Conceived in Liberty, Volume Two, Salutary Neglect, The American Colonies in the First
Half of the Eighteenth Century, by Murray N. Rothbard.
By liberty I understand the power which every man has over his own actions, and his right
to enjoy the fruit of his labor, art and industry, as far as by it he hurts not the society or
or any members of it, by taking from any member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he
himself enjoys. The fruits of a man's honest industry are the just rewards of it, ascertained
to him by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which
which he thinks fit. And thus, with the above limitations, every man is so lord and arbiter
of his own private actions and property. Indeed, liberty is the divine source of all human
happiness. To possess in security the effects of our industry is the most powerful and reasonable
to be industrious and to be able to provide for our children and to leave them all that we have is the best motive to beget them but where property is precarious labor will languish the privileges of thinking saying and doing what we please and of growing as rich as we can without any other restriction then that by all this we hurt not the poor
Public, Nor One Another, are the glorious privileges of liberty, and its effects to
live in freedom, plenty and safety.
Alas, power encroaches daily upon liberty, with a success too evident, and the balance
between them is almost lost.
Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth and striking at mankind, root and branch makes
the world a slaughterhouse.
Cato's Letters, Volume 2, Introduction, The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
After the upheavals of the period of the Glorious Revolution in England, late 1680s, early 1690s,
The American colonies had settled down into an uneasy truce by the end of the first decade
of the eighteenth century. During the first half of the eighteenth century, or more precisely
from about 1710 until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the colonies settled
into a relatively stable society and form of government. Stable relative to the swift
and Dramatic Changes of the Preceding Century when the American Colonies were founded.
The history of the colonies during this period can therefore be examined in a far more cross-sectional
and less chronological manner than can the early century or the dramatic and exciting
pre-revolutionary and revolutionary eras that followed.
But the first half of the 18th century was not only as stable time for the colonies.
It also saw far greater uniformity between the separate colonies than could have been
imagined in the preceding century.
The diversity of religion, of motivation, of government, of culture, between the various
colonies had been enormous.
What possible connection could there be between the grim Puritan theocrats of Massachusetts
Bay and the tolerant Pacific and enterprising Quakers of Pennsylvania, between the Puritans
and the aristocratic landed elite of tobacco-growing Virginia, or between the Dutch in New Amsterdam
and the Swedes on the Delaware?
But the events and upheavals of the 1680s and 1690s had sown for the first time a firm
thread of uniformity throughout the colonies, the common imposition of political institutions,
a common relationship to the mother country, Great Britain. These common experiences were
slowly but surely too welled as solidarity between these once totally disparate settlements,
A solidarity that would ripen. Without these unifying experiences over the first half of
the century, the united effort of the 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
The Royal Appointees
Another vital unifying factor was the spread of a conscious 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.