Foundations of Political Power in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1720-1776

Bibliographic Data

ID4222620
AuthorsJack P Greene (corresponding author)
Year1959
Volume16
Issue4
Pages485
Publication date1959-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1920216
OpenAlexW2322953517
LanguageEN
Citations received6

H _ ISTORIANS have devoted more attention to the Virginia House of Burgesses than to any other lower house in the continental colonies. They have treated its internal development, its part in royal government, its procedure, and its personnel. They have assessed its role in developing the leaders of the Revolutionary generation and traced its part in the struggle for liberty. Yet, no one has attempted to analyze the structure of power within the Burgesses in the half century before the American Revolution. The first question to be asked in such an analysis is how was power distributed in the house? Was it spread more or less equally among all members, or was it generally concentrated in the hands of a few? The answer to this question lies in the committees where the work of the house was done and where the real decisions were made. The only way one can hope to determine the pattern of the distribution of power in the eighteenth-century house is by a qualitative analysis of committee poststhat is, by a study which takes into account not only the number of committee posts held by each member but also the varying degrees of importance of the committees themselves.' I have undertaken such an analysis and used my findings as a yardstick to measure the influence or power of individual burgesses. The results indicate that relatively few members played significant roles in the proceedings of the house: of the 630 men who sat in that body between 1720 and 1776, some 520 can safely be eliminated from consideration, because only iio members belonged at one time or another to the select few who dominated the proceedings of the house. Of these few, some, of course

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