by Ray Raphael
Any retreat to monarchy, in this context, was deemed a threat to the very existence of an independent nation. There was no turning back. Through the war years and beyond, the term “monarch” raised memories of dependency on a nation that had become the enemy, so to espouse it was akin to treason. The label had such clout that republicans hurled it with some frequency at any political opponent who espoused a greater concentration of power. Since a royal monarch was the supreme instance of concentrated power in the British political tradition, anything that leaned the slightest in that direction had to bear the extra burden of denial. Advocates of a stronger central government were forced into “I’m no friend of monarchy” disclaimers, much as rebels before the war felt the need to couple their protests with professions of loyalty to the Crown. The king, and all things kingly, had become an albatross.
Such was the legacy of the British monarch in America, up to and including the first week of June 1787. All delegates to the convention meeting in the Pennsylvania State House to devise a stronger government knew this. If they happened to favor James Wilson’s motion to concentrate executive authority in a single individual, they would open themselves immediately to complaints and criticism. Better, perhaps, to let someone else speak and absorb the first blow.
On-the-ground executive authority in most colonies in British North America lay in the hands of royal and proprietary governors, by proxy from the king or queen. For the better part of two centuries, these governors had tried to exert and extend what they viewed as their prerogatives, and very often colonists resisted. While political players in the colonies were slow to oppose the British monarch, they willingly contested the men whom the monarch had chosen to execute the royal will.
The first colonial governors ruled as agents of commercial enterprises. A governor’s job was first and foremost to turn a profit for his company, and to this end he provided for the orderly occupation of land and the development of resources. A governor was entitled to collect fees and quitrents from his subjects, while the company, which he represented, benefited by exporting whatever the settlers were able to extract or produce.
All of this required the displacement of Native people, whether through negotiation or war. Governors thereby ruled with military authority, and they expected military obedience. In 1612 the Virginia Company codified its martial law in a proclamation called “Laws Divine, Morall, and Martiall”:
No manner of person whatsoever … shall detract, slander, calumniate, murmur, mutinie, resist, disobey, or neglect the commandments, either of the Lord Governour, and Captaine Generall, the Lieutenant Generall, the Martiall, the Councell, or any authorized Captaine, Commander or publicke Officer, upon paine for the first time so offending to be whipt three severall times, and upon his knees to acknowledge his offence, with asking foregivenesse upon the Saboth day in the assembly of the congregation, and for the second time so offending to be condemned to the gally for three years; and for the third time so offending to be punished with death.13
This was only one of more than three dozen measures, each intruding deeper into the lives of the colonists. “Every man” was to take “especiall and due care, to keepe his house sweete and cleane … and set his bedstead whereon he lieth, that it may stand three foote at least from the ground, as he will answere the contrarie at a martiall Court.” Any fisherman who caught a sturgeon was to “bring unto the Governour” all the fish’s caviar “upon perill for the first time offending herein, of losing his eares.” Subsequent offenses would warrant a year and then three years in the galleys.
Colonists who survived the first ordeals eventually raised their voices against military rule, so arbitrary and prone to abuse. As indentures diminished and the proportion of free citizens expanded, colonists demanded the rights of Englishmen, to which they were nominally entitled. Civil society warranted civil rule, and one by one the colonies evolved from commercial enterprises into political entities. Although Maryland and Pennsylvania, which included Delaware, remained proprietary, and Connecticut and Rhode Island maintained their original corporate charters to the eve of the American Revolution, the rest became royal colonies. This meant that citizens were subject only to the Crown, not to a private company, and that governors were no longer responsible to company shareholders.
The change simplified the line of command, but in itself it did not diminish the authority of colonial governors, who continued to exert executive, judicial, and legislative powers. Royal governors owed their primary allegiance to the Crown, which issued their orders, and only residual allegiance to the people they had been hired to rule. As Governor Benning Wentworth from New Hampshire told his assembly: “My firm attachment to his majestys person family & government challenges my first attention—my next pursuit shall be the peace & prosperity of his majestys good subjects of this Province.” True, a royal governor had to contend with other foci of political influence—a council, usually appointed in England, and a locally elected assembly, which the governor needed in order to extract taxes from colonial inhabitants—but even so the governor, acting as viceroyalty, always had the last say. He could “negative” bills at his will, and anytime he so desired, he could prorogue or dissolve the assembly.14
The presumed authority of colonial governors suffered during the English Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century, when authority in the mother country was up for grabs, but with the Restoration in 1660, King Charles II reasserted the power of the Crown over its dominions overseas. Colonial rule became the province of Privy Council members acting variously as the Committee for Trade and Plantations, Council for Foreign Plantations, or Lords of Trade. In 1696 these evolved into the Board of Trade, which tightened enforcement of trade laws. On behalf of the Crown, this powerful group appointed governors, issued their instructions, dispensed land, and sent legislation to Parliament that taxed and restricted colonial commerce. Men who wanted to become colonial governors, or those already in office who wished to remain in power, played up to these royal officials, their primary audience.
