164 Chapter VIII
was popular objection to this situation, probably more than a reading of European
books, that made the separation of powers a principal American doctrine.
The North Carolina constitution, as written and adopted, enlarged the elector-
ate by granting all taxpayers the right to vote for members of the lower house. It
equalized the representation by giving more deputies to the western counties. It
required a freehold of 100 acres for members of the lower house, and of 300 acres
for those of the upper house, who were to be elected only by voters possessing 50
acres. The governor, elected by the two houses, had to have a freehold worth
£1,000. The constitution was a compromise between populace and landed gentry.
It lasted until the Civil War.^6
The situation in Pennsylvania was complex. The Quaker colony, idealized by
European intellectuals as the haven of innocent equality and idyllic peace, had
long been plagued by some of the most acrimonious politics in America. Quaker
bigwigs had long clashed with the non- Quaker lesser orders of Philadelphia and
the West. In the spring of 1776 Pennsylvania was the only colony in which the
assembly was still legal under the old law. It still showed a desire for reconciliation
with England, and, with it, maintenance of the old social and political system. This
persistence of conservatism in high places made a great many people all the more
radical. A year of open war with Britain had aroused the determination for inde-
pendence, and in May 1776 a mass meeting of 4,000 people in Philadelphia de-
manded the calling of a constitutional convention. Various local committees got to
work, and a convention was elected by irregular methods. Where the three eastern
counties had formerly been heavily over- represented, the situation was now not
equalized, but reversed. The West, with the same population as the three eastern
counties, had 64 delegates in the convention to only 24 for the East. “The Conven-
tion in Pennsylvania was a political expedient, and not, as in Massachusetts, the
cornerstone of constitutional government.”^7 Its real function was to promote the
Revolution, and assure independence from England, by circumventing the assem-
bly and all other opposition. Like the more famous French Convention elected in
1792, it rested on a kind of popular mandate which did not reflect an actual major-
ity of the population; like it, it became the government of the country during war
and revolution; like it, it behaved dictatorially. The constitutions drafted in Penn-
sylvania in 1776, and in France in 1793, were, in their formal provisions, by far the
most democratic of any produced in the eighteenth century. The Pennsylvania con-
stitution of 1776, unlike the French constitution of the Year I, was never submitted
even to the formalities of popular ratification. But the two constitutions became a
symbol of what democrats meant by democracy.
The Pennsylvania constitution vested legislative power in a single house. For the
executive it avoided the name and office of governor, entrusting executive power to
a council and “president,” a word which then meant no more than chairman. All
male taxpayers twenty- one years of age had the vote, and were eligible for any of-
fice. To sit in the assembly, however, it was necessary publicly to acknowledge the
6 For the text of the constitutions, see F. N. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial
Charters and Other Organic Laws of the... United States of America (Washington, 7 vols., 1909).
7 Douglass, op.cit., 260.