Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

American Revolution would have been impossible. Politically, virtually every
colony had a royally appointed governor, an upper house, or Council, and a
democratically elected lower house, or Assembly, engaged in a quiet but critical
power struggle with the royal appointees. Those colonies that remained
proprietary (owned by an English recipient of royal largesse)—Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and Delaware—were governed very similarly, the only difference
being that the governors were appointed by a proprietor instead of by
the Crown. Only the anomalous self-governing colonies of Connecticut and
Rhode Island were exceptions to this common experience of government
during the eighteenth century.
Another vital unifying factor was the spread of a concious libertarian ideology
throughout the colonies during this period, influenced directly by English
libertarians who engaged not only in trenchant theoretical arguments but also
in a caustic and powerful critique of the political institutions within Britain
itself. In the vital field of religion, the contrasting deistic movement and
the Great Awakening spread throughout the colonies; if the result was a deep
and long-lasting split between the rationalistic elite and the evangelical
masses, still both movements served to unify the colonies by cutting across the
previously disparate and contrasting religious passions of the separate colonies.
Before turning to these common experiences, which tended to unify the colonies
and which set the stage, directly or indirectly, for the new nation in the
latter part of the century, let us turn to a rundown of the separate colonies,
which, after all, were still separate and diverse in the first half of the century.
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