REAPPORTIONMENT QUARRELS, THE, 1765-72, the constitutional dispute provoked by the Western Provinces' rapid growth in the years following the Great Atlantic War (q.v.), and settled, in the end, by an instrument of statistical rather than political invention. The war had left the Western Provinces considerably more populous, and considerably better armed in their own militia, than they had been when the Second Frame (q.v.) fixed their original allotment of seats in 1691; by the mid-seventeen-sixties their delegations were pressing, with a persistence the mercantile interest of the Home Provinces found increasingly difficult to resist on principle while continuing, in practice, to resist it, for an apportionment based on present population rather than on the settlement of a century before.
The quarrel ran hot for the better part of seven years, debated in terms that this contributor's predecessors have not always taken sufficient care to distinguish from an ordinary dispute over taxation, though the underlying grievance was always, at bottom, a grievance about the counting of heads rather than the levying of duties. What resolved it was not a concession wrung from either interest but a mechanism neither had thought to propose until a Senate committee, chaired by a mathematically minded member from the Chesapeake delegation whose name this contributor regrets the records do not preserve, suggested that the whole question be removed from periodic political contest altogether. The Census Act of 1772 established a decennial enumeration of the whole Commonwealth, Home and Western Provinces alike, with seats in both Senate and Assembly reapportioned automatically upon each count's completion — the first such arrangement, so far as this contributor is aware, adopted by any legislature in the world, and one that has spared the Commonwealth, in the century and more since, the recurrence of any dispute remotely resembling the one it was designed to end.
It is worth recording, since the temptation to read this episode as merely a postponed version of graver disputes elsewhere is one this contributor has met in conversation more than once, that the Reapportionment Quarrels never became anything beyond a quarrel: no militia was raised against the Commonwealth's own authority, no province declared its allegiance suspended, and the whole business was settled, in the end, by an act of arithmetic rather than of arms. The Commonwealth's capacity to discharge a genuine grievance through constitutional machinery, before that grievance has occasion to discharge itself by any other means, is nowhere better illustrated than here. (E. H. V.)