It is true of the South, in spite of the fact--influential throughout the history of that section--that its population contained an element drawn from the wealthier classes of the mother country. It has indeed been said that Virginia was “a continuation of English society.” The seeds of privilege may have existed in the Old Dominion, but, nevertheless, in no colony was the spirit of personal independence more signally evinced. “With consistent firmness of character,” to quote again from Bancroft, “the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles that prevailed in their forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.”
With the aims of the English rebellion against Charles I., the American colonies were in full sympathy. Immediately after its outbreak, the general court of Massachusetts directed the governor to omit the oath of allegiance to the king, “seeing that he had violated the privileges of Parliament.” But the civil war had no effect upon the colonial governments. In England, the monarchy, the peerage, and the prelacy were at swords’ points with the people; in America, there was neither peerage nor prelacy, and monarchy was rendered remote by the Atlantic, so that there were no two parties to join battle.
The Restoration opened a new era in the history of the colonies--a period of conflict between royal usurpation and aristocratic oppression on the one hand, and popular liberties on the other; a period that, after many years of difficulty and struggle, culminated in events that gave rationality and independence to the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.
It was a period marked in England by the political ascendency of the aristocracy. At the Restoration, the nobility resumed possession of the hereditary branch of the Parliament. Through their influence over elections, they, to a great extent, controlled the House of Commons--and through it the crown, over which the Commons had given recent and striking proofs of power. It was the aristocratic element that dictated the policy which goaded the colonies into secession from the mother country. It supplied the office-holders--“carpet-baggers” they might have been termed in modern political slang--whom the home government quartered upon the colonials by an official system tainted with nepotism and corruption. Its foe--Pitt, the great Commoner--was the friend of America, and one of her few champions in Parliament.