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(Benjamin Franklin calling down lightning from the sky. Not that relevant to the episode, but I feel obliged to use it anyway.)

The Quaker faction in Pennsylvania fights a rearguard effort to hold on to political power despite their dwindling population, at one point literally beating back riotous sailors with clubs.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 39: The Long Death of Quaker Rule.

Over the last two episodes, we’ve discussed the history of Pennsylvania from the 1680s to the 1730s. Politically, the main struggle was over local autonomy. Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony ruled by one man, William Penn, and then later by his heirs. Thanks to various legal troubles, Penn had to spend most of his time in England instead of in America. In his absence the Assembly slowly but surely accumulated power until they were the dominant force within the colony. In fact, in 1701, the Assembly forced Penn to accept a new constitution, which made Pennsylvania unicameral. The Assembly became the sole legislative body, while the council was reduced to a mere group of advisors.

But just as important as these political changes were the demographic changes reshaping Pennsylvania across the 18th century. Pennsylvania had been founded as a refuge for persecuted Quakers, and in the beginning Quakers and other similar denominations did in fact dominate the colony. But there weren't actually that many Quakers in the world, and so the initial wave of Quaker migration soon dried up. However, that didn't mean that immigration stopped. Pennsylvania was a prosperous, tolerant place, and so many non-Quakers started coming. By the early 1700s the Quakers were already a minority in their own colony.

Some of these immigrants were Scots-Irish, fleeing the poverty of Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Scots-Irish in particular had almost nothing in common with the Quakers. They were rowdy, violent, and poor. I'll talk much more about them next time. And I've already discussed the Anglicans living in Philadelphia, plus other cosmopolitan men like Ben Franklin.

The other big group came from Germany. Germany was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War several decades ago, and therefore migration was an enticing prospect. And once they started coming, they didn’t stop. By 1717 there were some 15-20,000 Germans in Pennsylvania. By the Revolution, there were 110,000.

When it came to politics, these Germans tended to support the Quakers, for a few reasons. Firstly, many of the Germans also came from pacifist religious denominations. Even those Germans who weren't pacifists wanted to avoid war. Secondly, the Germans, being foreigners, were unlikely to run for office themselves, so it made sense to pick a group of native English candidates to support. And the Quakers, for their part, advocated giving the Germans citizenship as soon as possible, so that they could vote for Quaker candidates.

In order to maintain their power, the Quakers also made sure that the settlements on the western frontier, which were typically filled with non-Quakers, were systematically underrepresented in the Assembly. For example, in 1760, the eastern counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester had a combined 26 delegates out of 36 total, while the 5 western counties together had only the remaining ten representatives, despite the fact that both regions had similar populations.

So thanks to these sorts of tactics, the Quakers managed to stay in power much longer than you might expect, considering their small numbers. For example, in 1739, 22 out of 36 seats in the Assembly were held by Quakers. But it would've been clear to everyone that things were changing. In order to keep that power, the Quakers had to stick together. So no more middling vs. elite Quakers. From now on, there would just be a single Quaker faction.

And when I say “Quaker faction”, I mean Quaker faction. They may have gotten support from other groups, but it was very much controlled by the Quakers themselves. By the 1750s they were literally choosing their candidates during Quaker meetings. You might recall that Quakers governed themselves through a system of meetings, local meetings, regional meetings, meetings for men, meetings for women, and so on. Well it was at some of these meetings that the Quakers chose their candidates. It's a bit like if today Republican party candidates were being chosen explicitly by meetings of Evangelical Christian leaders.

Their opponents found this outrageous, and they issued calls for nominees to be chosen in public, rather than in private, but the Quakers ignored them.

Who were these opponents? Well, the Quakers had continued to attack proprietary authority, and so their opponents wound up becoming supporters of the proprietorship. So once again the factions were simultaneously split along lines of religion and politics. Quakerism overlapped with anti-proprietary beliefs, while non-Quakerism overlapped with pro-proprietary beliefs, by default.

However, the proprietary faction was generally on the losing side of things. The Quakers had assembled a powerful coalition, their policies were popular, and frankly the Penn family wasn’t much of a help.

William Penn had died in 1718, but it took a long time for his estate to be settled. The legal proceedings dragged on for most of a decade. I’ll spare you all the details, but basically in the end Pennsylvania went to his children by his second wife, Hannah, who herself died just after the court case was settled.

It took a few years longer to decide who was going to actually govern the colony, but in practice it was her son Thomas who wound up running things. Thomas spent some time in Pennsylvania, but mostly he lived in England.

He was a very different man than his father. In fact, he wasn’t even a Quaker. He didn’t see Pennsylvania as a Quaker refuge or as some divine experiment. He had no grand visions for what life in Pennsylvania could or should be. To him, it was just an investment to be properly managed. In his words, “I never desire to have views so noble, extensive, and benevolent as my father, unless he had left a much larger fortune; because these views, though good in themselves, yet by possessing him too much, led him into inconveniences which I hope to avoid.” No point in sticking to your beliefs so strongly you wind up in a debtor’s prison.

And the officials he appointed were generally non-Quakers as well.

So those are the dividing lines within Pennsylvania. Anti-proprietary Quakers, supported in particular by the Germans, vs. the non-Quaker proprietary faction. It's remarkable how the government of Pennsylvania had now become anti-Quaker. This in the colony founded by William Penn, one of the most prominent Quakers in history. Just goes to show the weird twists history can take.

By the way, this was also the time of the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening had a moderate impact in Pennsylvania, less than in New England but more than in New York. The Quakers and Germans proved mostly immune to the Awakening's charms, but other groups such as the Anglicans were more receptive. Therefore, members of the Quaker faction tended to oppose the Awakening, while members of the proprietary faction tended to support it, but I don't think that it actually proved to be a major source of division like in New England. Pennsylvania just wasn't theocratic in the same way that Massachusetts was.

But, moving along.

The 1730s were a time of transition. Many of the old politicians who had led Pennsylvania for the last half century -- David Lloyd, James Logan -- were either dead or nearing retirement. And a new generation of politicians was rising to take their place. Benjamin Franklin for one, although he was kind of an outlier. He was from Boston and he was a self-made man.

Most leaders came from the new Quaker upper class which I mentioned last time. Take for example William Allen, a leader of the proprietary faction. Allen had a somewhat successful merchant father and Allen himself become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He married the daughter of a prominent politician, and in the 1760s one of his daughters married into the Penn family. He became a member of the council at age 23, and was elected to the Assembly at age 27, then as mayor of Philadelphia at age 31. The same sort of career path as Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts. Men from prominent merchant families going into politics at a young age and marrying women from other such families.

So all in all, that's the pattern Pennsylvania had settled into by the mid-1730s. But in the late 1730s, King George’s War broke out, and once again, Pennsylvania was called upon to contribute to the war effort.

The governor asked the Assembly to raise funds, and at first the Assembly, which was controlled by the Quaker faction, was open to the idea. During the previous wars, the Quakers had come up with a compromise. They’d raise money without explicitly specifying what it was for, even though they in fact knew it would be spent on fighting. That had been enough for the Quakers. They felt that their hands were clean.

Initially, it seemed like that compromise would still hold. However, things were swiftly derailed. The governor began raising a volunteer militia. But when this militia took in a number of indentured servants without the permission of their masters, there was a general uproar in the colony. People thought that the militia, by taking in these servants, was stealing property from the masters. They soon turned both against the militia and against war in general. Realistically, it may have just been an excuse to oppose the war effort, but either way the damage was done. The Quaker faction now opposed the war.

There is one other factor to consider in understanding why this happened. The Quakers themselves were becoming more pacifist. You may recall that in New England, there had been a gradual transformation of Puritanism as time went on, as the initial enthusiasm wore off. Something similar had happened within Quakerism. After 50 years in Pennsylvania Quakerism had become less spiritual, less aggressive. And all you had to do to be a Quaker was conform to Quaker practices, rather than accept the Inner Light. Quakerism was becoming normal.

And just like in New England, this gradual loosening eventually provoked a backlash by people who wanted to recapture the old fervor, and to maintain the Quaker identity against all the other immigrants in Pennsylvania. That meant taking their beliefs more seriously, including pacifism. And so, many Quakers now found it harder to support war than in the past. They now wanted to be real pacifists, not just nominal pacifists. Of course, not all Quakers supported this change, but at the moment, it was the hardline pacifists who had the upper hand.

Whatever the reason, the Quaker faction was now at odds with the proprietorship.

During the 1740 election, the proprietary faction argued that unless Pennsylvania agreed to help fund the war, some sort of catastrophe might overtake them. The Quakers, on the other hand, argued that war meant conscription, tyranny, and higher taxes. The people found that message more believable, and the Quakers won the election and kept control of the Assembly.

The proprietary faction was in a difficult position. They really had very little chance of winning the Assembly, and without the Assembly, they couldn’t hope to contribute to the war effort, which would undermine the Penn family in Britain. Remember, it was still possible that Parliament might make Pennsylvania into a royal province. That concern hadn’t gone away. So, if they couldn’t win legitimately, the proprietary faction decided to use underhanded tactics instead.

In the runup to the 1741 election, they tried to get the Board of Trade to ban Quakers from holding elective office during times of war. Needless to say, such a drastic action would have wiped out the Quakers as a political force, at least temporarily. However, the Board of Trade declined to go along with the plan, which was probably sensible of them. Banning Quakers altogether sounds a bit harebrained to me.

Although, I should point out that it wasn't only the proprietary faction using underhanded tactics. For example, for several years the Quakers had been physically interfering with the election process in Philadelphia. As it happened, voters in the capital had to go up a flight of stairs in order to hand in their ballots. The Quakers had recently begun using this quirk to their advantage. They would all crowd along the stairwell and only allow voters who supported them to come up to vote. Everyone else they tried to block.

Anyway, during that next election, in 1741, things got a bit heated. When some reverend was accused of casting two ballots someone punched him. And when an official moved in to break up the fighting, he got punched too.

The Quakers won yet again, but that little scuffle was nothing compared to what happened in the next election in 1742. Having failed to oust the Quakers through legitimate or semi-legitimate means, the proprietary faction began considering more drastic actions.

First, I need to explain a bit more about how elections in Philadelphia worked at this time. There were actually two elections on election day. The second election was for the delegates to the Assembly, but the first election was for the inspectors. The inspectors were the people who oversaw the election. They were empowered to look at people’s ballots, to decide what was and wasn’t legal, to disqualify people from voting, and so on. So controlling the inspectors meant that you could control the election process. It was a lot like the sheriffs in New York I talked about a few episodes ago. If you wanted to manipulate the elections, the inspectors were the way to go. Or, if you feared that your opponents were going to manipulate the elections, you wanted to make sure that they didn’t control the inspectors.

How were the inspectors chosen? By election, of course. But since there would be no inspectors to oversee their own election, this had to be done through a different process, overseen by the sheriffs. Instead of using ballots, voters would simply line up behind their preferred candidate to be counted. I suppose the idea was to make the election as public as possible, so that there could be no trickery. And then, after the inspectors were chosen the real election would be held.

However, this system may have had some flaws. For one thing, the elections in Philadelphia were held near the docks, an area filled with taverns and drunken sailors. It was an unstable environment. There were no orderly procedures, just big crowds of people milling around. It was an even more volatile area than that stairwell, even more vulnerable to disruptions.

And before the election, there were rumors swirling throughout the city. Firstly, that the Quakers would bring in German immigrants to vote illegally. And secondly that the proprietary faction had hired sailors to act as muscle, to intimidate the Quakers out of voting. Everyone was on edge, everyone was expecting trouble.

On the morning of October 1, everyone gathered to vote. Tensions were indeed high. There were an unusual number of sailors on the streets, already getting drunk and making threats to “knock down the broad Brims”. That is, attack the Quakers. The Quakers wanted the sailors to be removed from the area, but since they hadn’t actually done anything yet, the officials overseeing the election refused. And even before the election began already a few punches had been thrown.

At 10 AM the polls opened and the voters began lining up to choose the inspectors. It soon became clear that the Quakers were set to win. Then suddenly 50 plus sailors appeared a block away, marching towards the voters. They began beating the voters with clubs, attempting to drive them away from the polling site. The voters were pushed back at first, but the sheriffs handed out clubs to any of the voters who were willing to fight back. Even a number of Quakers entered the fray.

Thus, there was a violent back and forth, and there were a few serious injuries. At one point the Quakers were pushed into the courthouse, and the sailors besieged the building. Windows were broken in and so on. But eventually, the sailors were driven back and the rest of the election could be held in peace. 54 of the sailors were thrown in jail. It took pacifist Quakers arming themselves, but in the end they prevailed.

Needless to say, the Quaker faction won big time, both in the elections for inspector and in the elections for the Assembly. And it wasn't just a one-time victory. The attack cost the proprietary faction dearly. The voters now associated them with violence and disorder, and with unfair elections.

Although, to be fair, the accusations against the proprietary faction were never actually proven. The Assembly led an investigation into the incident, but the investigation was biased and partisan. They were aiming to make the proprietors look bad, not figure out what happened. It's possible that what happened was that the Quakers, fearing an attack, had tried to kick the sailors out of the area, which upset the sailors and led them to attack on their own initiative. Possible, at least, though I think not likely. I would wager that the proprietary faction, or at least someone within the proprietary faction, was responsible. After all, we've seen these tactics before, in 1690s New York, when Governor Fletcher had brought in sailors to intimidate voters. Although in that instance, the sailors didn't actually attack anyone.

But in any case, now the Quakers were even more firmly in control of the Assembly than before. For a while, they controlled practically every seat. And the proprietary faction now had no hope of taking over themselves. They hardly even bothered to run candidates. So the governor now had to negotiate with the anti-proprietary faction from a position of weakness. The proprietary faction capitulated on a number of issues, but the Quaker faction gave in on military appropriations as well. They agreed to go back to the old compromise of granting money without explicitly stating what it was to be spent on.

However, although the Assembly was willing to send money to other colonies to help them fight, they were much less interested in creating any sort of army or militia to defend Pennsylvania. In fact, the colony was nearly defenseless, as was shown when a French warship sailed up the Delaware and harassed some English vessels before sailing away. Rumors spread that an even bigger invasion was planned. But still the Assembly refused to create a militia.

That gave an opening to Benjamin Franklin. He was always eager to form new institutions, and so he decided to create a volunteer militia himself. He wrote and published a pamphlet to that effect and it was immediately successful. Thanks to Franklin’s efforts many men across the colony organized themselves into regiments and began drilling.

Like many American militias at this time, the officers were elected. Specifically, the volunteers elected their officers, and then those officers elected colonels. Franklin could've been elected to lead the Philadelphia militia, but he declined the offer, instead serving as a common soldier, though all he ever did was keep watch. And in any case the war ended that next year.

Still, Franklin’s efforts further increased his standing, at least among most Pennsylvanians. The more extreme Quakers weren’t fans of the militia, but the moderates were happy enough to see someone else take up the burden. According to Franklin, “Indeed I had some cause to believe that the defense of the country was not disagreeable to any of them, provided they were not requir’d to assist in it.”

On the other hand, if many Quakers proved unexpectedly grateful, the proprietary faction was rather lukewarm. They weren't too happy that Franklin had succeeded where they had failed. It was partly due to jealousy, and to concerns over how ambitious Franklin was. Thomas Penn, the proprietor, was particularly wary of Franklin. He saw him as an agitator. “He is a dangerous Man and I should be very Glad he inhabited any other Country, as I believe him of a very uneasy Spirit. However, as he is a Sort of Tribune of the People, he must be treated with regard.”

So, strangely enough, by creating a militia, Franklin endeared himself more to the faction that opposed a militia than to the one that supported it. Although, Franklin did remain friendly with both sides, it wasn't like he had firmly sided with one camp or the other. And his efforts were popular with the people as a whole.

It was around this time that Franklin retired as a printer. He’d amassed enough money that he could now just pursue his personal interests, whether politics or science or inventions or founding new institutions. And though he was a dilettante, he did make genuine contributions. He helped advance the study of electricity, plus he invented the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, and a new type of stove. I have to say, his reputation was earned, it wasn’t merely inflated later on because of his role in the American Revolution. He was an impressive guy.

Politically, he became an alderman in Philadelphia, and then he was elected to the Assembly, where he served from 1751 to 1764. Although according to him, he didn't seek office on his own, though he was happy to accept it. “I would not, however, insinuate that my ambition was not flatter’d by all these promotions; it certainly was; for, considering my low beginning, they were great things to me; and they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.”

In his first years in office, Franklin didn't join with the Quakers or with the proprietary faction. He remained non-partisan, and he was able to work with men from both sides. He spent his time on various useful projects, getting a hospital built, getting the streets paved, and so on.

Perhaps less admirably, he also worked to reduce the influence of the Germans within Pennsylvania. Like many English-speaking Pennsylvanians at the time, Franklin harbored serious anti-German prejudice. He was concerned that the Germans might never assimilate to English ways of life. They could remain forever German, a foreign element in the body politic. Their pacifism worried him as well. In one essay he asked, “why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them...?”

And the Germans did indeed purposefully separate themselves from their English-speaking neighbors. They lived in ethnic enclaves and kept on speaking German rather than learning English. And they were politically passive. Franklin thought they were too ignorant of liberty to properly participate in government. They rarely voted, and when they did they just supported the Quakers en masse.

And so Franklin proposed measures to remedy the situation, to weaken the Germans politically and to encourage assimilation. According to the historian Theodore Thayer, he “proposed in 1752 that all non-English speaking people should be barred from holding civil or military office. In addition, he held that a prohibition should be placed on the importation of German books, and that all German publications should be obliged to carry an English translation on each page, while deeds, bonds, and other legal documents should be in English only. Intermarriage, he thought, should be encouraged to break down the clannishness of the Germans, and a limitation or quota should be placed on German immigration. Furthermore, he recommended that English schools be established among the Germans to Anglicize the younger generation.”

However, none of those plans really went anywhere. There were a few schools opened, but they folded within a few years, since they were correctly seen as being politically motivated. And the proprietary faction kept trying to ban Germans from voting along with the Quakers, but that didn't happen either. The Germans did begin to assimilate around the time of the Revolution, but it was of their own accord, not because the government forced them to.

Moving along, the main dispute after the end of King George's War was over paper money. The Assembly wanted to print more paper money, while the proprietor wanted the opposite. A very standard dispute.

