The colonies had little occasion to feel or to resent direct royal prerogative.
Category Archive: Albert Bushnell Hart
In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763.
In any event, colonization and the grant of lands were provincial matters.
Besides paid white laborers, there was everywhere a class of white servants bound without wages for a term of years, and a more miserable class of Negro slaves.
Each colony became accustomed to planting new settlements and to claiming new boundaries.
In comparison with other men of their time, the Americans were distinguished by the possession of new political and social ideas, which were destined to be the foundation of the American commonwealth.
In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States.
The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific.
One of the strongest and most persistent elements in national development has been that inheritance of political traditions and usages which the new settlers brought with them.
Few characters in history are indispensable.