When Vermont’s Ethan Allen and his fabled Green Mountain Boys seized Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, they purportedly did so in the “name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” demonstrating that the United States alone among the world’s major nations was created by a legislature. This nation’s legislative tradition is unparalleled, and any understanding of American governmental institutions must begin with a full awareness of the nation’s four centuries of legislative experience.

That understanding was provided in University of Missouri professor Peverill Squire’s first deep dive into US legislative history. That volume, The Evolution of American Legislatures: Colonies, Territories, and States, 1619–2009 (2011), covered the entirety of US legislative history from the original Virginia colony of 1619 to the 110th Congress, 2007–9. The only comparable work in scope and depth would be the four volumes assembled by US Representative Robert Luce (R.-MA) in his monumental Science of Legislation series (1922–35). And among relatively contemporary scholars, the most notable would be Jack Greene of Johns Hopkins, whose well-written The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (1963) illuminated that unique corner of colonial history.

Squire’s follow-up volume, The Rise of the Representative: Lawmakers and Constituents in Colonial America, provides flesh to the bone of the previous work in its focus on those who made the laws and their relationship to the citizens who placed them in those 16 assemblies— the original 13 and the 3 smaller ones subsumed by the colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

Squire’s 74 pages of references in the 2011 volume (pp. 341–414) and 54 pages in the 2017 volume (pp. 259–312) display a degree of research depth that one seldom, if at all, encounters in political science books and easily surpasses that of most books by historians. The decision of many historians more than a generation ago to focus on bottom-up social history of the common folk was long overdue, but their abandonment of much political history has left a serious void in the historical literature. Fortunately, Professor Squire’s deep burrowing into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legislative records demonstrate what a determined scholar can learn from these long-forgotten records about how these colonial legislators conducted the business of governance in a place three thousand miles away from their presumed forebears in the British Parliament. Confronted with creating new societies on a new continent, these colonial legislators emulated aspects of their distant forebears, but they did not replicate the legislative system of which few had more than passing knowledge. Settling into a continent considered “the wide-open spaces,” their ingenuity was remarkable: the creation of these 16 colonial legislatures virtually guaranteed that the Congress of the United States that emerged from the colonial tradition would be quite dissimilar from the parliamentary model miles away across the Atlantic.

Having some experience in longitudinal research myself, I was impressed by Professor Squire’s determination to gain access to colonial records as far back as possible, even those in existence before the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 Plymouth. This is a project greatly aided by the diligence of countless archivists who were able to maintain and protect these invaluable documents.

Relying on the time-honored trustee-delegate representational dichotomy, Squire identifies Virginia as trustee based, New England as delegate based, and the middle colonies as hybrids. These subnational designations are much like those in David Hackett Fischer’s classic Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), in which the three regions evince cultural qualities that also manifest themselves in representational styles.

Squire’s chapter on who could vote and who could represent those selected for colonial governance is yet another reminder of how long-standing and contentious these issues are, which indeed persist to the present day. Colonists who held land were not identical to colonists who paid taxes in lieu of landholding, nor were their respective political concerns. Nascent urban–rural tensions continue to bedevil the body politic more than three centuries later. Religious tests for political participation in the various colonies generally targeting Roman Catholics and Quakers were echoes of the state churches that existed in Europe and would be barred in the Constitution.

Political participation was also limited by colonists’ race and by conditions of servitude, most notably in the southern colonies. Presumed moral failings such as drunkenness and fornication were also cause for disenfranchisement. That it was the righteous Puritan elders of Massachusetts Bay Colony who were the most adamant on that score would surprise few, least of all Salem’s Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Puritan descendant of John Hathorne, a judge at that town’s infamous witch trials.

Although some colonies like New York allowed colonists who qualified to vote to serve in the assemblies, other colonies like Maryland were more restrictive, barring tavernkeepers who could vote but not serve in the legislature. The lack of uniformity throughout these colonial assemblies is yet another testament to US regional political diversity.

The debate over whether only “natural born” colonists could participate in the political life of colonial Virginia continues to echo in contemporary American politics. That these issues recur on the national stage almost four centuries later is remarkable proof of how long-standing debates over representation have been. Professor Squire’s thoughtful treatment of this issue is one that contemporary lawmakers would be wise to study.

Forays into claims of voter fraud, ethnic ticket balancing, and even violence at the polls that were part of colonial electioneering indicate that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Squire’s careful reading of these colonial documents is evident throughout, and much can be learned from his assessment of how these precedents shaped the US Congress and the nation’s 50 state legislatures.

I was most impressed by the comprehensive roll-call analysis from the Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania colonies, indicating that the hybrid “politico” role of legislators so clearly identified and labeled by John Wahlke and his associates in The Legislative System (1961) was in existence long before the Founders of the nation gathered in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the Constitution of the United States.

It may be too soon to dub these two volumes of Professor Squire’s as “classics” but that they are invaluable to our understanding of how American legislatures functioned then and now is demonstrably clear.