Thomas Penn sent governors to Pennsylvania with secret instructions to not approve any more money being printed. But the Assembly kept passing bills to that effect, which the governors had to veto over and over again, leading to a stalemate that lasted into the 1750s. The Assembly was aggrieved, not just that they couldn't get more money printed, but that Penn's instructions to his governors were kept private, meaning that they didn't know what they were negotiating with.

One governor got so fed up that he resigned. His replacement was a man named Robert Hunter Morris, who was actually the son of Lewis Morris, one of the big landowners in New York, the guy who’d been removed from the supreme court by Governor Cosby. He's not that important historically, but I bring him up because Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, relates an amusing anecdote about him which I'd like to share, which tells you something about how politics worked at the time.

“In my journey to Boston this year, I met at New York with our new governor, Mr. Morris, just arriv’d there from England, with whom I had been before intimately acquainted. He brought a commission to supersede Mr. Hamilton, who, tir’d with the disputes his proprietary instructions subjected him to, had resign’d. Mr. Morris ask’d me if I thought he must expect as uncomfortable an administration. I said, “No; you may, on the contrary, have a very comfortable one, if you will only take care not to enter into any dispute with the Assembly.” “My dear friend,” says he, pleasantly, “how can you advise my avoiding disputes? You know I love disputing; it is one of my greatest pleasures; however, to show the regard I have for your counsel, I promise you I will, if possible, avoid them.” He had some reason for loving to dispute, being eloquent, an acute sophister, and, therefore, generally successful in argumentative conversation. He had been brought up to it from a boy, his father, as I have heard, accustoming his children to dispute with one another for his diversion, while sitting at table after dinner; but I think the practice was not wise; for, in the course of my observation, these disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them. We parted, he going to Philadelphia, and I to Boston.

In returning, I met at New York with the votes of the Assembly, by which it appear’d that, notwithstanding his promise to me, he and the House were already in high contention; and it was a continual battle between them as long as he retain’d the government. I had my share of it; for, as soon as I got back to my seat in the Assembly, I was put on every committee for answering his speeches and messages, and by the committees always desired to make the drafts. Our answers, as well as his messages, were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive; and, as he knew I wrote for the Assembly, one might have imagined that, when we met, we could hardly avoid cutting throats; but he was so good-natur’d a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasion’d by the contest, and we often din’d together.”

So, politics could get heated, but it didn't always get personal. It depended on the men involved.

Anyway, as it happened, Morris was governor for the first two years of the French and Indian War, which is our next big topic of discussion.

The previous wars with Quebec had generally been fought in the north, on the borders of New York and New England. But now, a new theater was opening up: the Ohio Valley, which is the area surrounding the Ohio River. The Ohio runs west from Western Pennsylvania into the Mississippi. So basically the area we’re talking about is part of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. This territory was disputed between France and Britain. It was still mostly populated by Native Americans, with a few British traders. But now, the French were starting to move in. Who would control this region? Well, by 1754 it became apparent that the only way to settle this was through war.

War was coming to Pennsylvania for real this time, or at least to the outskirts of Pennsylvania. But the Quaker faction and the governor remained at each other's throats over the money supply, and for that reason it was hard to raise funds for the war. The Assembly was trying to use their leverage to increase their power, increase the money supply and force the governor to make his instructions public.

Into this dispute stepped Ben Franklin. He came up with a workaround solution which involved the Assembly issuing loans to raise funds, rather than printing money directly. He also proved extremely helpful in gathering supplies for the army of General Braddock, which was setting off to fight along the frontier. However, these were only temporary bandaids. Braddock's force was soon utterly defeated, and Braddock himself killed, which left Pennsylvania even more dangerously exposed to attack than before.

The Assembly voted to raise a further 50,000 pounds, but once again relations with the governor caused problems. This time the issue was property taxes. The Assembly had decided to raise the money by raising property taxes, but the bill they passed taxed land owned by the proprietor, along with everyone else's land. Governor Morris had instructions to prevent the Penn family lands from ever being taxed, and so he vetoed the bill, declaring that, “All Governors, whether hereditary or otherwise, are, from the Nature of their office, exempt from the Payment of Taxes; on the Contrary, Revenues are generally given to them to support the Honour and Dignity of Government, and to enable them to do the Duties of their Station.”

Obviously to the average Pennsylvanian, the idea that they had to pay taxes while their leaders didn’t, was seen as flagrantly unjust, especially during a time of war. With opponents like that, it’s no wonder the Quakers held on to power.

Well, that was only one reason they held on to power. The Quaker faction was also changing internally. Changing so much in fact, that within a few years it would hardly be a Quaker faction at all. You'll notice that the issue being fought over is not whether or not to fund these military expeditions, but over how that money was to be raised. The pacifist Quakers were slowly losing their grip on the Quaker faction. Their demands were more and more seen as impractical in a time of war, and they themselves were growing weary of politics, which meant that non-pacifists and indeed non-Quakers were now able to put themselves in positions of power.

Most notably, after spending his first few years in the Assembly as a non-partisan figure, Ben Franklin had moved into the Quaker faction. In fact, he swiftly became the leader of the Quaker faction, despite being neither a Quaker nor a pacifist.

He kept some of the old policies in place, in particular the attacks on proprietary authority. He still tried to get Governor Morris to accept that proprietary lands would have to be taxed, the same as everyone else. But he was also much more open to the use of force. He proposed a bill to create a voluntary militia, based on the one he'd created during the last war, and it was passed with only a few dissenting Quaker votes.

Indeed, Franklin himself was made an officer. He went out to the frontier and raised a force of 560 men. There he had several forts built, but he soon returned to Philadelphia to continue his work in the Assembly without ever seeing any action.

But the point is that Franklin was moderating the more extreme Quaker demands for total pacifism, to create a more moderate, broadly acceptable faction. It was such a big change that I'm going to start calling it the popular faction instead of the Quaker faction. It was a continuation of the old Quaker faction, but it no longer had much Quakerism in its DNA.

Franklin's new faction was opposed to proprietary authority, and it was still pretty anti-war, but it was also willing to raise a militia and so on. That was the sort of compromise position which appealed to most Pennsylvanians. They didn't want to pay for big armies or risk conscription, but neither did they want to be defenseless. Hence, a volunteer militia made perfect sense. It was a platform designed to get support from a supermajority of Pennsylvanians.

And at the same time Franklin was taking over the Quaker faction, the remaining Quakers were voluntarily removing themselves from power.

The proprietary faction was still continuing its quest to bar Quakers and Germans from serving in the Assembly or voting. In 1755 they sent a petition to London asking the Board of Trade to keep these groups out of government. The Board of Trade heard the petition and issued a recommendation to Parliament that they pass an act requiring officeholders in Pennsylvania to swear oaths, which of course Quakers were forbidden from doing. It was an indirect way to ban Quakers from office.

In response to this, the Quakers in England mobilized to help their brethren in America. They worked on two fronts: firstly, to keep officials in London from taking any drastic actions. And indeed, Parliament wound up not banning Quakers from office, although it was probably due to the fact that Pennsylvania was being more proactive in the war thanks to Ben Franklin. But either way the Quakers were saved for the time being.

The other thing that the English Quakers did was to discourage Pennsylvania Quakers from holding office during wartime. Maybe that seems contradictory. They were working both to make sure that Quakers could hold office and to make sure that Quakers didn't hold office. But I think it made sense. This way, the Quakers wouldn't have to compromise their principles, and they wouldn't take the blame for any problems that came up. It was better to voluntarily give up power for a little while, rather than risk being permanently forced out.

The Pennsylvania Quakers apparently agreed with this logic. Six of the hardline pacifists resigned from the Assembly, and they were replaced by Anglican supporters of Franklin. And after the next election, another four Quakers resigned. By 1756, a majority of the Assembly was now non-Quaker, a tremendously rapid fall.

But as it turned out, that was it for the Quakers. They never again regained control of Pennsylvania. Their numbers were too few and their total pacifism was too unacceptable. That they'd held on so long was a miracle itself, but realistically it couldn't last. As soon as they were dislodged, there was never any going back.

And so, the transformation of Pennsylvania was complete. The proprietorship had ceased to be Quaker with the death of William Penn, and now even the Quaker faction had ceased to be Quaker. 70 years was all they'd had.

The Quaker experiment had failed, just like every other planned attempt to build a society in America. In New England, the Puritans, in the end, had abandoned their Puritanism in favor of creating a normal society. The Quakers, however, made the opposite choice. They held on to their beliefs even when it meant losing power.

As society drifted away from the Quakers, the Quakers drifted away from society. Many Quakers were becoming increasingly apolitical. Well, not exactly apolitical – they still wanted to make the world a better place, but the compromises politicians had to make were unacceptable. And so the true believer Quakers became increasingly withdrawn from political life. Any of the Quakers who didn't support this turn drifted away from Quakerism in general, which reduced the Quakers to a small but devoted rump of true believers.

Instead of politics, the remaining Quakers devoted themselves more and more to charity and to advocacy, which is one of the big reasons why Quakers turned to abolitionism before almost anyone else in America. They redirected their energy into causes like that. And so the few remaining Quakers continued to have an outsized impact on America for generations to come.

There’s a saying, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s what Quakerism aspires to. Pennsylvania was no longer Quaker, but Quakerism imprinted itself on America’s identity far more than you’d think.

Next episode, we'll finish off the history of colonial Pennsylvania with a comprehensive look at the one group of colonists I haven't yet talked about: the Scots-Irish, the fighting Scots-Irish. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

The podcast is on twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or go to the blog at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com for transcripts of every single episode. And if you like the podcast, give it a good review on iTunes. That helps. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

The Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742 by Norman S. Cohen

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

The World of William Penn by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

Colonial Pennsylvania: A History by Joseph E. Illick

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740 - 1776 by Theodore Thayer

Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Germans by Glenn Weaver

American Nations by Colin Woodard

Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker Party, 1755-1756 by John J. Zimmerman

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(The oldest surviving courthouse in America, in Chester County, Pennsylvania)

The Quakers continue their struggle for self-rule against William Penn, now aging and ailing. Also, a promising young man by the name of Franklin makes his debut in Philadelphia.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 38: The Long Death of William Penn.

Last time, we discussed the history of Pennsylvania from the 1680s to the early 1700s. During this time, William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, was stuck in England thanks to various legal troubles. It didn’t take long for a local political elite to form, composed of men who were actually in the colony and able to wield direct influence. This group, which I’ve been calling the elite Quakers, very quickly claimed a lot of power for themselves at the expense of William Penn, who wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.

The elite Quakers were so successful, in fact, that an opposition faction emerged within just a few years, composed primarily of middle class Quakers who feared that they were about to be shut out of politics. This group I’ve been calling the middling Quakers. From the 1690s onward, they were led by a Welsh lawyer named David Lloyd, one of the few men in the colony who was both popular enough to win support and talented enough to use that support effectively.

Pennsylvania had become a hotbed of factionalism in record time, despite the supposed pacifism of the Quakers.

William Penn finally managed to get back to Pennsylvania for a few years around 1700, but he found a colony which was already outgrowing him. His influence was greatly reduced, and he mostly had to do what the Assembly wanted him to do. They forced him to agree to a constitution which made them, the Assembly, supreme. The Council lost its position as upper house of the legislature, making Pennsylvania unicameral. Thoroughly disheartened by his ungrateful colonists and by his constant legal and financial troubles, Penn soon returned to England. The government was once again trying to take Pennsylvania away from him.

So that’s where we left off. Today, I want to do two things. Firstly, I want to take us through the next two and a half decades of Pennsylvania history, during which time the conflict between the elite and middling Quakers will reach a crescendo. And secondly, I want to introduce a young man who will be of great importance to our story going forward, Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps you've heard of him.

Let's get going.

So Penn was back in England to defend his claim to Pennsylvania. Once again he was successful in doing do, but all of these struggles were taking their toll. He’d labored for decades on behalf of his colony, and all he had to show for it was a mountain of debt and endless legal headaches. Plus he was getting old. So he began to consider whether or not he should sell Pennsylvania to the Queen. That way at least he might get something for all his troubles. Better that than having the colony taken outright, which was still a risk.

So he began negotiations with the Crown. However, the talks never went anywhere, since some of the conditions Penn set were unacceptable to the Board of Trade. So things just sort of stumbled along for the rest of the decade without ever reaching a conclusion. In fact, it may have been more of a delaying tactic. Penn may not have ever seriously considered selling Pennsylvania, he may have just wanted to discourage Parliament taking it over by force. Pretend you’re interested and then just string them along for as long as possible.

But although the negotiations never went anywhere, people at the time didn’t know that that’s how it would work out. For all they knew, word might come at anytime that Pennsylvania had been sold. Within Pennsylvania itself, most people kind of assumed that it would become a royal colony sooner or later. That further undermined William Penn’s control. People didn’t think he’d be in charge much longer, and so they didn’t pay him much heed.

And that was on top of all the other reasons Penn had already lost control. He still supported unpopular policies. Not only that, the men he sent to Pennsylvania to represent his interests were all incompetent at best, actively hostile to him at worst, with one notable exception.

Let me give you one amusing example of incompetence. In 1706 the governor was a man named John Evans, who was hotheaded and young, only 28 at the time. Evans had grown frustrated with the colony’s continuing unwillingness to create a militia, and so he decided to teach them all a lesson, to show them how defenseless their pacifism had left them. He decided to fake an invasion.

He had some men ride up to Philadelphia one morning, warning that a French fleet had begun sailing up the Delaware, laying waste to the towns on the coast. And soon, they’d be in Philadelphia itself. The governor then rode around town, raising the alarm and rallying the colonists to defend themselves. I’ll quote the historian Gary B. Nash to describe what happened next. “The wildest disorder followed: powder was dealt out, two apprentices blew themselves up in their eagerness to initiate action, women miscarried, shopkeepers threw their goods into wells or hastily buried them in the ground, younger Quakers inexplicably found themselves shouldering arms and digging in for the fight, while other Friends, fleeing town, trembled at the shouts of Anglicans, who flung out warnings that under the circumstances Quakers and Frenchmen would make equally attractive targets.”

And then, when night fell, they discovered it was all some big prank. But the lesson they learned was not that Pennsylvania was defenseless, it was that the governor was a reckless idiot.

That’s the most dramatic example of incompetence from Penn's representatives, but I assure you there’s more where that came from.

Since the proprietary faction was busy embarrassing itself, the anti-proprietary faction, under the leadership of David Lloyd, remained dominant. As I already mentioned, the anti-proprietary faction was primarily composed of middling Quakers, while the elite Quakers had shifted over to the proprietary faction. Or at least, they were less anti-proprietary than the middling Quakers were, since no one in Pennsylvania was entirely for the proprietorship.

Those were the two main factions, but there were other, smaller groups as well, non-Quaker immigrants who were coming to the colony now that the initial wave of Quaker migration had dried up. In particular, many immigrants were Anglicans, who naturally opposed the Quakers and tried to undermine Quaker control of Pennsylvania. They actively tried to make the government less effective, in order to discredit the Quakers and increase the odds of another royal takeover, which would likely put them in charge.

For example, I've already discussed how Quaker pacifism caused problems during times of war, so you might naturally assume that it was the Quakers who did the most to keep the government from contributing to the war effort, but that wasn't the case. The Quakers had come up with a compromise position in which they would give a sum of money to the Crown without specifying what for. They knew that much of it would go to fighting the war, but they still felt that their hands were clean. In fact, it was often the Anglicans who did the most to keep Pennsylvania from supporting the war effort. That way, the colony would look bad to officials in London. And presumably the Quakers would take the blame, not them.

So to some extent, this aligned the Anglicans with the anti-proprietary faction, at least some of the time, since they shared an interest in embarrassing William Penn, but otherwise their aims were quite divergent.

In any case, it was the anti-proprietary, middling Quaker faction which remained in power. Over a decade they won control of the Assembly in all but two elections, and David Lloyd served as speaker for most of the first decade of the 1700s. The speaker being the top guy in the Assembly.

Under Lloyd, the Assembly became more powerful and more professionalized. I won’t get into all the details, since I’ve covered similar transformations in the other colonial legislatures. But procedures were regularized, delegates gained experience over time, the Assembly developed an institutional history of its own, and so on. In fact, Pennsylvania’s Assembly fast became one of the most powerful legislatures in the colonies. The proprietor was absent, the governors were weak, and there was no upper house to contend with.

And Lloyd didn't just try to strengthen the Assembly, he also tried to increase local autonomy wherever he could, although he only had mixed success, since William Penn was still able to veto legislation. So whenever Lloyd proposed some big bill to take control of the courts away from Penn, or to make the city of Philadelphia much more autonomous, that failed.

What did work was the gradual shifting of more and more offices from being appointed to being elected. For example, some positions, such as sheriff, were supposed to be chosen by a mixture of election and appointment. The freeholders in each county would vote, and then Penn or his governor would chose the winner from among the top two vote-getters. But in practice the offices became purely elective: whoever got the most votes always won.

And from the 1690s onwards the Assembly created more and more positions which were elected. In particular jobs such as assessor and county commissioner, which had to do with collecting taxes. As always, taxes were a super important issue for Americans. If you had the money, you had the power.

These local elections also enhanced local power in a more roundabout way, by increasing the number of men in local government, who could then make the leap to joining the Assembly. More men had experience as politicians, and that helped them win higher office. And thus, the Assembly's membership became more capable as time went on, thanks to the training provided by local elections.

So that, in a nutshell, is how Pennsylvania spent the first decade of the 1700s. The anti-proprietary faction was slowly increasing local authority, but David Lloyd's attempts to make bigger power grabs had failed. By the end of the decade, Lloyd was feeling stymied. He apparently thought that his political program hadn't been sufficiently successful, that he should have been able to get more done.

And so he turned his wrath on those he felt were responsible, in particular an official named James Logan. Logan wasn’t the governor, but he was one of Penn’s top men in the colony. In fact, from everything I’ve read, it sounds like Logan was virtually the only person in the colony effectively defending proprietary interests. He stayed loyal and he knew what he was doing, even if he did have an arrogant, off-putting demeanor. That made him Lloyd’s biggest enemy and by the end of the decade they were openly attacking each other.

In 1709, Logan announced that he was sailing back to England. Lloyd and the anti-proprietary faction were fearful that he would give a one-sided account of what was going on to William Penn. So they demanded that Logan provide evidence for the accusations he was making against them. When Logan refused, they tried to have him impeached. When the impeachment failed, they tried to have him arrested, but that failed as well, thanks to an intervention by the governor. Eventually, Logan sailed away undaunted.

