PREREVOLUTIONARY STRATIFICATIONrepo.komazawa-u.ac.jp/opac/repository/all/30118/rgs007-06.pdf · other common people had no substantive reason to hate Britain, whereas the merchants

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PREREVOLUTIONARY STRATIFICATION


D. Morgan Pierce

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. EARLY NEW ENGLAND .................................................................................... 137

2. NEW ENGLAND LAND STRATIFICATION.................................................... 141

3. THE SOUTHERN COLONIES ............................................................................ 147

4. CLASS FRICTION IN NEW ENGLAND ........................................................... 150

5. FRONTIER COLONIZATION ............................................................................ 155

6. MERCANTILE AMBIVALENCE ....................................................................... 162

7. THE BOSTON TEA PARTY ................................................................................ 167

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 172

1. EARLY NEW ENGLAND

No wealthy colonist would want American independence, because their

wealth depended on the prevailing rules of distribution, and any change,

even improvement, might alter distribution in such a way that their priority

would fall out; such people depended on the support of England to maintain

their present welfare. Under this premise it remains to inquire why colonists

who were not well off would support England, and why some who were well

off nevertheless rebelled. The Revolution displaced the colonial “aristocracy”

from colonial government; the colonial opposition to parliamentary taxation

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mobilized a popular call for independence. However, the labor class and

other common people had no substantive reason to hate Britain, whereas the

merchants and elites, whom British policy badly afflicted, opposed

independence. 1

The circulation of money is a key to understanding how the labor class

championed upper-class grievances and the upper class did not. Farmers

conducting subsistence agriculture were impassive to commercial setbacks,

whereas money circulating among farmers conducting commercial

agriculture would create a sympathetic reaction to external trade conditions.

Rough economic equality would signify that the agricultural economy,

disconnected from money circulation, was inert to political vicissitudes.

Thus, commercial buoyancy or depression did not equally affect all

agricultural regions; much would depend on the rate of conversion to

commercial agriculture.

New England should have been the least reactive to English governance.

The relatively equal land distribution in New England, contrasted with the

southern plantations, might have been due to geographical factors. However,

the preponderant reason might have been social. The climates of England

and New England were similar. Britain prohibited colonial exportation of

agricultural produce that coincided with domestic produce and prohibited

direct agricultural export to other European countries. The prohibition of

agricultural sale to England was the fundamental condition for the class

society peculiar to New England. A strong commercial demand for New

England agriculture would have caused unequal land distribution and a

1 Cf. Bailyn, Bernard; ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America”, The American Historical Review, 67 (1962), p. 340.

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class discrepancy based on plantation agriculture. Inequality would have

ignited internal strife that might have produced a popular revolutionary

movement. However, these conditions did not materialize.

Relative poverty and equality ought to have kept New England quiescent.

The English prohibition of New England export crops made its agricultural

production dead capital. Increased investment would have produced surplus

and price depreciation. Subsistence economy should have kept England

impassive to the vicissitudes of world economy. The England-New England

commercial exchange had never been a trade relation; it was an exchange of

English manufacture for money. New England trade could occur only where

it could not interfere with British trade; trade partners were neither

European nor prosperous, with the consequence that the viability of New

England commerce was always precarious. New England commerce could

not cause land value appreciation, so that there was little motivation either

to accumulate or speculate in land. 2 The commercial disinterest in land was

compatible with the religious (Puritan) intention to keep land distribution

equal. This symmetry did not alter with population growth, but only with

the proportion of commercial production within agriculture. The New

England progeny expanded agriculture in the western territory, but since

western agriculture had no access to commerce, it remained subsistence

agriculture. The population, though expanding, did not stratify because

wealth did not accumulate. When agriculture was not marketable,

conversion to commercial agriculture would be unprofitable. Remoteness of

seaports constantly diminished opportunity to convert subsistence into

commercial production. Only remote markets could enable conversion to

2 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 118.

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commercial agriculture. Neighboring markets do not enable commercial

production because there is no comparative advantage that would make it

cheaper for one region to buy its neighbor’s surplus production. Since only

the oldest seaboard settlements had accessibility to overseas markets,

differential distribution of income could obtain only on the seaboard.

Increased production would generate profit only if there was a vent in foreign

markets, but this was not a sufficient ground for accretion of landholding.

Agriculture had to be near a seaport, but purchasable land was progressively

distant. Expansion of landholding would entail hired labor. Export vents for

southern agriculture would make day labor or slavery profitable, where the

profits of greater production would offset the cost of labor. This was not an

option for New England. Surplus capital was invested in commerce.

The rate of conversion from subsistence to commercial agriculture

established economic inequality and class strife primarily in the southern

colonies. The profitability of land accumulation would create large

landholding and a landless labor class, and, since the commercial conditions

of production would make money circulate through both classes, class

hostility developed; day laborers migrated into North Carolina, and the

hostility of the slave was an irremediable datum. The money of New England

commerce did not circulate through the regions of subsistence economy.

Surplus profit from New England agriculture formed neither class hostility

nor increased agricultural investment. The indigent subsistence farmers of

New England should have been incapable of developing conflict with the

merchant class in the seaboard colonies. Of course, this inference is

completely wrong.

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2. NEW ENGLAND LAND STRATIFICATION

The original Puritan scheme of land apportionment intended to sustain

equality; the Puritan ideology of equality that germinated under entirely

different conditions, in England, was serendipitously compatible with the

conditions of land distribution in New England. Higher-ranking New

England colonists received a deferentially greater amount of land, but the

allotment difference was moderate; the high ranking member could neither

infeudate the common farmers, nor could a person to buy as much land as he

had money to pay. Puritan land distribution referred to a religious rather

than a pecuniary rationale. A society in its infantile stages organizes on the

most primitive form of social organization, religious principles, which are

capable of obtaining for as long as the conditions for more advanced social

organizations have not yet intruded.

Social homogeneity was beneficial for as long as religious rationale

governed structuration. The social economy was fragile. Other colonies had

gone extinct; colonial companies, finding colonization unprofitable, had

abandoned their colonial projects. A colony had better chances of survival

under wilderness conditions if all the members of the society composed a

unity, to which purpose a pronounced economic equality was propitious. The

Puritans, refugees from England, were vividly conscious of the intentions of

the mother country to exterminate Puritanism in New England; under the

influence of John Laud, England had prepared a naval and military force to

that purpose. Vulnerability made internal cohesion imperative in New

England. The pilgrims, who had previously settled in Dutch society, left

Holland, the most tolerant of all European societies, and migrated to New

England specifically to remove their children from exposure to non-Puritan

ideas in Dutch society. To protect the ideas of Puritanism in their children,

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they migrated to an environment where there were no competing ideas.

