Taxation and Political Culture: Massachusetts and Virginia, 1760-1800

HE new social history written during the past two decades has accentuated the dissimilarity of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England colonies. These two regions now appear to have been so dramatically unlike in their demographic characteristics as to constitute separate colonial worlds marked by sharply disparate mortality rates, sex ratios, patterns of family formation, and labor systems. That such different societies produced significantly different political consequences has been noted by historians who have contrasted the disorder of the Chesapeake with the stability of the Puritan colonies. The picture of these two regions that has been evolving from studies of eighteenth-century America is more complex and less sharply defined, but a growing body of literature suggests that population movement into the interior, the forces of the market and membership in the British Empire during an age of intercolonial wars, and other factors such as the Great Awakening muted the distinctiveness of the seventeenth-century settlements. Communalism in New England towns was diminished by population pressures, spatial dispersion, and developing linkages with the outside world; the skewed sex ratios and high mortality rates of the seventeenthcentury Chesapeake abated so that the creole population acquired a stability it had lacked, and Virginia, if not Maryland, entered an era of notable political harmony. Indeed, in point of political stability, Virginia and Massachusetts had seemingly more in common than either did with the factious politics of the Middle Colonies during the half century before the Revolution. The colonial worlds of the Chesapeake and New England were becoming one, as was all of British North America-a process accelerated by the discovery of a common grammar of opposition politics