But apparently Lloyd had gone too far in his attacks on proprietary authority. It wasn't just that he had gone after Logan so aggressively. It was that his war against William Penn had led to the neglect of routine government business. He had been so focused on increasing self-government that he hadn’t actually governed. Thanks to his frequent standoffs with the proprietorship he often failed to pass routine legislation necessary for the government to function properly. The people were fine with his attacks on the proprietorship, but only when it was actually benefiting them. Otherwise what was the point?

So the people were getting fed up with Lloyd. And the elite Quaker faction was finally regaining its footing, after a decade of ineffectiveness. And so in the elections that next year, 1710, there was a complete turnover in government. The elite Quakers took total control of the Assembly. Even Lloyd lost his seat.

And because the elite Quakers were much more willing to work with Penn instead of being confrontational all the time, they managed to pass a lot of important new bills, breaking the logjam. Thanks to this success, the elite Quakers wound up dominating politics in the 1710s much as the middling Quakers had in the previous decade.

You might think that this would be good news for William Penn, and I suppose it was, but sadly for him, it was too little too late. He had bigger problems now. He had spent most of 1708 in a debtor’s prison. In 1711 and 1712 he had two strokes which left him incapacitated, eventually unable to speak. His second wife, Hannah took control of his estate. Penn had had a son by his first wife, but he was a disappointing lout who wasn’t fit to inherit. He had had other children with Hannah, but they weren’t yet adults. And so the estate fell into Hannah’s hands.

William Penn wasn't dead yet, but as far as Pennsylvania was concerned, he might as well have been. Most everyone assumed that a royal takeover was finally at hand. As a result of this false certainty, the men who were serving as governors at this time were in a weird position. They thought that their employer was about to die and be replaced.

If that happened, then there was a very good chance that they would lose their positions to some royal appointee. In an attempt to head this off, the governors began distancing themselves from Penn and the Quakers. Instead they tried to ingratiate themselves with the leading Anglicans in the colony, in the hopes that if the king took over, they would keep their jobs.

One governor, a man named Charles Gookin, had a complete falling out with the Quakers in government. He ignored the advice of the Council and even shut down the Assembly on his own authority. After a few years in power, he was virtually ruling on his own. But it didn't work, and he was soon removed from office, after word reached England of his behavior.

In 1718 Penn finally died, still in debt. He was, without a doubt one of the most important men in the history of colonial America. He'd created a whole new colony almost out of thin air. That gives him a unique place in history. Most of the other colonies were joint ventures. Almost no one had such an influence on an individual level, other than maybe some of the monarchs. But that being said, once Pennsylvania had been created and once the Quakers started moving in, his influence had dropped precipitously. It's hard to think of a less effective ruler. Much of that was thanks to events beyond his control, but it's still undeniable. Pennsylvania slipped from his grasp within a few years.

Even its status as a Quaker refuge faded away over time, as we'll see. By the end of the colonial period, the Quakers were a tiny, almost powerless minority. What Pennsylvania became – mercantile, diverse both ethnically and religiously – was not at all what Penn had intended. Pennsylvania become American, not Quaker.

Penn's legacy is a curious one. He's super important, even though in the end nothing went his way. All his (genuine) good intentions came to nothing. His colony didn't turn out like he intended, and he ended his life as a sad debtor, forgotten by the colonists he'd done so much for. Every grand scheme for American colonization failed in the end, but his more rapidly than most.

So rest in peace William Penn. Your heart was in the right place and you got nothing but grief for it.

Back to the narrative.

The year before Penn’s death, in 1717, Hannah appointed as governor a man named William Keith, no relation to George Keith the religious agitator I discussed last time. Her hope was that he would just keep things going for the time being. At first, he seemed like a good choice. He fixed the problems which had been left by his predecessor, he reformed the judicial system, and he was generally respected within Pennsylvania.

However, in 1721 there was an economic crisis, prompted by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in England. This created a divide within the colony over whether or not to print more paper money. The middling Quakers said yes, while the elite Quakers said no. A very similar divide to the one in New England. The Penn family also said no, since printing money would lower the value of the revenue they were taking in from the colony.

Governor Keith, however, came out in favor of printing more money, against the interests of the Penn family. There are a few possible reasons for this. Firstly, maybe he just thought it was a good idea. Or perhaps he was trying to curry favor with England. English officials weren't exactly in favor of paper money either, but at least he was breaking with the Penn family. Thirdly, maybe he was trying to win favor with Pennsylvanians themselves, in hopes of carving out an independent political career in the colony should he get removed from office. Maybe it was all three at once, I'm not really sure. Either way he was definitely freelancing.

In support of the idea that he was trying to win favor in London, we can look at the faction he created to support his efforts. This was not exactly Lloyd's old coalition of middling Quakers. Instead, Keith tried to appeal to more recent immigrants. In particular, Germans and Anglicans. And by appealing to the Anglicans, Keith was of course also appealing to London.

Keith pushed to have German immigrants naturalized immediately upon arrival, so that they could vote for him. He removed his opponents from office and replaced them with his own men, who were often Anglicans.

And beyond these specific ethno-religious appeals, he also did all of the electioneering things which were standard for the time. He formed caucuses to nominate candidates. He handed out preprinted ballots. He engaged in pamphleteering. After the 1726 election he led a big parade of 80 men on horseback and plenty more on foot. He created two political clubs in which his supporters could meet, one for his high class supporters, and one for everyone else. He came up with a political program beyond just issuing paper money, with policies designed in particular to appeal to the debtors in the colony who'd been hurt by the economic crash. All very similar to the techniques we've heard about elsewhere.

However, this by itself was insufficient. The number of non-Quakers was growing, but there were still plenty of Quakers in the colony. So, Keith needed the support of the middling Quakers as well. That would give him enough religious and geographic diversity to win for sure.

Now, David Lloyd had been semi-retired from politics after his losses in the previous decade, but to cut a long story short he came back and formed an alliance with Governor Keith. By joining their two factions together, they could absolutely dominate Pennsylvania. And indeed in the 1721 election they managed to take control of the Assembly back from the elite Quakers.

However, this was an uneasy alliance. Both men were against the proprietorship, but they were also rivals to each other. Each had their own base of support, and each one wanted to be the leading figure within this broader coalition. But for a few years things held together and the Keith-Lloyd alliance prevailed.

As a result, politics once again became more chaotic, after the relative calm of the last decade. The proprietary faction feared that they were opening the door to mob rule, and not entirely without reason. There were a few riots. After the 1726 election a mob in Philadelphia burned the pillory and stocks – you know, where they'd lock up criminals in the middle of the town square for public humiliation. Unsurprisingly the pillory and stocks were seen as symbols of authority. So there was a bit of disorder, but that was the worst of it. It wasn't like there was bloodshed.

And in any case, the Keith-Lloyd alliance was already breaking down. James Logan, the one reliable friend the Penn family had, had returned to England to inform them of what the governor was up to. Therefore, Hannah Penn removed Keith from office.

However, Keith had been building a base of support within the colony, and he intended to use it. So he decided to run for a seat in the Assembly and challenge David Lloyd for leadership of the anti-proprietary faction. Keith won the election, but he failed to displace Lloyd as leader. Keith may have had some support, but it was nothing compared to Lloyd's. Lloyd had been a leader in the colony for decades, and he had the backing of the Quaker masses, while Keith's support was far more limited. It was probably always a hopeless attempt.

Keith remained in the Assembly, but he was now mostly powerless. After two years he decided to cut his losses and return to England. And so the Keith-Lloyd alliance had become just Lloyd again. Keith’s political clubs were closed, his supporters lost their seats in the Assembly, and things went back to the way they were before. If anything, things became calmer. The new governor sent to replace Keith proved to be friendly to David Lloyd and his faction, perhaps just out of necessity, since he was going to have to defer to them if he wanted to get anything done.

And so, in the end, Lloyd had won. His quest for local autonomy had been mostly successful, and now it was the Assembly who called the shots, not the proprietor or the governor.

Lloyd retired from the Assembly just a few years later, in 1729, and he died two years after that, at the age of about 75. He had become the most important person in Pennsylvania, outshining even William Penn himself. But although Lloyd had more power, in the long run I think that Penn was more important. Without Penn, Pennsylvania wouldn’t have existed at all, at least not in any recognizable form. That part of America would’ve been colonized sooner or later, but not necessarily by Quakers. Penn really was an individual who made a difference.

On the other hand, even without Lloyd, sooner or later Pennsylvania’s Assembly would’ve become more powerful, just like in all the other colonies. Perhaps he accelerated the process, but with or without him Pennsylvania would’ve wound up in about the same place. After all, the Quakers were proving to be a quite unruly people.

However, Lloyd's death did mark the end of the rivalry between the middling and elite Quakers. As non-Quaker immigrants continued to pour into the colony, the Quakers became a smaller and smaller minority, and so the divisions within the Quakers came to be less important compared to the divisions between the Quakers and everyone else.

It also may have helped that Quaker society was becoming more inegalitarian. Up until now, Pennsylvania had been very, very equal, even by American standards. Almost all the Quaker settlers came from the same social class. Everyone was similar to everyone else, and so it didn’t take much for a relatively rich guy to become relatively poor. Economic mobility was high, just because the distribution of wealth was so compressed.

And that in turn made politics less stable in some ways. In Europe, and in most of the colonies, political power was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy families. But the “elite” Quakers I've been talking about were only a few steps above their neighbors, hardly an aristocracy. And so their attempts to make themselves into a political elite met with considerable pushback from their only slightly poorer neighbors. And for a while the elite failed to entrench itself.

But as time went on, and Pennsylvania grew in size and complexity, the social elite became… actually elite, actually different. Pennsylvania was still relatively egalitarian, but less so than in the earliest decades. Which has been another consistent theme throughout the podcast – inequality increases as colonies develop. And so now, the Quakers actually had ruling families to rule them. Naturally, the middling Quakers diminished as a political force. The leadership within the Assembly came more from these elite families. Perhaps in later generations, inequality would’ve led to political divisions based on class, but that sort of thing didn’t really happen yet, for whatever reason. The legacy of deferential politics, maybe.

These two forces, the Quakers becoming a minority, and the Quakers becoming more inegalitarian, together led to the creation of what was more or less a single Quaker faction. There was still dissent within Quakerism, as we'll see, but the old rivalry between elite and middling Quakers was no more.

But now it’s time to move on. Now it’s time to introduce Benjamin Franklin. Writer, printer, scientist, politician, revolutionary. I'm sure you're familiar with him. But he is pretty important, both in Pennsylvania and to America as a whole, so I do want to talk about him a bit, both because of his importance and because he's a early example of a new character type in America: the Enlightenment man. The secularism, the pragmatism, the frugality, the focus on upward mobility. By the end of the century, these values would be common, but Franklin was one of the first men to fully embody them. It’s no wonder that Ben Franklin fit in so well with revolutionaries who were a generation or two younger than him. He was living their ideals before they had been born.

You can think of Franklin’s story as a counterpoint to the life of Thomas Hutchinson, the Massachusetts politician who became governor just before the Revolution. The guy whose house got ransacked by a mob. Both men were born in Boston around the same time, both became wealthy, both became prominent politicians, and both lived to see the American Revolution in their old age.

But there the similarities end. Hutchinson was born into a respected family; Franklin was a self-made man. When the Revolution came, Hutchinson remained a Loyalist, while Franklin became one of the most prominent rebels. Although Franklin was five years older than Hutchinson, in terms of mindset he came from a younger generation. Hutchinson was the last of the Puritans, while Franklin was the first of the Americans. That's probably unfair to Hutchinson, who was in fact fairly liberal and broad-minded in a lot of ways, but still the difference in outlook between them is palpable.

Anyway, a lot of the details here will be taken from Franklin’s own Autobiography, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it. I hadn’t read it before this podcast and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It gives you a very strong sense of Franklin’s mindset as he goes through life, and the worldview of everyone else he encounters. I wind up reading a lot of dry history books for research, and it was a breath of fresh air to see things from a more personal perspective.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. He was the youngest son of a youngest son of a youngest son of a youngest son of a youngest son. That’s five generations of youngest sons. His father was a minor tradesman who had seventeen children in all, seven by his first wife, ten by his second. Young Benjamin went to school for two years, from ages eight to ten, but after that he was put to work. First, he worked for his father, making candles, but when that proved unsuitable, he was apprenticed to his half-brother, a printer. That fit him much better, and it gave him a chance to read every book he could get his hands on. Importantly, he also taught himself how to write well. He even anonymously submitted items to his brother’s newspaper as a teenager. However, the two fought a lot and his half-brother beat him. Therefore, at age 17, he slipped away and fled Boston, hoping for better prospects elsewhere.

He first went to New York, but the printer there didn’t have work for him and advised him to press on to Pennsylvania. And so, on a Sunday morning in 1723, Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, with no friends or connections, and almost no money. He was able to find employment with some of the local printers, but he hoped to soon set up a shop of his own.

Philadelphia was a much more congenial town than Boston to a man like Franklin. Not because of the Quakers. Franklin liked the Quakers well enough, but the one time he attended one of their meetings he fell asleep. No, it was the other non-Quakers in the colony that he connected with, men with a similar entrepreneurial, free thinking spirit. Franklin preferred to spend his Sundays reading, not at church, and the diversity of Philadelphia allowed for that.

As it happens, soon after his arrival, William Keith, who was still governor at the time, heard about Franklin, who sounded like a promising young man. Keith went to visit him, encouraging him to set up his own shop.

Emboldened, Franklin first returned to Boston, hoping to borrow money from his father, though his father declined, since he thought he was too young. But on the way back, he stopped in New York again, and this time the governor there, William Burnet, asked to meet with him, hearing that he was a young man of some learning. So that’s two governors Ben Franklin had befriended, and he wasn’t even legally an adult yet. Franklin was just that kind of guy. He must’ve simply radiated vibes of “I'm going places” to everyone he met.

But before he could accomplish any great deeds, he still needed to set up his own business. Governor Keith now encouraged Franklin to go to London to buy equipment, promising to provide Franklin with the capital he needed.

However, Keith reneged on his promises, which left Franklin stranded in London, still with almost no money. Apparently the governor was prone to make promises he couldn't keep and back out at the last second. Franklin was too young and too naïve to realize this until it was too late and he was already on his way to England. But once in London he was able to find work, and eventually he made his way back to Philadelphia, probably wiser for the experience. After a few more years he raised the money needed to set himself up, and by age 24 he was running his own business.

And that was just the beginning of his rise. As one of the few printers in Philadelphia, he had a fair amount of influence. He published a weekly newspaper, and he was also able to put his own writing out there, most famously Poor Richard's Almanack. But he also dipped his toe in politics, always with an eye on advancing his business. For instance in 1729 he published a pamphlet about paper money. Unlike Thomas Hutchinson, he favored paper money. But to be fair, Franklin did have a personal stake in the issue. He had already helped design New Jersey's paper money, and he hoped to be hired to print Pennsylvania's currency as well. Which he was, partly thanks to the fact that he'd come out in support of the idea.

In 1736, he took a job as clerk to the Assembly, that is, he became the person who wrote down what actually happened during their meetings. The guy taking notes, basically. Again, this was to benefit his business. The job meant more work for his print shop, publishing records of votes in the Assembly and so on. The year after that he became Philadelphia’s postmaster, which helped him sell his newspaper.

But now that he was involved in government, Franklin began to turn his attention to public affairs in general.

In addition to running his print shop, Franklin was also very fond of founding institutions. He had already founded a subscription library which people could join. And now he began using that energy for the public good.

He began with the city watch of Philadelphia, which he thought was being poorly run. The constable often spent his nights drinking instead of patrolling the city, and the taxes which paid for the city watch were unfairly burdensome to the poor. Franklin came up with a proposal to reform the watch, in which taxes would be apportioned equitably, and where the watchmen would become fully professionalized. He presented his proposal a debating club he had founded, and its members spread the idea.

Around the same time he formed a volunteer fire brigade, which was so successful that numerous other brigades were formed across the city. In 1743 he founded a philosophical society and a little later he created an academy which would eventually become the University of Pennsylvania. And those are just some of his accomplishments. I could go on, but you get the point.

He even tried to become literally perfect, although that was a bit too much to ask even for him. “It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined.”

With such energy, it’s no wonder that Franklin became so prominent. And he hadn't even become an inventor or a scientist yet. That only happened in the 1740s, after he had made enough money to retire as a printer and fully pursue his own interests.

And as we'll see next time, he also joined the political fray in earnest, beginning a career that would end with him enshrined as one of the most famous Founding Fathers. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

The podcast is on twitter, @earlyoftenpod, or go to the blog at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com for transcripts of every single episode. And if you like the podcast, give it a good review on iTunes. That helps. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

The Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742 by Norman S. Cohen

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

The World of William Penn by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn

Colonial Pennsylvania: A History by Joseph E. Illick

Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726 by Gary B. Nash

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740 - 1776 by Theodore Thayer

The Keith-Lloyd Alliance: Factional and Coalition Politics in Colonial Pennsylvania by Thomas Wendel

The Evolution of the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1682-1748 by Chester Raymond Young

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(William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania.)

We return to Pennsylvania in the late 1600s. William Penn may not be happy with being stuck in England, but his colonists are very much enjoying their extra independence - and taking full advantage.

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 37: Man in the Middle.

Last time, we finished our discussion of New York’s colonial period. Today, we’re going to restart the history of colonial Pennsylvania. This episode draws especially from the book Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681-1726 by Gary B. Nash. Since it’s been a little while since we talked about Pennsylvania, let me recap the story so far.

Pennsylvania was the brainchild of William Penn. Penn had been born into a very prominent family with connections to the Stuarts, but as a young man he converted to Quakerism, a radical Christian sect whose members were persecuted by the government. Because of his background, Penn was one of the richest and most influential Quakers. He decided to use his position to create a new colony in America, which would serve as a refuge for his Quaker brethren.

He first became involved in a plan to colonize New Jersey in the 1670s. A few Quakers started trickling in, but Penn decided that New Jersey wasn’t big enough, and so he got the rights to a much larger grant of land, which stretched all the way from the Delaware to the Great Lakes.

