The New England Puritans, however, demonstrated their (Progressive) sense of governance by establishing towns as a community enterprise which accommodated a strong state-level government with a vital local direct democracy tasked with providing “people-centered” policy outputs. There was minimal county government buffering the contact between state and town/city.
The device the Massachusetts Bay colonial legislature chose to (create sub-state governance entities) was to create in each instance a town or land corporation that behaved much like a (town-level) trading company or any limited-liability business corporation of the time….these land corporations had shareholder members who were proprietors of the common land… (such) land or town corporations … were formed when the shareholders made formal agreements …which required the shareholders to perform certain common tasks, such as dividing the land, settling the lots, paying taxes and maintaining the commons.
This, of course, was the legal and structural basis of “New England town democracy” with its “town meeting” which was the a municipal governance based on shareholders forming a community through mutual compact. These distinctive styles of governance produced their own distinctive policy systems.
The towns founded during the seventeenth century were quasi-public, quasi-private entities— private enterprises sponsored by land corporations, whose members were shareholders. They owned the common land given to them by the assembly…shared the costs of organizing the town—raising revenues among themselves, spending funds on public ways … gaining profit as they divided and sold the land to other settlers. Early New England towns were comprised of circles within circles of people: the town residents (whether voters or not), the politically empowered voters (whether proprietors or not), and proprietors (whether residents or not). In both their founding and early political life, there was a pervasive ambivalence as to whether the early New England towns were public or private undertakings.[1]
Yankees wore religion on their sleeves—no matter how secular that religion had become. Their diaspora brought with it a flowering of all sorts of religions and millennial movements which usually included the ending of the world (like climate change today). Mormonism, of course, began in “the burned over district” (Oneida County New York) which also generated Charles Finney (who became President of Oberlin College) personification of the Second Great Awakening. Representatives sent from these states to Washington stoked the debate with southern planters and when left unfettered during the Civil War, led to the Morrill and Homestead Acts, as well as the transcontinental railroad—bitterly opposed in the past by Jacksonian-oriented legislators.
The antebellum South was an overwhelmingly rural society, with only one large city in the Deep South, New Orleans; other large southern cities were either isolated, like Charleston, or at the northern edge of the region, like Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis[2].
And in each southern county, long established or newly settled, the large landowners, who were almost inevitably the largest slaveholders, were the most respected and honored citizens. They were proud of their martial prowess and equestrian skills, they were learned in the classics or the law…. These southern planters did not see themselves as just local notables or even as national leaders; they also saw themselves as indispensable participants in an expanding and progressive world economy …. They tended to favor free trade, and with the British (and New England) textile manufacturers they were responsible for an industry that was providing cheap and comfortable clothing for an ever-increasing percentage of the people in the world. 46
[1] David J. Russo, American Towns, op. cit. p. 94.
[2] Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, op. cit. p.89. Of the top fifty cities in the census, the Confederate states included only seven cities—New Orleans (6th), Charleston (22nd), Richmond (25th), Mobile (27th), Memphis (38), Savannah (41st), and Petersburg VA (50th). Cities associated with New England and Yankee expansion totaled 23.
Ron W. Coan 