Under such awareness of past and present persecution, the community was

too weak to afford the extra cost of class antagonism, as would emerge from

normal degrees of stratification and economic inequality.

When the colony achieved greater economic stability, the emergent elite

group might find it conducive to promote its divisive economic interests, at

the expense of class conflict, rather than to accept economic constraints for

the sake of social homogeneity. The distribution of wealth varies directly

with economic organization; the more developed the economy, the greater the

inequality of economic distribution. Commercial communities were in toto

much wealthier, had a high index of wealthy individuals, and a higher

proportion of the total wealth belonged to the elite. The poor people in a

wealthy community will take up a higher percentage of the population than

in a poor community. A community never becomes wealthy absolutely, in the

sense that all individuals become wealthier and no individuals become

poorer.

This summary is too univocal. Division of labor is supposedly good because

it raises the total economy; its detrimental effect, economic inequality, is a

minor evil outweighed by its benefits. It is ambiguous whether inequality of

wealth is an inert after-effect, or an operative cause of higher economy. If

economic inequality is a negative effect that is not causal, it is per se evil; it

is tolerated only because it is an inseparable outcome of the same cause that

produces the good effect. Another possibility is that inequality is a per se

evil, but an instrumental good; inequality is a prior causal factor that brings

about the greater good. Puritan Boston faced this ambiguity in its transition

from Puritan to Yankee New England. Business interests attenuated the

priority of the previous religious mission. Whereas the affluence of the

southern colonies had not developed the ambiguity concomitant with a

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merchant class, the prohibition of agricultural commerce had made this

ambiguity an essential characteristic of New England.

A wealthy merchant recognizes the social superiority and authority of the

minister, and the content of this recognition appears to be ridiculous. The

minister, though socially superior, is tyrannical, because his authority is not

conducive to that in which the merchant is primarily interested. The

merchant must wonder whether the social priority of the minister might not

be something outgrown, irrelevant. Two solutions might ensue. The

merchant might retain the minister by subordinating him to the function of

sanctifying his commerce, or he might decide to ignore the minister, as an

anachronistic remainder from a bypassed age. The economy of the colonial

settlement had sufficiently stabilized to afford internal strife, and the dread

of English oppression, driving the compulsion for solidarity, had subsided. As

non-Puritan populations mixed into New England, the religious

requirements for the community apportionment of land weakened.

Conditions for a higher form of social organization had set in. If the

weakness of Boston vis-à-vis England was no longer perilous, the leading

class might calculate that Boston could afford more internal strife; one could

pursue commercial gain despite the expense of economic inequality and class

division.

Land brokerage might have been a retaliation of the upper classes against

the labor classes. Until the 1730s, New England established new towns and

settlements by conferring equal parcels of land to new Puritan families,

gratis. The practice reflected a Puritan communal intention to prevent

formation of stark class distinctions. The Puritan emphasis on equality had

encumbered mercantile progress; land speculation abrogated conditions for

social equality. England had awarded suffrage through the concept that a

person should have the right to vote only if the course of society would have

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immediate effects on that person; a person could be trusted with the vote

only if he had a compelling reason to wish for the well-being of society: “stake

in society.” This criterion postulated that individuals who contribute to

society should be entitled to vote. The colonial (e.g. Maryland) shift to

advocacy of “manhood suffrage” signified that individuals should have a

right to vote, not because they contribute, but because they stand to suffer

from the course of society. The “stake in society” criterion for suffrage favored

control by the gentry, and for the gentry; the “universal suffrage” model

suggested emancipation of the labor class from elite political control. The

slogan of universal suffrage served as a means to recruit support for the

revolution. 3

The “stake in society” formulation would disinhibit political control by the

wealthier classes, whereas universal suffrage would make the polity

democratic. The broad colonial preferences tended towards democratic

sentiment. Consonant with recent English history, the colonists had

preferred local militias because a standing professional army raised tax rates

and, more gravely, enabled central government to override civil liberties.

Colonial regimentation of colonial armies in the French and Indian and the

Revolutionary Wars was egalitarian; the armies did not establish recognition

of a colonial upper class in the guise of a practical necessity for command.

Colonial society had been too primitive to organize public investment;

similarly to how English corporations had assumed public functions, wealthy

individuals constructed public facilities at private expense. It had been an

English tradition for the great landowners, not British government, to build

communal structures such as schools, mills, roads, etc. The English colonists

3 Cf. Skaggs, David Curtis; ‘Maryland’s Impulse Toward Social Revolution: 1750-1776”’ The Journal of American History, 54 (1968), p. 784.

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persisted in assigning public expenses to private proprietors. When a formal

government arose from incorporation of a town, conflict developed over the

control of what now had become public facilities. Though built at private

expense, the only way for the proprietor to keep control of this property was

to control government. As more people came into the town who were not

proprietors, conflict over control of government policy emerged between this

and the proprietary group. The former proprietors formed an oligarchy that

attempted to control the government in its own interests. Conflicts centered

on taxation, compulsory labor requirements on roads and other public

improvements, and most importantly, on land policies. 4

By the 1730s, the merchant class had grown too strong to be overruled;

land speculation was an enticing opportunity for capital investment. The

colonial courts started to grant land for settlement to speculators instead of

settlers; the settler had to purchase a freehold. Many of the land grants were

illegitimate. Any group that comes in control of government will inevitably

form a class, and legislate for the public order only when its own interests

are convergent. Allocation of policy to the public authority does not resolve

the problem of self-interest, because the members of government are just as

self-interested as any other group. This problem is more concentrated for

societies with non-democratic elections.

Large landowners, who administered government, were interested in

restricting land sale of public land so that the real estate value of their own

land holdings would increase. The merchants of the coastal provinces had

accumulated enough capital from English trade to purchase all possible

territory to which the settlers might want to migrate. Land prices became


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exorbitant; the prospective settlers, who did not benefit from English

commerce, did not have capital for land purchase. If they settled a frontier

without purchase, government policy was to evict them and award whatever

improvement they accomplished to the landowner. 5 What was the motive

behind the conversion from free allotment to land brokerage? The

government, which had extricated itself from Puritan control, may have

eliminated an inconvenient element of Puritan democracy from land

settlement, and thereby attenuated the political power of the people, who

were critical of the government clique.

