The Forces in Conflict 143
a hereditary one; the indentures expired after a few years, and all white persons
soon merged into a free population.
Politically, the oldest colonies had originated in a kind of de facto independence
from the British government. Even after the British made their colonial system
more systematic, toward the close of the seventeenth century, the colonies contin-
ued to enjoy much local self- determination. Only five per cent of the laws passed
by colonial assemblies were disallowed in Great Britain, and, while these often
concerned the most important subjects, the infrequency of the British veto was
enough to make it the exception. The elected assemblies, as already noted, were the
most democratically recruited of all such constituted bodies in the Western World.
In general, it was necessary to own land in order to have the right to vote for a
member of the assembly, but small owner- farmers were numerous, most of all in
New England; and recent studies all tend to raise the estimates of the proportion
of those enjoying the franchise before the Revolution. It seems to have been above
eighty per cent of adult white males in Massachusetts, half or more in New Jersey,
perhaps a little under half in Virginia.^4 Many who had the right to vote did not
often use it, and this was in part because the procedure of elections was not made
convenient for the ordinary hard- working man; but non- voting also suggests an
absence of grievances, or perhaps only that the common man neither expected
much nor feared much from government. The elected assemblies enjoyed what in
Europe would be thought a dangerously popular mandate. By 1760, decades of
rivalry for power between the assemblies and the governors had been resolved, in
most of the colonies, in favor of the assemblies. The idea of government by consent
was for Americans a mere statement of fact, not a bold doctrine to be flung in the
teeth of government, as in Europe. Contrariwise, the growing assertiveness of the
assemblies made many in England, and some in America, on the eve of the Revo-
lution, believe that the time had come to stop this drift toward democracy—or, as
they would say, restore the balance of the constitution. In sum, an old sense of
liberty in America was the obstacle on which the first British empire met its doom.
Here the most sophisticated latest researches seem to return to the old- fashioned
American patriotic historical school.
From the beginnings of British America there had also been a certain rough
kind of equality. Except for slaves, the poor were less poor than in Europe, and the
rich were not so wealthy. Almost a quarter of the population of England were clas-
sified as paupers in 1688; almost a tenth in 1801. There was no pauperism in
America, accepted and institutionalized as such; anyone not hopelessly shiftless, or
the victim of personal misfortune, could make a living. At the other extreme, on
the eve of the Revolution, there were men who owned hundreds of thousands of
acres, mostly vacant, the main values being speculative and in the future. It is hard
to say how wealthy a wealthy colonial was. A fortune of £30,000 was thought very
large in Massachusetts; Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania was said to possess
4 R. E. Brown, Middle- Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780 (Ithaca,
1955), 50; R. McCormick, History of Voting in New Jersey... 1664–1911 (New Brunswick, 1953), 63;
C. S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Williamsburg, 1952),
32, 143, appears to think that about ten per cent of the white population was qualified to vote, but this
would be about half the adult males.