As North America developed, English elites tried time
and time again to set up institutions that would heavily
restrict the economic and political rights for all but a
privileged few of the inhabitants of the colony, just as the
Spanish did. Yet in each case this model broke down, as it
had in Virginia.
One of the most ambitious attempts began soon after the
change in strategy of the Virginia Company. In 1632 ten
million acres of land on the upper Chesapeake Bay were
granted by the English king Charles I to Cecilius Calvert,
Lord Baltimore. The Charter of Maryland gave Lord
Baltimore complete freedom to create a government along
any lines he wished, with clause VII noting that Baltimore
had “for the good and happy Government of the said
Province, free, full, and absolute Power, by the Tenor of
these Presents, to Ordain, Make, and Enact Laws, of what
Kind soever.”
Baltimore drew up a detailed plan for creating a manorial
society, a North American variant of an idealized version of
seventeenth-century rural England. It entailed dividing the
land into plots of thousands of acres, which would be run by
lords. The lords would recruit tenants, who would work the
lands and pay rents to the privileged elite controlling the
land. Another similar attempt was made later in 1663, with
the founding of Carolina by eight proprietors, including Sir
Anthony Ashley-Cooper. Ashley-Cooper, along with his
secretary, the great English philosopher John Locke,
formulated the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. This
document, like the Charter of Maryland before it, provided a
blueprint for an elitist, hierarchical society based on control
by a landed elite. The preamble noted that “the government
of this province may be made most agreeable to the
monarchy under which we live and of which this province is
a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous
democracy.”
The clauses of the Fundamental Constitutions laid out a
rigid social structure. At the bottom were the “leet-men,”
with clause 23 noting, “All the children of leet-men shall be
leet-men, and so to all generations.” Above the leet-men,
who had no political power, were the landgraves and
caziques, who were to form the aristocracy. Landgraves
were to be allocated forty-eight thousand acres of land