Ambitious lords and gentry in England sought colonial governorships to bolster their wealth, power, and prestige. Governors could expect to enrich their fortunes through a variety of perfectly legal channels. Anytime a colonial governor bestowed his blessing on an official transaction, he received personal compensation for sanctioning the affair. Fees for certification of vessels, letters of administration for probate, township patents, licenses to purchase land from Indians, marriage licenses, attorney’s licenses, or any other granting of a governor’s exclusive authority thus lined his pockets. So did a significant portion—generally one-third or one-half—of the fines and forfeitures paid for such infractions as bribery, practicing law without a license, derogation of courts, violation of the navigation acts, or ignoring quarantine regulations. While fines and forfeitures were set by law, fees were often determined only by “English custom,” a wording open to interpretation and abuse.15
Increasingly, colonists grumbled at the practice of awarding governorships to favored clients so they might receive the perquisites of office. According to one report submitted to the North Carolina Assembly:
Governments have bin sometimes given as a reward for services done to the Crown, and with design that such persons should thereby make their fortunes. But they are generally obtained by the favour of great men to some of their dependents or relations, and they have bin sometimes given to persons who were oblidged to divide the profit of them with those by whose means they were procured. The qualifications of such persons for government being seldom considered.16
Favoritism, nepotism, and kickback schemes—the system was not designed to win the hearts and minds of the colonists. Further, since most governors were dispatched from England, they had little familiarity with the people they were supposed to govern, the local geographies, or the political idiosyncrasies of their domains. Baron Thomas Culpeper governed Virginia for three years before venturing a brief trip there in 1680. In his absence,
Culpeper’s on-site agents extracted the quitrents, salary, fees, and fines that came with his post. During his token visit he browbeat the assembly to guarantee a permanent salary to all future governors, then hastened back to England bearing a handsome fortune, £9,500 of the provincial treasury. He also used the governorship to solidify his giant proprietary claims in the Northern Neck, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers.17
As stand-ins for the Crown, even absentee governors possessed sweeping powers. A governor appointed important colonial officials, including sheriffs and judges, so by tempting sycophants with his patronage, while cutting off those who opposed his will, he wielded great power. He possessed the authority to grant pardons, issue charters of incorporation to cities and towns, establish ports and markets, and engage in diplomatic relations with Indians. Although not directly authorized to make laws, he could exert considerable influence in the legislative arena by calling or disbanding the assembly and by negating bills it passed. As commander in chief of his colony’s armed forces, he could appoint officers (another opportunity to profit from patronage), muster and arm the militias, and even command people to move their homes should he declare the need. There was no oversight, and the people had no recourse.
A governor’s power, though, was not absolute. Erecting a fort or declaring martial law required the consent of his council. Colonial assemblies, meanwhile, held the power of the purse and often used it to their advantage. If a governor wanted money for military operations, he needed the assembly to provide funds through taxation. In some colonies, in order to receive his full salary, over and above the fees and fines that were his due, a governor first had to convene the assembly, which would pay him from the taxes it collected.
So although royal authorities and their appointed governors exerted an overarching reach over colonial affairs, significant enclaves of local power did develop. These were not ordinary colonials, of course, but prominent planters and men of commerce, the wealthiest and most ambitious, those with the most to gain and the most to lose. The colonial elite dominated not only the councils, as one would assume, but the assemblies as well, and they were not nearly so pliable and obedient as agents of the Crown would have liked.
Struggles for power between royal governors and colonials were legion. Witness Sir Edmund Andros, who for a short period of time wielded more authority than any other governor. In 1685, King James II unilaterally abolished the formerly distinct governments in Massachusetts-Bay, Plymouth, Maine, New Hampshire, Narragansett, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, East Jersey, and West Jersey. In their stead, he created a single jurisdiction, the Dominion of New England, to be ruled by Andros, a loyal supporter and former governor of New York, and a council of twenty-eight appointed by the Crown. Notably absent from this new governmental edifice were the colonial assemblies.
Andros tackled the job with the autocratic fervor James desired. He extracted quitrents that made freeholders feel like peasants. He imposed new taxes without the consent of the citizenry. (Previously, that had been the purview of the now-abolished assemblies.) He abolished town meetings. Yet the people had the last word: literally within moments of hearing that his mentor, King James II, had fled and abdicated the throne, Andros was captured, imprisoned under lock and key, and held for nine months before being shipped back to England.
