each, and caziques twenty-four thousand acres. There was
to be a parliament, in which landgraves and caziques were
represented, but it would be permitted to debate only those
measures that had previously been approved by the eight
proprietors.
Just as the attempt to impose draconian rule in Virginia
failed, so did the plans for the same type of institutions in
Maryland and Carolina. The reasons were similar. In all
cases it proved to be impossible to force settlers into a
rigid hierarchical society, because there were simply too
many options open to them in the New World. Instead, they
had to be provided with incentives for them to want to work.
And soon they were demanding more economic freedom
and further political rights. In Maryland, too, settlers insisted
on getting their own land, and they forced Lord Baltimore
into creating an assembly. In 1691 the assembly induced
the king to declare Maryland a Crown colony, thus removing
the political privileges of Baltimore and his great lords. A
similar protracted struggle took place in the Carolinas,
again with the proprietors losing. South Carolina became a
royal colony in 1729.
By the 1720s, all the thirteen colonies of what was to
become the United States had similar structures of
government. In all cases there was a governor, and an
assembly based on a franchise of male property holders.
They were not democracies; women, slaves, and the
propertyless could not vote. But political rights were very
broad compared with contemporary societies elsewhere. It
was these assemblies and their leaders that coalesced to
form the First Continental Congress in 1774, the prelude to
the independence of the United States. The assemblies
believed they had the right to determine both their own
membership and the right to taxation. This, as we know,
created problems for the English colonial government.
A T ALE OF T WO C ONSTITUTIONS
It should now be apparent that it is not a coincidence that
the United States, and not Mexico, adopted and enforced a
constitution that espoused democratic principles, created
limitations on the use of political power, and distributed that
power broadly in society. The document that the delegates