laws were vetoed and instructions were handed out by the king's governors or the agents of the proprietors.
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While the local assemblies, speaking for American farmers, planters, and merchants, were advancing by a steady extension of powers to the position of sovereign legislatures, agencies were developed by the British Crown and Parliament to check and control the swelling authority of colonial democracy. Chief among these agencies was the royal or provincial governor. By a gradual process, beginning with the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624 and ending with the extinction of the Georgia corporation in 1752, eight of the thirteen colonies became royal provinces, that is, their executive departments were in the hands of governors appointed by the King of England. In three, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, the old proprietary system remained in force until 1776, keeping the governors equally independent of popular assemblies. Only two, Rhode Island and Connecticut, retained the right to elect their own executives through all changes of the colonial period, and they were the objects of suspicion to the British imperialists who feared the "democratical" pretensions of America.
If the friends of "high-toned government" could have had their way, every colony would have been reduced to a single scheme—the province administered by an independent executive and judiciary sustained by permanent revenues collected under parliamentary authority. Events proved, however, that it was only necessary to have eight royal governors to set thirteen communities aflame.
Although there was a wide variety in the types of governors chosen in the course of a century or more to administer colonial affairs, they showed a general tendency toward conformity to pattern. Usually they sprang from ruling classes long accustomed to looking upon government as a
