Formalizes the legislature and the electoral process for selecting representatives.
SOUTH CAROLINA
74 Act to Ascertain the Manner and Form of Electing Members to Represent the Province, 1721
A legislative act that defines the basis for representation in South Carolina and lays out a fair electoral process.
GEORGIA
75 Act to Ascertain the Manner and Form of Electing Members to Represent the Inhabitants of This Province in the Commons House of Assembly, June 9, 1761
The first formal definition of the electoral process underlying representative government in Georgia.
CONFEDERATIONS
76 The New England Confederation, 1643
A true confederation and the first attempt to unite several colonies created by different charters.
77 The Albany Plan of Union, 1754
Although never ratified, the first serious attempt to unite all the colonies under a common compact.
78 The Articles of Confederation, November 15, 1777
The first U.S. Constitution—a compact that created a confederation.
Appendix: Unadopted Colonial Plans of Union
79 William Penn’s Plan of Union, February 8, 1697
The first proposal for uniting all the colonies under a general government.
80 Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union, 1774
The immediate precursor to the Articles of Confederation.
Bibliography
This volume is not just another collection of documents assembled in the hope of illuminating general historical trends or eras. Instead, the set of documents selected for reproduction results from decision rules based on a theory of politics. The theory of politics is drawn from the work of Eric Voegelin, although it was the work of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey that first pointed to the possibility of, and need for, a collection of American colonial documents based on Voegelin’s ideas.1
Eric Voegelin argues that political analysis should begin with a careful examination of a people’s attempt at self-interpretation—a self-interpretation that is most likely to be found in their political documents and writing. The crucial point occurs when, either before or after creating a political society, a people reach a shared psychological state wherein they recognize themselves as engaged in a common enterprise and bound together by values, interests, and goals. It is this sharing, this basis for their being a people rather than an aggregate of individuals, that constitutes the beginning point for political analysis.
Essentially what they share are symbols and myths that provide meaning to their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order. The shared meaning and shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people, to answer such basic political questions as How do we decide what to do? By what standards do we judge our actions? Through what procedures do we reach collective decisions? What qualities or characteristics do we strive to encourage among ourselves? What qualities or characteristics do we seek or require of those who lead us? Far from being the repository of irrationality, shared myths and symbols constitute the basis upon which collective, rational action is possible.
These myths and symbols become at the same time both the basis for action as a people and the means of their self-illumination as a people. Frequently expressed in political documents, the core political symbols tend to structure the documents and determine their content. Voegelin also says that these shared symbols can be found in embryonic form in the earliest political expressions made by a people and in “differentiated” form in later writings. Put another way, by studying the political documents of a people we can watch the gradual unfolding, elaboration, and alteration of the embryonic symbols that define a given people. Voegelin calls this process “differentiation” but also refers to it as “self-illumination” and “self-interpretation.”
Finally, in a synopsis too brief to do credit to such a profound theory, Voegelin argues that in Western civilization basic symbolizations tend to be variants of the original symbolization of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Without getting into a discussion of where this argument leaves the Greeks and Romans, suffice it to say that Voegelin’s analysis led Kendall and Carey to reexamine early American political documents, and what they found was a variant on the symbolization of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Using only a few of these early documents of foundation, Kendall and Carey identified a number of basic symbols present in all of them as well as in documents of the 1770s and 1780s: a constitution as higher law, popular sovereignty, legislative supremacy, the deliberative process, and a virtuous people. The important points made by Kendall and Carey are that there are basic symbols, in embryonic form, found in the earliest documents of foundation written by colonial Americans and that these symbols are found in American political documents written 150 years later, after the colonial era, but now in a differentiated form. While provocative and convincing, the position taken by Kendall and Carey cannot be considered firmly established until the early American documents of foundation can be comprehensively analyzed and the symbols traced through succeeding documents.
Later research by others does indeed show the continuity in symbols running from the Mayflower Compact to the American state and national constitutions of the late eighteenth century and that the embryonic basis for this political tradition clearly evolves from basic symbols in the Judeo-Christian tradition.2 Later support for the Kendall and Carey application of Voegelin’s theory thus leads to the need for a comprehensive collection of documents that illustrates the evolution of American constitutional symbols.
Because there are thousands of candidates for inclusion in a collection of American political documents based on Voegelin’s approach, a brief discussion of the decision rules used to select among them is required. The first decision rule was to include only those documents written during the colonial era. Post-1776 documents are readily available in a number of good collections, but there has been no good collection of pre-1776 foundational documents. The one exception to this rule in the present collection is The Articles of Confederation, which has been included because it is the direct culmination of colonial constitutional evolution. The Articles and the Declaration of Independence not only embody the colonial covenantal/compactual symbols but also together are what moved the colonies into independent nationhood. The state constitutions should also be included but are easily available in any library and are too long for inclusion, whereas the Articles of Confederation is brief and makes the transition from colonial to postindependence documents of political foundation dramatically apparent. Juxtaposing the Articles of Confederation with its immediate predecessors is therefore useful for illustrating the connection between pre- and postindependence documents.
The second decision rule was to include only documents written and adopted by the colonists, which excludes those written in Britain. Some may see this rule as tending to minimize the impact of the Mother Country on the process of constitutional development in America. The purpose of the rule, however, is to produce a coherent book of manageable length and not to imply the absence of English common law
