Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Hart’s line is doing more than arranging colonial furniture; it’s staking a claim about how power trained early Americans to think in layers. “Two sets” sounds tidy, almost administrative, but the phrase quietly points to a political stress fracture that becomes the Revolution’s fault line: colonists lived under a local machinery they could see and touch, while also answering to a “general” apparatus that was distant, abstract, and often felt like someone else’s project.

Context matters. Writing as a Progressive Era historian, Hart favored institutional explanations over romance-novel patriotism. He wants you to notice that by 1750 the colonies weren’t political blank slates awaiting liberty’s big reveal. They were already practiced in governance: town meetings, colonial assemblies, courts, charters. That local competence didn’t just create confidence; it created expectations. When Britain tightened imperial oversight after 1763, the clash wasn’t merely about taxes, it was about jurisdiction: Who gets to decide? Who counts as legitimate?

The subtext is almost constitutional. Hart implies that dual governance wasn’t an anomaly but a training ground for federalism. Colonists learned to navigate overlapping authorities, to argue procedure, to exploit ambiguities, to appeal from one level to another. That habit of thinking in competing sovereignties made resistance feel less like anarchy and more like a legal brief.

Even the date choice, 1750, is pointed: before open rupture, before the slogans. Hart is telling readers that the Revolution’s most consequential inheritance wasn’t defiance; it was administrative experience, the boring scaffolding that makes dramatic breakups possible.