Ruling From Afar Sows the Seeds of Independence
In the world of email, video calling, and social media, connecting people from different parts of the globe is quite easy.
Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, none of these things existed. That didn’t stop European countries creating massive overseas empires. But it did make controlling them rather difficult.
Messages could take weeks if not months to travel across oceans, and major news events took just as long to break.
This meant European nations had to work hard to keep control of their empires. Everyone took a different approach, and this produced different results.
For the English, they started with a “hands off” approach. They let people go out and settle lands in the name of England. They didn’t care too much how they governed. But as the colonies grew this changed.
The Crown wanted more control. But the people living there didn’t want to give it up.
The story of how colonial governments changed and grew helps explain why the English colonies in North America eventually told England to buzz off and declared their independence.
Self-Governing Colonies
The first type of colonial government quickly became the most uncommon.
These were “self-governing” colonies.
As the name suggests, these colonies operated almost entirely independently from the Crown.
Of course, any laws they made had to make the Crown happy. If the king or queen didn’t like them, they could take away their right to self-rule at any moment.
Most of the early colonies, such as Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay, were self-governing, even if this right had not been expressly granted.
For example, the Plymouth Company never had a royal charter to settle in North America. But the Crown also never said it was in control.
So, settlers passed the Mayflower Compact. This was a sort of constitution for how the colony would be governed. It was also one of the earliest self-rule documents to come out of the colonies.
The Crown was so relaxed in the beginning because the stakes were low. Early settler groups had just a few hundred people in them. And their chances at success were low. The first try at Roanoke ended in everyone dying.
As a result, the Crown said, “go ahead, be free…if you survive.”
In the end, they did survive, and the Crown’s lax attitude wound up backfiring. As the colonies became more successful, the Crown grew more interested in control. But people had gotten used to governing themselves.
At the time of independence, only Rhode Island and Connecticute were legally self-governing colonies. But the spirit of self-rule was in the blood of the colonists. Once they got a taste, they didn’t want to give it up.
This made separation from England sound like a really good idea.
Proprietary Colonies
In addition to self-governing colonies, there were also proprietary colonies. These colonies were unique in that they were ruled by one powerful individual or family.
They remained the property of the Crown, but the government and all its affairs were managed by the individual “proprietor” left in charge.
Of the original 13 colonies, only three operated as proprietary colonies: Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
This was a good arrangement for the Crown. It did not have to invest too many resources or effort into governing the colony. But because the proprietors were given so much power from the Crown, they were loyal.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as they say.
Overall, these colonies were more loyal to England and less supportive of independence. But people still rejected the harsh taxes imposed at the end of the colonial period. It took a bit more convincing, but eventually the proprietary colonies agreed that separating from England was best.
The Dominion of New England
The 13 English colonies in North America were all separate entities. They formed for different reasons and had different governments. The Crown understood this as a weakness and tried early on to bring them together into a more manageable unit.
In 1686, under King James II, the colonies were combined into the Dominion of New England.
To make this happen, the colonial charters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey, were revoked.
Instead of self-rule, these colonies had to welcome a new sheriff to town: a royal governor.
The first governor to take this title was Sir Edmund Andros. He set up shop in Boston, which became the capital of this newly-formed Dominion.
The idea made some sense. By uniting all the colonies, they should have been easier to govern. Or, perhaps more importantly, they should have been easier to tax.
The keyword here is “should.” Things didn’t quite work out as planned.
This is because the Dominion of New England abolished the culture of self-rule in the colonies. The colonists hated that.
Plus, the way it was run was messy and went against what the colonists had worked so hard to establish in the new world.
Andros often ruled without any sort of input from his council, he disbanded as many forms of local government as possible, and tried to impose several heavy and unpopular taxes on the people living in the colonies.
He also waged an ideological war on Puritanism, the dominant religion in Massachusetts and other parts of the northeast.
To make things worse, he also imposed heavy restrictions on trade.
In other words, he did everything the king wanted and nothing the colonists needed.
So, when the Glorious Revolution happened in 1688 in England, pushing James II out of the monarchy and bringing in Mary II and William the Orange, the colonists seized the opportunity to depose Andros.
Seeing how unpopular and impractical the Dominion was, William and Mary disbanded it and recalled Andros to England. It lasted all of two years.
Colonial governments reverted back to what they had been before, and all was well for ever and ever.
Well, not really.
Royal Colonies
The failure of the Dominion of New England didn’t stop the Crown from trying to establish more direct control over the colonies.
As a result, the Crown began converting colonies into “royal colonies.”
In fact, this process began before the Dominion of New England with the conversion of Virgina (1624), New Hampshire (1679), and New York (1686) into royal colonies. But it continued in earnest starting in 1691 when Massachusetts Bay Colony was combined with Plymouth Colony and placed under royal control.
Also known as Crown colonies, these were ruled by the Crown through a royal governor appointed directly by the king.
They were supposed to rule alongside the colony’s General Assembly, which was elected by the people, but this rarely happened. The royal governor did not have to follow the General Assembly, and the royal governor could even disband the assembly at will
This created a situation where the people living in a colony had little to no say over the laws they were forced to follow. And since they also were not allowed to send representatives to Parliament in England, they were left almost entirely voiceless in their government.
One area where they did remain independent was in local government. Towns and other smaller settlements were still free to establish their own forms of administration. But they were all subjected to the colonial government and by extension the Crown.
This made the idea of self-rule a kind of tease. People had a say in some things, but in other things, they were completely shut out.
This was tolerable when the Crown had a lax attitude. But as the monarchy tried to tighten things up, the situation became much more tense and made independence a very appealing solution.
In the end, the royal colonies were supposed to be the ones most closely controlled by the crown. But the wound up being the most rebellious.
You Say You Want a Revolution
For the first 100 or so years of English colonialism in America, the Crown was pretty hands off. But as the colonies grew and became more successful, this hands off approach gave way to more direct control.
And just like teenagers rebelling against their parents’ rules, the colonists responded to the Crown with dissent. It started as a murmur and then a whisper. But by 1776, it was a loud roar.
This strong desire for self-rule came directly from the Crown’s attempt to control it. It also helped create completely separate colonies that would later become states of an independent and unified nation we now call the United States of America.
Written by Matthew Jones