A History of the American People

German and Scots-Irish workmen, as well as slaves for the heavy work. This glorious iron-
master's house was held by six generations of Ridgeleys until, in 1948, it was bought by the
National Park Service and made available to visitors.
There were equally fine, and many more, country houses built in the 18th century in Virginia,
by members of the l00 leading families-Byrds, Carters, Lees, Randolphs, Fitzhughes, and so on-
of which many, such as Westover, Stratford, and Shirley, survive. Drayton Hall, built 1738-42,
on the Ashley River, a good example of the way local American architects used classical models,
is based on Palladio's Villa Pisani, happily survived the Revolutionary and Civil wars and is now
part of the American Trust for Historical Preservation. Another, rather later masterpiece, now
part of Johns Hopkins University, is Hoewood, a Baltimore classical villa erected by the famous
Charles Carroll of Carrolltown (1737-1832), grandest of the Revolutionary politicians. These
houses and mansions sometimes contained fine libraries of ancient and modern works. A visitor
described William Byrd II's library at Westover as consisting of nearly 4,000 volumes, in all Languages and Faculties, contained in 23 double-presses in black walnut ... the Whole in excellent Order.' He added, admiringly:Great Part of the books in elegant Bindings and of the
best Editions and a considerable Number of them very scarce.' This opulent pile also still exists,
though the interiors have been remodeled.
The men who owned these country houses, and others like them along the James, the
Connecticut, and the Hudson, and the neat and in some cases spacious city houses in Boston and
New Haven, Albany and New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Williamsburg, Annapolis, and
Baltimore, would in England have sat in the House of Commons, `to keep up the consequence of
their families,' as Dr Samuel Johnson put it. In some cases they would have sat in the House of
Lords, with a writ of individual summons to parliament. In the American colonies they played a
similar role, the main difference being that they were usually forced to consort with a host of
lesser folk, many of whom could barely write their names, in helping to run the country.
American colonies had their elites everywhere. There were immense differences in wealth and
social customs, especially in the South and notably between the Tidewater grandees and the
farmers of the piedmont and the inland valleys. Sometimes these grandees behaved as if they
owned the place. Thus, in early South Carolina, the Tidewater elite did not even have a House of
Assembly but met in one another's houses, just as if they were Whig dukes holding Cabinet
dinners in London. But that kind of thing did not last. Rich Americans who got too uppity or
tried to pull a rank they did not in law possess were soon reminded that America was a society
where all freemen were equal, or liked to think they were anyway. One of the effects of slavery
was to make even poor whites assertive about their rights. They felt they were of consequence
because they were complacently aware of a huge servile class below them.
To 18th-century Frenchmen or Spaniards, who were familiar with the uniform manner in
which their own colonies were directed, with an omnipresent state, a professional bureaucracy,
and only the most nominal element of local representation, the British colonies in America must
have seemed bewildering, chaotic, and inconsistent in the way they were run. The system was
empirical and practical rather than coherent. It evolved almost organically, in the way English
institutions had always evolved. No two colonies were quite the same. The system is worth
examining in a little detail both because of its bearing on the events leading up to the American
Revolution, and because of its influence on the way the American Republic developed thereafter.
Originally all the colonies had been divided into two categories: trading or commercial
companies, run like primitive joint-stock corporations, or proprietary companies run by one or
more great landed estate-owners. All had charters issued directly by the crown. Without these