New land conveyed through speculative marketing would accumulate not

with the common people but with a capitalistic elite, who would support

government. 6 Instead of municipal land grants, public officials, including

judges, used public powers to award land grants to themselves and their

friends. Great landowners conspired to throttle frontier land sale to optimize

the real estate value of their possessions. The same landowners withdrew

“the commons,” land for common use, so that smallholders would be pressed

to settle in the great landholder’s land at higher land prices. Ordinary

colonists however did manage to derive smallholdings from the remaining

public land; the county courthouses awarded the land to the squatters

instead of evicting them. The great landowners failed to corner the land, and

their power in this regard collapsed. 7

If there were to be antagonistic groups in the colonies, England quite

5 Cf. Hacker, Louis M.; The Triumph of American Capitalism, Columbia University Press, 1947, p. 108.6 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 132.7 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 132.

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reasonably wanted to introduce alternatives by which the antagonists within

the dichotomy would be the poor, because the poor are impotent. England

arranged for the social fissures of colonial society to split in such a way that

loyalists would be wealthy, and patriots, to anticipate a new term, would be

poor. England promoted the wealth of those showing prospects of loyalty, and

adopted policies that would curtail the wealth of antagonistic groups whose

wealth would otherwise have increased. This conflicted with the previous

English strategy deployed for colonial migration.

3. THE SOUTHERN COLONIES

As long as colonial migration had been from a region of scarce land and

cheap labor to a region of abundant land and expensive labor, migration

would proceed spontaneously; migration would not be a great cost to the

government. If colonial land ceased to be inexpensive, labor would become

cheaper as those who could not obtain freeholds would seek employment. If

the wage gap between colonial and home labor were to close, people would

cease to indenture themselves for migration at their own expense. Populating

colonies would then become a formidable cost to the British government. The

initial omen occurred in the first mature colonial industry: tobacco. During

the 1680s, the English re-export of tobacco to Europe contracted; it was the

first time that a colonial export went into recession. At the same time, labor

shortage curtailed tobacco production; the English had ceased to emigrate

when English wage rates improved. As personal initiative to emigrate waned

because of the narrowing wage differential, it became too expensive for

England to populate the colonies with native English. England tapped into

the ethnic and religious distress of European countries; transplantation of

foreign religious outcasts had become less expensive than transplantation of

Englishmen for economic incentive. The labor shortage forced the colonists

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to substitute indentured servants with slaves.

Class distinctions were more indistinct in the colonies than in the mother

country. Royalist immigration and plantation economy provided the best

conditions for economic inequality, but, unlike Europe, the inequality of the

southern colonies did not originate from cities. The South had tried to create

cities and a middle class. Why? It failed. Why? Middle class in this context

connotes a non-agricultural class of independent entrepreneurs. In the

southern colonies, artisanal work progressed on the plantations rather than

in villages. The artisan was, as it were, a private property of the plantation

owner; if artisanal work had started in villages, the trajectory of the artisan

would have been independent of the plantation owner. In England,

artisanship had evolved from manorial, to village, to urban independence;

what factor deterred parallel evolution of independent artisanal profession

in the southern colonies?

The English artisan had no opportunity to acquire a small farm, and

artisanship had lower social ranking than smallholding or tenancy. The

colonial artisan did not evolve through the same progression because he

could graduate to small landholding. Land ownership presented a powerful

opportunity of capital accumulation; artisanal capital at the end of a career

would be negligible, whereas the same investment in land might culminate

in great capital value. Artisans progressed into smallholding. Wages and

prices for most of this period were set by competitive market forces and were

higher than those prevailing in England. 8 The incessant dwindling of

artisanal workers prevented guilds, such as had formed in England; the

scarcity of artisanal labor kept wages for artisanal work inordinately high,

8 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 122

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so that there was no motivation to form guilds. The shortage of artisanal

labor induced the plantation owner to maintain proprietary artisans. It was

a market flaw. Distributively, it was better for every artisan to abandon

artisanship for a smallholding, but collectively, the rational choice of each

artisan would cause social harm.

The southern colonies legislated to supplement its deficiency in skilled

labor. Virginia legislated prohibitions against abandonment of an artisanal

trade. Maximum wage laws and regulations over volume and quality of

tobacco were legislated. Most of the colonies experimented at one time or

another with government regulation of wages, working conditions, and the

prices of goods consumed by labor. These initiatives to control professional

distribution were overwhelmed by the superior capital value of land

ownership and by the option of farming. Artisans could not rise to higher

social levels unless they converted to agriculture. Scarcity of artisanship

raised the wage rate of artisanship. The market mechanism of high wage

rates usually expands employment, but, oddly, it was the primary cause of

artisanal depletion; high wages enabled artisans to change to agriculture.

Depletion of artisanal supply motivated plantation owners to train slaves

in the unavailable skills. Only after the Southern colonies had succeeded less

well than the northern colonies in developing industry did they turn to

artisanal training of slaves. 9 The towns and cities of the northern colonies

expedited artisanal development, whereas the failure of town development

in the southern colonies led to the training of slaves for artisanal work. 10 The

9 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 59.10 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 59.

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racial theme is irrelevant to the covert assumption that slave labor, having

no political representation, was an inert element with no effect on social

stratification. Though slaves themselves did not politically participate,

slavery exerted enormous political effect by displacement of people who

would have constituted towns and the social stratification of a middle class.

In both England and France, steep economic difference constituted a natural

progression by which great landholders accumulated in the cities, but this

did not obtain in the southern colonies. If cities had developed in the

southern colonies, social inequality would have been more trenchant.

4. CLASS FRICTION IN NEW ENGLAND

New England migration had first behaved normally; relatively destitute

individuals migrated from a densely populated area with no prospect of

employment to a less populated frontier with a prospect of farmland.

Introduction of exploitative land brokerage reversed the population flow;

population flowed backwards into the older areas of settlement. In 1760,

there were one and a half million British American colonists; within 30

years, the population grew to nearly four million. Only 110,000 lived beyond

the Appalachian ridge. 11 Migration exacerbated inequality in wealth exactly

where population was growing. Populations migrated from poorer to richer

sections, presumably from the inference that where there was more wealth

there would be more opportunity. Class conflict starts only where classes

have matured; the natural movement of population from the poor to the rich

sections automatically aggravates class friction.

