The Kaleidoscope of Colonial Governments

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In the Americas, the Spanish Crown extended its rule over these substantial American territories in much the way it already ruled its considerable empire in Europe. The Crown sent viceroys as the king's chosen agents to govern these regions under Spanish law. England's colonial projects, however, were quite different.

First of all, the indigenous peoples the English encountered were not organized into centralized governments the way that the Spanish colonies in Mexico and Peru were. In many cases, North American Indians were semi-nomadic, moving from one place to another during the course of the year to take advantage of shifting food resources.

Secondly, the English projects were not conducted directly by England's monarchs. Instead, the Crown granted charters of power, delegating its authority over a specified tract of land in America to subjects who would undertake the task of colonization. Sometimes these charters were given to individuals, great noblemen like William Penn, or James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II. In other cases, charters were granted to groups of people organized as trading companies, such as the London Company of Virginia or the Massachusetts Bay Company. In either case, however, it was left to the holders of the charter to govern the settler colonists and to conduct relationships with the Indians who already lived within the charter's designated territory.

Table listing the colonies founding years, founding owner, and when it became a royal colony.

In most cases, the territory within the limits of a given charter was not under the authority of a single dominant Indian power, in the way that the Aztecs dominated Mexico or the Inca ruled Peru. As a result, English colonists often attempted to deal with this ambiguity by purchasing land from its Indian inhabitants. However, this strategy usually only increased the ambiguity of authority over the land, as Indians understood land "ownership" very differently than the English did.

For many Indians, the varied uses of a given tract of land — for farming, hunting, gathering, settlement, travel — could be owned simultaneously by many different people or groups. For the English, property ownership tended to be absolute, exclusive, and indivisible. As a result, the boundary zones of contact between Indian inhabitants and European newcomers remained fraught and contentious throughout this long period of English colonization in North America.

Massasoit was a leader of the Wampanoag people in eastern Massachusetts in the early 17th century.
Message from Massasoit, What is this you call property.

Even with respect to English colonists, colonial government could be chaotic, and it differed widely from colony to colony. In some colonies, a tremendous amount of authority was vested in the proprietary rulers to whom the crown had granted charters. In others, power was widely dispersed among the many colonists who invested their money and their lives in the enterprise. In addition, the geographical ignorance of Europeans regarding the American landscape meant that many of the colonial charters and patents unintentionally overlapped one another, leaving it unclear which colony controlled what territory.

Land disputed by the Plymouth and London Companies.
The map shows an area between the Plymouth Company and the London Company being claimed by both.

Nevertheless, over the course of the 17th century, certain common patterns evolved across the colonies as a whole. As the colonial population grew and spread out across the countryside away from the initial coastal settlements, government had to adapt in each colony. There had to be some mechanism that allowed the more distant colonists to communicate their wants and needs to the government centers. At the same time, the government needed to have some mechanism to extend and enforce its authority over the outlying regions.

Expansion of British settlement in North America, 1700-80.
The map shows the expansion of British settlements between 1700 and 1780.

As a result, every colony developed some sort of representative assembly, in which local communities sent delegates or deputies to meet, express their interests, and give their consent to the colony's government. Similarly, every colony developed a system of courts across its territory to hear cases, resolve disputes, and extend the rule of law.

Royal, proprietary and charter colonies in the mid-18th century.
A map of royal, proprietary and charter colonies in the mid-18th century.

Within this general pattern, there still remained tremendous diversity from colony to colony. In some, the colonists elected all their own officials, from the governor at the top down to the lowest town officers. In others, the king himself appointed a royal governor for the colony and approved the membership of the governor's advisory council. In the proprietary colonies, the holders of charters would choose the governor, for example, Pennsylvania, where the Penn family made such decisions.

At the local level some colonies, most notably in New England, developed quite extensive and impressive systems of self-government. The colonies became adept at collecting taxes, distributing services such as schools and poor relief, and maintaining order, thanks to the widespread participation of the citizenry. In other colonies, especially the southern plantation colonies, local government was thin and weak, with rich plantation owners preferring to take care of themselves and their own needs, keeping the intrusive public out of their businesses.

Another source of diversity lay in the realm of religion, which had always had a governmental function in England, where the church was part of the state and the king stood at its head. Some of the colonies, such as Virginia, the Carolinas, and the West Indies, attempted to replicate this by establishing the Church of England as the official colonial church. But others like Massachusetts and Connecticut established their own dissenting religion as their official church. Still others like Pennsylvania and Rhode Island did away with state churches altogether and allowed for widespread religious toleration.

Engraving of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, talking to Narragansett Indians, 1856.
Puritan Roger Williams is sitting on a rock; leafless trees sound him and the group of well-dressed Natives. Natives are wearing headdresses and embroidered clothing, and weapons. It seems to be a peaceful meeting.

In the later years of the 17th century, as the colonial populations grew and their economies became more prosperous, England's government began to take notice of the chaotic qualities of colonial government and attempted to regularize them. In some cases such as Massachusetts and Bermuda, charters that granted the colonial government significant autonomy were revoked and royal governors were appointed to replace locally elected ones.

England's Parliament passed laws to make the trading practices of individual colonies more uniform. After 1651, they created a system of Navigation Acts that channeled the colonies' trade toward the mother country and away from imperial competitors such as Spain and France. The Navigation Acts required the development of a somewhat more extensive royal bureaucracy in the colonies to administer its rules. But even with these increased levels of crown oversight, government in colonial British America remained widely variable from place to place, a fact commonly noted by the occasional European traveler who visited multiple colonies in the mid-18th century.

In 1600, England had no transatlantic colonial outposts, and eastern North America was Indian country. In 1750, a century and a half later, the entire North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Georgia was in English hands, as were a dozen or so Caribbean islands. Indian control of the territory from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic coast had been seriously weakened if not eliminated altogether by the presence and power of a million new colonists from the British Isles, continental Europe, and West Africa.

Yet while Britain now had a large and rich network of colonies, we might still hesitate to call it a unified empire because of the very rich diversity of its colonial inhabitants and the chaotic conditions under which they lived and ruled themselves. Each colony had its own important connections to the British homeland, but very little connected the colonies one to another, and a great deal divided them.

The force that began to change this was war. In earlier decades, individual colonies had fought in conflicts against their imperial neighbors — Massachusetts and New Hampshire against New France in the north, South Carolina and Georgia against Spain in the south. But beginning in the 1740s, and increasingly rapidly thereafter, Britain began to ask its colonies to join the homeland in its far-reaching conflicts against France, Spain, and their colonial possessions. It was these imperial wars that began to make an empire out of Britain's collection of American colonies.