William Penn was made the sole proprietor of this new colony. It was his to do with as he pleased, but he chose to give the colony a fairly liberal constitution -- with himself still in charge of course. Notably, the upper house of the legislature was to be elected rather than appointed. However, the lower house was not all that powerful. When Penn was in the colony, he would serve as governor himself. When he was absent, he could appoint a deputy governor to rule instead, who was usually just called the “governor”.

The first colonists set off for Pennsylvania in 1682, Penn himself included. The colony attracted lots of immigrants, but Penn always had problems. For one thing, many of the colonists resented the power he held as proprietor. Almost immediately they forced him to substantially revise Pennsylvania’s constitution. He also had lots of money problems.

And he had endless legal headaches thanks to what is now state of Delaware. You see, Pennsylvania itself didn’t quite reach the ocean, and in order to ensure that his colony had access to the sea, Penn had also purchased a smaller strip of land adjacent to Pennsylvania along the Delaware Bay. But for one thing, the area was already inhabited by non-Quakers who resented being lumped in with Pennsylvania. For another thing, the land was also claimed by Maryland. In fact, after only a few years in America, Penn had to return to England to defend his claim to Delaware, and it would be over a decade and a half before he managed to return.

The voting system was pretty similar to what we've heard about elsewhere. The property requirements were normal, and most adult men had the vote. Elections were held annually on October 1, for most of the colonial period. Voting was done either inside or outside the county courthouse, depending on the weather. Turnout was typically between 20 and 40%.

Let me read you a description of a standard Pennsylvania election by historian Chester Raymond Young. “The voter handed the election clerk a paper or ticket on which he had written the names of the eight candidate for whom he was voting. If an illiterate person appeared with his paper, the names on it were read aloud by the sheriff to make certain he wanted to vote for those individuals. In case an elector brought no ballot with him, he was allowed to give his vote orally. If challenged by an election inspector, a voter was required to affirm that he possessed the qualifications required by the 1706 law and that he had not already voted that day. The polls were open from ten a.m. to two p.m., and the election continued for as many days as were necessary to allow each freeholder to vote.

“When the voting was completed, the sheriff opened the ballot box in the presence of the inspectors. The ballots were taken out and read aloud one by one and a tally made. Then the names of the eight men who received the highest vote would be announced as the assemblymen for that county. If a ballot listed more than eight names, or had a second paper folded in with it, it was rejected.”

So, that’s roughly where we left Pennsylvania. The colony was young and growing fast, but already there were problems on the horizon. Penn’s absence meant that he had to govern his colony from a distance, through proxies. And it didn’t help that a number of Penn’s most prominent supporters within Pennsylvania soon either left the colony or died. That created a power vacuum, and other Quaker elites, with fewer personal ties to the Penn family, moved in to fill it.

I’ve talked before about how sometimes factions in the colonies were divided along the lines of court vs. country. That is, those who defended the privileges of the king vs. those who fought for local autonomy. Well, that was what was happening in Pennsylvania, only with the proprietor in place of the king. It’s rather like the opposition to the Calvert family in Maryland. The colonists had no interest in letting William Penn control things. They wanted as much self-government as possible. Certainly the non-Quakers in Delaware wanted as little to do with Penn as possible, but even the Quakers were too independent minded to accept his authority unquestioningly.

And from the start Penn pursued policies which were bound to make him unpopular. I won’t get into all the details here, but basically to the colonists it seemed like Penn was arbitrarily favoring himself and his friends at the expense of everyone else. Which he kind of was. In particular, his land policy was very unfair. He gave himself large tracts of land which were exempt from taxation, land which often went unfarmed instead of being put to use. He came up with unpopular rules about the buying and selling of land and then he exempted his friends from those unpopular rules.

So bad laws plus favoritism plus high rents plus an absent proprietor. It was not a recipe for popularity. An anti-proprietary faction opposed to Penn began forming within just a few years.

When Penn had left, rather than appoint a governor, he decided to place all executive authority within the Council as a whole. In the beginning, the upper house was controlled by Penn’s allies, so this must’ve seemed like a safe bet to Penn at the time. However, as the decade went on, the Council became increasingly estranged from the proprietor. Partly just because of those unpopular policies that Penn supported. But also, the Council was becoming more and more powerful the longer Penn was in England. They were now appointing officials and proposing new laws entirely on their own authority. And that was power they didn’t want to give up.

So when word reached Penn that the Council was becoming disobedient, he decided to take some of their powers away. The Council would no longer have executive authority. Instead, Penn created a smaller group of just five appointed men to run things, the Commission of State it was called. You can think of it as kind of an attempt to create a normal appointed upper house like other colonies had. Penn hoped that they would defend his interests better, but the Commission of State proved to be just as useless to Penn as the Council. The men he appointed were variously either unpopular with the colonists, or at odds with one another, or they turned out to be opposed to proprietary authority.

Penn was rapidly becoming so powerless that there was hardly a proprietary faction at all to support him. Normally, even if the ruler of a colony was unpopular, he could at least assemble a coalition to support him, thanks merely to the fact that he had the power to give people lucrative jobs. That alone meant that some number of colonists would support him, simply out of the hope for further advancement. However, Penn had mostly surrendered his control over appointments, so he didn’t even have patronage anymore.

The anti-proprietary faction now pretty much controlled the government top to bottom. In fact, the anti-proprietary faction was so successful so fast that an opposition began forming against them.

This divide was basically economic. There wasn’t much of an upper class in Pennsylvania, but one was starting to form out of the more prosperous merchants in the colony. These guys weren’t that much richer than anyone else, but they were trying to turn themselves into a little ruling class. These people were the ones currently running the government, who had been fighting against Penn. I’ll call them the elite Quakers.

In opposition to the elite Quakers were the middling Quakers, the middle class who were worried about being shut out of power by this new elite. Shopkeepers and small landowners and the like. These guys were also opposed to proprietary authority, but they were willing to cooperate with it sometimes when it benefited them.

The elite Quakers dominated the Council, while the middling Quakers had their base of support in the Assembly. And on top of these factions, there were also the non-Quakers, who dominated in Delaware but were otherwise mostly shut out from power. But basically it became a three way struggle between Penn, the elite Quakers, and the middling Quakers.

In particular, the elite and middling Quakers fought over how much power the Assembly should have. The Council had been steadily increasing its authority at the expense of William Penn, but now the Assembly was trying to take some of that power for itself. They wanted the right to propose new legislation, to propose amendments to bills, that sort of thing. The same desires every colonial lower house had. Penn tried to play them off of each other, but whichever side he supported, he wound up giving more power to men who were fundamentally opposed to him. It was a no-win situation.

Increasingly despondent, Penn wrote to the colonists, begging them, “For the love of God, me and the poor country, be not so governmentish, so noisy and open in your dissatisfactions.”

Penn decided that in order to enforce his will properly, he was going to have to name a governor to run things, instead of a committee. His first choice was a Welsh Quaker named Thomas Lloyd, who had previously been in both the Council and the Commission of State. Lloyd was actually an opponent of Penn, but Penn hoped that he could use the appointment as a peace offering. However Lloyd declined, since he didn’t want to have to enforce Penn’s unpopular policies.

So instead Penn chose a Puritan soldier named John Blackwell. That didn’t go well either. As a Puritan, Blackwell was temperamentally opposed to the Quakers. And Thomas Lloyd, acting as leader of the opposition, did everything he could to stonewall him. Both sides resented each other and nothing much got done. Blackwell resigned after a year and the Council took over again, under the leadership of Thomas Lloyd. The anti-proprietary faction, specifically the elite Quakers, were back in charge, and fully in control of every level of government.

But you won’t be surprised to hear that almost immediately new problems popped up. For one thing, the Glorious Revolution happened in 1688, which I’ll get to in a minute. But also, there was a surprise religious controversy to liven things up.

Enter George Keith. Keith was an intellectual Quaker who had first immigrated to East Jersey before moving to Philadelphia to become a schoolmaster. Keith was very argumentative, always looking to pick fights over doctrine. He thought that Quakerism had become too lax and he meant to remedy that. However, the other Quakers in Pennsylvania rebuffed his proposals for reform. They weren’t interested in an intellectual, doctrinal faith. That would defeat the whole purpose of Quakerism. The Inner Light was enough for them. But Keith refused to take no for an answer. He kept escalating the dispute until he got expelled from his local Quaker meeting in 1692.

Even that wasn’t enough to end things. In fact, Keith escalated his attacks to include Thomas Lloyd and the rest of the government, so what had been just a religious dispute now became a political one.

It’s kind of like what happened in Massachusetts. Back in the 1630s, when Massachusetts was just getting settled, reformers like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had challenged the religious establishment. And because church and state were so closely linked to one another, a religious challenge almost certainly meant a political dispute as well. How far would the government go to enforce orthodoxy? Would they be willing to clamp down or would the colony fall into disunity almost immediately? In Massachusetts, officials had cracked down. Williams and Hutchinson had to go into exile in Rhode Island. And for the next half century, things remained calm.

In Pennsylvania, things didn’t go that far, but the government did still try to stop Keith. In order to prevent him from distributing pamphlets, they had his printer imprisoned for four months without charges. Then the Council banned the printing of all seditious material. Then they imprisoned Keith and several of his followers, though without seriously punishing them.

That polarized Pennsylvania even more. Although, truth be told, there weren’t that many followers of Keith, at least not that many who agreed with his ideas about Quakerism. Mostly, Keith was an excuse for people with pre-existing grudges to attack the government. His biggest supporters were men who were already opponents of Lloyd, and his biggest opponents were already supporters of Lloyd. In fact the overlap was pretty overwhelming. So really this was a continuation of the elite vs. middling fight rather than something new. The divide was given a new intensity thanks to the religious angle, but that’s all. It was a roundabout way for middling Quakers to attack the government. Once again, religion, class, and politics all fed into and amplified each other.

However, Keith left the colony of his own accord in late 1693, and without his presence, the religious dispute itself died down.

But that just meant Pennsylvanians could move on to bigger problems.

The Glorious Revolution had happened 5 years ago, in 1688. Within Pennsylvania, it didn’t lead to anything as dramatic as the fall of the Dominion, but it was still important. For one thing, it meant that Penn was still stuck in England. He had been a close friend of James II, but after James was overthrown, he fell under suspicion from the new regime. He was even arrested for treason twice. Plus there were serious worries that the crown would take Pennsylvania away from him altogether, so there was no way he could return to America anytime soon.

Also, the Glorious Revolution led directly into King William’s War, which meant that the colonies would be fighting Quebec. In New England or New York, war simply meant war. Death, destruction, defeat, debt. But in Pennsylvania, the problems caused by the war were quite different. Pennsylvania was far from the front lines, and it was controlled by pacifist Quakers. You might think that the colony would thus be able to make it through the war unscathed, but it was not to be.

Firstly, the war further inflamed tensions between Delaware and the rest of Pennsylvania. Delaware, being on the coast, was more exposed to naval attack. The colonists in Delaware pushed the government to beef up their defenses, which were currently nonexistent, but the Quakers blocked any such attempts.

The residents of Delaware decided to force the issue by more or less seceding from Pennsylvania altogether. The representatives from Delaware began meeting on their own, as a separate legislature. They started appointing their own officials without regard to the rest of Pennsylvania. Given that the Quakers weren’t about to use force to bring Delaware back under control, there wasn’t much they could do about it. So they just had to live with it. Penn appointed a separate governor for Delaware and from now on the two colonies would be at least semi-independent from one another, although they weren’t formally split up until 1701.

But it wasn’t just Delawareans who wanted Pennsylvania to be more aggressive. So too did the Board of Trade and everyone else in the empire. England couldn’t hope to fight the French if there was a Pennsylvania-sized gap in their defenses. Even if Pennsylvania refused to raise a militia, the least they could do was send money to the other colonies to help. However, even that seemed to conflict with Quaker principles, since you’d still be raising money to help fight a war. And in any case, who wants to pay extra taxes to help someone else fight?

But to England, this was a serious problem. Serious enough, in fact, that King William decided to take Pennsylvania away from William Penn altogether and turn it into a royal colony. Penn’s constitution would be thrown out and replaced by a standard royal constitution, with a powerful governor and an appointed council. That was a big change, very similar to the creation of the Dominion of New England, except limited to just one colony. After barely 10 years in charge, Penn had already lost his colony, but that’s what happens when you’re on the wrong side of a revolution.

The new governor that King William chose was actually Benjamin Fletcher, who was also currently serving as the governor of New York. He was that very corrupt governor I talked about in Episode 34, the one who gave away lots of land to his supporters. It was hoped that sharing a governor would help the colonies coordinate better.

Naturally, he was an unpopular choice. All of these changes meant that the elite Quaker faction, the one led by Thomas Lloyd, was being forced out of power. They immediately began opposing Governor Fletcher. They didn’t like being under Penn’s authority, but this was worse. And Fletcher naturally turned to the middling Quakers instead, those who had supported George Keith. These were the men he appointed to the Council and to other important posts. Those guys weren’t exactly in favor of royal control, but I guess they were happy enough to take power for themselves.

Again, this is a pretty standard pattern. A new governor arrives in a divided colony, and decides to support whichever faction seems like the lesser of two evils.

The elite Quakers, having been kicked out of the Council, moved their base of operations down into the Assembly. There, they led a very successful effort to stonewall Governor Fletcher as much as possible, just like with Governor Blackwell a few years ago. Most importantly, they managed to block most of his attempts to raise money for the war effort.

That was a big problem. The whole point of turning Pennsylvania into a royal colony was to raise that money, but Governor Fletcher was proving no more successful than before. And in fact his failure brought this experiment in royal government to a swift end. Penn was starting to regain some of his influence at court, and after only two years King William agreed to hand Pennsylvania back to Penn, on the condition that he do more to help with the war. I’m sure the lesson was not lost on Penn that if he failed again, he could lose his colony for good.

Once again, obstruction proved to be a useful way to get rid of an unwanted governor.

So the government was back in Penn’s hands and he had to raise that money no matter what. But the legislature was unwilling to do so without concessions. In fact, they wanted major changes to Penn’s constitution for the colony.

In particular, they wanted to strengthen the power of the Assembly. That was a major reversal for the elite Quakers, who had previously been the ones trying to weaken the Assembly. Why the change? Well, since they had been kicked out of the Council once, it stood to reason that they might get kicked out again. In which case, it made more sense to focus their efforts on the Assembly, where the only ones who could kick them out were the voters, who they thought they could control better.

They had other demands as well, which included cutting the size of both the Council and Assembly by half, plus changes to the franchise aimed at weakening the power of non-Quakers. In particular, the property requirement for rural voters was cut by half, while the requirement for urban voters was increased. Also residents would have to live in the colony for a year before they could vote. Since non-Quakers tended to be newcomers who lived in Philadelphia, these proposed changes would make it harder for them to vote, while impacting the Quakers much less.

Add it all up and we’re looking at a minor constitutional revolution. The elite Quakers were strengthening themselves at the expense of both William Penn and their opponents within the colony.

Penn had no interest in any of these changes, but the elite Quakers linked the reforms to the money Penn was demanding. No reforms, no money. And since Penn still risked losing his charter if he failed, he ultimately had little choice but to capitulate, and after a year’s delay, in 1696 the changes were passed into law.

A steep price to pay for a fairly small sum of money. The Assembly really was swiftly becoming the central governing body within Pennsylvania.

I should mention that Thomas Lloyd had died in 1694. He was succeeded by his distant cousin, David Lloyd, who will stick around as one of the most important Pennsylvanians over the next few decades. David Lloyd came from a lower class background, but he had worked his way up in society. First, while in England he had helped William Penn manage some legal affairs concerning land in Pennsylvania. Then, he had moved to Pennsylvania himself. Thanks to his relationship with Penn and with his cousin Thomas, he quickly worked his way up through government. However, he eventually began opposing Penn and when Thomas died, he took over as leader of the anti-proprietary faction.

Anyway, King William’s War came to an end in 1697. The next big issue was smuggling. Like every other colony, Pennsylvania was doing its level best to avoid enforcing the Navigation Acts. Parliament passed further laws to strengthen the Acts, but Pennsylvania passed its own laws to undermine them. The Board of Trade told Penn to crack down on his unruly colonists and to remove intransigent officials from office.

Penn decided that this was an opportune time to finally get back to his colony and see for himself how things were going. Another reason for the visit was that Penn was now deeply in debt and he hoped that by returning to Pennsylvania, he could raise more money.

And so, in December 1699, he found himself back in Philadelphia, which had already grown to 5000 people, as big as New York City, second only to Boston. And all that growth after less than 20 years. 80 years on after Jamestown, the English had finally figured out how to do colonization right.

The elite Quaker faction, led by David Lloyd, remained in power at all levels of government, and they had the support of most Quakers. The opposition, which included middling Quakers and the growing Anglican population, was stuck on the sidelines.

There was a brief honeymoon period after Penn’s arrival, and the legislature agreed to crack down on smuggling. But within a few months things went back to normal and he wasn’t able to get much more done. And once again, his policies undermined his popularity. He tried to resurvey land and begin collecting the rents that he was owed. He tried to dislodge David Lloyd and the anti-proprietary faction from power, but failed.

In any case, within 2 years Penn had to return to England yet again. Parliament was again considering a bill which would place Pennsylvania back under royal control, and Penn decided that his presence would be required in order to stop it.

The fact that Penn would be leaving, possibly for good, and the fact that Pennsylvania might soon become a royal province for good, encouraged the leadership within Pennsylvania to push for even more constitutional reforms while Penn was still in the colony. Basically, the Assembly wanted to force Penn into giving them even more power in case Pennsylvania was annexed by the crown. Because after that, the opportunities for them to make further constitutional changes would be slim at best. They needed to maximize their amount of self-government ASAP.

However, it was no longer the elite Quakers who were leading the push for self-government. David Lloyd had shifted his allegiance to become leader of the middling Quakers, which was an easier thing to do in the days before political parties, and now they were the ones pushing for greater independence.

Why the switch? Why didn’t Lloyd just stick with the elite Quakers? One possible reason is that Lloyd was determined to keep increasing Pennsylvania’s independence, while the elite Quakers had become less interested. On the other hand, the middling Quakers were becoming more interested. In other words, David Lloyd’s views now aligned better with the middling Quakers, and so he switched.