For as long as the agrarian poor could believe in the possibility of social

11 Cf. Channing, Charles; A History of the United States, Volume Ⅲ, The American Revolution, 1761-1789, p. 528.

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ascent, class friction would not intensify. The return migration from the

western frontier into Boston signified that the disadvantaged believed in

osmotic communication of the social classes; proletarian classes in England

or France would not have succumbed to such an illusion. 12 The bare fact that

urban and rural labor classes cooperated with upper class resistance against

the British signifies a belief in compatibility. Different prospects animated

the labor class support of the elite. A labor class that found itself

unconditionally precluded from social advancement would favor insurrection

in the hope of a benevolent successor. Whether the proletariat would adopt

this impulse depended on whether they perceived Parliament, or the colonial

assembly, to be the repressive factor.

This paradigm does not work perfectly. The colonial labor class was not,

and did not feel, oppressed; it was entirely the upper classes that British

policy was afflicting. The elite vacillated over whether or not to excite labor

class opposition against Britain; the predictable result would be a labor class

yodeling for liberty and equality. Demand for liberty or equality was possible

as a popular campaign slogan because it was a slight disguise for the naïve

belief that the labor class would receive better treatment if British

government withdrew. This was an illusion; the outcome sought from

successful revolution would have entailed the same conditions as the labor

class presently bore. A more rational slogan would have targeted

concentrated wealth, not British oppression, but on this formulation, the

labor class remained silent. Laborers had adopted the delusion that in a new


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society there would be possible graduation into a privileged class. 13

Colonial class interests could not have been as divergent as they had been

in Europe; in the colonial environment, certain democratic ideals did not

pique aristocratic formation. Aristocratic factions had cherished

philosophical ideas of civil rights since before the Glorious Revolution; these

ideals had been engendered not from an oppressed lower class, but had

transpired from earlier European upper classes to the colonial labor class.

The check and balance device that was to be built into the American

Constitution originated from Montesquieu, and would preserve the

aristocracy, as well as the people, from legal encroachment. There was no

authentic aristocracy in the American colonies. Aristocracy traditionally

depended on land monopoly; it was infeasible in America. Those in the

higher classes of the colonies sought a similar ascendancy in commercial

devices. As small landholders had no capital, colonial smallholding was

congenial to the upper class; it could ascend from the profit from financing

smallholders. 14

Both principal areas, Virginia and New England, did form a proto-wealthy

class, which occupied the government and commercial positions according to

English pattern. The southern colonies had achieved a non-democratic

representational system similar to that of England; representation was

regionally distributed, but the representation excluded the common

population from government and suffrage. Despite emergence of a colonial

upper class, which should have been to England’s favor, the outcome of social

13 Cf. Nettles, Curtis P.; The Roots of American Civilization, George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1963, p. 685.14 Cf. Nettles, Curtis P.; The Roots of American Civilization, George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1963, p. 685.

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stratification was, oddly, the reverse; the colonial upper class articulated the

rebellion. The colonial upper class did not form into a bulwark for English

interests.

The fixity of agricultural production in the southern colonies made a non-

democratic representational system possible. Since productions were

constantly the same, no new social groups emerging from novel sources of

profit ever upset the composition of the wealth producing groups; by simple

land engrossment, the upper class families could anchor their power across

generations without disturbance from trades that were independent of the

traditional basis of wealth. An established Anglican Church and a non-

democratic representation prevailed because of the productive fixity of an

agricultural economy. The homogeneity of production, principally rice,

tobacco and then cotton, fostered the transformation of agriculture to huge

land-holding plantation economies; the per-unit production of a homogenous

crop is greater than per-unit production of dispersed land holding. The

plantation economy was thus able to continue the legacy of the English

agricultural class structure. 15 Six percent of the population owned more than

sixty percent of the slaves and more than fifty percent of the land. More than

half the white population of Virginia and Maryland owned no land, although

some were tenant farmers. The percentage of landholders was, moreover, on

the decrease; in 1756, 44% of the Maryland population consisted of

landholders; by 1771, the percentage of landholders had dwindled to 37%.

Apart from the obvious, that fewer middling people owned land, the trend

meant that the power of the plantation owners was not holding, but

increasing; southern agricultural society was strongly forming into


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aristocracy. 16 Virginia ought to have been staunchly loyalist, and colonial

patriotism ought to have stemmed only from the inconsiderable poor white

and frontier population. The opposite, seemingly against logic, was the case.

Regional representation had English and European origins, but the

equation of regional with popular representation was distinctly American. In

the wake of the parliamentary decision to close and fix the assignment of

colonial representative seats, frontier settlements did not receive assembly

seats when their population matured. The older and wealthier seaboard

regions withheld the assembly seats for themselves, so that the regional

limitation on representation was equivalent to a class limitation. The

colonists regarded limited regional representation as fraudulent because it

excluded popular representation. Regional representation did not meet its

definition when the representation corresponded to particular classes rather

than to mere numerical units of population in the given region. 17 Ironically,

the colonies engendered this revolutionary idea of popular representation,

nowhere reflected in Europe, from the English initiative to revamp the

dominance of the colonial proto-aristocracy over the commoners. The idea

originated from the frontier population, which the English instruction

against extension of assembly seats had precluded from political

participation.

The New England merchant class deceptively appears to follow the English

pattern in the direction of a representative aristocracy. Virginia’s agricultural

economy was more conducive to the English tradition because monoculture

16 Cf. Simmons, R. C.; The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence, Longman, 1976, p. 321.17 Cf. Bailyn, Bernard; ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America”, The American Historical Review, 67 (1962), p. 347.

