Politics & Power Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Hart is doing something historians love and politicians quietly depend on: making today feel inevitable. By calling the “relation” between towns and counties in the middle colonies a “forerunner” of Western local government, he turns a messy colonial patchwork into a clean origin story. The sentence works less as a vivid description than as an act of intellectual zoning: it draws a straight line from early American administrative habits to the governmental grid that later organized the Midwest and beyond.

The specific intent is comparative and genealogical. Hart is pointing to an institutional hybrid, places where both town meetings (New England’s participatory, granular governance) and county structures (more typical of the South’s broader, court-centered administration) were “active” at the same time, forced into conversation by demography, geography, and settlement patterns. That “relation” matters because it implies coordination rather than dominance: neither unit swallows the other. Instead, they share power, duties, and legitimacy.

Subtext: the West isn’t portrayed as a radical democratic invention but as an inheritance. Hart’s framing subtly legitimizes Western governance by rooting it in an older, proven American precedent, smoothing over conflict and contingency. It also reflects a Progressive Era historian’s appetite for systems: institutions evolve, and the nation’s expansion looks like administrative maturation rather than conquest, displacement, or improvisation.

Contextually, Hart is writing when professional history prized classification, continuity, and state-building narratives. His sentence is a small, tidy bridge between colonial diversity and national coherence - persuasive precisely because it sounds like neutral description while doing ideological work.