Assemblies, Colonial

ASSEMBLIES, COLONIAL

ASSEMBLIES, COLONIAL, were the standard for representative government. Initially, elected representatives met in joint sessions with the governor and the council, later becoming the lower house of the legislature. It took most colonies until the 1720s to develop bicameral bodies that met regularly and had sufficient internal organization and systematic record keeping. Most of an assembly's workload developed from petitions, or constituent requests to the assemblies. The assemblies increased in output and importance from 1730 to 1765. Most legislation utilized Britain's criminal and civil code that governed elite procedures and was not for the citizens at large; thus, government was kept small to minimize the tax burden.

Initially, legislation was passed simply at the behest of the governor and his council, but in the late seventeenth century, the lower houses began to assert their authority in order to counter threats to local autonomy from governors and royal appointees, reversing the balance of power that had been in place since the early 1600s. Internal proceedings concerning taxes and the budget were strengthened. As the lower houses controlled local revenue, they held the power to vote permanent incomes to executive officers, including the governor's salary.

The first colonial assembly was the Virginia House of Burgesses, created on 30 July 1619, with a governor, Sir George Yeardley, four members of the council, and two burgesses from each of the Virginia boroughs as a unicameral body enlisting the settlers' support for the decisions passed by the company headquarters in London. Not until 1628 did it have the ability to pass tax or other laws. Under the Massachusetts Bay Company, the second colonial representative body emerged in 1629, composed of all adult males who were full church members and thus freemen. In 1634, this membership was changed to two delegates from each town to attend the annual meeting, chaired by the governor and the Court of Assistants, later evolving into a representative bicameral body. Rhode Island's assembly, developed after 1663, had the dominant role in government; the elected governor had little power and the assembly made official appointments. Connecticut's assembly was similar until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was replaced with local elections for colonial officials. In Maryland, the proprietor Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, struggled with the assembly, but finally allowed it to initiate laws on the condition that it submit them to him for acceptance or rejection. Carolina's eight divergent proprietors sought to enforce the feudal Fundamental Constitutions while the settlers upheld their right to a popular elected assembly of freeholders, guaranteed by the Concessions and Agreement of 1665. From the beginning, Pennsylvania had a popularly elected assembly, which clashed frequently with the Penn family proprietors, although in 1756, six pacifist Quakers resigned from the assembly in response to the threat of oaths required by Parliament, resulting in a short period of harmony between the legislature and executive. Conflicts with the governors consistently left the assemblies in an increasingly stronger position up to the Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Charles McLean. Colonial Self-government, 1652–1689. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904.

Bliss, Robert M. Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1990.

Greene, Jack P. The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

Sosin, Jack M. English America and Imperial Inconstancy: The Rise of Provincial Autonomy, 1696–1715. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Michelle M. Mormul

See also Colonial Councils ; Colonial Policy, British ; House of Burgesses ; Representative Government .