ABSTRACT
Debating the founders’ democracy Given that the original 13 colonies had variable degrees of democratic selfgovernance within the British Empire and, arguably, more democracy than England by the 1770s (Bailyn 1968), then America’s democratic experience is more than 400 years old. The General Assembly of Virginia, the first statewide legislative body, was established in 1619. During the Revolutionary era, the people acted through their colonial assemblies, temporary assemblies and conventions elected when the Crown closed the colonial assemblies, citizen committees, mass meetings, and mobs. Furthermore, the United States has never had a homegrown monarchy or feudal past. Instead:
The emigrants who colonized America . . . separated the principle of democracy from all those other principles against which they contended when living in . . . the old European societies, and transplanted that principle only on the shores of the New World. It could there grow in freedom and, progressing in conformity with mores, develop peacefully within the law.
