assemblyman had to be a man of real substance, the owner of five hundred acres of land and ten slaves, or the possessor of land, houses, or other property worth a thousand pounds sterling. In New Jersey only freeholders possessed of a thousand acres of land could sit in the representative chamber. So, by one method or another, control in the popular assemblies of the American colonies was concentrated in the hands of a somewhat compact body of propertied men, freeholders, merchants, and planters, having a common interest in resisting taxation.
These little parliaments enjoyed powers which were nowhere strictly defined in laws, charters, and decrees. From small and obscure beginnings they grew in dignity until they took on some of the pomp and circumstance long associated with the House of Commons. In the course of time they claimed as their own and exercised in fact the right of laying taxes, raising troops, incurring debts, issuing currency, fixing the salaries of royal officers, and appointing agents to represent them in their dealings with the government at London; and, going beyond such functions, they covered by legislation of their own wide domains of civil and criminal law—subject always to the terms of charters, acts of Parliament, and the prerogatives of the Crown.
Endowed with such impressive authority, these assemblies naturally drew to themselves all the local interests which were struggling to realize their demands in law and ordinance. They were the laboratories in which were formulated all the grievances of the colonists against the government of England. They were training schools where lawyers could employ their talents in political declamation, in outwitting royal officers by clever legal devices. In short, in the representative assemblies were brought to a focus the designs and passions of those rising economic groups which gave strength to America and threw her into opposition to the governing classes of the mother country. Serving as the points of contact with royal officers and the English Crown, they received the first impact of battle when