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determined that class members in successive generations came to the same

economic positions as they had in the previous generation. In New England,

by contrast, there was no natural source of wealth; each generation had to

improvise the source of wealth. Whereas limited geographical representation

was compatible with Virginia gentry, the same form of representation in New

England tended to democracy, because annual commercial variations brought

new interest groups, so that the commercial factors had no time to settle into

defined economic classes. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary period, as the

region took on its most defined class structure prior to national

independence, a vociferous lower class impinged upon political affairs, both

in northern and southern colonies. 18

5. FRONTIER COLONIZATION

Due to the prior migration policies, those who became loyalists were not

always the wealthy, but, paradoxically, the fringe minorities. At a time when

European nations thought that national power was equivalent to the size of

their populations, England sought to retain her native population by enticing

persecuted nationals from other countries to take refuge in the British

Atlantic colonies. This enticement consisted in promising the foreign

immigrants “the rights of an Englishman,” i.e. the identical legal status as

that of the English American colonists. This was not an idea that the English

American colonists welcomed. The policy was a first-ever event in European

history. The tradition had been for a foreigner never to have the status of

citizen except in his country of origin; a foreign national was to have the

second-class status of denizen in any non-native country even if he settled

18 Cf. Hofstadter, Richard; America at 1750: A Social Portrait, Vintage Books, 1973, p. 142.

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permanently; there had never been an institution for changing citizenship.

Contrary to custom, England protected the foreign immigrants from the

majoritarian tyranny of the colonists of English descent. The English

legislation had fomented resentment against the foreign immigrants, since

changing national habitation usually involved a severe forfeiture of rights

and status. The Scotch-Irish had migrated to New England because of the

close affinity of their Presbyterianism with New England Puritanism, but

within the next generations, they migrated to the remote southwest

Appalachian territories to escape the hostility of their religious cognates.

This was paradigmatic; presumably the objection against them was not that

their religion was slightly different from Puritanism, which was theologically

quite liberal, but because they were Scotch-Irish.

Loyalists turned out largely to consist of later minority groups, because

these groups had depended on England to sustain their rights where English

colonists were overbearing. 19 The older colonists of English descent were

most likely to oppose Britain, because British commercial policy afflicted the

upper-class colonists, and the earlier colonial settlements were more likely to

belong to that group. The determination of the English to sustain the

equality of the foreign nationals accounts for why the immigrants did not

segregate into separate regions and persist with their native languages. The

Quakers and the German immigrants in Pennsylvania had vigorously fought

against English economic abuses, having at one climax expelled the governor

appointed by Penn. They had wanted a royal government to supplant the

proprietary government. Prior to the Revolutionary War, the Quakers did not

19 Cf. Phillips, Kevin; The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America, Basic Books, 1999, p. 166.

－ 157 －


oppose Britain. 20

The Quakers refused participation in any war from religious principle.

They maintained close association with the Quakers in England, which

preponderated over their reasons for antipathy against Britain. The Quakers

owed their prosperous class position to international commerce, which could

continue only through English collaboration. Germany had severely

persecuted the Anabaptists, and the generosity of the English, implemented

to promote colonial migration, had rescued them. Later immigrants could

not sympathize with the first colonial generations; the colonists of the coastal

areas were preoccupied with commercial interests, i.e. British trade, whereas

the inland and transappalachian colonists were primarily concerned with

local settlement.

The two sets of interests were incompatible; if government spent less

capital funds on frontier settlement, more funds for British commerce were

investible. The English had fostered this incompatibility; the South Carolina

Charter of 1701 fixed the distribution of the Assembly representatives so

that the earliest provinces would always preponderate over the frontier

provinces, regardless of whether the cisappalachian frontier out-populated

the commercially active provinces. In consequence, the frontier colonists

were primarily hostile to their coastal compatriots and only secondarily

hostile to the prime movers, the English.

The frontier colonists inclined to rebel against the English, except when the

coastal colonists rebelled against England. The Scotch-Irish, predominating

in the frontier, had further reason for primary hostility to the English.

Economic aggressions of the English had driven them out of Scotland into


D. Morgan Pierce

－ 158 －

Ireland, and several generations afterwards English economic aggressions,

again, forced them to leave Ireland and migrate to America; they could not

have been confused about the primary perpetrator. This was, however,

complicated; the Scotch-Irish had chosen to migrate to New England because

of the large agreement between Presbyterianism and Puritanism. The

doctrines did largely agree. The Puritans however took great exception to

Presbyterianism, and ostracized the new immigrants, who reacted by moving

to the frontier areas to the south, where the coastal provinces abusively

ignored them.

REGULATORS

The fundamental ground for loyalty in the face of countervailing forces was

the English legacy. The first colonists were English; the later colonists were

not. The oldest colonists were therefore the elite, and possessed their

preeminence by virtue of the social institutions they founded before the

arrival of non-English colonists; forms of governance and economy were in

imitation of those of England rather than of Ireland, Scotland, or Germany.

The elite could maintain their eminence by asserting their Englishness in

contrast to forms of other ethnic origins; the force of this distinctive identity

persisted by virtue of the essentially English law and constitution. The

native aristocracy of merchants and landholders in New England and the

plantation owners in Virginia vaguely imitated the English composition of

aristocracy.

Parliament had wanted a colonial aristocracy, by which the colonies would

be more amenable to control. The British were however horrified that anyone

might equate or confuse colonial “aristocrats” with British aristocrats.

Parliament therefore improvised Spanish and American Indian names for

the various ranks of the proposed colonial nobility. The colonial upper class

－ 159 －


was predominantly English by lineage; they pretended their eminence by

virtue of their Englishness. It was a stinging assault on their pretension for

priority when Parliament demurred over whether colonists could have

English rights, on the ground that they were not, in truth, English. The

parliamentary attitude undermined the ground on which the colonial upper

class asserted their authority over other colonial classes. The ethnically

English colonial upper class had to be very sensitive to this aspersion

because the pretension to superiority by virtue of English descent was

already fragile. These upper class colonists were not aristocratic by descent

from English aristocrats; their ancestors had migrated to America because

they were the scum of English society: convicts, indentures, religious

deviants, etc.

The English had assumed that the predominantly English colonial

aristocracy would naturally go into alliance with the British officials, vis-à-

vis the colonial commoners. The restriction of colonial assembly seats was

part of this design; the inchoate colonial aristocracy used the property

qualifications on the franchise and office holding, the laws of primogeniture

and entail, and judicial appeal to dominate the government and economy of

the colonies. England had provided a derivative of medieval feudalism for

colonial habitation: tenancy. England was partially causal in the formation

of colonial aristocracy, for so long as the British presentiment persisted that

an aristocratic class would naturally collaborate with England, whereas a

common class would spontaneously oppose its upper class, and by association

the mother country. Land engrossment followed upon English laws that

promoted a colonial upper class whose interests would align with those of

England. Primogeniture and entailment fostered an American aristocracy.