People at the time had a less flattering view of Lloyd. Many back then thought that he was driven by personal issues -- general resentment against authority, hostility towards William Penn -- rather than by any high minded principles. Of course it’s impossible to know the truth about someone’s motives, especially from a distance of three centuries. And in any case, those two possibilities aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes we start off by holding a petty grudge against someone, and then we come up with some justification for that grudge, and over time that justification comes to drive us just as much as the original grudge ever did. And sometimes people just want power. As far as history is concerned, it might not even matter what someone’s motives are, just their actions. Either way, the outcome was the same: Lloyd changed sides.

But that raises another question: why were the elite and middling Quakers changing their positions? Well I think -- and this is just my speculation -- that as time went on, self-government was coming to mean something different. Early on, self-government had meant, in practice, rule by the elite Quakers. There wasn’t yet that much political awareness among the people, and so the elite Quakers naturally took power. However, after two decades, your average Pennsylvanian was starting to understand that he had real power over the government, that a powerful Assembly would make him powerful. So self-government now meant power for the people instead of power for the elite. Hence, it was now the middling Quakers who most wanted to strengthen the Assembly. Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone was still in favor of self-government overall, but their relative positions had changed.

And so, Lloyd switched sides. In fact, he made an active effort to reach out to the average Pennsylvania citizen. Under his watch, laws were passed which required elections to be publicly advertised in advance, so that everyone would know they were happening. He was even willing to ally with Anglicans and old supporters of George Keith when the opportunity arose. Naturally, these actions considerably increased the number of politically active men, by bringing in groups that normally would’ve been much more passive.

Anyway, Lloyd and his supporters presented William Penn with a set of proposals for further reforms. Some of them, such as the changes to Penn’s land policies, were popular among elite and middling Quakers alike. But others, such as the proposed constitutional reforms, were more controversial.

Penn resisted most of these demands, since they meant that his own authority would be weakened even further. However, he found that he had little choice in the matter, given that most of the rest of the colony was against him. Even his supporters only supported him partway, while his opponents opposed him wholeheartedly. Only days before he sailed back to England he reluctantly agreed to the changes. Part of the reason he caved in was that he expected to lose Pennsylvania anyway, so whatever changes he accepted probably wouldn’t matter too much.

But he didn’t lose control of Pennsylvania, so in fact these changes mattered a whole lot. Really it was a whole new constitution. Most notably, the Council completely lost its role as a legislative body. It no longer had the right to propose laws, it could no longer veto laws proposed by the Assembly, nothing. It was now merely an advisory body for the proprietor, a bit like a modern cabinet. The Assembly became the sole legislative body within the colony, making Pennsylvania and Delaware the only unicameral colonies in America. This may be the closest America ever came to parliamentary government. The Assembly hadn’t become the sole governing body, but it was certainly moving in that direction. Perhaps if more colonial legislatures had gained this level of power before the American Revolution, the constitution would’ve turned out quite different, with less of an emphasis on presidential power. Maybe. Who knows.

In addition to that change, other features of Penn’s constitution, such as term limits, were dropped as well. And Delaware was finally separated from the rest of Pennsylvania.

This new constitution would last until the Revolution.

With that out of the way, Penn sailed back to England, defeated yet again. He was hopelessly stuck in the middle between English officials and his own colonists. There was just no way to please one without enraging the other. And so he had to make concession after concession.

Like with so many other idealistic plans for colonization his plan had fallen flat. For comparison, think of John Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. It was just next to impossible to force the colonists to act against their wills. They had most of the power and they used it. No one in England had the will to really coerce the colonies into doing their bidding. And certainly a pacifist like William Penn would never crack down on his own people. Therefore, there was nothing much to be done. His authority as proprietor was predestined to be sloughed off by the Pennsylvanians. Penn’s bad luck, ineptness, and inflexibility undoubtedly hurried matters along, but it would’ve happened regardless.

His colony was no longer really his. It was already out of his hands. And though he couldn’t have known it as he sailed off into the Atlantic, he’d never see Pennsylvania again.

Next episode, we'll discuss the next few decades of Pennsylvania's history, as the rivalries within the colony heat up even more. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

The World of William Penn by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn

Colonial Pennsylvania: A History by Joseph E. Illick

Elections in Colonial Pennsylvania by Sister Joan de Lourdes Leonard

Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726 by Gary B. Nash

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740 - 1776 by Theodore Thayer

The Evolution of the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1682-1748 by Chester Raymond Young

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Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 36: What About Livingston?

Last time, we looked at two periods of factionalism in colonial New York, the merchant-landowner rivalry of the 1710s and ‘20s, and the Morris-Cosby dispute of the 1730s. During these decades the various elite factions within the colony were slowly learning how to appeal to popular opinion, as a weapon in their fights against each other.

Today, we’re going to talk about the final few decades of New York’s colonial history, from the 1740s to the 1760s. Once again, there will be two separate rounds of factionalism. The first will be like the Morris-Cosby dispute, a battle between elites which goes public. The second round will be a confusing whirlpool of different interest groups aligning and dealigning with each other as New York goes through increasingly rapid changes in the run up to the American Revolution.

But first, a few words on how New York has changed over the last several decades, just to put things in perspective.

The population had grown from 19,000 in 1700 to 80,000 in 1750, though plenty of other colonies were still bigger.

The Dutch domination of Albany was declining sharply, thanks in part to the influx of men to fight in the wars with Quebec. According to the historian Michael Kammen, “One measurable result was that the proportion of voters with Dutch surnames in Albany County declined from 82 percent in 1720 to 57 percent in 1763.” So the old Dutch-English split was still there, but becoming less important with each passing decade.

Literacy was growing, and the colony was becoming more cultured. The first college in New York, which would become Columbia University, was chartered in 1754, a full 118 years after Harvard in Massachusetts. Print culture was starting to develop as well. The first public library was opened in 1754 and an increasing number of books were published within the colony. And twenty two different newspapers were printed in New York during the colonial era, almost all in New York City. These were mostly weekly newspapers, with just a few pages per edition. But they were widely read.

And the press paid an increasing amount of attention to politics as time went on. According to Kammen, during the 1750 election there were 40 political titles published. During the 1761 election, 59 titles. And in 1769, 135 titles.

So, just like how New England was becoming less Puritan over time, I think that New York was becoming less mercantile. It was still very focused on trade, but the other aspects of civilization were being brought in as well.

So that’s New York in general, but let’s get into the narrative for this episode. To begin with, I need to introduce the leader of one of the two factions that are about to form, James DeLancey.

DeLancey, born in 1703, was the son of Stephen DeLancey, founder of one of the leading merchant families in New York. As a young man he studied law in England and come back to America to work as a lawyer there. Thanks to his family’s connections, he was made a member of the council at age 26, and a member of the supreme court soon afterwards.

Now, you’ll remember from last episode that Governor Cosby got into a fight with Lewis Morris, the chief justice of the supreme court, and he had Morris removed from the court altogether. Well, that was good news for DeLancey. When Morris was fired, DeLancey was promoted to be chief justice at age just 30, an office he’d hold for the next 27 years.

So DeLancey was already in a great position for such a young man. But he wasn’t content to merely hold one of the most powerful posts in the colony. He was also determined to build up a network of supporters, and with the help of his family he did just that. The DeLanceys became one of the most powerful families in the colony, and his father and two of his brothers all served as Assemblymen at various periods. A bit like Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts, I suppose.

And on top of all that, DeLancey was also very well connected in London. He and his sister had both married into very prominent English families plus he had economic and personal ties with other important Englishmen. In fact, DeLancey was so well-positioned that he was often thought to be more powerful than the governors were.

But although he was accumulating all this power, he wasn’t using it to oppose the government. Instead, the best path for him was to support the governors, since that was the way to get even more power. So when a new governor, George Clinton, arrived in 1743, he received a warm welcome from DeLancey, who promised to use his network of supporters to back Clinton. In return, Clinton appointed several of DeLancey’s friends to the Council, which increased his influence even further. DeLancey became Clinton’s chief advisor.

(Governor Clinton, by the way had served as an officer in the navy for the last 35 years and he’d also been governor of Newfoundland for a time.)

But although DeLancey and Clinton started off as close allies, within just a few years, the two had a serious falling out, probably thanks to the start of King George’s War. Now, no one in New York was looking forward to another war, especially considering how the last wars had been ruinously expensive disasters. So none of the New Yorkers were looking to prosecute the war with any vigor. They wanted minimal involvement.

Governor Clinton, on the other hand, since he represented British interests, was duty bound to push the fight as hard as he could, to goad the colonists into supporting the war even against their will. But almost none of the local politicians wanted to back him on this, including DeLancey. They were all hemming and hawing, hoping to avoid publicly supporting an unwanted war.

And so, after DeLancey declined to attend an important conference with the Iroquois about the war effort, Clinton replaced him as chief advisor with another man who might actually help him fight the war.

That other man was named Cadwallader Colden. Colden had been born in Scotland, and he studied medicine there before setting off for America. In America, he did well for himself, becoming a scientist of some note, and corresponding with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Like many scientists back then, he was also active in political life. In fact, Franklin had encouraged him to remain involved in politics, and not just retreat to his study to conduct his research in private.

But he had a reputation as rigid and pugnacious, and he had managed to offend many prominent men in the colony. Normally that might be a problem, but I suppose in this case it was an advantage, since Colden didn’t have much to lose by helping the governor do unpopular things. He was already used to picking fights, so this was no different.

But the point is, DeLancey was out and Colden was in. However, no matter which advisors he had, Governor Clinton’s popularity was bound to decrease. So an opposition began to form, and naturally James DeLancey stepped in as leader. It was an obvious choice for him: of course you should oppose the governor who had spurned you and who was now leading an unpopular and unsuccessful war effort. It was all upside. DeLancey took his network of supporters and used them to assemble a broader coalition of different groups opposed to the war. Albany merchants, farmers worried about economic disruption, and so on.

But actually, King George’s War ended in just a few years, when the factionalism was only getting started. So at first, Governor Clinton wasn’t too worried. He figured that with the end of the war he could easily win the colony back to his side. He started by removing supporters of DeLancey from the upper house and replacing them with his own men. That was simple enough, but the lower house was a harder nut to crack. The Assembly was thoroughly controlled by DeLancey’s faction. In order to govern effectively, he was going to have to fight for control of the Assembly, and that meant appealing to the people.

It was an uphill task. DeLancey had much deeper roots in the colony that he did. But Clinton set his advisor Colden to work, replacing many of the appointed officials throughout the colony with his own men, that he might have better control over the election process. By 1750 he was ready to call for a new election. Both sides fought hard, going after each other in the newspapers. DeLancey himself went out into the countryside to encourage supporters to vote.

Well, according to Governor Clinton’s faction, DeLancey wasn’t just out in the country to shake hands and be nice, he was out there to browbeat people into voting for him. Supposedly, DeLancey even threatened to forcibly enlist men in the army if they didn’t support him. In fact Clinton’s faction made numerous accusations like that, saying that the DeLanceys were threatening and bribing voters, as well as shipping in people from outside to cast votes in elections they weren’t supposed to vote in. Whether or not those accusations were true is hard to say. A lot of the evidence that we have comes from unreliable partisan sources. But there were a lot of accusations like this being thrown around, and I have to imagine that at least some of them were true.

In any case, whether through fraud or genuine support or both, DeLancey’s faction won the election handily. Governor Clinton was so depressed by the results that he wrote to London asking that either he or DeLancey be removed from office, as “it is impossible, that I can maintain his [Majesty’s] Prerogative in opposition to the Influence & crafty Wiles of him at the head of the faction”.

However, Clinton wasn’t recalled from office yet, and so that next year he decided to try again. He dissolved the Assembly and once again called for elections. But once again, he and his men were thoroughly defeated.

However, fortunately I guess, in the spring of that next year, 1753, Clinton was relieved of his office. Officials in London had decided that the only way to fix the colony’s problems was with a fresh start. Finally his tribulations were over. So goodbye Governor Clinton.

A new governor was sent to New York to fix things, but as it turned out the new guy was very depressed over his wife’s recent death and he hung himself just a few days after he arrived in the colony. With the new governor’s suicide, DeLancey, who had recently been appointed lieutenant governor, now became acting governor, a position he’d hold for most of the rest of the decade.

The opposition was now the government. Now that he was in command, DeLancey took steps to lower tensions within the colony. He reached out to his rival Cadwallader Colden and the two were easily reconciled. Pretty soon all the old rifts were healed. Which just goes to show that the divisions had never been all that big to begin with. There were some real issues at stake, in particular the war effort, but mostly this was just a personal rivalry which ended as soon as one of the leaders involved had left the colony.

Anyway, DeLancey ruled New York for the rest of the decade, as powerful a figure as the colony had ever known. But in 1760 he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 57. The loss of such a powerful figure put New York in a state of what you might call uneasy calm. No one quite knew what politics would be like in a post-DeLancey world.

With DeLancey gone, Colden now became the acting governor. As I’ve already said, Colden was always a pretty offputting figure to a lot of New Yorkers, and that didn’t change now that he was in charge. Simply put, he lacked tact and restraint. In particular, Colden made several attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He raised the possibility of giving the King greater control over judges, and he undermined the authority of juries to decide cases on their own. These actions alienated him from the lawyers of New York City, who were becoming an influential group by this point.

But perhaps most importantly, he was a strong defender of the royal prerogative. When the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, it was just as unpopular in New York as in New England, but Colden felt compelled to enforce it anyway, which alienated everyone else in the colony. Soon, New Yorkers were burning Colden in effigy. Only five years after DeLancey’s death, they were back at it again, fighting over politics

So, that brings us to the next phase of factionalism in New York. Well, the last phase of factionalism before the Revolution. It’s a confusing period and I’m not even sure that people at the time were entirely sure what they were fighting over, but I’ll do my best to make it simple.

First, we need to describe some of the most important groups within New York at this time.

To begin with, the Livingston family. I’ve mentioned them a few times before, but only in passing. The Livingstons were one of the biggest landowning families in the Hudson Valley. As a result, many members of the family were politically active within the colony, although never quite important enough for me to mention by name. Well, that was starting to change. Back in the elections of 1758, just before DeLancey had died, a full four members of the Livingston family were elected to the Assembly. They didn’t yet form a coherent faction or anything. In fact, they often voted against each other.

But over time, they were starting to come together. The DeLancey family were merchants, and under DeLancey’s rule, the merchants within the colony had been ascendant. Well, now the landlords were regaining their political footing, forming a faction of their own, with the Livingstons in charge.

Some of the most prominent lawyers in New York City sided with this faction as well, because they were opposed to Colden for the reasons I already mentioned. Plus one of those prominent lawyers was himself a Livingston, so there was a family connection as well.

And while this elite opposition was growing, popular opposition was rising as well, thanks to anger over the Stamp Act. The unhappy colonists formed a group called the Sons of Liberty to fight back. The Sons of Liberty soon spread throughout the thirteen colonies.

Within New York, the elite faction of Livingstons and lawyers decided to ally themselves with the movement. They hoped to harness the unrest for their own benefit, by taking over leadership for themselves. But their attempt didn’t quite go according to plan. The passions of the people overtook them. Within just a few months, the Sons of Liberty had split into two groups, the moderates and the radicals. The Livingston faction sided with the moderates, but they were left controlling only half of a protest movement.

And unfortunately for them, a new figure used that opening to jump into politics himself, James DeLancey, Jr., the son of the late James DeLancey. DeLancey, Jr. had served as a captain in the British infantry during the French and Indian War, but after his father’s death, he returned to New York City to manage his family’s affairs. Now, he wanted to become a politician just like dad. He made his entry into the political arena by siding with the radical faction of the Sons of Liberty. This was a very opportunistic move on his part. As we’ll soon see, DeLancey had no real commitment to radicalism.

But in any case, the battle lines were being drawn. DeLancey Jr., backing the radicals, and the Livingston/landowner/lawyer faction backing the moderates. You’ll note that there was no faction in favor of Colden and the Stamp Act. Colden was so unpopular he hardly had any support at all. So these two factions are the important ones.

It’s hard to concisely state what these two groups were all about. After all, both factions were in large part alliances of convenience between popular movements and small elite factions looking to capitalize on those movements for their own reasons. You had two elite groups, and two popular groups, and which elite group sided with which popular group was more or less just coincidence. If history had gone slightly differently it could’ve been reversed. There was no ideology holding them together. For convenience's sake, I’m going to call them the radicals and the moderates, but again, there’s a lot more to it than that, and not all of the radicals were really that radical.

But actually, the Stamp Act was quickly repealed and a new governor came in to replace Colden, so the issues which had caused this factionalism had gone away, at least temporarily. However, the factionalism remained. As we’ve seen before, partisanship can continue on long after the root causes have faded into memory. It doesn’t have to continue, but it can.

And within a few years, it was time for new elections, since now they had to be held at least once every seven years. The new governor would’ve preferred not to dissolve the current Assembly, but his hands were tied.

And so, both sides geared up for battle. I’ve already described how New York elections worked in general, so let me focus in on one election in particular, the election in New York City, so we can explore some of the details.

Now, New York City sent four delegates to the Assembly, but instead of holding four separate elections, there was one big election all the candidates ran in. The top four vote-getters would become delegates.

In this particular election, there were seven candidates running. Two of the candidates had no real shot at winning, so we can ignore them, which leaves five real candidates to discuss. The two leading men were Philip Livingston, a moderate, and James DeLancey, Jr himself, supposedly a radical. Of the other three candidates, one was a moderate lawyer, while the other two were radical merchants allied with DeLancey.

This was a complex election, which required some serious strategizing if you wanted to win. The radical faction decided to let Livingston win a seat without challenging him. He was already popular, and so he was likely to win no matter what they did. That way they could focus all their attention on the moderate lawyer. If they could attack him successfully, then DeLancey and his two allies would all win seats in the Assembly, thus coming out ahead three to one.

So they went after the lawyer as hard as they could. In pamphlets and in newspaper articles, they argued that he was unfit to represent New York City. Firstly, he was a lawyer rather than a merchant, and New York City, being a commercial town, ought to be represented by merchants. Secondly, as a lawyer, he had ties to landowner families who opposed the interests of New York City. In fact, he had represented some of them in court in their lawsuits against poor families. Thirdly, it was a bad idea to elect lawyers in general. “[It] would be more gross and dangerous to choose Lawyers than other Men, in Proportion as they have more Cunning, Ability and Temptation to injure us, than other Men have. The more eminent their Abilities are, the more ought we to dread and avoid them, for we may be assured, that all those Abilities will be exerted against us, if our Folly should give them an Opportunity.” (By the way, you may be interested to know that these days, over a third of members of congress are lawyers, although the numbers have been dropping for a while.)

