States

The first constituent states of the United States were born out of the thirteen British colonies in America. Although many of the colonists had in common their British heritage and English language, the colonies were settled for different reasons and developed different societies. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was founded by Pilgrims, members of a Christian religious sect in England known as Puritans. Before landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, they drew up [Page 518] an agreement, the Mayflower Compact, stating: “[We] combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation” (see page 609). Much farther to the south, the Georgia Colony was settled in 1733 by the British humanitarian James Edward Oglethorpe and the earl of Egmont under a land grant from the British Crown for the purpose of “settling poor persons of London” in the New World.

After he traveled across the new nation early in the nineteenth century, the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) noted, “The Union is a vast body and somewhat vague as the object of patriotism. But,” he wrote in Democracy in America (1835), “the state has a precise shape and circumscribed boundaries; it represents a [definite] number of familiar things which are dear to those living there.” For these and other reasons, he suggested, “interest, custom, and feelings are united in concentrating real political life in the state, and not in the Union.”

Today the traditions of New Englanders continue to differ sharply from those of southerners, and both differ in many ways from those of the majority of Californians, for example. Each state also has its own constitution and many laws that differ from those of other states. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941) characterized the states essentially as laboratories of democracy because they each, in their own way, experiment with different forms of constitutional democratic government.

State Government