meeting. were obliged to go under penalty of fine or severe punishment. Left to themselves, each group of inhabitants thus bound together about the meeting-house, near which also was generally placed the school, contrived for the regulation of affairs which interested all alike the forms which came most handy, and these were the folk-moot with its accompaniments, The townthe local self-government of Anglo-Saxon days, revived with a faithfulness of which the colonists themselves were not at all conscious. For twenty years Plymouth had a folk-moot for its entire jurisdiction, open to every freeman. The restriction which in the colony of Massachusetts Bay admitted only churchmembers to the franchise, was at last abrogated, so that there, too, every reputable citizen had a right to vote. To cast a glance ahead, in a century and a half, Massachusetts, absorbing Plymouth and holding possession of Maine, contained more than two hundred towns. In New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the population was similarly apportioned into townships, whose constitution is thus described by a writer of the time: "Every town is an incorporated republic. The selectmen by their own authority, or upon the application of a certain number of townsmen, issue a warrant for the calling of a townmeeting. The warrant mentions the business to be engaged in, and no other can be legally executed. The inhabitants are warned to attend; and they that are present, though not a quarter or tenth of the whole, have a right to proceed. They choose a president by the name of Moderator, who regulates the proceedings of the meeting. Each individual has an equal liberty of delivering his opinion, and is not liable to be silenced or browbeaten by a richer or greater townsman than himself. Every freeman or free-holder gives his vote or not, and for or against, as he pleases; and each vote weighs equally, whether that of the highest or lowest inhabitant. . . . All the New England towns are on the same plan in general."1 "A New England town-meeting," says Freeman, "is essentially the same as the folk-moot." 2 Of the forms of organization above the town, the hundred was never reproduced in New England at all, while the shire or county, though reproduced, never acquired the importance which it had in the mother-land. At first the towns sufficed; the counties did not appear in Massachusetts Bay until 1643, while elsewhere there was still longer delay, Rhode Island first adopting shires in 1703. They had little significance, except as judicial districts, the courts. being modelled after the English Quarter Sessions. The venerable shire-moot, still persisting in England as the centre of political life, the assembly at which were elected the representative knights and certain local officials, though most of its judicial and administrative functions had long been lost, never appeared in New England. What was the course of development in Virginia, the great colony which presently grew out of the little settlement at Jamestown, becoming in Virginia of the representative colony of the South as Massachusetts soon became that of the Reproduction contemporary England. 1 Gordon: History of Independence of United States, I, p. 262. 2 American Institutional History, Johns Hopkins Historical and Political Series, I, 1, p. 16. The parish. North? As Virginia took shape, her institutions were no less thoroughly English than those of Massachusetts, and yet they were not the same as those of Massachusetts. While in the case of New England the settlers reverted to a state of things so primitive, Virginia, on the other hand, reproduced the forms which actually existed at home contemporaneously with her settlement.1 First, we find as early as 1631 the name parish; the earlier "plantations" had no doubt been de facto parishes, and afterward the counties were regularly subdivided into them. Here, as at home, the vestry had chief authority, composed usually of twelve "of the most sufficient and selected men," who soon became, after the home precedent, a close corporation for the discharge of functions both ecclesiastical and civil. Here the clergyman presided as first in dignity (another English practice), whose salary was yearly sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. On the whole, the Virginia vestries, though aristocratic in form, were fairly wise and moderate, and usually sustained by the people, though the people had no voice in choosing them. So great a democrat as Jefferson testifies in their favor: in early days when the royal governor tried to force upon the parishes his own nominees, an active resistance was made, and in the bickering back and forth the way was prepared for the events of 1776.2 But though the parish performed many important functions, it was early overshadowed by the county, which possessed all the higher The county. 1 E. A. Freeman: American Institutional History, Johns Hopkins University Studies, 1st Series, 1, p. 17. 2 Howard: Local Constitutional Government of the United States, I, p. 118, etc. The Court of sions. offices of local self-government and was as well the unit of representation and administration. This, too, was a reproduction of a contemporary English organization. Though the first settlers had adopted the village community, economic causes brought it about that the later organization was soon adopted; for everything tended to plantation rather than town life. As early as 1634, eight shires appear, "governed as the shires in England," which become seventy-four by the time of the American Revolution. The Courts of Quarter Sessions appear duly in all these, composed of justices appointed by the royal governor. The board of justices in each shire has the privilege of nominating to the governor the appointees; and it therefore results that the county court, like the parish vestry, becomes a close corporation composed of the leading gentry.1 The justices assume all functions, judicial and administrative. The only approach to a democratic feature in the aristocratic polity is the manner of electing the burgesses, the members who sit in the colonial assembly, and who constitute with a royal council nominated by the Crown, and a Crown-appointed governor possessed of a veto power, the central government. As the colony becomes established, two burgesses sit for each county, and these are chosen by such freeholders as have an estate for life in one hundred acres of uninhabited land, or in twenty-five acres with a house on it, or in a house or lot in some town. With so high a property qualification, very many were disfranchised, but we may discern here a feature in some measure popular. The Scene at a county court, 1 Howard: Local Constitutional Government of the U. S., I, p. 388, etc. elections took place in presence of the sheriff (who was either himself a justice or an appointee of the justices), at the county court, the people coming together in shire-moot, for the purpose, after the fashion not yet obsolete in England. Crippled though the power of the people was, still the Virginian court-day in the old time must have presented a democratic aspect. It was a holiday for the whole country-side, especially in the fall and spring. The people came generally on horseback, on foot, in wagons. In the great assembly on the court-house green, hunters, small farmers, great proprietors, grinning negroes, mingled freely together. Old debts were settled, new debts contracted; the auctioneer and the peddler plied busily their vocations. If an election was pending, every convenient stump pedestalled its orator. In a measure, the county court took the place of the town-meeting: like the town-meeting it exercised a powerful levelling influence, and was in a way, by no means ineffective, a training-school for the republican life which lay in the future.1 Reasons for between New Virginia. The tlers of the the contrast England and That New England and Virginia should have adopted institutions so widely different is quite explicable. New England, while containing a few families of gentle blood, was in vast majority settled by yeomen, the lower middle class, to which belonged in Old England the traders and small farmers. It was in this class that the Anglo-Saxon strain ran purest, with least of Norman intermixture. To such men, primitive ways were most likely to be congenial; to such yeomen set former. 1 Hannis Taylor: Origin and Growth of English Constitution, I, 39. |