Anyway, the moderates tried to push back against these attacks, but they were always on the defensive.

Soon enough, the polls opened and voting began. In fact, the polls were open for five days straight, giving New Yorkers plenty of time to go vote. During that time, both sides were busy trying to woo voters as best they could. In fact, campaigns like these were becoming pretty expensive, given the need to entice voters with food and alcohol. According to the historian Patricia Bonomi, at one tavern alone, DeLancey had to pay for “248 “meals of victuals”, 134 bottles of wine, 106 ½ “Double Bowls of punch,” 117 “mugs of Beer and Seyder” and a variety of other beverages.”

The moderate lawyer also went around town scrounging up votes, though in a less grandiose fashion. Instead of buying food, he offered to bribe voters directly, supposedly even offering to buy someone a canoe in exchange for his vote. He also threatened to sue someone if he didn’t vote for him. Or at least he was accused of doing those things. As always, it’s hard to know for sure.

In any case, the clever strategizing by DeLancey and the radicals paid off. Livingston won his seat as expected, but they won the three other seats, by a very comfortable margin of a few hundred votes out of around 6000 cast.

Outside of New York City, the radicals weren’t quite as successful, though they still did reasonably well. Roughly speaking, a third of the winners were moderates, a third were radicals, and a third were unaffiliated with either side, and might support one group or the other depending on the situation.

However, this Assembly lasted less than a year. Already there were new problems with Britain flaring up. Parliament had just passed another set of hated laws aimed at America, the Townshend Acts, and once again the colonists were in an uproar. When the Assembly began to challenge the Townshend Acts, the governor quickly dissolved the Assembly and called for new elections. The Stamp Act may have been repealed, but none of the problems with Britain had been solved at all.

So that brings us to 1769, just 7 years before the Declaration of Independence. Once again, the factions were gearing up for the next election. The moderates, seeing how well the radicals had done with their simple arguments -- “lawyers bad”, “Stamp Act bad” -- decided to come up with a simple argument of their own. They decided to use religion as their issue.

Let me briefly talk about religion in New York. The relationship between church and state in New York had always been complicated. Officials in London wanted the government to promote the Anglican church, but Anglicans were always a minority within the colony, so in practice compromises had to be made with the Dutch, with the Puritans, and so on. In 1693 the Anglican church had been sort of established as the official state religion, but only in a limited way. For the most part, toleration was the order of the day. There was some discrimination -- Anglicans were always privileged -- but not that much discrimination.

Now, as it happened, right around this time there was some discussion of sending an Anglican bishop to America for the first time. America had never had a bishop of its own, just priests, and many dissenting Christians were happy to keep it that way. They feared that a bishop would increase the Church of England’s control over them, that it might lead to greater intolerance over time.

And so the moderates thought that this might be a good issue to latch on to. They hadn’t challenged the Stamp Act enough for voters, but maybe they could challenge the idea of an American bishop, and link the radicals with the evils of Anglican control. As it happens, the DeLancey family were prominent Anglicans, so there was at least some surface plausibility to the accusations. If it worked, the moderates would suddenly seem like the real opponents of English oppression, not the radicals.

Sadly for them, though, it didn’t work. I think that it was just too much of a stretch, too obviously opportunistic. It sounds like all they did was alienate Anglicans without attracting enough dissenters. The real issue was still the colony’s relationship with the British government, and on that count, the radicals were bound to be much more successful than the moderates.

Let me go over the next election in New York City, to compare it with the previous one.

After the moderates only managed to win one of the four seats in the previous election, this time they proposed a compromise with the radicals: instead of campaigning, why not agree to each nominate only two candidates? Wouldn’t that be much easier for everyone? But of course, to the radicals, that compromise meant losing a seat, so they refused. Instead, they made a counteroffer where they would nominate 3 candidates and the moderates would only nominate one, which would leave things the way they were. However, the moderates refused that offer, and so once again both sides had to fight it out.

By this time, caucuses were commonly held by various factions to nominate candidates for upcoming elections, but typically this was done behind the scenes, in those proverbial smoke-filled rooms. But this time, both factions decided that it would be in their interests to include the public in the nominating process. Hopefully, that would increase their support when the election came. So the moderates held a large gathering of several hundred people in one of the fields around the city, while the radicals met indoors. Both sides nominated four candidates.

But this time, the radicals did even better. They won all four seats by a comfortable margin. And they improved their performance outside of the city as well, winning a solid majority of seats. Anti-British agitation was becoming very popular very quickly.

And the radicals used their power to strengthen their control even more, by having several of the Livingstons expelled from the Assembly. They passed a law which excluded members of the Supreme Court from sitting in the Assembly, which got rid of one Livingston. They then kicked out another Livingston because he wasn’t a resident of the district he was elected from. They also expelled Lewis Morris III, grandson of the Lewis Morris we talked about last time.

By kicking all these enemies out, the radicals gained a much more absolute control over the Assembly. However, the so-called radicals in the Assembly were also rapidly becoming less and less radical. It wasn’t really the radicals who had won, it was the DeLancey part of the radical coalition. And now that they controlled the Assembly, they were detaching themselves from the real radicals. So although the election had been won on the grounds of fighting British tyranny, the Assembly soon began governing in exactly the opposite way. Naturally, everyone felt betrayed. The real radicals became even more radical.

As a matter of fact, by the time the Revolution came around, in just a few years, the DeLanceys and the Livingstons had basically swapped places. The DeLancey faction became conservative Loyalists who rejected independence, while the Livingstons were more on the side of the radicals, although they weren’t really radicals themselves. Not only that, James DeLancey Jr. himself wound up in exile in Britain, just like Thomas Hutchinson. So you can see why I said that his alliance with the radicals was purely opportunistic. He betrayed them at the first opportunity, as soon as they seemed to be more of a liability than an asset.

Hopefully, now you can understand why John Adams called New York politics “the devil’s own incomprehensibles”. Ideologies, family loyalties, class interests, regional interests, were all mixed together in one big political stew, and you never could know what the next bite would taste like.

I think that I’ll end the story here. The political landscape was still shifting, but we’re already almost to the Revolution itself. I’ll leave New York in a state of flux for now. This whole confusing sweep of ever-shifting factions would only be ended thanks to the question of independence, which clarified things in a way that nothing else could. New York will be the last colony to declare for independence, but it’ll get swept up in the war just as much as everywhere else.

So that brings us to the end of New York’s colonial history. A lot has happened, so let me give a quick recap. In the 1690s and 1700s you had the feud between the Leislerians and anti-Leislerians. In the 1710s and 1720s you had the feud between the merchants and the big landowners. Then in the 1730s through the 1750s you had several different instances of factionalism, all of which centered around local leaders enlisting local support in their fights against the governors. Court vs. country, basically. And finally, in the 1760s you had a much more confused round of factionalism, as I just described.

And those are just the biggest examples of factionalism, there were plenty of smaller instances as well, which I didn’t have a chance to discuss.

But apart from what happened in New York, I’d also like to draw your attention to something equally important: what didn’t happen. There was a lot of factionalism in New York, but there were just as many issues that New Yorkers could have fought over, but didn’t. I mean, many of the problems which confounded politics in New England barely left a ripple in New York. For example, although in the early 1700s New York had had a big problem with its debt and with its paper money system, unlike in New England, New York managed it much more successfully. There were difficulties in the 1710s, but by the 1720s the government had a handle on things. There was much less inflation and there weren’t those big swings in the value of money that you saw in Massachusetts.

Another big difference was the Great Awakening. In New England, with its close union of church and state, the Great Awakening was a super big deal. But in New York, it passed almost without notice, at least outside of the Puritans of Long Island. New Yorkers were just not a very religious people.

I haven’t talked about Pennsylvania yet, but things were different there too. In Pennsylvania, many of the divisions were over ethnicity and religion, as new groups of immigrants came in and began taking over from the Quakers, who had become a small minority within their own colony. Obviously nothing like that applied to New York.

The point is this: in all of these colonies -- at least in the North, since the South was a bit different -- in all of these colonies the issues being fought over were very different, but the overall political developments were similar. Factions became more organized over time, and they started to appeal directly to the people, even if they weren’t yet real parties. The colonial legislatures became more assertive and powerful. Despite their different cultures and histories, they were all on the same track.

Something to keep in mind as we approach the Revolution. Often it can seem like these colonies were in their own separate worlds, with nothing in common but the English language, but in fact they were converging politically in many ways, which no doubt helped them to cooperate when the time came.

This was often, but not always, more of a top down process. In the beginning, every colony had this network of elites in which disputes were supposed to be resolved internally, within the elites themselves. But sooner or later, one group of elites realized that they could gain an advantage by appealing to the people. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had elected governors and elected upper houses, popular support was all you needed in order to take power.

If the governor was appointed, things were a bit more complicated. Popular support helped, but it was insufficient. If all you controlled was the Assembly, then the most you could do on your own was block legislation. Then, maybe the governor would negotiate with you. But if he refused, then you could keep blocking all of his legislation. That would make him look weak and incompetent to officials in London. Then, you might convince the Board of Trade to have the governor removed from office and replaced with someone more to your liking. So in a colony like New York, you didn’t want to win popular support for its own sake. It was really a way to send a message to London: “This governor sucks and we refuse to work with him.” The will of the people thus only had an indirect effect.

But either way, there was still an advantage in appealing to the people. Whoever did so successfully had an edge over everyone else. And that meant that politics in every colony became more democratic, more populist over time. In order to appeal to the people, you actually had to offer them something. Sometimes, like with James DeLancey, Jr. supporting the radicals, that something was offered cynically and in bad faith. Other times the offer was more sincere.

But again either way, the changes produced were similar. Once candidates were regularly appealing to you for your vote, it naturally seemed to you like you had the power, not them. The elites had invited the people in for their own short-term benefit, but the people had no intention of leaving. What had begun as a top-down process became more bottom up over time. And then elected officials had to change their mindsets to match the new reality as well. They could compete for popular support or risk losing office or even being attacked by a mob.

But I don’t want to imply that if the elites in each colony had never sought popular support then this could have been avoided. I’m certain that sooner or later the people would have realized their power and started to organize on their own behalf. After all, the New Lights in Connecticut were bottom up from the very beginning, so it was certainly a possible alternative.

If you have a broad franchise and if elected officials have real power, then sooner or later someone will try to appeal to the voters in order to wield that power. It might be top down, it might be bottom up, but sooner or later it’ll happen. These divisions within the elite accelerated the process, I think, but they weren’t essential.

But still, that’s how it happened, and I think that that’s the best way to understand events in New York. All of that factionalism may seem like random noise, but if you take the long view, it really was building towards something: populist democracy.

Next episode, we’ll skip over New Jersey and jump straight to Pennsylvania, to see how William Penn and his fellow Quakers are faring in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, and to see how they slowly lose power after being swamped by new waves of not-so-pacifist immigrants. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

Sources:

Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980-1994 by Wayne Bodle

A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York by Patricia U. Bonomi

Colonial New York: A History by Michael Kamen

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

How the most disliked — and elected — profession is disappearing from politics by Ana Swanson

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 6 years

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No new episode this week, on account of the fact that the loud construction in the apartment above mine has now entered its fourth week. But hopefully this is the last one I’ll have to miss for a while.

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 6 years

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(Lewis Morris, a prominent landowner in New York, a central figure in the Morris-Cosby dispute of the 1730s, and owner of a truly terrible powdered wig.)

During the early 1700s, the colony of New York is divided by two successive bursts of factionalism, one over taxes and the other over a ridiculously trivial salary dispute.

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 35: Fight, Fight, Fight!

Last time, we talked about New York’s political history in the two decades after Leisler’s Rebellion. In the aftermath of the Rebellion, New York was divided into two rival factions, the pro- and anti-Leislerians. Several times, governors were sent to New York with instructions to be conciliatory to both sides, but unfortunately, each governor soon aligned himself with one faction or the other.

Benjamin Fletcher, who served from 1692 to 1697, sided with the anti-Leislerians, because that was his best bet at making money through corruption. After he was recalled to England to answer for his actions, his successor, Lord Bellomont, who served from 1698 to 1701, swung in the opposite direction. He was there to fight corruption, and so he wound up siding with the Leislerians instead. But he died unexpectedly, and then Lord Cornbury, who served from 1702 to 1708, reversed course again, and followed the corrupt, anti-Leislerian policies of Governor Fletcher.

It was only with the arrival of William Hunter in 1710 that things finally calmed down. Governor Hunter was competent and well-liked, unlike his predecessors, and he soon put an end to the factionalism by being nice to both sides. So that’s where we left things off last time. Governor Hunter was in office and the pro- and anti-Leislerians had gone away.

Today, we’re going to look at the next two periods of factionalism. The first round of factionalism took place during the 1710s and 1720s. This was a rivalry between the two most powerful economic groups within the colony, the merchants and the big landlords, over who should have to pay more in taxes. The next round of factionalism took place in the 1730s. This time the cause was a personal rivalry between the governor and some of the other leading men of the colony.

But first, the fight between the merchants and the landlords. To begin, we need to talk some more about what the economy of New York was like at this time. Most of the American colonies only had one group of rich families. For instance, in New England, all of the rich men were merchants, while in the Chesapeake, all of the rich men were plantation owners. In New York, however, there were two different kinds of rich families, with different interests: the merchants and the big landowners. Now, obviously merchants often used their money to buy land, and landowners were often involved in trade, but families were more focused on one thing or the other. They were distinct enough to form two separate interest groups, at the very least.

There were four main merchant families in New York around this time. None of them were English. Three were Dutch, the Philipses, the Van Cortlandts, and the Schuylers, while the fourth, the DeLanceys, were founded by a French Protestant. All of these families were intermarried with each other. They traded in all sorts of goods, and with all sorts of people, from the Iroquois to Europe to the Caribbean.

The landlords I’ve already talked about a bit. These men were the recipients of those large estates being handed out by Governors Fletcher and Cornbury. Well, they were already rich men beforehand, but the extra land certainly helped. In fact it made them some of the biggest landowners in the colonies. These were much larger estates than the plantations in Virginia, although they were run very differently. Tobacco didn’t grow up there and slave labor was ineffective. So instead, the land was parceled out to tenant farmers, more like how the nobility in Europe might rent their land out to peasants.

And though these estates were huge, much of the land went uncultivated, since not many people wanted to be tenant farmers when they could be freeholders elsewhere. So despite their great size, these manors might have only a few dozen or a few hundred families living on them. And over time the land was subdivided and sold off, so this wasn’t really like a permanent Old World aristocracy.

Some of these manors were given feudal privileges, such as the right to hold courts and to demand corvee labor from their tenants, but in practice those feudal elements didn’t amount to much.

But these landlords were still powerful men. They basically controlled the government on their lands. Their tenant farmers could vote, but in practice they almost always voted for whoever the landlord supported. Three of the estates were large enough to have their own delegate in the Assembly, and in each of those cases, the delegate was always a member of the landowner’s family, and the elections were uncontested until the 1760s.

The two most politically active landed families were the Morrises, who were English, and the Livingstons, who were Scottish. Both of those families will pop up again several times.

So those are the merchants and the landlords. Now, what was it that these two groups disagreed about? What makes this split politically important?

Well, the main issue was taxation. In New York at this time there were two sorts of taxation. The main type was taxes on imported goods and a few other things like liquor. This tax hurt the merchants most of all. The other, less important type of taxation was a property tax, which was only imposed irregularly, on an as-needed basis. This tax harmed landowners most of all.

And unfortunately for New York, the colony was still in debt, so taxes were going to have to go up, one way or another. I think you can see where this is going. The stage was now set for a fight over who was going to foot the government’s bills. Would import taxes go up, or land taxes? Over the last few decades the merchants in New York had been growing richer and more influential. They resented the fact that the burden of taxation fell more heavily on them, and now they had enough clout to fight back.

So although Governor Hunter had successfully ended the last period of factionalism, already there were new problems brewing.

When he arrived in New York Hunter acted as though he would be friendly to both sides, just like with the pro- and anti-Leislerians, but soon enough he began to side just with the landowners. That seems to happen a lot with these governors: they come in, planning to be bipartisan, or at least saying they’ll be bipartisan, but soon they figure out it’s better to side with one faction over the other.

Why Hunter sided with the landowners over the merchants isn’t exactly clear. At the time, people thought he’d decided on the basis of a friendship with Lewis Morris, one of the leaders of that faction. Or maybe he just thought that the landowners had better arguments. Or maybe he disdained merchants in general, as being socially inferior to the landed gentry. Or maybe it was that the merchants were mostly Dutch. Who knows. Probably some combination of those things.

In any case, within a few years it was clear what the new dividing lines within New York were.

As it happened, the merchants controlled the Assembly for the first several years of Hunter’s administration, and they refused to raise regular tax revenue to pay for the government, knowing that the burden would fall mostly on them. But as a result, the fiscal situation was growing increasingly dire, and Governor Hunter had his back against the wall.

So in 1713 he called for new elections, hoping that the next Assembly would be more compliant. He and Lewis Morris, that landowner friend of his, led a concerted campaign to win the elections. They published several pamphlets, attacking the merchant faction, calling them “a Few Whimsical, Factious and Angry Men”. They argued that taxes on imported goods were mostly paid by the rich, and that taxes on land would hurt both rich and poor landowners alike.

However, that wasn’t enough to win the election. Both factions wound up in about the same position as before. So, since they couldn’t win at the polls, Hunter and Morris had to hammer out a compromise with the opposition to keep the government running. Hunter would get his revenue, but he agreed to give the Assembly much more direct control over how that money was spent going forward. That’s a common pattern you’ll notice: with each crisis, the assembly within a colony would use its leverage to get more and more control over finances, greatly increasing its power over time. The rise of colonial legislatures in this way was one of the most notable trends in eighteenth century America. And because of this self-government, by the time independence came around, the colonists were pretty used to ruling themselves, since the governors had already become weak figures.

Anyway, Governor Hunter also agreed to a bill which naturalized foreign born New Yorkers, whose citizenship had been in doubt. Even with this agreement, most of the merchants still stood in opposition, but enough men defected to get everything passed.

In fact, Governor Hunter became so frustrated with how unruly the Assembly was that he wrote a satirical play about it, called “Androboros: A B[i]ographical Farce in Three Acts”, which was actually the first original play to be printed in America.