Various laws that prevented small freeholding in favor of tenancy stifled the

growth of an agricultural middle class. The English prohibition of colonial

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 160 －

paper currency favored the plantation aristocracy, inasmuch as it impeded

small freeholders from surmounting their debts, eventually forcing them to

yield their small land holdings to the great plantation owners.

The British intended that a colonial analogue to the English institutions of

established religion, economic inequality, and aristocracy would guarantee

the alignment of colonial interests with those of England. 21 They surmised

that conflict could come only from the lower classes, which would be

powerless. However, the governor and the council or the upper house, who

were to be the aristocratic interests, atrophied, while the lower house

assembly achieved virtually all political power, and came to represent the

common colonial, rather than imperial, interests. The colonial government

ought to have represented exclusively upper class colonial interests; there

was never supposed to be any plebeian participation in government. Against

plan and expectation, demographic forces had shifted government

representation to the middling interests; Britain had not split the

government from the people the way it intended. There intervened a

productive stratification; social classes instead formed from the

determination of what they produced.

The western territories might be supposed to have been more predisposed

to revolt than the east coast; the western colonists, being remote and non-

elite, and too separate to benefit from British commerce, would have less

interest in affability with the English. The western frontiers, being the least

developed area, had the most egalitarian wealth distribution. 22 Nevertheless,

21 Cf. Bailyn, Bernard ;‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America”, The American Historical Review, 67 (1962), p. 340.22 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 121.

－ 161 －


the Revolutionary War originated from the group that had the best reason to

preserve British amity: the East coast elite. It would be silly to assume

implicitly that western colonists felt hostility to seaboard commerce due to

an idea that their advocacy of “equality” made them morally superior to the

seaboard peoples, who had abandoned such a value. Class friction was,

rather, a motivation for the less well off within the wealthy areas. The social

inequality of the seaboard was the condition for revolutionary activity; the

revolutionary movement originated from endogenous class relations of the

social groups of the East coast. The feasibility of social ascent could have

induced the east coast labor class to support the commercial class instead of

demonizing them. The two classes would not have split because of upper

class trepidation concerning the labor class advocacy of social equality. 23

The later immigrants were already declassed. The prior English colonists

had become an incipient upper class that would take advantage of the later

wave of immigrants. The coastal North and South Carolina colonists had

pre-empted the frontier; their occupation of the colonial assembly legally

enforced the capitalistic predilections of the landowners, who intended to

charge exorbitant land prices. The Carolina assemblies had manipulated

taxation so that the poor frontier cisappalachian and transappalachian

provinces would pay higher tax rates than the commercial coastal provinces,

although the same assemblies would not ratify expenditure for protection of

the frontier from Indian raids nor finance ordinary domestic policing. The

frontier colonists autonomously established an organization, “the Regulators”

to suppress banditry and Indian terrorism. The colonial assemblies forthwith

designated the Regulators as an outlaw group, and which they eventually

23 Cf. Morison, Samuel Eliot; The Oxford History of the American People, Volume One, Meridian Books, 1994, p. 262.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 162 －

exterminated in battle on May 16th, 1771. 24 The Regulators had privately

carried out police functions for which the colonial assembly refused

allocations; the Regulators were not rebellious. The colonial assembly had

stigmatized them as outlaws because they were composed of non-elite groups

who were acting independently of the assembly.

The frontier colonists had from most recent history strong reason to make

their proximate enemy their prime enemy; they adopted whatever position

was opposite that of the coastal colonists: ‘Whoever is the enemy of our

enemy is our friend; if the coastal provinces want to oust the British, we

want to keep loyalty to the British.’ This sort of reaction was ambivalent; the

western settlers might rebel against the English from the antecedent

reasons. Correctly perceiving the English as the primary cause of their

affliction, they might hope that a patriotic victory would liberate them from

the undemocratic subordination to the East Coast Assembly. 25

6. MERCANTILE AMBIVALENCE

The upper classes had refrained from opposing the English because they

recognized that by opposing the English the lower classes would support

them against the English. It is peculiar for the upper class to have feared,

not opposition from their lower class, but support. The lower class would

eagerly cooperate, but might remove the privileges with which the English

invested the mercantile and upper class. The upper class could get the

substantial support of the lower class only by promising democratic

24 Cf. Smith, Howard R.; Economic History of the United States, The Ronald Press Company, 1955, p. 61.25 Cf. Channing, Charles; A History of the United States, Volume Ⅲ, The American Revolution, 1761-1789, p. 197.

－ 163 －


concessions that they did not want the lower class to have. As the British

conflict advanced the upper class dependence on the labor class became

desperate; they had no alternative but to promise democratic legislation.

Hypothesizing the above, the upper class would undergo a new split during

the Revolutionary War. The upper class had temporized on democratic

innovations in the pre-Revolutionary period, for the sake of protecting their

privileges, and for the sake of containing disagreement internal to the upper

class. The promise of democratic innovation would grant what one sector of

the upper class had most dreaded; the elite loyalist-patriot split during the

war would become more trenchant than it had been prior to the war. The

democratic promise was indispensable; paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin,

the colonial leaders would either hang together, or hang separately. To enlist

the labor classes they would have to advocate democratic liberation that they

privately hated. As soon as Britain could no longer hang them, the upper

class would renege on the promise of democracy. The elite anticipated loss of

their privileges in the case of victory, since Britain could no longer support

their class position. They had the same anxiety as the loyalists, differing

only in the respect that the loyalists saw no hope for preserving privilege

without the support of England, whereas these patriots, though equally anti-

democratic, hoped to erect new protection for themselves within a new

American polity.

Other elites, who saw democracy, similarly to the idea of checks and

balances, as a device to prevent the types of oppression endemic to the

English tradition, would hold to the promises they had made to the lower

class. 26 Jefferson had regarded Virginia’s repeal of the primogeniture and

26 Cf. Simmoons, R. C.; The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence, Longman, 1976, p. 152.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 164 －

entail laws as the greatest reform Virginia ever achieved. Primogeniture was

an intergenerational device that instituted steep class divisions by correcting

against equal distribution of wealth. It forced wealth to return to an

aristocratic default position, which annulled any incremental gain by the

lower classes. It returned the same distribution of wealth to the original

small aristocracy, regardless of the mistakes by which this same group in the

preceding generation had lost their wealth. Primogeniture and entail had

functioned somewhat like what a regressive income tax. Jefferson

characterized the Virginia repeal as part of ‘a system by which every fiber of

ancient or future aristocracy would be eradicated; and a foundation laid for a

government truly republican.’ 27 Although southern society as a whole

emulated the English aristocratic class structure, the most indispensable

element thereof, primogeniture, could not have functioned in the southern

colonies. Land needed to be severely restricted in order for an English

aristocracy to form. In the southern colonies, every attempt to restrict the

enormous availability of cheap land, most particularly preemption, was

bound to fail.