The Dominion of New England was admittedly an aberration, but colonial distrust of British governors was widespread throughout the colonial era. Colonists viewed them as strangers intent on lining their pockets and ordering people around. Yet they had to be cautious in their resistance, since the governors were backed by the British Crown, so when they did go after a governor, they focused on his alleged personal shortcomings. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Edward Hyde, better known as the Viscount Cornbury, made many local enemies with his high-handed style when he assumed the governorships of New York and New Jersey. Retaliating, his critics painted him as an effete courtier and fop, a derogatory stereotype that had riled up the populace since at least Shakespeare’s day, a century past. Charges of corruption might be difficult to prove, but slander, gossip, and ridicule required no evidence. Political opponents spread the word that Cornbury was fond of dressing as a woman and prancing about, a burlesque caricature of high-toned European noblemen. This charge stuck. Half a century later, William Smith, in his seminal History of the Province of New-York, reported Cornbury’s cross-dressing as fact. By 1787, when a group of well-educated Americans meeting in Philadelphia contemplated the nature of executive authority, the stereotype that Cornbury represented—a corrupt, decadent British governor preying on his colonial subjects rather than serving them—was deeply ensconced in the American experience.18
Each colony had its litany of past abuses, its list of notorious governors. Prior to 1765, any opposition to a royal governor remained primarily a local affair, with little impact in other colonies. With the pan-colonial resistance to imperial policies that started in the mid-1760s, however, local contests took on wider significance. Contests for power in one colony were noted elsewhere, and alleged abuses, such as dissolving assemblies that challenged Parliament, became linked within a single overarching narrative.
In New York on November 1, 1765, the day the hated Stamp Act took effect, protesters focused their wrath on the acting governor, seventy-seven-year-old Cadwallader Colden, who insisted he would enforce the measure. They hung Colden in effigy, broke open his coach house, removed his prized chariot, and committed the effigy and chariot alike to flames in a giant bonfire. Previously, most resistance to governors had been contained within legal channels; this time, the lower orders turned their backs on deference and opposed executive authority in the most forthright way they could. Opposition to Colden was only one battle in a wider war against imperial taxation, a war joined by British colonies from New Hampshire to South Carolina.
In 1767, upon the suggestion of Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Parliament enacted duties on specified American imports. Colonists resisted these Townshend duties not only because they presented a new round of “taxation without representation,” a complaint featured in all American textbooks, but also because the revenues were to be used to pay the salaries of royal governors, thereby stripping the colonial assemblies of their one significant check on executive abuse, the power of the purse. Further, the Townshend Acts, as this series of parliamentary bills was labeled, officially suspended the New York Assembly, which had refused to comply with an act requiring the quartering of British soldiers in private homes; by implication, Parliament could henceforth suspend any colonial assembly. This restructuring of colonial government, disempowering the assemblies and liberating governors from their only dependency on the people they governed, angered colonists as much as the actual taxes.
The Townshend Acts were repealed in 1770, but the British ministry instigated a new crisis two years later by ordering that salaries of superior court judges, in addition to those of governors, be paid through imperial revenues, not through funds raised by the assemblies. Henceforth, the executive and judicial functions of government would lie beyond the people’s control. In Massachusetts, political activists used this latest threat to the people’s autonomy to mount a new challenge to the sitting governor, Thomas Hutchinson. American born and bred, educated at Harvard, and of impeccable moral character, Hutchinson did not fit the mold of the corrupt, conniving Englishman out for his own good, and that created problems for his political opponents. In their attack on the governor’s powers, however, Boston’s aggressive patriots were aided by Benjamin Franklin, who managed to get hold of some letters that Hutchinson had sent to his friends in high places in London. Government had been “too long in the hands of the people of Massachusetts,” Hutchinson had written. “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in the colonies, since it was impossible for people “3,000 miles distant from the parent state [to] enjoy all the liberty of the parent state.�
� That was the end of Hutchinson’s political career in Massachusetts, and it also closed the argument on colonial governors in general. Simply put, none could be trusted, ever.19
For southern delegates to the Federal Convention in 1787, there was one additional governor to vilify, a man so evil he had done the unthinkable. In November 1775, the last royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had proclaimed freedom to all slaves who joined with the British to fight against their patriot masters. “That man,” wrote George Washington at the time, “must be crushed before spring…. Nothing less than depriving him of life or liberty will secure peace to Virginia.” Twelve years later, for the president of the convention and all other delegates representing states dependent on bonded labor, the memory of Dunmore and his “diabolical schemes,” in Washington’s words, still loomed large. They could not afford to vest any executive with powers so vast that he might, by decree, commandeer the (human) property of others. That was their bottom line.20
All this was basic history, long since internalized by each of the learned delegates gathered in the Pennsylvania State House in the summer of 1787. There must be no more Dunmores, no more Hutchinsons or Cornburys or any of the rest, just as there would be no more monarchs like King George III. For every bit of authority they wished to place at the executive’s command, they would have to demonstrate they were not raising these ghosts from the dead. Just as the new executive office must include no features reminiscent of royal prerogatives, it must also be distanced from the unpopular royal governorships. The executive or executives must not be able to exert undue influence through patronage, nor should he or they possess the power to dissolve assemblies. If the executive office was given authority to negate particular acts of the legislature, that too would certainly arouse some suspicion and possibly serious resistance. The office should not provide an avenue for aggrandizement or facilitate personal ambition. Above all, any executive must in some manner remain responsible to the people, the only true source of governmental authority.