In this play, instead of an Assembly, there’s an insane asylum, full of inmates who are very obvious stand-ins for Hunter’s political enemies, but with names like “Fizle”, “Mulligrub” and “Doodlesack”. These buffoonish inmates are plotting to overthrow the keeper of the insane asylum, very obviously a stand-in for Governor Hunter himself, and replace him with one of their own. First they smear feces all over a minister’s robes and try to blame it on the keeper, and when that doesn’t work they try to lure him into a trap door, only to fall in themselves. In the end, the inmates are defeated in their ludicrous scheming, and the keeper retains his position.

Apparently this play was never performed back in the 1700s, it was only printed. But you may be interested to know that just last year, in 2017, a theater company in New York performed the play for the first time ever. That’s one way to keep history alive.

Anyway, in between writing plays and verse, Governor Hunter also made sure to further strengthen his relationship with the landowner faction. In addition to his friendship with Lewis Morris, he also became friends with Robert Livingston, from the other big landowning family. In 1715, he made sure to give the Livingston manor its own seat in the Assembly, which meant that he was one man closer to controlling it.

And in fact, in the elections held that next year, a number of prominent merchants lost their seats for whatever reason, which meant that Governor Hunter and the landowners were now in power.

Well, in power within the colony at least. But since the merchant faction was now shut out from New York’s government, they changed tactics. Rather than try to control the Assembly, they instead appealed to the Board of Trade in London, hoping to talk them into blocking some of the Governor’s new taxes. Basically, they were unhappy with the way their boss was running things, so as a workaround they tried to appeal to their boss’s boss.

That was the best way to get power. If you had London on your side, you were in charge. But unfortunately for the merchants, two could play at that game, and Governor Hunter had plenty of connections in England himself. After a few years, the Board of Trade backed Governor Hunter, with some minor reservations.

That actually takes us to the end of Governor Hunter’s time in New York. He left the colony in 1719. He’d only served as governor for nine years, which really wasn’t that long of a time, considering how slow things moved back then.

Anyway, his successor was another Scottish guy, William Burnet. Unfortunately, Burnet was a less skilled politician than Hunter. Although Hunter had sided mostly against the merchants, he was still on friendly terms with them, and he hadn’t let factionalism get too out of hand. As far as I can tell he was widely respected, even by his rivals. Governor Burnet, on the other hand, was not so tactful. Upon arrival, he promptly sided 100% with the landed interests. He didn’t feel the need to conciliate the merchants at all.

He also broke with precedent by not calling for new elections. Normally, when a new governor arrived, he would dissolve the old Assembly. But since the 1716 Assembly was already dominated by his new allies, Burnet decided to just keep that Assembly in place. Why rock the boat? That was a legal thing to do, but it was unpopular.

He also removed the last members of the merchant faction from the Council, as supposed enemies of good government.

On top of that, Burnet pursued some unpopular economic policies. For instance, he tried to cut off Albany’s trade with Quebec, since he thought that it undermined New York’s security. Naturally, Albany didn’t like that at all. There were other important issues as well, which I’m not going to get into, such as how trade with the Indians should be regulated.

The point is that Governor Burnet was doing a lot of stuff that was bound to make him unpopular, regardless of whether or not it was a good idea. None of this led to an immediate wave of opposition, but discontent was growing over time.

There were special elections to fill vacant seats in the Assembly in 1723, ‘24, and ‘25, and the merchants won each of them. Governor Burnet, as undiplomatic as always, tried to challenge the qualifications of one of those men to sit in the Assembly, by arguing that he wasn’t a citizen. But as I mentioned already, 10 years ago Governor Hunter had agreed to a bill which naturalized foreigners, specifically over concerns like this. So the Assembly unanimously agreed to seat the man, which must have been a major rebuke to Burnet.

By now the opposition to Burnet was becoming more open. Burnet reacted with threats rather than negotiations, which turned opinion against him even more. The merchant faction lobbied the Board of Trade in London to block some of the governor’s legislation, this time successfully.

Finally, the pressure against Governor Burnet built to the point that he agreed to hold elections for the first new Assembly in 11 years. The merchants did very well for themselves, unsurprisingly. But actually, it didn’t really matter. The year after that, Burnet was removed as governor of New York and made governor of Massachusetts instead. So he was out of New York’s hair. Actually, he was soon out of Massachusetts’ hair as well, since he died within two years of being transfered.

The next governor of New York, John Montgomerie, wound up siding with the merchant faction, but he also died quickly, after only three years in office.

But in fact, by this point the merchant/landowner rivalry was starting to lose its potency, thanks to various changes within the economy. By the 1730s, the economy of New York was becoming complex enough that you could no longer so clearly distinguish between merchants and landowners as separate interest groups. And divisions were opening up within the merchant faction. Previously, the merchants in Albany and New York City had had similar interests. But Albany was shifting away from just trading furs. Now they were shipping a wide variety of local goods, which meant that their interests now aligned more with their landowning neighbors than with the merchants of New York City.

So, after less than 20 years, things in New York had once again changed enough that the old factions withered away. But New York never stayed placid for long.

That brings us to the Morris-Cosby dispute of the 1730s. Unlike the previous struggle we’ve just been talking about, which was straightforwardly about two competing economic interests, this dispute began as a minor personal disagreement over salary that escalated into something bigger.

The first person in this dispute is Lewis Morris, the big landowner who had been an ally of Governor Hunter. At the moment, he was serving as chief justice of the supreme court. All you really need to know about his personality is that he was very much a politician who loved to be in the thick of partisan fighting.

The other figure in the dispute is the new governor, William Cosby. Cosby was another man like Fletcher or Cornbury: in it to make money for himself rather than to govern well. He wasn’t qualified for the job and he only got the appointment thanks to his wife’s connections. He also had a rather authoritarian temperament.

When he arrived in New York, Governor Cosby quickly sided with the merchant faction which still controlled the Assembly. They agreed to raise the money he wanted and to give him a good salary, while he agreed to not call for elections.

Now we come to the minor dispute which sets everything else off. It’s a little bit involved, but don’t worry about the details. None of this will be on the test.

Apparently in New York at this time, for some reason it was standard that when a new governor arrived, the man who had been serving as acting governor in the interim would give to the governor half of the salary he had earned while acting as governor. Governor Cosby asked the former acting governor, Rip Van Dam, to give him his share, but Van Dam refused.

Cosby sued Van Dam to collect the money, but he figured that his case wouldn’t have a chance if he had to face a jury of unsympathetic New Yorkers. So he tried to come up with a workaround, a way to avoid having his case be tried by a jury. The solution he came up with was to order the New York supreme court to sit as a court of exchequer. I won’t get into all the legal technicalities here, but basically what that means is he wanted the supreme court to hear his case and decide the matter itself, under special rules which bypassed the need for a jury.

However, this was a controversial move, and it wasn’t clear whether or not Cosby’s request was legal. Did the governor have the authority to create a new court on his own authority, just like that, or did he need the Assembly’s approval? The case was brought before the supreme court, which at the time consisted of three men, Lewis Morris, the chief justice, who came from the landed faction, and two other men from the merchant faction.

The first issue the court had to decide was whether or not it had the authority to hear the case in the first place. Unsurprisingly, Chief Justice Morris said no, that the Assembly had to approve the creation of any new courts. The governor’s authority was insufficient. But the other two justices said that yes, the governor did have the authority. A typical partisan split.

However, although Morris had been outvoted, he used his position as chief justice to simply shut the proceedings down and stop the court from hearing the case any further. To be more precise, he insulted the arguments of his colleagues and then walked out, which prevented anyone from rendering a verdict. Which I would think is legally questionable tactic, but back then everything was a bit legally dubious, given how primitive the courts were.

After this, Governor Cosby decided not to press his lawsuit against Van Dam any further. Instead, he escalated the matter in a different way, by removing Morris from the supreme court.

I suppose things could have ended there, but Morris wasn’t the sort of person to take this blow lying down. He decided to take the feud public, by running for a vacant seat in the Assembly. You remember two episodes ago, when I described an unusually spirited election where both sides led big parades of men on horseback? Well, that was this election. I won’t go over the specifics again, I’ll just remind you that Morris won. But that wasn’t the end of it. Morris’s victory was merely the first step in a bigger escalation. What had been a petty dispute among the elite was about to become a partisan dispute among the people at large.

Morris and the other leaders of his faction -- I’ll just call them the Morrisites from now on -- the Morrisites decided that public opinion would be a useful weapon against the governor. So they came up with a platform that they thought would have broad appeal. According to the historian Michael Kammen: “Lewis Morris, Sr. built a coalition of Hudson Valley farmers and New York City artisans along with small traders there and in Albany. To hold their support he offered the farmers better roads, cheaper money, and favorable land laws; he offered the petit bourgeois protection against imports, subsidies for local production, and restrictions against peddlers; and for the middle class generally, the burden of direct taxation would be shifted to imposts paid by the larger merchants.” They also focused on good government, with bills to regulate the sheriffs, to regulate the courts, and to increase the power of the Assembly.

So this was a broad coalition. It wasn’t simply rich vs. poor or merchants vs. landlords. As usual, there were a lot of things going on at once.

In order to spread their message and, just as importantly, to attack their enemies, one of the first things the Morrisites did was found a newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal. There was already a newspaper in the colony, but it tended to support the government’s point of view, since the guy who printed it was also the official printer for the government and he didn’t want to lose those valuable contracts. But this new newspaper was very much in the hands of the opposition.

Morris and his associates started churning out essays. They criticized the government, they criticized the governor. Even the ad page was politicized. There were advertisements for lost animals in which the descriptions of the animals suspiciously resembled notable politicians in the colony.

Naturally, this sort of brazen attack on the leadership provoked a backlash. Within three months Governor Cosby was working to get the paper shut down. He even had certain issues of the Weekly Journal burned in public.

And in late 1734, he had the newspaper’s printer, John Peter Zenger, charged with libel. Normally, this would have been a slam dunk case, since at this time it was very, very easy for the authorities to convict people for libel. But Zenger had a good lawyer, who made the novel argument that statements couldn’t be libelous if they were actually true. Believe it or not, that wasn’t the standard approach back then. Even if you told the truth about someone you could still be convicted for libel, which is part of why it was so easy to get convictions. But not this time. Zenger was acquitted by a jury after only a few minutes of deliberation. Later on, this would be seen as an important precedent for freedom of the press in America, but at the time maybe the most important impact was that it further hurt Governor Cosby’s popularity.

That same year, the Morrisites managed to take most of the seats in the New York City Council. They made gains in the Assembly as well, but since there had been no general election held in the last six years they were unable to take it over completely. Everyone agreed that it was time for a new election. Even the Assembly itself had unanimously agreed to a statement saying that the current Assembly should be dissolved. But if an election were held, Cosby was almost certain to lose out, and so he held back.

Since there were no elections to win, the Morrisites decided to attack Cosby by undermining his support in Britain. And so Lewis Morris himself went to London, carrying with him a petition with 34 complaints against the governor, including that he interfered with elections by denying Quakers the vote.

The Morrisites had a number of demands as well. Firstly, that Cosby be removed from office, or at least have his powers reduced. They also wanted a number of reforms to the electoral system. They wanted elections to the Assembly to be held every 3 years or less. They wanted the seats in the Assembly to be reapportioned by population. And they wanted to increase the number of officials in New York City and Albany who were elected rather than appointed. (And of course there were other, non-election related demands as well, but I’m focusing on the election stuff.)

But like with so many such journeys by colonists back to the mother country, Morris found it hard to get his message across. He spent all of 1735 in London, making very little headway with anything. According to him, Englishmen were “unconcerned at the Sufferings of the People in America”, and “the most Nefarious Crime A governor can commit is not by some counted So bad as the crime of Complaining of it”. In fact, at one point he was more or less offered the governorship of New Jersey as a bribe, just to make him go away. Morris declined.

But as it turned out, none of his struggles in London really mattered, since in March that next year, Governor Cosby died of tuberculosis. He’d only been governor for three and a half years. Random deaths were really a big deal back then. It’s amazing how often stuff like that happened.

So back to New York. Although Cosby was dead, the factionalism continued on a little while longer. This time the issue was who should serve as acting governor.

When there was no governor in New York, the eldest member of the council was supposed to be acting governor. Before Cosby had arrived, that man had been Rip Van Dam, the guy who got sued. But Cosby had since removed Van Dam from office, so now the acting governor was supposed to be some other guy named George Clarke.

Clarke was confirmed by the Council, but Van Dam claimed that he should be named acting governor instead, although I think his claim was very tenuous at best. But for months on end, the Morrisites agitated on Van Dam’s behalf, using their newspaper to undermine Acting Governor Clarke. After some local elections in New York City were won by supporters of Van Dam, there were enough fears of a popular revolt that Clarke moved into the nearby fort for safety, along with his family, and he shipped in extra gunpowder to the city just in case. But things calmed down once word reached New York that London had approved Clarke as acting governor. That settled the matter immediately.

But in fact, this burst of factionalism was coming to an end regardless. Acting Governor Clarke agreed to hold new elections, the first in 9 years. The Morrisites finally took control of the Assembly, but Clarke had signalled to them that he was open to a reconciliation. Most of the Morrisites took him up on the offer, including Lewis Morris himself. They were welcomed back into the fold. After all, there hadn’t been that much dividing them in the first place.

Clarke served as acting governor for 6 years and during that time the old party animosities all dissipated.

So that was the end of the Morris-Cosby dispute. Not much more than a blip in history, all told.

Though there were some changes in New York as a result. For example, the reformers did pass a bill which mandated that elections be held at least once every seven years, as was the case with the British Parliament.

Also, the Assembly began to keep records of which members voted for or against a particular bill. Before, like in Massachusetts, no records had been kept to say how delegates voted. One further step on the road to accountable government.

And in general, New York took one more step on the road to full-blown populist politics. The elites found that popular opinion could be a useful weapon, but in order to get popular opinion on your side, you had to offer the people things that they wanted, and you had to learn how to make your message heard. Newspapers, propaganda, parades, etc. And as the factions fought for popular support, the people became politically aware. Once politicians started offering them things, they came to expect it, and to demand more and more.

Though I don’t want to overstate things. The will of the people was still of secondary importance. London mattered much more. And once the dispute between the elite factions went away, so did the need to appeal to the people, so there were no permanent parties set up or anything like that. The people didn’t stay fully politicized once their leaders stopped trying to politicize them.

(By the way, I’ve been using the word “populist” a lot lately without ever really defining it. All I mean by it is that the people as a whole are involved. I don’t mean “populist” in the sense of any particular ideology, or any particular style of politics. Just “populist” meaning the people, in whatever sense. Just so we’re clear.)

Next episode, we’ll look at the last period of New York’s history before the American Revolution, as the storm clouds begin to gather. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

Sources:

Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980-1994 by Wayne Bodle

A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York by Patricia U. Bonomi

The Myth of the “Middle Colonies”: An Analysis of Regionalization in Early America by Robert J. Gough

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, edited by Kevin J. Hayes

At Fraunces Tavern, a 300-Year-Old Play Gets Its World Premiere by Juliet Hindell

Colonial New York: A History by Michael Kamen

Governor Fletcher's Recall by James S. Leamon

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I by Herbert L. Osgood

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

Election Procedures and Practices in Colonial New York by Nicholas Varga

From British Colony to Independent Nation: Refashioning Identity by Steve Wilmer

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 6 years

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No new episode this week. I apologize for delaying two episodes in a row, but some of the upcoming ones have been unusually tricky to write, and I need to make sure I maintain a healthy buffer of finished scripts. Plus there’s been construction going on nearby, making it difficult to record.

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 6 years

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That “Keep reading” link is broken, so here are the transcript and sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 34: The Anti-Leislerians.

Last time, I gave a brief overview of what political life in New York was like during the eighteenth century. Over the next few episodes, I’m going to get into the specifics, looking at the very complex history of factionalism in New York during this period. John Adams once called New York’s politics “the devil’s own incomprehensibles”, and I think after these three episodes you’ll start to understand why. There were no stable alliances, no political parties to give the era any structure. Instead, there was a constant flux, as different interest groups would change sides every decade as best suited them.

So there won’t be a clear throughline over these next few episodes. Instead, try to think of it as a kaleidoscope, which lets you see New York’s political culture from dozens of different, colorful angles all at once. Your mind may not form a complete picture, but you’ll at least get a sense of things.

Anyway, for this episode we’ll be looking at New York in the 1690s and 1700s, during the immediate fallout of Leisler’s Rebellion.

It’s been a few months since we’ve talked about New York, so let me give you a quick refresher of everything that’s happened so far.

New Netherland was founded by the Dutch in the early 1600s, basically as a fur trading outpost. They set up settlements at what is now New York City, as well as up the Hudson River, which was the main route inland, towards Iroquois territory. Growth was slow, since the Dutch government didn’t put the same effort into colonization than the English did, and since there were fewer disaffected people in the Netherlands who might wish to emigrate.

In any case, the colony was captured by England in 1664 and renamed New York. It became the property of the king’s brother, James. When James became king, New York thus became a royal province. Now, James was a believer in royal absolutism and so he declined to give his new colony an elected assembly. New Netherland hadn’t ever had an assembly and he was content to keep it that way.

Not many people wanted to go to New York, which caused the colony financial problems. In order to encourage immigration, James was finally prevailed upon to grant New York an assembly. But soon afterwards he became king and he completely reversed course. He not only got rid of the assembly, he merged the colony with New England and New Jersey into a single administrative unit, the Dominion of New England.

But after James was overthrown in England by the Glorious Revolution, rebellions in Boston and New York City overthrew the Dominion and restored the old order, more or less. In New York, the provisional government was led by a German merchant named Jacob Leisler. Leisler did not do a great job administering the colony, and New York became divided.

Leisler eventually succumbed to paranoia, and he wound up in hiding with a few of his loyal followers, convinced that there was some plot against him. There wasn’t a plot against him, but when he was captured by the English forces that had been sent to restore order to the colony, he was executed for treason.

So that’s where we left New York. Now we’re back to the early 1690s, back when William and Mary were co-monarchs, and when the colonies were fighting the first of their four wars against Quebec. And although Leisler was dead, New York was still divided between Leisler’s supporters and his opponents, a rivalry which would define political life in the colony for the next two decades.