Just prior to the Revolutionary War the merchant class was holding a tiger

by the tail. Pre-war Boston society had become unequal; the top 10% of the

taxpayers in 1771 owned nearly two thirds of the wealth and held most of

the important town offices. 28 The wealthy could hold down the labor class

through two features; 1) they shifted blame for colonial social inequality to

England, and 2) they depended on England to protect colonial class

27 Cf. Bailyn, Bernard; ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America”, The American Historical Review, 67 (1962), p. 345.28 Cf. Kulikoff, Allan; The Progress Of Inequality In Revolutionary Boston, The William And Mary Quarterly, third series, 28 (1971), pp. 375-412.

－ 165 －


hierarchy. The merchant position was hypocritical. The parliamentary

legislation, prominently the Sugar Act and Tea Act, affected the merchant

class directly. The elite could resist English commercial oppression only by

enlisting the labor class against England, but the same reasons would turn

labor against the merchant class as had turned them against England.

Colonial merchants had wanted the commercial liberty of which the English

had deprived them; apart from this deprivation, the merchants would never

have become restive.

The colonial politicians readily complied with the merchants from

apprehension that British placemen would supplant the colonial

governments. The colonial upper class was antagonistic not only to

Parliament but to local government. Colonial governors, native Englishmen

appointed by the Crown, had the power of prerogative; they could supersede

the colonial assemblies to appoint native Englishmen in government

position, they accepted bribery to appoint government officials, and they paid

off other officials to impetrate illegal acts of government. The corruption in

colonial government consistently favored British interests. The colonials

developed a conviction that they could eliminate bribery and other corruption

only if government were limited to the local town level, on the model of town

meetings, in which the candidates and elected officials were immediately

acquainted with the people. 29 This “town meeting” model connoted that no

native English placemen would occupy colonial government posts.

Only the labor class was intrinsically indifferent to the issue of colonial

mercantile privilege. The people would have ignored the Sugar Act and the

Stamp Act if it had not been for Samuel Adams. The colonial body had not

29 Cf. Schutz , John A.; “Representation, Taxation, and Tyranny in Revolutionary Massachusetts” Pacific Historical Review, 43 (1974), p. 155.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 166 －

yet felt alienated from England. By incessantly publishing tracts that

delineated the implications of the Sugar Act, Adams managed to instigate

indignation that had not previously been there. Samuel Adam’s publication

vitalized the coinage “no legislation without representation” and in doing so

revealed that the colonial upper class was in debt to the proletariat.

The position was ambivalent: the merchants wanted restoration of the

conditions prior to 1763, but did not want to incur independence as its price.

They wanted the support of England to keep their class privilege but they

wanted the anti-English backing of the lower classes to retrieve their former

mercantile liberties from England. Only labor class support would make

resistance to the British barely possible. Independence was not within

consideration of the elite because secession would exclude them from British

trade. The Stamp Act crisis had instilled in the labor class ideas of social

equality. The ideas of liberty and equality had not previously possessed the

labor class, and even if the colonies acquired independence, such ideas would

be impossible to realize. It would be convenient for the upper class if such

ideas remained dormant. The false belief, that such an idea was feasible,

could have real utility for the merchant class, although actual social equality

or liberty was an idea alien and incompatible with the ideas motivating the

merchant class. If the elite inspired the labor class to insurrection for the

purposes of commercial liberties, the laborers would let themselves be

animated by incompossible illusions of social equality, and push the rebellion

far beyond the intentions of the merchants. Only the English would be

capable of protecting the merchants from the labor class; only the English

would be capable of sustain their privilege and class position. 30

30 Cf. Shannon, Fred A.; America’s Economic Growth, Macmillan, 1951, p. 96.

－ 167 －


7. THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

The English Currency Act of 1764 had protected the English merchants

from payment of debt with inflated money, but it inadvertently protected the

colonial merchants as well. If the colonial merchants had opposed British

authority too stridently, they would have lost all the money owed to them by

the colonials. 31 If the merchants cooperated with the Sugar Act, they would

go bankrupt; the New England economy depended on molasses and rum in

order to conduct its triangular trade. Since New England agriculture

remained stunted throughout the colonial period, New England became

reliant on a highly artificial product, rum, to support its total commercial

viability. The customs duty would have destroyed the profit margin. The

proto-capitalists anticipated that the colonists might win if they excited the

common people to violence against British oppression. However, a successful

repulse of the British might lead the popular element to usurp political

control, sincerely effect the pretended democratic slogans as promised,

legislation of cheap money, repudiation of debts, and redistribution of land

holdings.

If they attempted to popularize their opposition to Parliament by dressing

up the sugar trade as a demand for democracy, no taxation without

representation, etc., then, if they won, they would lose British support and they

would be unable to collect on accumulated colonial debt owed to themselves;

if they failed, then the Sugar duty etc. would not be repealed. 32 The labor

31 Cf. Nettles, Curtis P. ; The Roots of American Civilization, George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1963, p. 624.32 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 23.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 168 －

classes would not feel the direct effects of the British commercial legislation.

The labor classes had apparently supported the colonial merchants in their

opposition to the Stamp Act. Nevertheless, it gave the merchants an insecure

feeling that the slogans of the labor class, “liberty”, and “no taxation,” would

be complaints just as well justified against colonial government after the

British had withdrawn. 33 Since the commercial legislation did not impinge

on ordinary people, demand for repeal of these Acts could not have combined

the labor with the merchant class; merchants needed an extraneous cause

that would directly pull on popular interests. Labor organization entailed

progress towards popular democratic participation. The merchant class

might successfully defy British authority, but only under the liability that

the populace might dislodge the merchant class from social ascendancy. The

internal, elite division of loyalists and patriots originated from this dilemma.

