The Forces in Conflict 147
On the other hand, the rise of such an aristocracy brought class friction and
internal tension. “In many a colony in 1764,” according to Professor Rossiter
(whose view of an “American consensus” I do not wish to misrepresent), “civil war
seemed more likely than war with Britain.”^13 There was everlasting bickering over
land titles, quit- rents, debts, and paper money. There was complaint, in the west-
ern part of several provinces, at under- representation in the elected assemblies, or
at the long distances it was necessary to go to cast a vote or to be present in a
court of law. Rich and poor were not so far apart as in Europe, but they were far
enough apart to cause trouble. Western Massachusetts, suspicious of Boston, was
not hostile to Britain until 1774. There was a great rent riot in the Hudson valley
in 1766, directed against the manorial system on which the Van Rensselaers and
the Livingstons grew wealthy. A thousand angry western Pennsylvania farmers
marched on Philadelphia in 1764, enraged that the over- represented East, and its
opulent and pacifistic Quaker aristocracy, begrudged them military protection at
the time of Pontiac’s Indian war. The best example was afforded by the Regulators
of North Carolina.
This province, though scarcely a century old, had developed a fine system of
decayed boroughs on the British model. The five oldest coastal counties, thinly
inhabited, enjoyed a dozen times as much representation in the assembly, per
capita, as the newer uplands, so that the bulk of the people, while having the vote,
could get little accomplished. Political life was most active at the county level, and
in each county a few families named the judges and sheriffs, who are estimated
to have embezzled over half the public funds. The governing elite, if one may so
term it, unabashedly made a living off the legal business that small farmers could
not avoid. A group of these farmers founded an “association” for “regulating pub-
lic grievances,” and these Regulators began to refuse to pay taxes. The governor
finally called out the militia against them, chiefly a mounted troop of Gentlemen
Volunteer Light Dragoons, in which 8 “generals” and 14 “colonels” led less than
1,300 enlisted men. The Regulators were routed in the Battle of Alamance in
- Seven of them were hanged. Later, when the gentry led the province into
the Revolution, the British found many loyalist strongholds in the back country
of Carolina.
Conflicting forces were therefore at work in America, when the Stamp Act
added the conflict between America and Great Britain. Americans all but univer-
sally opposed the Stamp Act. Most of those who eventually became loyalists dis-
approved of British policy in the ten years before the Revolution. The doctrine of
parliamentary supremacy was an innovation, accepted in England itself only since
the revolution of 1689; the trend toward centralization of the empire under parlia-
mentary authority, with attendant plans for reordering the colonial governments,
was a modern development, a new force, much less old than the American liber-
ties. On this Americans could agree. They began to disagree on the means used to
uphold the American position. It was one thing to sit in meetings or submit peti-
tions to Parliament; it was another to persist stubbornly in defiance, to insult or
intimidate the King’s officers, stop the proceedings of law courts, and condone the
13 Ibid., 115.