152 Chapter VII
the values of the British governing class, were more numerous among loyalists
than in the general population. On the other hand, lest any one thesis be carried
too far, it should be pointed out that Virginia, a very English province in some
ways, was so solidly patriotic that only thirteen natives of the Old Dominion ever
applied to Britain for compensation for loyalist losses.^23
The war itself polarized the issues. Each side needed strength, and the revolution-
ary leaders looked for it in the mass of the population, the loyalists among the ruling
circles of Great Britain. In legal form, the struggle was between the sovereignty of
the former colonies and the sovereignty of the British King- in- Parliament. Rebel-
lious leaders, however, clothed themselves in the sovereignty of the “people,” both in
form and to a large degree in content. The social content of Parliament in the eigh-
teenth century needs no further elaboration. The struggle, whatever men said, and
whatever has been said since, was inseparable from a struggle between democratic
and aristocratic forces. If the rebellion was successful, democracy in America would
be favored. If it failed, if Parliament and the loyal Americans had their way, develop-
ment in America would move in an aristocratic direction. In this respect the Ameri-
can Revolution resembled the revolutions in Europe.
That the war favored democracy in America is apparent in many ways. In some
places, notably Massachusetts, the suffrage was nearly universal before the Revolu-
tion; in others, notably Virginia, the Revolution did not extend it. But in Pennsyl-
vania the pro- British leanings of the Quaker patriciate brought them into disre-
pute after hostilities began; and their aversion to military solutions, at a time when
any solution was bound to be military, threw power into the hands of the western
farmers, who by becoming soldiers made themselves indispensable to the infant
state, so that Pennsylvania developed the most democratically organized govern-
ment in the new union.^24 In New Jersey the provincial congress, enjoying no le-
gality and in rebellion against the legal authorities, sought to broaden its mandate
by extending the voting franchise. In fact, petitions streamed into the Congress,
urging that all householders or taxpayers should have the vote, the better to oppose
enemies of the “American cause.” The provincial congress in February 1776, five
months before independence, granted the vote to all males at least twenty- one
years old, resident in the state a year, and possessing goods worth £50 “proclama-
tion money.” With wartime depreciation of proclamation money, virtual universal
manhood suffrage ensued. Voters also, after July 1776, were required to take an
oath abjuring allegiance to George III, and some purists, pained by revolutionary
illiberalism, have deprecated such restriction of political rights, as if the only fea-
sible alternative would have been more democratic, and as if oaths did not exist in
Britain itself, where men could still be obliged to abjure the House of Stuart.^25
23 Alden, op.cit., 89.
24 E. P. Douglass, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority Rule
during the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1955), 251–52.
25 R. McCormick, Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period (New Brunswick,
1950), 35; and an unpublished doctoral dissertation in the Princeton University Library by J. R. Pole,
“Reform of the Suffrage and Representation in New Jersey, 1744–1844.” See also, below, 159–68. In
Massachusetts the suffrage was if anything slightly restricted by the Revolution, but Massachusetts
remained one of the states where the largest proportion of the population had the right to vote.