146 Chapter VII
the “state of nature,” a liberty defined by the remoteness of government, gradually
changed, especially after the British revolution of 1688, into the more organized
and channelized liberty of British subjects under the British constitution. There
was a bias toward equality in the foundations. The superstructure, as it was raised,
exhibited palpable inequalities. As America became more civilized it began to
have, like all civilized countries, a differentiation of social classes. Even the once
unmanageable Quakers took on new social refinements. The Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting of 1722 officially declared its “decent respect” for “ranks and dignities of
men,” and called for honor and obedience “from subjects to their princes, inferiors
to superiors, from children to parents, and servants to masters.”^10 Increasingly
there was a kind of native American aristocracy. No question was of more impor-
tance for the future than the way in which this new aristocracy would develop.
The colonial aristocracy, as it took form in the eighteenth century, owed a good
deal to close association with government. From New Hampshire to the far South,
as has been seen in Chapter II, there were intermarried families which monopo-
lized seats in the governors’ councils, in some cases, now, to the third and fourth
generation. There were Americans, close to the British authorities, who regarded
themselves as the natural rulers of the country. Sometimes, like Englishmen of the
class to which they would compare themselves, they expected to draw a living
from public offices, to which they need devote only part of their time. This prac-
tice has been most closely studied for Maryland, where there were a number of
offices in which a man could live like a gentleman, with a good deal of leisure, for
£150 a year.^11
More generally, the wealth of the growing American upper class came from
early land grants, or from inheritance of land in a country where land values were
always rising, or from mercantile wealth in the half- dozen seaboard cities, all of
which except Charleston lay from Philadelphia to the North, or from the owner-
ship of plantations and Negro slaves in the South. New York and the Southern
provinces, because of their systems of landholding, were the most favorable to the
growth of aristocratic institutions, but an upper class existed everywhere in the
settled regions. In places where landed and mercantile wealth came together, as at
New York and Charleston, people mixed easily with mutual regard; there was no
standoffishness between “trade” and “gentry.”
Without the rise of such a colonial aristocracy there could have been no suc-
cessful movement against England. There had to be small groups of people who
knew each other, who could trust each other in hazardous undertakings, who had
some power and influence of their own, who could win attention and rally follow-
ers, and who, from an enlarged point of view, felt a concern for the welfare of the
provinces as a whole. “While there are no noble or great and ancient families...
they cannot rebel,” as an observer of New England remarked in 1732.^12 A genera-
tion later such “great” families, if not noble or very ancient, could be found every-
where in the colonies.
10 F. B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: the Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia
(Williamsburg, 1948), 111–12.
11 D. M. Owings, His Lordship’s Patronage: Offices of Profit in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1953).
12 Quoted by Rossiter, op.cit., 109.