With Leisler out of the way, Colonel Henry Sloughter took over as governor of New York. The first order of business was to clean up all the leftover debris from the Rebellion. New men were appointed to the council, all of whom had been strongly opposed to Leisler. One of them had even been imprisoned by Leisler. A harsh law was passed to punish any future revolts, commissions were set up to compensate people for property lost during the rebellion, and so on. But Sloughter died within a year, so we don’t need to worry about him any more.

His replacement was a man named Benjamin Fletcher, who served as governor from 1692 to 1697. He arrived with instructions to reconcile with the Leislerians and to free the last of the men who were still imprisoned. Now that the guilty rebels had been punished, officials in England hoped that the two factions would be reconciled, so that everything could go back to normal.

But it didn’t work out that way. Both the Leislerians and the anti-Leislerians remained at each other’s throats. My sources differ on which side to blame — probably both sides — but either way the reconciliation leaders in England had been hoping for failed to materialize. There wasn’t much of a substantive disagreement between them — no big policy differences or anything — it was mostly just bad blood thanks to all the unfortunate things that had happened on both sides during the Rebellion.

And because neither faction was going away any time soon, Governor Fletcher soon found that he had to pick a side. Naturally, he sided with the anti-Leislerians. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, he wasn’t likely going to buddy up with the men who had been rebels just a few years ago. And secondly, the anti-Leislerians were richer. The most prominent merchants and landowners were all anti-Leislerians. The pro-Leislerians, on the other hand, were led by merchants of more modest means. Not poor, but not the elite.

That mattered because Governor Fletcher was corrupt. He was mainly in New York to make money for himself and the best way to do that was by becoming friends with the richest guys in the colony. One of the ways he did that was by granting his supporters, these rich guys, vast amounts of land in the Hudson Valley, which were virtually exempt from taxation. In return for helping the rich get richer, he got bribes and other favors, plus a tacit agreement to overlook the fact that he was misappropriating government funds for himself.

These vast estates, which were even larger than the big plantations in the south, made New York unusual. Power and wealth were being concentrated among a few rich families to a much greater extent than in nearby colonies. The families who owned these estates would go on to be very prominent in New York politics. These manors would decline in importance over the 18th century, as bits and pieces were sold off over time, but for a while they were pretty dominant, both economically and politically.

All that because Governor Fletcher — and a few other governors too — wanted to toady up to some rich people.

Anyway, Governor Fletcher did have other business to attend to besides getting kickbacks. For one thing, King William’s War was happening. I already covered the course of the war in previous episodes, so I’m not going to get into that here. But basically, like New England, New York was quite exposed to attack from Quebec and so they were similarly involved in the fighting and in the disastrous invasion campaign.

Fletcher was determined to vigorously prosecute the war, but he had a lot of trouble getting New Yorkers to cooperate and pay their taxes, and even more trouble trying to get nearby colonies to send any help at all.

And there were still the Leislerians to deal with. One of the Leislerians who had been released from jail, Abraham Gouverneur, jumped bail and fled to Massachusetts. Despite being a fugitive, he was given an audience there with Governor Phips, the uncouth sea captain governor.

Gouverneur wanted to convince Phips to take his side against Fletcher and the anti-Leislerians. Phips agreed, but not just because he found Gouverneur and the Leislerians to be personally sympathetic. Phips was already opposed to Fletcher, because Fletcher was trying to expand his powers over the nearby colonies in order to use their resources for the war. He tried to get control of Connecticut’s militia and he was even briefly made governor of Pennsylvania. Naturally, this led to resistance from everyone else, including Phips. So that’s why he had agreed to meet with Gouverneur and refused to return him to New York. He was opposed to Fletcher and so he wanted to support Fletcher’s enemies within the colony.

Gouverneur then went to London to complain about Fletcher. His trip was a success, thanks to the help of Phips. Leisler’s estate was restored to his family and the Leislerians were all given pardons.

Fletcher was outraged by all this, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

And on top of that, Fletcher was developing a bad relationship with the Assembly. He wanted them to give him lots of money for the war effort. The Assembly was mostly willing to acquiesce to his demands, but Fletcher tried to push them too far. He didn’t just want the Assembly to grant him money, he wanted them to pass a bill which would pay for the government for the rest of King William’s life.

That was rather unprecedented. Normally, the Assembly passed a bill which would fund the government for one year or for several years, but not for life. If the Assembly had given him what he wanted, then they would have cut themselves out of the decision-making process entirely by giving up all their leverage. After all, control over the budget was their most important power. They agreed to pass appropriations for the next five years, which was still a long time, but that was it.

And when Fletcher called for new elections in 1693, a number of prominent Leislerians were elected. As a result, the Assembly became less accommodating to Governor Fletcher. They took a more active role in monitoring government activities, looking for ways to criticize the governor.

They did in fact find some spending irregularities. There was some money that was unaccounted for, money which should have gone to the war effort but didn’t, probably because it was going into the pockets of the governor and his friends. Therefore the Assembly refused to give the governor any more money, reasoning that if nothing illegal was going on, then that unaccounted money should still be out there somewhere and thus there was no need for them to raise further taxes.

The governor refused to account for the missing money and therefore the Assembly denied him any further appropriations. Fletcher then dissolved the Assembly in early 1695, hoping that the next one would be more compliant.

Apparently this time Governor Fletcher tried to use underhanded tactics to win the election, or at least that’s what the Leislerians accused him of. According to them, the governor brought in soldiers and sailors, who were placed around the city at key locations armed with clubs, implicitly threatening anyone who voted against the governor. Fletcher also spread rumors that anyone who voted against him might be impressed, that is forced into service in the navy. And he replaced the sheriffs with his own men. Remember, the sheriff in each county controlled the elections, and so they could influence the outcome one way or the other if they so chose.

We don’t have proof that these things happened, all we have are the accusations of Fletcher’s opponents, which might be untrue or exaggerated, so it’s hard to know for sure. If so, this was maybe the most unfair election we’ve heard about so far.

The accusations do seem plausible to me, especially since all of the Leislerians from New York City lost their seats in the Assembly. So, if the governor was intimidating the voters, he was successful, at least in the short term. He now had a new, more compliant legislature, which was willing to raise all the money he needed.

However, the tactics soon backfired. The Leislerians sent complaints about the rigged election to England, as well as accusing Fletcher of greed, corruption, and complicity with piracy. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were raising similar concerns as well. Although the accusations came from biased sources, they were probably in large part true. He was complicit with piracy and was probably embezzling money.

By 1697, the accusations had become loud enough and convincing enough that the Board of Trade decided to recall Governor Fletcher.

This led to a big change in New York. Fletcher had been appointed by a Tory government in England, but now the Whigs were in power, so they were the ones who picked his replacement.

The new governor, Lord Bellomont, was more of a believer in good government than Fletcher had been, and he was determined to investigate Fletcher’s crimes and undo the damage as best he could. He cancelled several of those land grants Fletcher had given to his supporters. He also led a thorough investigation of the misdeeds of Fletcher’s administration. When the results were sent back to London, the Board of Trade charged Fletcher with 18 crimes, including encouragement of piracy, corruption, and negligence.

Naturally, all of the anti-Leislerians who had supported Fletcher quickly came to oppose Bellomont and his attempts at reform. Generally speaking, it’s a good rule of thumb that corrupt officials will try to block attempts to end corruption. So Bellomont had five of Fletcher’s loyalists suspended from the council. He replaced them with Leislerians. Since Fletcher had supported the anti-Leislerians, Bellomont, found it expedient to take the other side. He even had Leisler’s body disinterred from under the gallows where he had been executed and given a proper burial in a cemetery.

And so the factionalism continued, although I don’t think Bellomont meant for it to happen. But the two sides were unwilling to cooperate with each other and so in order to govern he had to pick one side or the other. And given his preferred policies, the Leislerians were the only plausible choice.

Bellomont soon called for new elections, but he and the Leislerians lost badly. The governor thought that the election had been rigged by his opponents. After all, he hadn’t yet replaced all of Fletcher’s appointees with his own men yet, so the sheriffs were all still anti-Leislerians. Again, it’s hard to know how true the accusations of fraud were, but they seem plausible to me at least. There were 19 men elected to the Assembly and a full 11 of them had their elections challenged. However, the Assembly determined its own membership, and they were still controlled by the anti-Leislerians, so they ruled in favor of their own candidates in every case but one.

The governor was very dissatisfied with this result, and so he called for new elections almost immediately. This time he did it right. He dismissed the old sheriffs and replaced them with his own men. And this time the Leislerians were victorious, winning three quarters of the seats.

So we can see here the importance of controlling the mechanisms of election, in this case by controlling who was sheriff. There were very few checks on the sheriffs and how they ran their elections, so other than the risk of being fired they could pretty much do as they pleased. Naturally, if you wanted to win an election it was important to be on the sheriff’s good side. That power wasn’t always abused so flagrantly, but it was there.

We can also see the importance of the fact that the Assembly can determine its own membership. Whenever there was a disputed election, it was the Assembly who decided the winner, and of course that power was often abused. Those decisions weren’t always 100% partisan, but they were partisan.

Anyway, now that they controlled the government top to bottom, the Leislerians undid as many of Fletcher’s policies as they could. Needless to say, these actions just kept the factionalism going and going.

However, before the Leislerians could really consolidate power, Lord Bellomont died suddenly in 1701 after just a few years in America. Word was sent to England, of course, but in the meantime, there was a power vacuum in New York, while the colony waited for a new governor to arrive. This often happened in the colonies, since it could take a year or more for the news to reach England, for officials in London to decide who the next governor should be, and for that man to sail to America. There was an acting governor, but that was a less powerful position than an actual governor, and so it was a good time for factions to attack each other. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play”, basically.

For example, in the elections that were held that year, the Leislerians once again came out on top. But that wasn’t enough for them. They tried to have two anti-Leislerians removed from the Assembly on the grounds that they didn’t live in the counties they were elected from, and because one of them was accused of bribing a sheriff. The anti-Leislerians countered by arguing that one of the Leislerians was unfit to serve because he was a naturalized citizen instead of native-born.

But the Leislerians were in the majority and so they had their way. The two anti-Leislerians were expelled from the Assembly, along with several other members who had boycotted the Assembly in protest. Needless to say, these kinds of shenanigans undermined the legitimacy of the Assembly as a whole. When some more delegates challenged the actions of the Assembly and refused to attend, they too were expelled and even threatened with prosecution.

The Leislerians also tried to influence elections by increasing the number of representatives coming from Albany and New York City, where their support was strongest.

The anti-Leislerians sent several petitions to England protesting this behavior. When the Assembly demanded copies of the petitions so that they could see the accusations for themselves, the anti-Leislerians refused. That gave the Leislerians the opportunity to charge some of their opponents with treason. Not only that, they managed to get several of the anti-Leislerians sentenced to death, by using handpicked, partisan judges and juries packed with supporters. Even then, one of the juries had to be threatened by the judges in order to return a guilty verdict. In order to avoid being executed, some of the convicted anti-Leislerians begrudgingly agreed to confess to their alleged crimes.

So, this whole situation was escalating very quickly. I guess the Leislerians were out for revenge after what had been done to them a decade ago.

This little reign of terror was only stopped by the arrival of the new governor. Since Bellomont had been appointed, the Whigs had fallen out of power in England, and the Tories were back in control. So that meant that politics in New York was once again about to do a 180, with a new governor working to undo everything the last governor had done.

The new governor, Lord Cornbury, was Queen Anne’s nephew. He had been given the job out of favoritism and because he needed it. He came from a rich background, but he was a big spender in need of cash. Like Fletcher, he was there to make money. Cornbury’s instructions from the government were to not side with either faction, and to calm things down as best he could, but that’s not what he did. It was almost predetermined that he would side firmly with the anti-Leislerians. Not only was he from the opposite faction as Governor Bellomont, he wanted to emulate Fletcher’s corruption by currying favor with the richest men in the colony. All of that meant that the anti-Leislerians were his natural allies.

When he arrived, the Leislerians were still persecuting the anti-Leislerians, but Cornbury put an end to that right quick, and swiftly moved to take control of the government away from the Leislerians. He not only expelled the five Leislerian councilors from the council, he had them charged with various offenses. Two of them even fled the colony altogether. The governor dissolved the Assembly and some of the legislation which had been passed under Bellomont was disallowed.

In the election of 1702, the anti-Leislerians took back the Assembly, though whether it was due to further cheating or because New Yorkers were genuinely tired of the Leislerians I don’t know.

Either way, things had reversed again in a remarkably short span of time. Now it was the Leislerians who were being persecuted and hounded from office. Well, “persecuted” might be a strong word. None of them were being charged with treason and sentenced to die. At worst, there was some financial harassment.

Probably Cornbury was more interested in making money than in settling old scores. He pretty much followed Governor Fletcher’s playbook, once again giving away large tracts of land to his supporters.

Actually, as a side effect of Bellomont’s death and Cornbury taking over, Fletcher managed to escape punishment for his misdeeds. Bellomont had still been investigating Fletcher when he died, but when Cornbury came in, he started his own investigation, which naturally cleared Fletcher of all charges. Apparently that was enough for the Board of Trade, since they let Fletcher off the hook. However, his reputation had still been ruined by the accusations, and so he retired from public life and died just a few years later.

Anyway, I don’t think there’s any need to get into the details of Cornbury’s time in office. It was very similar to what had happened under Governor Fletcher, and trust me, you really don’t want me to get into all the boring financial details, I promise.

I should point out that there’s been an attempt to rehabilitate Cornbury’s reputation, arguing that he was the victim of a smear campaign by his enemies. And that’s to some extent true. In addition to the accusations of corruption, there were also rumors that he was a crossdresser, which was almost certainly false. But those stories took on a life of their own, and a few decades later there were even rumors that he had presided over the Assembly in a dress, because, according to him, “I represent a woman (Queen Anne) and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can”. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I kind of wish it did, but there’s just no way.

So that particular rumor is clearly false, but whether the corruption allegations were also false, I don’t know. I’ve presented the standard narrative about Cornbury, that he was corrupt, but honestly there’s a lot that we don’t know about colonial American history. There just hasn’t been as much research on many of these topics as you might expect. I think that most of the attention goes to the first few decades of colonization plus the American Revolution itself, along with a few other particularly interesting moments like the Salem witch trials. Everything else is a bit unfairly neglected. My point here is just to remind you again that American history is not yet a settled subject, and that at least some of the narratives I’ve presented may be wrong. Which ones? Well, if I knew I’d tell you.

One other point I should make is that although I’ve been presenting everything through the lens of Leislerians vs. anti-Leislerians, that was just one thing that was going on at the time, and maybe not even the most important thing. The wars with Quebec, general worries about money and corruption, and local concerns were all at least as important. And even when one faction was entirely in control of the government, there were still plenty of disagreements between them. Like in New England, I’m focusing on factionalism, because that’s more relevant to the history of elections, but that’s not always what people cared about at the time.

Anyway, in 1708, Cornbury was removed from office. He had actually wound up further in debt while serving as governor, and as soon as he stepped down he was placed under house arrest to make sure that he didn’t flee the colony to escape his creditors. A rather ignominious end for any governor. But anyway, Cornbury eventually made his way back to England, where he successfully defended his conduct as governor. He went on to become a member of the Privy Council, and the House of Lords. A better fate than Fletcher, for sure.

But that’s got nothing to do with New York. As far as New York was concerned, Cornbury was out and the new governor was in. That new governor was a Scottish gentleman named Robert Hunter. Unlike almost all of the governors of New York, before and after, Hunter was actually a competent, well-liked, and widely respected guy. He was a talented politician, he was a good writer, he was even a friend of Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels.

Let me give you a description of Governor Hunter by Cadwallader Colden, a scientist/politician. Colden was then a young man, but he’ll be an important figure in our story later. “When I knew Mr. Hunter he was an exceedingly well shaped and well proportioned man, tho’ then advanced in years. He understood the Belles lettres [bell lettre] well and had an intimacy with the distinguished men of wit at that time in England. Among them Dr. Arbuthnot, Queen Anne’s favorite physician, was his most intimate and useful friend, tho’ he and the doctor differed greatly in their political sentiments, for Mr. Hunter was a staunch Whig…. He wrote some elegant little pieces of poetry, which never appeared in his name. He had an exceeding pretty and entertaining manner of telling a Tale and was a most agreeable companion with his intimate friends. He was fond of men of Learning and encouraged them whenever he had an opportunity. In short he was a Gentleman of extraordinary abilities, both natural and acquired, and had every qualification requisite in a Governor.”

Obviously Colden was a fan, but everything else I’ve read about him was pretty favorable as well. At the very least, he was successful at ending the feud between the pro- and anti-Leislerians within just a few years. He appointed men from both factions to important offices, and was willing to work with both sides. And very quickly, both factions dissipated into nothing. That was that.

Probably the feud was already winding down of its own accord. After all, it had been two decades since Leisler’s Rebellion at this point, and time must have healed at least some of those wounds.

And I’m not even sure that the rivalry between the Leislerians and anti-Leislerians was really about anything. There were no big policy disputes between them, it was mostly just bad blood. There was a class element to it, but it’s not clear to me that their economic interests were actually that divergent. And there were plenty of exceptions to the rule: rich Leislerians, or non-rich anti-Leislerians, plus plenty of people who switched sides when it was politically expedient. It was mostly factionalism for factionalism’s sake. So there was really nothing keeping it going except for momentum.

Plus, as New York continued to grow and develop, there were new divisions opening up, new ways for New Yorkers to divide themselves. That’ll be our topic next time, as we look at the next few decades of factionalism, in which merchants and landowners each try to force each other to pay more taxes. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

Sources:

Themes and Directions in Middle Colonies Historiography, 1980-1994 by Wayne Bodle

A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York by Patricia U. Bonomi

Lord Cornbury Redressed: The Governor and the Problem Portrait by Patricia U. Bonomi

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

The Encyclopedia of New York State by Peter R. Eisenstadt

The Myth of the “Middle Colonies”: An Analysis of Regionalization in Early America by Robert J. Gough

Colonial New York: A History by Michael Kamen

Governor Fletcher’s Recall by James S. Leamon

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I by Herbert L. Osgood

Election Procedures and Practices in Colonial New York by Nicholas Varga

(Left: Lord Bellomont, governor of New York from 1698-1701. Right: Robert Hunter, governor of New York from 1710-1719.)

After the chaos caused by Leisler’s Rebellion, New York spends the 1690s and 1700s attempting to recover, only for that recovery to be repeatedly derailed by ongoing factionalism that no one could stop.

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