Reconciliation with England would have exempted the need to appeal to the

common people. If the people enlisted themselves in the cause of the

merchants, the ensuing struggle itself would stimulate the labor class to

articulate labor class interests. If these interests remained inarticulate, the

common people would omit to notice that their resentment against Britain

equally implied resentment of the colonial upper class; in this case, the

reasons for the upper class resentment of Britain would cease to motivate

them. It would be too subtle and precarious for the colonial elite to keep

these perceptions divided. The labor class involvement in trade embargoes

connected with the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and Townshend Acts gave

substantial effect to colonial opposition. However, the meaning that the labor

class attached to this tactic frightened the mercantile patricians who

33 Cf. Becker, Carl; “Growth of Revolutionary Parties and Methods in New York Province, 1765-1774,” The American Historical Review, 7 (1901), p. 63.

－ 169 －


originally incited the movement, making most of them withdraw from the

resistance they had authored. 34

If Parliament was not entitled to tax the colonists without their consent,

why should the labor class, without suffrage, accept taxation from the

colonial assemblies? John Adams put it: “the Stamp Act controversy filled the

minds of the people with sentiments of liberty.” Liberty could allude to

oppressions from the colonial gentry as well as those of British rule. 35 The

uses of “representation” and “self-determination” perplexed the upper class;

they needed this posture in order to mount a sufficient ground for objecting

to the British, but if they legitimated the principle by championing it, then

they would license the lower class to use the same principle against

themselves. If on the other hand they gave up the epithet about liberty to

avert the lower class from imitating the same claim, they would have no

claim to excite opposition to the British; they would have to accept the

British legislation in silence. It was a dilemma between submitting to British

abuse in exchange for the class privileges they still had by virtue of British

support, or overthrowing British oppression, thereby giving up the privileges

they had only by inheritance of the British social structure.

The Tea Act had been promoted by the London financial circles. British

economy was dependent on India and the English East India Company, and

the East India Company was on the verge of bankruptcy. If England could

rescue the East India Company, the British Stock Exchange would not

collapse; otherwise, it would crash. An enormous backlog of tea stocks could

34 Cf. Nash, Gary B.; The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 300.35 Cf. Curtis P. Nettles, The Roots of American Civilization, George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1963, p. 638.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 170 －

vent in neither Britain nor Europe; if the Atlantic colonies provided a new

market, the East India Company could delay bankruptcy.

The Tea Act threatened to create an English monopoly in colonial imports for

the East India Company at the expense of these New England merchants.36

Merchants inclined to be loyalists would benefit optimally if they stayed united

with England. However, if they did their utmost to advocate loyalty, they would

identify themselves as enemies of the people. They would expose themselves to

colonial hostility. If they did nothing, then their inaction might allow the elite

patriots progress that they might not have achieved in the face of resistance.

Successful enforcement of the Tea Act would suggest that Britain might ad

libidenem monopolize colonial businesses in English companies, depriving the

colonials of native employment and commerce. The loyalists could not

withdraw from the confrontation, because their wealth was immoveable. Given

this dilemma, some would oppose the revolt, some would comply, and some

would give up their property and leave. What forces determined each choice?

Although tea would be cheaper from the ensuing legislation, the colonies

objected on the ground that tea would be a dutiable import from England. The

duty was insignificant and had no pecuniary importance for British or colonial

economy, but Parliament had improvised the duty to establish a precedent for

charging duties on other colonial imports. The colonial merchants had always

resisted this proposal, since British duties would raise prices and diminish

business volume; the merchants had always advocated a boycott on any

dutiable goods. 37

36 Cf. Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981, p. 23. 37 Cf. Becker, Carl; “Growth of Revolutionary Parties and Methods in New York Province, 1765-1774,” The American Historical Review, 7 (1901), p. 74.

－ 171 －


The Tea act itself was convoluted. The import tax would be a new cost on

the merchants, but tea would be substantially cheaper for the consumers.

How could the merchant class arouse the labor class to oppose a legislative

act that was beneficial to the labor class? Presumably, all other imported

commodities would become substantially cheaper from extensions of the Tea

Act legislation in the future. The Tea Act, taxing the merchants but

benefitting the labor class, ought to have split the colonial opposition against

each other. Only the enticement of “liberty and equality” for the common

people could make the labor class jump the hurdle of its immediate self-

interest. In fact, the elite class did not resort to arousal of the greater

public. The merchant and elite classes had been ready to acquiesce. The Tea

Party originated from the labor, not the elite class, to fight for the interest of

the merchant, not the labor class. Immediately following the Tea Party the

elite class hastened to make apologies to the British government with offers

of immediate reparations; it was the labor class, alone, that steadfastly

opposed the British, for elite, not labor, interests, and elicited support from

the Committees of Correspondence from the other colonies.

D. Morgan Pierce

－ 172 －

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailyn, Bernard; ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in

Eighteenth-Century America”, The American Historical Review, 67

(1962).

Becker, Carl; “Growth of Revolutionary Parties and Methods in New York

Province, 1765-1774,” The American Historical Review, 7 (1901).

Channing, Charles; A History of the United States, Volume III, The American

Revolution, 1761-1789.

Faulkner, Harold Underwood; American Economic History, Harper &

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Hacker, Louis M.; The Triumph of American Capitalism, Columbia

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Hofstadter, Richard; America at 1750: A Social Portrait, Vintage Books, 1973.

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Journal of Legal History, 18 (1974).

Klein, Milton M.; “New York Lawyers and the Coming of the American

Revolution”’ New York History, 55 (1974).

Kulikoff, Allan; “The Progress Of Inequality In Revolutionary Boston,” The

William And Mary Quarterly, third series, 28 (1971).

Lemisch, Jesse; “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of

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Revolutionary America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, third series,

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third series, 16 (1959).

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Morison, Samuel Eliot; The Oxford History of the American People, Volume

One, Meridian Books, 1994.

Nash, Gary B.; The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness,

and the Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard University Press,

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LTD, 1963.

Olson, Alison G.; “The London Mercantile Lobby and the Coming of the

American Revolution” The Journal of American History, 69 (1982).

Phillips, Kevin; The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of

Anglo-America, Basic Books, 1999.

Poulson, Larry W.; Economic History of the United States, Macmillan

Publishing Co., Inc., 1981.

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Ryerson, R. A.; “Political Mobilization and the American Revolution: The

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Schutz, John A.; “Representation, Taxation, and Tyranny in Revolutionary

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Documents

PREREVOLUTIONARY STRATIFICATIONrepo.komazawa-u.ac.jp/opac/repository/all/30118/rgs007-06.pdf · other common people had no substantive reason to hate Britain, whereas the merchants