, once again, Fischer does not describe what else the vestry did, except to say it was less active in the life of the community than the town meeting and presumably subjected individuals to fewer constraints.   The other main form of local government was the court, and especially the county justice of the peace.  Unlike in New England, where these officials were elected by the town meeting, in Virginia they were appointed by the colonial legislature (the famous House of Burgesses).  In theory, the legislature could appoint whoever it pleased to office.  In practice, the local country gentry would decide who should hold which office and the legislature almost always respected their wishes.  The only elective offices were to the colonial legislature.  Elections took place about once every seven years.  But Fischer finds another interesting comparison between the colonies.  In New England, where the town meeting met once a year to elect officials and as many times between as necessary to manage the town business, turnout was low, except in times of crisis.  In Virginia, where elections were rare and special events, turnout was much higher.  Apparently people are more willing to participate when participation is not too demanding.

The Cavaliers cherished their freedom, but had little respect for the freedom of others (especially their servants and slaves).  Fisher calls their attitude one of “hegemonic liberty,” equating freedom with domination of others.  Although he does not put it that way, Cavaliers assumed that it was the inevitable nature of society for people at the top to oppress people at the bottom.  Liberty was being as high up in the social order as possible.  This is related to, but different from, the Puritan view of “liberties” granted as special exemptions from restraint.  Puritans, too, believed that a gentleman had more liberties than a person of lower order, much less a servant or slave.  But at the same time, Puritans also recognized other “liberties” as common to all, and some (fishing rights, for instance) that were granted by community, rather than by rank.  To Virginians, liberty was mostly a matter of who dominates whom.  This makes liberty a zero sum game – one person’s gain in liberty is necessarily someone else’s loss.  Suddenly I began to understand why southerners felt so threatened when anyone sought to undermine slavery.  If one’s view is enslave or be enslaved, then any threat to one’s ability to enslave is necessarily a threat of enslavement.  It explains the maddening view so often expressed by apologists for slavery – that it elevates all white people to an aristocracy.  If one views freedom in hegemonic terms then, yes, I suppose race slavery could be the most effective way to extend hegemonic liberty to the greatest number of people.   It also goes a long way to explaining why marriages were so often power struggles – marriage, too, could not be a partnership, but only a question of who dominates.

It is also true that the Cavaliers moved beyond this view.  After all, Jefferson, who wrote so eloquently about universal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence came from this culture.  It is an outlook that goes clearly against the one the United States adopted as its ideology in 1776 and since.  But traces remained, especially in race relations, which were conceived of as a zero sum game long after the zero sum view had been abandoned everywhere else.  It is an outlook that remains tempting to this day because it is a more natural outlook than the one that no one need dominate anyone, but that we should all be free together.

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*Of course, just because the death penalty is on the books for an offense does not necessarily mean that it is enforced.  But Fischer also compares the actual numbers of executions in Massachusetts to Virginia.  Virginia had a much higher rate.

Albion's Seed: Wealth and Rank

Wealth and rank are obviously related, although not the same. One thing Fischer discusses is that in the 17th Century, rank was seen more in terms of "orders" and "degrees" than wealth. The more materialist concept, equating wealth and rank, began in the 18th Century. Perhaps a more important concept he does not discuss directly is what a society means by equality. He describes at length (later) what the four different cultures meant by liberty. But implied in the text is that there are at least two different concept of equality -- equality of wealth and equality of manners. These things often correlate, but not always.

They correlated fairly well in three of the four societies, but with one striking anomaly.

In Virginia, distribution of wealth was very unequal. A narrow oligarchy owned most of the land and nearly all of the slaves. While there was a middle class of land holding yeoman farmers, they were not numerous. Far more common were landless tenants and migrant laborers. Indeed, in a land with abundant natural resources and a distinct shortage of labor, Virginia nonetheless managed to have a significant number of paupers. And, of course, there were slaves who by definition never owned anything, even themselves. Not surprisingly, rituals of deference were eleborate. Fisher remarks that rituals of deference were more elaborate in the 16th and 17th centuries than at any time before or since.

The Quakers, by contrast, were fierce egalitarians, both in wealth and in manners. They set out to make a deliberate policy of encouraging owner-cultivated family farms of roughly the same size, and of discouraging great landholders, landless tenants, and slaves. About three-fourths of all Virginians came over as indentured servants. While they might serve out their term of indenturement, their chances of advancement were slim to none. Quakers, by contrast, had about half the members of their colony come over as servants, but once their term was complete, they could take their places in general society. Quakers were also shockingly egalitarian in manners. They rejected bowing, curtsying, raising of hats, and all the other elaborate rituals the time, and instead greeted everyone with a handshake. They also dropped the elaborate titles of the day, such as "my lord," "your grace," "your excellency," "master," "mistress," "sir" or "ma'am." Everyone was simply addressed as "Friend." Quaker's famous use of "thou" and "thee" was also originally part of their radical egalitarianism -- they addressed social superiors in the familiar.

The Puritans were somewhere in between. Their goal was to keep something like the society of an East Anglia village, maintaining the social distinctions that would exist within such a society, but excluding both the top and bottom of society that would not be part of their village. This manifested itself in both wealth and manners. Like the Quakers, Puritans set out to create mostly a middle class of family farmers, and to avoid great landlords or landless tenants. The did not, however, divide land equally, but reserved a larger share for more prominent members of society. (The ratio was about 3:1). The Puritans deliberately excluded an aristocracy from their society, so there were no "lords" or "graces," but the leading members of the community were addressed as "your excellency" or "your honor." Gentlefolk were "master" and "mistress." The yeomanry were "goodman" and "goodwife." Only the poor and landless had no titles.

The anomaly was in the back country. Contrary to popular belief, frontier conditions did not make for equality of wealth. Despite abundant land, it was concentrated in relatively few hands, with large numbers of landless tenants. Fischer says the back country had the least equal of all four cultures, but his statistics do not bear this out. Rather, the least equal counties look comparable to the most equal counties in Virginia; while the most equal counties in the back country have wealth distributions similar to Boston, the least equal part of New England. The reason people do not think of Appalachia or the back country in general in those terms is that manners there were very equal, scandalously so to outsiders. People of all ranks addressed one another by their first names. Rank made very little difference in terms of manners, dress or rules of conduct.

Fischer suggests that people's concepts of deference, like their attitudes toward witchcraft changed with the times. The later migrations, the Quakers and back countrymen, were less rank-obsessed, as rank and rules of deference were beginning to decline. Color me unconvinced. The egalitarian manners of the Quakers and back countrymen scandalized their contemporaries and were seen as radical departures from accepted norms.

The truly striking thing is not just that there are (at least) two different concepts of equality, but that the back country attitude appears to have won out. Americans today are willing to tolerate substantial inequality in wealth. What we are not willing to tolerate is any sort of inequality in manners or any demand to show deference to our "betters."

Next up (perhaps over several posts) order, local government, and concepts of freedom.