Aristocracy: The Constituted Bodies 39
men to help them govern. A list of all who served on the councils before the Revo-
lution, according to the estimate of Professor Labaree, would include ninety per
cent of the “first families,” that is the socially prominent families, of the colonial
period. By the 1760’s in most colonies these families had repeatedly intermarried,
until “their genealogical trees became veritable jungles of interwoven branches, the
despair of the researcher but the pride of their descendants.”^26
Visitors to the restored buildings at Colonial Williamsburg can call the scene to
mind. The capitol of the royal province of Virginia stands at the end of Duke of
Gloucester Street, as it stood before the American Revolution. Its floor plan is like
the cross- section of a dumbbell. At one end is the room where the elected assem-
bly, the House of Burgesses, sat on rows of benches. The other end of the building
was used by the governor’s council. At this end, on the second floor, is a room with
twelve high- backed armchairs. Here the council sat as an upper legislative house.
Directly below, on the ground floor, is a courtroom, with twelve more high- backed
armchairs. Here the council sat as the supreme provincial court. The point is that
the same 12 men occupied both sets of chairs. We can easily picture them gather-
ing also, by threes and fours, in the adjoining committee rooms or at the palace
half a mile away, to consult with the governor on executive business. The 12 were
appointed by the governor, and while governors came and went the councillors sat,
in most cases, until death or extreme old age. They were a close- knit group. Ten of
them, in the year 1775, as they looked across at their assembled colleagues in the
high- backed armchairs, upstairs or downstairs, saw the familiar countenances of
their own relatives by blood or marriage. Ten of them knew that their own fathers
or grandfathers had sat in these same seats. In the whole period from 1660 to
1774, 91 persons were appointed to the council. Nine surnames accounted for al-
most a third of them—Page, Byrd, Carter, Lee, and 5 others.
It was much the same in the other British American provinces. In Maryland, in
1753, 8 out of 11 sitting members had fathers or grandfathers on the council be-
fore them. In New York, 25 out of 28 councillors appointed from 1750 to 1776
bore the names of great Hudson Valley landowners. When John Wentworth, a
native of the colony, became governor of New Hampshire in 1766, he had on his
council his father, an uncle, two uncles by marriage, a first cousin, a first cousin
once removed, a step- cousin and the husband of a cousin—8 out of 12. By 1773,
after filling a number of vacancies in the interim, he had raised the number of his
relatives on his council to 9. In Connecticut, the councillors were elected by the
freemen. There was less of a clearly marked and intermarried governing group in
this highly republican colony, but the freemen, like those of Uri in Switzerland,
elected and reelected men of the same families year after year. “The holders of
twenty- five surnames occupied two- thirds of all the places in the Connecticut
magistracy. These figures coincide almost exactly with those for Virginia.” A Pitkin
was elected 98 times; an Allyn, 77; a Walcott, 63. Nor is it to be supposed that the
whole number of persons with these names was especially large. It may be perti-
nent, and may satisfy those methodologists who urge the historian to divulge his
own prepossessions, to remark that a few years later there were in all Connecticut
26 L. W. Labaree, Conservatism in Early American History (N.Y., 1948), 3.