ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the political patterns developed in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania from their founding days through the Revolution have carried down through two centuries of people national experience. It also shows how the habit of authority led many members of Boston's upper class to participate vigorously in governing their city and state as well as the nation. The defiant democracy of Pennsylvania, by contrast was led predominantly by the sons of Scotch-Irish immigrants, all of them heirs to the traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism, brought from John Calvin's Geneva by John Knox. Deference democracy has been the rule in Massachusetts, especially where its senators have been concerned. The Boston Brahmins and Philadelphia Gentlemen in politics before the Civil War were different in another respect: they were, by and large, class deviants in Philadelphia and representatives of class authority in Boston. In contrast to the Bostonians, the Philadelphia mayors were a more heterogeneous and less educated group.
