Town-Meeting Politics in Massachusetts, 1776-1786
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4875810 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Syrett (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1964 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 352 |
| Publication date | 1964-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1918451 |
| OpenAlex | W2334553239 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
HE political history of Massachusetts during the I770's and I780's has been written chiefly in terms of conflict. Radicals and conservatives, debtors and creditors, Easterners and Westerners, democrats and aristocrats, farmers and merchants battle each other across the pages of a multitude of books, reviews, and articles. Charles A. Beard's theory that Massachusetts politics was dominated by an undemocratic commercial aristocracy was fought over by historians until i955, when the center of conflict shifted to include Robert E. Brown who stated flatly that most men could vote and therefore Massachusetts in the I770's and 8o's was a middle class democracy.' This emphasis by historians on class, sectional, and ideological conflict has obscured the actual workings of Massachusetts political institutions. A review of the record of one of these institutions, the town meeting, long considered as a source of American reveals that the town meeting of colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts resembled other eighteenth-century British institutions and suggests that the government of Massachusetts hardly conformed to modern concepts of democracy. Sir Lewis Namier has shown that British political institutions naturally produced electoral absurdities and that the word democracy, used in the modern sense, could not be applied to Great Britain in the eighteenth century.2 Scholars who have studied other parts of the British Empire have reached similar conclusions. John Bartlet Brebner, for instance, has found that during the American Revolution politics in the province of Nova Scotia were under the tight control of a small clique of officeholders in Halifax,3 and Charles S. Sydnor in his penetrating and
Ancient history · Aristocracy (class · Battle · Colonialism · Democracy · Economic history · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2019 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |