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.) In Massachusetts, by contrast, the electorate comprised overthree-fourths of the male population.This did not mean that everyone voted.In most elections, only a small portion ofeligible voters actually cast ballots.In New York, perhaps as many as 80 percent ofthe free white males could vote, though rarely did more than 25 percent of these vot-ers exercise their franchise.Two-thirds of Virginia s free white males held the fran-chise; rarely did more than one-fourth of them exercise it.The same pattern held inPennsylvania nearly 75 percent of the adult white males could take part in elec- THE EMPI RES REI NVENTED, 1660 1763 289tions, but only when they were hotly contested, as in the 1760s, did more than halfthe voters bother to vote.While the laws of South Carolina gave to almost all freewhite males the right to vote, fewer than 10 percent regularly cast ballots.City folk,more easily roused by electoral contests, voted more often than country folk.Colonial assemblies met for short periods of time.Tops were Pennsylvania, SouthCarolina, and Massachusetts, averaging three or four months a year.Assembly ses-sions were more frequent and more businesslike as the century wore on, and as-semblies became centers of protest against the crown.By the middle of the eighteenth century, colonial legislatures were active organsof law making, administration, and adjudication.Indeed, in their relations to otherbranches of colonial governments, as in their view of the imperial connection, colo-nial assemblies ignored theoretical limitations on their authority.First, colonial legislatures had become increasingly active makers of statute law.For example, the number of laws passed in the Massachusetts General Court in-creased from seventeen or eighteen at the beginning of the century to thirty-eighteach session at the end of the 1750s.These were not so-called private bills for theconvenience of an individual petitioner but public acts similar to modern legislation.Virginia averaged over thirty bills per session, New York over twenty-five, and Mary-land nearly as many.Equally important, the acts were printed and circulated in thecolony and served to regulate the inhabitants behavior far more effectively than thefirst assemblies regulatory efforts.Even the language of the acts became more pre-cise as more and more lawyers agreed to serve in the legislatures.Second, the colonists often turned to their assemblies when they might have gonefor relief or action to the governor or the courts.For example, by midcentury the NewJersey assembly was effectively handling six times as many petitions as it handledthirty years earlier, many of which might well have gone to the governor s office.Upon the petition of the leading planters, the Virginia legislature fashioned an in-telligent and comprehensive system of quality control for tobacco.In New York andMassachusetts, legislative action had aided the interests of the ports of New York Cityand Boston and regulated wages and prices in the seagoing industries.There were exceptions to this rule.Though the South Carolina legislature sat formany days, its work product was small compared to that of its northern neighborsfewer than fifteen laws per session.In part this may be due to the relative paucity ofthe petitions for redress it received under twenty per session compared to over twohundred for Massachusetts.Such legislative activities prove that separation of powers among the threebranches of government was a postrevolutionary conception.For example, the Penn-sylvania assembly routinely carried on administrative and judicial functions.Thelower house selected and oversaw commissioners to collect taxes and record legaltransactions.Payment for these officials came from fees on a schedule set by the leg- 290 FROM PROVI NCES OF EMPI RE TO A NEW NATI ONislators.The assembly did not shrink from granting monopolies for such officialfunctions.The Connecticut assembly functioned as a high court of appeals through-out the colonial period, as did the legislative upper houses in the southern colonies.Third, colonial legislatures notorious penchant for ignoring royal authority andintimidating royal governors proved that they did not see themselves as the subor-dinate partner in the imperial relationship.Governors and their assemblies clashedover who could choose the Speaker of the lower house and how the seats in it wereto be apportioned.When the proprietor asked the Pennsylvania assembly, in 1739,to raise funds to support the war efforts, the assembly simply refused.In Massachu-setts in the 1730s, the General Court tried to charter a land bank and issue paper cur-rency on its investments over the objections of Governor Belcher.His veto of the bankin 1741 cost him his job.In these and other cases, rudimentary political party orga-nizations radiated out from the assemblies into the electoral districts, and candidatesfor legislative office often campaigned against imperial policies.Colonial CourtsEighteenth-century colonial courts did a little better than assemblies in copyingEnglish forms and obeying crown precepts.But unlike the English system of com-partmentalized and specialized tribunals, almost all of the colonies developed anoverlapping hierarchy of courts of generalized jurisdiction.Petty sessions held by the justices of the peace were the lowest level of official tri-bunal
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